I have had several requests in recent months to make peak oil presentations. I regret that I have had to turn them down and that, further, I can not commit to any future presentations at this time. I have had serious health issues this past year and, considering the nature of those issues, do not see any point on the near term horizon when I will again be in a position to make presentations.
I have a condition called cardiomyopathy. Specifically two of my three heart arteries are completely collapsed, but the good news is that my circulatory system has rerouted itself successfully meaning that the cardiologists say there is no point in a bypass operation which would only duplicate what my body has already done for itself. The down side of my condition, however, is that I only have thirty percent heart function, which means my energy level is low, I tire easily, and long drives and air travel are definitely not recommended by my doctors.
All of that is further complicated by the fact that I have progressive arthritis in my hips, high blood pressure, and have, as a result of the heart condition, developed type 2 diabetes. All in all I am physically a mess at the moment
The good news is that none of this has interfered with my research and my writing on peak oil, of which this blog is a major component. Nor do I intend to let my condition interfere with that, other than concessions to my easily tiring.
I thank all of those who are regular readers of my blog and hope that it is contributing to your awareness of peak oil and its serious societal implications.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
People Starting to see the Light on Oil Supply
In a recent WorldPublicOpinion.org poll (just released on April 20, 2008) conducted in 16 nations collectively containing 58 percent of the world's population, a majority of the 14,896 poll respondents believe "that governments should assume that oil is running out". That is the good news. The bad news is that they also believe "it is necessary for governments to make a major effort to replace oil as a primary source of energy." "Only 22 percent on average believe that enough new oil will be found so that it can remain a primary source of energy for the foreseeable future.” according to the poll. There does not appear to be a belief, however - there were no questions in the poll by which one could get an accurate reading - that this is a cause to change our lifestyle. The onus in the questions as posed in the poll is on governments to find replacement energy sources to allow life to carry on as is, for business as usual. It is not clear whether this was predicated on a pre-existing belief that that would be the position of the majority of people. It does, however, limit the utility of the poll.
Although it is heartening that a significant majority of people polled (the number of poll respondents is too low to be statistically accurate) appear to now understand that global oil supplies are running out, it is very disheartening that they have not made the connection that this is going to require any changes on their part. That connection has to be made before there is any chance of a realistic move toward a post-fossil-fuel society. Small steps, nonetheless, are better than no steps at all.
According to Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org, in fact, “The widespread consensus that oil needs to be replaced as an energy source may be prompted by concerns about the effect of oil on climate change as well as the belief that oil will run out.” That suggests that there is, as yet, little understanding, even though the majority of people believe that global oil supplies are running out, of the serious implications for global society when they do. It suggests they see global warming as a threat to global society but do not make the same connection for depleting oil supplies. This may be based on the apparent belief or expectation that governments will find that elusive replacement for oil that will allow things to carry on as usual. The energy fairy would seem to be alive and well. Clearly much more work has to be done to get people to see the full picture.
What this poll does do, in a limited way, is help define the nature of the myopia in public opinion as regards the approaching global energy crisis. It gives us a little better picture of where the major efforts are going to be required to raise public awareness to a level where meaningful action can be undertaken. It also clarifies what the general public perception is of government's awareness of the energy situation. Whether that perception is realistic is irrelevant; perception is reality. Clearly if government continues down the road of assuring the people there is no problem, that technology will solve the energy problem, they are going to be in dire straits when that public perception catches up with reality, when people finally realize that there is no viable replacement for oil. Having now finally realized that oil is running out, when that final shoe drops (that there is no viable substitute) it will be devastating to society. Clearly as the public starts to make that connection there is going to be a strong need for very clear and meaningful leadership and direction of what society needs to do to powerdown to a non-fossil-fuel lifestyle. That's when things are going to get really interesting.
============================
World publics say oil needs to be replaced as energy source by World Public Opinion
World Publics Say Oil Needs to Be Replaced as Energy Source
Although it is heartening that a significant majority of people polled (the number of poll respondents is too low to be statistically accurate) appear to now understand that global oil supplies are running out, it is very disheartening that they have not made the connection that this is going to require any changes on their part. That connection has to be made before there is any chance of a realistic move toward a post-fossil-fuel society. Small steps, nonetheless, are better than no steps at all.
According to Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org, in fact, “The widespread consensus that oil needs to be replaced as an energy source may be prompted by concerns about the effect of oil on climate change as well as the belief that oil will run out.” That suggests that there is, as yet, little understanding, even though the majority of people believe that global oil supplies are running out, of the serious implications for global society when they do. It suggests they see global warming as a threat to global society but do not make the same connection for depleting oil supplies. This may be based on the apparent belief or expectation that governments will find that elusive replacement for oil that will allow things to carry on as usual. The energy fairy would seem to be alive and well. Clearly much more work has to be done to get people to see the full picture.
What this poll does do, in a limited way, is help define the nature of the myopia in public opinion as regards the approaching global energy crisis. It gives us a little better picture of where the major efforts are going to be required to raise public awareness to a level where meaningful action can be undertaken. It also clarifies what the general public perception is of government's awareness of the energy situation. Whether that perception is realistic is irrelevant; perception is reality. Clearly if government continues down the road of assuring the people there is no problem, that technology will solve the energy problem, they are going to be in dire straits when that public perception catches up with reality, when people finally realize that there is no viable replacement for oil. Having now finally realized that oil is running out, when that final shoe drops (that there is no viable substitute) it will be devastating to society. Clearly as the public starts to make that connection there is going to be a strong need for very clear and meaningful leadership and direction of what society needs to do to powerdown to a non-fossil-fuel lifestyle. That's when things are going to get really interesting.
============================
World publics say oil needs to be replaced as energy source by World Public Opinion
World Publics Say Oil Needs to Be Replaced as Energy Source
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Wherefore Art the Widgets?
This article deals with the issue of whether nations need a National Infrastructure Database to prepare for the possibly severe infrastructure management challenges that will manifest themselves as we move past peak oil and head down the post-peak downslope. It was suggested by Geoff Holman of Australia, for which I thank him. Ah, the wonders of the worldwide web. May it last long and prosper. It has made this peak oil dialogue truly global, which it needs to be but which would have been very difficult to accomplish without the internet.
Also see my other articles in this blog on infrastructure;
Peak Oil and the Three Sisters of Social Collapse
Peak oil and overpasses
The myth of permanence: post-peak infrastructure maintenance
Post Peak Dam Maintenance, or Lack Thereof
Our Dangerous Infrastructure
Cascade Failure in River Systems with Multiple Dams
Our Dangerous Infrastructure II
Infrastructure is generally seen as - and loudly proclaimed by politicians and the captains of industry as being - a societal facilitator. In thefreedictionary.com it is described thus; "The term infrastructure has been used since 1927 to refer collectively to the roads, bridges, rail lines, and similar public works that are required for an industrial economy, or a portion of it, to function."[6] And investorwords.com defines it as "The basic physical systems of a country's or community's population, including roads, utilities, water, sewage, etc. These systems are considered essential for enabling productivity in the economy."[7]
But what happens when the ability to maintain that infrastructure disappears and the infrastructure becomes a hindrance rather than a facilitator, such as it will do during the probable long, grinding economic decline accompanying peak oil? When the current infrastructure maintenance professionals begin retiring or dying and aren't being replaced because of ever-tighter budget constraints, who will even know in a broad context what all is included in "infrastructure", where it is, what condition it is in, when it was built, how old it is, how long it should last, what maintenance it needs and when?
Will the same politicians who built their election campaigns around throwing up new feel-good infrastructure be as quick to accept the responsibility for ensuring it's maintenance as the global economy falls into serious, terminal decline? The paper, Deconstructing the Manifest has this take, "of course, maintenance of these "public" projects is left to the public. .....no politician could ever successfully run on a platform of "maintenance" or status quo. The public will is not swayed by the mundane. And so we see our roads and bridges decay, slowly, inexorably,..... Truly comprehensive maintenance is simply too expensive....."[12]
The reality is, as well as facilitating an economy, infrastructure is also a limiting factor for that economy, a constraint. The infrastructure defines the limits within which an economy can effectively function and, more importantly, evolve, adapt and change. For the economy to shift direction, as it must surely do on the peak oil downslope, it suddenly finds that its infrastructure is an impediment. The walls that enclosed and secured the fortified cities of medieval Europe, for example, were a serious constraint as those cities sought to expand and open up as the Industrial Revolution swept across the continent. The established infrastructure of any city suddenly becomes an impediment when that city wants to install rail lines or highways or subways linking the city center with the suburbs and areas beyond. The destruction of the infrastructure of so many European and Asian cities during two world wars, in reality, facilitated the rebirth of those cities around new infrastructure, saved those cities the agonizing decisions and complications of replacing and upgrading their infrastructure to satisfy and facilitate the drastically changed needs of a technology-oriented, growth-driven, post-war society.
The strong probability is that the infrastructure needed and maintainable by a post-fossil-fuel or seriously fossil-fuel-deficient society will be as different from today as today's infrastructure is different from that which existed in pre-industrial Europe. In the past, however, the impediment imposed by seriously outdated and unmaintainable infrastructure was handled by demolishing and replacing that old infrastructure with new. But will this be an option still open to us if we wait until we are on the peak-oil downslope before we start to address the infrastructure needs of the future? We will no longer have the exploitable energy, technology, finances and vast quantities of raw materials needed for wholesale replacement of that infrastructure. The only options left open to us if we sleepwalk into peak oil may narrow down to trying to somehow maintain that crumbling infrastructure in perpetuity or simply doing without as it falls apart. But infrastructure doesn't just shrivel up benignly in the sun like a tomato dropped from the vine. As infrastructure crumbles through age and lack of maintenance it can impose very serious risks on society that could, collectively, jeopardize millions of lives over the balance of this century and beyond.
Geoff Holman, a reader of this blog from Australia, as noted above, graciously suggested an article on the question of building a national infrastructure database to serve as the basis for dealing with the massive infrastructure inventory during the declining economy that will likely occur beginning with peak oil and the downslope beyond. Not surprisingly, various attempts at building national infrastructure databases have been made in the past.
One of the first projects, for example, of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, formed following the terrorist attack on the U.S. on September 11, 2001, was the establishment of a Critical Infrastructure Database. This database was intended as a reference source of all U.S. infrastructure considered critical and susceptible to terrorist attack, infrastructure like nuclear power plants, major dams, water systems of large urban centers like New York, airports, and so on.
Like so many projects begun in the bowels of bureaucracy, the design of this database and the data collected for it was, at best, fuzzy and incomplete. An assessment report issued by the U.S. Inspector General's office in July, 2006 turned out to be a blistering critique. The Inspector General's report cited several deep flaws in the database that underlies the plan, including: "The database’s failure to distinguish the criticality of the approximately 77,000 assets it includes; The database's failure to provide a comprehensive picture of national assets; The need to develop more sophisticated tools to assess risks associated with various assets; The need for substantial additional work to complete the database. ..... The IG report specified multiple flaws that arose in the process of building the database, such as missing ZIP codes, missing facility names and language translation problems. At one point, “officials estimated that on average each [critical infrastructure/key asset] record they researched was missing information for about seven fields,” according to the report. Department officials progressively improved the methods of gathering and processing the data over the past three years, the report added. The IG analysts predicted that the database could eventually grow to hundreds of thousands of records."[11] Another report notes, "Among the critical assets in the database are Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, a Kangaroo Conservation Center, Jay’s Sporting Goods, several Wal-Mart stores, Amish Country Popcorn, and the Sweetwater Flea Market."[9] Partly as a result of the criticisms the database has been morphed into a National Asset Database but the fuzzy design, structure and data-gathering procedures still persist[8].
Whether or not the failings and criticism of the Critical Infrastructure Database/National Asset Database are responsible, the U.S. congress has recently introduced legislation taking another shot at a National Infrastructure Database. "The Dodd-Hagel National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2007 is a bipartisan measure that addresses the critical needs of our nation’s major infrastructure systems. The legislation establishes a new method through which the Federal government can finance infrastructure projects of substantial regional or national significance more effectively with public and private capital. ..... Infrastructure projects that come under the Bank’s consideration are publicly-owned mass transit systems, housing properties, roads, bridges, drinking water systems, and wastewater systems." The focus here, however, is still largely that of future infrastructure projects rather than maintenance of that already in place. Analysts and critics of this new bill, such as the American Society of Civil Engineers, note that "the current condition of our nation’s major infrastructure systems earns a grade point average of D and jeopardizes the prosperity and quality of life of all Americans." According to the Environmental Protection Agency, "$151 billion and $390 billion is needed respectively every year over the next 20 years to repair obsolete drinking water and wastewater systems. Drinking water and wastewater systems range in age from 50 to 100 years in age."[1] One wonders whether any database resulting from this effort will prove any more successful than that of the Department of Homeland Security.
A long, thirty-year career of designing and building information systems, almost always incorporating a database, has taught me that any database is as good as the ingenuity built into the design. Going back after the fact and trying to resurrect a poorly-designed, disfunctional database through retrofitting patches simply further exacerbates the problems and leads to the almost certain demise of the database, like retrofitting new extraction technology to a played-out oil well. Databases, unlike living organisms, do not evolve well. Any database, especially one as potentially complex as a national infrastructure database, needs to have considered in it's design; the motivation behind the database's existence, the breadth of data to be included, the depth of data the database can support, the data relationships to be incorporated which seriously impacts the flexibility, the controls on the purity and veracity of the data gathered, the uses the database is intended to satisfy, the ownership of and responsibility for the data contained, and much, much more. The fuzzy thinking and lack of clarity of potential use of the database that has characterized various government efforts at national infrastructure databases (not just that elaborated above) is and will, in my view, continue to be a drawback of institutional and bureaucratic control over the design and operational management of such databases. And yet I am not, for a moment, suggesting that any such national infrastructure database be privatized and handed over to business and industry. That, in my opinion, would burden such an effort with a purely business-centric, economic motivation rather than gearing it to the societal need it should serve.
For any nation to set out on a course of developing a national infrastructure database designed to help manage the infrastructure inventory on the peak oil downslope and transition into a post-peak, post-fossil-fuel age they must surely first recognize peak oil and the impact it will have on infrastructure maintenance. And considering the amount of feeding from the public trough that will be involved in the design and construction of such a database and the massive drain on public finances that will be involved in mitigating the impact of that decaying infrastructure while the national and global economy implodes, that is going to be an extremely difficult sell. It is an impossible sell when that government will not even utter the words peak oil but insists on perpetuating the myth of the steady growth economy.
There is no question, in my mind at least, that the massive, technology-dependent infrastructure on which our modern society is built is going to be a tremendous and dangerous liability on the peak oil downslope. I simply do not believe, however, and I hope that I am wrong, that any workable database could be developed at this late stage in the game, even if the political will were there to develop it, that could help mitigate the problem. Any such database is itself going to be dependent on a technology and infrastructure that may not survive long enough for the database to be a viable tool during the developing criticality of infrastructure decline. I for one, therefore, will not be joining and grassroots movement to demand that government build such a database. Sorry.
==========================================================================
1) NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE BANK ACT OF 2007
Senator Christopher J. Dodd and Senator Chuck Hagel
2) User Friendly Electronic Database Management System for Infrastructure Maintenance in Small Cities
3) British Virgin Islands Infrastructure and Utilities Broad Policy
4) The Age of Infrastructure
5) Definitions of Infrastructure on the Web:
6) Infrastructure
7) infrastructure
8) Critical Infrastructure: The National Asset Database
9) Critical infrastructure database full of useless junk
10) National Infrastructure Coordinating Center INSight Application
11) DHS asset database can't support vaunted infrastructure protection plan
12) Deconstructing the Manifest
Also see my other articles in this blog on infrastructure;
Peak Oil and the Three Sisters of Social Collapse
Peak oil and overpasses
The myth of permanence: post-peak infrastructure maintenance
Post Peak Dam Maintenance, or Lack Thereof
Our Dangerous Infrastructure
Cascade Failure in River Systems with Multiple Dams
Our Dangerous Infrastructure II
Infrastructure is generally seen as - and loudly proclaimed by politicians and the captains of industry as being - a societal facilitator. In thefreedictionary.com it is described thus; "The term infrastructure has been used since 1927 to refer collectively to the roads, bridges, rail lines, and similar public works that are required for an industrial economy, or a portion of it, to function."[6] And investorwords.com defines it as "The basic physical systems of a country's or community's population, including roads, utilities, water, sewage, etc. These systems are considered essential for enabling productivity in the economy."[7]
But what happens when the ability to maintain that infrastructure disappears and the infrastructure becomes a hindrance rather than a facilitator, such as it will do during the probable long, grinding economic decline accompanying peak oil? When the current infrastructure maintenance professionals begin retiring or dying and aren't being replaced because of ever-tighter budget constraints, who will even know in a broad context what all is included in "infrastructure", where it is, what condition it is in, when it was built, how old it is, how long it should last, what maintenance it needs and when?
Will the same politicians who built their election campaigns around throwing up new feel-good infrastructure be as quick to accept the responsibility for ensuring it's maintenance as the global economy falls into serious, terminal decline? The paper, Deconstructing the Manifest has this take, "of course, maintenance of these "public" projects is left to the public. .....no politician could ever successfully run on a platform of "maintenance" or status quo. The public will is not swayed by the mundane. And so we see our roads and bridges decay, slowly, inexorably,..... Truly comprehensive maintenance is simply too expensive....."[12]
The reality is, as well as facilitating an economy, infrastructure is also a limiting factor for that economy, a constraint. The infrastructure defines the limits within which an economy can effectively function and, more importantly, evolve, adapt and change. For the economy to shift direction, as it must surely do on the peak oil downslope, it suddenly finds that its infrastructure is an impediment. The walls that enclosed and secured the fortified cities of medieval Europe, for example, were a serious constraint as those cities sought to expand and open up as the Industrial Revolution swept across the continent. The established infrastructure of any city suddenly becomes an impediment when that city wants to install rail lines or highways or subways linking the city center with the suburbs and areas beyond. The destruction of the infrastructure of so many European and Asian cities during two world wars, in reality, facilitated the rebirth of those cities around new infrastructure, saved those cities the agonizing decisions and complications of replacing and upgrading their infrastructure to satisfy and facilitate the drastically changed needs of a technology-oriented, growth-driven, post-war society.
