Sustainability Blog: John Ayers

The parable of the snacirema

2011-02-21T17:23:00.000-08:00

Once there was a happy town filled with people called snacirema. The snacirema were peaceful people, but occasionally a snacirema turned bad and hurt or killed his fellow snacirema. These incidents were well-publicized, and they made some snacirema fearful. Those who were afraid decided they needed protection, so they started to breed sreraebnug for protection. Sreraebnug were powerful creatures that usually did their master's bidding, but sometimes the sreraebnug turned bad and attacked their masters or other snacirema. Although the sreraebnug made their masters feel protected, the many sreraebnug patrolling the town made the snacirema uneasy.

The more sreraebnug that people bought for protection, the more people heard of other snacirema who were hurt or killed by sreraebnug gone bad. Sometimes the sreraebnug would get confused and kill good snacirema or sreraebnug. This scared the snacirema even more, so many bought more sreraebnug to protect them. Soon the snacirema were afraid to go outside without a sreraebnug to protect them. And there were so many sreraebnug that deaths caused by confused or bad sreraebnug became common.

Finally the snacirema became so frightened that they held a town meeting. "How has our town become so dangerous?" someone shouted. Another chimed in "I used to buy sreraebnug to protect myself from bad snacirema. Now I have to buy more sreraebnug to protect myself from other sreraebnug. But I don't feel any safer." Arguments raged through the town hall. Then one young snacirema stood up and asked, "Didn't we all feel safer before everyone started buying sreraebnug? Didn't we have fewer deaths and injuries without the sreraebnug?" The crowd murmured for several minutes before the snacirema standing next to her said "The girl is right. Using sreraebnug for protection has made our town more dangerous, not less. The sreraebnug have made us more frightened, not less. I wish we could get rid of all of the sreraebnug, and then maybe we will all feel safe again."

It was decided; the snacirema herded up all of the sreraebnug and put them in a zoo, promising to keep them well fed. They didn't have to do that for long, though, because the sreraebnug fought and killed each other until none were left. "Good riddance" said the townsfolk. They were no longer afraid to go outside. Without the sreraebnug, they learned to trust each other again instead of being afraid of each other. And the snacirema lived happily ever after.

Global Climate Change: Theory and Evidence

2011-02-17T18:07:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the greatest challenge to sustainability is Global Climate Change (GCC). Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide (CO₂), a known greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. This has led to a steady rise in the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere. At the same time, average global temperature has risen 0.76°C (1.4°F) since 1850, a phenomenon known as Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). “Business as usual” models project global temperatures to rise an additional 3°C (5.4°F) by 2100. The consequences of such rapid and dramatic global change are largely unknown, but preliminary estimates suggest that sea level will rise a little over 3 feet by 2100, and that weather hazards will become more severe. Economic losses are estimated in the trillions of dollars and loss of life in the hundreds of millions. A 3°C rise in average global temperature could put 30-50% of plants and animals at risk of extinction (IPCC 2007). Risks can be magnified if global climate passes a tipping point that leads to irreversible change. The high level of uncertainty about the effects and consequences of GCC demands that we apply the precautionary principle and reduce carbon emissions. In this blog post we will review the theory behind AGW and the supporting evidence.

First we have to make clear what we mean by “climate.” Climate is what you expect, but weather is what you get. Climate is the long-term characterization of the 'average' weather. It changes over decades, while weather changes on a daily and even hourly basis. We often overgeneralize, in space and time, the short-term changes in weather. An example of overgeneralizing in a geographic sense is "we had a wet summer, so everyone in the U.S. had a wet summer." We overgeneralize in a temporal sense when we say "this week is the coldest I can remember; we must be entering a new Ice Age.” We make both types of mistake when we generalize short term changes in local weather to long-term changes in global climate, e.g., "this summer in Nashville is the hottest I can remember; it must be global warming.”

GCC has happened often during earth’s long history. Much of what we know about these changes comes from the study of ancient climates as preserved in rocks, sediments, and ice cores. These changes resulted from natural processes such as variation in solar output, in the earth’s orbit around the sun, in the spatial distribution of the continents, in oceanic circulation patterns, and the rates of volcanic activity. However, never has climate change resulted from human activity, until now. The greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO₂), which is emitted during burning of fossil fuels, is believed to be responsible for a sudden rapid increase in average global surface temperatures in the last century. Average global temperature has risen by 0.76°C (1.4°F) since 1850 and is projected to increase another 0.5-1.0°C (0.9-1.8°F) due to greenhouse gases we have already added to the atmosphere (Dawson and Spannagle 2009). These changes are irreversible over a timescale of 1,000 years because it would take longer than 1,000 years for the artificially warmed oceans that moderate climate to cool off (Solomon, Plattner et al. 2009). Because the rate of temperature change is greater than at any other time in the last 22,000 years when natural processes determined the global temperature (Joos and Spahni 2008), we infer that a new, non-natural process is responsible for these changes, so we name it anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

The idea of global warming is really quite simple. Energy in sunlight passes through earth’s atmosphere and heats the surface, which warms and gives off heat. Without greenhouse gases like CO₂ in the earth’s atmosphere, that heat would radiate into space and be lost, and the average surface temperature of the earth would be only -18°C (0°F), meaning that all water on the earth’s surface would be frozen (Faure 1998). Life would not be possible. Fortunately, the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere absorb and trap the heat, increasing the average observed surface temperature of the earth to a very hospitable 15°C (59°F). We are fortunate to have greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. However, like Goldilocks we need it not too cold and not too hot, but just right. If the concentration of greenhouse gases gets too high, it will be too hot for us.

Recognition of the greenhouse effect goes back to Joseph Fourier in the early 19^th century, and the role of carbon dioxide (CO₂) was identified in 1859 by John Tyndall. No scientists dispute that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas: scientists have repeatedly verified that through experiment. It was Svante Arrhenius in 1896 who predicted that human activities could contribute to the greenhouse effect, but it wasn’t until the 1970’s that scientists like Roger Revelle and Wallace Broecker began to raise the alarm. Their concern was based on measurements by Charles Keeling, who showed that CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere was increasing at an alarming rate. Atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ (Figure 1) show both seasonal fluctuations related to plant growing seasons, and a long-term trend of steadily increasing CO₂. So how is this related to human activity? In the Peak Oil chapter, we described how oil contains the energy of sunlight that fell on earth millions of years ago, trapped in organic molecules manufactured by plants using photosynthesis. The simplified chemical reaction is:

Figure 1. Atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide at Mauno Loa, Hawaii, USA (ppm) and average annual global surface temperature anomaly (°C) between 1958 and 2010. Temperature data from Hansen (2010), atmospheric CO2 concentration data from Keeling (2009).

Eq. (1) CO₂ + H₂O + energy from sunlight = CH₂O + O₂

The molecule CH₂O represents the organic matter that stores the energy in fossil fuels. When we use fossil fuels, we undo the work of photosynthesis, promoting the reverse reaction by heating the organic matter in the presence of atmospheric oxygen so that they react and liberate the stored energy, a process called combustion. The troubling product of this combustion is CO₂, which accumulates in earth’s atmosphere, leading to the observed steadily increasing atmospheric CO₂ concentration (Figure 1).

Equation (1) illustrates the delicate balance between plant photosynthesis (forward reaction) and combustion (reverse reaction) that determines the concentrations of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. From Eq. 1 above we can see that combustion consumes O₂ while producing CO₂. Thus, we would predict that increasing CO₂ concentration should be balanced by decreasing O₂ concentration in the atmosphere, which is what we observe (IPCC 2007).

The current atmospheric O₂ concentration of 21% is just right for trees: If O₂ rose to 25%, forests would burn after every lightning strike, but if it fell to 13%, we could not start a fire. In fact, it is life that regulates the composition of the atmosphere, as illustrated vividly by James Lovelock’s conception of Gaia. He posits that earth behaves like an organism because its components act in concert to maintain life-support systems at optimal levels. Just as our body maintains a constant temperature of 98.6°F, the earth can maintain global temperatures within a narrow range that is conducive to life. How does it accomplish this? Eq. (1) gives us some insight. Because temperature positively correlates with atmospheric CO₂ concentration, when CO₂ is increased, then temperature increases, and these changes combine to create a greenhouse that promotes plant growth through photosynthesis (Eq. 1). This causes plants to extract greater amounts of CO₂ from the atmosphere, decreasing atmospheric CO₂ concentration and therefore temperature. This is an example of a balancing negative feedback loop. Thus, life helps to regulate the composition of the atmosphere and maintain an optimal temperature, and the earth system of which life is a part is self-regulating (homeostatic). Essentially, the solid earth and atmosphere (geochemistry) and life (paleontology) have co-evolved.

The rapid increase in human population coupled with the rapidly rising rate of combustion of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution has destroyed the balance. Where atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ and O₂ were in a steady state prior to the Industrial Revolution, they are now rapidly changing. As noted by E.F. Schumacher in “Small is Beautiful (1973),” “The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.” As we pump increasing amounts of CO₂ into the atmosphere and temperature rises, the earth acts more and more like a greenhouse and plants grow faster, acting as a sink for CO₂ according to Eq. (1). However, this negative feedback is not sufficient to keep atmospheric CO₂ concentrations from increasing (Figure 1). Although life absorbs some CO₂ we emit through fossil-fuel burning, it won’t absorb all of it. Atmospheric CO₂ concentration will continue to increase, but not as much as it would without photosynthetic plants. Another negative feedback is dissolution of atmospheric CO₂ in seawater. As atmospheric CO₂ concentrations rises, increasing amounts of CO₂ dissolve in the oceans to form carbonic acid according to:

Eq. (2) H₂O + CO₂ = H₂CO₃

Increasing concentrations of this weak acid cause the pH of seawater to decrease. This is a major problem for organisms that extract Calcium Carbonate (CaCO₃) from seawater to build shells, because Calcium Carbonate dissolved readily in acidic water. Coral reefs are the backbone of coastal marine ecosystems that have very high biodiversity, yet these reefs are rapidly dying across the world’s oceans, in part due to ocean acidification. How sad that these corals, which have been some of earth’s most successful creatures, having survived for hundreds of millions of years, now face extinction because of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions. If the world’s coral reef ecosystems collapse, so will most of the world’s coastal fisheries, leading to the loss of the primary protein source for most low-income coastal communities.

How do scientists know that the excess CO₂ in the atmosphere did not come from decaying plant matter or burning of modern vegetation? Because the proportion of atmospheric carbon that is radioactive ¹⁴C has been declining steadily, indicating that ancient carbon is being added to the atmosphere[i]. How do we know that the CO₂ didn't come from volcanoes? Because the ¹³C/¹²C ratio of the atmosphere has been steadily decreasing. Volcanic CO₂ has high ¹³C/¹²C, and only plant matter has low ¹³C/¹²C, so the decrease in atmospheric ¹³C/¹²C must come from burning plant matter[ii].

So we can agree that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, and that human activity has increased the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere. This should lead to warming of the atmosphere, which will thermally equilibrate with the land surface and oceans through heat transfer, causing them to also warm. Thus, the entire earth will warm, as is evident in (Figure 1). The rate of heating was higher in the last 25 years than over the previous 150 years. This acceleration of warming to rates higher than ever recorded in geologic history is what has scientists concerned (Joos and Spahni, 2008).

Global warming is documented by many global changes. Instrumental records (corrected for the urban “heat island” effect) and natural evidence (shrinking and thinning of Arctic ice, loss of Antarctic ice shelves, and receding of most Alpine glaciers globally[iii]; lengthening of growing seasons, migration of animals and plants to higher latitudes, and borehole measurements) all show that the earth’s surface has warmed 0.4-0.8°C (~1°F) during the 20th century. The probability that warming is real is > 99% (IPCC 2007). For example, the warmest eight years recorded since record-keeping began about 150 years ago all occurred within the twelve years preceding 2011. In fact, since 1850 the 24 warmest years have been as follows, from warmest to coolest: 2010, 2005, 2009, 2007, 2002, 1998, 2003, 2006, 2004, 2001, 2008, 1997, 1995, 1990, 1991, 2000, 1999, 1988, 1996, 1987, 1983, 1981, 1994, and 1989. The 24 warmest years have all occurred since 1980. It is nearly impossible for these observations to occur by chance.

It’s also important to know that CO₂ is not the only important greenhouse gas; others include methane CH₄, Nitrous Oxide N₂O. Together, these gases increase the average global surface temperature by 34°C. The heating power of a greenhouse gas (radiative forcing) is proportional to the reduction of infrared radiation leaving earth caused by a unit increase in concentration of gas in the atmosphere. The cumulative effect of a greenhouse gas depends on its radiative forcing and how long it stays in the atmosphere, termed the “residence time.” The total Global Warming Potential (GWP) therefore depends on both the radiative forcing and residence time of a GHG in the atmosphere (scale normalized to CO₂): CO₂ = 1, CH₄ = 21, N₂O = 290, CFC’s = 3000-8000 (Faure 1998). GHG emissions are usually reported as CO₂ equivalents CO_2e. So, for example, emission of 1 kg of CH₄ would be equivalent in terms of GWP to 21 kg of CO₂, so CO_2e = 21 kg. The GWP of CFCs are large because their atmospheric concentrations are near zero, they absorb infrared radiation between 8000-12,000 nm where CO₂ is ineffective, and they have long atmospheric residence times (Faure 1998)[iv].

(Figure 2) compares the relative importance of GHGs to global warming by plotting the percentage of total CO_2e associated with each type of GHG emission. Although CO₂ is the weakest of the GHG, it has the largest effect on global warming because we emit such large volumes of CO₂ during fossil fuel burning. Thus, AGW mitigation measures must first focus on reducing CO₂ emissions.

Figure 2. Global Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gas Emissions in 2004 expressed as the percentage of total CO_2e. Data from IPCC 4th Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report, http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/globalghg.html

Of course anthropogenic GHG emissions are not the only cause of GCC. Natural causes of GCC include variable sunlight intensity, strengthening greenhouse, increased atmospheric aerosols, and volcanic eruptions. Computer simulations based on real-world measurements show that the natural drivers, solar variability and volcanic eruptions, have actually caused earth’s surface temperature to decrease during the 20^th century. Aerosols also cause cooling. As a result, observed global surface temperatures cannot be explained by natural forces alone (Figure 3). Therefore, the only remaining cause of global warming is increased greenhouse gas concentration from fossil fuel burning. (Figure 1) shows an excellent positive correlation between atmospheric temperature and CO₂ concentration from 1880 to the present, consistent with the idea that increased CO₂ is associated with increases in temperature. Data from ice cores collected in Antarctica demonstrate that this correlation stretches back 420,000 years (Petit, Jouzel et al. 1999). Plotting CO₂ concentrations versus temperature anomalies recorded in the ice cores demonstrates that the trend for the “Anthropocene” is distinctly different from the natural trend, showing unequivocally that the atmosphere-climate system has been highly perturbed by human activities (Figure 4). The positive correlation between temperature and atmospheric CO₂ concentration shown in (Figure 1) and (Figure 4) suggests, but does not prove, a cause and effect relationship[v]. However, we can say with a high level of confidence that when atmospheric CO₂ concentration is high, average global surface temperatures are high, and since the atmospheric CO₂ concentration is now higher than at any time during the past 420,000 years, we can expect that temperatures will rise to levels higher than at any time during the past 420,000 years as the global climate system adjusts to the new, higher level of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Figure 3. Comparison of average global surface temperatures that were observed with those predicted by models that accounted only for natural climate forces and not human forces. From Mann and Kump (2009).

Figure 4. State–space view of Antarctic ice-age cycles. From Etkin (2010).

References

Archer, D., M. Eby, et al. (2009). The Atmospheric Lifetime of Fossil Fuel Carbon Dioxide. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science. 37: 117-134.

Dawson, B. and M. Spannagle (2009). The Complete Guide to Climate Change, Routledge.

Etkin, B. (2010). "A state space view of the ice ages—a new look at familiar data." Climatic Change 100(3): 403-406. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-010-9821-x.

Faure, G. (1998). Principles and applications of geochemistry: a comprehensive textbook for geology students, Prentice Hall.

Hansen, J. E., R. Rued, et al. (2010) "NASA GISS Surface Temperature (GISTEMP) Analysis." Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change DOI: 10.3334/CDIAC/cli.001. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/temp/hansen/hansen.html.

IPCC (2007). Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, U.K. and New York, NY, USA, Cambridge University Press.

Joos, F. and R. Spahni (2008). "Rates of change in natural and anthropogenic radiative forcing over the past 20,000 years." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(5): 1425-1430. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/105/5/1425

Keeling, R. F., S. C. Piper, et al. (2009) "Atmospheric CO2 records from sites in the SIO air sampling network." Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change DOI: 10.3334/CDIAC/atg.035. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-keel.html.

Mann, M. E. and L. R. Kump (2009). Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming. New York, DK Publishing, Inc.

Petit, J. R., J. Jouzel, et al. (1999). "Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica." Nature 399(6735): 429-436.

Solomon, S., G.-K. Plattner, et al. (2009). "Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106(6): 1704-1709. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/6/1704.abstract.

[i] ¹⁴C has a half-life of 5700 years, so plant matter that is older than roughly 6 half-lives or 8*5700=45600 years has essentially no ¹⁴C.

[ii] Note that it is the changing ¹⁴C content of the atmosphere that makes accurate ¹⁴C dating of material less than 100 years old impossible.

[iii] see http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/james_balog_time_lapse_proof_of_extreme_ice_loss.html

[iv] Some confusion about GWP values exists because they are sometimes quoted for different timescales. Some studies only look at a 100 year timescale and find that the GWP of CH4 is 73, i.e., methane is 73 time more potent than carbon dioxide. However, if we take the longer term view required by sustainability of, say, 1000 years, the GWP of CH4 drops to 23 because CO2 persists in the atmosphere longer than methane. See Archer, D., M. Eby, et al. (2009). The Atmospheric Lifetime of Fossil Fuel Carbon Dioxide. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science. 37: 117-134.

[v] One complication is that, when viewed at high temporal resolution, ice cores show that atmospheric CO₂ increases lag behind temperature increases by several centuries, possibly suggesting that increased temperatures cause high atmospheric CO₂ rather than the reverse. However, there is a good explanation for this relationship, one that relies on increases in solar insolation to trigger warming episodes that then become amplified by increases in atmospheric CO₂. Variations in insolation (solar intensity) due to Milankovitch cycles are not sufficient to explain the large (6° C) temperature variations of the ice ages. However, they can trigger temperature excursions. If insolation increases, then atmospheric temperature will increase slightly. This causes the solubility of CO₂ in seawater to decrease; the ocean begins to add CO₂ to the atmosphere, which further increases temperature due to the greenhouse effect, which leads to more degassing, creating a positive feedback loop. This is reinforced by another positive feedback loop in which continental ice sheets melt and recede, exposing land with a lower albedo, leading to increased absorption of solar radiation and heating. The oceans take about a thousand years to overturn and degas, so the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere will not peak until roughly a thousand years after the heating episode began.

Green Construction

2011-02-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

A Guest blog by Krista Peterson

Green construction is a new form of construction that is safer for people and the environment and is cheaper over the long term than old construction. Its use follows an era in which residential and commercial buildings were constructed both cheaply and quickly to please owners. Instead of focusing on quality, the goal was most certainly quantity. The materials used in the building of these shoddy and quickly-constructed structures were typically very unfriendly to the environment and contained hazardous products including fibrous asbestos¹.

Fibrous asbestos is the only known cause of the disease mesothelioma, which is a rare form of cancer that affects the linings of the heart, chest and abdomen. When asbestos fibers become airborne they can be inhaled or consumed – via eating or drinking – and they will eventually cause a variety of harmful and fatal health problems. Mesothelioma symptoms often resemble the common cold and other basic chest and lung ailments, which makes the victims life expectancy substantially shorter because of the common misdiagnosis.
Asbestos was used in more than 3,000 products during the 20^th century, as it was inexpensive and present in large quantities. Perhaps the most common use of asbestos was for insulation. Fortunately, construction workers can now use safer choices to insulate a building. These include:
1. Cotton Fibers – A highly popular material used in the construction of “green” buildings, insulation made of cotton fiber is made using denim and other forms of batted recycled material. As with cellulose, cotton fiber is treated using mild chemicals to make the material fireproof. However, the fiber is completely nontoxic and does not produce any gases.
2. Cellulose – Formed from 85% recycled material, cellulose is a fancy way of defining old shredded newspaper. This material has quickly become one of the most popular forms of eco-friendly insulation throughout the world. The cellulose is treated using safe chemicals to increase its resistance to heat and to prevent growth of mold. It is completely nontoxic and has been shown to decrease utility bills by as much as 20% annually.
3. SPF or Spray Polyurethane Foam – This type of insulation is ideal for those who suffer from allergies as it is sprayed within the areas that need to be insulated. The foam fits very snugly and does not allow mold to grow. These are several different types of foams that are sold but it is agreed that water-based icynene is the best. It contains no polybrominated diphenyl ether that is toxic. This type of foam also lacks hydrochlorofluorocarbons that are greenhouse gases and can catalyze the destruction of stratospheric ozone. On average, the use of SPFs can decrease utility bills by around 35%.

Other substances that were toxic were also used in building construction, which would affect both the health of those who were working to construct the site and those who worked in or resided in the building. Fortunately, the dawn of the 21st century brought many different options when it came to replacing these old products that were used and proven hazardous to human health. These replacements greatly improved the indoor air quality and the general environment for working and living conditions. Additionally, buildings that were well-constructed and were built to be environmentally friendly typically needed less energy to function and consumed less water. This saved environmental resources, and pleased tenants and landlords as the costs of water and electricity were decreased. Thus, green construction is smart construction because it is healthier, eco-friendly, and in the long term more cost-effective than conventional construction.

1. Asbestos is a family of six minerals. The fibrous amphibole forms (amosite, crocidolite, anthophyllite, tremolite, and actinolite) are known to be carcinogenic. However, the cancer risk presented by the most commonly used form of asbestos, chrysotile, is low or nonexistent; see Ross (1984) Definitions for Asbestos and Other Health-related Silicates, American Society for Testing Materials Special Publication 834, pp. 51-104.

Peak Oil 4: Consequences of Peak Oil

2010-11-24T14:13:00.000-08:00

The scale of all human enterprises will contract with the energy supply. We will be compelled by the circumstances of the Long Emergency to conduct the activities of daily life on a smaller scale, whether we like it or not, and the only intelligent action is to prepare for it. - James Kunstler (2005) "The Long Emergency"

Peak oil has already had a major impact on U.S. society. Rising gas prices, and the realization that the gigantic cars manufactured by the U.S. auto industry were unsustainable, caused the collapse of some of the largest corporations in America. The American auto manufacturing industry was so unsustainable that doubling the price of gas caused an almost complete collapse of the industry within one year. Many people lost their jobs, most of them for good. High gas prices in 2007-2008 led to many public protests and riots worldwide [i]. Oil prices are projected to increase substantially in the “business as usual” scenario, from $80.16 in 2010 to $110.49 in 2015 and $121.94 in 2025 ((EIA 2009), Table 16, pg. 88). As the title of Richard Heinberg’s book on peak oil suggests (2005), “The Party is Over,” and life is going to get tougher.

What will the post-peak world be like? It's hard for us to know. Many people thought the world would collapse because of the year 2000 problem, but it had an insignificant effect on our lives. Still, it's hard to believe that the change from cheap to expensive oil won't have big repercussions. Bates (2006) comments "Peak Oil may be the trigger for a global economic depression that lasts for many decades. Or it may not. It may plunge us into violent anarchy and military rule. Or it may not. But if Peak Oil doesn't wake us up to the precariousness of our condition, divorced from our roots in the soil and the forest, annihilating the evolutionary systems that sustain us and replacing them with brittle, artificial, plastic imitations, what will?"

Peak Oil will cause four types of changes in transportation. From the fastest to the slowest they are:

· Lowered quality of life – e.g. drive less

· Increased energy efficiency – e.g. buy a Prius

· Adapt a new energy supply – e.g. ethanol.

· Changed cultural aspirations- e.g. buy a house in the city, no need for a car.

These four changes will work together to reduce energy demand. Alternative energy will never replace oil for transportation, and we will face a decline in the four ways above (http://transitionculture.org/2006/08/25/dennis-meadows-limits-to-growth-and-peak-oil/). As a result, many who study Peak Oil believe that people will essentially be stranded in the suburbs due to oil shortages, and will be forced to migrate out of the suburbs (e.g., see the interesting movies “Sprawling from Grace” (Edwards 2009) and “The End of Suburbia” (Greene 2004). However, it seems unlikely that people will abandon the suburbs in response to peak oil, as there will be alternative methods of transportation such as electric cars, which as of 2011 are already becoming widely available.

Peak oil will also reduce food supply and economic capital. As people adapt to preserve economic capital, the changes will become social as individuals work together as communities to adapt to an oil-free, low energy lifestyle. Transport of food and goods currently depends on liquid fuels; Peak oil will sharply curtail transport, creating a gap between supply and demand of food and goods that only increasing local production can fill.

Environmental and Social Costs of Oil Use and Addiction

The environmental consequences of Peak oil and the costs of our oil dependence are well illustrated by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. The Deepwater Horizon rig was drilling 41 miles off the Louisiana coast in water 5,000 feet deep when it exploded on April 20, killing 11 platform workers. Before British Petroleum (BP) capped it on July 15, 4.9 million barrels of crude oil had gushed from the drill hole, causing widespread damage to shorelines and fisheries. The federal government closed nearly 36% of federally-owned area in the Gulf of Mexico to fishing, costing the fishing industry billions of dollars. The U.S. Travel Industry estimates that the three-year cost to lost tourism could exceed $23 billion. Costs to BP had risen to $3 billion by July 5, 2010.

A clue to how the spill relates to Peak oil is contained in the name: the Deepwater Horizon was in deep water because oil companies had already drilled all of the shallower, easier to drill locations. Drilling for oil is becoming riskier and more expensive as we are forced to mine more extreme environments; the easy oil is already gone.

The social costs of oil use also deserve closer inspection. In his book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded" (2008) Thomas Friedman argues that the global dependence on oil has made the oil states powerful, and that power has prevented or even reversed political reforms. In (Figure 1.) the countries that produce more oil than they consume plot in the green “sustainable field,” where we refer to the ability of a country to meet its current needs. Countries in the green field export oil, and countries in the red field must import oil. The dependence of countries like the U.S. on oil from countries in the green field has caused many social problems, including decreased national security of importing states.

Figure 1.

Of the 23 countries that get the majority of their income from oil and gas, none are democracies (p. 105). Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia can treat the U.S. with impunity because oil income has made them powerful. Friedman's First Law of Petropolitics states "In oil-rich petrolist states, the price of oil and the pace of freedom tend to move in opposite directions… Petrolist states (are) authoritarian states (or ones with weak state institutions) that are highly dependent on oil production for the bulk of their exports and government income ((Friedman 2008), p. 96)." Governments of petrolist states get their money from oil sales, not taxes, and they use the money to placate their citizens through subsidies. If the price of oil plummets (which seems unlikely), governments of petrolist countries like Iran will likely collapse.

In general, the "resource curse" affects third-world countries that sell their natural resources and use the money to develop in unsustainable ways. Typically a minority of citizens controls the resource, and they became fabulously rich while the vast majority of citizens remain destitute. The resulting concentration of power prevents the development of democracy. "Our addiction to oil makes global warming warmer, petrodictators stronger, clean air dirtier, poor people poorer, democratic countries weaker, and radical terrorists richer (p. 81)." Thus the proliferation of bumper stickers in the U.S.: ((Friedman 2008), p. 80): "How many soldiers per gallon does your SUV get?"; "Osama loves your SUV"; "Nothin' Dumber than a Hummer"; "Draft the SUV drivers first." Friedman concludes that "The world will be a better place politically if we can invent plentiful renewable energy sources that eventually reduce global demand for oil to the point where even oil-rich states will have to diversify their economies and put their people to work in more innovative ways ((Friedman 2008), p. 107)."

Effects on Transportation and the Economy

Peak oil is likely to strongly hurt businesses that depend on transport by truck or plane. If you are a trucker, work in the airline industry, for FedEx or UPS, or for big box stores like Wal-Mart, you should start formulating a backup plan in case you lose your job. Obviously if you are an investor you don't want to invest long-term in companies that make money primarily through transportation. New jobs in sectors like local food production will open up to close the supply-demand gap for transported goods.

The post-peak world may be like living in the U.S. during WWII. Americans were resource-constrained, and there was energy rationing (no new cars, limited gas). People grew victory gardens. WWII was an emergency, but not the type we are used to, the kind associated with natural disasters. Rather, it was a "long emergency,” to use James Kunstler's phrase, and that's the type of emergency that will confront us. The repercussions and responses to Peak oil will stretch out over years. Yet like natural disaster emergencies, when people band together and work toward a common cause, the Peak oil emergency may help rebuild communities. It may reverse many negative trends of the 20th century such as depersonalization and centralization.

The U.S. is particularly vulnerable to the challenges presented by Peak oil because it has a low population density, and because the U.S. built its cities for cars rather than people, leading to urban sprawl. Australia is even more vulnerable because transportation distances within Australia and to its trade partners are even greater than in the U.S., and it is more dependent on petroleum-based fertilizers to produce its food.

In conclusion, Peak oil is one of the biggest challenges facing humanity in the next several decades. As global oil production decreases and demand increases, the price of oil and of all goods that use of oil or oil-derived energy in their life cycle will skyrocket. Sadly, people will be forced to abandon marginal living areas that petroleum made livable, such as big chunks of Australia. But out of the Peak oil crisis may emerge a new, more rewarding lifestyle, if we prepare for change.

For more information about Peak oil see:

ASPO International: The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas: http://www.peakoil.net/

References

Bates, A. (2006). The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times, New Society Publishers.

Edwards, D. M. (2009). Sprawling From Grace: 82 min.

EIA (2009). Annual Energy Outlook 2009, USDOE: 230. http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/pdf/0383(2009).pdf.

Friedman, T. (2008). Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Greene, G. (2004). The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream: 78 min.

Heinberg, R. (2005). The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, New Society Publishers.

[i]For a sampling from 2007-8 see: Transporters, farmers to protest failure to cut fuel prices in India (http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/business/transporters-farmers-to-protest-failure-to-cut-fuel-prices_100148001.html, Truckers protest fuel prices in Mexico City (http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/02/24/mexico.protest/index.html, Scores of bikers in UK have caused rush-hour disruption in a protest against rising fuel prices (http://latestnews.virginmedia.com/news/uk/2008/06/05/bikers_stage_fuel_price_protest, Truckers to protest fuel costs in U.S. (http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2008-03-30-truckers_N.htm, Hundreds Protest Against Steep Fuel Price Rises in Burma (http://www.irrawaddy.org/multimedia.php?art_id=8391

Peak Oil 3: National and Global Production Peaks of Oil and Other Resources

2010-11-04T05:41:00.000-07:00

"We've embarked on the beginning of the last days of the age of oil." — Mike Bowlin, Chair, ARCO

"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel." — attributed to Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, Emir of Dubai

We are not good at recognizing distant threats even if their probability is 100%. Society ignoring [peak oil] is like the people of Pompeii ignoring the rumblings below Vesuvius." — James Schlesinger, former US Energy Secretary

Geologists have been predicting since the 1950s that oil production would begin to decrease in a matter of decades. When Geophysicist M. King Hubbard predicted in 1956 that oil production in the U.S. would peak in the early 1970s, both the scientific community and the public made him a pariah. However, when production peaked in 1970 as he predicted (Figure 1), many scientists accepted him as a prophet (most of the public remained unaware of his predictions). Many people forget that until the early 1970s the U.S. was, like Saudi Arabia of the 1980s and 1990s, the largest oil producer in the world. However, since the early 1970s the U.S. has become increasingly dependent on foreign countries like Saudi Arabia to feed its voracious appetite for oil. We now rely on unstable third world countries to fuel our cars, and we finance despots and wars to maintain our precious oil supply. Even George W. Bush acknowledged in 2008 that the U.S. is addicted to oil. The effects on foreign countries of the U.S. addiction to oil are very similar to the effects of the U.S. addiction to illegal drugs: the flow of money from the wealthy U.S. leads to corruption, crime, and political instability in third world countries. Our addiction has caused scores of countries and millions of people to suffer. Moreover, our dependence on foreign countries for oil has obviously decreased our national security.

Figure 1. U.S. oil production over time. Equation for Gaussian fit: y = 10955*exp(-0.5*((x-1972.8)/36.21)^2). Data from BP Statistical Review (2010).