The strong probability is that the infrastructure needed and maintainable by a post-fossil-fuel or seriously fossil-fuel-deficient society will be as different from today as today's infrastructure is different from that which existed in pre-industrial Europe. In the past, however, the impediment imposed by seriously outdated and unmaintainable infrastructure was handled by demolishing and replacing that old infrastructure with new. But will this be an option still open to us if we wait until we are on the peak-oil downslope before we start to address the infrastructure needs of the future? We will no longer have the exploitable energy, technology, finances and vast quantities of raw materials needed for wholesale replacement of that infrastructure. The only options left open to us if we sleepwalk into peak oil may narrow down to trying to somehow maintain that crumbling infrastructure in perpetuity or simply doing without as it falls apart. But infrastructure doesn't just shrivel up benignly in the sun like a tomato dropped from the vine. As infrastructure crumbles through age and lack of maintenance it can impose very serious risks on society that could, collectively, jeopardize millions of lives over the balance of this century and beyond.
Geoff Holman, a reader of this blog from Australia, as noted above, graciously suggested an article on the question of building a national infrastructure database to serve as the basis for dealing with the massive infrastructure inventory during the declining economy that will likely occur beginning with peak oil and the downslope beyond. Not surprisingly, various attempts at building national infrastructure databases have been made in the past.
One of the first projects, for example, of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, formed following the terrorist attack on the U.S. on September 11, 2001, was the establishment of a Critical Infrastructure Database. This database was intended as a reference source of all U.S. infrastructure considered critical and susceptible to terrorist attack, infrastructure like nuclear power plants, major dams, water systems of large urban centers like New York, airports, and so on.
Like so many projects begun in the bowels of bureaucracy, the design of this database and the data collected for it was, at best, fuzzy and incomplete. An assessment report issued by the U.S. Inspector General's office in July, 2006 turned out to be a blistering critique. The Inspector General's report cited several deep flaws in the database that underlies the plan, including: "The database’s failure to distinguish the criticality of the approximately 77,000 assets it includes; The database's failure to provide a comprehensive picture of national assets; The need to develop more sophisticated tools to assess risks associated with various assets; The need for substantial additional work to complete the database. ..... The IG report specified multiple flaws that arose in the process of building the database, such as missing ZIP codes, missing facility names and language translation problems. At one point, “officials estimated that on average each [critical infrastructure/key asset] record they researched was missing information for about seven fields,” according to the report. Department officials progressively improved the methods of gathering and processing the data over the past three years, the report added. The IG analysts predicted that the database could eventually grow to hundreds of thousands of records."[11] Another report notes, "Among the critical assets in the database are Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, a Kangaroo Conservation Center, Jay’s Sporting Goods, several Wal-Mart stores, Amish Country Popcorn, and the Sweetwater Flea Market."[9] Partly as a result of the criticisms the database has been morphed into a National Asset Database but the fuzzy design, structure and data-gathering procedures still persist[8].
Whether or not the failings and criticism of the Critical Infrastructure Database/National Asset Database are responsible, the U.S. congress has recently introduced legislation taking another shot at a National Infrastructure Database. "The Dodd-Hagel National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2007 is a bipartisan measure that addresses the critical needs of our nation’s major infrastructure systems. The legislation establishes a new method through which the Federal government can finance infrastructure projects of substantial regional or national significance more effectively with public and private capital. ..... Infrastructure projects that come under the Bank’s consideration are publicly-owned mass transit systems, housing properties, roads, bridges, drinking water systems, and wastewater systems." The focus here, however, is still largely that of future infrastructure projects rather than maintenance of that already in place. Analysts and critics of this new bill, such as the American Society of Civil Engineers, note that "the current condition of our nation’s major infrastructure systems earns a grade point average of D and jeopardizes the prosperity and quality of life of all Americans." According to the Environmental Protection Agency, "$151 billion and $390 billion is needed respectively every year over the next 20 years to repair obsolete drinking water and wastewater systems. Drinking water and wastewater systems range in age from 50 to 100 years in age."[1] One wonders whether any database resulting from this effort will prove any more successful than that of the Department of Homeland Security.
A long, thirty-year career of designing and building information systems, almost always incorporating a database, has taught me that any database is as good as the ingenuity built into the design. Going back after the fact and trying to resurrect a poorly-designed, disfunctional database through retrofitting patches simply further exacerbates the problems and leads to the almost certain demise of the database, like retrofitting new extraction technology to a played-out oil well. Databases, unlike living organisms, do not evolve well. Any database, especially one as potentially complex as a national infrastructure database, needs to have considered in it's design; the motivation behind the database's existence, the breadth of data to be included, the depth of data the database can support, the data relationships to be incorporated which seriously impacts the flexibility, the controls on the purity and veracity of the data gathered, the uses the database is intended to satisfy, the ownership of and responsibility for the data contained, and much, much more. The fuzzy thinking and lack of clarity of potential use of the database that has characterized various government efforts at national infrastructure databases (not just that elaborated above) is and will, in my view, continue to be a drawback of institutional and bureaucratic control over the design and operational management of such databases. And yet I am not, for a moment, suggesting that any such national infrastructure database be privatized and handed over to business and industry. That, in my opinion, would burden such an effort with a purely business-centric, economic motivation rather than gearing it to the societal need it should serve.
For any nation to set out on a course of developing a national infrastructure database designed to help manage the infrastructure inventory on the peak oil downslope and transition into a post-peak, post-fossil-fuel age they must surely first recognize peak oil and the impact it will have on infrastructure maintenance. And considering the amount of feeding from the public trough that will be involved in the design and construction of such a database and the massive drain on public finances that will be involved in mitigating the impact of that decaying infrastructure while the national and global economy implodes, that is going to be an extremely difficult sell. It is an impossible sell when that government will not even utter the words peak oil but insists on perpetuating the myth of the steady growth economy.
There is no question, in my mind at least, that the massive, technology-dependent infrastructure on which our modern society is built is going to be a tremendous and dangerous liability on the peak oil downslope. I simply do not believe, however, and I hope that I am wrong, that any workable database could be developed at this late stage in the game, even if the political will were there to develop it, that could help mitigate the problem. Any such database is itself going to be dependent on a technology and infrastructure that may not survive long enough for the database to be a viable tool during the developing criticality of infrastructure decline. I for one, therefore, will not be joining and grassroots movement to demand that government build such a database. Sorry.
==========================================================================
1) NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE BANK ACT OF 2007
Senator Christopher J. Dodd and Senator Chuck Hagel
2) User Friendly Electronic Database Management System for Infrastructure Maintenance in Small Cities
3) British Virgin Islands Infrastructure and Utilities Broad Policy
4) The Age of Infrastructure
5) Definitions of Infrastructure on the Web:
6) Infrastructure
7) infrastructure
8) Critical Infrastructure: The National Asset Database
9) Critical infrastructure database full of useless junk
10) National Infrastructure Coordinating Center INSight Application
11) DHS asset database can't support vaunted infrastructure protection plan
12) Deconstructing the Manifest
Monday, April 14, 2008
Peak Oil and the Three Sisters of Social Collapse
Three of the fundamental and basic human needs - food, water and shelter - have in the past century all become critically and increasingly dependent on technology and the fossil fuels that power it - at least in the developed world but also to a lesser and growing extent in the underdeveloped and developing world. These three needs will, as we pass peak oil, become the three sisters of global but uneven social collapse. Peak oil alone would make that a serious problem but they are also each going to be heavily impacted by the progression of anthropogenic or man-made global warming. Both of these serious global problems, it now appears, will occur at roughly the same time, seriously increasing the risk in these three critical areas. The whole in this case is definitely greater than the sum of the parts.
The predominant focus of debate around the peak oil issue is still, unfortunately, centered on energy itself; endless debate over when oil will peak; obfuscation over sweet versus sour versus synthetic crude, debate over the minutiae of various alternative energy options; the price of gasoline/petrol, etc. That is as much a form of denial within the peak oil community as that practiced by energy executives, politicians and the mainstream media. Peak oil is not about the oil! Focusing on the energy itself is safe, makes one appear to be aware and involved while successfully avoiding dealing with the disastrous implications of that peak and decline. Keeping the focus on energy is a self-perpetuating debate by setting up easy deniability for energy executives and their paid-for politicians, allowing them to attack the variability and imprecision in the various peak oil estimates. That in turn facilitates their continuing the climate of endless disinformation that easily serves as a smokescreen and a roadblock to beginning the increasingly critical process of preparing for the transition away from fossil fuels, a process that should have begun with the 1970s oil shocks if not earlier when the concept of peak oil was first introduced by M. King Hubbert in the 1950s.
But that transition is not or should not simply be a question of finding a workable alternative for our profligate use of oil and the other fossil fuels to power our modern society in the style to which we have become accustomed. That is, or should be, an impossible dream. Put simply, how could we move a world consisting of 6.6+billion people, 1+billion automobiles, hundreds of millions of trucks, buses, trains, planes, ships and heavy equipment, trillions of dollars of energy-dependant infrastructure and 300,000+ products at least partially made from or derived from oil and other fossil fuels into an era of declining fossil fuels that will be effectively devoid of those fossil fuels (from an EROEI perspective) within a century without impacting that society? The answer? We can't. As we approach peak oil, however (if we have not already arrived there and moved beyond it, as I believe we have), rather than dealing with that question and getting on with the transition and the massive and sometimes traumatic changes it will entail, we continue to increase our reliance on fossil energy and technology in these three areas of basic need.
The bulk of the food produced in the world today (and the foundation of the artificial carrying capacity, created as part of the Green Revolution, on which our massive surplus population survives) is very much dependant on heavy duty agricultural machinery driven by fossil fuels, massive applications of artificial fertilizers and pesticides produced from fossil fuels, on energy-intensive GMO seeds (as much as 70% of the crops we eat are now produced using GMO seeds), on the major, energy-intensive global distribution network that gets them to the farmers and the food they produce to your table, and on irrigation facilitated through powerful, fossil-energy-dependant pumps extracting water from both surface water (lakes and rivers) and groundwater (aquifers) sources (globally 70-75% of our freshwater usage is for agricultural irrigation). The building global food crisis - food riots have already occurred in several countries such as Egypt and Haiti and are probable in many more as this year progresses, and in many of the world's poorest nations food purchases already consume 50-90% of the average person's meagre income - is not so much a problem of insufficient food or even insufficient land on which to grow it. The problem is rapidly decreasing global agricultural productivity, a result of a staggering annual global loss of topsoil from erosion, toxification and salinity and a rapidly growing deficiency in soil fertility, largely a result of industrialized, petrochemical-intensive agriculture and decades of serious overcropping.
Soil fertility is produced by millions of soil micro-organisms which are all being decimated by our profligate and dangerous overuse of agrochemicals. Soil erosion and other forms of land degradation, in fact, now rob the world of 70-140,000 square kilometers per year of farm land. The total world availability of topsoil is estimated at 7,000 gigatonnes - about seventy years of topsoil at current rates of destruction and loss according to a U.N. estimate. The peak slaughter of these critical soil organisms will occur concurrent with peak oil and at the same time, therefore, that our global need for natural soil fertility will begin a dramatic increase. Globally, food availability, especially for the poor - the global emergency food grain reserve, as I detailed in my article Biofuels: Recipe for Artificially-Induced Overshoot of Earth's Carrying Capacity, has shrunk over this past decade from a marginal 120 day supply to a sub-critical 53-55 day supply [5] - is further exacerbated by the rapid increase in meat consumption in the world's major developing nations like India and China and in the frantic push toward biofuels in the rich, western nations, biofuels being produced from those already diminishing global stocks of food grains.
The vast majority of new water and irrigation projects in this past half century have been reliant on the use of powerful pumps to extract water from underground aquifers (many of which are non-replenishable, like the heavily-exploited Ogallala Aquifer in the U.S. midwest, and the majority of which are being drawn down at levels well above their replenishment rate - many of the world's major aquifers, both replenishable and non-replenishable, are declining by more than twenty feet per year), desalination plants heavily dependant on fossil fuels (this same desalination technology may soon have to be used on water drawn from coastal aquifers, like those in many nations in the middle east, which are becoming increasingly contaminated from saltwater intrusion because of excessive drawdown), powerful, energy-intensive irrigation equipment for irrigating large monoculture fields, desperate increases in agricultural development in arid areas, marginal lands and even deserts. It is a common fallacy, particularly in most of Europe and North America, to think that our supplies of fresh water are somewhat infinite. The reality is, as the report UN Highlights World Water Crisis outlines, "Despite the fact that 75 percent of the Earth's surface is covered by water, only 2.5 percent of it is fresh water, and three-quarters of that is locked up in glaciers and permanent snow cover. Only 0.3 percent of the water is surface water, found in rivers and lakes. The rest is buried deep in the ground."[6] The general lack of awareness of the limits of earth's easily-accessible freshwater resources leads to dangerous over-exploitation and abuse. Imagine the energy crisis we would be looking at if only 2.5% or 0.3% of the oil in the world were accessible, recoverable and usable and the cornucopean energy executives had been reassuring us for decades that it was all recoverable. It wouldn't much matter if there were people saying this wasn't true and that a crisis is coming. There is an unfortunate tendency for people to believe - and even go out of their way to find - those who are telling them what they want to hear, that there is no problem.
The infrastructure (using the broadest, social definition of infrastructure) on which our modern societies are so dependant (including the homes in which we live) has primarily been constructed in the past half century, most of it with a designed life span of fifty to seventy-five years (will all of those mass-produced McMansions really last that long?), built of materials that are derived from or dependant on fossil fuels, and requiring heavy fossil fuel inputs in their maintenance, upkeep and demolition. "There's a tremendous need," said Larry Roth, a professional engineer who is deputy executive director of the American Society of Civil Engineers. "Not only are we not keeping pace with growth, but we're not keeping pace with the maintenance that's required. As a result, our infrastructure is simply crumbling."[1] Most of this infrastructure will achieve and surpass its designed life span just as we pass peak oil when the natural resources (Mike Stasse, owner and moderator of ROEOZ, in his excellent paper, What Went Wrong, calls it natural capital) to replace it will no longer be available, when the energy, materials, finances, trained people resources and technology required to maintain it will no longer be available, and even when the technology and resources to decommission or demolish it are becoming increasingly unavailable (how do you tear down a fifty storey steel and glass tower before it falls down, or decommission a massive dam before it collapses and possibly kills hundreds of thousands or even millions of people?). The costs of infrastructure maintenance, always underestimated, are sobering. “We have a major infrastructure problem in this country,” said Maureen L. McAvey, an executive vice president with the Urban Land Institute, which recently published a report on global infrastructure issues. “The civil engineers have estimated that we have a $1.7 trillion shortfall in this country [U.S.A.] alone”[2]. And the growth of this deficit is very likely to accelerate as the growth economy grinds to a halt. Maintenance is almost invariably the first place that budget managers look for cuts when finances get tight.
Much of the money that needs to be spent on preparing our society for life beyond fossil fuels in the areas of food production, water usage and infrastructure maintenance, replacement, decommissioning and rebuilding, is being drained off paying for the increasing cost of supporting our car-centric mobility and our energy-dependant lifestyle. Oil prices - as well as the cost of other fossil fuels and the cost of almost everything as everything is at least partially dependent on the cost of oil and other fossil fuels - have increased dramatically over these past several years as we are increasingly dependent on more expensive and more technologically-challenging sources of energy. Shawn McCarthy, in his Toronto Globe & Mail Report on Business article, Oil peak theorist warns of chaos, war, writes, "The average cost of producing a barrel of oil has more than doubled in the past eight years, with most of that increase occurring in the past four, he[Matt Simmons] said."[3] The fossil-energy story doesn't end at oil, however. Natural gas is also fast approaching peak and prices are increasing in lockstep with the price of oil. And Richard Heinberg reports, in his article Burning the Furniture, "A soon-to-be-released study by the Energy Watch Group in Germany [the report has now been released] on the future of global coal supplies has implications so surprising and far-reaching that energy policymakers may take years to digest it. ..... The report’s central conclusion is that minable global coal reserves are much smaller than is commonly thought, and that a peak in world coal production is likely within only ten to fifteen years."[4]
Much of the misinformation and disinformation surrounding these three primary issues centers on the complexity of quantity versus quality. GMO crops, despite constant claims otherwise, produced with massive applications of artificial fertilizers and bombarded with herbicides and pesticides simply do not have either the taste or nutritional value of natural foods produced with non-chemical, organic methods. GMO seeds, particularly with the boost of global climate change, may produce larger plants and higher yields per acre but the result is like sugar- and salt-laden snack foods. The bulk is there but they are devoid of nutritional value. Like those snack foods, the more you eat the hungrier you get. The world is also lapsing into a global food allergy crisis as our digestive and immune systems struggle to adapt to relying on these unnatural foods for our nutrition.
Over one fifth of the global population today do not have access to clean drinking water. As many as a quarter of the deaths in poor third world countries is caused by water borne diseases, most commonly and crtically dehydration from diahrea caused by contaminated water. Another one fifth of the world's population only have access to one quarter to one tenth the amount of drinking water that the U.N. has established as the daily minimum requirement, and not enough water for basic hygienne. This problem worsens with each passing year. It is estimated that the majority of the global population increase over the next half century will be in areas already struggling with critical water shortages.
The glut of infrastructure development over this past half century has neglected durability and survivability in favour of speed, ease and cost reduction of construction. Sprawling suburbs of cookie-cutter houses and strip malls have grown like a cancer outward from established urban centers which are all expanding outward toward each other, gobbling up the low-density rural spaces between them. Cities have rapidly evolved over this past century into morbidly obese mega-cities covering thousands of square kilometers of concrete entombment.
It is difficult for many to understand why and how food, water and infrastructure can form the foundation of global social collapse without first gaining an understanding of the individual contributors to that collapse, the small details and problems which by themselves may seem meaningless but when combined together do build to a monumental crisis that can and will engulf the entirety of global society. This is further complicated by a general and understandable uncertainty as to the relative timing of peak oil and the subsequent decline in oil and other fossil fuels and the progression of global waming/climate change. But variability in timing ultimately affects only the severity of the challenges at any point in time. The following is by no means intended as a complete list of these problem areas but rather a representative sample.
....Over this past half century the vast majority of small, regional seed companies (many specializing in maintaining rare varieties of crop seeds) have disappeared, gobbled up by multinational companies like Monsanto, Cargill, Dupont and others. This has resulted in a rapid decline in genetic diversity as these large multinationals focus on their favourite varieties on the basis of business economics. It has also, however, made seed production a centralized industry dependent on the global distribution system, often with global seed production concentrated in either the northern or southern hemisphere, out of sync with the seasonal seed needs of the other hemsphere. This has made global agriculture and the seeds on which it relies a handmaiden of the global economy and, with centralized production and global distribution, the global energy situation. It's not just a question of reactivating and regrowing the small regional seed companies. The biodiversity of the available seed line will not be sufficient to accomodate the needs of regional climate and soil diversity. The risk and impact of crop loss with an increasingly limited global emergency food reserves is often discussed. Rarely considered, however, is the globalization of that risk if the crops being lost are the seed production of these centralized seed production companies. A major crop loss in one area, without redundancy built into the global seed production system, could suddenly wipe out the needed seed supply of much of the world. Similarly, with the drastic reduction of crop biodiversity under the control of multinational seed companies, the risk of a sudden susceptibility of a particular, widely-used variety of crop could leave much of the world with no usable fall-back variety.