Now that the U.S. depends on foreign countries for 2/3 of its oil, we must be concerned not only about the reliability of our existing suppliers but also the natural limits to global oil production. In the year 2008 the world experienced for the first time a spike in oil and gas prices resulting from demand, as opposed to previous price spikes in 1973, 1980, and 1990 caused by global conflicts. Increases in oil prices result in increases in the costs of farming and food. The spike in 2008 occurred because countries didn't allow the market to correct itself; instead, for decades they subsidized energy and food, keeping prices artificially low ((Friedman 2008), p. 41).

To understand better why we can expect to have future shortages of non-renewable resources such as oil, we refer to (Figure 2), which plots hypothetical production rates of renewable and nonrenewable resources as a function of time. As discussed previously, because there is a finite amount of every nonrenewable resource such as oil, production and consumption inevitably lead to resource depletion. The total amount of a resource that is available (the ultimate cumulative production) is equal to the area under the curve. Resources that are not abundant and that we use rapidly run out quickly so that their resource production curves are very narrow. Resources that we use slowly or that are abundant last much longer, so their curves are wide and do not peak until well into the future.

Figure 2. Hypothetical production rates as a function of time. After Hubbert (1987).

It is the timing of the peak that is of most interest, because any time after the peak the resource will be scarce and therefore be expensive. In (Figure 2) the “unlimited exponential growth” curve can represent human population, while “renewable resource” can represent water production/consumption. As stated by Hubbert, “In their initial phases, the curves for each of these types of growth are indistinguishable from one another, but as industrial growth approaches maturity, the separate curves begin to diverge from one another. In its present state the world industrial system has already entered the divergence phase of these curves but is still somewhat short of the culmination of the curve for nonrenewable resources (1987).”

Note that on the rising limb of Hubbert's Peak demand drives supply: "the more oil the world economy needed, the more the oil industry could produce… Once we pass the peak, supply begins to dictate demand, meaning that prices start to rise suddenly and steeply, and the people with control of the remaining oil really get to start calling the shots (Hopkins 2008)."

We can apply Hubbert’s approach of constructing resource availability curves to any non-renewable resource on either a local or a global basis. Many countries are already post-peak for production of oil (including the U.S.) and other resources. For example, the U.S. imports 100% of the following resources that it uses: Arsenic trioxide, asbestos, bauxite and alumina, columbium (niobium), fluorspar, graphite, manganese, mica, quartz crystal, strontium, thallium, thorium, and yttrium (Keller 2011). Because we have global trade, local scarcity has not resulted in a crisis. Countries that have a surplus of a resource export it, and countries erase their deficits by importing. The problem occurs when global annual production rate of a nonrenewable resource peaks and then begins to decline. During the decline, resource production cannot keep pace with demand, and resource prices rise. Peak oil may cause shortages of many other resources because oil provides the energy to transport those resources. If the U.S. doesn’t have oil to transport all of the resources that we import, we will have more than just an energy problem.

What nonrenewable resources may become scarce in the 21^st century? Hubbert predicted that copper, tin, lead, and zinc would reach peak production within decades (Hubbert 1987). At the current rate of consumption, these metals will be available for 60, 40, 40, and 45 years respectively, and Indium, which is used in LCDs and solar cells, may run out in only 15 years (Ragnarsdottir 2008). Phosphate, which is an essential component of fertilizers, may disappear within the next 60-70 years (Oelkers and Valsami-Jones 2008), which could greatly decrease agricultural productivity and cause widespread food shortages.

It’s not just non-renewable resources that we have to worry about. Certain types of renewable resources have production curves similar to those of non-renewable resources because their renewal rate is less than the harvesting rate. For example, deep (fossil) groundwaters have been in the ground for hundreds or thousands of years, which means it would take hundreds or thousands of years to replace them at natural recharge rates. In many areas of the world, the groundwater extraction rate is much greater than the recharge rate, so the groundwater reserve is shrinking, as made visible by falling water tables in unconfined aquifers. When we use groundwater and other resources faster than they can be replaced, we are effectively mining them, and we can expect the production rate to peak and then decline, as occurred in Saudi Arabia (Figure 3). Consequently, hydrologist Luna Leopold advocated the treatment of groundwater as a nonrenewable resource that we should use only during droughts. The sustainable approach to resource use is not to use renewable resources faster than nature can renew them.

Figure 3. Saudi Arabia Water Supply 1980-2000 in Million cubic meters/year. Data from Abderrahman (2001).

Another renewable resource whose production has peaked is the global wild fish catch, which peaked in the 1980’s due to overfishing (Fig. 1.10). Fortunately the use of aquaculture as a substitute is expanding, which has softened the blow. As human population and resource demand continue to increase, we can expect to see the production of more resources peak and then begin to decline. The important question is, will we always find adequate substitutes as we did for marine fish?

Oil production is now declining in 60 of the 98 oil-producing countries. Most of these countries had a peak in oil discovery 30-40 years before they reached peak production. Similarly, we can expect world oil production to peak 30-40 years after world discovery rates peaked in 1965. World oil consumption has outpaced the discovery of new oil reserves for almost three decades: we now consume four barrels for every one we discover.

Discoveries of oil total about two trillion barrels worldwide, and we already used ~one trillion barrels. That puts us at the center of the production curve where the peak is (often called “Hubbert’s Peak”), so that when we start consuming the second half, production rates will decrease and prices will rise (the curve is symmetrical, so the peak is in the center and the area under the curve to the left of the peak is the same as to the right of the peak, corresponding to one trillion barrels). Furthermore, the first trillion barrels was the oil that was easy to get out of the ground; the second trillion barrels will become increasingly more difficult to mine. The EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Investment) will steadily decrease, and the amount of environmental damage associated with oil recovery will greatly increase.

Andrew Nikiforuk gives good evidence that the world is nearing peak oil in his book “Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent” (Nikiforuk 2008). He notes that the biggest supplier of oil to the U.S. is no longer Saudi Arabia, but our next-door neighbor Canada. U.S. citizens are happy because there is less risk that money we spend on oil will end up in the hands of terrorists who target us. However, Canadian oil primarily comes from the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, and mining of this “dirty” oil creates huge environmental problems, including much higher CO₂ emissions per unit energy because large amounts of natural gas are used to refine this dirty oil. Production of tar sand oil emits roughly 100 to 650 pounds of CO₂ per barrel, compared with North Sea oil that emits only ~20 pounds per barrel. Nikiforuk (Nikiforuk 2008) calls this “a switch from bloody light oil to dirty heavy oil,” and concludes that it is not in the best interests of the U.S. or Canada.

Several other observations support the idea that global peak oil is near. First, of the 98 oil-producing nations, 60 have already passed their peak (Hopkins 2008), including the U.S., U.K., Norway, Venezuela, and Russia; countries near their peak include Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and China; and countries where production is increasing include Canada (tar sands), Kazakhstan, and seven others. Second, although prices have been very high, giving an incentive to increase production, the production rate has remained steady at 84-87 million barrels per day for the last six years (Figure 4). The evidence is that geology rather than economics or politics dictates production rates. Third, oil companies are drilling in more difficult environments because they have already tapped out the easy targets. For example, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in May 2010 resulted from the extreme pressures below one mile of ocean and four miles of rock where they were drilling. Another supporting observation is that oil companies have not greatly expanded their oil exploration activities even though the price of oil has skyrocketed. Oil companies are now using their vast amounts of money to diversify or buy back their own stocks rather than spending more money on R&D and exploration. This is clear evidence of falling return on investment in exploration, and shows that oil companies are planning for reduced oil production.

Figure 4. World oil production in thousands of barrels daily. Gaussian fit predicts peak production in the year 2026 (y = 85079*exp(-0.5((x-2026)/51.94)^2). Data from BP Statistical Review of World Energy Data 2010.

So when will global oil production peak and then begin a steady decline leading to increasing cost? Oil companies and national governments want investors to be optimistic about the future, so they try to discredit peak oil claims. To get the true story we need experts who are independent of corporate or government interests, who have no personal stake so their opinions are objective, and who base their opinions on facts. Kenneth Deffeyes (2001) argued that the peak would be somewhere close to the year 2005. Using data from British Petroleum’s annual Statistical Review of World Energy 2010, I plotted world oil production through 2009 (Figure 4). The data show that oil production plateaued starting in 2005. The increasing gap between constant supply and increasing demand fueled by countries like China and India caused oil prices to increase dramatically by 2007 before falling in response to the global recession. A Gaussian fit to the production data peaks at 2026[i] (Figure 4). Most other studies that tried to fit the production data and extrapolate it into the future suggested that oil production would peak near 2008-2010 (Figure 5, from www.theoildrum.com). Considering that oil production has not increased significantly since 2005, and actually dropped 2.6% from 2008-2009 (BP 2010), these predictions seem accurate. However, as Hopkins (2008) points out, the exact date of the peak doesn't matter; what matters is that it is near, and we haven't begun to prepare for it.

Figure 5. World oil production (EIA Monthly) for crude oil + NGL. The median forecast is calculated from 15 models that are predicting a peak before 2020 (Bakhtiari, Smith, Staniford, Loglets, Shock model, GBM, ASPO-[70,58,45], Robelius Low/High, HSM,Duncan&Youngquist). 95% of the predictions sees a production peak between 2008 and 2010 at 77.5 - 85.0 mbpd (The 95% forecast variability area in yellow is computed using a bootstrap technique). The magenta area is the 95% confidence interval for the population-based model.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, “The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary” (Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation & Risk Management, February 2005, Page 64). What is crazy and wasteful is that the U.S. and other countries are still building car assembly plants, roads, highways, parking lots, suburban housing developments, and airplanes as though cheap oil will last forever (Brown 2009). We continue to make investments in an infrastructure that will be superfluous shortly after we build it. This is an example of a market that is failing because it does not anticipate even short-term changes.

Many will dispute the assertion that world oil production has nearly peaked. It is possible that the current peak apparent in (Figure 4) is a local maximum rather than a global maximum. Examples of local maximums include the 1973 and 1980 peaks in world oil production followed shortly after by price increases. Both of these local maxima resulted from political events, the OPEC embargo in 1973 and the Iraq-Iran war in 1980. So while resource availability is the primary control, anything that disrupts production and transportation of oil (wars, natural disasters, and politics) can cause short-term fluctuations in production rates and therefore price. However, the current oil production peak is not caused by political events, but by the inability of producers to increase supply.

Others argue that oil production, or at least combined conventional and unconventional oil and gas, will not rapidly decline but will plateau or slowly decline (Cheney and Hawkes 2007). Production of conventional oil and gas may decline steeply. However, substitution with unconventional oil such as tar sands combined with improvements in extraction technologies will slow the rate of production decline for combined conventional and unconventional oil and gas, consistent with the nearly constant production rate of the last six years. Even in this best-case scenario where world oil production plateaus rather than peaks, oil prices will still climb considerably because demand will continue to increase exponentially as the economies of China and India expand at an exponential rate. As noted by Lester Brown, in this era of globalization “where oil production is no longer expanding, one country can get more oil only if another gets less (Brown 2009)”. The U.S. will be competing with China, India, and every other country in the world for oil, which will drive up oil prices.

Some think that increasing domestic production will solve any oil shortage problems for the U.S., but in reality, oil companies will sell any domestically-produced oil on the global market. Despite political claims to the contrary, if the U.S. opened the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling today, when it reached maximum production in roughly 2030 it would supply no more than 1.2% of the total world oil consumption[ii], and therefore would have a negligible impact on oil prices. Furthermore, oil production could not begin until roughly ten years after opening ANWR (yes, it takes that long to build the pipeline, drilling facilities, etc.), and would peak around 2030 before starting to decline, so it won’t help the U.S. for at least ten years. So no, opening ANWR will not solve our oil problem.

The most important question about oil is not how much remains in the ground, but how much can we mine and still maintain economic and energy profits (Hall and Day (2009)). We get an energy profit when we get more energy from the oil we produce than the amount of energy required to produce it. The Energy Return On Energy Investment EROEI of U.S. petroleum declined from roughly 100:1 in 1930, to 40:1 in 1970, to about 14:1 in 2000 (Hall and Day (2009)). For the tar sands that produce a major amount of oil consumed in the U.S. the ratio is much less than 10:1, perhaps even close to 1:1 (Figure 6). As EROEI decreases, the cost per unit energy increases.

Figure 6. From Hall and Day (2009)

Increases in EROEI, supply-demand gap, and price of petroleum will also cause increases for gasoline, because gasoline is produced by distilling oil in a refinery. Gasoline is an amazing substance that we take for granted. Each gallon of gasoline contains 37 kWh of energy, which is equivalent to 500 hours of human work[iii] (http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Research.html). In other words, you could hire 500 people to push your car for one hour and it would get you roughly as far as one gallon of gasoline. Currently that gallon of gasoline costs about $2.50, but to hire 500 people to push your car for one hour at a typical wage of $10/hour would cost you $5000. People say gas is too expensive? It’s the bargain of the millennium, which is why people are burning through it so quickly.

Some argued that gas prices were high in 2008 because the U.S. didn’t have enough refineries, and that the problem of high gas prices would just go away if we build more refineries. If that were true, then the price of gas should be cheaper in most other countries, which are unlikely to all have made the same dumb mistake. Here is a global comparison of gas prices:

Table 5.2: Gasoline Prices for Selected Countries, February/March, 2009

From <http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2009_fotw569.html>.

Country	Pump Prices	Country	Pump Prices	Country	Pump Prices
Netherlands	$6.25	India (Delhi)	$3.75	China	$1.93
United Kingdom	$5.94	Australia	$3.32	Nigeria	$1.85
Germany	$5.87	South Africa	$3.24	Indonesia	$1.67
Italy	$5.72	Russia	$2.38	Iran	$0.33
France	$5.56	Mexico	$2.36	Venezuela	$0.12
South Korea	$5.38	United States	$2.23

In most countries gasoline is more expensive than in the U.S.. Iran and Venezuela have anomalously low prices because they are petroleum-producing countries with government-controlled pricing. European countries have much higher prices due to heavy government taxation. Thus, high gas prices are a global problem caused by oil scarcity, and are not caused by a U.S. infrastructure deficiency. We conclude that oil is becoming scarce, that exploration and enhanced recovery are unlikely to relieve that scarcity, and that oil prices will continue to rise as demand increases.

References

BP (2010). Statistical Review of World Energy 2010, British Petroleum. http://www.bp.com/productlanding.do?categoryId=6929&contentId=7044622.

Brown, L. (2009). Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. New York, NY, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Cheney, E. S. and M. W. Hawkes (2007). "The Future of Hydrocarbons: Hubbert's Peak or a Plateau?" GSA Today 17(6): 69-70.

Deffeyes, K. S. (2001). Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press.

Friedman, T. (2008). Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Hall, C. S. A. and J. W. J. Day (2009). "Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil." American Scientist 97: 230-237.

Hopkins, R. (2008). The Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience, Chelsea Green Publishing.

Hubbert, M. K. (1987). Exponential Growth as a Transient Phenomenon in Human History. Societal Issues, Scientific Viewpoints. M. A. Strom. New York, NY, American Institute of Physics: 75-84.

Keller, E. A. (2011). Environmental Geology, Pearson Prentice Hall.

Nikiforuk, A. (2008). Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent. Vancouver, BC, Canada, Greystone Books. file:///C:\Users\ayersj\Documents\My%20Classes\Sustainability\Papers\TarSandsBook.pdf.

Oelkers, E. H. and E. Valsami-Jones (2008). "Phosphate Mineral Reactivity and Global Sustainability." Elements 4(2): 83-87.

Ragnarsdottir, K. V. (2008). "Rare metals getting rarer." Nature Geoscience 1(11): 720-721. http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n11/pdf/ngeo302.pdf.

[i] According to Deffeyes (2001), production values for nonrenewable resources such as oil are best fit using the Gaussian or normal distribution y=a*exp(-.5*((x-x₀)/b)²). This equation has three adjustable parameters: the year of peak production (x₀), the amount of oil produced daily during that peak year in millions of barrels (a), and the number of years between the half-maximum points (b). I used the Solver add-in in Microsoft Excel 2010 to minimize the sum of the squares of the residuals (= predicted – measured), known as the chi-squared statistic, by automatically adjusting the values of the three parameters until I obtained the best fit values for global production of a = 85.0, b = 51.9, and x₀ = 2026, with r² = 0.87. I obtained the same results using nonlinear regression in Sigmaplot 11. The calculated peak production of 85 million barrels per day is roughly equal to the production rate from 2007-2010.

[ii] Fear of oil shortages has led to the spread of misinformation, particularly for political gain. Recently a friend said he had heard from several sources that ANWR can supply about 60 years of oil for the U.S.. I told him that I had heard that, given our current oil consumption rate, it was more like a two -year supply (if it were our only source of oil), and that to last 60 years ANWR would have to contain more oil than Saudi Arabia ever had. That night I looked up the statistics. According to the USGS (2001) ANWR holds roughly 10.4 billion barrels. In 2007, the United States consumed 7.54 billion barrels of oil. Thus, it would take only 10.4 bbl/7.54 bbl/year = 1.38 years for Americans to consume all of the oil. For the maximum estimate of 16 billion barrels of oil in ANWR it would take 16/7.54 = 2.1 years. Considering our rate of consumption of oil is continuously increasing, an estimate of two years supply is a reasonable upper limit.

[iii] Actually, if as stated previously "One kilowatt-hour per day is roughly the power you could get from one human servant”, then I calculate that it is 888 h as follows: if E = P*t, then t = E/P = 37 kWh/(1 kWh/d) = 37 d * 24 h/d = 888 h

Peak Oil 2: Oil Formation, Exploration, and Recovery

2010-11-04T05:27:00.000-07:00

To understand why the amount of oil stored in the ground is finite, and the amount that we can retrieve is even smaller, we need to review how oil forms and how we recover it from the ground. The oil stored within the earth initially formed hundreds of millions of years ago when plants used photosynthesis to store the sun’s energy, died, were rapidly buried, and transformed under heat and pressure into oil. The energy stored in oil molecules is therefore ancient trapped sunlight. Oil can form from buried plants only under special conditions in the oil window at approximately 3-6 km depth, and only when oxygen is not present to react with the carbon to form carbon dioxide (respiration). Oil is usually found only in sedimentary rocks that are less than 500 million years old, because land plants did not exist before that time. Because oil takes millions of years to form, it is considered a non-renewable resource.

Oil source rocks are the fine-grained organic-rich sedimentary rocks, usually shales, where oil forms over millions of years. Because it is a low density fluid, oil does not usually remain in the source rocks but tends to migrate upwards through permeable rocks. A reservoir rock such as a sandstone or coral reef has sufficient permeability to let the oil flow into it and porosity (empty space) to store the oil. An impermeable cap rock, often salt beds, can trap the oil beneath the surface. Petroleum geologists look for oil in places where cap rock (salt) lies above potential reservoir rock (sandstone), which in turn lies above potential source rock (shale).

Because oil is “liquid gold,” oil companies have spent billions of dollars perfecting techniques for oil exploration and recovery. Over time, exploration shifted from the surface to the subsurface. Each drilled well provided information about the subsurface. From drill chips, geologists could identify rock types and microfossils and assess their potential as source, cap, or reservoir rock. After drilling a series of wells, a geologist could interpolate the subsurface structures (sedimentary layers, faults, etc.) between wells so they could estimate the depth of reservoir rocks in undrilled locations, and therefore how deep they would have to drill a potential well.

To improve their oil-finding capabilities further, oil companies developed methods for wire line logging, gravity surveys, and subsurface seismic profiling that greatly increased the success rate of expensive drilling and allowed exploration geologists to find small patches of oil at great depth. These techniques greatly lowered the costs of exploration; they also greatly increased the amount of oil delivered to the market. Both factors helped to keep the price of oil low. These techniques were so effective that oil discoveries skyrocketed until 1965 (Figure 1) but have fallen ever since, suggesting that most or all of the abundant oil supplies have been found.

Figure 1. Crude oil price per barrel (2009 U.S. $) over time. Data from BP Statistical Review of World Energy (2010).

Experts debate how much oil remains, and how much we can recover. In his book “Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage” Princeton geologist Kenneth Deffeyes (Deffeyes 2001) claimed that the total recoverable amount of oil was 2.1 trillion barrels in 2001, and that we had used roughly half of that, so that roughly 1000 billion barrels remained. In 2006 we consumed oil at a rate of 31 billion barrels per year. If that rate remained constant, it would take 1000/31 or ~32 years from the time of Deffeyes’ estimate to consume all of the remaining oil, i.e., we would deplete oil reserves by the year 2033. However, the oil consumption rate is increasing exponentially because population is increasing at an exponential rate. Furthermore, it is not the timing of ultimate exhaustion of the resource that concerns us, but the timing of peak oil production. After oil production peaks, a gap will develop between continuously increasing demand and decreasing supply, and the price of oil will skyrocket (Figure 2). This will occur well before ultimate depletion occurs.

Figure 2. Peak oil and the supply-demand gap. After Keller (2010).

The prospects for finding large new oil deposits to erase the supply-demand gap are not good. Theoretically we can recover large amounts of oil from smaller oil fields, but it is not economically feasible; oil companies make most of their money from giant oil fields. Today ~85% of total production comes from less than 5% of production fields (Deffeyes 2001). Oil companies made all but two of the major oil discoveries before 1940, so the rate of discovery of large oil deposits (spikes in (Figure 3)) has greatly decreased.

Figure 3.

Enhanced oil recovery is also unlikely to significantly increase supply. Primary recovery, which uses natural reservoir pressure, extracts no more than 25% of the petroleum in the field. Enhanced recovery, which requires manipulating the reservoir pressure by injecting gases and liquids, extracts up to 50–60% of the petroleum. Despite more than 50 years of research on how to improve recovery rates, we still leave more than 40% of the oil underground. This is unfortunate, because worldwide we are now abandoning more wells than we are drilling.

References

Deffeyes, K. S. (2001). Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press.

Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining

2010-10-21T08:15:00.000-07:00

In October 2010 I traveled to eastern Kentucky to learn about the effects of mountaintop removal (MTR) mining on the community. We were fortunate to be able to tour an ICG coal mine in Hazard, KY, and to meet with some prominent opponents of MTR, including Tom Fitzgerald, director of the Kentucky Resources Council, and Erik Reece, author of "Lost Mountain." Most of the community clearly supported coal mining, but a vocal minority of opponents included people like Beverly May who had to fight coal companies to save their homes. After saving her neighborhood from MTR coal mining, Beverly became an activist with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and was featured in the documentary "Deep Down." Her story made me wonder if coal supporters would become opponents like Beverly if coal companies threatened their homes. Why are people willing to let corporations destroy their neighbors homes and write it off as "progress?"
The devastating effects of MTR mining became apparent when we toured the property of Daymon Morgan, an army veteran who has been fighting for decades to prevent a coal company from destroying his land. Because he is too old to walk through his forested backyard, he hopped in his ATV to take us for a tour. He showed us the herbs and trees that grow in the wild. Then he took us over the ridge to see his neighbor's property: it was a bald patch of rock and dirt, with rubble strewn along its length. The contrast between the beauty of Daymon's forest and the horror of the coal mine was so overwhelming that a student started crying.
Traveling through Hazard, KY made me realize the scale of MTR mining. When I started teaching Geology, I would tell amazed students that the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens blew 1300 feet of rock from its top. In Hazard alone I must have seen ten mountains that had that much rock removed from their tops. Humans have exceeded nature in destructive capacity.
Perhaps we could live with MTR mining if coal companies returned mine tailings to their original location at the top of the mountain rather than dumping them into stream valleys where they contaminate the water. If coal companies restored the land surface to its "approximate original contour" and then replaced the soil and planted new trees, the environmental and aesthetic objections would mostly disappear. However, coal companies insist on using the cheapest mining methods, and don't view "restoring the land" as part of their job. Thus, they continue to turn much of Appalachia, one of the most beautiful areas I've ever seen, into a wasteland.

Peak Oil: Background

2010-10-21T07:13:00.000-07:00

Climate says we should change, but peak oil says we will be forced to change (Hopkins 2008).

Oil is an amazing liquid, and an ephemeral, invaluable gift[i]. It has been the world's most important source of energy since the mid-1950s. But evidence suggests that demand for oil will soon outstrip supply, and in the face of shortages of energy, especially for transportation, we will be forced to change our lifestyles.

Oil is effectively a non-renewable resource because it forms much more slowly than we consume it. Thus, by definition our dependence on oil is unsustainable. Oil will become a “scarce,” expensive resource when the world production rate reaches a maximum, an event called peak oil. After that peak, oil production will decline and oil prices and the cost of living will begin a long-term increase.

Currently we have no adequate substitutes for oil. It is the only high energy density liquid that can fuel our current forms of transportation. Coal is used to produce electricity, natural gas for power and heating, but there is no substitute for oil for transportation. The only other liquid fuels that could potentially substitute for oil are hydrogen and biofuels, and both have significant drawbacks. Hydrogen is not a source of energy but a carrier of energy. Hydrogen production requires other forms of energy, usually fossil fuels, and hydrogen vehicles are not energy efficient (MacKay 2009). Biofuel production requires large amounts of land because the efficiency of photosynthesis is low. In most countries biofuel can only be produced by converting land for food to land for fuel, but even if we converted all agricultural land to biofuel production it still could not meet our transportation fuel needs. For example, if Britain converted all of its agricultural land to biofuel production, it still would not supply enough energy (36 kWh/d per person) to meet demand from cars (40 kWh/d per person - see (MacKay 2009) pp. 43-4). After peak oil, we will think twice before hopping in the car for joyrides or frivolous errands; those activities will be too expensive to continue.

Besides its importance for transportation, oil a critically important part of our industrial agriculture system, and is the raw material for many chemical products, including pharmaceuticals, solvents, fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics; the 16% not used for energy production is converted into these other materials. Peak oil advocates such as Deffeyes argue that we should save our remaining oil for more valuable applications than burning it up in our cars. For example, we can’t make most plastics without oil. An oil shortage could cause shortages in all these materials:

Table 4.1: Things we may have to do without* after Peak Oil

* or fall back on less adequate or more expensive substitutes

Most forms of plastic including PVC and polycarbonates
Wax
Asphalt used to make roads
Tar
Many lubricants
Many solvents
Many detergents
Many adhesives
Resins and epoxies
Fibers (polyester, acrylics, nylon, etc.)
Synthetic rubber
Agrochemicals: Fertilizers, Pesticides, Herbicides
engine coolant and aircraft deicer fluid (propylene glycol)
Styrofoam
Many personal care products including perfumes, cosmetics,
Oil-based paints including polyurethanes
Materials for electronics (electrical insulation, capacitors, transformers)
Many inks and dyes
Many food additives including flavorings, colorings, and fragrances
Many pharmaceuticals

Thus, an oil shortage could have a major impact on the way we live. In the next post we will explore the evidence for peak oil.

References

Hopkins, R. (2008). The Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience, Chelsea Green Publishing.

MacKay, D. J. C. (2009). Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. Cambridge, England, UIT Cambridge Ltd. www.withouthotair.com.

[i] Note that we use the term “oil” synonymously with petroleum

Cuba’s transition from a peak- to a post-petroleum world

2010-08-24T09:31:00.001-07:00

Excerpts from “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived the Peak Oil Crisis”

Cuba’s "Special Period" was an economic depression that began in 1991 after the collapse of Cuba's primary sponsor, the USSR. The depression peaked by the mid-1990s and decreased in severity by the end of the decade. Cuba also experienced an energy famine when oil imports dropped from 13 to 4 million barrels per year. Thus, Cuba was the first country to face the peak oil crisis, even though it was an artificial peak. This crisis transformed Cuba's society and economy, as exemplified by the Cuban governments change of its 30-year motto from "Socialism or Death" to "A Better World is Possible", and led to the nationwide adoption of sustainable agriculture. Cuba's successful transition from a peak- to a post-petroleum world teaches us many lessons that will be useful when our own countries are forced to make this transition in the near future.

Because most of Cuba's electricity was produced by burning oil, the oil shortage led to widespread blackouts. People could no longer rely on refrigerators, so their only option was to eat fresh food when it was available. Food shortages became the first problem to develop during the Special Period. To understand why, it helps to know that Americans consume 10 barrels of oil per year producing food, 9 on autos, and 7 on houses. Food shortages were exacerbated by an intensification of the U.S. embargo, which led to an 80% decrease in food imports. After the Green Revolution Cuba's agricultural system was the most heavily industrialized in Latin America, but the oil shortage meant that they couldn't use energy-hungry tractors or combine harvesters or transport the food great distances to consumers. Thus, farmers had to completely transform the agricultural system by relocalizing it and changing farming methods from those of industrial agriculture to permaculture. Society became more decentralized as people moved from cities to farms. People became more self-sufficient as they learned to produce their own food. This took 3-5 years, during which there were constant food shortages, and Cubans lost an average of 20 pounds. Government food distributions & rationing kept people from starving.

But Cuba had some advantages: it had 2% of the population of Latin America but 11% of the scientists. Prior to the Special Period scientists had conducted research on sustainable organic farming, and once the need arose they implemented these methods nationwide. It took 3-5 years to make damaged soils fertile and productive again through systematic application of green manure (plowing green matter in) and compost and use of crop rotation. Nationwide farmers decreased oil-derived pesticide use from 21,000 tons to only 1,000 tons per year by using crop-interplanting methods and biopesticides. Now 80% of the food produced in Cuba is organic. The Cuban diet has changed in response: it is now more vegan-like, with greatly decreased consumption of meat, sugar and dairy products and increased fiber content.

The urban agricultural movement was also effective. It started as a survivalist response on the part of individuals, but grew when entire communities began to convert idle neighborhood plots of land to community gardens. These communities used permaculture methods to create natural gardens on roofs and patios. Each neighborhood has a kiosk to sell fruits and vegetables.

The impact of Peak Oil during the Special Period extended far beyond agriculture. To be politically independent Cuba had to be economically independent, which in turn required energy independence. Cuba now uses its own crude oil (which unfortunately is dirty and bad for the environment) and biomass to produce electricity, and Cubans now use one-eighth of the amount of energy that Americans use. Cubans now would rather sell their oil than use it.

The collapse of the economy meant that money became worthless, and people were forced to switch to alternative currency systems such as bartering. People had to abandon their cars. In small towns people turned to horses for transportation. For transportation over short distances city dwellers could walk or use bicycles. For longer distances Cuba had to develop a mass transit system overnight. Even now mass transportation in cities is inadequate, so the current trend is to build mixed-use communities that are self-reliant because all amenities are local.

Increased exercise and a switch to a healthier diet of fresh vegetables caused the health of Cubans to improve. Health care became decentralized, with doctors and nurses living in the same neighborhoods as their patients and paying house calls. Universities decreased in size but increased in number so they could serve local populations.

The people of Cuba demonstrated impressive resilience during the Special Period. They were forced to live with less and to change their way of thinking and way of life, but they successfully adapted, and are still happy. Cubans survived despite their government's planned economy; perhaps during "long emergencies" such as the Special Period it doesn't matter what form of government you have as much as how resilient communities are.

For more information see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Period and the video "The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived the Peak Oil Crisis"

Solar Cookers for Haiti

2010-08-23T14:32:00.000-07:00

I recently purchased a panel reflector solar cooker for $130. The HotPot was designed and developed by Solar Household Energy (www.she-inc.org) and is manufactured by Integrated Logistics Solutions (www.ils.com.mx) in Monterrey, Mexico. Its design uses simple scientific principles. The reflector focuses sunlight on a black pot containing food. The pot is enclosed in a transparent glass "greenhouse" that traps the heat absorbed by the black pot. The HotPot is excellent for slow-cooking vegetables, rice, legumes, and fish (and meat for my wife). Twice per week I buy locally grown organic produce at the Farmers Market, come home, cut it up, and toss it in the HotPot. It can cook up to 9 pounds of most foods within 3 to 4 hours. Preparation usually takes no more than 15 minutes of cutting and tossing into the pot. No liquids need to be added except for rice and beans because water is "sweated" out of the food. Cooking is even easier; I just set it outside facing the sun, and then rotate it twice to track the sun across the sky. Afterward I simply fold up the reflector, wash the black pot, and store them with the glass pot. Solar cooking requires no fossil fuel energy, is good for the environment, and requires minimal cleanup. In addition, the dishes I prepare are healthy and are excellent as leftovers.

Solar cookers can help solve two of the biggest problems in Haiti, deforestation and lack of clean water. Deforestation primarily results from poor people chopping down trees to make charcoal to fuel their stoves. Women often spend many hours every day collecting wood to make charcoal. A simple solution is to provide solar cookers with instructions to the women in each household. Haiti has abundant sunshine, and to become sustainable the Haitian people need to make use of this valuable, free resource. Solar cookers eliminate the need to cut down trees for charcoal. The time saved could be used by women and girls to improve the situation, perhaps through education. An additional benefit is that solar cookers can be used to effectively pasteurize water, thereby preventing water-borne diseases. Solar cookers are an extremely cost-effective solution to the problems of deforestation and water contamination. Solar Cookers International (http://www.solarcookers.org/) has an aid program to distribute solar CooKits, pots and Water Pasteurization Indicators (WAPIs) in Haiti. This is an example of high-impact philanthropy, meaning charitable donations are used to maximize benefits by leveraging existing resources.

The Simpleton’s Guide to Sustainability

2010-08-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

From general to specific. Items in lists within good cells improve to the left from good to better to best. Any suggestions for additions or deletions?

Bad	Good
Destroy	Preserve
Dependent	Self-sufficient
Ignorance	Knowledge
Opinion	Fact
Waste	Conserve (reduce, reuse, recycle)
Spending	Saving
Consuming	Producing
Fat	Thin
Monoculture	Polyculture
Deficit	Surplus
Hidden costs	Triple bottom line accounting
Disposable	Reusable, recyclable, biodegradable
Noisy	Quiet
Polluting	Clean
Toxic	Benign
Clear-cutting	Selective harvesting
Coal	Solar and wind energy
Personal Automobiles	Public transportation
Beef	Soybeans, farm-raised herbivorous fish
Escalators, elevators	Stairs
Jet-ski	kayak or canoe
Powerboat	Sailboat
Snowmobile	Snowshoes
Downhill skiing	Cross-country skiing
Recreational vehicles	Tents and Cottages
Industrial agriculture	Organic Community Supported Agriculture
Using a treadmill	Walking outside
Driving	Running or bicycling
Travel for meetings	Videoconferencing
Daily commute to work	Telecommuting

Cutting government services doesn’t always save money

2010-08-17T10:19:00.000-07:00

People are familiar with the concept that cutting corners often ends up costing more money in the long run: this applies to homes, cars, nearly every consumer purchase. But the same holds true with government services, which we purchase with our tax dollars. Many want the cheapest government possible, so the trend in the past few decades has been towards decreasing taxes. That trend combined with the recession beginning in 2008 has led to drastic cuts in government services. Those cuts, however, often lead to problems that cost money to remedy. One of many examples is the problem of violent patients in emergency rooms (Julie Carr Smyth, AP, 8/11/2010). Cash-strapped states have closed state hospitals and addiction programs and cut mental health jobs. As a result, ER visits for drug- and alcohol-related incidents increased from ~1.6 to ~2 million between 2005-8, and incidents of violence in ER rooms jumped from 16,277 to 21,406 between 2006-8. In response, hospitals have had to pay for expensive deterrents such as 24-hour guards, bulletproof glass, installation of "panic buttons", coded ID badges and scanners, and metal detectors. From a sustainability perspective, it makes more sense to invest in prevention of substance abuse and mental illness than in security systems to protect people from addicts and the mentally ill. Treatment and prevention increase social capital and may increase economic capital through cost savings; security and deterrence systems do not increase any form of capital.

Globalization and culture

2010-06-25T09:08:00.000-07:00

Much of the backlash against globalization stems from a fear that it will lead to a homogenization of culture. This process has operated throughout history, but electronic media and global transportation have accelerated the process because they have removed barriers to the exchange of information. Without barriers, random processes cause the entropy of the global social system to increase, eventually leading to homogenization. It's like the classic experiment that explains entropy and diffusion. Divide a box into two chambers and fill each with a different gas. When you remove the divider, Gas A molecules begin to diffuse into the Gas B chamber, and vice-versa. The entropy, or disorder, of the system increases as the two chambers change composition from pure gas to increasingly similar mixtures of A and B molecules. When the process is complete, the two chambers have the same compositions. Both entropy and stability are at their maximum values.

Likewise, geographic and communication barriers have historically divided world cultures. A diverse array of cultures developed in isolation, which led to decreased stability and increased conflicts. The modern removal of communication barriers inevitably reversed the process of cultural divergence by increasing the efficiency of information exchange and removing cultural obstructions. Theoretically, the subsequent cultural 'blending' will ultimately (over long periods of time) lead to cultural homogenization and societal stability, but in the short term the process can be disruptive and painful. However, the force driving this process is relentless, so stopping the process would be difficult or impossible, and undesirable since it leads to an increase in stability. As long as humanity has affordable global travel and digital communication, fighting against cultural homogenization on a global scale would be futile. The only way to slow or prevent it is to slow or stop the exchange of information, which is neither desirable nor acceptable.

Just as a homogeneous mixture of two gases is more stable than the segregated pure gases, cultural homogeneity should encourage stability. Removal of cultural differences and barriers increases understanding, which decreases fear and hatred, which increases stability. However, we also previously argued that decreased diversity leads to decreased resilience. A system is most resilient when diversity is at a maximum. For example, ecosystems with high biodiversity are more resilient than those with low biodiversity. In a farm or garden, a polyculture is more resilient than a monoculture. Reasoning by analogy, high cultural diversity corresponds to greater resilience. Cultural diversity makes it more likely that society will find solutions in the face of global threats such as global warming. In the past, some cultures were better prepared to deal with adversity, while other less adept civilizations collapsed. For example, in contrast to the Easter Islanders who practiced unsustainable logging practices until no trees remained, Japanese leaders successfully dealt with timber shortages in the mid-17th century. They invoked Confucian principles of limiting consumption and accumulating reserve supplies to develop sustainable forest management (Diamond 2005). In our global society, one culture may provide the seed of knowledge or understanding that will lead to the preservation of global civilization. What if that culture were wiped out during cultural homogenization? Global homogenization of culture would decrease the resilience of humanity.

Therefore, sustainability requires stability and diversity. We must maximize the two at different spatial scales. A community containing people with similar cultures and beliefs can be stable; a country containing diverse communities can be resilient if those communities respect each other’s differences. To promote sustainability, society should adopt policies that reduce intracommunity diversity and increase intercommunity diversity. For example, many cities in the northeast like Buffalo, where I grew up, have multiple ethnic neighborhoods (Polish, Italian, and Irish in Buffalo), and these neighborhoods have coexisted peacefully for more than one hundred years.

Simple Science is Sometimes the Best Science

2010-05-20T07:04:00.000-07:00

Many people think that important science always involves sophisticated mathematics, high-powered supercomputers, or expensive technical instruments. A recent book demonstrates that this is not always the case. David MacKay, Professor of Physics at Cambridge University, published a very influential book in 2009 titled "Sustainable Energy: Without the hot air", available for free download at http://www.withouthotair.com/. A review in Physics World stated it is 'a book every budding physicist should read - and perhaps also ... the one every working physicist would like to have written.' This book has probably had a greater impact on science and society than any other scientific publication in the last couple of years, but it involves physics no more complicated than application of Newton's laws of motion. MacKay uses data, logic, and simple math to arrive at important conclusions. He systematically calculates the maximum amounts of energy that can be produced by renewable energy sources in Britain and shows that it is not physically possible to meet Britain's energy needs using renewable energy alone. This conclusion is very important, but MacKay also shows why some forms of renewable energy such as solar are much more promising than others such as biofuels. His conclusions will help determine where future scientific research funds will be funneled and therefore what path research on renewable energy will take. Though the science MacKay used is simple, the conclusions are important enough that he was appointed as the chief scientific advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change shortly after the book was published. Britain is now conducting studies to decide whether to support large-scale deployment of tidal power, the form of renewable energy that MacKay most strongly endorsed for Britain in his book.

The enormous impact of MacKay's book may help dispel some misconceptions about science. Important science doesn't need to be expensive or complicated, and sometimes it is published in books rather than scientific journals (remember "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin and "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica" by Isaac Newton?). Society needs clear-headed thinkers like David MacKay to show us how to address some of the pressing scientific problems of our time such as global climate change and peak oil. And the general public can learn a lot about the future of society by reading MacKay’s book.

Economic growth can be too fast, leading to attacks against children in China

2010-05-02T06:44:00.000-07:00

Change as rapid as China is experiencing is destabilizing. Imagine you are Chinese peasant whose lifestyle does not change while everything changes around you. Your friends who became wealthy will no longer be friends with you; the girl you hoped to marry now spurns you because her family is now wealthy. The landmarks you grew up with have been torn down and replaced with modern buildings. You feel alienated and disempowered. What do you do? Perhaps these changes can explain the strange rash of copycat crimes in China that started in March 2010, when a man stabbed eight children to death while they waited for a bus outside their elementary school in the southeastern city of Nanping. At his trial the man said he was angry because he was jilted by a woman and treated badly by her wealthy family. On April 28 he was put to death, and on the same day the second attack occurred: a man in the southern city of Leizhou wounded 15 students and a teacher in a knife attack. The third attack occurred the next day in the eastern city of Taixing when a man slashed 28 children, two teachers and a security guard with an 8 inch knife. The following day a fourth attack occurred in Beijing, where a farmer attacked kindergarten students with a hammer, then burned himself to death.

According to experts, "outbursts against the defenseless are frequently due to social pressures... and growing feelings of social injustice in the fast-changing country. An avowedly egalitarian society only a generation ago, China's headlong rush to prosperity has sharpened differences between haves and have-nots (Bodeen, AP, 4/29/2010)". Change can be too fast for systems and people to adapt; even seemingly positive change like rapid economic growth is unsustainable because it is destabilizing and causes social upheaval.

A Message to Science Educators and Students about Global Climate Change

2010-03-31T13:57:00.001-07:00

A recent poll of climate scientists by the University of Illinois found that 97% now accept that human activity is causing climate change (http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/19/eco.globalwarmingsurvey/index.html). Yet many high school and university science educators who are not climatologists remain skeptical, and pass that skepticism on to their students. What science educators need to realize is that they are teaching their students to be skeptical not about one scientific theory, but the entire scientific process. If science educators don't accept the overwhelming consensus of scientific experts, why should their students or the public? My concern isn't so much whether students learn and accept the scientific consensus on global warming; my concern is that they will conclude that science isn't a legitimate source of knowledge, and that it shouldn't play a role in public policy decisions. If scientists don't trust science, if they don’t believe it is the most effective method for discerning the truth, then why should anyone else? Frankly, I feel sorry for science educators who dedicate their lives to a process that they don't trust. They do science and their students a disservice by not having an unbiased expert present the facts so that their students can form their own opinions. All of us should avoid giving opinions on subjects we are not qualified to evaluate.

Now climate contrarians are allying with creationists to keep the teaching of global climate change and evolution out of the public schools (see “Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets”, Kaufman, published March 3, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/science/earth/04climate.html). For over a century creationists and their predecessors have fought against earth scientists about the age of the earth, biologists about evolution, and astronomers about the age of the universe. Now the same anti-science groups are fighting climatologists about global climate change. Scientists in these fields need the support of other scientists; we need them to take the time to learn about these issues; we don't need them to undercut science by voicing their opinions rather than presenting the facts to students.

Students of science: Don't believe anyone who states opinions about scientific issues without presenting supporting facts, including me. If your teacher or Professor makes an unsubstantiated statement challenging the consensus scientific view, be it on evolution, global climate change, or any other topic, challenge them to explain what evidence they base their opinions on. On global climate change, ask them why they think they know better than the 97% of climatologists who believe the evidence shows that the earth is warming. Ask them how all of those climatologists could be wrong. If the response is not based on science, but on something else like politics or religion, call them on it. If they claim that the scientific experts in that field are unreliable or have all committed fraud, ask them why you should trust any scientific authority.

Taxes can promote sustainability

2010-02-22T05:39:00.000-08:00

The majority of U.S. citizens favor low taxes because they want to decide how to spend their money rather than letting the U.S. government decide. However, most Americans don't realize that taxes are useful not just for raising revenue but also for discouraging undesirable choices. For example, gas taxes discourage gas consumption, which reduces our payments to countries that sponsor terrorism, reduces pollution and emission of GHG, and increases national security by preparing America for future gas shortages. If the proceeds from these taxes are used to remedy other chronic societal problems, and in doing so increase the quality of life of all Americans, we get a win-win situation. For example, the three E's of sustainability are environment, economy, and equity. Raising gas taxes is an investment in the environment, and it improves the economic situation of the federal government, making it more sustainable. If the revenue is used to provide health insurance and education to poor children, we've made a wise investment in human capital and increased equity, making our society more sustainable. Many people would rather not have to pay the gas tax, and use the money they save to buy stuff like HDTV's. But that use of money is not in the best interests of society, or even of those individuals. I believe that the benefits of having a healthy, educated citizenry far outweigh the benefits of having more unnecessary stuff. Would you give up the chance to upgrade to an HDTV if it meant you might live longer (due to reduced pollution)? That you would pay less for your healthcare because hospitals would not have to charge the insured to cover the uninsured? That as an employer you could more easily find well-educated workers, which would improve your bottom line? That all Americans would benefit because a better educated citizenry would make our country more competitive in the global marketplace and our workers more valuable in the global workforce? And since we are now competing globally, a better educated, healthier workforce would make all U.S. companies more competitive and richer, which would make their employees richer, which would increase the amount of tax revenues flowing to the government, which might result in future tax reductions. Thus our choice to raise gax taxes and invest the money in people rather than stuff improves environment, economy, and equity, making the whole country more sustainable. Yes, not all taxes reap so many benefits, but we have to acknowledge that they have the potential to, and therefore be willing to pay them, recognizing that they are simply another form of investment. Wouldn't you rather invest in people rather than stuff?

The Failure of the U.S. Government to Address Sustainability

2010-02-17T08:07:00.000-08:00

The U.S. Government will fail to adequately address sustainability issues, and American citizens will have to abandon the top-down approach and rely on a bottom-up approach to solving these problems that affect our national security. I say this because Congress and the public have become so polarized along ideological lines that compromise and political progress have become impossible. As a result, moderate members of Congress are choosing to leave rather than run for reelection. On February 16, 2010 when moderate Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) announced that he would not seek reelection after two terms, he stated that "there is too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving" on Capitol Hill (Kellman and Jackson, AP, 2/17/2010). Nowhere was this more apparent than when the Senate in January rejected a bipartisan deficit commission that could have forced Congress to make painful budget decisions. Members of Congress are unable to agree to reduce capital outflows, but they refuse to increase capital inflows by raising taxes because that is politically unpopular. Most telling was the fact that some Republicans who originally supported the commission changed their votes after President Obama endorsed it. Clearly these members of Congress were acting in the interests of their political party rather than of the country they serve.

By rejecting the establishment of a commission that could have taken the heat for such unpopular decisions, Congress essentially sealed the economic fate of the federal government. This plot shows the federal deficit over time. The total area under the annual deficit bars is a measure of the total deficit, i.e., the economic overshoot = outflows - inflows, which is also shown by the cumulative deficit line that is now approaching $6 trillion. The federal budget is seriously out of balance, but even worse, in most cases these deficits were planned. Unbalanced proposed budgets are passed every year now.

In this plot I've shaded Republican administration years red and Democratic administration years blue. Notice that until Barack Obama took office in 2009 the red area was much greater than the blue area, meaning that until 2009 Republican administrations contributed more to the deficit than Democratic administrations. Of all of the Presidents since 1970 only Bill Clinton managed to balance the budget, ringing up surpluses in his last three years of office. In contrast, President George W. Bush changed the budget surplus of his first year in office, which was budgeted by Clinton, and turned it into record deficits within two years.

As a result of the economic recession in President Obama's first year in office in 2009 the annual federal budget deficit rose to the highest level ever. It remains to be seen if the benefits of the money spent on the economic stimulus package to stave off the recession outweigh the harms resulting from the increase of the deficit, but if the trend continues, the federal government will soon be unable to meet its financial obligations, and this will likely result in an economic collapse. Most economists predict that interest payments on the budget deficit will consume 80% of all federal revenues by 2020 (Tom Raum, AP, 2/15/2010).

And it will only get worse. In January the U.S. Supreme Court, dominated by political ideologues, voted to eliminate any limits to political contributions by corporations or lobbies. Most American citizens believe that members of Congress are already in the pockets of corporations. Now these corporations will have unlimited influence. The fate of bills will be decided by who has the deepest pockets. And when it comes to the three ABCs of unsustainability, who do you think will win when Congress tries to regulate Automobile, Beef, and Coal producers? Will members of the Senate ever vote to limit CO2 emissions when wealthy oil companies are paying them not to? Congress is losing its integrity and its independence. Soon it will lose its economic power and therefore its influence. We can't rely on Congress to fix our problems.

Do snowstorms disprove global warming?

2010-02-16T09:23:00.000-08:00

The two snowstorms that hit the U.S. east coast in the past few weeks have been touted by many climate change contrarians as proof that the theory of global warming is incorrect. Much of the focus was on Washington, DC, because that's where media people and contrarian politicians are concentrated. Here I examine the many errors associated with this line of thinking.

First, contrarians argued that snow equals cold, and therefore that an unusually large amount of snow means unusually cold. Of course this is a logical fallacy: anyone who has lived in a snow-prone area like my hometown of Buffalo, NY knows that unusually cold means less snow, because very cold air holds less moisture. Large snowfalls are usually associated with warm, moisture-rich air. In Washington DC it is usually cold in enough in January and February to snow, so what was unusual about the two snowstorms was how much snow fell, not how cold it was. Thus, people were confusing precipitation and temperature. In fact, the theory of global warming predicts more intense storms, because the atmosphere has more energy, and greater amounts of precipitation, because the atmosphere is warmer and therefore can hold more moisture. The storms on the east coast resulted from warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico moving northeast and hitting cold dry air from Canada. This caused the warm moist air to cool, and because cold air can hold less moisture than warm air, the excess moisture fell as snow. This was expected because El Nino has been active off the U.S. west coast, and this typically causes more precipitation in the southern and eastern U.S. (note that El Nino events are expected to become more frequent and intense as warming continues).

Contrarians were also confusing local and global. They were committing the logical fallacy of over-generalizing when they inferred from observations on the U.S. east coast the condition of weather globally. They don't seem to understand that it's possible to be unusually cold in some areas but unusually hot in the rest. For example, looking at a global map of temperature anomalies for the month of December 2009 (data from NASA), we can see that it was unusually cold in the U.S. and Siberia, but unusually warm in the rest of the world:

Finally, contrarians were confusing weather and climate. On the short term of weather (days, months) it is entirely possible to have unusually cold temperatures; warming just makes them slightly less probable. But over the long term of climate (years, centuries, millennia) the trend is towards increasing average global temperatures.

So when arguing that snowstorms on the U.S. east coast refute global warming, contrarians were confusing precipitation and temperature, local and global, weather and climate. Is it possible to get any more confused about global climate change?

For more information see http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123671588

For humorous takes see http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-february-10-2010/unusually-large-snowstorm
and
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/264085/february-10-2010/we-re-off-to-see-the-blizzard

Eco-Cities and Eco-villages

2009-06-17T12:25:00.000-07:00

When people think of “green”, they think of forests and grasslands with few people. But for a given number of people, it is more green to all live in one small space rather than spread out. High population density leads to many efficiencies: resources and wastes only have to be transported to one location rather than many; distances to work, school, and stores are shorter; electrical power is transmitted shorter distances, meaning less line loss and greater efficiency. Water and sewage pipes, cable, phone, and power lines all become shorter per capita as housing density increases, making basic services more affordable and less resource-intensive. High-density housing in mixed-use developments also makes sustainable living easier because public transportation becomes feasible, and people can walk and bike to work and school. In fact, residents of Manhattan use less energy and fewer resources than anywhere else in America ([1], pp. 228-9). And if people take up less space by living in cities, that leaves more space for ecosystem services and preservation of biodiversity. Finally, because more than half of the world's population now lives in cities, it makes sense to focus on making cities more sustainable.

Some cities in North America have been at the forefront of planning for sustainability. One of the greenest cities in the world is Vancouver, British Columbia. I was there in summer of 2008 and was truly impressed by the beauty of the natural setting but also by the forward-thinking policies of the government and developers. The majority of Vancouver’s residents live downtown in high-rises and compact communities [1], p. 231). The city is designed for pedestrians and bicycles, and many residents have given up their cars. I rode all over the city in buses and found it remarkable easy and enjoyable. By avoiding urban sprawl, Vancouver has become one of the world’s most livable cities. Preparations for the 2010 Olympic Games that it is hosting are making Vancouver even more impressive.

Not everyone can live in the city. How can we make smaller communities sustainable? Enter the concept of the eco-village. Just by coincidence I live very close to one of the most widely publicized eco-communities in the world, The Farm, located in Summertown, TN (http://www.thefarm.org/). It includes the Farm Ecovillage Training Center, which offers regular courses on sustainable living. The Farm was founded in 1971 when a group of hippies left San Francisco looking for the right place to start their experiment in communal living. The right place was the area with the cheapest land, and that's why they ended up in middle Tennessee.

I went there for a tour one day, during which they briefly described the history of the farm. It started as a socialist society, but eventually the practice became unsustainable because there were too many freeloaders. So in the mid-1980's they abandoned socialism, causing a large segment of the residents to leave. They now have a cooperative system in which they work together to develop shared resources and pay dues. It now seems to operate as a sustainable capitalist community, with many of the residents operating businesses that manufacture radiation detectors, publish books, sell mushroom growing kits, produce video, and offer midwife services and classes. The residents regularly offer classes on mushroom farming, yoga, organic gardening, and other topics. But touring the Farm was somewhat disappointing to me. The residents are good at self-promotion on the web, but the Farm itself is a small collection of run-down buildings and unused fields. As a farm it is a dismal failure, with most of the land left to pasture but no animals (they are all vegetarians) and only one commercial crop, soybeans, which they make into soy milk and ice cream (which is quite delicious). I think the reason is that though they were idealistic, the hippies were ignorant about farming practices, and also many/most of them do not like manual labor. I wanted a demonstration of how they managed to live sustainably, but I never got a glimpse, making me suspect that their community isn't truly sustainable. Even the mushroom growing demonstration was simply a slideshow accompanied by partially coherent, rambling pronouncements on politics by someone who seemed to have partaken of too many mushrooms in his lifetime (I fell asleep). We never even saw where they grow the mushrooms! I could view a slideshow on my computer without driving 40 miles. But to their credit, the residents of The Farm live more simply and have much smaller ecological footprints than most Americans. They understand that you don’t have to have a lot of money and “stuff” to be happy.

Perhaps a more successful eco-village is Gaviotas, located in the llanos (grasslands) of Colombia and well-described by Alan Weisman in his book “Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World” [2]. Like The Farm, it was founded in 1971, but it seems they made greater progress because the founder, Paolo Lugari, had the foresight to bring a team of scientists and engineers to tackle the problems of sustainable living. This team came up with many novel solutions, including a special water pump that could extract groundwater from greater depths and with less effort than with traditional pumps. This pump was connected to a see-saw to put the energy of children’s play to good use. They also developed solar water heaters, the sale of which became a major source of income. Finally, the planting of 1.5 million trees returned part of the llanos back to its preexisting state of tropical jungle by trapping the moisture in a microclimate [2]. The villagers of Gaviotas tap the trees and sell the resin. The genius of the residents of Gaviotas enabled them to succeed in a harsh climate in a country bordering on anarchy.

So when choosing a place to live, you should seriously consider the city. Your ecological footprint will be smaller if you live there. And when gas prices and transportation costs skyrocket, you’ll be glad that you moved there.

1. Steffen, A., ed. World Changing: A User's Guide for the 21st Century. 2006, Abrams: New York, NY. 596.

2. Weisman, A., Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World. 1999: Chelsea Green Publishing Company 1-890132-28-4.

Collect and Purify Water

2009-06-16T09:30:00.001-07:00

During short- and long-term emergencies, the most critical resource for you and your family will probably be potable water, especially if you live in an arid region. To prepare for such emergencies, and also to conserve water, you can practice rainwater harvesting. Rainwater harvesting is one of the easiest ways to move towards self-sufficiency. Because we need water to survive, it is important not to rely completely on the system to provide it; redundancy is desirable in critical life-support systems such as water supply [1].

Because evaporation purifies water, rainwater is usually the purest water in the hydrologic cycle; you can therefore use it to water gardens without treatment. The simplest solution is to place a rain barrel (usually a 55-gallon drum with a valve) underneath the downspout of a rain gutter; the barrel should be placed as high as possible, keeping in mind that any support structure such as a stack of cinder blocks must be able to withstand the 450 pounds of a full barrel. Connect a hose to the valve and place it in your garden. The greater the height difference between the rain barrel valve and the hose outlet in the garden, the greater the pressure that drives the flow, and therefore the faster the water will come out of the hose. Rain barrels should have screens at the top to prevent debris or animals from entering the barrel [2]. Detains on how to construct a rainbarrel are given in [1], or you can purchase one prefabricated.

If during an emergency bottled or municipal tap water are not available and you plan to use rainwater for drinking or food preparation, you will need to go through some extra steps to make sure the water is not contaminated. Waterborne diseases cause nearly 15 million deaths each year. Disinfection kills the pathogens (bacteria, protozoa, parasites, and viruses) that can cause disease. Sterilization kills all living organisms in the water, bad or good. Purification removes potentially harmful chemicals in the water. A simple example makes the distinctions clear. You can disinfect water by pasteurizing it, which requires heating it to 149°F (65°C) for six to twenty minutes ([3], pg. 174). To sterilize the water, simply heat it to a hard boil in a covered pot. Boiling the water requires more energy for heating than pasteurization, but you can reduce the amount of energy required by tightly covering the pot to reduce heat loss. Pasteurization and boiling kill pathogens but do not remove dissolved chemicals such as the salts in seawater. To purify the water, you can remove the dissolved chemicals by boiling the water in an uncovered pot and collecting the condensed steam. Again, this is a very energy-intensive process. Below we will look at a few safe alternatives that require less energy.

The first step in water purification is to filter out suspended sediments that can hold chemical and biological contaminants by forcing the water through clean cheesecloth [2] or by temporarily placing the turbid water in a container to let the sediment settle out. Next, you need to remove biological contaminants that can cause disease. Boiling for ten minutes is the easiest solution. However, if you don't have enough fuel to treat all of your water this way, a more energy-efficient method is to use solar disinfection, termed SODIS ([1], [3]). Ultraviolet light kills the pathogens, and becomes more effective at high temperatures. Simply fix some shelves to a piece of metal painted black, then place bottles filled with water on the shelves and expose them to sunlight for six hours. You can paint the back of the bottles black so they will more effectively absorb sunlight and heat up to higher temperatures, killing the pathogens in as little as one hour [1]. In emergencies or while backpacking you can use iodine tablets, tincture of iodine 2%, betadine, or chlorine bleach to chemically treat water; see Lundin [3] and many other sources for detailed instructions on how to do this safely. There are other ways to kill pathogens, but most of them use high-tech devices such as UV lamps that need to periodically replaced or require electricity and are therefore unsustainable.

After filtering the water and killing the pathogens, most water will be safe to drink. For example, collected rainwater generally has very low concentrations of chemical contaminants, so it usually does not need to be treated to remove them. This is fortunate because it is much more difficult to remove dissolved inorganic chemicals from water. However, if you have reason to believe that your water contains chemical contaminants, you can use sunlight to evaporate the water and then collect the purified condensed water, a form of solar "still" ([4] pg. 471). The Watercone has an ingenious design that allows it to purify 1.6 quarts per day; it can even desalinate seawater ([5], pp. 193-4); see http://www.mage-watermanagement.com/. Or you can set up a still to collect steam produced by boiling water, as described above.

Following the simple procedures described above can help you provide potable water for you and your family during short- and long-term emergencies.

1. Kellogg, S. and S. Pettigrew, Toolbox for Sustainable City Living. 2008, Cambridge, MA: South End Press. 241

2. Bates, A., The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times. 2006: New Society Publishers. 236 978-0-86571-568-4.

3. Lundin, C., When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need to Survive When Disaster Strikes. 2007, Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith. 449

4. Tawrell, P., Camping & Wilderness Survival. Second ed. 2006, Lebanon, New Hampshire: Paul Tawrell. 1080 978-0-9740820-2-8.

5. Steffen, A., ed. World Changing: A User's Guide for the 21st Century. 2006, Abrams: New York, NY. 596.

Composting

2009-06-15T10:24:00.001-07:00

Household garbage often contains a large amount of organic debris that contains stored energy. One of the easiest and most satisfying ecological practices is to compost your waste and produce valuable humus, the organic-rich component of soil that is rich in nutrients and microbes and is essential for fertile soil. At our first house my wife and I bought a large plastic container for composting, but at our second house we used a more environmentally friendly and cheaper approach by building a compost container out of stakes and metal screens used for gardens (Fig. Compost_pile). If designed and maintained properly, compost bins do not usually smell badly, but to be safe we placed ours at the back of our yard. The disadvantage is that we have to walk a few hundred yards to dispose of waste in our compost pile, so we reduce the number of trips by using a small container that we fill and then carry to the compost pile. This is about the only effort required for passive composting, which takes about one year to completely breakdown organic debris into humus. Active composting can produce humus much more quickly, but requires much more effort, and in general I prefer the easy approach. We occasionally stir and water the pile, and then remove soil from the bottom of the pile for our gardens. And we follow some simple rules. First, we add no meat or fatty foods like butter that can attract animals and smell when they spoil. We try to use ½ green, wet material such as tree and bush trimmings and grass clippings that are nitrogen-rich, and ½ brown, dry material (decayed leaves, straw, wood chips) that is carbon-rich ([1], pp. 111-121), in addition to any compostable food waste we produce (banana and orange peels, used coffee grinds and tea leaves, eggshells, corn husks, artichoke leaves, and spoiled fruit and vegetables). We add these materials in layers. It’s better to have too much brown than green material, as too much green can cause formation of molds and bad smells. We don’t add weeds to our compost so as to avoid adding their seeds to our gardens when we add composted soil. Compost bins do not need sunlight, so we placed ours in a shady corner of our yard.

Start your compost pile by mixing together yard litter and foodstuffs, mixing in a small amount of soil that contains the necessary microorganisms, and adding a little water. Little may happen in the first few weeks, but once the microorganisms multiply and establish healthy colonies they will start digesting the waste, extracting energy for their metabolic processes and releasing some of the energy as heat. You will know that your compost pile is working when you feel it giving off heat. When oxygen is present the breakdown of organic matter can be described by the reverse of our model chemical reaction for photosynthesis:

C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂ = 6 CO₂ + 6 H₂O

The heat comes from the energy of the sun, temporarily stored in organic molecules by plants utilizing photosynthesis. Essentially the same reaction occurs in our bodies when we consume food; respiration releases the energy stored in the food so our bodies can use it. Oxygen is present under aerobic conditions, and the microorganisms use it to breakdown (oxidize or combust) the organic molecules to extract their energy, but if the oxygen they use is not replaced, then eventually it will all be consumed, and under such anaerobic conditions the above reaction grinds to a halt. What happens next is that anaerobic fermentation reactions begin to breakdown the organic molecules and produce alcohol, the same process that we use to make bread and beer with yeast (the alcohol escapes from the bread during cooking). Anaerobic respiration also produces lactic acid in our muscles when we strenuously exercise: the body cannot replace the oxygen fast enough, so it begins to break down sugars and fats anaerobically (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-does-lactic-acid-buil). The problem with alcohol production in the compost pile, however, is that alcohol is a disinfectant, so it sterilizes the pile, wiping out the microbial communities. And anaerobic respiration tends to produce odors from compounds like hydrogen sulfide, which gives the “rotten egg” smell you associate with swamps, where it is produced in the same way.

Finished compost should be dark brown. If it is black, your compost pile does not have enough oxygen; you need to add less water, and aerate the pile by turning it over. A simple approach to solve both of these problems is to place perforated PVC pipes, ones that are slightly greater in length than the diameter of your pile, at various heights in the pile. The pipes will suck air in to provide oxygen to aid decomposition, and drain off excess water.

Creating your own soil by composting is one more way to move yourself toward sustainability and independence [1]. And composting, combined with recycling, has greatly reduced the amount of waste we put in garbage cans.

1. Kellogg, S. and S. Pettigrew, Toolbox for Sustainable City Living. 2008, Cambridge, MA: South End Press. 241

Buy Green and Encourage Sustainable Design

2009-06-14T13:39:00.000-07:00

Besides avoiding purchases of disposable products and junk that is designed to break, and repairing rather than replacing, you should try to purchase products that are designed sustainably, made from renewable resources, and manufactured locally (to reduce carbon emissions from transportation and to help your local economy). When contemplating a purchase, ask yourself, “Do I really need this product? Will it add value to my life? Was the product manufactured in an eco-friendly way? Will its use harm the environment?”