....Global demand for food crops continues to rise. This is due to continued increases in the global population (more mouths to feed), global changes in food and nutrition requirements (more people turning to meat as their source of protein), more and more food crops being diverted to the production of biofuels. The problem arises from the fact that the demand for the resources required to grow that food do not rise at the same rate. While the population has tripled over the past century the usage of fresh water ras risen over six fold and the water for agriculture over eight fold. In the past twenty five years alone global use of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides has grown by an amazing thirty-three times. The amount of energy involved in food production has grown exponentially over this past century to the point that for every calorie of food energy produced and consumed more than ten calories or energy input Are required. Food miles traveled by food produced has gone through the stratosphere this past half century with food travelling now more thasn 1500 miles between field and table. Topsoil loss has grown dramatically over this past have century because of serious overcropping, erosion from irrigation and bare-field tillage, losses due to chemical toxicity and salination. Resource consumption and depletion involved in producing those ever greater quantities of food, therefore, is dramatically greater than the additional food produced.
....There was a time not that long ago when for practically ever farmer, regardless of the crop produced, saving and storing his own seed was still standard practice, and more recently still was in the underdeveloped and developing world. This localised, cultural practice of seed saving was a key component of food crop biodiversity around the world, with local varieties of the same crop genetically evolving independent of the same crop in other parts of the world. With the insidious spread of GMO seeds this critical component of biodiversity is disappearing. Everyone in agriculture knows the tremendous cost and complexity of taking on the big multinational seed companies when their seed cops invade your property and accuse you of saving seeds from their crop when your own crop has been cross-contaminated from crops of neighbouring farmers using their patented seeds. The use of GMO seeds is so ubiquitous that the ability to prevent cross-contamination of your own crop, a product of generation after generation of careful seed saving, is very slim. Often their own carefully-saved seed turns out to be sterile after cross-contamination from a GMO containing a terminator gene, a gene inserted to prevent the plant from producing seed or to cause it to produce a sterile seed so the plant can't be reproduced from its own seed, this securing the dependence of the farmer on the seed company. Even those farmers who are trying to hold out against the seed giants are finding their crops contaminated and the courts consistently come down in favour of the big multinational seed giants.
....With the bulk of modern agricultural crops being produced from GMO seeds restrictively produced in one area of the world and shipped all around the world from that one point, the production of the world's food is becoming rapidly and increasingly dependent on the health of the global economic system. This will make the next depression, when it happens, so much different from any past depression. In severe economic downturns of the past, or in times of war and heavy civil unrest, people would quickly revert to producing their own food and this was very often the key to surviving the hard times. Even if you have a crop today, the chances of your continuing to produce a crop in the event of a severe economic downturn or social chaos are extremely slim because your crop probably will not produce a usable seed and the seed company will very likely have fallen on hard times as the economy implodes. Where is the food to come from if no one is saving seeds, the small regional seed companies no longer exist, and the multinational seed companies that produce all the seed and the global distribution system that gets them to the farmer go out of business in an economic downturn?
....The bulk of the commercially produced food crops in the world (as opposed to the personal garden) are produced with the use of specialized, heavy farm equipment. With the exception of some of the equipment available in some third world nations, the equipment needed for small scale farming, the equipment meant to be used with human or animal power alone, the equipment that our ancestors used a century ago simply no longer exists, nor do the companies and the manufacturing equipment to produce it. Most of us have seen a piece or two of such equipment rusting beside a barn or planted with flowers on a suburban lawn. If the coming energy-decline economic downturn is very slow and very gradual and business, industry and government act with foresight, and the raw resources to do so are available, it is possible that the production of such equipment can be revitalized and ramped up in time to prevent an economic recession or depression turning into a critical global food crisis. That is a lot of ifs that are extremely unlikely to all come together in the right way and at the right time.
....There is an old and, at one time, frequently used expression that somewhat pinpoints the agricultural crisis that awaits us on the other side of peak oil: dirt farmer. Today's farmers are mostly chemical farmers and machine operators (I apologize to any legitimate dirt farmers who take umbrage with that generalization). When the fertilizers and pesticides are no longer available and the tractor and combine and electric milking system no longer function most of today's farmers will be as ill-equipped for farming as the person born, raised, and having spent their entire lives in the inner city. It is a common fallacy to think that when the machinery stops running we'll revert to labour-intensive manual farming as more and more people get involved, as workers, in the production of the food they consume. But who is to teach them what to do? Who is to teach them how to work a field of crops without the aid of machinery? Who is to show them the difference between a seedling of a food plant and the sprout of a weed? At the beginning of the last century as much as 50% of the population were involved in the production of food. Today that is less than 2%. Getting from here to non-chemical, non-mechanized, non-industrial, labour-intensive farming is going to take decades of rebuilding the skills and knowledge bases that will be needed. Trying to do this on the other side of peak oil, when the ability to absorb years or decades of non-productive trial and error doesn't exist, could be truly devestating.
....Along with the disappearance of local seed companies this last half century has also seen a wholesale collapse of the local grain storage and milling business. There was a time that virtually every small agricultural community had a small-scale miller where local farmers would take their seed to; be stored; turned into animal feed; turned into flour; pooled and shipped to centralized grain terminals, stored (and often mixed with that of other local producers) as seed for next year's grain crop. Local bakers would get the flour they used from the local miller. Often the miller, generally a grain farmer himself, would take as payment a set amount of the grain he was given to mill or the product he produced from that milling. Often miller and baker were one in the same. My small town had such a mill until twenty years ago. Now all of the grain produced goes into the impersonal national and global distribution system. The chance of the grain produced in an area even ending up on the tables of local residents is extremely slim. Once the distribution system begins to break down and the large, centralized milling companies begin to falter because of operating costs, lack of feed stock and lack of markets, how are small scale grain producers to have their grain processed into flour and seed? It could take a decade or more to revitalize and rebuild the local milling industry.
....Tomatoes in February. Ice-cream in July. New Zealand spring lamb and kiwi fruit in Toronto. Canadian maple syrup and bacon in Sydney Australia. Our food and our food tastes are a biproduct of a global food distribution system that is critically dependent on high-volume, long-distance shipping and energy-intensive refrigeration both in shipping and in general storage. When I was a child we had a root cellar for over-winter cold storage of root crops, nuts, grains and certain other fruit and vegetable crops. In addition we had an extensive food storage cellar that got restocked every fall with preserves and canned (meaning bottled) vegetables and fruits, dehydrated vegetable fruits, and a host of other preserved foods. Much of the food preserved we grew ourselves but that which wasn't was purchased locally and grown locally. When the global food distribution system begins to break down on the other side of peak oil, when energy-intensive refrigeration is no longer available for storing food after the harvest, when the materials such as mason jars, crocks, sterilizing equipment critical to canning food, when the supermarkets can no longer be looked upon as the primary source of the family's food, how will people manage? How will you manage? It could take a decade or longer to reaquire the skills and equipment and storage facilities necessary to ensure your family has food to eat at any time of the year.
....Over the last half century while much of the world has become increasingly dependent on groundwater from aquifers (97% of the world's liquid freshwater) for drinking water, industry, agricultural irrigation, and frivolous usage such as golf courses and casino fountains, the would's fresh surface water resources (lakes and rivers) have become increasingly contaminated with chemical toxins and aghricultural runoff. Although surface water is part of the global hydro-cycle and the water in the surface water systems turns over in a matter of days (water in aquifers is trapped there for, on average, 1400 years) the toxins in those systems build up in bottom sediments and continue to keep the water above toxic. It could take decades or even centuries for nature to remove the toxins that have built up in contaminated surface water systems. This is a matter of critical importance as we pass peak oil. Our ability to rely on deep aquifers for our fresh water (most shallow aquifers have already been sucked dry or have become contaminated in the same way and at the same rate as surface water), most of which are already heavilly over-exploited and declining by twenty feet or more per year, will disappear as the electricity and fossil fuels to run the massive pumps that are needed to draw water from these deep aquifers gets increasingly scarce and unreliable. Hand pumps - there were four of them within 200 yards of the home in which I grew up on which we relied for water in our plumbing-void house - are genrally not powerful enough to draw water from deep aquifers. Hand pumps are also a very scarce commodity in our industrialized society. This could place much of the world in the same position as one fifth of the world's people already are, having to rely on contaminated, chemically-toxic, disease-laden surface water and shallow aquifers for not just agricultural irrigation but for industrial use, basic hygienne and drinking water. The rate of incidence of death from water-borne diseases, which already claims millions every year, will most certainly increase exponentially.
....Vast tracts of homes have been constructed over this past half century in our industrial society. They are built to standards that assume there will be sufficient fossil-fuel and electrical energy to maintain heat to a level of 70F degrees or higher in winter and cool them to a comfortable 70F or lower in the heat of summer. Without this high-energy input those homes, more and more with sealed windows, do not have the insulation and thermal mass levels needed to maintain a home within livable standards. When the seriously-aging and materially-crumbling grids fail, even sporadically, and the fossil fuels are not available, sporadic, or priced beyond the reach of the average household, the vast majority of our modern homes will become increasingly problematic. To upgrade them all (hundreds of millions of them) to a thermal standard able to cope with the coming declines in fossil fuels will not only prove very expensive but will probably run up against increasing material shortages as available resources decline. And we most certainly aren't going to be able to think in terms of buldozing he suburbs and starting over again with housing suitable to a world of steadilly decreasing energy.
In what has become known as The Hirsch Report (commissioned by the U.S. congress and co-authored by Hirsch) [7] Robert Hirsch adamantly makes the point that it would take a minimum of 1-2 decades to prepare for the energy crisis presented by peak oil, if that effort were begun before peak oil arrived. That may already have become a moot point as we may already have passed that point with no such preparation having yet been done. But the energy crisis represented by peak oil, as I have tried to show here, is a small portion of the problems that peak oil will create or seriously exacerbate. Where preparation for the energy crisis may take 1-2 decades preparing for the parallel food, water and infrastructure crises could take many times that, could be 1-2 centuries rather than 1-2 decades with the same qualifier, that the effort is begun before peak oil, and with the additional qualifier that priority usage of the world's remaining fossil energy reserves be given to this effort. We spent the first half of the world's fossil fuel reserves creating the world as it is. It will take the other half to recreate the world as it will need to be to be workable without those fossil fuels.
===========================
1) Is aging infrastructure slowing the U.S.?
2) Engineers See Dangers in Aging Infrastructure
3) Oil peak theorist warns of chaos, war - Shawn McCarthy, Globe & Mail - Report on Business
4) Burning the furniture by Richard Heinberg
5) Biofuels: Recipe for Artificially-Induced Overshoot of Earth's Carrying Capacity
6) UN Highlights World Water Crisis
7) Peaking Of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management
The predominant focus of debate around the peak oil issue is still, unfortunately, centered on energy itself; endless debate over when oil will peak; obfuscation over sweet versus sour versus synthetic crude, debate over the minutiae of various alternative energy options; the price of gasoline/petrol, etc. That is as much a form of denial within the peak oil community as that practiced by energy executives, politicians and the mainstream media. Peak oil is not about the oil! Focusing on the energy itself is safe, makes one appear to be aware and involved while successfully avoiding dealing with the disastrous implications of that peak and decline. Keeping the focus on energy is a self-perpetuating debate by setting up easy deniability for energy executives and their paid-for politicians, allowing them to attack the variability and imprecision in the various peak oil estimates. That in turn facilitates their continuing the climate of endless disinformation that easily serves as a smokescreen and a roadblock to beginning the increasingly critical process of preparing for the transition away from fossil fuels, a process that should have begun with the 1970s oil shocks if not earlier when the concept of peak oil was first introduced by M. King Hubbert in the 1950s.
But that transition is not or should not simply be a question of finding a workable alternative for our profligate use of oil and the other fossil fuels to power our modern society in the style to which we have become accustomed. That is, or should be, an impossible dream. Put simply, how could we move a world consisting of 6.6+billion people, 1+billion automobiles, hundreds of millions of trucks, buses, trains, planes, ships and heavy equipment, trillions of dollars of energy-dependant infrastructure and 300,000+ products at least partially made from or derived from oil and other fossil fuels into an era of declining fossil fuels that will be effectively devoid of those fossil fuels (from an EROEI perspective) within a century without impacting that society? The answer? We can't. As we approach peak oil, however (if we have not already arrived there and moved beyond it, as I believe we have), rather than dealing with that question and getting on with the transition and the massive and sometimes traumatic changes it will entail, we continue to increase our reliance on fossil energy and technology in these three areas of basic need.
The bulk of the food produced in the world today (and the foundation of the artificial carrying capacity, created as part of the Green Revolution, on which our massive surplus population survives) is very much dependant on heavy duty agricultural machinery driven by fossil fuels, massive applications of artificial fertilizers and pesticides produced from fossil fuels, on energy-intensive GMO seeds (as much as 70% of the crops we eat are now produced using GMO seeds), on the major, energy-intensive global distribution network that gets them to the farmers and the food they produce to your table, and on irrigation facilitated through powerful, fossil-energy-dependant pumps extracting water from both surface water (lakes and rivers) and groundwater (aquifers) sources (globally 70-75% of our freshwater usage is for agricultural irrigation). The building global food crisis - food riots have already occurred in several countries such as Egypt and Haiti and are probable in many more as this year progresses, and in many of the world's poorest nations food purchases already consume 50-90% of the average person's meagre income - is not so much a problem of insufficient food or even insufficient land on which to grow it. The problem is rapidly decreasing global agricultural productivity, a result of a staggering annual global loss of topsoil from erosion, toxification and salinity and a rapidly growing deficiency in soil fertility, largely a result of industrialized, petrochemical-intensive agriculture and decades of serious overcropping.
Soil fertility is produced by millions of soil micro-organisms which are all being decimated by our profligate and dangerous overuse of agrochemicals. Soil erosion and other forms of land degradation, in fact, now rob the world of 70-140,000 square kilometers per year of farm land. The total world availability of topsoil is estimated at 7,000 gigatonnes - about seventy years of topsoil at current rates of destruction and loss according to a U.N. estimate. The peak slaughter of these critical soil organisms will occur concurrent with peak oil and at the same time, therefore, that our global need for natural soil fertility will begin a dramatic increase. Globally, food availability, especially for the poor - the global emergency food grain reserve, as I detailed in my article Biofuels: Recipe for Artificially-Induced Overshoot of Earth's Carrying Capacity, has shrunk over this past decade from a marginal 120 day supply to a sub-critical 53-55 day supply [5] - is further exacerbated by the rapid increase in meat consumption in the world's major developing nations like India and China and in the frantic push toward biofuels in the rich, western nations, biofuels being produced from those already diminishing global stocks of food grains.
The vast majority of new water and irrigation projects in this past half century have been reliant on the use of powerful pumps to extract water from underground aquifers (many of which are non-replenishable, like the heavily-exploited Ogallala Aquifer in the U.S. midwest, and the majority of which are being drawn down at levels well above their replenishment rate - many of the world's major aquifers, both replenishable and non-replenishable, are declining by more than twenty feet per year), desalination plants heavily dependant on fossil fuels (this same desalination technology may soon have to be used on water drawn from coastal aquifers, like those in many nations in the middle east, which are becoming increasingly contaminated from saltwater intrusion because of excessive drawdown), powerful, energy-intensive irrigation equipment for irrigating large monoculture fields, desperate increases in agricultural development in arid areas, marginal lands and even deserts. It is a common fallacy, particularly in most of Europe and North America, to think that our supplies of fresh water are somewhat infinite. The reality is, as the report UN Highlights World Water Crisis outlines, "Despite the fact that 75 percent of the Earth's surface is covered by water, only 2.5 percent of it is fresh water, and three-quarters of that is locked up in glaciers and permanent snow cover. Only 0.3 percent of the water is surface water, found in rivers and lakes. The rest is buried deep in the ground."[6] The general lack of awareness of the limits of earth's easily-accessible freshwater resources leads to dangerous over-exploitation and abuse. Imagine the energy crisis we would be looking at if only 2.5% or 0.3% of the oil in the world were accessible, recoverable and usable and the cornucopean energy executives had been reassuring us for decades that it was all recoverable. It wouldn't much matter if there were people saying this wasn't true and that a crisis is coming. There is an unfortunate tendency for people to believe - and even go out of their way to find - those who are telling them what they want to hear, that there is no problem.
The infrastructure (using the broadest, social definition of infrastructure) on which our modern societies are so dependant (including the homes in which we live) has primarily been constructed in the past half century, most of it with a designed life span of fifty to seventy-five years (will all of those mass-produced McMansions really last that long?), built of materials that are derived from or dependant on fossil fuels, and requiring heavy fossil fuel inputs in their maintenance, upkeep and demolition. "There's a tremendous need," said Larry Roth, a professional engineer who is deputy executive director of the American Society of Civil Engineers. "Not only are we not keeping pace with growth, but we're not keeping pace with the maintenance that's required. As a result, our infrastructure is simply crumbling."[1] Most of this infrastructure will achieve and surpass its designed life span just as we pass peak oil when the natural resources (Mike Stasse, owner and moderator of ROEOZ, in his excellent paper, What Went Wrong, calls it natural capital) to replace it will no longer be available, when the energy, materials, finances, trained people resources and technology required to maintain it will no longer be available, and even when the technology and resources to decommission or demolish it are becoming increasingly unavailable (how do you tear down a fifty storey steel and glass tower before it falls down, or decommission a massive dam before it collapses and possibly kills hundreds of thousands or even millions of people?). The costs of infrastructure maintenance, always underestimated, are sobering. “We have a major infrastructure problem in this country,” said Maureen L. McAvey, an executive vice president with the Urban Land Institute, which recently published a report on global infrastructure issues. “The civil engineers have estimated that we have a $1.7 trillion shortfall in this country [U.S.A.] alone”[2]. And the growth of this deficit is very likely to accelerate as the growth economy grinds to a halt. Maintenance is almost invariably the first place that budget managers look for cuts when finances get tight.