When making purchases, avoid greenwashing, the practice of attaching a green label to a product that is not eco-friendly ([1], pp. 38-9). A perfect example is the Ortho Ecosense line of insecticides http://www.scotts.com/smg/brand/ecosense/brandLanding.jsp, where the word "Ecosense" is displayed in large green letters, but in smaller letters underneath it says "not intended to imply environmental safety either alone or compared to other products". So why are the letters in green and the prefix "Eco" in the name? Because it helps sell the product, even if for the wrong reasons.

New sustainably designed products are hitting the market, but if no one buys those products, then we will lose the opportunity to help make the market more eco-friendly. Consumers have the power to make the market more green by choosing eco-friendly products.

Simple rules should guide the design of sustainable products. Consumers should look for products that follow these rules. For example, Edwin Datschefski (in “The Total Beauty of Sustainable Products”, Rotovision, 2001) states simply (see [1], p. 86) “that things must be cyclic, solar, and safe”, and that “an object’s total beauty should not be undermined by hidden impacts.”

There are many examples of home interior products that are designed sustainably. Bamboo is becoming a popular choice for wood flooring because this fast-growing wood is beautiful, durable, and renewable. For carpeting check out DuPont’s Smart-Strand, which is made from corn, is recyclable and biodegradable, and costs no more than comparable nylon carpeting. Using renewable corn instead of non-renewable oil to make the plastic saves a gallon of gas for every seven square yards of carpet. Eco by Cosentino is a durable surface made of 75% recycled content composed of post-industrial or post-consumer materials bound by an environmentally friendly resin which comes in part from corn oil (See http://www.pr.com/press-release/158589). Vetrazzo’s recycled glass countertops contain 85% recycled glass by weight. The glass comes from curbside recycling programs, post-industrial usage, windows, dinnerware, stemware, automotive windshields, stained glass, laboratory glass, reclaimed glass from building demolition, and other unusual sources such as decommissioned traffic lights. Ivy Coatings make a zero VOC, non-toxic paint that can help improve indoor air quality. Finally, Ultra Touch Insulation is made from recycled denim jean (also http://www.pr.com/press-release/158589).

Designing sustainably takes creativity. As stated by the inventor Edwin Land, creative and effective design requires the “sudden cessation of stupidity” ([1], p. 84). When you encounter a creative sustainable design for the first time, the usual reaction is to say, ‘why didn’t anyone think of this before?” because it is better in every respect than the old design, and yet it is simple. A design I recently encountered, the parking lot swale, elicited that reaction from me. Parking lots often flood because asphalt and concrete are impermeable. They need a sink for water to flow into and infiltrate into the ground during heavy rain events. The only permeable surfaces in parking lots are the islands, which are usually raised beds surrounded by concrete barriers. Water does not flow to the islands because it does not flow uphill. A smart and simple alternative is to make the islands depressions into which water will flow (Fig. Parking_swale_schematic.jpg). The depressions do not need to be surrounded by concrete barriers, and they effectively drain water from the parking lot (Fig. Parking_lot_drainage.jpg). And the parking spots themselves can be partially carpeted with grass (Fig. Green_parking_lot_Ikea.jpg) or porous concrete. These measures reduce the risk of flooding, allow water to infiltrate and recharge the aquifer, reduce the “heat island” effect caused by the high heat absorption and thermal mass of asphalt, and reduce the amount of rainwater shunted into storm systems, which saves energy used to pump and treat the water. Also, by increasing the amount of plants, they help increase water retention, remove pollutants, act as windblocks and noise mufflers, and beautify the parking lot. And all of these benefits come for free, because the sustainable design costs no more than the old unsustainable design.

One of the goals of the sustainability movement is to close the manufacturing loop. Currently most products track a linear path from resource extraction to manufacture to use to disposal. In a closed loop products are never disposed of; they are either reused or recycled. How do we know if sustainable practices were followed at each step in the lifecycle of a product? One way is to see if the product has been certified. For example, a Cradle to Cradle (C2C) platinum certified product is produced sustainably, and at the end of its usable life can be recycled, or is biodegradable, as described in “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things” by William McDonough and Michael Braungart (North Point Press, 2002).

1. Steffen, A., ed. World Changing: A User's Guide for the 21st Century. 2006, Abrams: New York, NY. 596.

Our Relationship with Nature

2009-06-10T11:38:00.000-07:00

*Please note: I haven’t been posting recently because there have been so few comments that I was not convinced anyone was reading my entries. If you read this entry, please post a comment (click the “Comment” link at the end). You don’t even have to write anything; I just want to use the number of comments to estimate how many people are reading. If no one is reading these, then I’m not going to bother posting any more. Thanks, John

Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature. ~Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future, 1964

There is a basic antagonism between the philosophy of the industrial age and the philosophy of the conservationist. – Aldo Leopold

Environmental problems develop when there is an unhealthy relationship between humans and the environment. The ways people approach, treat, and think of nature depend on their self-image. According to Wilson [1] there are two competing types of human self-image, exemptionalist and naturalist. Exemptionalists believe that humans exist apart from environment and hold dominion over it. In western civilization, most believe that God made the environment for our benefit, and that we have the freedom to use it as we see fit. Using technology, we can improve our current environment or adapt to any new environments. In contrast, naturalists believe that humans have perfectly adapted to our environment through millions of years of evolution, but that we are now rapidly destroying that environment. However, we can only be happy when we live in our original, natural environment because it is prescribed in our genes. The basic principle of organic evolution called habitat selection states that species prefer and gravitate to the environment in which their genes were assembled. Thus, we are completely dependent on our environment, including other species.

Wilson supports the Naturalist view. He states that the failures of the Biosphere 2 project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioSphere_2) show that we and our environment are fragile and that our current technology cannot be used to create artificial sustainable environments. Exemptionalists claim that new technologies (power of the human mind) and free-market economies will provide adequate resources for the growing population; however, Wilson points out that there are limits to the amounts of water, arable land, oil, and food (including seafood), that can support us, and all of this is complicated by global warming. Exemptionalists are taking a gamble when they advise pressing forward with current policies and assume that technology will provide solutions to these growing problems before they become disasters. Ecologists like Wilson don’t like these gambles because they know that if we lose, we lose everything.

Wilson [1] believes that economists, who generally take the exemptionalist point of view, promote policies that are inconsistent with sustainability. Their economic models ignore human behavior, and they ignore the environment. A big problem is that they assume that there are adequate resources for all countries to have the same standard of living as the U.S.. However, the U.S. can only maintain its standard of living by using the resources of other countries (“economic miracles are not endogenous”), which we will demonstrate in detail later. Finally, economists do not use full-cost accounting, i.e., they don’t include the loss of natural resources. In this book I advocate a naturalist approach to solving environmental problems and achieving future sustainability.

The different approaches to nature are illustrated in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Elves lived symbiotically with nature and are presented as pure and good, while the ugly and evil orcs used resources like trees in a non-renewable way and transformed their environment into a wasteland. Clearly, to Tolkien it was evil to destroy the beauty of nature. In the Lord of the Rings some humans sided with elves and some with orcs, just as today humanity is divided between naturalist and exemptionalist camps (I’m not trying to say that exemptionalists are as ugly as orcs).

I am a naturalist rather than an exemptionalist, so I believe it is most effective to work with rather than against nature. You must always keep in mind that Nature is a powerful force; it is constantly at work, and while your short bursts of work may be more intense, and the use of energy from oil can magnify your efforts, eventually Nature will win because it has limitless time. How did streams cut through mountains to create water gaps? How did ancient mountains almost completely erode away? In ”The World Without Us”, Alan Weisman [2] describes what would happen to our structures (cities, buildings) if humans disappeared. It wouldn’t take long for nature to completely erase the evidence of our existence.

1. Wilson, E.O., Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. 1998, New York, NY: Vintage Books. ISBN 367 0-679-45077-7.

2. Weisman, A., The World Without Us. 2007, New York, NY: Picador. ISBN 416 978-0-312-42790-0.

Industrial Agriculture

2009-05-26T10:00:00.001-07:00

The American farm is not what it once was. Agriculture is now a commercial operation, not a family operation. On the modern industrial farm, monocultures (a single crop, usually corn) have replaced polycultures, and farm animals are often nowhere to be found. In the past, we took animal waste and used it to fertilize the crops that fed the animals; this comprised an efficient closed loop system. Now we house animals in feedlots, where the waste is no longer a resource but a pollutant, and at the farm we have to use fossil-fuel fertilizer in place of manure.

Unfortunately industrial agriculture is now firmly entrenched in the U.S.. Pollan [1] gives an excellent introduction to the problems of industrial agriculture, which is entirely reliant on fossil fuels, less healthy for us and the environment, consumes more resources, and is therefore less sustainable than old-style agriculture. As noted before, it now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce one calorie of food, whereas in the 1940's it only took 0.4 calories to produce on calories of food energy. Pollan [1] points out that unless we make the food system more dependent on renewable solar energy than non-renewable fossil fuel energy, it will be difficult or impossible to make progress in the U.S. on health care, energy independence, or climate change.

The use of monocultures and loss of agricultural biodiversity in industrial agriculture is particularly troubling. For example, long ago there were many varieties of bananas grown in the tropics. But consumer preference soon led to the predominance of a single cultivar (bananas are grown by propagation because they are seedless) named Gros Michel. That cultivar was wiped out in the 1950’s by Panama disease (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananas) and was replaced by the Cavendish, which is very popular because it is grown year-round and has long shelf-life. However, because of the way it is grown, it lacks genetic diversity, which makes it vulnerable to disease, and it therefore could be wiped out like its predecessor Gros Michel. Growers are concerned that the Cavendish could be wiped out in a pandemic, perhaps caused by the black sigatoka fungus, within the next twenty years, and there are no similar plants to replace it. This would be a huge loss because the banana is the most popular fruit and the fourth most important food crop worldwide ("A future with no bananas?". New Scientist. 2006-05-13. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn9152-a-future-with-no-bananas.html). Thus, high biodiversity gives us food security.

Like our monoculture lawns, monoculture crops are unnatural and therefore require lots of energy to maintain. Modern grain crops are annuals rather than perennials, and modern varieties did not develop over millions of years in perfect tune with the local climate. Rather, they were developed quickly through breeding and genetic engineering to grow fast, not to be hardy. They are not as well adapted to the local environment as the weeds, which is why the weeds take over if we don't fight on behalf of the crop. The less hardy and well-adapted a crop is, the more energy that is required to make it grow. To reduce the amount of oil-derived energy used to produce crops you must work with rather than against nature. Use perennials as crops rather than annuals. Choose natural varieties that are well-adapted to the local environment (known as heirlooms), even if they have lower yields. The resulting increase in genetic diversity will increase our food security. And decreasing our reliance on oil in agricultural production now will better prepare farmers and our society for the post-oil world. We will discuss these solutions in more detail later in the section on Organic Agriculture, but where you can have the most influence on changing the food production system is in the choices you make as a consumer.

Consumers drive the food production system. Americans want cheap food, and they tend to prefer sweet and highly processed foods. Also, they don’t want to know how their food was produced, and they don’t want to have to cook; it’s too much effort. So why do we often feel fat and stupid? Our ancestors used to spend much of their day growing, preparing, and cooking food. Today food is an afterthought. Most parents don’t ask the question “what will we have for dinner tonight” until they get home from work. They don’t have the time or energy to pick fresh vegetables and prepare a balanced meal. For breakfast, our grandparents took the time to make eggs, bacon and toast every morning; our parents replaced that with the convenience of cereal and milk. Now we don’t even leave enough time to eat a bowl of cereal, often rushing out the door with an instant breakfast or a protein bar.

To me the protein bar symbolizes everything that’s wrong with American food culture. Families used to sit together at the table, talk, and enjoy their food. Now we don’t have time for that, so we choose to rush off to the car with a bar that looks like a turd and tastes like cardboard. Protein bars are highly processed, so we don’t recognize the taste of any of the ingredients. And no wonder! If you read the list of ingredients, you will find that it is extraordinarily long, and that you don’t recognize the names of most of the ingredients. Most of them are synthetic chemicals. If you gave your grandparents a protein bar they would probably frown, take one bite and spit it out. They would not consider a protein bar to be food because it contains no recognizable ingredients, and therefore has no recognizable taste. And when you told them how much it cost per ounce, they would laugh at you. The more processing it takes to make a food, the more expensive it becomes per ounce, and the more profit the food manufacturer makes. So of course, food companies try hardest to sell their most highly processed foods by heavily advertising them. So why do people buy them? For the convenience (I think protein bars would survive a nuclear war), and because we think they are good for us. However, in my experience the people who rely on highly processed foods such as protein bars are less healthy than people who eat “real” food. Protein bars are just another type of fast food, and we all know that fast food is unhealthy. The trend towards increasing proportions of fast food and processed foods in our diets has led to an epidemic of obesity and type II diabetes in the U.S..

One of the most damning indictments of industrial agriculture is that it is unethical. People sometimes joke about where the meat in their hot dog came from, usually agreeing “you don’t want to know”. We sometimes hear from animal rights groups about atrocities committed in slaughterhouses, but those groups have lost credibility in the eyes of much of the public, and the average person can’t just walk into a slaughterhouse to verify the claims. It’s amazing to me that animal feedlots have not been subjected to greater public scrutiny. Part of the problem may be that the American public still has a soft spot in their hearts for farmers, and they don’t want to hassle them, but again it is not family farmers but large corporations that run CAFOs. Why do the media and the public handle them with kid gloves? I’ve read about reporters being turned away at the doors of CAFOs (e.g., [2]), but that never stopped investigative journalists in the past. As a result, I don’t know as much about CAFOs, slaughterhouses, and food processing as I should (I almost wrote “As I would like”, but I’m not sure I would like to know, which may explain the public being satisfied to be left in the dark). But I have read about what happens to egg-laying chickens [2], and it so upset me that ever since I read about it I have paid 4x as much for cage-free eggs.

In conclusion, the food production system in the U.S. is seriously flawed because it harms human health, it degrades the environment, and it is unethical. It is broken because the federal government’s subsidy system rewards the overproduction of corn. These subsidies make processed foods made from corn inexpensive, leading to the expansion of fast food companies such as McDonald’s. In fact, McDonald’s is probably the primary beneficiary of farm subsidies. The goal of our food production system is to maximize productivity, so we subsidize Happy Meals but not healthy meals. In 1973 we decided as a country to produce as many calories per acre as possible, and that is when America started getting fat. We now live in the "age of plenty", eating more calories than in 1970 but spending only half as much of our salaries on food (currently on average we use 16-17% of our salaries to buy food compared to about 30% in 1970). On the plus side, industrial agriculture requires fewer people to produce food, freeing people to do other things, and very few people in the U.S. are starving. But is industrial agriculture good for us? And is it good for the environment? I think the answer to both questions is no.

Pollan [1] lists some simple principles for improving agriculture in the U.S.. Improved Food Policies should: 1) strive to produce a healthful diet for all people; increase the quality and diversity of calories rather than the quantity. 2) aim to improve the resilience, safety, and security of our food supply. 3) reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change. He notes that "while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food". To make food production more sustainable he recommends that we resolarize farms, reregionalize the food system, and rebuild America's food culture. He ends by listing "21st century's most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve the health of the American people, and to mitigate climate change." As noted by Brown [3], “"The wildcard in the food prospect is climate change. Crop ecologists estimate that for each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature above the norm during the growing season, we can expect a 10-percent decline in grain yields."

What changes can we make in agriculture to make sure that it can feed the 10 billion people predicted to be on the planet in 2010? Is it even possible to adequately feed that many people? It depends on what they eat [4]. If everyone on earth becomes a vegetarian, then it may be possible.

Until the Green Revolution the limiting factors on agricultural yield were nutrient availability and soil moisture. Using energy from oil, farmers erased these constraints by applying oil-derived fertilizers and pumping water for irrigation. An eleven-fold increase in fertilizer use combined with a three-fold increase in irrigated area and the adoption of high-yielding hybrids of corn, wheat, and rice led to a tripling of world grain harvest [3] (Fig. World Grain Production and Consumption). However, in many areas this high-intensity agriculture is unsustainable because it relies on the non-renewable resources oil and deep groundwater. Like oil, on a human timescale deep groundwater is a single-use resource: once we use it, it's gone. And oil and water shortages are appearing nearly simultaneously, giving farmers a double-whammy. This may cause grain production to actually decrease in the near future. Since demand continues to increase due to the annual addition of roughly 70 million people per year and the expanding use of grains as biofuels, the outlook is for increasing grain prices and increasing numbers of hungry poor people. In addition to grain shortages, we must also worry about the decline in the world fish harvest due to the recent collapse of some marine fisheries. The per capita wild fish harvest is now lower per capita than at any time since the early 1960’s (Fig. World Wild Fish Harvest Per Person). Catastrophists point to these trends and claim we are facing a global food crisis, but their predictions in the past have frequently proved inaccurate. For example, catastrophist Brown made the following food supply predictions that are obviously inaccurate: "Farmers...can no longer keep up with rising demand; thus the outlook is for chronic scarcities and rising prices" (Brown 1974); "Global food insecurity is increasing...the slim excess of growth in food production over population is narrowing" (Brown 1981). However, we have to admit that the current trends are troubling, and that we have to come up with new solutions to prevent a global food crisis and sustainably produce an adequate food supply for 10 billion people.

Perhaps the biggest problem in affluent countries like the U.S. is that we now take food for granted. As observed by Smil [4]: “When judged by the allocation of labor force, ours are predominantly service economies. They depend, however, no less than millennia ago, on adequate food production. I find it astonishing that this truism is so widely, and so easily, discounted. Saving, as so many economists do, that agriculture does not matter as much as it used to because it now accounts for just a few percentage points of the GDP betrays a touchingly naive trust in arbitrary accounting procedures and the most profound ignorance of the real world. Our postmodern’ civilization would do quite well without Microsoft and Oracle, without ATMs and the WWW—but it would disintegrate in a matter of years without synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, and it would collapse in a matter of months without thriving bacteria. Our first duty is to take care of these true essentials.”

How can we expand agricultural yield in a sustainable way? One approach is to breed crop varieties that we can grow in arid and cold regions that are currently not farmable. Another is to multicrop, i.e., to grow two or three crops each year rather than harvesting one and then leaving the land bare and unproductive for the rest of the year. China has used some of these methods to greatly increase their food production. Some catastrophists like Brown predicted widespread starvation in China in the 1980's-1990's (see [4]), but China is now a grain exporter.

To avoid future global starvation we need to stabilize world population, change our buying and eating habits (pay the true cost of food by being willing to pay extra for organic foods), move down the food chain by becoming vegetarian (eat foods from lower trophic levels in the food chain), stop growing crops for fuel, develop less energy-intensive forms of agriculture such as no-till farming, and use water in a sustainable way (no deep groundwater mining) by raising water productivity [3]. These topics will be explored in later chapters.

1. Pollan, M., The Food Issue: Farmer in Chief, in New York Times. 2008: New York, NY

2. Pollan, M., The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. 2007.

3. Brown, L., Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. 2008, New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

4. Smil, V., Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-first century. 2000, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Food

2009-05-24T14:05:00.001-07:00

"I believe that the great Creator has put ores and oil on this earth to give us a breathing spell. As we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our farms, which is God's true storehouse and can never be exhausted. We can learn to synthesize material for every human need from things that grow." — George Washington Carver

Most people are unaware of the radical changes in food production since WWII. One hundred years ago most people lived and worked on farms; today most people do not, and many have never even been on a farm. We have changed from an agrarian society to an industrial society. As a result, most people think that food is produced the same way it was 100 years ago. I personally knew that there were significant changes, but reading Michael Pollans’ book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” [1] was a revelation to me, and as I’ve read more I’ve continued to be amazed and sometimes appalled at current food production practices in the U.S..

The changes began with the Green Revolution in the middle of the 20^th century. Through the use of irrigation, chemical fertilizers, new varieties of crops, use of new pesticides and herbicides, and industrialized systems, factory farms were able to greatly increase the grain yield (amount harvested per unit acre). This industrial system of agriculture is unsustainable. It relies on energy from a non-renewable resource, oil [2]. On average, it now takes ~10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce 1 calorie of food energy. In the process, oil-derived fertilizers and toxic pesticides and herbicides are used, and CO₂ is emitted, in great quantities. Massive scale farming also began the era of perverse subsidies, perverse because they are harmful both to the environment and to the economy. Examples include paying farmers to overproduce crops such as corn and to leave fields bare during growing seasons, which can cause erosion and soil depletion, instead of employing crop rotation. Intensive agriculture also requires more water, and has led to the overuse of groundwater and falling water tables. Also, the standardization of crop strains during the green revolution has resulted in decreased natural and agricultural biodiversity. With less biodiversity, the food supply is at a greater risk to pathogens. In sum, the green revolution led to an energy-intensive, monoculture style of farming that is worse for the environment and produces food that is less healthy. You can also argue that it allowed for an expansion of the population, which allowed for an even greater negative impact on the environment. And as the growth in yield slowed, it was overtaken by the increase in population, so by 1985 the per capita production of crops began to decline, and grain reserves began to decrease [3].

Further changes began in 1973, when Secretary of the Interior Earl Butz made monumental changes in the way federal government dealt with farmers. Prior to 1973 the government paid farmers to let practice crop rotation (i.e., let soil lie fallow), generally by planting legumes every fourth year to replenish critical nutrients such as nitrogen in the soil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation). For example, soybeans are commonly rotated with corn so that the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in soybean roots can replace the nitrate extracted from the soil by corn. By controlling the amount of food produced, the government stabilized food prices and kept grain prices high enough to keep agriculture profitable. Butz thought it was wasteful to pay farmers to not plant the primary crop, usually cereals such as corn and wheat, especially when we could replace soil nitrogen using industrial chemicals produced from oil, so he changed the farm program. The emphasis was now on increased quantity rather than quality. Americans wanted cheap food, and large surpluses of grains like corn kept prices so low that the government had to start subsidizing grain farmers to keep them in business.

To increase efficiency, farms grew in size, and most family farms went under or were purchased by corporate farms. New corn hybrids were bred to withstand higher planting densities and tolerate the application of herbicides; the goal was to maximize the number of food calories produced per acre of land. But most of the corn grown today is less nutritious because it was bred for increased starch (larger endosperm), which results in a lower proportion of protein (smaller germ). And it is practically inedible for humans; farmers rarely eat the food they grow today.

Soon the corn surpluses became so large that new markets had to be developed. It was found that beef could be made more cheaply by force-feeding corn to cattle in Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’s) rather than letting cattle graze on grass. Americans preferred the marbled, higher fat content beef that was produced: Grass-fed beef has 1.3% saturated fat, while CAFO cows have 8% fat because they are confined to small areas and do not get any exercise. Because cows did not evolve to eat corn, their bodies are unable to digest it properly. After about five months of eating corn, cows usually develop acidosis, where excess stomach acids eat through the stomach lining and produce ulcers. To combat the effects of acidosis, livestock consume 70% of the antibiotics used in the U.S.. Because of problems related to a corn diet, cows are usually killed after living only 140-150 days; it’s unlikely they would live much longer if allowed to. The cows often have trouble walking to the slaughterhouse because they never develop the necessary muscles. It’s sadly pathetic to see a cow flopping on the ground, unable to walk toward its’ own death.

But we still had too much corn. Why not use corn as a sweetener? Americans have a sweet tooth, but the price of sugar from sugar cane was high, and Americans like cheap food. So in the 1970's food companies replaced sugar with High fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Since 1970 the average number of calories from sweeteners in the American diet has increased 30% [4]. Much of that comes from drinking soda pop, which used to contain sugar but now contains HFCS. If you read ingredient labels, you know that most of the processed foods you eat contain HFCS. Some, like pancake (not maple) syrup, are almost entirely HFCS. For our ancestors wheat was the dominant grain crop, but for us it is corn. Corn is now so widespread in our diet that is reflected in the carbon isotope composition of our hair. As a grass, corn uses a process called C4 photosynthesis that produces C with a higher ¹³C/¹²C ratio than non-grasses like wheat that use C3 photosynthesis and have lower ¹³C/¹²C. The hair of Americans typically has ¹³C/¹²C even higher than that of Mexicans, suggesting that we eat more corn than the true “People of the Corn” (corn originated in southern Mexico). We now eat and drink corn, and the animals we eat ate corn, so almost all of the food we take in is derived from corn.

But still we have too much corn. Why not use corn as a fuel? We could cut subsidies and thereby stop encouraging the overproduction of corn, but that would be politically unpopular: stop giving money to our farmers? Again, voters have a quaint, outdated image of the American farmer and his family, when in reality most farms today are owned by corporations. So President Bush had a great idea that would prop up the ebbing popularity if his political party: pay farmers to grow fuel. When this decision was made in 2007, the price of oil was on the increase. When it reaches a certain level, corn becomes more valuable as a fuel than as a food. So farmers started to sell their corn for use in the production of ethanol, and Americans felt good because when they gassed up their flex-cars they were helping Americas’ farmers and decreasing pollution. However, there is one fatal flaw in logic that you may have deduced. A huge amount of oil is used to produce that corn, so in reality you are not using any less oil to fuel your car even if you use 100% ethanol; you are simply paying Americas’ farmers to grow more corn that we don’t need. Today roughly 50% of corn today goes to feedlots; 32% is exported or turned into ethanol; and the rest is turned into corn sweetener (high fructose corn syrup).

1. Pollan, M., The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. 2007.

2. Manning, R., The Oil We Eat: Tracing the Food Chain Back to Iraq, in Harper's Magazine. 2004

3. Wilson, E.O., Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. 1998, New York, NY: Vintage Books. 367.

4. Woolf, A., King Corn. 2007

The Nuclear Waste Disposal Problem

2009-05-20T08:36:00.001-07:00

What, then, are our options for disposing of nuclear waste? Since our focus is on evaluating fission reactors as a viable source of energy in the future, we will examine the properties of and disposal options for SNF, and ignore storage of defense waste (from decommissioned nuclear warheads, etc.).

One option that nuclear proponents discuss is the use of breeder reactors to recycle the waste. On the surface, recycling sounds like a good choice from an environmental standpoint, as it would reduce the amount of waste that needs to be disposed of, and it would reduce the required amount of environmentally harmful Uranium mining. However, the Carter administration chose in 1977 to ban the use of breeder reactors due to the enhanced risk of nuclear proliferation (breeder reactors produce Plutonium, which is ideal for making nuclear bombs). France uses breeder reactors to recycle their fuel, but I’ve been told by experts at Vanderbilt that breeder reactors are so complex that they frequently break down and have poor safety records [1]), so France has started to decommission their plants. Breeder reactors are not a panacea to the waste disposal problem.

Geological storage is widely considered to be the safest method for storage of SNF [2]. Until recently, the goal was to isolate SNF from the surface environment for at least 10,000 years, which was considered long enough for the total radiation level to decrease to acceptable levels. However, a court ruling in 2006 (?) increased the mandatory safe storage duration to 1,000,000 years. Considering humans have yet to build any structure that has lasted more than 5,000 years, there clearly is no way to guarantee that a HLNW disposal structure could maintain its integrity and confine the waste for one million years.

Yucca Mountain is a logical choice to store SNF because it is so dry. The primary objective of SNF storage is to keep the waste away from water. Why? Because water is the strongest known solvent, and it is mobile. The fear is that water would dissolve the waste and transport it a densely populated area such as Las Vegas, which is where groundwater from Yucca Mountain was originally thought to flow. Yucca Mountain has the lowest water table in the continental U.S.; to get well water there, you would have to drill a well 2,000 feet deep. The idea was to bury the waste 1,000 feet deep so that 1,000 feet of rock would protect it from the groundwater below and any infrequent precipitation events at the surface. Furthermore, it was discovered that Yucca Mountain is in an isolated hydrologic basin, so even in the worst-case scenario where the waste contaminated the groundwater, it would still be isolated within that small, uninhabited basin. Yucca Mountain is located at the edge of the Nevada Test Site, where 928 atomic bombs were detonated between 1951 and 1992, so it is already contaminated by radiation. Finally, the low population density and suitable host rock (volcanic tuff) make Yucca Mountain well suited for disposal of SNF.

Evidence that geological storage of SNF is relatively safe comes from natural analogues such as the Oklo natural reactor in Gabon. In this location 1.7 billion years ago a natural uranium ore deposit formed. At that time natural uranium had a higher proportion of ²³⁵U, the fissile isotope, so the uranium did not have to be artificially enriched like today to generate a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Isotopic analyses show that the ore body is highly depleted in ²³⁵U, and has the same proportions of isotopes as SNF, so we infer that the ore body acted as a natural fission reactor (http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/fact/Oklo_Natural_Nuclear_Reactors.shtml). In fact, 15 separate reactors have been discovered at the site. When the reactors were active 1.7 BYBP, groundwater acted as neutron moderator, slowing neutrons so that they could fission ²³⁵U nuclei. The heat released by fission reactions caused the groundwater to boil off, which shut down the chain reaction. Groundwater would then fill up the reactor again, and the cycle repeated. The fission reactions consumed 6 tons of ²³⁵U, producing 15,000 megawatt-years of energy over 500,000 years and heating rocks to ~400°C. Yet in the 1.7 BY since the reactors stopped operating, the original uranium and all of the fission-product nuclides have remained immobile, even though the host rocks are permeable and were likely often filled with flowing water. This is very strong evidence that SNF can be stored safely underground.

Some of my own research can be applied to the problem of safe SNF storage. To answer the question of what material can safely immobilize the components of SNF, geologists look to nature for the answers. They look for minerals that can hold high concentrations of radioactive elements like uranium and thorium for long periods of time. The mineral that holds the longevity record, the Methuselah of all Earth materials, is zircon (ZrSiO₄). The oldest solid material ever found on the surface of the earth is a 4.4 BY old fragment of a zircon crystal. How do we know it is 4.4 BY old? Zircon concentrates uranium in its structure, and once a zircon crystal grows it traps the uranium so that it can’t escape. Over time, the uranium decays to lead at a very low but constant rate, so that today we can measure the proportions of uranium and lead isotopes and estimate the amount of time elapsed since crystallization. This “isotopic clock” works because zircon also traps the lead after it forms from uranium decay, and because zircon does not incorporate any lead when it forms. Zircon can last 4.4 BY because it is very stable and therefore insoluble in natural waters, as shown by measurements made by myself and others. All of this suggests that zircon would be a good “wasteform” for storage of uranium in SNF. The problem is that zircon actually incorporates < 1 wt.% uranium in it structure, and we need something that can incorporate much higher concentrations. Another problem is that over time high radiation levels destroy the zircon structure [3], turning the zircon crystals into glass, which is much more soluble in natural waters and therefore much less effective at immobilizing the uranium [4].

A better candidate for storage of uranium and thorium is the mineral monazite, which is a rare earth element phosphate (REEPO₄). Although the geological evidence suggests that monazite is not quite as durable as zircon, it can hold much higher concentrations of Th (up to 10 wt.% ThO₂) without experiencing significant radiation damage and still last for billions of years. In the laboratory, I have studied the solubility of monazite in natural waters at elevated temperatures and pressures, and found its solubility to be very low at near-neutral pH. In field studies, I have investigated the stability of monazite in rocks, and have developed methods for using monazite to date the infiltration of water into rocks [5]. Although this research was “pure science” because the primary objective was to develop a better understanding of how the Earth works, it has implications for storage of SNF. History shows that most technological advances were enabled by research in pure science, and since it is primarily advances in technology that fuel the economic engine, particularly in the U.S., and that in the future may provide answers to how our society may become sustainable, it would be unwise for the U.S. to stop investing in pure science.

I am confident that further research into durability of crystalline wasteforms and the geology of potential waste disposal sites will give us the technological ability to safely dispose of SNF in the future. However, we do not and may never have the political or societal will to deal with the problem. Even if we as a society face the situation, agree on a site, and fund the building of a facility, it will take too long to make nuclear power a short-term fix to our energy needs. Abandoning Yucca Mt. means that we won't have a SNF disposal site for at least 20 years. Given the possibility that they will be stuck with more SNF in the future, utility companies are less likely to start building new power plants. In addition, since it takes about 20 years to build a new reactor, U.S. capacity to generate electricity through nuclear fission is unlikely to increase for at least 30 years.

To sum up, what are the advantages of nuclear power plants? They have near-zero CO₂ and pollutant emissions. What are the disadvantages? Radiation is released to the environment at every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle. There is a very small but real risk of nuclear reactor accidents (e.g., Chernobyl). Terrorists or hostile countries could steal enriched uranium destined for fission reactors or plutonium from breeder reactors to make nuclear bombs. The U.S. has no safe SNF disposal facilities, and won’t have any for at least twenty more years. We have a limited supply of minable uranium, so nuclear power is a non-renewable energy source (we have enough U ore to deploy 1000 new reactors in the next 50 years and maintain for 40 years [6]). Finally, nuclear power is not cost-effective. In a nutshell, nuclear power is a very complicated, expensive, centralized form of energy production that requires a lot of government involvement (regulation and oversight), has a very vocal opposition, and big potential problems, while decentralized, renewable energy sources pose fewer risks and may be more cost effective.

In general, I am advocating a move from centralized to decentralized, from hard path to soft path, from non-renewable to renewable, and from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources. Nuclear is centralized, and we don't have a solution to the waste problem, so I am not recommending it as an energy source, unless it is the only way we can eliminate fossil fuels.

1. Charman, K., Brave Nuclear World? Part II. World Watch Magazine, 2006: p. 12-18.

2. Macfarlane, A.M. and R.C. Ewing, eds. Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation's High-Level Nuclear Waste. 2006, The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts. 431.

3. Farnan, I., H. Cho, and W.J. Weber, Quantification of actinide [agr]-radiation damage in minerals and ceramics. Nature, 2007. 445(7124): p. 190-193. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature05425

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7124/suppinfo/nature05425_S1.html

4. Grambow, B., Nuclear Waste Glasses - How Durable? Elements, 2006. 2: p. 357-364.

5. Ayers, J.C., et al., In situ oxygen isotope analysis of monazite as a monitor of fluid infiltration during contact metamorphism: Birch Creek Pluton aureole, White Mountains, eastern California. Geology, 2006. 34(8): p. 653-656. http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/34/8/653

6. Ansolabehere, S.e.a., The Future of Nuclear Power: An Interdiscplinary MIT Study. 2003, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. p. ix-x, 1-16.

Why Not Nuclear?

2009-05-19T08:47:00.001-07:00

Nuclear power has always been controversial. The fear of nuclear power plants is usually irrational, but the danger posed by nuclear waste is real. Unlike most environmentalists, for most of my life I have been pro-nuclear. Nuclear power plants produce about 20% of electricity in the U.S. [1] (15% globally), but that number has not increased since the 1980’s. Three obstacles prevented growth of nuclear power in the U.S.. First, a large part of the public resists expansion of nuclear power because they fear all things nuclear. Nuclear power will always be associated in people’s minds with the use of nuclear bombs in WWII and the fear associated with proliferation of nuclear warheads during the Cold War. Furthermore, radioactivity is particularly frightening to people because it is invisible and outside of their normal experience. Fear makes people irrational, and as a result, I have never been able to convince any opponents that nuclear power is safer than other forms of energy, even though I have the statistics to prove it (see section on “Risk”). In the U.S. the only significant nuclear power plant accident ever was the Three Mile Island accident in central Pennsylvania in 1979, a minor accident that released very little radioactivity into the environment. Both Three Mile Island and the more serious accident in Chernobyl, USSR resulted not from technology problems but human error. Despite the fear it invokes, nuclear power has a remarkable safety record. Second, electricity generated using nuclear fission reactors is more expensive than electricity produced using natural gas or coal. Finally, we have no site to store the radioactive Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) from fission reactors. For these reasons, no electric utility companies have applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to operate a new nuclear power plant in over 20 years. However, the recent recognition of the need to reduce CO₂ emissions has reopened the debate: should we expand the use of nuclear power in the U.S.? Nuclear reactors do not emit CO₂ or any other pollutants, giving them a decided advantage over fossil fuel-powered plants. Moreover, if we start to tax energy produced by burning fossil fuels, then nuclear power may become economically competitive. President Obama's proposed cap and trade program to reduce CO₂ emissions would internalize the social cost of carbon emissions, increase the cost of fossil fuels, and make nuclear energy more economically feasible. That would leave only one problem: Can the U.S. choose a site and build a facility for storage of SNF? And if the cost of waste disposal is factored in, would nuclear energy still be cost-effective?

I think the answer to both questions is no. After the federal government spent $13.5 Billion dollars developing a high-level nuclear waste disposal site at Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, newly elected President Obama announced that the government was abandoning the project (http://www.nevadaappeal.com/article/20090306/NEWS/903069981/1070). When the President’s science advisor was asked why, after waffling for several minutes he finally said, “We can do a better job.” Considering that our country spent over 30 years developing the Yucca Mountain site, and that 30 years later it will be even harder to find a site that is acceptable to all parties (the NIMBY syndrome), I am not holding my breath. The Yucca Mountain project fell victim to politics. Senate majority leader Harry Reid represents southern Nevada, where resistance to the Yucca Mt. project has always been strong, and he had previously vowed to kill the project. This is an example of how some individuals gain too much power and abuse it by appeasing narrow interests and disregarding the greater good. Perhaps Harry Reid thought that it was his duty to do what his constituents asked (though I doubt it), but the same will happen with every state that is chosen in the future, making it almost impossible to build a facility. Nevadans named the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act that named Yucca Mountain as the nation’s waste disposal site the “Screw Nevada Bill”, but now < 1% of the population got what they wanted and screwed the rest of the country.

I know many people who are still asking, “why not nuclear power”? However, I bet none of those people would be willing to have a nuclear power plant or waste disposal facility sited in their community. NIMBY is a powerful force in the U.S.. As always, the Golden Rule applies: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Don’t ask others to shoulder the burden to satisfy your energy needs.

Even if the U.S. had followed through and built the Yucca Mountain facility, it would not have been large enough to accept all of the waste we would have by the time it opened. The U.S. currently has 103 operating nuclear power plants [1]. By law, the capacity of the Yucca Mountain facility was limited to 70,000 tons, of which 63,000 tons were designated for SNF and 7,000 tons for defense waste. However, it is estimated that by 2050 the U.S. will have 84,000 tons of SNF [2]. The U.S. now has SNF at over 100 sites in 42 states [3], and we have now eliminated our only option for safely disposing of it. And the federal government now pays fines of ?/year to the utility companies for breach of contract: they had promised to take the SNF off the hands of the utility companies by ?, but the waste still sits at the site of each nuclear reactor that produced it.

*Next post: The Nuclear Waste Disposal Problem

1. Wallace, M.J., Testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Hearing on the Department of Energy's Nuclear Power 2010 Program. 2005.

2. Carter, L.J. and T.H. Pigford, Getting Yucca Mountain Right. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1998. March/April.

3. Long, J.C.S. and R.C. Ewing, YUCCA MOUNTAIN: Earth-Science Issues at a Geologic Repository for High-Level Nuclear Waste. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 2004. 32(1): p. 363-401. http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/loi/earth

Case Study: Ducktown, Tennessee

2009-05-16T06:29:00.001-07:00

One of my favorite environmental stories centers on Ducktown, Tennessee, where native copper was discovered in 1843, and where since 1854 metal sulfides mined from the Copper Basin were smelted in ovens to separate the copper [1], [2]. Trees from the local hardwood forests fueled the ovens, which emitted sulfur oxides that combined with water in the air to form sulfuric acid. The acid stung the eyes, damaged the lungs, killed local vegetation, and leached nutrients from the soil. Without vegetation, the soil eroded away, leaving behind a thin layer of hard, red, infertile soil covering the rocks. Thus, the area surrounding Ducktown looked like the surface of Mars for many decades; U.S. astronauts said it was one of the most recognizable features on the surface of the earth. For environmentalists the good part of the story is that, by 1903, the mining companies figured out how to reduce the environmental damage caused by smelting and at the same time make more money. They simply collected the sulfur oxides released during smelting, added water to make sulfuric acid, and then sold the acid for more money than they made from selling the copper. This is an example of one of those rare “win-win” situations that businesses should always look for.

Since the 1930’s the government has been trying to revegetate the Ducktown area to reduce erosion and the amount of toxic heavy metals being dissolved and transported into local streams [2]. However, the soil is so acidic and infertile that almost nothing will grow in it except a few hardy pine species.

1. Keller, E.A., Introduction to Environmental Geology. 3rd ed. 2005: Pearson Prentic Hall. 583.

2. Kaufman, D.S., The Effect of Pine Afforestation on Copper and Iron Movement Through the Recovering Soils of the Copper basin Mining District, Ducktown, Tennessee, in Geology. 1999, Vanderbilt University: Nashville, TN. p. 135.

Change Your Transportation

2009-05-14T12:06:00.001-07:00

Transportation has a huge environmental impact, so society must focus on reducing that impact. Consider the environmental impact of a single automobile that travels an average of 100,000 miles in its lifetime. There is the damage that results from the manufacturing of the car and the mining and processing of the raw materials; from the drilling, transporting, and refining of the oil and gas that it uses; and from the emission of green house gases, NOx that contributes to acid rain, and ozone that causes photochemical smog. There are many other problems associated with automobiles. Driving a car is one of the riskiest activities we engage in, and cars make walking and bicycling much more dangerous on shared roads. Much of our country has been paved over by roads and parking lots, which has increased flooding risks but also uglified our landscape (I love Joni Mitchell’s song “They Paved Paradise and Put up a Parking Lot”). Driving in heavy traffic is very stressful, often leading to episodes of “road rage”. Yes, driving in the countryside without other cars can be very relaxing and enjoyable, but how often does that happen today, and is it worth all of the problems it creates? My prediction is that the most significant lifestyle change in the U.S. in the next two decades will be the abandoning of the car culture. That lifestyle won’t disappear completely, but it will become less prevalent as the price of fuel dramatically increases (due to peak oil and carbon taxes). The change may be traumatic, as 88% of workers in the U.S. travel to work by car, making the U.S. particularly vulnerable to peak oil [1]. People will choose smaller cars, cars that do not run on fossil fuels, or other modes of transportation including moped, bicycle, and mass transit. They will move closer to their jobs to decrease their transportation costs (I hope to buy a home within walking distance of my work before peak oil makes the cost unaffordable). They will take fewer long trips, and they will go to school closer to home. They will travel less for work, as companies try to cut costs. Telecommuting will become even more widespread, and in many cases, videoconferencing will make travel to meetings unnecessary. All of these changes will reduce traffic congestion and pollution, increase our national security by decreasing our dependence on foreign oil, reduce CO₂ emissions contributing to global warming, and I would argue, increase our health (more walking) and quality of life (less time wasted in traffic, better scenery).

Change What You Drive

The technology of automobiles hasn’t changed dramatically over the last 100 years. Most still use a standard internal engine fueled by gasoline. Throughout my life, U.S. auto manufacturers have presented prototypes of cars that were supposed to change the way we drive, but none of them ever came to fruition. Production and leasing of the EV-1 in the 1990’s signaled a potential shift to electric cars, but GM aborted that foray into new technology by confiscating all of the cars and destroying them, as documented in the film “Who Killed the Electric Car?”. However, contrary to general wisdom and the claims of some environmentalists, electric cars currently are not better for the environment. That is because the electricity used to power them comes primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal. Also, they are inherently less efficient, because any time you convert energy from one form to another you lose some energy. Converting fossil fuels into electricity to fuel automobiles is much less efficient than using them to fuel the car with an internal combustion engine directly. The same argument holds true for the now heralded hydrogen cars, which use electricity to produce hydrogen gas H₂, which in a fuel cell in the car reacts with oxygen gas O₂ to produce H₂O, releasing energy in the process. Although the hydrogen-fueled car emits only water, the process of producing the hydrogen requires lots of energy that usually comes from the burning of fossil fuels, which emits large amounts of CO₂ and other pollutants. So how can we make cars less harmful to the environment? First we must convert our primary source of energy from fossil fuels to renewable forms like wind and solar. Then we should use the electricity that is produced to fuel plug-in gas-electric hybrid cars, or eventually to produce H₂ gas for hydrogen-fueled cars.

Hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius have already raised the bar for energy efficiency. Hybrids have both a gasoline engine and electric motor. They produce electricity through regenerative braking, and automatically shut off the engine when idling. Another promising development is cars that run on biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel. Flex cars can use ethanol or gasoline, but this is not a new technology, as it dates back to the original flex-fuel vehicle, the Model T, built in the 1910s. Many have concluded that production of ethanol from corn is not energy efficient, with some estimates showing that it requires more fossil fuel energy to produce the ethanol than is obtained from burning it. In addition, use of corn for ethanol production has increased the price of corn worldwide, which is a serious problem for the poor who depend on it for food. An increase in the price of corn causes increases in the price of all products for which corn is used as a feedstock. This problem of using food for fuel can be avoided by producing ethanol using switchgrass and wheat straw, which are also more energy efficient than corn.

So what can you do now? First, make every effort to decrease the number of miles you travel. Combine your errands. Never idle you car. Make sure your car is in tune and properly inflate the tires to maximize gas mileage. Carpool whenever possible. Make purchases online rather than driving to the store. Accelerate and decelerate slowly, and try to maintain a constant top speed. Ask your boss if you can telecommute one day per week. Vacation locally, or consider purchasing carbon offsets for the miles that you travel for vacation [2].

When the time comes to change your ride, buy a fuel-efficient hybrid as soon as you can, or even better, switch to mass transit. Encourage your employer to pay for your mass transit costs (like my employer, Vanderbilt University, they may be willing to do so because it means they will save money by building fewer parking garages). Imagine how much money you would save if you didn’t have monthly car and car insurance payments.

In the future, I envision a decentralized system of energy production for fuel-efficient homes and cars. Picture a windmill in your yard, and solar panels on your roof. The wind and the sun that power these energy sources are free and limitless. The electricity that they produce could be used to power your home and your plug-in electric car, or to produce hydrogen for the fuel cell in your car, all with zero CO₂ emissions or pollution.

1. Brown, L., Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. 2008, New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

2. Jeffery, Y., L. Barclay, and M. Grosvenor, Green Living for Dummies. 2008: For Dummies.

Book Abstract

2009-05-13T15:11:00.000-07:00

The environmental impacts of increasing human population, consumption, and technology are now widely recognized and global in scale. Humanity is now bumping up against the limits defined by earth’s carrying capacity. Rising costs of many natural resources reflect the combined effects of shrinking supplies and increasing demand. Global production of oil has peaked and is now declining, portending long-term cost increases for fuel and food. Global production of other resources such as marine fish are also declining. Global warming threatens supplies of food and water and may make many locations uninhabitable. Overconsumption and pollution have led to water shortages in many countries. The global reserve of grain has shrank for the last eight years, and during that time the price of grains has increased 2-4x (*check). The global ecological footprint is now 1.3 Earths, meaning that the growing human population and economy have overshot the capacity of earth to regenerate resources and absorb waste by 25%. Humanity was last sustainable in the 1980's, and most global human welfare indicators have declined since the 1980's. The only solution to these multiple threats is for humanity to adopt sustainable living practices that help to preserve People, Prosperity, and the Planet and guarantee that future generations can live as well as we do today. First, we must switch energy production from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. This soft approach of decentralized use of renewable resources that do not emit CO₂ is preferred over the hard approach of centralized energy production using non-renewable resources because it is sustainable and increases our energy security, and it would make the use of electric and hydrogen-fueled cars truly CO₂-free. A drastic reduction in the number of coal-fired power plants can reduce the problems of CO₂ emissions, acid rain, and unsafe fly ash and coal slurry ponds. Power plants that continue to burn fossil fuels could capture and sequester CO₂ in the ground. Water conservation and decentralized purification or privitization can help ensure adequate, safe drinking water supplies.

In the last 100 years, cheap oil has fueled rapid global and particularly U.S. economic growth and helped us to produce the food needed by an exploding human population. As oil production drops, oil prices will rise, and so will the cost of food and nearly every product on the market. Of greatest concern is the potential increasing cost and scarcity of food. Current agricultural practice requires 10 calories of oil energy for production of one calorie of food energy. Global warming, decreasing biodiversity, and water scarcity will compound the problems of energy and food shortages. In this declining world, people will need to adapt to living with fewer resources and less wealth.

The changes that are required to make our society sustainable may be too great to achieve through action of a centralized government, particularly because the U.S. government relies on continuous economic growth and is beholden to corporate interests. On the other hand, decisions made collectively by individuals can greatly reduce the ecological footprint of societies. High prices will force people to make sustainable lifestyle choices, including purchasing fuel-efficient vehicles and decreasing miles traveled by moving to high-density housing close to the workplace. This will lead to a reversal of the decades-long migration from cities to the suburbs, eventually resulting in the rebirth of cities and decay of the suburbs. Anticipating these changes can help individuals make smart investment decisions.

The goal of this book is to convince you that change is coming. You can try to ignore or deny change, but you will be better off if you anticipate change and adapt to it. Because the change will involve resource shortages, you can best adapt by limiting your resource use. Stop living large! Reduce your consumption, and reuse and recycle everything. By reducing your ecological footprint and living sustainably, you can be happy while living on less, and because you will incur less damage on your environment, it will be able to provide you with more. On the other hand, if you continue to take more from the environment, it will have less to give you in the future. You can be happier if you simplify your life and live sustainably. Once you have reformed your own lifestyle, you can help to reduce the ecological footprint of others. Protest the opening of any new coal-fired power plants. Convince your community to switch to compact fluorescent lights or even ban incandescent lights. Try to move your workplace toward sustainability by starting recycling programs and discouraging the use or sale of disposable products such as bottled water. The more positive changes you make, the better chance our society has for survival, and the better life will be for us and our children.

My writing style and the use of Wikipedia

2009-05-12T17:55:00.001-07:00

I am aiming this book at the average person who knows little about environmental science. I therefore hope to publish it in a popular press, not a specialized academic press. In addition, I would like to make it available as an inexpensive PDF file. To make the material accessible to a larger audience I am writing the book in an informal, conversational tone, using the first and second person and active voice, rather than the third person and passive voice like the scientific literature.

I have used Wikipedia quite a lot for my preliminary research. However, I recognize the need to fact-check, i.e., check the original sources to verify the claims, and cite those sources in the final version. Wikipedia makes this easy because it usually contains hyperlinks to the original sources. The need to check sources was well-illustrated by an AP story on May 12, 2009, in which an Irish college student posted a fake quote on the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the composer died (see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30699302/). Many newspapers published the quote, demonstrating that many journalists rely on Wikipedia for information but do not verify the accuracy of that information. The good news is that Wikipedia editors discovered the fraud within hours of it being posted and deleted it. My plan has been to use Wikipedia as a preliminary reference; usually I use it to confirm what I already know, and so far, I've found it to be quite accurate. In fact, in 2005 the journal Nature conducted a study comparing science entries in Wikipedia and The Encyclopedia Britannica and found them to have similar levels of accuracy [1]. Wikipedia is especially useful because I can include links to its articles in my blogs, while many of the original sources are not online. During the revision stage of writing my book, I plan to fact-check and cite the original sources rather than Wikipedia. One reason I won't cite Wikipedia in my book is that the content of Wikipedia pages always changes, and future versions of a cited Wikipedia page may not support the claim I make when I cite it.

1. Giles, J., Special Report Internet encyclopaedias go head to head. Nature, 2005. 438: p. 900-901. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html

Short note for today

2009-05-07T08:15:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I purchased Lester Brown's "Plan B 3.0", and quickly realized that his book covers a lot of the same material as my book. However, his emphasis is on society, failing states and the potential collapse of modern civilization. Much more of his book is dedicated to Response (Plan B) than understanding the problems, i.e., he is more focused on policy change than on science. Also, he does not use equations or charts in his book. So I think our books will complement each other. My book focuses less on government and policy than Brown's because I think that the system is broken, and the only way we can affect change is to work outside the system. Perhaps power is centralized in an ascending state but becomes decentralized in a declining state. The approach to change that I am advocating is decentralized - it depends on individuals changing their lifestyles. The U.S. government is beholden to corporate interests and addicted to economic growth, so I believe it will never institutionalize the necessary changes.

Check out today's new blog "Reduce Your Waste". Also, I forgot to mention in my consumption/consumerism blog yesterday that a good online video to watch (20 minutes), if a bit liberal biased, is "The Story of Stuff" by Annie Leonard. Note: Tomorrow I will be a faculty marshall at commencement, so there will be no blog entry.

Reduce Your Waste

2009-05-07T07:33:00.001-07:00

In 1990 U.S. citizens generated over 4 pounds of solid waste per day, or over 1500 pounds per year. Individuals in most other developed countries generate only half that amount. Over 39% of municipal solid waste is paper, something we can easily reduce. Most communities dispose of solid waste in sanitary landfills by dumping it on the ground and covering it each night with a fresh layer of soil. Rainwater can infiltrate the waste and dissolve material to form a “leachate” solution, so modern landfills have liners and leachate collection systems that prevent the leachate from contaminating the underlying groundwater. However, unregulated and pre-regulation landfills have extensively contaminated groundwater aquifers. There are about 3,000 landfills in the U.S.. Most people don’t want a landfill sited near their home, an example of the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome. Also, because expansion of urban centers and overall population growth make it difficult to find suitable locations for landfills, the number of landfills and the capacity of landfills in the U.S. have been decreasing, and some cities are finding it hard to find places that can accept their waste. The most famous example was of a garbage barge that in 1987 could not find a facility to accept their waste, and after traveling over 5,000 miles over 112 days it finally unloaded its waste at an incinerator in Brooklyn, New York (http://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/11/nyregion/trash-barge-to-end-trip-in-brooklyn.html).

Two alternative approaches are to recycle and to incinerate waste. Until 2007, the city of Nashville burned their garbage and used the released energy to heat and cool metro buildings downtown. However, the smell of the garbage, the increasing value of the riverside property that the incinerator was located on, and the fear that the incinerator released heavy metals from its’ smokestack, led the city to close the operation.

Your effort to reduce waste must start at the beginning, when you are in the purchasing phase [1]. First, don’t buy a product unless you need it. Never buy disposable products or junk that will need to be replaced frequently. Next, buy products with minimal packaging, avoiding those that are “individually wrapped”.

Choose products that are made from recyclable materials, not plastics that can’t be recycled . When possible, buy products with provisions for returning or recycling the used product. Always remember to bring your reusable bags when you go shopping, and place fruit and vegetables directly in the bag rather than using the plastic bags in the produce department. Save some trees and use less paper: don’t subscribe to newspapers or magazines, since most of the information they contain can be obtained online. This semester I taught a class on Sustainability, and we went almost completely paperless (e.g., term papers were turned in, graded, and returned electronically). When you use paper in the office, always print double-sided, or reuse paper that has been printed on only one side.

The mantra for reducing waste is the 3 R’s: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, in that order (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_hierarchy). It’s best to reduce by consuming less. For example, I run a chemical laboratory at Vanderbilt University. We used to buy chemicals in bulk to reduce the cost per unit volume. However, we rarely ended up using all of the chemicals. When labs are closed down (when Professors retire), large amounts of chemicals, some hazardous, must be disposed of at great expense. When you consider that the environment was degraded twice, both in the production and disposal of the waste, and the fact that the chemicals were never used, it all seems very wasteful. Now we buy small quantities of chemicals, and purchase replacements when needed.

There are numerous references that give ideas on how to reuse and repurpose materials. For example, Jeffery et al. [1] suggests that we reuse plastic bags after washing, use empty glass jars as storage containers (it’s nice to see what’s inside a container without opening it), shop at second-hand clothing and book stores, and reuse wrapping paper. Reusing and repurposing items is also an opportunity for you to think “outside the box” and be creative. I personally always reuse disposable paper and plastic shopping bags. I store recyclables in the paper bags until they become unusable, and line garbage cans with the plastic bags. We forgo our reusable shopping bags only when we run out of disposable paper or plastic shopping bags. We donate our used clothes to Goodwill unless they are in bad shape, in which case we cut them up and use them as rags. Though I love books, I now avoid purchasing them, and instead sign them out of the library to save both money and paper.

Many charities accept used goods for reuse. This year we donated a computer to the National Christina Foundation. I personally found it rewarding to fix the computer up and then drop it off at a school for children from low-income families. Goodwill accepts many types of items and resells them in their stores. We have donated furniture and electronics to Amvets, and many charitable organizations are in need of used cars – you can claim a nice tax deduction for donating an old car instead of taking it to the dump.

Recycling is often the first concept that comes to mind when people discuss green living. That’s because we can recycle without really changing our lifestyle, so it is comparatively easy. Just throw the item in a recycle bin rather than a trash can. However, not everything can be recycled, especially when we consider cost. Moreover, not everything needs to be recycled, as I will now demonstrate. Students in my Sustainability class were upset when they learned that Vanderbilt recycles paper, plastic, and aluminum, but not glass. That got us talking about reasons for and costs of recycling. I noted that glass is a harmless material that is costly to recycle. Glass is made by melting beach sand containing silicate minerals like quartz (SiO₂). The sand melts over a range of temperatures, and isn’t completely molten until temperatures of around 1200°C (this temperature is lowered by addition of fluxes such as lime CaO, soda Na₂O, and sometimes Borate B₂O₃). To heat it to such high temperatures requires a lot of energy. It takes a lot of energy to remelt the glass during recycling, and because glass is relatively inert and won’t cause environmental damage when disposed of in a landfill, forgoing recycling was not as evil as they perceived. On the other hand, glass recycling uses less energy than manufacturing glass from sand, saving 315 kg of CO₂ for every ton of waste glass recycled (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_recycling), so recycling glass is still preferable. The best option is to reuse the glass, so it doesn’t have to be remelted.

The material that saves the most energy by recycling is aluminum. Aluminum ore is called bauxite, and it contains aluminum oxides that must be converted to metal. This means the Al³⁺ in the oxide must be reduced to metallic Al⁰ by adding three electrons, which requires a lot of energy because Aluminum prefers to be in the +3 state. This also means that Al metal will oxidize when in contact with oxygen in the atmosphere, but fortunately the process is very slow. Al metal has a very low melting temperature, so it takes a lot less energy to recycle the aluminum by heating and melting it than it would to mine more bauxite and convert the oxide to the metal.

The other thing to keep in mind is that it only makes sense to recycle materials when there is a market for the recycled product. For example, recycled paper is generally inferior to first-use paper, so different uses must be found for it. Fortunately, clever people are thinking of many new uses for reused and recycled products.

Whenever you are about to throw something in the garbage, think about whether that item can be reused or recycled. Repair it, or find someone who could use it, perhaps by selling it on eBay. Consider whether the waste is hazardous, which would require special disposal (we will discuss this in the next section). Don't just throw it in the garbage without thinking!

1. Jeffery, Y., L. Barclay, and M. Grosvenor, Green Living for Dummies. 2008: For Dummies.

Change the Way You Live: Sustainable Living

2009-05-06T06:24:00.000-07:00

"The diligent farmer plants trees, of which he himself will never see the fruit." — Cicero

You go into a community and they will vote 80 percent to 20 percent in favor of a tougher Clean Air Act, but if you ask them to devote 20 minutes a year to having their car emissions inspected, they will vote 80 to 20 against it. We are a long way in this country from taking individual responsibility for the environmental problem. -William D. Ruckelshaus, former EPA administrator, New York Times, 30 November 1988

The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river. -Ross Perot

Materialism is widespread in our culture. It is perhaps the most important social force in our society. It drives our economy, fuels our desires, and preoccupies our minds. Americans are addicted to shopping and self-indulgence. We continue to spend even when we don’t have any money, which is part of the reason why our country is now in the throes of an economic crisis (another reason is that we are bumping up against the physical limits to growth where our demand (ecological footprint) exceeds the supply (biocapacity)). That we continue to purchase products that we don’t need and can’t afford, when we buy them when we know we shouldn’t, when the anxiety caused by accumulating financial debt does not prevent us from purchasing more, then we have an addiction, a disease of the mind. The symptoms are an uncontrolled compulsion to shop and purchase items and the habit of “going shopping” whenever we have free time even when we don’t need anything. There is also a buildup of tolerance to the pleasure of shopping but decreasing satisfaction with continuing purchases, so we must buy more to get the same “high”, a sure sign of addiction. The following sections contain prescriptions to the disease of consumerism. Many of these prescriptions are common sense, and they don’t require the knowledge of a scientist to explain or elaborate. However, I am reminded of the numerous books and magazines sold daily that tell the reader how to lose weight. The answer is obvious (stop eating!), but sometimes we need encouragement. Also, I would argue that here we are dealing with a much larger problem than obesity, and unlike obesity there is more than one way to reduce the problem.

How Should I Start Living Sustainably?

We have to shift our emphasis from economic efficiency and materialism towards a sustainable quality of life and to healing of our society, of our people and our ecological systems. -Janet Holmes à Court

Reduce Your Consumption

We’ve reviewed a lot of evidence that consumption has the biggest impact on the environment. I hope it has convinced you to change your lifestyle. But how? What changes will have the greatest effect? To reduce consumption requires changing the way you think and how you spend your time, which is not easy. So be patient, and take small steps. Don’t get frustrated. It will probably take a few years of effort before you become satisfied. Start small, or start with the “low-hanging fruit”, the easy changes that have a big impact.

First, you must divorce yourself from materialism. Look around your home. How much do you own? How much of it do you really need? When looking at past and potential purchases, ask yourself if you would be less happy if you didn’t own it. If you are still tempted to make an unwise purchase, remind yourself that it is unsustainable, and picture what it will look like in a landfill a few years in the future. Remind yourself that the peace of mind you gain from keeping that money in the bank, or avoiding another credit card purchase you can’t afford, is worth more than the item. Pat yourself on the back for not letting advertisers manipulate your behavior. If you stop and think this way before making any purchase, you will avoid the trap of impulse buying that comes naturally in a materialistic world.

When trying to reduce consumption, one of the easiest guidelines to remember is to avoid disposable products. I’ve followed this guideline for most of my life, because it always seemed so obvious to me: products are designed to be disposable so that we will spend much more money continuously replacing them. Disposable products may seem more convenient, but often they are marginally so, and using them generates huge amounts of waste. Water bottles have become a symbol of our wasteful society, and rightly so. It’s so easy to avoid using disposable water bottles: buy a BPA-free water bottle, carry it with you wherever you go, refill it for free, and wash it every day. You can save yourself lots of money by doing this.

It’s useful to keep in mind that corporations always try to sell as much product as possible. They do this by convincing you through advertising that you need something that you don’t really need. There are endless examples of ways that advertisers try to get consumers to consume more, e.g., Taco Bell serves a "4th meal", and movie theaters have increased the size of their drinks to the point that they no longer fit in the drinkholders, both obvious examples of why America has an obesity epidemic – we are victims of advertising. Some advertisers suggest that you can’t be happy without their product; for example, Best Buys motto is: "You. Happy."

Another way that corporations get you to buy more is through the use of planned and perceived obsolescence. Everyone born before the 1970’s has the perception that the quality of products has declined, and that products are now designed to be disposable. I remember that my grandfather spent a lot of his time fixing things, and as a result, he seldom had to purchase replacements. In fact, I still have some of my grandfather’s tools, which are now between 50 and 100 years old. How many of today’s products last that long? Few do because most products now are designed with planned obsolescence in mind. Again, the goal of the manufacturer is to get you to buy as much of their product as possible, so they design the product to fail after a planned amount of time, usually just after the warranty lapses. In fact, most consumers now accept that they will have to buy a replacement shortly after the warranty expires, but it wasn’t like that in the past. My parents and grandparents each owned only one vacuum in their lifetimes, but today people frequently replace their vacuums after only one or two years of service. The vacuums are made so cheaply that they are not even worth repairing. Do you remember TV and appliance repair shops? You almost never see them now, because it usually is more expensive to repair a product than to replace it. Now the old product goes into the landfill as waste, and we waste more time shopping for and more money purchasing replacements.

Corporations and advertisers also rely on perceived obsolescence when they try to convince you to replace a product that still works perfectly well. By emphasizing a fancy feature in each new version of a product, usually a feature that you are unlikely to use and definitely don’t need, they convince you to buy replacements on a regular basis. This strategy has always worked well for car sales, but it works even better for new electronic devices that perform better tricks every year. I know people who buy annual upgrades of products such as the IPod nano or the IPhone because Apple is so remarkably good at marketing. I personally am a technophile, so I enjoy playing with gadgets and figuring out how to use all of their features (I even read the manuals!), but I still use less than half of the features bundled in most of my electronic gadgets. Yes, I am tempted to buy the newest versions of these products, but I know I don’t need them. From my experience, the constant upgrading is time-consuming and expensive, and I have more enjoyable and less expensive things to do. To convince myself not to buy them, I find the best strategy is to remind myself how much time it will take to figure out how to use them and to configure them properly. I now strive to simplify my life and eliminate clutter, a topic to which we will return.

Sometimes it’s not easy identifying the cheaply made junk. A good source of information on product reliability is the magazine Consumer Reports. Over time, you will learn which brands and countries sell junk, and which make reliable products. My grandfather used to say decades ago that anything marked “made in China” was junk, and that may be even truer today (and we now know that they frequently make their products using materials that are bad for our health).

Besides avoiding purchases of disposable products and junk that is designed to break, and repairing rather than replacing, you should try to purchase products that are made from renewable resources and that are made locally (to reduce carbon emissions from transportation and to help your local economy). Always keep in mind that your goal is to reduce your footprint. Does your footprint look like that of an elephant, or of a mouse? Stop living so large!