Much of the money that needs to be spent on preparing our society for life beyond fossil fuels in the areas of food production, water usage and infrastructure maintenance, replacement, decommissioning and rebuilding, is being drained off paying for the increasing cost of supporting our car-centric mobility and our energy-dependant lifestyle. Oil prices - as well as the cost of other fossil fuels and the cost of almost everything as everything is at least partially dependent on the cost of oil and other fossil fuels - have increased dramatically over these past several years as we are increasingly dependent on more expensive and more technologically-challenging sources of energy. Shawn McCarthy, in his Toronto Globe & Mail Report on Business article, Oil peak theorist warns of chaos, war, writes, "The average cost of producing a barrel of oil has more than doubled in the past eight years, with most of that increase occurring in the past four, he[Matt Simmons] said."[3] The fossil-energy story doesn't end at oil, however. Natural gas is also fast approaching peak and prices are increasing in lockstep with the price of oil. And Richard Heinberg reports, in his article Burning the Furniture, "A soon-to-be-released study by the Energy Watch Group in Germany [the report has now been released] on the future of global coal supplies has implications so surprising and far-reaching that energy policymakers may take years to digest it. ..... The report’s central conclusion is that minable global coal reserves are much smaller than is commonly thought, and that a peak in world coal production is likely within only ten to fifteen years."[4]
Much of the misinformation and disinformation surrounding these three primary issues centers on the complexity of quantity versus quality. GMO crops, despite constant claims otherwise, produced with massive applications of artificial fertilizers and bombarded with herbicides and pesticides simply do not have either the taste or nutritional value of natural foods produced with non-chemical, organic methods. GMO seeds, particularly with the boost of global climate change, may produce larger plants and higher yields per acre but the result is like sugar- and salt-laden snack foods. The bulk is there but they are devoid of nutritional value. Like those snack foods, the more you eat the hungrier you get. The world is also lapsing into a global food allergy crisis as our digestive and immune systems struggle to adapt to relying on these unnatural foods for our nutrition.
Over one fifth of the global population today do not have access to clean drinking water. As many as a quarter of the deaths in poor third world countries is caused by water borne diseases, most commonly and crtically dehydration from diahrea caused by contaminated water. Another one fifth of the world's population only have access to one quarter to one tenth the amount of drinking water that the U.N. has established as the daily minimum requirement, and not enough water for basic hygienne. This problem worsens with each passing year. It is estimated that the majority of the global population increase over the next half century will be in areas already struggling with critical water shortages.
The glut of infrastructure development over this past half century has neglected durability and survivability in favour of speed, ease and cost reduction of construction. Sprawling suburbs of cookie-cutter houses and strip malls have grown like a cancer outward from established urban centers which are all expanding outward toward each other, gobbling up the low-density rural spaces between them. Cities have rapidly evolved over this past century into morbidly obese mega-cities covering thousands of square kilometers of concrete entombment.
It is difficult for many to understand why and how food, water and infrastructure can form the foundation of global social collapse without first gaining an understanding of the individual contributors to that collapse, the small details and problems which by themselves may seem meaningless but when combined together do build to a monumental crisis that can and will engulf the entirety of global society. This is further complicated by a general and understandable uncertainty as to the relative timing of peak oil and the subsequent decline in oil and other fossil fuels and the progression of global waming/climate change. But variability in timing ultimately affects only the severity of the challenges at any point in time. The following is by no means intended as a complete list of these problem areas but rather a representative sample.
....Over this past half century the vast majority of small, regional seed companies (many specializing in maintaining rare varieties of crop seeds) have disappeared, gobbled up by multinational companies like Monsanto, Cargill, Dupont and others. This has resulted in a rapid decline in genetic diversity as these large multinationals focus on their favourite varieties on the basis of business economics. It has also, however, made seed production a centralized industry dependent on the global distribution system, often with global seed production concentrated in either the northern or southern hemisphere, out of sync with the seasonal seed needs of the other hemsphere. This has made global agriculture and the seeds on which it relies a handmaiden of the global economy and, with centralized production and global distribution, the global energy situation. It's not just a question of reactivating and regrowing the small regional seed companies. The biodiversity of the available seed line will not be sufficient to accomodate the needs of regional climate and soil diversity. The risk and impact of crop loss with an increasingly limited global emergency food reserves is often discussed. Rarely considered, however, is the globalization of that risk if the crops being lost are the seed production of these centralized seed production companies. A major crop loss in one area, without redundancy built into the global seed production system, could suddenly wipe out the needed seed supply of much of the world. Similarly, with the drastic reduction of crop biodiversity under the control of multinational seed companies, the risk of a sudden susceptibility of a particular, widely-used variety of crop could leave much of the world with no usable fall-back variety.
....Global demand for food crops continues to rise. This is due to continued increases in the global population (more mouths to feed), global changes in food and nutrition requirements (more people turning to meat as their source of protein), more and more food crops being diverted to the production of biofuels. The problem arises from the fact that the demand for the resources required to grow that food do not rise at the same rate. While the population has tripled over the past century the usage of fresh water ras risen over six fold and the water for agriculture over eight fold. In the past twenty five years alone global use of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides has grown by an amazing thirty-three times. The amount of energy involved in food production has grown exponentially over this past century to the point that for every calorie of food energy produced and consumed more than ten calories or energy input Are required. Food miles traveled by food produced has gone through the stratosphere this past half century with food travelling now more thasn 1500 miles between field and table. Topsoil loss has grown dramatically over this past have century because of serious overcropping, erosion from irrigation and bare-field tillage, losses due to chemical toxicity and salination. Resource consumption and depletion involved in producing those ever greater quantities of food, therefore, is dramatically greater than the additional food produced.
....There was a time not that long ago when for practically ever farmer, regardless of the crop produced, saving and storing his own seed was still standard practice, and more recently still was in the underdeveloped and developing world. This localised, cultural practice of seed saving was a key component of food crop biodiversity around the world, with local varieties of the same crop genetically evolving independent of the same crop in other parts of the world. With the insidious spread of GMO seeds this critical component of biodiversity is disappearing. Everyone in agriculture knows the tremendous cost and complexity of taking on the big multinational seed companies when their seed cops invade your property and accuse you of saving seeds from their crop when your own crop has been cross-contaminated from crops of neighbouring farmers using their patented seeds. The use of GMO seeds is so ubiquitous that the ability to prevent cross-contamination of your own crop, a product of generation after generation of careful seed saving, is very slim. Often their own carefully-saved seed turns out to be sterile after cross-contamination from a GMO containing a terminator gene, a gene inserted to prevent the plant from producing seed or to cause it to produce a sterile seed so the plant can't be reproduced from its own seed, this securing the dependence of the farmer on the seed company. Even those farmers who are trying to hold out against the seed giants are finding their crops contaminated and the courts consistently come down in favour of the big multinational seed giants.
....With the bulk of modern agricultural crops being produced from GMO seeds restrictively produced in one area of the world and shipped all around the world from that one point, the production of the world's food is becoming rapidly and increasingly dependent on the health of the global economic system. This will make the next depression, when it happens, so much different from any past depression. In severe economic downturns of the past, or in times of war and heavy civil unrest, people would quickly revert to producing their own food and this was very often the key to surviving the hard times. Even if you have a crop today, the chances of your continuing to produce a crop in the event of a severe economic downturn or social chaos are extremely slim because your crop probably will not produce a usable seed and the seed company will very likely have fallen on hard times as the economy implodes. Where is the food to come from if no one is saving seeds, the small regional seed companies no longer exist, and the multinational seed companies that produce all the seed and the global distribution system that gets them to the farmer go out of business in an economic downturn?
....The bulk of the commercially produced food crops in the world (as opposed to the personal garden) are produced with the use of specialized, heavy farm equipment. With the exception of some of the equipment available in some third world nations, the equipment needed for small scale farming, the equipment meant to be used with human or animal power alone, the equipment that our ancestors used a century ago simply no longer exists, nor do the companies and the manufacturing equipment to produce it. Most of us have seen a piece or two of such equipment rusting beside a barn or planted with flowers on a suburban lawn. If the coming energy-decline economic downturn is very slow and very gradual and business, industry and government act with foresight, and the raw resources to do so are available, it is possible that the production of such equipment can be revitalized and ramped up in time to prevent an economic recession or depression turning into a critical global food crisis. That is a lot of ifs that are extremely unlikely to all come together in the right way and at the right time.
....There is an old and, at one time, frequently used expression that somewhat pinpoints the agricultural crisis that awaits us on the other side of peak oil: dirt farmer. Today's farmers are mostly chemical farmers and machine operators (I apologize to any legitimate dirt farmers who take umbrage with that generalization). When the fertilizers and pesticides are no longer available and the tractor and combine and electric milking system no longer function most of today's farmers will be as ill-equipped for farming as the person born, raised, and having spent their entire lives in the inner city. It is a common fallacy to think that when the machinery stops running we'll revert to labour-intensive manual farming as more and more people get involved, as workers, in the production of the food they consume. But who is to teach them what to do? Who is to teach them how to work a field of crops without the aid of machinery? Who is to show them the difference between a seedling of a food plant and the sprout of a weed? At the beginning of the last century as much as 50% of the population were involved in the production of food. Today that is less than 2%. Getting from here to non-chemical, non-mechanized, non-industrial, labour-intensive farming is going to take decades of rebuilding the skills and knowledge bases that will be needed. Trying to do this on the other side of peak oil, when the ability to absorb years or decades of non-productive trial and error doesn't exist, could be truly devestating.
....Along with the disappearance of local seed companies this last half century has also seen a wholesale collapse of the local grain storage and milling business. There was a time that virtually every small agricultural community had a small-scale miller where local farmers would take their seed to; be stored; turned into animal feed; turned into flour; pooled and shipped to centralized grain terminals, stored (and often mixed with that of other local producers) as seed for next year's grain crop. Local bakers would get the flour they used from the local miller. Often the miller, generally a grain farmer himself, would take as payment a set amount of the grain he was given to mill or the product he produced from that milling. Often miller and baker were one in the same. My small town had such a mill until twenty years ago. Now all of the grain produced goes into the impersonal national and global distribution system. The chance of the grain produced in an area even ending up on the tables of local residents is extremely slim. Once the distribution system begins to break down and the large, centralized milling companies begin to falter because of operating costs, lack of feed stock and lack of markets, how are small scale grain producers to have their grain processed into flour and seed? It could take a decade or more to revitalize and rebuild the local milling industry.
....Tomatoes in February. Ice-cream in July. New Zealand spring lamb and kiwi fruit in Toronto. Canadian maple syrup and bacon in Sydney Australia. Our food and our food tastes are a biproduct of a global food distribution system that is critically dependent on high-volume, long-distance shipping and energy-intensive refrigeration both in shipping and in general storage. When I was a child we had a root cellar for over-winter cold storage of root crops, nuts, grains and certain other fruit and vegetable crops. In addition we had an extensive food storage cellar that got restocked every fall with preserves and canned (meaning bottled) vegetables and fruits, dehydrated vegetable fruits, and a host of other preserved foods. Much of the food preserved we grew ourselves but that which wasn't was purchased locally and grown locally. When the global food distribution system begins to break down on the other side of peak oil, when energy-intensive refrigeration is no longer available for storing food after the harvest, when the materials such as mason jars, crocks, sterilizing equipment critical to canning food, when the supermarkets can no longer be looked upon as the primary source of the family's food, how will people manage? How will you manage? It could take a decade or longer to reaquire the skills and equipment and storage facilities necessary to ensure your family has food to eat at any time of the year.
....Over the last half century while much of the world has become increasingly dependent on groundwater from aquifers (97% of the world's liquid freshwater) for drinking water, industry, agricultural irrigation, and frivolous usage such as golf courses and casino fountains, the would's fresh surface water resources (lakes and rivers) have become increasingly contaminated with chemical toxins and aghricultural runoff. Although surface water is part of the global hydro-cycle and the water in the surface water systems turns over in a matter of days (water in aquifers is trapped there for, on average, 1400 years) the toxins in those systems build up in bottom sediments and continue to keep the water above toxic. It could take decades or even centuries for nature to remove the toxins that have built up in contaminated surface water systems. This is a matter of critical importance as we pass peak oil. Our ability to rely on deep aquifers for our fresh water (most shallow aquifers have already been sucked dry or have become contaminated in the same way and at the same rate as surface water), most of which are already heavilly over-exploited and declining by twenty feet or more per year, will disappear as the electricity and fossil fuels to run the massive pumps that are needed to draw water from these deep aquifers gets increasingly scarce and unreliable. Hand pumps - there were four of them within 200 yards of the home in which I grew up on which we relied for water in our plumbing-void house - are genrally not powerful enough to draw water from deep aquifers. Hand pumps are also a very scarce commodity in our industrialized society. This could place much of the world in the same position as one fifth of the world's people already are, having to rely on contaminated, chemically-toxic, disease-laden surface water and shallow aquifers for not just agricultural irrigation but for industrial use, basic hygienne and drinking water. The rate of incidence of death from water-borne diseases, which already claims millions every year, will most certainly increase exponentially.
....Vast tracts of homes have been constructed over this past half century in our industrial society. They are built to standards that assume there will be sufficient fossil-fuel and electrical energy to maintain heat to a level of 70F degrees or higher in winter and cool them to a comfortable 70F or lower in the heat of summer. Without this high-energy input those homes, more and more with sealed windows, do not have the insulation and thermal mass levels needed to maintain a home within livable standards. When the seriously-aging and materially-crumbling grids fail, even sporadically, and the fossil fuels are not available, sporadic, or priced beyond the reach of the average household, the vast majority of our modern homes will become increasingly problematic. To upgrade them all (hundreds of millions of them) to a thermal standard able to cope with the coming declines in fossil fuels will not only prove very expensive but will probably run up against increasing material shortages as available resources decline. And we most certainly aren't going to be able to think in terms of buldozing he suburbs and starting over again with housing suitable to a world of steadilly decreasing energy.
In what has become known as The Hirsch Report (commissioned by the U.S. congress and co-authored by Hirsch) [7] Robert Hirsch adamantly makes the point that it would take a minimum of 1-2 decades to prepare for the energy crisis presented by peak oil, if that effort were begun before peak oil arrived. That may already have become a moot point as we may already have passed that point with no such preparation having yet been done. But the energy crisis represented by peak oil, as I have tried to show here, is a small portion of the problems that peak oil will create or seriously exacerbate. Where preparation for the energy crisis may take 1-2 decades preparing for the parallel food, water and infrastructure crises could take many times that, could be 1-2 centuries rather than 1-2 decades with the same qualifier, that the effort is begun before peak oil, and with the additional qualifier that priority usage of the world's remaining fossil energy reserves be given to this effort. We spent the first half of the world's fossil fuel reserves creating the world as it is. It will take the other half to recreate the world as it will need to be to be workable without those fossil fuels.
===========================
1) Is aging infrastructure slowing the U.S.?
2) Engineers See Dangers in Aging Infrastructure
3) Oil peak theorist warns of chaos, war - Shawn McCarthy, Globe & Mail - Report on Business
4) Burning the furniture by Richard Heinberg
5) Biofuels: Recipe for Artificially-Induced Overshoot of Earth's Carrying Capacity
6) UN Highlights World Water Crisis
7) Peaking Of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management
Monday, March 31, 2008
Biofuels: A Final Nail in the Green Revolution Coffin
In the middle of the last century, with a steadily rising world population and a similar steady shrinking of global food productivity due to over exploited and stressed soils and increasingly polluted water sources, the world was on the verge of perhaps the greatest humanitarian disaster in recorded history. Hundreds of millions of people were at constant risk of starvation and tens of thousands were dying of starvation and nutrition related diseases daily. Then, like the cavalry riding in on galloping steeds, under the command of Doctor Norman Borlaug the Green Revolution came to the rescue and millions were saved from starvation.
Let us be clear. The problem that we are talking about in the biofuels versus food debate did not begin with the construction of the first ethanol plant. It really began and grew with the Green Revolution over the last half of the twentieth century and is being brought to a head by peak oil which is the prime driver behind the frantic rush to biofuels. Prior to the Green Revolution it was becoming abundantly clear that the global human population of about 2.5 billion was too great for the finite carrying capacity of the earth. We could not produce and distribute enough food to feed ourselves. People were dying every day by the tens of thousands of starvation and other nutrition-related diseases. Population experts were warning of mass starvation in Africa and Asia that could claim the lives of hundreds of millions.
In fact the problem actually has its roots in the much earlier Industrial Revolution and the resulting twin, resource-gobbling scourges of overproduction and consumerism. But going back that far requires too long a lens to serve as a useful focal point. The Green Revolution is recent enough in our history, and still very much with us and contributing to the problem, that it is the appropriate place to begin.
Doctor Norman Borlaug, in response to the threat of global famine, proposed what we have come to know as the Green Revolution. The keys to this proposed solution were; a dramatic increase in agricultural irrigation largely facilitated by the exploitation of vast reserves of groundwater in deep aquifers (approximately 97% of the world's liquid freshwater is contained in these underground aquifers) using powerful mechanical pumps; the efficient, mechanized cultivation of vast tracts of hybrid (subsequently GMO) high-yield crops of feed grains like corn, wheat, soy, millet, rice and others; the development of an efficient global food distribution system to get the food from where it could be grown to where it was needed; vastly increased yields and crop security, especially on increasingly exploited marginal lands, through the use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides; the establishment of a global emergency food grain reserve to serve as a buffer against crop losses in vulnerable third world nations (that reserve has shrunk from a marginal 120 day supply to a critical 57 day supply over the past several years[37], [78]); and the development of emergency food aid NGOs to get food to those poor and malnourished most in need of it in Africa, Asia and elsewhere.
All in all, the Green Revolution seemed to most like a good and humanitarian thing to do at the time. Few other programs, after all, could claim to be responsible for saving hundreds of millions of lives. The end result, however, was far more than the millions of lives saved. The Green Revolution resulted in the fastest doubling of the human population in history, from 2.5 to five billion in less than forty years, from 2.5 to 6.5 billion in just over fifty years. Considering that the Green Revolution came about because the carrying capacity of earth could not support our then population of 2.5 billion, doubling and, now, nearly tripling those numbers could hardly be considered a success. That entire surplus of four billion people since added to the global population is living on an artificial carrying capacity that is totally dependent on finite and now rapidly diminishing fossil fuels. Whether we are already at or about to reach peak oil the situation can only worsen as our artificial carrying capacity gradually disappears.
Concurrent with the unfolding of the Green Revolution there grew a new psychology of plenty and, subsequently, affluence. We forgot that finite systems have limits and came to believe that anything was possible and that we could continue to grow forever. The previously unimaginable levels of exploitation of energy to support this growth also seemed to have no limits, a belief fostered by governments, industry and the mainstream media for the past several decades.