Is Our Current Lifestyle Unsustainable?

2009-05-05T07:37:00.000-07:00

Human population is estimated to increase from 6 to 9 billion by 2050, but humans already use over half of accessible runoff and about 40% of plant growth for the energy stored in plants by photosynthesis [1]. We have created large holes in the ozone layer and increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by more than a third. The rate of species extinctions is growing exponentially (we are actually in the midst of earth's 5th mass extinction event, primarily caused by humans), and the percentage of fisheries fully exploited is nearly 80%. How many humans can Earth support? In this chapter, we look at sustainability as a balance between ecological resource supply and demand.

The ecological footprint is a measure of your resource demand. It is an attempt to estimate how much of earth’s resources you consume, and how much of an impact you have on the environment. There are many ways of calculating the size of your footprint, as you will find if you search the Internet for ecological footprint calculators. One way to express the size of a footprint is as the number of Earths that would be required to support the world’s population if all humans consumed resources at the same rate, i.e., the global ecological footprint. One problem with this approach is that the number of Earths then depends on the global population, which is exponentially increasing. It is thus a moving target. In spite of this problem, it is still a useful way to compare qualitatively the environmental impact of different lifestyles. Another more accurate method is to estimate the area of earth and sea that are required to support an individual’s lifestyle by regenerating renewable resources and absorbing wastes. If measured in productive land area, the global ecological footprint in acres per capita is 6.8, while citizens of the U.S. require 23.5 [2]. I like to think that I could sustain my family of four on our relatively large suburban yard of 1 acre, but to live like average U.S. citizens we would need 4*23.5 = 94 acres!

The concept of the ecological footprint is clearly Malthusian. It assumes that there is a fixed amount of resources available. It raises an important question: What is the carrying capacity of the Earth, the number of humans that Earth can support sustainably? Estimates range between 4 and 10 billion, depending on the average environmental impact of humans [3]. Remember that I = P*C*T. Assuming T is equal to one (*elsewhere we will debate whether T is smaller or greater than one, i.e., whether technology increases or decreases our environmental impact), then one Earth can sustainably withstand a maximum level of human impact Imax = P*C. If we reduce consumption C, we can increase population P and still maintain the equality. If all humans minimized C by becoming vegetarians and we farmed all arable land, then the maximum population that Earth could support Pmax = Imax/Cmin = 10 billion people. However, currently our consumption rate is closer to Cmax, and in this case Pmin = Imax/Cmax is about 4 billion. The current global population is 6 billion. According to the Living Planet Report 2008 [2], the current global ecological footprint of that 6 billion people is 1.3 planet Earths (See Fig. Global ecological footprint from [2]). This means that humanity uses ecological services 1.3 times faster than Earth can renew them. We are in “ecological overshoot”, i.e., our population and impact have grown so much that the earth can no longer support us sustainably. In order to live sustainably, humanity must reduce its total ecological footprint to one earth, either by reducing consumption or population. We can choose now to reduce consumption, but if we don’t act then eventually nature will make the choice for us and without mercy, and global population will decrease until it reaches a sustainable level.

The maximum amount of ecological services and resources that Earth can provide is termed the biocapacity. It is a measure of supply, expressed as the amount of land available for production per capita. The global biocapacity is -0.6 hectares per capita, again indicating that we have a global ecological overshoot (see Fig. Footprint and Biocapacity factors that influence overshoot from [2]). For the U.S. it is -4.4 hectares per capita [2], which explains why the U.S. has to import so many goods. Our use of ecosystem services and resources is sustainable when we demand less than the Earth can supply, i.e., when the global ecological footprint equals or is less than the global biocapacity. Unfortunately, the footprint now exceeds the biocapacity, and the gap between the two is increasing. The Figure Ecological footprint Biocapacity Overshoot [2] illustrates an optimistic scenario in which we act quickly to close the gap between supply and demand. In the unsustainable situation when demand is greater than supply, as it is now, we build up an ecological debt. If we decrease the demand until it is less than the supply, then we can build up a reserve.

Cornucopianists argue that advances in technology could make the term T in I = P*C*T vanishingly small, so that both population and consumption are relatively unconstrained. To understand their reasoning I give the following quote from Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience, in which Wilson uses the term “Exemptionalist” synonymously with Cornucopianist: “Of course the exemptionalists will say that new technology and the rising tide of the free-market economy can solve the problem. The solution, they explain, is straightforward: Just use more land, fertilizer, and high-yield crops, and work harder to improve distribution. And, of course, encourage more education, technology transfer, and free trade. Oh, and discourage ethnic strife and political corruption. All that will certainly help, and should have high priority, but it cannot solve the main problem, which is the finite resources of planet Earth. It is true that only 11 percent of the world’s land surface is under cultivation. But that already includes the most arable part. The bulk of the remaining 89 percent has limited use, or none at all.” [3]

1. Speth, J.G., The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. 2008, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 295.

2. Hails, C., ed. Living Planet Report. 2008, WWF, ZSL, and the Global Footprint Network. 48. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/download.php?id=505

3. Wilson, E.O., Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. 1998, New York, NY: Vintage Books. 367.

Case study: DuPont Plant, New Johnsonville, TN

2009-05-04T06:48:00.001-07:00

For a number of years I took students in my graduate course Aqueous Geochemistry to tour the DuPont Plant in New Johnsonville, TN, about two hours west of Nashville. The plant manufactures Titanium Dioxide TiO₂ by mining the mineral ilmenite FeTiO₃ and reacting it Hydrochloric acid HCl as follows: FeTiO₃ + 2HCl = FeCl₂ (aq) + TiO₂ + H₂O. The Titanium dioxide is a pigment that gives Kilz paint, Oreos, and many types of toothpaste their brilliant white color. There are two problems with this process. One is that the product solution is still very acidic. The other problem is that ilmenite contains many toxic heavy metals that are soluble in the acidic solution. In the 1960’s when people didn’t know better, DuPont was allowed to dispose of hundreds of thousands of gallons of this toxic acid solution directly into the Tennessee River, which of course killed all fish and bottom feeders downstream. Later they switched to the more environmentally friendly but more expensive process of deep-well injection. They drilled wells between 1000-2000 feet deep and then pumped the acidic waste into a confined, deep limestone layer. The thinking was that the limestone (which contains calcite CaCO₃ and dolomite CaMg(CO₃)₂) would neutralize the acid: CaCO₃ + 2H⁺ = Ca²⁺ + H₂O + CO₂. The confining (impermeable) layer above would keep the waste isolated from shallow aquifers that supplied drinking water. Once again, there were two problems with this plan, which my class would remind the DuPont engineers of every year, and every year they would claim ignorance. First, the acidic solution dissolves the limestone, which results in the formation of large caves deep underground. Eventually the weight of the overlying rock layers causes them to collapse, breaking into pieces, falling, and filling the caves. This shatters the confining layer and makes it permeable, so that the wastes can rise up into the aquifers. The other problem is that, as shown in the reaction, limestone dissolution produces CO₂ gas, and the pressure of that gas can build until it shatters the overlying rock and escapes. Either way, it seemed likely that the confining layer would eventually be compromised. So, to their credit, DuPont came up with a new solution that was even more environmentally friendly but (they claimed) even more expensive. Since around the year 2000 DuPont has been reacting the ilmenite with sodium carbonate, and according to the DuPont engineers the only by-product is harmless FeCO₃ (the mineral siderite), which is used to make bricks for construction. However, recently it was learned that this process produces dioxin as a by-product. Pure Dioxin is the strongest poison known to man (it is the neurotoxin in Agent Orange), and the New Johnsonville Plant is the fourth-largest producer of dioxin in the U.S..

This case study illustrates many different points. First, it is difficult to anticipate all of the potential outcomes of a complex industrial process. That is why ecologists advocate the precautionary principle. Second, industrial chemistry sorely needs to be “greened”. Green chemistry is a field just now coming into its own, and it has the potential to reduce greatly the environmental impact of the chemical industry. Third, despite repeated attempts at trying to “green” the chemical process, the production of Titanium Dioxide still causes serious environmental problems. DuPont is being sued by numerous plaintiffs who live near or work at their Titanium Dioxide plant in DeLisle, Mississippi, who claim that dioxin has seriously damaged their health or caused the death of loved ones (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7693391300780002092). At New Johnsonville, TN, many citizens are afraid to talk about the health risks posed by the DuPont plant because they work for the plant, their livelihood depends on its success, and they fear retaliation (http://www.dupontsafetyrevealed.org/newjohnsonville.htm). This raises many questions: Should we allow chemical companies to manufacture goods like Titanium Dioxide that are nonessential (it is simply used for aesthetic reasons) but that cause great harm to human health and the environment? Or should we close the plants, even if it meant that thousands of people would lose their jobs? The plants in New Johnsonville DeLisle are by far the largest local employers, so closing them would be an economic disaster for those communities. In fact, years ago when DuPont reapplied to the State of Tennessee for a permit for deep well injection, a representative of the Tennessee Environmental Council asked me if I would testify against the application. I refused, saying that deep well injection seemed to be the best of the alternatives known at the time, and that I couldn’t bear the thought of helping to put all of those people in New Johnsonville out of work. Yes, I am pro-environment, so I believe we should always be looking for ways to protect the environment, but the overall benefits of change have to outweigh the overall negatives, and in this case, the economic vitality of New Johnsonville seemed to me to outweigh the potential risks of deep-well injection.

Environmental Risk

2009-05-03T07:48:00.000-07:00

Here’s an example of how knowledge can sometimes make life more difficult. In the morning, I am often confronted with the question of whether to empty the water out of the teapot and refill it with fresh water. It seems wasteful to dump the water in the pot down the drain, and furthermore that water has degassed its fluorine (although all fluorine probably degasses during boiling anyway). However, the water may have leached heavy metals from the pot while in contact with it for several days, or perhaps bacteria have begun to grow in the water. Also, I am impatient, and prefer to fill the pot with hot water so it takes less time to boil. So I dump the water out and then run the tap water for one minute before filling the pot because water standing in our pipes overnight may have leached metals from our pipes (this is unlikely to be a problem for us, though, because the practice is designed to avoid lead that leaches from solder that connects Copper pipes, and most of our pipes are galvanized steel). Is it better to save energy by using the water already heated in my hot water heater rather than heating cold water on my stove until it boils? Or is it better to save water by not running it until the water gets hot, which in my house takes roughly one minute? There are so many considerations that go into making such a simple decision, that complex decisions can seem overwhelming. Am I overanalyzing every situation? Wouldn’t life be simpler if I always did what was easiest, but perhaps at a slightly higher level of risk? Are the perceived dangers great enough to warrant my concern? Won’t I become unhappy if I have to assess a list of threats for every decision I make? Thinking about the world this way does make it seem to be a dangerous place.

The best approach to this problem of “too much information” is to only concern yourself with the greatest potential threats. The problem is that human perception of risk in the modern world is notoriously inaccurate. Stone Age humans faced essentially the same risks that their ancestors faced may thousands of years previously. Natural selection caused humans to evolve, preparing them to better deal with these risks and reducing their chances of succumbing to those risks. Also, they could pass on survival strategies orally from generation to generation. My guess is that Stone Age humans’ perception of risks in their environment was largely accurate. However, our society and environment is now changing so rapidly that evolution does not have time to prepare us for the many new risks we are faced with. Furthermore, the risks our generation faces are different from the risks faced by our parents, so the wisdom they impart to us is not sufficient, and we have to rely on other sources of information to adequately deal with these new risks. In this new world, how well do our new coping strategies prepare us for risk? Not very well. A famous study published in Science (*v. 236, 1987) examined the perception of risk by groups such as college students and The League of Women Voters. They were asked to rank risk associated with twenty different activities. Their rankings were then compared with the actual risks, defined as the mortality rate for that activity (number of deaths per year associated with that activity, probably normalized to the number of people participating in that activity *check). These two groups rated “nuclear power” as the highest risk, when in reality it was the lowest risk. Studies like this have led to several generalizations about risk perception:

1. We are genetically predisposed to worry about risks, because worrying about risk increases our chances of survival. However, it is possible to worry too much.

2. We tend to overestimate the risk associated with high-impact, low probability events (e.g., nuclear power plant disasters)

3. Man-made risks worry us more than natural ones (e.g., radiation from power lines & cell phones are less dangerous than radiation from the sun)

4. New (unfamiliar) risks worry us more than old risks.

A good example of point 2 is air travel. Many people are so afraid of traveling on airplanes that they refuse to fly. However, per mile traveled, the risk of dying in an automobile is much greater than in an airplane.

So what are the risks associated with global warming, peak oil, and water pollution? We will examine that question in the following chapters.

The Behavior of Water Pollutants

2009-05-01T09:08:00.000-07:00

In their textbook "Ecological Economics" (2004), Herman Daly and Joshua Farley say that the limits to human population growth may lie not in resource depletion, but in the waste absorption capacity of the environment. This can be understood with the following analogy. Water purification filters usually contain a resin that turns color when it becomes saturated, i.e., it cannot absorb any more pollutants. The interface between the two colors of resin (the reaction front) will migrate through the column from the inlet towards the outlet. Water flowing from the outlet will be purified until the interface reaches the end of the column, at which point the column resin is saturated in pollutants and cannot absorb any more. From that time on the outlet water will be just as polluted as the input water. In this case, the waste absorption capacity of the filter has been exceeded. Our environment acts as a filter, purifying water that passes through it, but eventually the filter will become saturated.

Let’s examine this in a little more detail. What happens when the concentration of a pollutant in a sediment-water system (lake or stream) keeps increasing? Examine langmuir 10-007. Imagine that we pour uranium U into a beaker containing water and sediment. Some of the U will dissolve in the solution, but some will adsorb onto the surface of mineral grains in the sediment. At first the proportions of U in solution and adsorbed to sediment will be constant as the total U concentration increases (move along a straight line away from the origin). As concentrations get higher the number of available sites for U to sorb onto mineral surfaces begins to decrease, and a greater proportion of U enters the fluid, causing the adsorption isotherm to level off and approach a slope of zero when the adsorption sites become “saturated”. Eventually even the solution becomes saturated, i.e., it can’t dissolve any more U. What happens then? Any additional U added to the system will precipitate out as a U-rich mineral (in this case Schoepite) that is added to the sediment and therefore causes the sediment concentration of uranium to begin increasing again. Note that as long as the solutions remains saturated in Schoepite, any additional U we add will go into the sediment, increasing the U concentration in the sediment. Conversely, no matter how much additional U we add, the concentration of U in the solution is fixed at its highest possible concentration. In this case, we have saturated our filter.

Let’s look at some slightly more complicated models in which the sediment but not the solution becomes saturated. Polluted water enters a beaker with sediment, equilibrates with the sediment, and then is replaced with another batch of polluted water. At first, a large proportion of the pollutant will sorb onto the sediment, causing the concentration in the solution to decrease substantially. As more batches of polluted water equilibrate with the sediment, the concentration of pollutant in the sediment will increase, and therefore the concentration of pollutant in the water that exits the beaker will increase in direct proportion. As the sediment approaches “saturation”, it can sorb less pollutant, so most of the pollutant remains in solution, and our sediment filter become increasingly ineffective.

What if we stop polluting? Can the system recover? Start adding batches of fresh water. You would observe that the water that exits the beaker would at first have high concentrations of pollutant because our sediment filter was saturated in pollutants. But with time, the concentration of pollutant in the sediment and in the exiting fluid would decrease and eventually go to zero. Thus, we can “flush” pollutants out of a sediment-water system such as a stream or lake, but it may take a long time and a lot of fresh water to remove all of the pollutant, especially if the pollutant strongly sorbs to the sediment (which is why PCB’s are still in Hudson River sediments after many decades).

Now imagine a reservoir such as a swamp with one stream entering and one stream exiting. If the stream entering the swamp is polluted, sediments near its entrance point will strip pollutants out of solution. With time, a concentration gradient will develop across the swamp, with high pollutant levels near the input stream and low levels near the output stream. As polluted water flows across the swamp, it encounters sediments with decreasing pollutant concentrations, so the concentration of the pollutant in the solution will continuously decrease. The water becomes increasingly pure as it traverses the swamp. In nature, swamps do an excellent job of filtering pollutants from water. However, if pollutants continue to enter the swamp, the total pollutant concentration in the swamp will keep increasing. Eventually sediments near the input stream will become saturated, and that “saturation front” will slowly migrate across the swamp until it reaches the output stream. At that point the entire swamp system has become saturated, and the output water will be just as polluted as the input water. As in our beaker example, if we stop polluting and the water in the input stream becomes pure again, then over time the process will be reversed, and the pollutants will slowly be flushed out of the swamp.

How Much Oil in Alaska?

2009-04-30T14:04:00.000-07:00

*Note: my spring semester is over, so I will be publishing at a much greater frequency.

My goal is to dispel the falsehoods spread by talk show hosts and politicians. Last night an acquaintance said he had heard from several sources that there is about 60 years of oil for the U.S. in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge ANWR. I told him that what I had heard was that, given our current oil consumption rate, it was more like a two year supply (if it was our only source of oil). To last 60 years the ANWR would have to contain more oil than Saudi Arabia ever had, and that gave him pause.

The problem is that people listen to talk-show hosts and believe everything they say. The talk-show host is not an expert on the subject, and what he says may be totally unreasonable, but many people accept his statements uncritically, and don't make an effort to find out for themselves.

When I got home that night, I looked up the statistics. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Refuge_drilling_controversy) "the total production from ANWR would be between 0.4 and 1.2 percent of total world oil consumption in 2030. Consequently, ANWR oil production is not projected to have a large impact on world oil prices..[24] … In 1998, the USGS estimated that between 5.7 and 16.0 billion barrels (2.54×109 m3) of technically recoverable crude oil and natural gas liquids are in the coastal plain area of ANWR, with a mean estimate of 10.4 billion barrels (1.65×109 m3), of which 7.7 billion barrels (1.22×109 m3) lie within the Federal portion of the ANWR 1002 Area.[17] … In 2007, the United States consumed 20.68 m bbls of petroleum products per day."

Using the mean estimate of 10.4 billion barrels, and an annual consumption rate of 20.68E6*365=7.54E9 barrels per year, it would take only 10.4E9/7.54E9=1.38 years to consume all of the oil. For the upper limit of 16 billion barrels we would have 16E9/7.54E9=2.1 years. Considering our rate of consumption of oil is continuously increasing, an estimate of two years supply is a reasonable upper limit. So regardless of what Sarah Palin says, no, we don't have enough oil in Alaska to solve our energy problem. In addition, if we do open the ANWR up to drilling, it would not contribute significantly to domestic crude oil production until 2018 (Wikipedia).

Water Pollution Case Study: Lake Erie

2009-04-30T13:37:00.001-07:00

I grew up in Buffalo, New York in the 1960’s and 1970’s, when pollution was reaching its peak in the rust belt and the environmental movement was beginning. One of the watershed moments in the environmental movement was the discovery in 1978 of toxic waste underneath a school in Love Canal, near Niagara Falls and very close to Buffalo. Until I was six we lived down the street from Lake Erie, and I still recall walking along the shoreline with a clean-up crew. The Lake was very polluted at that time; signs posted near fishing areas stated severe limits on consumption of caught fish due to the threat of mercury poisoning. Not that there were many fish to catch; the only type of fish anyone caught was catfish. Why only catfish? Because catfish don’t need oxygen in the water to breathe; unlike other fish who use gills to extract dissolved oxygen from water, catfish obtain their oxygen by gulping air when they come to the surface. The problem in Lake Erie and many other bodies of water at that time was that it was eutrophic, i.e., oxygen-depleted. In the process of eutrophication, limiting nutrients like phosphorous and nitrogen added to the water cause algae blooms. When the algae die, they decompose:

C6H12O6 + 6O2 = 6 CO2 + 6H2O

This consumes the oxygen dissolved in the lake water. In temperate regions such as upstate New York, lakes have two layers: a shallow, warm, buoyant layer and a deep, cold, dense layer. In a eutrophic lake, the shallow layer in contact with the atmosphere is oxygen-rich, but the deep layer becomes oxygen depleted because the dead algae sink to the bottom of the lake and decompose. In the fall and spring the density difference between the two layers disappears and they mix together. The problem is that, especially in the fall, the deep water has no oxygen, so when it mixes with the shallow water the resulting mixture does not have enough oxygen for fish to breathe, and they die in large numbers. This is still a widespread problem in many areas of the U.S.. In fact, there is now a huge “dead zone” near the Mississippi delta in the Gulf of Mexico that formed because fertilizer-derived nutrients caused algae blooms and eutrophication. The good news is that there is a solution. Simply removing phosphorous from detergents in areas surrounding Lake Erie led to a decline in algae blooms, and now the lake has mostly recovered. No one is worse off for using phosphate-free detergents, but for some reason in areas where regulations allow it (including my current home state of Tennessee) most detergents still contain phosphates, and eutrophication is still a problem.

Lake Erie is still not without problems. In summers, beaches are often temporarily closed after rainfall events. Why? Because wastewater disposal systems have limited capacity, and during heavy rains they fill up and then overflow into local streams, which flow to the lake. You may have noticed that water treatment plants and pumping stations usually have overflow ponds with pipes near the top that drain into a stream. When it rains, you can observe the overflow ponds fill up. Once they are full, any additional wastewater flows out through the pipe and dumps into the stream. Ironically, water in streams is usually dirtiest after rainfall events. Currently many cities are in the process of upgrading their wastewater systems under federal mandate. The problem is the same problem we face with highways; you can add more lanes, but traffic will build until a few years later it as just as congested as it was before you added the lanes. Population growth means that the ideal size of a service system is a moving target, and these systems frequently require expensive expansion projects. The city of Nashville had to increase its water bill in 2009 in order to pay for the expansion of its wastewater system, which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Lawn Care

2009-04-29T17:57:00.001-07:00

I’m a pretty modest guy, but whenever I see my neighbors spending huge amounts of time and money maintaining their green grass lawns I feel smug. My yard requires almost no effort and no money to maintain. True, it’s a full acre, which is about 4-5 times larger than I would like, but the zoning rules in my suburban neighborhood require that lots be no smaller than one acre (see how fast that changes when gas permanently rises above $5 per gallon). As a result, I require a small lawn tractor to mow my lawn, and I feel guilty about the amount of gas I use, and the large amount of raw materials needed to make the mower (let alone the cost). We use a reel mower for small areas that are hard to get to. So other than mowing, my lawn is maintenance-free. Why? Because I let nature decide what will grown on my lawn. Nature wisely chooses the plants that are best acclimated to our climate. This leads to a rich diversity of healthy plants carpeting my lawn. What are my neighbors doing? They partake in a cultural aberration that is almost unique to the U.S. and that began after WWII: they are growing monoculture grasses. Only one grass species, nay, only one plant species is allowed to grow on their lawns. And if you have unlimited amounts of oil to provide energy for machines to mow, aerate, and edge, and to make fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, why be limited to only indigenous species? Why not choose a grass that you saw on vacation on a golf course hundreds of miles away? Maybe it’s not the species that is best suited to the local climate, but all of the chemicals will make up for that. If pests try to dig in your lawn, you can easily find poisons targeted for each type of pest. All it takes is time and money to kill every living thing but one: that single grass species that you love. If you’re wealthy, you can pay companies like Chemlawn to come and broadcast spray your yard every week with chemicals designed to kill everything except your precious grass. But don’t let your kids or pets play on the lawn! Well, no worries there, how often do you see kids nowadays playing outside? As long as you can see a uniform sea of green outside your window, who cares if your environment has become sterile?

Obviously what we’ve described is an unsustainable, even bizarre form of behavior. I feel smug because I haven’t mindlessly followed the self-defeating lawn care practices of my neighbors. Why fight against nature when it can be your ally? What is the purpose of a lawn, anyway? It’s nice to have a lawn for the kids to play sports on, but nowadays parents cart them off to manicured ball fields many miles away to play organized sports. Lawns today serve almost no purpose. Why do I have an acre of grass (actually, it’s mostly onions and clover)? I don’t want it because I don’t use it for anything. Yes, I did play with my kids on the lawn when they were little, but we could have done the same on a yard ¼ the size. We would have been happy to walk a block or two to play in a neighborhood park, but suburban neighborhoods aren’t set up that way. In fact, the design of suburban neighborhoods does not follow their function at all. People appreciate that machines like cars should be designed to perform their function most efficiently. But most people cannot even describe the function of their yard, so how could they decide on an optimal design?

Don’t just settle for the mindless suburban mindset by growing a green grass lawn. Avoid the use of harmful pesticides and herbicides, and of fertilizers that pollute streams and cause eutrophication. Avoid wasting the large amount of time and energy required to maintain it. Don’t fight against nature: let the plants that are most fit win control of your yard, because nature knows best.

The Evils of Coal

2009-04-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

*I am rushing to post a few blogs for my Sustainability students to read before their final exam, so this entry is only partially complete.

*Note: An excellent recent article in the New York Times makes many of the points that I hope to make in this book. See:

"New Limits to Growth Revive Malthusian Fears" <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120613138379155707.html>

From the global warming perspective, you might think that decreasing oil supply would be good because it would lead to decreasing CO2 emissions. Unfortunately, we are likely to turn to other fossil fuels that emit more CO2 per unit energy (*give table with CO2 per unit energy). And the dirtiest fuel we have available is coal.

Coal companies are now under pressure, and in classic corporate fashion are responding with an ad campaign that makes a joke of the truth. The ad I saw on TV last night emphasized in audio and text that coal is a clean fuel. Actually, it’s the dirtiest fuel I can think of. If you have ever held a piece of coal, perhaps on Christmas in a year you were “naughty”, you know that it is dirty. You touch it and your hands turn black. If you burn it you will see lots of dirty smoke, and when you’re done burning it you will have a pile of ashes. It’s very similar to charcoal; both form by partial oxidation (burning) of organic matter, usually cellulose-rich plant material such as wood, and both are dirty. Coal was the preferred fuel of the 19^th century in England, when everything was covered with a layer of black soot. It was not coincidence that cancer was discovered in England at that time. A doctor noticed that chimney sweeps often had testicular cancer. This was because the sweeps were usually orphans pressed into hard labor, who were forced to take off all of their clothes so they could fit inside a chimney. They would climb the chimneys to clean them, and their bodies were always covered in black soot.

One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward I decreed the death penalty for burning of coal. At least one execution for that offense is recorded. But economics triumphed over health considerations, and air pollution became an appalling problem in England. ~Glenn T. Seaborg, Atomic Energy Commission chairman, speech, Argonne National Laboratory, 1969

But the most dangerous effect of burning coal is not the visible carcinogenic pollutants that are released when it is burned, nor the fly ash that remains after burning; it is the huge amount of CO2 that is released to the atmosphere. Coal is fossilized plant matter, so the reverse of Eq. 1 shows what happens when we burn it. Coal releases more CO2 per unit energy than any other form of fuel (see Table ?). So not only does use of coal lead to mountaintop removal, failure of coal slurry retention ponds (Martin County, KY 2000), pollution, and failure of fly ash retention ponds (e.g., Kingston, TN 2008), it also leads to maximum possible CO2 emissions and global warming. I’m sorry, what were the selling points for coal? Oh, that we have a lot of it? Well, we have a lot of sewage too, but that doesn’t mean we would want to use it for anything.

Let me give you some examples of how coal companies operate. Massey Coal is an example of the worst of American corporations. The movie “Sludge” shows how a subsidiary of Massey, Martin County Coal, released 306 million gallons of coal slurry into the Coldwater Fork of Wolf Creek in eastern KY in 2000, which contaminated local drinking water. A Martin County Coal representative told residents that the slurry posed no health threats because everything in the slurry could be found in the periodic table. Whoa, that was reassuring. Once the Bush administration took office, the investigation into the cause was shut down, the one dissenter was fired, and Massey was ordered to pay a fine of only $110,000, which amazingly was later lowered to only $1000 (*check). Yes, that’s what we pay those government regulators for. In 2008 Massey had accrued fines of roughly $2.4 billion for violations of the Clean Water Act; in 2008 they agreed to pay $20 million to the U.S. EPA. Also in 2008 Massey paid $4.2 million in civil and criminal penalties resulting from a mine fire in West Virginia in 2006, the largest financial settlement in the history of the coal industry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massey_Coal). Recently I heard on the radio that Massey is involved in a lawsuit that has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. It seems a competitor, Harman Mining, refused to sell a coal mine to Massey, so Massey bought all of the property surrounding that mine and prevented access to the property. The competitor sued in court and won $50 million, but Massey appealed it to the State Supreme Court. Massey’s chief executive Don Blankenship arranged donations of $3 million to get Brent Benjamin elected to the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals (the $3 million was spent on a character assassination campaign against Benjamin’s opponent). When Massey’s appeal made it to the Court of Appeals Benjamin refused to recuse himself from the case, and ended up casting the deciding vote in favor of Massey. Gee, do you think he was biased? Do you think Massey bought the court’s decision? Why do we allow the public election of judges in this country, anyway? The U.S. Supreme Court head the case in March 2009, and we are currently waiting to see if they reinstate the judgement against Massey.

Here is some dirt on Massey CEO Don Blankenship from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massey_Coal): “On November 22, 2008 the Williamson (Daily News (Williamson, WV) reported that Massey CEO Don Blankenship compared the editor of the Charleston Gazette, James A. Haught, to Osama bin Laden at a public speech to the Tug Valley Mining Institute on Nov 20 ^[59]. In the videotaped speech, Blankenship called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Harry Reid and former Vice President Al Gore "crazies" and "greeniacs" ^[60]. He referred to the support of President Jimmy Carter for energy conservation in the 1970s to communism: "Buy a smaller car? Conserve? I have spent quite a bit of time in Russia and China, and that's the first stage."

On April 3, 2008, ABC News reported that CEO Blankenship attacked an ABC News cameraman at a Massey facility near Belfry, Kentucky as the camerman attempted to question Blankenship about photos published in the New York Times ^[61] showing Blankenship on vacation in Monaco with West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Elliott "Spike" Maynard. "If you're going to start taking pictures of me, you're liable to get shot," Blankenship stated in the video^[62]. Following the incident, Justice Maynard lost his bid for re-election to the West Virginia Supreme Court in the West Virginia primary election ^[63].

Clean coal is an oxymoron, similar to “healthy cigarettes”. Coal is the dirtiest form of energy we have. When Obama refers to clean coal, he means that all of the CO2 is captured and sequestered.

See Clean Coal Air Freshener parody: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-_U1Z0vezw

Clean Coal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLZ-hvVVGmY&NR=1

Water

2009-04-21T12:03:00.000-07:00

If there is magic on this planet, it is in water. Loren Eiseley, in “The Flow of the River”, The Immense Journey.

Water is already a limiting resource in many areas of the world, and has been so throughout human history. The earliest civilizations of Mesopotamia such as Sumeria most likely crumbled due to water shortages, specifically salinization of irrigated fields that caused food shortages, and the armed conflicts that ensued (see “Water Conflict Chronology”, Gleick, 2008).

Little [1] gives an example that provides a clear contrast between the sustainable approach and “business as usual”. When farmers in Garden City, Kansas learned from state and federal geologists in the late 1960’s that the water they were pumping was geologic water and would soon run out, they responded in two distinct ways. Most purchased more pumps and began pumping faster. Others like Rodger Funk chose to change their farming methods in order to conserve water and keep their farms viable when the groundwater ran out. Funk started using methods like no-till agriculture, and planted crops like wheat and grain sorghum that required less water. The goal was to rely only on rainwater by capturing and using all rainfall, which averages 18 inches in southwestern Kansas.

In his article “How Much is Clean Water Worth”, Jim Morrison [2] makes clear that investments in water conservation and in preserving ecosystems that provide fresh water pay for themselves. In the field of ecological economics, ecosystems are capital assets because they provide services such as clean water. For example, New York City relies on the Catskill Mountains to the north to provide fresh water. It was cheaper for NYC to preserve that ecosystem by spending $1.3 billion on upstate sewage treatment plants than it would have been to build a filtration plant in the city for $6-8 billion and operate it for $350-400 million per year. Thus, the value of the water that the Catskills provides is easily hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars per year. The Catskills provide other ecosystem services such as flood control, food, and shelter, in addition to its scenic beauty and the recreation activities it provides such as trout fishing, both of which bring in lots of tourism dollars to the area. Another excellent example that Morrison [2] provides is the restoration of the Napa River in Napa, California to its original floodplain to reduce flooding. This project cost only $250 million, but it saved an estimated $1.6 billion in flood damage repair costs over the next century. And within one year of restoration, flood insurance rates dropped 20% and real estate prices rose 20%. There are many examples like this that illustrate that taking the soft path and relying on nature to provide ecosystem services is not only cost effective but preserves the beauty of nature.