But all of that is changing. Despite the impressive accomplishments of the Green Revolution, despite a half century of unimaginable global economic growth, despite wondrous new technological advances, despite the first real globalization of human society, the limits that gave rise to the Green Revolution are still there, waiting like the overly-patient creditor for the loan on which we have been living for the past half century to be repaid, with interest. Like the debt-laden, third world country that pays the interest on its outstanding loans by taking on new loans, the longer we continue to live above our means, the longer we continue to survive on this artificial carrying capacity we have created through the massive over-exploitation of great reserves of energy, the greater and more devastating will be the collapse when it can no longer be avoided. We are living in a fool's paradise.
Over the past couple months I must have read over three hundred articles, columns, papers and reports from all over the world on the link between biofuels and increasing global hunger and poverty. It makes this writing of yet another article on the subject seem like kicking a dead horse. But as long as we continue our infatuation with biofuels the problem is going to continue to worsen and efforts, big and small, are still going to be needed to put the brakes on this insidious and ultimately dangerous new energy fairy.
Much of the debate over whether the production of biofuels is contributing to world poverty and hunger is an apples and oranges affair. Proponents of biofuels claim that the production of biofuel crops in third world countries can actually improve conditions in those countries by giving them another lucrative cash crop ([1], [12], [24], [59]), I guess to go along with the bananas, coffee, tea, cotton and millet that they now produce for export. But for every piece extolling the virtues of biofuels there are a hundred articles warning how they will contribute to the already existing crisis of global hunger (for example; Biofuels and world hunger[10], Will Agro fuels Usher Famine? [16], The Globalization of Hunger[21], Starving for Fuel: How Ethanol Production Contributes to Global Hunger[35] and many, many more). The benefits of the production and export of exportable cash crops, though it may increase the foreign cash influx for a third world country, do not accrue to the people most in need, those grappling with starvation and poverty. It benefits the large-scale, fat-cat industrial farmers who may, or may not, employ some of those living in poverty at a wage that is guaranteed to keep them there, and keep them barely alive nutritionally (see, for example, Neither biofuels nor biotechnology will benefit African smallholder farmers[39], Small farmers speak out against globalisation[57]).
The impact of biofuels on global food prices and global emergency food aid is not on those large farmers who grow and export biofuel crops. The impact is on the poor and starving, urban and rural. The impact is on those small farmers who have been priced off their own small piece of land because of the globalization of food prices and the fact that their small-scale production has to compete in a global market against the output from a highly-mechanized 50,000 acre farm in the U.S. heartland. The impact is on the small farmer who is forced into growing a crop he cannot afford to buy, and can't eat, in order to try to buy food at a market, food that has increased in price by 25-50% over this past year alone[26]. The impact is on the hundreds of thousands of destitute and starving refugees crowded into barely survivable refugee camps, people who have lost everything and have little prospect of ever having anything again. The impact is on the dozens of emergency food aid NGOs that are having to plead to increasingly reluctant western governments ([59], [71], [76]) for much more funding because of the skyrocketing prices of the food grains they rely on to feed starving millions in Africa and Asia ([14], [48], [52], [60], [65], [68], [71], [74]).
The biofuels debate is badly confused because of the many different, and highly variable, biofuels that are lumped under that single banner. The basic grouping of bio-diesel and ethanol/methanol is not even sufficient to lend clarity. The cost and impact of ethanol on the environment and on global hunger depends very much on what type of ethanol/methanol (distilled ethanol, celulosic ethanol, etc) and on the specific feedstock you are discussing (sugar cane, sugar beet, corn, wheat, palm oil, jatropha, cassava, rice, switchgrass, algae, etc.).
I am not a chemist so please forgive me if I oversimplify. Producing ethanol is essentially a task of turning plant sugars into alcohol through a process of esterization and fermentation. Regardless of the feedstock, this final stage is relatively similar in process, technology and cost. Where the tremendous variability occurs in both process and cost is in converting the feedstock into the required sugars, in getting the feedstock to release its sugars. This generally has to be accomplished with the aid of different enzymes that convert the carbohydrates in the organic material into sugars. But not all enzymes are created the same and different feedstocks need different enzymes. Some enzymes are very efficient, others not. The carbohydrates that the enzymes convert into sugars may be very different in molecular structure, and vary considerably in concentration within the organic matter.
The environmental impact and the contribution to soil destruction and, most importantly, to world hunger is very much dependent on that feedstock. To lump together the ethanol produced relatively efficiently from sugar cane in Brazil and the heavily-subsidized corn ethanol produced in a plant in Kansas is to completely cloud the argument. They are as different as night and day. Take away the ludicrous subsidies enjoyed by America's corn ethanol producers and you have an industry operating in the red. The EROEI on corn ethanol is negative, that of sugar cane ethanol slightly above one. In fact the majority of ethanol processes could not survive without government subsidies. Yet any suggestion that those subsidies should be removed meets with a flurry of objections ([6], [8], [9], [20], [22], [49], [51], [59]). You can't just offer the subsidies then take them away. Companies are going to suffer. Many of those companies could fail.
Well that's an argument I would very, very much like to turn around. The green revolution promised the people of the world, especially the impoverished and hungry of the third world, that food would no longer be a problem, that they could be confident of being able to put food in front of their children today and tomorrow, led them to believe that food was an inalienable right and that the world would take care of it's poor and hungry. They could bring children into the world without the risk of having to watch their bellies bloat up from hunger and have them die in their arms because there was no food. To the poor and starving that promise of food, even the most basic of food, was as important as the guarantee of lifetime employment to a factory employee in the industrial heartland. The food aid distributed by the food aid organizations to the most hungry and destitute among us was the equivalent of the corn ethanol subsidy that many governments are reconsidering. Through the surpluses produced starting with the Green Revolution we assumed the role of subsidizing global overpopulation. The end result, like corn ethanol plants sprouting up in Kansas, was that the population continued to climb. Everyday the world had to subsidize more and more excess population.
To take away that subsidy, to now begin diverting that food on which the world's poor are so dependent for their very lives away into the production of ethanol and other biofuels, to now begin to cut back on the national contributions to the emergency food aid agencies that distribute that food, to now start pressuring those poor third world countries into using their increasingly impoverished agricultural land to produce crops to produce ethanol, is going to spread unimaginable additional suffering among the world's poor and hungry. They are going to be paying the real price for our ethanol mania. Removing the corn subsidies from ethanol producers may cause many companies to fail. What we are doing in our pursuit of biofuels will cause untold additional deaths.
I must apologize for the long list of articles and other references below. This is, however, just a small sampling of the massive amount of material available. I urge you to read at least some of them.
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1) Biofuels Will Help Fight Hunger
http://biodiesel.carimson.com/2007/11/biofuels-will-help-fight-hunger.html
2) Biofuel industry says oil hike driving food prices
http://www.palmoilprices.net/news/biofuel-industry-says-oil-hike-driving-food-prices/
3) A balanced contribution
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2007/11/a_balanced_contribution.html
4) AGRICULTURE: Costly Prosperity
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40000
5) GSPI States: Some Biofuels Add Significant Food to Your Table
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20071109005204&newsLang=en
6) Screwing the poor to secure votes
http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2007/11/screwing-poor-to-secure-votes.html
7) Biofuels: Is corn ethanol the way to go?
http://runyogi.gaia.com/blog/2007/11/biofuels_is_corn_ethanol_the_way_to_go
8) Repeal "Biofuels" Requirements
http://dad29.blogspot.com/2007/11/repeal-biofuels-requirements.html
9) Hell hath no fury like a special interest questioned
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/business/hancock/blog/2007/11/hell_hath_no_fury_like_a_speci.html
10) Biofuels and world hunger
http://www.workers.org/2007/world/biofuels-1018/
11) Corn prices raise the specter of hunger
http://www.latinamericapress.org/article.asp?lanCode=1&artCode=5401
12) Ethanol leaders urge U.N. to review biofuel report
http://uk.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUKN1247224320071112
13) A clean, green machine?
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2007/11/a_clean_green_machine.html
14) Biofuels eating into food security--Golez
http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20071216-107111/Biofuels_eating_into_food_security--Golez
15) Are commodities a bubble ready to burst?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/money/2007/12/16/ccmines216.xml
16) Will Agro fuels Usher Famine?
http://blackstarnews.com/?c=122&a=3990
17) Zimbabwe: Myths of Agro-Fuels Boom
http://allafrica.com/stories/200712170216.html
18) The Buzz on Biofuels: Worse Than Dickensian
http://chinaconfidential.blogspot.com/2007/12/buzz-on-biofuels-dickensian-solution_19.html
19) Saving and Restoring Forests Saves Far More Carbon Emissions than Biofuels
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/12/370099.shtml
20) What Is The Real Cost Of Corn Ethanol?
http://culturaleconomics.blogspot.com/2007/12/what-is-real-cost-of-corn-ethanol.html
21) The Globalization of Hunger
http://www.madre.org/articles/inter/globalizationhunger.html
22) Subsidizing Hunger On Borrowed Cash
http://www.globalpolitician.com/23911-economics
23) NCSU researchers re-engineer sweet potato for efficient ethanol production
http://biopact.com/2007/12/ncsu-researchers-re-engineer-sweet.html
24) Biofuels "Will Not Lead to Hunger"
http://coolexcooling.com/2007/12/23/biofuels-will-not-lead-to-hunger/
25) Zimbabwe: Biofuels - Promote Research On Non Food Crops
http://allafrica.com/stories/200712240568.html
26) Global food prices rise 40% in 2007 to new record
http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1227-fao.html
27) Biofuels, the Biggest Scam Going
http://www.counterpunch.org/goodman12282007.html
28) The Last Word (for 2007) on Biofuels and Hunger
http://chinaconfidential.blogspot.com/2007/12/vandana-shiva-gets-years-last-word-on.html
29) False Solution to Climate Change
http://liberianature.blogspot.com/2008/01/false-solution-to-climate-change.html
30) How Global warming is creating global hunger
http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2008/01/how-global-warm.html
31) Eating MEAT and using BIOFUELS becomes an international disaster
http://iaoeoai.blogspot.com/2008/01/eating-meat-and-using-biofuels-becomes.html
32) Three Billion Dead: The Future of Biofuels and the Future of Resistance
http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2008/01/three-billion-dead-future-of-biofuels.html
33) It's time to wake up to the danger of this infatuation with biofuels
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/brendan-keenan/its-time-to-wake-up-to-the-danger-of-this-infatuation-with-biofuels-1261870.html
34) Defra scientist: second generation biofuels need investment
http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=14033&channel=0
35) Starving for Fuel: How Ethanol Production Contributes to Global Hunger
http://www.theglobalist.com/DBweb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=5518
36) Africa: Controversial Proposals Expected At WEF Gathering
http://allafrica.com/stories/200801190055.html
37) The world has only 11 weeks of consumable corn reserves - the lowest level ever
http://12degreesoffreedom.blogspot.com/2008/01/world-has-only-11-weeks-of-consumable.html
38) World Economic Forum to look at Africa's Green Revolution and energy
http://biopact.com/2008/01/world-economic-forum-to-look-at-africas.html
39) Neither biofuels nor biotechnology will benefit African smallholder farmers
http://africanagriculture.blogspot.com/2008/01/neither-biofuels-nor-biotechnology-will.html
40) Ethanol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol
41) Ethanol The Road to a Greener Future
http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/publications/infosource/pub/vehiclefuels/ethanol/M92_257_2003.cfm
42) Methanol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol
43) Biodiesel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel
44) Jatropha
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatropha
45) Biofuels could generate extensive food shortages
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/296855
46) CLIMATE CHANGE: EU Persists With Biofuels
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40890
47) INSIGHTS: Why Ethanol Production Will Drive World Food Prices Even Higher in 2008
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2008/2008-01-25-insbro.asp
48) Food supplies too scarce to meet relief needs
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/df52ae50-cbb1-11dc-97ff-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1
49) DEVELOPMENT: Biofuels a Lose-Lose Strategy, Critics Say
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40929
50) The Choice Between Food And Fuel
http://freeinternetpress.com/story.php?sid=15055
51) Groups call for moratorium on government biofuels incentives
http://www.brownfieldnetwork.com/gestalt/go.cfm?objectid=C7EF413E-BA4E-4A46-4486791A7CAF9782
52) UN aid chief worried by food inflation, weather
http://uk.reuters.com/article/homepageCrisis/idUKL29349230._CH_.242020080129
53) Impoverished Areas Of Africa And Asia Face Severe Crop Losses From Climate Change In 20 Years
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080131152010.htm
54) Nine Billion Little Feet on the Highway of the Damned
http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant02062008.html
55) Studies conclude that biofuels are not so green
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/07/healthscience/biofuel.php
56) Genetically modified (GM) crops ‘failing to keep promises’
http://fooddemocracy.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/genetically-modified-gm-crops-failing-to-keep-promises/
57) Small farmers speak out against globalisation
http://www.busrep.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=&fArticleId=4254663
58) The ravages of ethanol
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/guests/s_552462.html
59) CLIMATE CHANGE: Lula Calls for Flexibility from Rich Countries
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41302
60) African NGOs call for moratorium on biofuels
http://www.afrol.com/articles/28075
61) Canadians Bemoan the Lack of Availability of Biofuels
http://domesticfuel.com/2008/02/24/canadians-bemoan-the-lack-of-availability-for-biofuels/
62) The Future is Famine
http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2008/02/future-is-famine.html
http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2008/02/future-is-famine-part-2.html
63) A recipe for inflation
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/a-recipe-for-inflation-787936.html
64) The Great Agrofuel Swindle
http://www.gnn.tv/articles/3571/The_Great_Agrofuel_Swindle
65) World Food Program issues 'emergency appeal' for funds
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-food25mar25,1,6674660.story
66) "We knew we were poor before, but now it's worse than poverty."
http://12degreesoffreedom.blogspot.com/2008/03/we-knew-we-were-poor-before-but-now-its.html
67) Hot air on biofuel
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/Hot-air-on-biofuel/287849/
68) Food Agencies Are Starting to ask for Extra
http://batucuda.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/food-agencies-are-starting-to-ask-for-extra/
69) EU's biofuels target could be amended amid concerns
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5j1UHdxrunQY6gK9ddDZzHUi4zrRA
70) Biofuel: The fake solution to climate change
http://carboncapstaskforce.blogspot.com/2008/03/biofuel-fake-solution-to-climate-change.html
71) Soaring Food Prices Putting U.S. Emergency Aid in Peril
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022904029.html
72) Ethanol Is Not The Answer
http://robertd.wordpress.com/2008/02/29/ethanol-is-not-the-answer/
73) NYT Hits Small Mark, Misses Big One
http://www.animalperson.net/animal_person/2008/03/nyt-hits-small.html
74) Higher grain prices putting squeeze on world food aid
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-wed-world-food-programmar05,0,2800064.story
75) 2008: The year of global food crisis
http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2104849.0.2008_the_year_of_global_food_crisis.php
76) Economies face the prospect of mass migration, fear, famine and disorder
http://www.financialnews-us.com/?page=uscomment&contentid=2450009523
77) World Bank to Increase Africa Agriculture Loans
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,date:2008-03-11~menuPK:34461~pagePK:34392~piPK:64256810~theSitePK:4607,00.html
78) Hunger is set to grow as global food stocks fall
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Hunger_is_set_to_grow_as_global_food_stocks_fall/articleshow/2859771.cms
79) World Bank Loan To Complement Agricultural Reform In Kazakhstan
http://commercecan.ic.gc.ca/scdt/bizmap/interface2.nsf/vDownload/IMI_2414/$file/X_554592.DOC
80) China: Third Irrigated Agriculture Intensification Loan Project
http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/EAP/eaprural.nsf/PrintFriendly/43A7075F389926A485256F970068FDE9?Opendocument
81) Results For "agriculture development"
http://extsearch.worldbank.org/servlet/SiteSearchServlet?q=agriculture%20development
82) World Bank Support of Agricultural Development Projects in Romania
http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/oed/oeddoclib.nsf/DocUNIDViewForJavaSearch/18C44C3F0235EA25852567F5005D89BF
83) Agriculture & The World Bank
http://www.whirledbank.org/environment/agriculture.html
Let us be clear. The problem that we are talking about in the biofuels versus food debate did not begin with the construction of the first ethanol plant. It really began and grew with the Green Revolution over the last half of the twentieth century and is being brought to a head by peak oil which is the prime driver behind the frantic rush to biofuels. Prior to the Green Revolution it was becoming abundantly clear that the global human population of about 2.5 billion was too great for the finite carrying capacity of the earth. We could not produce and distribute enough food to feed ourselves. People were dying every day by the tens of thousands of starvation and other nutrition-related diseases. Population experts were warning of mass starvation in Africa and Asia that could claim the lives of hundreds of millions.
In fact the problem actually has its roots in the much earlier Industrial Revolution and the resulting twin, resource-gobbling scourges of overproduction and consumerism. But going back that far requires too long a lens to serve as a useful focal point. The Green Revolution is recent enough in our history, and still very much with us and contributing to the problem, that it is the appropriate place to begin.
Doctor Norman Borlaug, in response to the threat of global famine, proposed what we have come to know as the Green Revolution. The keys to this proposed solution were; a dramatic increase in agricultural irrigation largely facilitated by the exploitation of vast reserves of groundwater in deep aquifers (approximately 97% of the world's liquid freshwater is contained in these underground aquifers) using powerful mechanical pumps; the efficient, mechanized cultivation of vast tracts of hybrid (subsequently GMO) high-yield crops of feed grains like corn, wheat, soy, millet, rice and others; the development of an efficient global food distribution system to get the food from where it could be grown to where it was needed; vastly increased yields and crop security, especially on increasingly exploited marginal lands, through the use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides; the establishment of a global emergency food grain reserve to serve as a buffer against crop losses in vulnerable third world nations (that reserve has shrunk from a marginal 120 day supply to a critical 57 day supply over the past several years[37], [78]); and the development of emergency food aid NGOs to get food to those poor and malnourished most in need of it in Africa, Asia and elsewhere.
All in all, the Green Revolution seemed to most like a good and humanitarian thing to do at the time. Few other programs, after all, could claim to be responsible for saving hundreds of millions of lives. The end result, however, was far more than the millions of lives saved. The Green Revolution resulted in the fastest doubling of the human population in history, from 2.5 to five billion in less than forty years, from 2.5 to 6.5 billion in just over fifty years. Considering that the Green Revolution came about because the carrying capacity of earth could not support our then population of 2.5 billion, doubling and, now, nearly tripling those numbers could hardly be considered a success. That entire surplus of four billion people since added to the global population is living on an artificial carrying capacity that is totally dependent on finite and now rapidly diminishing fossil fuels. Whether we are already at or about to reach peak oil the situation can only worsen as our artificial carrying capacity gradually disappears.