The movie “Flow” [3] describes the problems of water exploitation by multinational corporations and the privatization of water supplies in developing countries. Since water-borne diseases are the leading killer of children less than 5 years old in the developing world, efforts to provide clean water in these countries should be a top priority. What is the best approach? Since water is essential for survival, we must consider access to clean drinking water a fundamental right. The chosen approach must therefore guarantee access to all. It is this one essential requirement that seems to have been overlooked in efforts to privatize water supply in countries like Bolivia. The World Bank pressured the government of Bolivia (which is deeply in debt to the World Bank) to privatize their water, which they did in 1999. Although the agreement was for the multinational corporation Suez to provide universal access to water, they neglected to provide water to the poorest citizens. Civil demonstrations turned into riots, and in 2007 the government rescinded their contract with Suez and returned the water to the people. In other countries like South Africa, even the poorest of the poor are required to pay for their water; when they cannot afford to pay, they are forced to steal water or drink unsafe water, which often leads to death.

Why didn’t privatization work in these countries? On the surface, it makes sense to contract a corporation with decades of experience to set up a water distribution system. This is a complicated, expensive task that many countries in developing countries are not prepared to execute. And when water is in short supply, it makes sense to treat it as a commodity, because charging for water encourages people to conserve it and not be wasteful. However, governments need to work with the corporations to ensure that they provide water even to the poorest. They should subsidize access to water so that the poorest do not have to pay. In the U.S. we subsidize food and water, heating oil, and telephone access, because these are essential needs (telephone access is necessary for emergencies). If private companies don’t build the water infrastructure in developing countries, who will? The government could oversee the planning and sub-contract the construction, but since it’s unlikely that anyone in the government has experience in developing water distribution systems, it’s doubtful that the process will be effective. Governments in developing countries need to work closely with multinational corporations to build their infrastructure. The goal is to build safe, reliable, and cost-effective water supply systems as quickly as possible to save as many lives as possible. The U.N. estimates that it would cost 30 billion U.S.D. to provide safe water to everyone in the world. This is a pittance; probably over 100 individuals in the world have that much money, and it could be used to save millions of lives each year. Ironically, 100 billion U.S.D. are spent each year globally for bottled water.

Another problem highlighted by the movie “Flow” [3] is the strong financial incentive for multinational corporations like Nestle and Coca-Cola to extract groundwater to bottle and sell. In most countries, including the U.S., you are allowed to pump as much groundwater as you please out of the ground, as long as you own the land. This is why smart people like T. Boone Pickens are extracting groundwater from their land for free and then selling it to cities. This policy is particularly unfair when multinational corporations like Coca-Cola buy land in developing countries, extract all of the water out of the ground at no charge, bottle and sell it for four dollars per bottle, and when the water dries up, pack up and leave the country. The indigenous people get no money from the sale of their most valuable resource, and they are left with no water. As long as people continue to pay outlandish prices for bottled water, there will be an incentive for corporations to exploit the developing world.

The movie "Flow" [3] and many other environmentally-themed movies and books paint a very bleak picture. That is because the authors are trying to motivate their audience and encourage them to take action to improve the situation. However, watching many of these movies or reading many of the papers may lead you to conclude that there are just too many problems and that we can never fix all of them. Just remember that you can always look at these problems in two ways: is the glass half empty, or half full? The reality is that several hundred years ago most human beings in towns and cities lacked access to clean drinking water, and a much higher percentage of humans died from water-borne diseases. In the developed world these diseases have been almost entirely wiped out, which was a huge accomplishment. What remains frustrating is that, although we know how to eliminate water-borne diseases, we haven't done so in many countries of the world. So while the situation has improved, it hasn't improved enough.

1. Little, J.B., The Ogallala Aquifer: Saving a Vital U.S. Water Source. Scientific American Earth 3.0, 2009.

2. Morrison, J., How Much is Clean Water Worth? National Wildlife, 2005: p. 24, 26-28.

3. Salina, I., Flow: For Love of Water. 2007, Oscilloscope. p. 84 min.

Biodiversity

2009-04-20T17:48:00.001-07:00

Biodiversity is measured by the number of species present in a system [1]. It is not accurately quantified because we have discovered only 1.5-1.8 million species, less than half of the total estimated amount of between 3.6-100 million ([1], p. 14). Most of the undiscovered species are small in size, but even rare large mammals are still occasionally discovered in remote localities. The factors that cause loss of biodiversity (extinction of species) are summarized by the acronym HIPPO (p. 50): Habitat destruction, Invasive species, Pollution, Population, and Overharvesting. The driving force for most modern extinctions is human population growth, which directly leads to the leading cause of extinction, habitat destruction. The near extinction of the Vancouver Island marmot is a result of clear cutting of forest to harvest timber; humans either wipe out species’ habitats during the process of extraction of natural resources (in this case, timber) or occupy the land, killing or displacing species from their ecosystem.

Arguments supporting conservation of biodiversity:

· Ecosystems become less robust as component species become extinct, and therefore less effective at cleaning our air and water and enriching our soil.

· The current extinction rate is 100 to 1000 times higher than before man. Previous mass extinctions show that evolution requires ~10 million years to restore diversity to predisaster levels. Thus, our descendants will suffer.

· Once a species goes extinct, it is lost forever. With each lost species, we lose valuable scientific information and potential products including life-saving pharmaceuticals.

We can preserve a small number of species in zoos, but we cannot preserve most small species that are vital parts of ecosystems. Moreover, like species, once an ecosystem is gone, it is lost forever (even if we develop the technology to replicate entire ecosystems far in the future, the space will not be available).

I have personally witnessed the frailty of ecosystems, and the devastating feeling of loss at their passing. When I was a child, my family would vacation on the east coast of southern Florida, in West Palm Beach. Up until the early 1970’s there was a beautiful coral reef in Phipps Park. We would return each year to skin dive, and the incredible diversity of marine life fascinated me. Those experiences convinced me at an early age to become a scientist. However, the last year we went to Phipps Beach, about 1973, the entire reef was dead. All of the fish, eels, and urchins were gone, and the sand on the beachfront had washed away, exposing the dead reef. The reef was subareal in places, which I had never seen before. I couldn’t believe how one year could change paradise into a wasteland. I questioned people on the beach, and learned that during the previous year the anglers had started to catch parrotfish because they found them to be tasty. My theory was that overfishing removed one of the critical components of the reef ecosystem. Parrotfish graze on coral reefs, nibbling the reef down to keep it below the waterline, passing the hard parts through their digestive systems, and then excreting sand-sized particles. Without the parrotfish, the reef grew above the waterline and died, and without a living reef the entire ecosystem collapsed. This type of “domino effect” has been observed in many ecosystems, although in general ecosystems are more robust, and can survive the loss of multiple species or experience multiple forms of degradation before the completely collapse.

In his book “The Future of Life”, E.O. Wilson is most interested in small species including insects and microorganisms (his research specialty is ants). In terms of number of individuals, number of species, and even biomass, these are the dominant animal groups on earth; large mammals are relatively insignificant. Each species is a product of billions of years of evolution, and microorganisms hold a wealth of genetic information, yet we are unaware of the existence of most species. “Among the multicellular organisms of Earth in all environments, the smallest species are also the least known” ([1], p. 15). Many may prove to be invaluable as sources of medicines or for bioengineering, but only if we discover and study them before they go extinct. Some have unique properties that enable them to live in extreme environments of high or low temperature, pressure, and salinity. These organisms are being intensively studied because they may yield insights into the origin of life on earth and possibly other planets. Small organisms lie at or near the base of the food chain, and if enough of them go extinct the entire ecosystem could crumble, and biodiversity would plummet. Also, since life regulates the environment to keep it livable (the concept of Gaia) then extinction of these species may make the earth uninhabitable for us.

Wilson views human beings as a part of nature; we cannot be separated from it because it is part of us. Our ancestors evolved in the environment over millions of years; we are happiest when we are in the same environment occupied by our ancestors (e.g., in a savannah). Because of our brains and the energy we obtain from fossil fuels, we have the power to destroy nature; we have already destroyed a large percentage of natural habitats and caused the extinctions of many species. However our brains also give us the ability to consider our choices, and we could choose to dedicate some of our resources to preserving ecosystems. We have the power to save nature because we know what factors cause species to become extinct (HIPPO) and we have a plan to reduce or eliminate those factors at a relatively low economic cost ([1], Chpt. 7). However, if we don’t take action soon, we may pass the “point of no return” and become unable to save nature. This may make life difficult or impossible for us, as nature is our “life support system”.

Wilson advocates the purchase by non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) of large undeveloped contiguous tracts of land in areas that have high biodiversity and set them aside as reserves in an effort to preserve as many species as possible. The global “hotspots” that are a high priority to purchase are at risk and have high concentrations of species ([1], p. 160). Scientific considerations dictate that each reserve should be large in area because the number of species a reserve can support is roughly proportional to the fourth root of its area ([1], p. 58); also, large size makes them less vulnerable to human activities and invasion of alien species ([1], pg. 177). The reserves should be implemented in three steps to maximize their effectiveness ([1], pp. 177-8): 1) creation of reserves, 2) restoration by reclaiming developed land to enlarge reserves, and 3) connect reserves using large natural corridors. Other elements of the plan ([1], pp. 161-4) include preserving existing frontier forests, ceasing all logging of old-growth forests, protecting freshwater and marine ecosystems, continuing scientific and mapping studies of species and ecosystems, using biodiversity to improve health and make money, and supporting population planning to reduce the rate of increase of human population. Together these changes will help reduce the negative impacts represented by the letters in “HIPPO”. The plan is economically feasible because the total cost of $30 billion is only 1/1000 of the current annual world domestic product. It is politically feasible because it relies on NGO’s and private donations.

One of the arguments against Wilson’s plan is that it is just another example of wealthy developed countries using their money to steal land from poor countries. How can Wilson’s plan be made attractive to the governments and citizens of developing countries, and how could it actually benefit them? To understand how people in developing countries will react to conservation proposals proposed by citizens of developed countries, we have to put ourselves in their position. They will ask “why should we agree to the demands of the U.S. to limit our economic activities and preserve our natural areas for the global good when the U.S. has already become rich by plundering their own?” The U.S. must accept that other countries will not agree to make sacrifices if the U.S. does not make some of its own.

In general, people in developing countries want to raise their standard of living, and land is usually essential to accomplish that goal. They will resent the purchase of land in their countries by foreign concerns unless they actually profit, not just in the short term by a lump sum payment, but in the long term. Conservation must be made profitable for native peoples, perhaps by promoting ecotourism or by identifying or growing plants for pharmaceuticals. Once the native people recognize that the preserved land is a long-term source of income, they will be motivated to protect the land. Involving natives in the process of making decisions that affect the reserve, and guaranteeing that the reserve will be a source of jobs and income, gives natives a stake in conservation.

1. Wilson, E.O., The Future of Life. 2002: Knopf.

Peak Oil

2009-04-15T10:37:00.001-07:00

The public hates negativity and pessimism. When Geophysicist M. King Hubbard predicted in 1956 that oil production in the U.S. would peak in the early 1970’s, both the scientific community and the public made him a pariah. However, when production peaked in 1970 as he predicted, many scientists accepted him as a prophet (most of the public remained unaware of his predictions). Many people don’t remember that up until the early 1970’s the U.S. was the Saudi Arabia of the world. However, since the early 1970’s the U.S. has increasingly depended on foreign countries like Saudi Arabia to feed its voracious appetite for oil. We now rely on unstable third world countries to fuel our cars, and we finance despots and wars to maintain our precious oil supply. Even George W. Bush acknowledged in 2008 that the U.S. is addicted to oil. The effects on foreign countries of the U.S. addiction to oil are very similar to the effects of the U.S. addiction to illegal drugs: the flow of money from the wealthy U.S. leads to corruption, crime, and political instability in third world countries. Our addiction has caused scores of countries and millions of people to suffer. Moreover, our dependence on foreign countries for oil has obviously decreased our national security.

Now that the U.S. depends on foreign countries for 2/3 of its oil, we must be concerned not only about the reliability of our existing suppliers but also the natural limits to oil production. When will global oil production peak and then begin a steady decline of decreasing supply and increasing demand and cost? In his book “Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage”, a Geologist from Yale University named Kenneth Deffeyes [1] argued that the peak would be somewhere close to the year 2005. I used data made available by BP Oil on their website to plot world oil production through 2007:

The data indicate that oil production peaked in 2006 (we will need to collect data for a few more years to confirm this). The increase in gasoline prices and the gas shortages of 2008 certainly made U.S. citizens acutely aware of their addiction to gasoline:

Good evidence that the peak has already arrived is given by Andrew Nikiforuk in his book “Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent”[2]. He notes that the biggest supplier of oil to the U.S. is no longer Saudi Arabia, but our next-door neighbor Canada. U.S. citizens are happy because there is less of a risk that money we spend on oil will end up in the hands of terrorists who target us. However, Canadian oil primarily comes from the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, and mining of this “dirty” oil creates huge environmental problems, including much higher CO2 emissions per unit energy because large amounts of natural gas are used to refine this dirty oil. Production of tar sand oil emits roughly 100 to 650 pounds of CO2 per barrel, compared with North Sea oil that emits only ~20 pounds per barrel. Nikiforuk calls this “a switch from bloody light oil to dirty heavy oil”, and concludes that it is not in the best interests of the U.S. or Canada.

Of course, the concept of peak oil is neo-Malthusian. There is a finite supply of oil in the ground, so it cannot last indefinitely. I don’t think that Cornucopianists dispute this; rather, they believe that through our ingenuity we will find other sources of energy. However, it bears reminding that any non-renewable resource can ultimately become depleted, so taking the long-term view, it makes sense to increase our reliance on renewable sources of energy. Non-renewable resources are finite and subject to Malthusian limits. Renewable resources are unlimited.

Let me give an example of how knowledge can give you an economic advantage. I have always favored small cars, initially because they produce less pollution, but later because I knew the price of gas would increase due to Malthusian limits. Having small, fuel-efficient cars gave me some decided advantages. For example, in the wake of hurricane Rita in 2008 there were gas shortages in several major cities, including my home in Nashville. My family’s fuel-efficient cars were able to get us through the weeklong shortage without a refill. Also in 2008, the price of gas increased to $4 per gallon. Suddenly everyone wanted to trade in his or her large SUV’s for smaller, more economical cars. The value of large vehicles plummeted, and it became so bad that car dealers stopped buying large used SUV’s, and wouldn’t even take them for trade-ins because they were piling up in the dealer’s lots. Domestic auto manufacturers, who had promoted large vehicles for years, were caught off-guard. The market had changed suddenly, and most of the vehicle models they offered were no longer in demand. Sales and profits plummeted, and the auto manufacturers started hemorrhaging money. In this case, the market punished both individuals and large corporations for their short-sightedness. Individuals not only were stuck filling up their gas-guzzling trucks and SUV’s with $4 per gallon gas, but the value of their vehicles plummeted and they had great difficulty selling them. Although the price of gas dropped precipitously in late 2008 due to the economic recession, I can state with confidence that it will soon go back up to $4 per gallon and higher. Take my word for it: don’t buy a large vehicle. It is a bad investment. Purchase a small, economical car, preferably a hybrid car, because it will not only be a better investment, but will also be better for the environment.

1. Deffeyes, K.S., Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage. 2001, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 208.

2. Nikiforuk, A., Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent. 2008, Vancouver, BC, Canada: Greystone Books.

Book Outline

2009-04-12T13:02:00.001-07:00

Introduction

What is sustainability?

Why should I try to live sustainably?

Unsustainable Societies

The Collapse of Ancient Civilizations

Ghost Towns

What is the Evidence that our Current Lifestyle is Unsustainable?

How Should I Start Living Sustainably?·

What are the near-term challenges to sustainability?

Population Growth

Globalization

Energy

Energy Resources: Introduction

Energy Supply and Demand

Sustainable Energy Policy

Peak Oil

Global Warming

The Evils of Coal

Water

Food

Air

What are the Solutions?

Stabilize Population (brief)

Switch to Renewable Energy

Wind

Solar

Biofuels

Why Not Nuclear?

Change the energy infrastructure

Hydrogen for energy transportation

Change the Economics

Economics and Capitalism

Personal Financial Considerations

The Role of Corporations

Change the Way You Live: Living for the Future

Reduce Your Consumption

Reduce Your Waste

Change Your Home

Move to High-Density Housing Close to Your Workplace

Design Your Home Wisely

Sustainable Architecture

Make your home efficient

Energy Conservation

Water Conservation

Change Your Transportation

Change What You Drive

Change How You Drive

Use Mass Transit

Change What You Eat and Drink

Change How You Use Your Land

Sustainable Landscaping

Organic Gardening

Be Good to the Environment

Steps I have taken to reduce my impact on the environment

The Role of Education

Where is the U.S. Headed?

What if the Worst Happens?

Survivalism

What is Most Likely to Happen
References

Steps I have taken to reduce my impact on the environment

2009-04-10T17:39:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty busy the last two weeks, so while I have several sections that are partially complete, I don't have a completed section of text to post. In the meantime, I thought you, my readers, might be interested in looking at what I have done so far to reduce my environmental impact. I think that it's important to "walk the walk", not just "talk the talk".

Reduce
- Have reduced consumption of meat, particularly red meat
- Print less frequently, almost always duplex
- Water
  - Low-flow showerheads
- Electricity
  - Switched from desktop to notebook computers, use energy-saving modes, turn off at night
  - Have replaced over half of my lighting fixtures with compact fluorescent bulbs
  - Use motion-activated security lights
  - Routinely shut off lights in rooms that are not being used
  - Have energy star-rated clothes washer, dishwasher, window AC unit, printer, computer monitor
  - Use smart outlet strips to reduce vampire currents
- Gas/Transportation
  - Bought fuel-efficient cars
  - I drive a 1994 Saturn with > 115,000 miles that gets ~30 mpg
  - Combine errands to save gas and time
  - Keep car tires properly inflated
  - Shop at local farmer's market each week, purchase locally-grown organic foods

Reuse
- Have always avoided disposable products; recently stopped using disposable water bottles
- Stopped using disposable shopping bags, or when I do I reuse them for storing recyclables (paper) or as trash bags (plastic)
- Give old products to Goodwill or Amvets rather than throwing out
- I have worn hand-me down clothes my entire life; I had two older brothers, and more recently I wear hand-me down clothing from my father, father-in-law and brother-in-law (everything but underwear)
- Buy used clothes at the thrift store

Recycle
- Recycle cardboard boxes, paper, plastics, aluminum, glass, tin cans, batteries, computers

Increase efficiency
- Paid extra $ for energy efficient HVAC
- Bought house close to work

Have continuously increased the proportion of organically-grown foods in diet (including those purchased in supermarket)
Started a compost pile
Started organic farming of vegetables
Do not use pesticides, very limited use of locally applied herbicide (not broadcast)
Stopped using antibacterial soap (contains triclosan, which is an endocrine disruptor, can react with chlorine to form chloroform, a carcinogen, and can promote the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria)
Invest in green (socially responsible) mutual funds
Caulked windows
Started using phosphate-free dishwashing detergent
Switched to paperless bill paying and billing
Reduced the volume of junk mail we receive (I forget how I did this)
Set the thermostat temperature low in winter and high in summer:

Plans for future:

Switch to TVA's Green Switch program to invest in alternative energy sources
Use a clothesline instead of a dryer
Replace old incandescent holiday lights with light-emitting diode lights(LEDs)
Have chickens in backyard for eggs & meat
Grow tra (Vietnamese catfish) in a pond
Replace all disposable batteries with rechargeable batteries
Replace refrigerators, clothes washer, and dryer with Energy Star models
Cancel newspaper

What is sustainability?

2009-04-05T12:28:00.000-07:00

Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature. ~Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future, 1964

I became interested in the idea of sustainability early in the 1970’s when I was in junior high school. I distinctly remember reading a book called “Future Shock” by Alvin Tofler. I can’t find a copy of the book today, but my recollection is that it described the huge amount of waste that our society produces. The book took the Malthusian approach, named after Thomas Malthus, who in 1798 published a paper titled “An Essay on the Principle of Population”. Malthus argues that agricultural production would limit human population growth. Unchecked population growth could lead to a “Malthusian catastrophe” in which widespread starvation would reduce the population to a level that could be supported at a subsistence level. This bleak view of the future was later supported by studies of animal populations. For example, at times when food is abundant, deer populations increase at an exponential rate, but when food is scarce for extended periods of time (due to drought, extended winters, etc.) deer will die in large numbers, and the deer population plummets. This cycle repeats indefinitely, and widespread recognition of this problem is the justification for the culling of deer populations by hunters. The Malthusian concept has more recently been extended to all resources that are essential for maintaining our current lifestyle, including metals and oil, and people who subscribe to this view are labeled “neo-Malthusians”.

I think all of us have seen the Malthusian concept in action. For example, in my laboratory I have succulent plants in two pots that I purchased about ten years ago. If you take good care of plants, they grow over time, and their pots must be replaced with bigger pots to accommodate the growth. Humanity’s pot is the earth, and unfortunately it is fixed in size. Being lazy when it comes to plant care, I never changed the pot, so the plants were very healthy while growing then reached the limits of growth and partly withered. Branches fell off and died, and now the plants seem to have reached a steady-state where their growth is not prodigious and the existing branches appear a little less healthy. This is analogous to the Malthusian catastrophe: once the sustainability limit is reached (in this analogy the limit is set by the amount of root that can fit in the pot), there is a die-off and the human population (or in this case plant mass) decreases, and then continues at a subsistence level thereafter. Cornucopianists argue that we can grow the pot, but notice that for plant growth to resume we must grow not only the pot but also the amount of soil, water, and fertilizer. Any one of these essential components could limit growth; unlimited plant growth can occur only if there is unlimited growth in the availability of these critical resources. Can humans grow the supply of every resource that we need, indefinitely?

The Malthusian view is generally supported by scientists, particularly ecologists who see it at work in ecosystems as described above. The opposing view is espoused by “cornucopianists”, who contend that Malthusian limits do not apply to human populations because our intelligence can overcome those limits. Cornucopianists can be considered optimists because they believe there are no limits to growth, while Malthusians are more pessimistic. The debate between Malthusians and Cornucopianists is embodied in the bet that scientist Paul Ehrlich made with economist Julian Simon in 1980. Ehrlich posited that population growth would increase demand on a limited supply of metals, causing the price of those metals to increase in one decade. Simon won the bet because the price of all five metals decreased. However, Simon lost a less-known wager that he made with David South of the Auburn school of Forestry in 1995. Simon wrongly bet that timber prices would decrease in five years. Of course, as a scientist I believe that economists like Simon are wrong, and to support my view I simply point out that economists’ predictions about the future are more often wrong than not; witness the economic collapse of 2008 that was completely unanticipated. As pointed out by the biologist E.O. Wilson in his brilliant book “Consilience”, economics is not a science because it has essentially no predictive power.

Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him. But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot be entirely dead. ~Herman E. Daly, Steady-State Economics, 1977

*Mention Club of Rome study “Limits to Growth”

Sustainability refers to the long-term ability to maintain an ecosystem or human society. In this book we will primarily discuss the sustainability of human societies because that is what the reader is most familiar with. However, I would argue that we cannot maintain human society without also preserving our supporting ecosystems and their biological diversity, because we depend on those ecosystems to provide our food, water, air, and medicines. In short, ecosystems provide many life-support functions that we take for granted, but we must always remember that without those ecosystems we would likely perish. Fortunately, most of the solutions I prescribe for preserving human society also help to preserve our supporting ecosystems.

Important components of sustainability are illustrated in the figure Three_spheres.jpg. As shown in the figure, the three pillars of sustainability are Social, Economic, and Environmental (or the equivalent three P's: People, Prosperity, and the Planet). As we’ll discuss below, our human population continues to increase at an exponential rate, which requires us to accommodate that growth in our temporary plans. However, we must remember that exponential rates of change of any kind are unsustainable and lead to unstable systems. To provide for growth in a sustainable fashion we most engage in sustainable development, which will allow us to "leave future generations the capacity to live as well as we do today" (Robert Solow).

One of the main messages of this book is that our society will experience resource shortages in the near future. Some resources will become of short supply within the lifetimes of my generation (baby-boomers). Others will become scarce during the lifetimes of our children. To understand this problem, we must introduce some terms and concepts. Renewable resources can be created, whereas non-renewable resources either can’t be created or are created at such a low rate that we essentially have a fixed supply of them. Non-renewable resources are fixed in quantity, so the faster you use them, the faster they run out. Fossil fuels fall into this category because it takes millions of years for nature to produce oil and coal from plants. In general, we are more at risk of running out of non-renewable resources. However, we can also run out of renewable resources if we use them much faster than they are replaced. For example, marine fisheries are collapsing worldwide because over-fishing has decreased the populations of certain fish species to critically low levels; those fish species may become extinct, or if left alone to breed they may regenerate their populations to preexisting levels, but that could take many decades. You may have noticed that certain species of fish such as haddock have essentially disappeared from grocery shelves; this is because the commercial catch of haddock has declined rapidly in recent years, and its conservation status is now considered “vulnerable” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haddock). The figure resource_availability shows how the amount of a resource can grow or shrink, depending on the relative rates of replenishment (input) and extraction (output). Our haddock example is of type (b), where we the rate of extraction exceeds the rate of replenishment. Resources that fall in this category are the ones we must be concerned about, and we will examine many examples, particularly water. In case (a), the rate of input equals the rate of output, and we have what’s called a steady-state in which the amount of resource available for use remains constant. Steady-state systems are stable because they don’t change, and the optimal use of renewable resources is to maintain them at a steady state. The sustainable approach to managing renewable resources is to harvest the resource at the same rate they are produced. Sustainable use of renewable resources is desirable because it guarantees long-term availability of those resources.

Global Warming Conclusion (Incomplete)

2009-04-04T15:28:00.000-07:00

*Note: make sure you click on the hyperlinks to see the figures. For the sake of expediency I am temporarily using figures from authors (primarily Mann and Kump, 2009), but will soon replace the most important figures with my own versions.

*Note: Some sections of this blog are simply notes, placeholders for sections that I still must write. Some of the notes follow those of one of my colleagues, Jonathan Gilligan, who is an expert on global warming. But I am anxious to start posts on other subjects, so this will be the final blog on global warming, even though I haven't completed the first draft on that topic.

How Will Global Warming Affect us in the Future?, or What changes are likely to occur in the near future, and what will be the consequences?

How Sensitive is the Climate to Changes in CO2 concentration?

"Climate scientists compare model predictions with estimated changes in average temperatures in the northern Hemisphere derived from proxy data. The proxy temperature estimates match the model simulations well when the assumed equilibrium climate sensitivity is 2-3°C, meaning that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations will lead to a roughly 2-3°C warming of the globe (this is the famous hockey-stick figure produced by Mann):

Northern Hemisphere Temperature Changes over the Past Seven Centuries

The most likely changes in the near future are represented by the IPCC (2007) "middle of the road" A1B emissions scenario (pg. 86). CO2 emissions will peak in the year 2050 (pg. 104a), and atmospheric CO2 conc. Will level off at ~550 ppm (pg. 104b). The corresponding increase in temperature between 2000 and 2100 is 3 deg. C (pg. 88), causing sea level to rise ~0.8 m = 31.5 /12=2.625 ft. (pg. 99). This will cause the global loss of 2223 km² of land, $944 billion and 145 million lives (pg. 111).

Known Consequences: Sea Level Rise

Projected sea level rise

Sea level rise: 4” in 20^th century, 8-28” in 21^st; Large areas will become flooded, including much of south Florida and many inhabited Pacific islands (entire countries). Flooded coastline

Increases in coastal erosion: Up to 260 ft on open beaches
Landward shift of existing estuaries
Disastrous impact on existing developments along coastal zones

Potential Impacts of Global Warming

Doubling greenhouse gas concentrations ↑ avg. global temp 1.5–9^°C (IPCC 2007).
Global warming leads to significant changes in rainfall, soil moisture
Agricultural activities and world food supplies affected greatly by climatic factors
Global warming affects the frequency, intensity, and distribution of natural hazards such as hurricanes and other storms
Higher incidence of weather extremes (high T, floods and drought); causes ↑ in weather-related deaths)
Migration of plants and animals to higher latitudes
Economic losses from seal level rise and storms; could bankrupt insurance companies
↑ in infectious diseases and respiratory illnesses
Countries that contribute the most to climate change will suffer the least.

Reducing the Impact of GW

Identify the historic changes that have occurred
Predict the potential changes in the future
Political commitment: Reconcile the conflicts between the
- environmental need for reduction of greenhouse gases
- economic demands for more fossil fuel

Mitigate: reduce the emission of CO₂ until it stabilizes at 550 ppm (scenario A1B)
- Use fossil fuels releasing less CO₂
- Use alternative renewable energy
- Conserve energy
- Store CO₂ in forests, soils and rocks (sequestration of CO₂)

Adapt: offset the effects of buildup
- China and Africa have low adaptive capacities
- Climate change vulnerability in 2100: A1B scenario with current adaptive capacities

Economists say that cost of emissions reductions will be less than the economic damage in the absence of mitigation
SCC = Social Cost of Carbon: cost to society of emission of one metric ton of carbon (equiv. to 10,000 miles of driving). Integrated assessment models estimate that SCC = $30; this cost would be made up by a 9 cent per gallon tax on gas.
Is it fair for rich developed nations to decide whether action is worth taking, when it is the poor developing countries that will suffer the most?

Summary

The approach many people take to climate change is similar to the approach they take when driving in a lane that is about to close. Prudent people change lanes when they see the warning sign; the probability that they will be able to change lanes without slowing down is high because they have a lot of time and therefore opportunities to change lanes. However, some people won't change lanes until they are forced to when their lane ends. Because they didn't make good use of the warning sign, they have only one chance to change lanes. The probability of their being able to change lanes without slowing down or stopping is low, and they may find it very difficult to change lanes and get back up to speed. They may even get in an accident. They miss most of the opportunities to make change easy. Likewise, if we keep driving down the same path and don't heed the warning signs about global warming, and change our lifestyles only when we are forced to, we will miss most of the opportunities to make change easy, and we may be forced to drastically slow down (greatly decrease our consumption rates and quality of life) in order to make the change.

People who say that we don't have to worry about making changes to the earth, or that the changes we make may even prove beneficial, should think of this analogy: the earth is a complex system that we don't understand. Making changes to it without knowing the consequences is like an untrained mechanic bashing the working engine of a flawless Ferrari with a wrench in hopes of improving it's performance. The Ferrari is a complex system of working parts, and almost certainly any change that is made to a Ferrari in perfect working condition will have deleterious effects. In fact, breaking one part of the engine can lead to other parts breaking down if it is kept operating (and we can't stop the earth system from operating in order to repair it). An induced oil leak in the Ferrari would cause a breakdown of the lubrication system, and the resulting friction would lead to overheating and deformation of the mechanical parts, leading to an irreversible failure of the engine system. Our tweaking of the much more complex earth system, with its many working connected parts, could lead to the failure of individual parts, or in the case of a domino effect failure of complete subsystems (atmospheric or oceanic circulation patterns, ecosystems, etc.). The precautionary principle states that we would be unwise to make global-scale changes without having any idea of what the consequences will be. As Donald Rumsfeld said, there are the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. In the case of global climate, we know there are known unknowns, and there are almost certainly some unknown unknowns.

Humans have adapted to the earth's surface environment over several million years; Homo sapiens have existed since the beginning of the Holocene epoch 10,000 years ago. During that time the earth's climate has been relatively stable (*check). However, the rates of change of atmospheric CO₂ concentration and global temperature are greater than at any time in earth's history, and if continued will outpace the ability of plants and animals to adapt by migration and certainly by evolution (which occurs at a much slower pace). Humans may be able to adapt through use of technology, but much of human society cannot afford the costs of these technologies, so the death rate in poor undeveloped countries will skyrocket. This is one of the great injustices of global warming: those most responsible for global warming (e.g., U.S. citizens) are likely to suffer the least from it. We are wealthy, so we can afford to buy and operate another air conditioner, to import bottled water and food, etc.. Another injustice is intergenerational: we may be making many areas of the earth uninhabitable for our offspring. Almost certainly, life will be more difficult for the next generation, who will be burdened not only with the consequences of global warming, but also an enormous financial debt (witness the exploding budget deficit of the federal government) and shortages in key resources such as oil. The current generation must look for ways to soften the blow that will be delivered to our offspring as a result of our actions and decisions. Most parents make sacrifices for their children’s welfare; the truly responsible parents also make sacrifices for their children’s future (e.g., saving money for them to go to college). We must now make other kinds of sacrifices, ones that will make our lifestyles more sustainable and therefore easier for our children to maintain. We will discuss this in great detail in the coming chapters.