Concurrent with the unfolding of the Green Revolution there grew a new psychology of plenty and, subsequently, affluence. We forgot that finite systems have limits and came to believe that anything was possible and that we could continue to grow forever. The previously unimaginable levels of exploitation of energy to support this growth also seemed to have no limits, a belief fostered by governments, industry and the mainstream media for the past several decades.
But all of that is changing. Despite the impressive accomplishments of the Green Revolution, despite a half century of unimaginable global economic growth, despite wondrous new technological advances, despite the first real globalization of human society, the limits that gave rise to the Green Revolution are still there, waiting like the overly-patient creditor for the loan on which we have been living for the past half century to be repaid, with interest. Like the debt-laden, third world country that pays the interest on its outstanding loans by taking on new loans, the longer we continue to live above our means, the longer we continue to survive on this artificial carrying capacity we have created through the massive over-exploitation of great reserves of energy, the greater and more devastating will be the collapse when it can no longer be avoided. We are living in a fool's paradise.
Over the past couple months I must have read over three hundred articles, columns, papers and reports from all over the world on the link between biofuels and increasing global hunger and poverty. It makes this writing of yet another article on the subject seem like kicking a dead horse. But as long as we continue our infatuation with biofuels the problem is going to continue to worsen and efforts, big and small, are still going to be needed to put the brakes on this insidious and ultimately dangerous new energy fairy.
Much of the debate over whether the production of biofuels is contributing to world poverty and hunger is an apples and oranges affair. Proponents of biofuels claim that the production of biofuel crops in third world countries can actually improve conditions in those countries by giving them another lucrative cash crop ([1], [12], [24], [59]), I guess to go along with the bananas, coffee, tea, cotton and millet that they now produce for export. But for every piece extolling the virtues of biofuels there are a hundred articles warning how they will contribute to the already existing crisis of global hunger (for example; Biofuels and world hunger[10], Will Agro fuels Usher Famine? [16], The Globalization of Hunger[21], Starving for Fuel: How Ethanol Production Contributes to Global Hunger[35] and many, many more). The benefits of the production and export of exportable cash crops, though it may increase the foreign cash influx for a third world country, do not accrue to the people most in need, those grappling with starvation and poverty. It benefits the large-scale, fat-cat industrial farmers who may, or may not, employ some of those living in poverty at a wage that is guaranteed to keep them there, and keep them barely alive nutritionally (see, for example, Neither biofuels nor biotechnology will benefit African smallholder farmers[39], Small farmers speak out against globalisation[57]).
The impact of biofuels on global food prices and global emergency food aid is not on those large farmers who grow and export biofuel crops. The impact is on the poor and starving, urban and rural. The impact is on those small farmers who have been priced off their own small piece of land because of the globalization of food prices and the fact that their small-scale production has to compete in a global market against the output from a highly-mechanized 50,000 acre farm in the U.S. heartland. The impact is on the small farmer who is forced into growing a crop he cannot afford to buy, and can't eat, in order to try to buy food at a market, food that has increased in price by 25-50% over this past year alone[26]. The impact is on the hundreds of thousands of destitute and starving refugees crowded into barely survivable refugee camps, people who have lost everything and have little prospect of ever having anything again. The impact is on the dozens of emergency food aid NGOs that are having to plead to increasingly reluctant western governments ([59], [71], [76]) for much more funding because of the skyrocketing prices of the food grains they rely on to feed starving millions in Africa and Asia ([14], [48], [52], [60], [65], [68], [71], [74]).
The biofuels debate is badly confused because of the many different, and highly variable, biofuels that are lumped under that single banner. The basic grouping of bio-diesel and ethanol/methanol is not even sufficient to lend clarity. The cost and impact of ethanol on the environment and on global hunger depends very much on what type of ethanol/methanol (distilled ethanol, celulosic ethanol, etc) and on the specific feedstock you are discussing (sugar cane, sugar beet, corn, wheat, palm oil, jatropha, cassava, rice, switchgrass, algae, etc.).
I am not a chemist so please forgive me if I oversimplify. Producing ethanol is essentially a task of turning plant sugars into alcohol through a process of esterization and fermentation. Regardless of the feedstock, this final stage is relatively similar in process, technology and cost. Where the tremendous variability occurs in both process and cost is in converting the feedstock into the required sugars, in getting the feedstock to release its sugars. This generally has to be accomplished with the aid of different enzymes that convert the carbohydrates in the organic material into sugars. But not all enzymes are created the same and different feedstocks need different enzymes. Some enzymes are very efficient, others not. The carbohydrates that the enzymes convert into sugars may be very different in molecular structure, and vary considerably in concentration within the organic matter.
The environmental impact and the contribution to soil destruction and, most importantly, to world hunger is very much dependent on that feedstock. To lump together the ethanol produced relatively efficiently from sugar cane in Brazil and the heavily-subsidized corn ethanol produced in a plant in Kansas is to completely cloud the argument. They are as different as night and day. Take away the ludicrous subsidies enjoyed by America's corn ethanol producers and you have an industry operating in the red. The EROEI on corn ethanol is negative, that of sugar cane ethanol slightly above one. In fact the majority of ethanol processes could not survive without government subsidies. Yet any suggestion that those subsidies should be removed meets with a flurry of objections ([6], [8], [9], [20], [22], [49], [51], [59]). You can't just offer the subsidies then take them away. Companies are going to suffer. Many of those companies could fail.
Well that's an argument I would very, very much like to turn around. The green revolution promised the people of the world, especially the impoverished and hungry of the third world, that food would no longer be a problem, that they could be confident of being able to put food in front of their children today and tomorrow, led them to believe that food was an inalienable right and that the world would take care of it's poor and hungry. They could bring children into the world without the risk of having to watch their bellies bloat up from hunger and have them die in their arms because there was no food. To the poor and starving that promise of food, even the most basic of food, was as important as the guarantee of lifetime employment to a factory employee in the industrial heartland. The food aid distributed by the food aid organizations to the most hungry and destitute among us was the equivalent of the corn ethanol subsidy that many governments are reconsidering. Through the surpluses produced starting with the Green Revolution we assumed the role of subsidizing global overpopulation. The end result, like corn ethanol plants sprouting up in Kansas, was that the population continued to climb. Everyday the world had to subsidize more and more excess population.
To take away that subsidy, to now begin diverting that food on which the world's poor are so dependent for their very lives away into the production of ethanol and other biofuels, to now begin to cut back on the national contributions to the emergency food aid agencies that distribute that food, to now start pressuring those poor third world countries into using their increasingly impoverished agricultural land to produce crops to produce ethanol, is going to spread unimaginable additional suffering among the world's poor and hungry. They are going to be paying the real price for our ethanol mania. Removing the corn subsidies from ethanol producers may cause many companies to fail. What we are doing in our pursuit of biofuels will cause untold additional deaths.
I must apologize for the long list of articles and other references below. This is, however, just a small sampling of the massive amount of material available. I urge you to read at least some of them.
**************************
1) Biofuels Will Help Fight Hunger
http://biodiesel.carimson.com/2007/11/biofuels-will-help-fight-hunger.html
2) Biofuel industry says oil hike driving food prices
http://www.palmoilprices.net/news/biofuel-industry-says-oil-hike-driving-food-prices/
3) A balanced contribution
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2007/11/a_balanced_contribution.html
4) AGRICULTURE: Costly Prosperity
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40000
5) GSPI States: Some Biofuels Add Significant Food to Your Table
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20071109005204&newsLang=en
6) Screwing the poor to secure votes
http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2007/11/screwing-poor-to-secure-votes.html
7) Biofuels: Is corn ethanol the way to go?
http://runyogi.gaia.com/blog/2007/11/biofuels_is_corn_ethanol_the_way_to_go
8) Repeal "Biofuels" Requirements
http://dad29.blogspot.com/2007/11/repeal-biofuels-requirements.html
9) Hell hath no fury like a special interest questioned
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/business/hancock/blog/2007/11/hell_hath_no_fury_like_a_speci.html
10) Biofuels and world hunger
http://www.workers.org/2007/world/biofuels-1018/
11) Corn prices raise the specter of hunger
http://www.latinamericapress.org/article.asp?lanCode=1&artCode=5401
12) Ethanol leaders urge U.N. to review biofuel report
http://uk.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUKN1247224320071112
13) A clean, green machine?
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2007/11/a_clean_green_machine.html
14) Biofuels eating into food security--Golez
http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20071216-107111/Biofuels_eating_into_food_security--Golez
15) Are commodities a bubble ready to burst?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/money/2007/12/16/ccmines216.xml
16) Will Agro fuels Usher Famine?
http://blackstarnews.com/?c=122&a=3990
17) Zimbabwe: Myths of Agro-Fuels Boom
http://allafrica.com/stories/200712170216.html
18) The Buzz on Biofuels: Worse Than Dickensian
http://chinaconfidential.blogspot.com/2007/12/buzz-on-biofuels-dickensian-solution_19.html
19) Saving and Restoring Forests Saves Far More Carbon Emissions than Biofuels
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/12/370099.shtml
20) What Is The Real Cost Of Corn Ethanol?
http://culturaleconomics.blogspot.com/2007/12/what-is-real-cost-of-corn-ethanol.html
21) The Globalization of Hunger
http://www.madre.org/articles/inter/globalizationhunger.html
22) Subsidizing Hunger On Borrowed Cash
http://www.globalpolitician.com/23911-economics
23) NCSU researchers re-engineer sweet potato for efficient ethanol production
http://biopact.com/2007/12/ncsu-researchers-re-engineer-sweet.html
24) Biofuels "Will Not Lead to Hunger"
http://coolexcooling.com/2007/12/23/biofuels-will-not-lead-to-hunger/
25) Zimbabwe: Biofuels - Promote Research On Non Food Crops
http://allafrica.com/stories/200712240568.html
26) Global food prices rise 40% in 2007 to new record
http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1227-fao.html
27) Biofuels, the Biggest Scam Going
http://www.counterpunch.org/goodman12282007.html
28) The Last Word (for 2007) on Biofuels and Hunger
http://chinaconfidential.blogspot.com/2007/12/vandana-shiva-gets-years-last-word-on.html
29) False Solution to Climate Change
http://liberianature.blogspot.com/2008/01/false-solution-to-climate-change.html
30) How Global warming is creating global hunger
http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2008/01/how-global-warm.html
31) Eating MEAT and using BIOFUELS becomes an international disaster
http://iaoeoai.blogspot.com/2008/01/eating-meat-and-using-biofuels-becomes.html
32) Three Billion Dead: The Future of Biofuels and the Future of Resistance
http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2008/01/three-billion-dead-future-of-biofuels.html
33) It's time to wake up to the danger of this infatuation with biofuels
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/brendan-keenan/its-time-to-wake-up-to-the-danger-of-this-infatuation-with-biofuels-1261870.html
34) Defra scientist: second generation biofuels need investment
http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=14033&channel=0
35) Starving for Fuel: How Ethanol Production Contributes to Global Hunger
http://www.theglobalist.com/DBweb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=5518
36) Africa: Controversial Proposals Expected At WEF Gathering
http://allafrica.com/stories/200801190055.html
37) The world has only 11 weeks of consumable corn reserves - the lowest level ever
http://12degreesoffreedom.blogspot.com/2008/01/world-has-only-11-weeks-of-consumable.html
38) World Economic Forum to look at Africa's Green Revolution and energy
http://biopact.com/2008/01/world-economic-forum-to-look-at-africas.html
39) Neither biofuels nor biotechnology will benefit African smallholder farmers
http://africanagriculture.blogspot.com/2008/01/neither-biofuels-nor-biotechnology-will.html
40) Ethanol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol
41) Ethanol The Road to a Greener Future
http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/publications/infosource/pub/vehiclefuels/ethanol/M92_257_2003.cfm
42) Methanol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol
43) Biodiesel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel
44) Jatropha
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatropha
45) Biofuels could generate extensive food shortages
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/296855
46) CLIMATE CHANGE: EU Persists With Biofuels
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40890
47) INSIGHTS: Why Ethanol Production Will Drive World Food Prices Even Higher in 2008
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2008/2008-01-25-insbro.asp
48) Food supplies too scarce to meet relief needs
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/df52ae50-cbb1-11dc-97ff-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1
49) DEVELOPMENT: Biofuels a Lose-Lose Strategy, Critics Say
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40929
50) The Choice Between Food And Fuel
http://freeinternetpress.com/story.php?sid=15055
51) Groups call for moratorium on government biofuels incentives
http://www.brownfieldnetwork.com/gestalt/go.cfm?objectid=C7EF413E-BA4E-4A46-4486791A7CAF9782
52) UN aid chief worried by food inflation, weather
http://uk.reuters.com/article/homepageCrisis/idUKL29349230._CH_.242020080129
53) Impoverished Areas Of Africa And Asia Face Severe Crop Losses From Climate Change In 20 Years
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080131152010.htm
54) Nine Billion Little Feet on the Highway of the Damned
http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant02062008.html
55) Studies conclude that biofuels are not so green
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/07/healthscience/biofuel.php
56) Genetically modified (GM) crops ‘failing to keep promises’
http://fooddemocracy.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/genetically-modified-gm-crops-failing-to-keep-promises/
57) Small farmers speak out against globalisation
http://www.busrep.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=&fArticleId=4254663
58) The ravages of ethanol
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/guests/s_552462.html
59) CLIMATE CHANGE: Lula Calls for Flexibility from Rich Countries
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41302
60) African NGOs call for moratorium on biofuels
http://www.afrol.com/articles/28075
61) Canadians Bemoan the Lack of Availability of Biofuels
http://domesticfuel.com/2008/02/24/canadians-bemoan-the-lack-of-availability-for-biofuels/
62) The Future is Famine
http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2008/02/future-is-famine.html
http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2008/02/future-is-famine-part-2.html
63) A recipe for inflation
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/a-recipe-for-inflation-787936.html
64) The Great Agrofuel Swindle
http://www.gnn.tv/articles/3571/The_Great_Agrofuel_Swindle
65) World Food Program issues 'emergency appeal' for funds
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-food25mar25,1,6674660.story
66) "We knew we were poor before, but now it's worse than poverty."
http://12degreesoffreedom.blogspot.com/2008/03/we-knew-we-were-poor-before-but-now-its.html
67) Hot air on biofuel
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/Hot-air-on-biofuel/287849/
68) Food Agencies Are Starting to ask for Extra
http://batucuda.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/food-agencies-are-starting-to-ask-for-extra/
69) EU's biofuels target could be amended amid concerns
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5j1UHdxrunQY6gK9ddDZzHUi4zrRA
70) Biofuel: The fake solution to climate change
http://carboncapstaskforce.blogspot.com/2008/03/biofuel-fake-solution-to-climate-change.html
71) Soaring Food Prices Putting U.S. Emergency Aid in Peril
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022904029.html
72) Ethanol Is Not The Answer
http://robertd.wordpress.com/2008/02/29/ethanol-is-not-the-answer/
73) NYT Hits Small Mark, Misses Big One
http://www.animalperson.net/animal_person/2008/03/nyt-hits-small.html
74) Higher grain prices putting squeeze on world food aid
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-wed-world-food-programmar05,0,2800064.story
75) 2008: The year of global food crisis
http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2104849.0.2008_the_year_of_global_food_crisis.php
76) Economies face the prospect of mass migration, fear, famine and disorder
http://www.financialnews-us.com/?page=uscomment&contentid=2450009523
77) World Bank to Increase Africa Agriculture Loans
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,date:2008-03-11~menuPK:34461~pagePK:34392~piPK:64256810~theSitePK:4607,00.html
78) Hunger is set to grow as global food stocks fall
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Hunger_is_set_to_grow_as_global_food_stocks_fall/articleshow/2859771.cms
79) World Bank Loan To Complement Agricultural Reform In Kazakhstan
http://commercecan.ic.gc.ca/scdt/bizmap/interface2.nsf/vDownload/IMI_2414/$file/X_554592.DOC
80) China: Third Irrigated Agriculture Intensification Loan Project
http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/EAP/eaprural.nsf/PrintFriendly/43A7075F389926A485256F970068FDE9?Opendocument
81) Results For "agriculture development"
http://extsearch.worldbank.org/servlet/SiteSearchServlet?q=agriculture%20development
82) World Bank Support of Agricultural Development Projects in Romania
http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/oed/oeddoclib.nsf/DocUNIDViewForJavaSearch/18C44C3F0235EA25852567F5005D89BF
83) Agriculture & The World Bank
http://www.whirledbank.org/environment/agriculture.html
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Solving the World's Problems
We collectively in society have a pervasive belief that big problems are someone else's to solve. When someone points out a problem to us our general reaction is to ask what they intend to do about it. I am not sure when it became that he who recognizes a problem has the responsibility to fix it. Where is the responsibility of the person(s) who created the problem in the first place? To me the first responsibility of someone who recognizes a large systemic problem that they cannot fix themselves, especially one not of their own making, is to make others aware of it so they can collectively fix it, or avoid it if it can't be fixed.
I have a confession to make. I cannot fix global warming and climate change. I cannot prevent peak oil. I can not solve resource nationalism. I cannot correct the global freshwater crisis. I cannot rebuild the planet's lost soil fertility. All of these problems are beyond my meagre talents to rectify. All of them will affect me as much as the next person so I very much want to see them corrected but I am powerless, on my own, to do anything significant about them. Does that mean, therefore, that I should just accept them (like the old quote from Anonymous suggests, "Accept the things you cannot change, have the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.") and wait for someone else to recognize them, speak about them and offer solutions? I am personally very skeptical of anyone promising solutions to large global problems. They are generally simplistic and focused on the symptoms, not the underlying cause. And I do not believe you can effectively solve any problem unless you correct the underlying cause. Fixing the symptoms without fixing the underlying cause just sets up a return visit to fix other symptoms, and then others. The symptoms may change but the problems will persist.
Why do I write about global problems without proposing solutions? The problem with proposing solutions to large problems, especially systemic global problems, is this. What is the next response when you tell someone a solution to a problem? "That's great. Now go do it and don't bother me about it anymore."
Let me illustrate. I could tell you that the underlying cause of peak oil is that we are using far too much oil and have become too dependent on it and have no other alternatives to fall back on when it can no longer satisfy our needs. The solution? Reduce our oil dependence, reduce our oil consumption through greatly improved efficiencies, develop and ramp up the alternatives for us to fall back on so we are ready as the oil supply diminishes. "Great. Now go away and do it and don't bug me." See how it works?
The solutions to our global problems are not simple. They are as complex as the intricate web of underlying causes of the problems. No one can tell you "in seventy-five words or less" how to solve peak oil, global warming or any of the other serious global problems on the horizon. If the primary requirements for any proposed solution are simplicity, brevity and the ability to be done (by someone else, of course) without affecting people's lifestyles then no workable solutions can be put on the table. Period!
Why do peak-oilers wallow in despair? Because people do want brief, simplistic solutions that will not affect their lifestyle. Well, how about this. That lifestyle is the underlying cause of peak oil, global warming, resource depletion, soil contamination, the freshwater crisis, pollution and the rest of the whole long list of global problems we are facing. This planet cannot sustain a massive population of a single parasitic species at the very top of the food chain (we 6.6 billion humans) in the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed. For starters we have to drastically change and simplify our lifestyles, stop globalization, eliminate our obsession with and dependence on the personal auto, abandon the perpetual growth economy, re-orient our consumption to satisfying needs not wants, oh, and reduce our population to one billion by the the middle of this century. But that does not fit within the criteria that acceptable solutions must satisfy - brevity, simplicity and no changes.
Because there are no solutions that can satisfy those criteria!
Of course there are solutions! But they are complex, intricate, they are going to be painful, and they are going to involve massive changes. At this late stage there is no other option. The time for simple, easy solutions was centuries ago when the contributors to the problems we have created were simple and easy. But the layers of complexity that we have added to those problems are going to require similar layers of complexity in the solutions. And governments and politicians, industry and the media continually telling people what they want to hear - that there are no problems, that life is good, that the American way of life is not negotiable, and that people living beyond their means is acceptable (nay, required) - simply serves to make the proposal of "real" solutions that much more difficult and to be viewed as that much more unacceptable.
Peak-oilers are seen as pessimists and doom-n-gloomers because they won't share in the false euphoria that permeates mainstream society. We wont sing Kumbaya and validate the cornucopean proclamations of society's cheerleaders. Most importantly, and very mistakenly, we are accused of wishing for the collapse of human society. Nothing could be further from the truth. Don't shoot the messenger.
Every peak-oiler I know hopes beyond hope to be able to head off some of the disasters they see coming by alerting unaware people to those disasters in hope they will collectively take action and make the necessary changes and sacrifices to prevent them or reduce their impact. The pessimism comes from the constant confirmation that that is unlikely to happen. People do not seem to be interested in saving themselves, their children and their grandchildren if it means giving up or changing anything. So be it! At least we try. You can't force people to unplug themselves from the matrix. All you can do is try to make them aware that they are part of it. If they like it in there and feel comfortable and secure and don't want to come out, all you can do is move on and try to save those that you can. It's very lonely and often times it seems like the easiest course of action is to just give up and re-insert the plug and rejoin the matrix. After all, your chances of survival on your own, while the matrix is still there, are very remote. Why not enjoy it while it lasts?
But enjoy what exactly? What benefits are there to be derived from blissful ignorance of the problems we have created and continue to make worse? It's a little like marching knowingly into the Auschwitz gas chambers blithely joining in the celebration of the wonderfully cleansing shower they have told us we are about to have. You know you are about to be gassed to death but you go along with the pretense and put on your best, silk bathrobe.
How do we solve all of the problems I talk about? With a universal change in attitude. We have to collectively start treating the earth and the environment like we are part of it, like we belong to it rather than it belonging to us. How we achieve that, I do not know. Maybe we need massive, penalizing luxury taxes on all non-essential goods. Maybe we need to build into every item the true environmental cost and compel both the manufacturers and users of those products to invest that money in correcting the environmental damage done by their manufacture and use. I don't know what the answers are. But I do know there are answers. I may know some of them. You may know some of them. Charlie on the next block may know some. But if we never talk about the problems, if we continue to act like they don't exist, we will never solve them.
The solution to any problem starts with the understanding and acceptance that there is a problem that needs solving. And I don't think we have collectively reached that point yet. I believe the majority of people still think everything is fine and life is great. And why wouldn't they? Every mountain of a problem is reduced by the media and politicians to a molehill and every tiny molehill of a solution is built up as a Mount Everest. Black is white, red is green and pigs fly.
I am as guilty as the next person and as much a part of the problem, perhaps more guilty because I already know the things I should be doing but am not. Others can at least plead ignorance, even if selective and voluntary. I can only plead advancing age and ill health. But we do have to fix the problems, if the human race is to have any long-term survivability as a viable species, and the time to do so is rapidly running out. Fixing the problems will not involve more of the same. We cannot continue on with human society as it is presently constituted. There must be a serious change in direction. There simply are not sufficient resources - be that oil, natural gas, coal, water, soil, a wide variety of metals and minerals, or any other resources - to continue on the way we have, especially for these past few hundred years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
One of the most controversial and painful subjects of discussion among peak-oilers is the so-called die-off. This is the theory (strongly held belief?) that when we pass peak oil the massive global human population, which has virtually exploded since the Industrial Revolution but, most particularly, since the beginning of the oil age in which time it has more than tripled, will begin to diminish rapidly back to a level, it is believed, approximating global population before the Industrial Revolution. That population was about one billion. This theory or belief is based on an analysis of the amount of energy (most derived from oil and other fossil fuels) required to produce the food and other life essentials needed by a human population, and the close co-relation between population and energy use. (See my article in this blog, Energy as the Catalyst in the Punctuated Equilibrium of Human Population Growth).
It is reasonably estimated, for example, that in western industrialized societies it takes about ten calories of energy, again mostly from fossil fuels, to produce every calorie of food. That, to me, despite being a shocking ratio, is a very low, conservative estimate. Why? Because it does not take into account the massive amount of topsoil loss caused by so much human agriculture and the effort, time and energy that will be required to revitalize that soil to the level needed to produce the food needed by the population without modern agricultural machinery, chemicals and practices (See my article in this blog, Post-Peak Agricultural Capacity). It does not take into account the damage done to our lakes, rivers and oceans from agricultural run-off and the effort and energy it will require to recover them. It does not account for the massive depletion and toxification of the planet's underground aquifers, especially non-replenishable fossil aquifers like the Ogallala aquifer in Western U.S. (See my water articles in this blog; The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis, Peak Water, and Mining Water), and the effort, energy and time that will be involved in bringing them back to health. It does not account for the spent and wasted energy that will be involved in crop losses in storage without modern storage techniques. In other words, it is an estimate that has little applicability to human society on the other side of peak oil where, one way or another, the food needed by the population will have to be produced without today's prodigious energy inputs.
Whatever level of population exists on the other side of peak oil, and regardless of all the other "things" that population produces and consumes and surrounds itself with, that population is going to require the same quantities of food per person as today's population. If every calorie of that food requires ten calories of energy to produce where is that energy to come from without those fossil fuels? Obviously if it is to be produced from human power, manual labour, human energy, we will not survive long as a species if we are expending ten calories of human energy for every calorie of food we produce and consume. Food production in our modern, globalized society is perhaps one of the most inefficient uses of energy we are guilty of. There is absolutely no choice but to find greater efficiencies in food production on the other side of peak oil. But we are constantly told, and very incorrectly so, that food production using fossil energy and the practices instituted with the Green Revolution are the most efficient in history. They are the most efficient in one respect only, the reduction of the amount of human labour involved in that food production. We use so much energy in food production because we have replaced human energy with machines, massive, energy-gobbling machines. We produce more food with fewer man-hours of effort than at any time in human history. But we do so, and can do, only because of the massive amount of energy fossil fuels have allowed us to exploit. The practices we use today simply are not applicable to a post-fossil-fuel world. We are going to have to relearn agriculture and food production, and we need to begin now.
I have a confession to make. I cannot fix global warming and climate change. I cannot prevent peak oil. I can not solve resource nationalism. I cannot correct the global freshwater crisis. I cannot rebuild the planet's lost soil fertility. All of these problems are beyond my meagre talents to rectify. All of them will affect me as much as the next person so I very much want to see them corrected but I am powerless, on my own, to do anything significant about them. Does that mean, therefore, that I should just accept them (like the old quote from Anonymous suggests, "Accept the things you cannot change, have the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.") and wait for someone else to recognize them, speak about them and offer solutions? I am personally very skeptical of anyone promising solutions to large global problems. They are generally simplistic and focused on the symptoms, not the underlying cause. And I do not believe you can effectively solve any problem unless you correct the underlying cause. Fixing the symptoms without fixing the underlying cause just sets up a return visit to fix other symptoms, and then others. The symptoms may change but the problems will persist.
Why do I write about global problems without proposing solutions? The problem with proposing solutions to large problems, especially systemic global problems, is this. What is the next response when you tell someone a solution to a problem? "That's great. Now go do it and don't bother me about it anymore."
Let me illustrate. I could tell you that the underlying cause of peak oil is that we are using far too much oil and have become too dependent on it and have no other alternatives to fall back on when it can no longer satisfy our needs. The solution? Reduce our oil dependence, reduce our oil consumption through greatly improved efficiencies, develop and ramp up the alternatives for us to fall back on so we are ready as the oil supply diminishes. "Great. Now go away and do it and don't bug me." See how it works?
The solutions to our global problems are not simple. They are as complex as the intricate web of underlying causes of the problems. No one can tell you "in seventy-five words or less" how to solve peak oil, global warming or any of the other serious global problems on the horizon. If the primary requirements for any proposed solution are simplicity, brevity and the ability to be done (by someone else, of course) without affecting people's lifestyles then no workable solutions can be put on the table. Period!
Why do peak-oilers wallow in despair? Because people do want brief, simplistic solutions that will not affect their lifestyle. Well, how about this. That lifestyle is the underlying cause of peak oil, global warming, resource depletion, soil contamination, the freshwater crisis, pollution and the rest of the whole long list of global problems we are facing. This planet cannot sustain a massive population of a single parasitic species at the very top of the food chain (we 6.6 billion humans) in the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed. For starters we have to drastically change and simplify our lifestyles, stop globalization, eliminate our obsession with and dependence on the personal auto, abandon the perpetual growth economy, re-orient our consumption to satisfying needs not wants, oh, and reduce our population to one billion by the the middle of this century. But that does not fit within the criteria that acceptable solutions must satisfy - brevity, simplicity and no changes.
Because there are no solutions that can satisfy those criteria!
Of course there are solutions! But they are complex, intricate, they are going to be painful, and they are going to involve massive changes. At this late stage there is no other option. The time for simple, easy solutions was centuries ago when the contributors to the problems we have created were simple and easy. But the layers of complexity that we have added to those problems are going to require similar layers of complexity in the solutions. And governments and politicians, industry and the media continually telling people what they want to hear - that there are no problems, that life is good, that the American way of life is not negotiable, and that people living beyond their means is acceptable (nay, required) - simply serves to make the proposal of "real" solutions that much more difficult and to be viewed as that much more unacceptable.
Peak-oilers are seen as pessimists and doom-n-gloomers because they won't share in the false euphoria that permeates mainstream society. We wont sing Kumbaya and validate the cornucopean proclamations of society's cheerleaders. Most importantly, and very mistakenly, we are accused of wishing for the collapse of human society. Nothing could be further from the truth. Don't shoot the messenger.
Every peak-oiler I know hopes beyond hope to be able to head off some of the disasters they see coming by alerting unaware people to those disasters in hope they will collectively take action and make the necessary changes and sacrifices to prevent them or reduce their impact. The pessimism comes from the constant confirmation that that is unlikely to happen. People do not seem to be interested in saving themselves, their children and their grandchildren if it means giving up or changing anything. So be it! At least we try. You can't force people to unplug themselves from the matrix. All you can do is try to make them aware that they are part of it. If they like it in there and feel comfortable and secure and don't want to come out, all you can do is move on and try to save those that you can. It's very lonely and often times it seems like the easiest course of action is to just give up and re-insert the plug and rejoin the matrix. After all, your chances of survival on your own, while the matrix is still there, are very remote. Why not enjoy it while it lasts?
But enjoy what exactly? What benefits are there to be derived from blissful ignorance of the problems we have created and continue to make worse? It's a little like marching knowingly into the Auschwitz gas chambers blithely joining in the celebration of the wonderfully cleansing shower they have told us we are about to have. You know you are about to be gassed to death but you go along with the pretense and put on your best, silk bathrobe.
How do we solve all of the problems I talk about? With a universal change in attitude. We have to collectively start treating the earth and the environment like we are part of it, like we belong to it rather than it belonging to us. How we achieve that, I do not know. Maybe we need massive, penalizing luxury taxes on all non-essential goods. Maybe we need to build into every item the true environmental cost and compel both the manufacturers and users of those products to invest that money in correcting the environmental damage done by their manufacture and use. I don't know what the answers are. But I do know there are answers. I may know some of them. You may know some of them. Charlie on the next block may know some. But if we never talk about the problems, if we continue to act like they don't exist, we will never solve them.
The solution to any problem starts with the understanding and acceptance that there is a problem that needs solving. And I don't think we have collectively reached that point yet. I believe the majority of people still think everything is fine and life is great. And why wouldn't they? Every mountain of a problem is reduced by the media and politicians to a molehill and every tiny molehill of a solution is built up as a Mount Everest. Black is white, red is green and pigs fly.
I am as guilty as the next person and as much a part of the problem, perhaps more guilty because I already know the things I should be doing but am not. Others can at least plead ignorance, even if selective and voluntary. I can only plead advancing age and ill health. But we do have to fix the problems, if the human race is to have any long-term survivability as a viable species, and the time to do so is rapidly running out. Fixing the problems will not involve more of the same. We cannot continue on with human society as it is presently constituted. There must be a serious change in direction. There simply are not sufficient resources - be that oil, natural gas, coal, water, soil, a wide variety of metals and minerals, or any other resources - to continue on the way we have, especially for these past few hundred years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
One of the most controversial and painful subjects of discussion among peak-oilers is the so-called die-off. This is the theory (strongly held belief?) that when we pass peak oil the massive global human population, which has virtually exploded since the Industrial Revolution but, most particularly, since the beginning of the oil age in which time it has more than tripled, will begin to diminish rapidly back to a level, it is believed, approximating global population before the Industrial Revolution. That population was about one billion. This theory or belief is based on an analysis of the amount of energy (most derived from oil and other fossil fuels) required to produce the food and other life essentials needed by a human population, and the close co-relation between population and energy use. (See my article in this blog, Energy as the Catalyst in the Punctuated Equilibrium of Human Population Growth).
It is reasonably estimated, for example, that in western industrialized societies it takes about ten calories of energy, again mostly from fossil fuels, to produce every calorie of food. That, to me, despite being a shocking ratio, is a very low, conservative estimate. Why? Because it does not take into account the massive amount of topsoil loss caused by so much human agriculture and the effort, time and energy that will be required to revitalize that soil to the level needed to produce the food needed by the population without modern agricultural machinery, chemicals and practices (See my article in this blog, Post-Peak Agricultural Capacity). It does not take into account the damage done to our lakes, rivers and oceans from agricultural run-off and the effort and energy it will require to recover them. It does not account for the massive depletion and toxification of the planet's underground aquifers, especially non-replenishable fossil aquifers like the Ogallala aquifer in Western U.S. (See my water articles in this blog; The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis, Peak Water, and Mining Water), and the effort, energy and time that will be involved in bringing them back to health. It does not account for the spent and wasted energy that will be involved in crop losses in storage without modern storage techniques. In other words, it is an estimate that has little applicability to human society on the other side of peak oil where, one way or another, the food needed by the population will have to be produced without today's prodigious energy inputs.
Whatever level of population exists on the other side of peak oil, and regardless of all the other "things" that population produces and consumes and surrounds itself with, that population is going to require the same quantities of food per person as today's population. If every calorie of that food requires ten calories of energy to produce where is that energy to come from without those fossil fuels? Obviously if it is to be produced from human power, manual labour, human energy, we will not survive long as a species if we are expending ten calories of human energy for every calorie of food we produce and consume. Food production in our modern, globalized society is perhaps one of the most inefficient uses of energy we are guilty of. There is absolutely no choice but to find greater efficiencies in food production on the other side of peak oil. But we are constantly told, and very incorrectly so, that food production using fossil energy and the practices instituted with the Green Revolution are the most efficient in history. They are the most efficient in one respect only, the reduction of the amount of human labour involved in that food production. We use so much energy in food production because we have replaced human energy with machines, massive, energy-gobbling machines. We produce more food with fewer man-hours of effort than at any time in human history. But we do so, and can do, only because of the massive amount of energy fossil fuels have allowed us to exploit. The practices we use today simply are not applicable to a post-fossil-fuel world. We are going to have to relearn agriculture and food production, and we need to begin now.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Mining Water
(See also my articles Peak Water and The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis in this blog.)
The term "mining water" is increasingly used to refer to the extraction of groundwater, usually by pumps, from underground aquifers. Get used to the term. At the rate we are polluting our surface water in lakes and rivers and the rate at which freshwater sources are drying up under the assault of global warming and human development it may soon be the only potential source of clean drinking water we or our children and grandchildren have left. It is an appropriate term in many ways.
Water is a finite resource that is constantly recycled - like the metal in beer cans - and many of the underground aquifers from which we extract it are non-replenishable, meaning once it is gone, like a vein of ore, it's time to shut off the pumps and go home or move on to another aqua-motherlode. Even those aquifers that are replenishable, however, have a long-established, generally-low rate at which they will replenish ("Water that enters an aquifer remains there for an average of 1,400 years, compared to only 16 days for rivers."[5]. Extract more water than the rate at which it will refill and you start the process of depleting, and possibly irreversibly damaging, the reservoir. The land over many aquifers that have been over-exploited shows clear signs of sinking and compression due to the underground void left as the water is extracted.
Changing weather patterns generally, and the more pronounced changes being brought on by global warming, and the persistent human habit of draining marshes and wetlands for development, many of which are the source of replenishment for underground aquifers, are also changing the rate at which many aquifers replenish, usually negatively. Unless aquifer replenishment rates are tracked with changes in the climate and local development ("The Yellow river in China, Colorado River in North America, and the Murray River in Australia are amongst the Earth's major rivers that are regularly sucked dry.")[1], those dependent on an aquifer for water may find their wells suddenly going dry even though they have not increased their water extraction.
There is another aspect to the term "mining water" that is particularly worrisome for the future. Water rights to surface water in most areas today require a water rights license, even if the water runs through or touches your property. That license spells out what source of water you have access to and how much water from that source you are permitted to use. If the term and concept of "mining water" works its way into government bureaucratic lexicon you may also need a license to access the groundwater beneath your own property - some jurisdictions already require it - a license that similarly specifies how much of that water you have a right to use. In international trade agreements, and in the conditions attached to IMF and Worldbank loans to developing countries, water services and water rights are a commodity that is increasingly required to be open for commercial trade. It is possible, as clean surface water sources become increasingly scarce, that your groundwater may become an important tradeable commodity for which you are going to have to compete against the highest commercial bidder. With the majority of aquifers already under pressure from over exploitation governments everywhere may decide that growing demand for commercial groundwater access is exactly why there is a need of government control and private access restriction.