Global Warming: Part II

2009-04-01T13:48:00.001-07:00

Development of a Scientific Consensus

*Note that my references are incomplete; I am struggling to get my Bibliography software to work on my computer. Here I have written what I felt, but I may later have to edit out some of the harsh criticisms in order to avoid the appearance of bias. - John

Although I study the earth, scientific research today is very compartmentalized, so that scientists are often not aware of developments even in closely-related subdisciplines. In some respects, this compartmentalization was necessary to allow some scientists to focus their energies on developing knowledge in narrow domains. This has led the public to perceive many areas of research as irrelevant: “why would anyone spend their life learning the reproductive cycle of fruit flies?” However, these seemingly small problems are all inter-related, and understanding in one narrow area often promotes advances in other areas. The truly large problems like global warming consist of countless overlapping problems. To develop a comprehensive understanding of a global problem requires that scientists from many subdisciplines must collaborate. The trend in scientific research in recent years has been to promote interdisciplinary research, because it is the areas of overlap between subdisciplines where progress is often made. This is because, when forced to communicate, scientists in closely-related fields are confronted with unfamiliar ideas, and they must reconcile their understanding with that of their colleagues, who often have a different perspective on the bigger problem.

Because of the compartmentalization of science and the fact that I was not involved in climate research, I was not aware of the early research on global warming. It wasn’t until the mid- to late-1990’s when I was teaching an introductory Environmental Geology class that I started tracking the issue, first in newspaper reports and then in the scientific literature. My recollection is that the issue had not yet become thoroughly politicized, and I personally pride myself on my objectivity, so I believe that I was able to interpret the scientific data in an unbiased manner. I concluded in the late 1990’s that global warming was occurring; then in the early 2000’s I first became confident that humans were contributing, and then that they were the primary cause of warming.

The development of the climate science communities’ understanding of the global warming issue tracked my own. In 2001 the IPCC concluded that warming was occurring at that time, that “There is a discernible human influence on global climate”, and that the mean surface temperature will ↑ 1.5° to 6.0° during the 21^st century. President Bush was skeptical & asked the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (the most prestigious scientific organization in the U.S.) for an independent report, which was published in 2001 and fully supported the conclusions of the IPCC report[1]. In 2003 (?) the American Geophysical Union published its position paper which stated that “In view of the complexity of the Earth climate system, uncertainty in its description and in the prediction of changes will never be completely eliminated…AGU believes that the present level of scientific uncertainty does not justify inaction in the mitigation of human-induced climate change and/or the adaptation to it.” In 2004 the American Association for the Advancement of Science concluded that “even if measures to reduce global warming are put into place today, some increase will still occur and ways will be needed to adapt to it; that adapting will be challenging, costly and imperfect; that ecosystems around the world are already being affected by global warming; and that acting in advance of problems is necessary to reduce damage.” Finally, in 2007 the IPCC released its 4^th report, for which the committee received the 2007 Nobel Prize. It stated that “"Warming of the climate system is unequivocal...Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations", where “very likely” means a greater than 90% probability. Yet for all of the reports, and the huge amount of research that informed the report writers, and the enormous amounts of money spent on that research, the U.S. government chose to ignore and even distort the findings of the reports. My question is, why pay scientists to do the research and then ignore their advice?

I will refer to those who continue to deny the reality of global warming as climate contrarians. Hansen (2006) points out that “contrarian” is a better description than “skeptic” because healthy skepticism is necessary for good science. In contrast, contrarians ignore all evidence except that which supports their beliefs, and that evidence usually turns out to be anecdotal. MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen has accused global warming supporters of advocating a “religion”, but it is contrarians who ignore all of the evidence and rely on faith. My guess is that many of the contrarians are also creationists, because both show contempt for science and are adept at ignoring evidence.

In his book “State of Fear” author Michael Crichton claimed that anthropogenic global warming is a hoax perpetrated by scientists to increase their funding. It is accepted that scientists sometimes overstate the significance of their results to gain publicity and funding; however, it’s extremely cynical to think that nearly all scientists studying climate change are fabricating their data. Crichton’s mentor Richard Lindzen, one of the last respectable scientists who remains a climate contrarian, made the same claim in a 2006 editorial (*reference), but in fact the climate change advocates he referred to wanted the government to increase funding for research into alternative energy sources, not for their field of climate science. In fact, Lindzen and other contrarians have been back-pedaling for years, first claiming that warming was not occurring, then that it was occurring but that humans were not the cause, then that humans are the cause but that it is not an important issue (Begley 2007, Newsweek). Another prominent contrarian is Fred Singer, Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Virginia until 1994. Singer may have been at the cutting edge of climate science research decades ago, but now he is not even a scientist; rather, as President of an organization he founded called Science and Environmental Policy Project, he is a lobbyist who oil companies pay to spread uncertainty about climate change. In an ironic twist, he was involved in an effort to discredit the claim that second-hand smoke causes cancer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer). In March 2009 there was a meeting of the Climate Change skeptics in Chicago, and I read in the paper how a beleaguered Singer was trying to set his contrarian colleagues straight on some of the science, reminding them that yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas; that is a fact and we can’t legitimately claim otherwise. I hope Singer is enjoying the company of the dwindling number of contrarian wackos.

Why do a handful of prominent scientists like Lindzen resist accepting the consensus of the scientific community? I can think of three possible explanations: they simply delight in being contrarians; their scientific judgment is biased because they are unable to separate the political and scientific dimensions of the issue; or they are being paid by oil companies or other vested interests to publicly voice their opposition to the consensus. I like to think that Lindzen is not guilty of the latter, but decades ago there were many scientists who accepted payments from tobacco companies to make fraudulent claims. From the oil company perspective, it is a very effective strategy to pay relatively small amounts of money to a few respected and vocal dissidents in order to lead the public to believe that scientists are undecided on the issue, when in reality a consensus has existed for years. I’ve read that as a survivor of the Holocaust Lindzen tends to favor the underdog, and the same may be true of Singer, who had to flee Austria during the Nazi occupation (Begley, 2007).

Hansen (2006) gives one of many examples of the dishonesty of global warming contrarians when he describes a paper by Patrick Michaels, who deliberately deceived his readers into believing that Hansen’s (1988) global warming scenarios were inaccurate. To support this false claim, Michaels (*ref.) compared global mean temperatures measured between 1988 and 1997 with the only one of Hansen’s three “predictions” made in 1988 that did not agree with the data, which was a scenario for extreme warming. Hansen’s middle-of-the-road best estimate agreed with the data almost perfectly, but readers of Michael’s paper were led to believe that global climate models were completely inaccurate. Because many global warming contrarians now seem to be knowingly promoting false information, it might be tempting to scientists and global warming activists to stretch the truth or make false claims to promote their cause. The other side has an unfair advantage because they allow themselves to lie. Do not give in to this temptation. First, scientists must not tarnish the reputation of science and their host institutions by lying. Integrity is the most critical trait of a good scientist, and scientists who knowingly promote falsehoods should no longer be allowed to wear that noble title. Furthermore, it is not necessary to resort to falsehoods when the truth is on your side. I am an optimist who believes in the old adage “the truth shall prevail”; however, I often get frustrated because it takes so long to prevail.

Why did it take so long for a scientific consensus to develop? Because Earth's climate is a very complex system with many feedback loops; makes it very difficult to confidently predict future climate. Furthermore, science can’t prove anything; it can only increase our level of confidence that humans are causing global warming.

Response of the Public and Politicians to Global Warming

Denial and the politicization of global warming unfortunately has slowed our societies response to a potentially terrible threat. It is unclear to me why conservatives became the global warming skeptics as opposed to liberals. Global warming should not be a political issue, but rather a scientific and moral issue. As evidence mounts that global warming is human-induced, conservatives dig in their heels and deepen their denial. Rather than face the facts and make some hard decisions, they would rather bury their heads in the sand and label an entire field of human endeavor as fraudulent. Conservatives have adopted a conspiracy theory that requires that nearly every scientist in the world, each of who has devoted their lives to the search for truth, is knowingly contributing to a lie. They claim that all of the data has been fabricated. How cynical can you get?

I asked my Sustainability class if they could explain why, until recently (2009), most Republican members of Congress tended to be contrarians. They hypothesized that the Republican party generally promoted legislation favorable to large business such as oil companies, and many were given political contributions by those companies. Due to the efforts of oil companies to spread doubt, most Republican congresspeople honestly believed there was no consensus on global warming, but others likely knew that warming was happening and either dismissed it as unimportant or allowed their votes to be swayed by oil money. But why did party members who are not politicians and therefore did not get “paid off” by oil companies so fervently believe that global warming was a hoax? How could so many subscribe to a belief that defied all of the evidence? It’s hard not to draw an analogy to religion. However, with religion, it’s easier to understand “faith”, because those beliefs are indoctrinated in people at an early age, and there is a very large, well-funded system to support their beliefs. Where does the faith of global warming contrarians come from? It comes from a very large, well-funded system of oil companies and politicians. But those oil companies and politicians did not speak directly to the voters and inculcate those beliefs. They had intermediaries who spoke to the masses, similar to the role that priests play in organized religion. In conservative politics the intermediaries who speak to the masses are in the media (note that media forms part of the word intermediary), and they have a powerful influence on listeners beliefs. It is well known that conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh talks not to the facts, but to the beliefs of his listeners (see Al Franken’s books “Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them” and “Rush Limbaugh is a Big, Fat Idiot”). My brother Mike once told me that people don’t tune in to Limbaugh’s show to get information, but rather to hear excuses, e.g., “I don’t have to make sacrifices to reduce my carbon footprint because Rush Limbaugh says that global warming is a hoax.” What’s scary is the fervency of their beliefs and the anger they express when they talk about government funding of “junk science” (it’s so easy to dismiss any evidence you don’t agree with as “junk science”). They act like religious fundamentalists, but we aren’t talking about religion, are we?

Rush Limbaugh claims to be a patriot who only wants what’s right for this country. But when Barack Obama took office in 2009, Limbaugh said repeatedly that he hoped Obama’s economic policies would fail. Yes, he wanted America’s economy to go down the toilet just to prove that he was right and Obama was wrong. It is more important to Limbaugh that he be right than for America to succeed. Do you think Limbaugh will ever admit that he was wrong on global warming?

Rush Limbaugh and his audience should know by now that they have been bamboozled by big oil. The subtlety and effectiveness of the oil companies campaign against global warming science is frightening. The general belief in the U.S. is that you can accomplish anything if you have enough money, and the oil companies have proved it. The evidence suggests to me that lobbying by oil companies delayed political action on global warming by at least ten years, allowing them to earn record profits. They also eliminated competition (see the movie “Who Killed the Electric Car”). Governments around the world could learn a lot from the disinformation campaigns of big oil companies like Exxon-Mobil. Unfortunately, the world will not be a better place if they do. If you think that oil companies do not have such power, consider that Exxon Mobil is larger than the economies of 180 nations (Speth, p. 62). It has great power, and uses it to fight government regulation and oversight. Auto manufacturers were the same until recently, when they plunged into near bankruptcy and were essentially taken over by the U.S. government in 2009.

Another example of corporate shortsightedness and dishonesty is given by American auto manufacturers, in particular GM. These companies’ efforts to swindle consumers, mislead politicians, and silence consumer advocates like Ralph Nader are legendary (see the movie “Ralph Nader: An Unreasonable Man”). Over the years, there have been many good reasons to downsize cars, the generally unknown problem of peak oil being only one of them. Government and States (particularly California) have tried to regulate the industry and encourage or force them to build smaller, more efficient cars. Auto manufacturers fought them every step of the way. Companies like GM would regularly develop prototypes of such cars, only to shelve them. In one case they actually built and leased a remarkable electric car called the EV-1, but after successfully pressuring California into dropping their stricter emissions standards, the EV-1 program was shut down. Then, in an unbelievable display of corporate arrogance, GM forced the leasers to give up their beloved, nearly brand-new cars so that GM could make the cars disappear (in junkyards) and the public forget about electric cars (see the move “Who Killed the Electric Car?”). Once the price of gas went up to $4 per gallon in 2008, GM could not sell their gigantic Humvee’s and SUV’s, and taxpayers are now handing GM billions of dollars to stay afloat. Why are we all paying for the monstrous mistakes that GM executives made? Nearly everyone knew that this would eventually happen, but GM was always focused on short-term profits to maintain high executive bonuses and keep investors happy. Clearly, executives of auto manufacturers like GM never gave a thought to the long-term viability of their companies. Now that the U.S. government is spending billions of dollars to keep GM afloat, President Obama is insisting that they develop of sustainable business plan. Shouldn’t investors and the corporate boards have been demanding that all along? How could all of these people be so irresponsible?

It’s time to end the denial and take action. An April 2006 poll showed that 70% of Americans are willing to make sacrifices to stop global warming. Our country needs to invest in insurance against global warming. We spend trillions of dollars per year for national defense as an insurance policy against external aggression, but we spend zero dollars to insure ourselves against the threats posed by global warming (Pollack, 2005). In this case, the old adage “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is appropriate: it is usually a lot cheaper to prevent a problem than to deal later with its consequences.

[1] Note that in his second term Bush admitted that the earth was warming and that we were probably contributing, but he chose to do nothing about it.

Global Warming: Introduction

2009-03-31T12:14:00.001-07:00

The intertwined problems of population growth, water shortages, and food shortages have been recognized for over one hundred years, and no one disputes that they are important global problems. However, until very recently much of the public was unaware of the related problems of peak oil and global warming. As a result, I will spend more time focusing on these less familiar problems.

At the time of this writing (2009), there is growing public acceptance of the reality of human-induced global warming. I would argue that the scientific community reached consensus in the late 1990’s on the reality of global warming, and in the early 2000’s on the idea that warming is primarily human-induced. As expected for an issue this complex, it is taking longer for the public to reach a consensus. This is not surprising, as the culprit is fossil fuel use, and there are extremely powerful and wealthy business concerns that have campaigned against this consensus to protect their profits. This situation closely parallels that of the tobacco companies in the 1970’s, who paid lobbyists and scientists large sums of money to spread falsehoods about the link between smoking and cancer (see the book “Thank You For Smoking” for an insightful and amusing illustration of how corporations conspire to hide the truth). Unfortunately, this has led to a politicization of the global warming issue. Although Al Gore did an admirable job of raising public awareness on this issue (for which he won the Nobel Prize in 2006?), his political associations led many to close their minds to the possibility that he was right. However, Al Gore did not invent the theory of global warming, nor did he participate in any of the scientific investigations; he was merely publicizing an issue that was hidden from view. Most scientists are not very good at public outreach, and they need well-known figures like Al Gore to carry their message to the masses. This effort has been only partly successful, so now it is up to scientists like me to help the public understand the reality and the importance of issues like global warming and peak oil.

The concept of global warming is really quite simple. Energy in the form of sunlight passes through earth’s atmosphere and heats the surface; the surface warms and gives off heat. Without greenhouse gases like CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere, that heat would radiate into space and be lost, and the average surface temperature of the earth would be only 0°F, meaning that all water on the earth’s surface would be frozen, and life would not be possible. Fortunately, the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere absorb and trap the heat, increasing the average observed surface temperature of the earth to a very hospitable 59°F. We are fortunate to have greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. However, like Goldilocks we need it not too cold and not too hot, but just right. If the concentration of greenhouse gases gets too high, it will be too hot for us.

Recognition of the greenhouse effect goes back to Joseph Fourier in the early 19^th century, and the role of carbon dioxide (CO2) was identified in 1859 by John Tyndall. It was Svante Arrhenius in 1896 who predicted that human activities could contribute to the greenhouse effect, but it wasn’t until the 1970’s that scientists like Roger Revelle and Wallace Broecker began to raise the alarm. Their concern was based on measurements by Charles Keeling, who showed that CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was increasing at an alarming rate:

Fig. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide-en.svg

Although there are seasonal fluctuations related to plant growing seasons (see inset of Fig. 1), the long-term trend shown in red is of steadily increasing CO2 concentration. The measurements in Fig. 1 were made at the famous Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, but similar measurements have been made at many other observatories and show the same trend. So how is this related to human activity? In the Peak Oil section, we described how oil contains the energy of sunlight that fell on earth millions of years ago, trapped in organic molecules that were manufactured in plants through photosynthesis. The simplified chemical reaction is:

Eq. 1: 6 CO₂ + 6 H₂O + energy from sunlight = C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6 O₂

The glucose molecule C₆H₁₂O₆ represents the organic matter that stores the energy in fossil fuels. When we combust fossil fuels, we undo the work of photosynthesis, promoting the reverse reaction by heating the organic matter in the presence of atmospheric oxygen so they react and liberate the stored energy. The troubling product of this combustion is CO₂, which accumulates in earth’s atmosphere, leading to the steadily increasing atmospheric CO₂ concentrations exemplified by Keeling’s curve (Fig. 1).

Another example of this delicate balance maintained by earth’s atmosphere is the oxygen concentration of the atmosphere. From Eq. 1 above we can see that combustion consumes O₂ while producing CO₂. Thus, we would predict that if combustion of fossil fuels are now the primary source of atmospheric CO₂, then with time increasing CO₂ should be balanced be decreasing O₂ concentration in the atmosphere:

*Insert link to figure

The current atmospheric O₂ concentration of 21% is just right for trees: If O₂ rose to 25%, forests would burn after every lightning strike, but if it fell to 13%, we wouldn’t be able to start a fire. In fact, it is life that regulates the composition of the atmosphere, as illustrated vividly by James Lovelock’s conception of Gaia, which posits that earth behaves like an organism because it’s components act in concert to maintain life-support systems at optimal levels. Just as our body maintains a constant temperature of 98.6°F, the earth can maintain global temperatures within a narrow range that is conducive to life. How? Eq. (1) gives us some insight. Because temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration are positively correlated, when CO2 is increased, then temperature increases, and the combined effect is to induce plant growth through photosynthesis (Eq. 1). This causes plants to extract greater amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, thereby decreasing atmospheric CO2 concentration and therefore temperature. In effect the earth system works to counteract environmental changes, a process called negative feedback (similar to LeChatlier’s principle in Chemistry). Thus, life helps to regulate the composition of atmosphere and therefore helps maintain an optimal temperature, and the earth system of which life is a part is self-regulating (homeostatic). Essentially, the solid earth and atmosphere (geochemistry) and life (paleontology) have co-evolved.

If life maintains the composition of the atmosphere at an optimal level, why worry about greenhouse gas (CO₂) emissions?

· They may exceed the capacity of the system to maintain constant temperature and composition

· They may kill coral reefs and other marine organisms

CaCO₃ + H₂O + CO₂ = 2 HCO₃^- + Ca²⁺

· They could shut down the “ocean conveyor belt” and cause drastic cooling of Europe

· Severe weather events such as El Nino and hurricanes may become more frequent and intense

· Specific regions may become uninhabitable due to desertification

How do we know that the new CO2 added to earth’s atmosphere derives from human use of fossil fuels, rather than some other natural source such as volcanic degassing? There are several lines of evidence that clinch the case, two of which involve the use of carbon isotopes. When plants grow through photosynthesis (Eq. 1), they preferentially extract the light isotope ¹²C from the atmosphere, so organic matter has a low ¹³C/¹²C ratio. Volcanic degassing would not change the ¹³C/¹²C ratio of the atmosphere, but returning organic carbon back to the atmosphere through burning of fossil fuels should lead to a decrease in the ¹³C/¹²C ratio of the atmosphere, which is what we observe. Another carbon isotope found in the atmosphere is ¹⁴C, which is radioactive and has a half-life (the amount of time it takes for half of the ¹⁴C to decay) of 5700 years (*check; it continuously formed by cosmic rays in the earth’s upper atmosphere). Modern plants incorporate ¹⁴C from the atmosphere and are therefore slightly radioactive. However, the organic matter from plants that grew millions of years ago that is now contained in fossil fuels has no remaining ¹⁴C, so burning fossil fuels (as opposed to modern biomass) should cause a decrease in atmospheric ¹⁴C concentration, which is again what is observed[1].

We can fit a straight-line to all of the data to obtain the red curve, which shows a ~150-year trend of increasing global average temperature. If we fit a line to the data from the last 25 years, we obtain the yellow line that has a steeper slope than the red line, suggesting that the rate of heating was higher in the last 25 years than observed over the 150-year period. This acceleration of warming to rates higher than ever recorded in geologic history is what has scientists concerned.

Why is the greenhouse effect so hard for humans to detect (Pollack, 2005)?

It is difficult for humans to focus on small incremental changes worldwide when big things are happening at home.
Our senses are tuned to detect rapid change (e.g., lobster in boiling water).
We can easily detect changes in weather (short-term), but not changes in climate, which is the long-term characterization of the average weather.
It becomes harder to interpret human-induced changes in climate when they are superimposed on longer-term natural changes (Milankovitch cycles, continental drift, and oceanic circulation patterns).
We are tempted to interpret short-term departures from the norm as long-term trends.
Small changes such as a 1° increase in average global temperature can have a large impact because the earth, like our bodies, is a complex, finely-tuned machine that cannot tolerate small changes in temperature.

What is Causing the Warming?

Possible causes of climate change include variable sun, strengthening greenhouse, increased atmospheric aerosols, and volcanic eruptions. Computer simulations based on real-world measurements show that the natural drivers, solar variability and volcanic eruptions, have actually caused earth’s surface temperature to decrease during the 20^th century. Aerosols also cause cooling. Therefore, the only remaining cause of global warming is increased greenhouse gas concentrations from burning of fossil fuels.

*More to come...

[1] Note that it is the changing ¹⁴C content of the atmosphere that makes accurate ¹⁴C dating of material less than 100 years old impossible.

First Sustainability Book Blog

2009-03-31T11:45:00.000-07:00

I just started writing a book on Sustainability, and decided a good way to get feedback from people as I write is to periodically post snippets to a blog. If successful, this would be my first published book, although I have published many articles in the scientific literature. What I will post to the blog will be my first drafts of sections. I have been working on the book for roughly ten days, and my time is limited because I have a very hectic schedule this semester, so the going may be slow over the next couple of months. However, I've completed most of the Introduction, which I will post here as my first entry. Comments and suggestions are welcome. I'm particularly interested in hearing whether people think they would find this book interesting and worth reading. Thanks for your input! - John

Introduction

Our society faces some major challenges in the next few decades. Scientists are concerned about the availability of energy, water, and food needed for a growing population. Most of our energy comes from sources such as oil, coal, and natural gas that are non-renewable. Furthermore, use of those energy sources releases the greenhouse gas CO2 into the atmosphere. In the United States, our high quality of life derives from abundant, cheap fossil fuels. However, many scientists believe that global oil production recently peaked, and therefore oil will become less abundant and more expensive with time. This will cause a large increase in the cost of living because most of the goods we use and food we eat were produced and transported using fossil fuels. In the Age of Oil it was easy to get rich, but after the peak in oil production it will be hard to stay rich. This book has two target audiences: those who feel a moral obligation to help preserve a high quality of life for our offspring and future generations by living sustainably, and those who simply want to find ways to maintain their current high standard of living. The first group has likely already been convinced that our current lifestyle is not sustainable. The second group either doesn’t know or doesn’t care, but recognizes that they can profit if they acquire the knowledge needed to anticipate future economic trends shaped by availability of resources. As a result, I wrote the first few chapters of this book to convince those in the second group that our current lifestyle in the U.S. is unsustainable, and that we can expect shortages in energy, water, and food in the coming decades. These shortages will cause economic recessions and possibly depressions, and likely will lead to multiple wars (as wars are generally fought over resources). The following chapters are aimed at those in the first group who are willing to make small sacrifices in their personal lifestyles for the greater good. By reducing their consumption they can help society delay future shortages; on the plus side, they will be better prepared when the shortages come. The final chapters give some advice on how people in both groups can anticipate the global economic changes looming in the near future and best position themselves to adapt to those changes. We can’t completely avoid the coming shortages and the economic consequences, but we can lessen the fall; we can reduce the impact on individuals and on society as a whole, and (for those in group one like myself) improve the quality of life of future generations.

Why did I write this book, and what qualifies me to write it? I am a Professor in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at Vanderbilt University, specializing in Geochemistry. My work has focused on aspects of the environment and resource availability and quality (primarily water but also ore deposits and fossil fuels). After teaching about these topics for over twenty years, I realized that due to the exponential growth of human population and consumption rates we were likely to deplete some critical natural resources in the near future, and that could have very large economic and societal consequences. It now seems likely that oil will soon be in short supply, and oil shortages will limit the economic growth that has sustained the global economy for decades. The U.S. is the most powerful county in the world because in the 20^th century it had abundant oil to jump-start its economic growth; we now use our power to maintain the flow of oil from other countries. Without oil, our economy and our power would whither. I have two children, and I began thinking about how all of this would affect their lives. Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound good for them. I believe that the world economy has peaked and will soon start a steady decline caused by oil shortages. Furthermore, the U.S. is particularly vulnerable because we currently consume roughly 25% of the oil produced even though we make up only 4% of the global population. I also recently became convinced that our use of oil and other fossil fuels is causing global warming, and it scares me that we are changing the earth on a global scale and we don’t really know how it will affect us. So our reliance on oil is doubly evil, as it makes us reliant on unstable foreign countries for supply and vulnerable to shortages, but it also makes changes on a global scale to a delicately balanced system that we don’t fully understand. Thus, it seems critically important to me that, first and foremost, we reduce our use of oil (we must also reduce coal use for other reasons outlined in chapter ?). This can be accomplished through conservation measures taken by individuals and communities, but on a the larger societal scale it requires policy makers to promote a switch to renewable energy sources (wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal, and hydroelectric) that don’t release CO2 to the atmosphere. This book aims to give citizens the tools they need to reduce their ecological footprint and achieve sustainability, and in the process save money and maintain a high quality of life. It will also educate citizens so that they can elect political candidates who acknowledge these problems and advocate workable solutions to them rather than ignoring them. The problem is that politicians are focused on the short-term, but we need to elect politicians who have the strength and foresight to improve the future and not just the present. As a patriot, I want to convince our government officials that to keep America strong in the future our country must greatly reduce the use of oil. This is a point that we all can agree on, liberals and conservatives alike.

In writing this book, I’m aware that some will view me as just another “Chicken Little”. It’s true that some environmentalists have been claiming for decades that “the sky is falling”, and much of the public (perhaps rightly so) treats this group like The Boy Who Cried Wolf. But remember that boy, and Chicken Little if I recall correctly, turned out to be right. And while scientists in the past have not been able to successfully predict the exact timing of resource shortages (e.g., neo-Malthusian scientist Paul Ehrlich lost to Cornucopianist economist Julian Simon when he bet that metals prices would skyrocket in the 1980’s (?) due to shortages), I believe their warnings about the future had merit. For example, everyone agrees that oil will become scarce in the future, but there is little agreement on when. To me it is important that people know that oil will become increasingly unaffordable during their lifetimes, so that they can prepare for these near-future shortages and not get caught off-guard. I should also point out that I am an optimist, not a pessimist. I believe it is in our power to solve the problems I discuss in this book. First, however, we must acknowledge that we have a problem, and then discuss possible solutions to the problem. The primary problem we will discuss in this book is our addiction to oil, or more generally fossil fuels. Like any addiction, the addiction to oil is unhealthy. It hurts us as individuals, and it hurts our country. It is like a disease, and because it such a dangerous disease, it must be countered with many different medicines, and almost certainly a change in lifestyle.

I also think it is important for people to understand the important role that science plays in our society, and that we can use the information provided by science to our benefit. Although topics like global warming can be complex, I’m convinced that everyone is capable of understanding the essentials. Knowledge helps turn citizens into wise voters who are well-equipped to make the right choices for themselves and their country. In this book, I use a minimum of jargon in order to make this important information accessible to all. Moreover, I think the reader will find that topics like global warming are fascinating, and the rapid growth of our knowledge in this area is truly exciting.

This topic is particularly timely because there is a fundamental shift in the approach the U.S. government is taking. Contrast the inertia of the Bush administration (reluctance to change from fossil-fuel economy) to what is occurring now: “It now appears,” Schneider writes, “that Obama plans to launch his presidency with a daring idea: To anchor the American economy with energy sources not derived from fossil fuels.” As Schneider notes, Obama is trying to establish a new paradigm: Instead of marginalizing environmental concerns, Obama wants the solutions to environmental problems to help drive economic growth. Read Schneider’s article here.

I’m also trying to bridge the gap between scientists and laypersons. I believe I’m well-qualified for this task because I am a geoscientist, but I am not an expert on the specific topics that comprise this book. That makes it easier for me to explain the science to my readers, because I am really explaining it to myself using the printed word. My goal is to draw on the most up to date and high quality papers from scientific journals to inform the reader. I will also try to show the connections between seemingly disparate developments in Environmental Science. This is a time of rapid advances in our understanding of the relationship between humans and the environment, and the public usually only catches glimpses of these exciting developments. I will try to approach these issues holistically, pointing out, but not dwelling upon, the problems, and focusing on the possible solutions.

This book is focused on the U.S., the most powerful country in the world and the greatest contributor to environmental destruction. My aim is the convince U.S. citizens that we must turn the boat around 180 degrees and use our strength to show the rest of the world the path to the future - we need to reassume the mantle of leadership.

*Introduce chapters

In the end, I think that our society will only take serious action on these environmental issues when they reach the crisis stage. So why read this book and try to anticipate the crises if we can’t contribute to their solution? The answer is simply that you will be better-prepared for these future crises, which will give you great economic advantages over the short-sighted. However, if in spite of my cynical predictions humanity summons the courage to make difficult choices, and the strength to alter the course, then I hope this book will have contributed to that transformation.

This book was conceived in spring of 2009 when I taught a new course called “Sustainability: An Environmental Science Perspective”. For the first term paper, I created an outline for a book titled “Future Trends: How to Live Sustainably” and asked each of the 16 students to choose a topic for their paper. Each of the student’s papers became a chapter in a book that we published online at http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/page/h5dg6A. I realized that there were no comparable titles in print, and recognized that our society had an unfilled need for information on this topic. The notion of writing this book was particularly appealing to me because I’ve always wanted to “make a difference”, and it gave me an opportunity to use some of my knowledge to help others. I dedicate this book to my wife Mary who has made my life worth living, and to my children Alicia and Austin, who gave me the inspiration to think and write about our shared future. I hope this book helps make their world a better place.

Sustainability Blog: John Ayers

The parable of the snacirema

Global Climate Change: Theory and Evidence

Green Construction

Peak Oil 4: Consequences of Peak Oil

Environmental and Social Costs of Oil Use and Addiction

Effects on Transportation and the Economy

Peak Oil 3: National and Global Production Peaks of Oil and Other Resources

Peak Oil 2: Oil Formation, Exploration, and Recovery

Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining

Peak Oil: Background

References

Cuba’s transition from a peak- to a post-petroleum world

Solar Cookers for Haiti

The Simpleton’s Guide to Sustainability

Cutting government services doesn’t always save money

Globalization and culture

Simple Science is Sometimes the Best Science

Economic growth can be too fast, leading to attacks against children in China

A Message to Science Educators and Students about Global Climate Change

Taxes can promote sustainability

The Failure of the U.S. Government to Address Sustainability

Do snowstorms disprove global warming?

Eco-Cities and Eco-villages

Collect and Purify Water

Composting

Buy Green and Encourage Sustainable Design

Our Relationship with Nature

Industrial Agriculture

Food

The Nuclear Waste Disposal Problem

Why Not Nuclear?

Case Study: Ducktown, Tennessee

Change Your Transportation

Book Abstract

My writing style and the use of Wikipedia

Short note for today

Reduce Your Waste

Change the Way You Live: Sustainable Living

Is Our Current Lifestyle Unsustainable?

Case study: DuPont Plant, New Johnsonville, TN

Environmental Risk

The Behavior of Water Pollutants

How Much Oil in Alaska?

Water Pollution Case Study: Lake Erie

Lawn Care

The Evils of Coal

Water

Biodiversity

Peak Oil

Book Outline

How Should I Start Living Sustainably?·

Switch to Renewable Energy

What is Most Likely to Happen References

Steps I have taken to reduce my impact on the environment

What is sustainability?

Global Warming Conclusion (Incomplete)

How Will Global Warming Affect us in the Future?, or What changes are likely to occur in the near future, and what will be the consequences?

How Sensitive is the Climate to Changes in CO2 concentration?

Known Consequences: Sea Level Rise

Potential Impacts of Global Warming

Reducing the Impact of GW

Summary

Global Warming: Part II

Development of a Scientific Consensus

Response of the Public and Politicians to Global Warming

Global Warming: Introduction

First Sustainability Book Blog

Introduction

What is Most Likely to Happen
References