For me, in addition, the term also has a strong personal meaning which, I believe, clearly illustrates a broader issue. The southeastern Ontario community I grew up in was a mining town. A mile southeast of home, the constantly-growing, flat-top mountain of slag clearly visible from anywhere in town and the surrounding area, there was a large, open-pit iron ore mine that was the town's main employer during my growing-up years. When they had tapped out the economically-recoverable iron - there was still plenty of iron but they would have had to go underground to get it - the mining company shut off the pumps that kept the pit from flooding and walked away. They even ripped up their rail line that once delivered tons of crude ore to Lake Ontario for shipping across the lake to a Pennsylvania processing facility. They left behind a massive hole in the ground over 600 feet deep and a mile across.
For the past forty years that "hole" has been filling up with clear, blue water, draining every aquifer in the area. Whether they are replenishable I don't know since no appropriate survey of local aquifers has ever been conducted, though they are currently being studied as part of a broader, provincial groundwater survey. There isn't a well within miles, nonetheless, that still has water in it. The community, fortunately, takes its municipal water from the river that runs through town but the water mains end at the town limits. The farmers and other rural residents in the area over aquifers that are draining into the mine, being all those south and east of the town, have been left without a water supply. Perhaps, in another hundred years or so, when the water level in the "mine" comes up to the level of what was the local water table, those wells may produce water again, if they are replenishable and the flow characteristics of the aquifers haven't been irreversibly damaged. The periodic tremors in the area since the mine closure are a sign, unfortunately, that some such damage may be occurring as the aquifers drain, or may have occurred as a result of the tremendous blasts while the mine was in operation.
A full two thirds of the world's people already rely almost exclusively on underground aquifers for their drinking water and over half of global agricultural irrigation uses groundwater. But a third of the world's population lives in areas that are already seriously water-stressed. Where the UN established minimum daily requirement is 10 gallons of water per person these areas have an availability of only 1-3 gallons per day and much of the daily challenge and activity revolves around how to acquire water. Water for sanitation and basic hygiene is one of the greatest challenges in these areas and thousands die every day from infections and water-borne diseases. "One child dies every eight seconds from a waterborne disease; 15 million children a year."[4]
Overall as many as half the world's aquifers are already over-exploited, being drawn upon at a rate greater than they can be or are replenished. Too often a slowly-replenishing aquifer that has served the needs of local farmers and residents for centuries comes under pressure from high volume extraction for commercial use. This, for example, was the case for one aquifer in India where a well-known soft drink company built a plant in the area and drew on the aquifer for the water to make their soft drinks. Hundreds of wells in the area went dry, wells that had been in continuous use for hundreds of years, because the replenishment rate on the aquifer could not keep up with the traditional demand plus the high volume extraction by the software company. Repeated law suits consistently came down on the side of the soft drink company. The rapidly growing global demand for clean bottled water is also putting major pressure on many aquifers, most of them deep, pristine non-replenishable fossil aquifers.
Water in an aquifer, like oil in a reservoir, generally does not exist as a unified body like a vast underground lake. But it can. More commonly, it may saturate a layer of sand underground, like the Alberta tar sands, or it may trickle slowly through cracks and cavities in a rock formation. Look at the face of any rock cliff and you will generally see the telltale vertical dark streaks where water is oozing out of these cracks in the stone. Aquifers may be vast in terms of their overall size, like the Ogallala aquifer - a non-replenishable, fossil aquifer - which covers most of the U.S. midwest. Or they may cover only a few thousand square meters or less. And they may be just a few feet below the surface or a mile or more down.
Our romantic image of a water well is the picturesque round bricked well with the peaked roof and a pull-up rope wound round a hand-cranked pulley. The vast majority of wells, however, and most of those developed over the past half-century, are drilled wells with a pump, sometimes a hand pump, sometimes a windmill, but most often a mechanical pump run by electricity or a gasoline engine. It is these powerful electrical and gasoline-driven pumps that have allowed us to exploit ever deeper aquifers, some over a mile deep, in ever greater volumes (while global population has tripled in the past century global water usage has grown more than six-fold, most of that growth from underground aquifers).
Under China's arid north plain, where much of the country's vast quantities of wheat and other grains are grown, there is a shallow aquifer that has been relied upon for centuries to supply water to mostly hand-dug wells. The replenishment rate is slow but for many centuries the amount of water being used from it was below that recharge rate. Now that aquifer has been seriously over-exploited and has been, effectively, sucked dry. But there is also a deeper aquifer under the north plain that is now being tapped thanks to powerful new mechanical pumps. The problem is this deep reservoir is a non-replenishable aquifer, the fossil water in it having been sequestered there for thousands of years. With more and more wells sunk down to this deep aquifer it too may be sucked dry within a few decades leaving China's breadbasket that feeds much of her 1.6-billion people without a source of much-needed irrigation. China's grain production, in fact, has already fallen while half a billion people have been added to the population from its "peak of 392 million tons in 1998 to an estimated 358 million tons in 2005. For perspective, this drop of 34 million tons exceeds the annual Canadian wheat harvest."[2]
An aquifer, like an oil reservoir, covers a large enough area that multiple wells can draw from it at the same time. In India, for example, the relatively few aquifers in the country are being tapped into by more than 22-million wells. And like oil, each additional well drilled into an aquifer increases the depletion rate and has the potential and often does decrease the water available to the other wells. This becomes seriously apparent when the extraction rate of all the wells exceeds the replenishment rate of the aquifer. This vast mining of aquifers in India, for example, is taking its toll and is "lowering water tables in most of the country. In North Gujarat, the water table is falling by 6 meters (20 feet) per year."[2]
There are literally thousands of legal agreements worldwide covering the right of use of surface water in lakes and rivers. But as much as 97% of the world's liquid freshwater is not in these lakes and rivers but rather in underground aquifers. There are essentially no existing agreements covering the use of groundwater, even though many aquifers cross national borders and their over-exploitation on one side of the border is a strong potential source of conflict and even war. Those few agreements that even mention groundwater cover it as an aside and something to be dealt with in the future. But that future is now, if there is to be a future for the world's aquifers and drinkable water for future human generations.
We are taking our underground water sources for granted and treating them with the same reckless abandon that we treat our lakes, rivers and the oceans. "Toxic chemicals are contaminating groundwater on every inhabited continent, endangering the world's most valuable supplies of freshwater, reports a new study from the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based research organization."[3] Just a few U.S. examples, which are similar to examples from other continents, will illustrate the depth and breadth of the problem.
* "Water utilities in the midwestern United States, a region that is highly dependent on groundwater, spend $400 million each year to treat water for just one chemical, the pesticide atrazine. According to the U.S. National Research Council, initial cleanup of contaminated groundwater at some 300,000 sites in the United States could cost up to $1 trillion over the next 30 years."[3]
* "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that about 100,000 gasoline storage tanks are leaking chemicals into groundwater. In Santa Monica, California, wells supplying half the city's water have been closed because of dangerously high levels of the gasoline additive MTBE."[3]
* "Sixty percent of the most hazardous liquid waste in the United States - 34 billion liters per year of solvents, heavy metals, and radioactive materials - is injected directly into deep groundwater via thousands of "injection wells." Although the EPA requires that these effluents be injected below the deepest source of drinking water, some have entered underground water supplies in Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Oklahoma."[3]
Man is the only species on this planet able to and in the practice of exploiting earth's sequestered resources like oil, natural gas, coal, minerals, and water. Apart from the fact we claim an exclusivity that excludes other species with whom we reluctantly share this planet we also, particularly in this past century, seem to have no sense of responsibility for sharing them with future generations of humans, our own children and grandchildren. The resources they will need for their very survival are being voraciously gobbled up and discarded as an assumed birthright in our greedy demands for support of our increasingly decadent lifestyle. If this robbing from future generations were accidental because we did not understand the long-term implications of over-exploitation it would be bad enough. But it is not accidental. We do understand. Our governments and industry organizations pump out reams of statistics every day detailing our crime. And yet we continue on, as if to say to our grandchildren, "To hell with you. I'm going to have a good time as long as I can and it's your problem to figure out how to survive on what's left when our party is over."
==============
Additional reading material:
1) A Global Water Crisis
2) Aquifer Depletion
3) The Hidden Freshwater Crisis
4) UN Highlights World Water Crisis
5) The Hidden Freshwater Crisis
The term "mining water" is increasingly used to refer to the extraction of groundwater, usually by pumps, from underground aquifers. Get used to the term. At the rate we are polluting our surface water in lakes and rivers and the rate at which freshwater sources are drying up under the assault of global warming and human development it may soon be the only potential source of clean drinking water we or our children and grandchildren have left. It is an appropriate term in many ways.
Water is a finite resource that is constantly recycled - like the metal in beer cans - and many of the underground aquifers from which we extract it are non-replenishable, meaning once it is gone, like a vein of ore, it's time to shut off the pumps and go home or move on to another aqua-motherlode. Even those aquifers that are replenishable, however, have a long-established, generally-low rate at which they will replenish ("Water that enters an aquifer remains there for an average of 1,400 years, compared to only 16 days for rivers."[5]. Extract more water than the rate at which it will refill and you start the process of depleting, and possibly irreversibly damaging, the reservoir. The land over many aquifers that have been over-exploited shows clear signs of sinking and compression due to the underground void left as the water is extracted.
Changing weather patterns generally, and the more pronounced changes being brought on by global warming, and the persistent human habit of draining marshes and wetlands for development, many of which are the source of replenishment for underground aquifers, are also changing the rate at which many aquifers replenish, usually negatively. Unless aquifer replenishment rates are tracked with changes in the climate and local development ("The Yellow river in China, Colorado River in North America, and the Murray River in Australia are amongst the Earth's major rivers that are regularly sucked dry.")[1], those dependent on an aquifer for water may find their wells suddenly going dry even though they have not increased their water extraction.
There is another aspect to the term "mining water" that is particularly worrisome for the future. Water rights to surface water in most areas today require a water rights license, even if the water runs through or touches your property. That license spells out what source of water you have access to and how much water from that source you are permitted to use. If the term and concept of "mining water" works its way into government bureaucratic lexicon you may also need a license to access the groundwater beneath your own property - some jurisdictions already require it - a license that similarly specifies how much of that water you have a right to use. In international trade agreements, and in the conditions attached to IMF and Worldbank loans to developing countries, water services and water rights are a commodity that is increasingly required to be open for commercial trade. It is possible, as clean surface water sources become increasingly scarce, that your groundwater may become an important tradeable commodity for which you are going to have to compete against the highest commercial bidder. With the majority of aquifers already under pressure from over exploitation governments everywhere may decide that growing demand for commercial groundwater access is exactly why there is a need of government control and private access restriction.
For me, in addition, the term also has a strong personal meaning which, I believe, clearly illustrates a broader issue. The southeastern Ontario community I grew up in was a mining town. A mile southeast of home, the constantly-growing, flat-top mountain of slag clearly visible from anywhere in town and the surrounding area, there was a large, open-pit iron ore mine that was the town's main employer during my growing-up years. When they had tapped out the economically-recoverable iron - there was still plenty of iron but they would have had to go underground to get it - the mining company shut off the pumps that kept the pit from flooding and walked away. They even ripped up their rail line that once delivered tons of crude ore to Lake Ontario for shipping across the lake to a Pennsylvania processing facility. They left behind a massive hole in the ground over 600 feet deep and a mile across.
For the past forty years that "hole" has been filling up with clear, blue water, draining every aquifer in the area. Whether they are replenishable I don't know since no appropriate survey of local aquifers has ever been conducted, though they are currently being studied as part of a broader, provincial groundwater survey. There isn't a well within miles, nonetheless, that still has water in it. The community, fortunately, takes its municipal water from the river that runs through town but the water mains end at the town limits. The farmers and other rural residents in the area over aquifers that are draining into the mine, being all those south and east of the town, have been left without a water supply. Perhaps, in another hundred years or so, when the water level in the "mine" comes up to the level of what was the local water table, those wells may produce water again, if they are replenishable and the flow characteristics of the aquifers haven't been irreversibly damaged. The periodic tremors in the area since the mine closure are a sign, unfortunately, that some such damage may be occurring as the aquifers drain, or may have occurred as a result of the tremendous blasts while the mine was in operation.
A full two thirds of the world's people already rely almost exclusively on underground aquifers for their drinking water and over half of global agricultural irrigation uses groundwater. But a third of the world's population lives in areas that are already seriously water-stressed. Where the UN established minimum daily requirement is 10 gallons of water per person these areas have an availability of only 1-3 gallons per day and much of the daily challenge and activity revolves around how to acquire water. Water for sanitation and basic hygiene is one of the greatest challenges in these areas and thousands die every day from infections and water-borne diseases. "One child dies every eight seconds from a waterborne disease; 15 million children a year."[4]
Overall as many as half the world's aquifers are already over-exploited, being drawn upon at a rate greater than they can be or are replenished. Too often a slowly-replenishing aquifer that has served the needs of local farmers and residents for centuries comes under pressure from high volume extraction for commercial use. This, for example, was the case for one aquifer in India where a well-known soft drink company built a plant in the area and drew on the aquifer for the water to make their soft drinks. Hundreds of wells in the area went dry, wells that had been in continuous use for hundreds of years, because the replenishment rate on the aquifer could not keep up with the traditional demand plus the high volume extraction by the software company. Repeated law suits consistently came down on the side of the soft drink company. The rapidly growing global demand for clean bottled water is also putting major pressure on many aquifers, most of them deep, pristine non-replenishable fossil aquifers.
Water in an aquifer, like oil in a reservoir, generally does not exist as a unified body like a vast underground lake. But it can. More commonly, it may saturate a layer of sand underground, like the Alberta tar sands, or it may trickle slowly through cracks and cavities in a rock formation. Look at the face of any rock cliff and you will generally see the telltale vertical dark streaks where water is oozing out of these cracks in the stone. Aquifers may be vast in terms of their overall size, like the Ogallala aquifer - a non-replenishable, fossil aquifer - which covers most of the U.S. midwest. Or they may cover only a few thousand square meters or less. And they may be just a few feet below the surface or a mile or more down.
Our romantic image of a water well is the picturesque round bricked well with the peaked roof and a pull-up rope wound round a hand-cranked pulley. The vast majority of wells, however, and most of those developed over the past half-century, are drilled wells with a pump, sometimes a hand pump, sometimes a windmill, but most often a mechanical pump run by electricity or a gasoline engine. It is these powerful electrical and gasoline-driven pumps that have allowed us to exploit ever deeper aquifers, some over a mile deep, in ever greater volumes (while global population has tripled in the past century global water usage has grown more than six-fold, most of that growth from underground aquifers).
Under China's arid north plain, where much of the country's vast quantities of wheat and other grains are grown, there is a shallow aquifer that has been relied upon for centuries to supply water to mostly hand-dug wells. The replenishment rate is slow but for many centuries the amount of water being used from it was below that recharge rate. Now that aquifer has been seriously over-exploited and has been, effectively, sucked dry. But there is also a deeper aquifer under the north plain that is now being tapped thanks to powerful new mechanical pumps. The problem is this deep reservoir is a non-replenishable aquifer, the fossil water in it having been sequestered there for thousands of years. With more and more wells sunk down to this deep aquifer it too may be sucked dry within a few decades leaving China's breadbasket that feeds much of her 1.6-billion people without a source of much-needed irrigation. China's grain production, in fact, has already fallen while half a billion people have been added to the population from its "peak of 392 million tons in 1998 to an estimated 358 million tons in 2005. For perspective, this drop of 34 million tons exceeds the annual Canadian wheat harvest."[2]
An aquifer, like an oil reservoir, covers a large enough area that multiple wells can draw from it at the same time. In India, for example, the relatively few aquifers in the country are being tapped into by more than 22-million wells. And like oil, each additional well drilled into an aquifer increases the depletion rate and has the potential and often does decrease the water available to the other wells. This becomes seriously apparent when the extraction rate of all the wells exceeds the replenishment rate of the aquifer. This vast mining of aquifers in India, for example, is taking its toll and is "lowering water tables in most of the country. In North Gujarat, the water table is falling by 6 meters (20 feet) per year."[2]
There are literally thousands of legal agreements worldwide covering the right of use of surface water in lakes and rivers. But as much as 97% of the world's liquid freshwater is not in these lakes and rivers but rather in underground aquifers. There are essentially no existing agreements covering the use of groundwater, even though many aquifers cross national borders and their over-exploitation on one side of the border is a strong potential source of conflict and even war. Those few agreements that even mention groundwater cover it as an aside and something to be dealt with in the future. But that future is now, if there is to be a future for the world's aquifers and drinkable water for future human generations.
We are taking our underground water sources for granted and treating them with the same reckless abandon that we treat our lakes, rivers and the oceans. "Toxic chemicals are contaminating groundwater on every inhabited continent, endangering the world's most valuable supplies of freshwater, reports a new study from the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based research organization."[3] Just a few U.S. examples, which are similar to examples from other continents, will illustrate the depth and breadth of the problem.
* "Water utilities in the midwestern United States, a region that is highly dependent on groundwater, spend $400 million each year to treat water for just one chemical, the pesticide atrazine. According to the U.S. National Research Council, initial cleanup of contaminated groundwater at some 300,000 sites in the United States could cost up to $1 trillion over the next 30 years."[3]
* "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that about 100,000 gasoline storage tanks are leaking chemicals into groundwater. In Santa Monica, California, wells supplying half the city's water have been closed because of dangerously high levels of the gasoline additive MTBE."[3]
* "Sixty percent of the most hazardous liquid waste in the United States - 34 billion liters per year of solvents, heavy metals, and radioactive materials - is injected directly into deep groundwater via thousands of "injection wells." Although the EPA requires that these effluents be injected below the deepest source of drinking water, some have entered underground water supplies in Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Oklahoma."[3]
Man is the only species on this planet able to and in the practice of exploiting earth's sequestered resources like oil, natural gas, coal, minerals, and water. Apart from the fact we claim an exclusivity that excludes other species with whom we reluctantly share this planet we also, particularly in this past century, seem to have no sense of responsibility for sharing them with future generations of humans, our own children and grandchildren. The resources they will need for their very survival are being voraciously gobbled up and discarded as an assumed birthright in our greedy demands for support of our increasingly decadent lifestyle. If this robbing from future generations were accidental because we did not understand the long-term implications of over-exploitation it would be bad enough. But it is not accidental. We do understand. Our governments and industry organizations pump out reams of statistics every day detailing our crime. And yet we continue on, as if to say to our grandchildren, "To hell with you. I'm going to have a good time as long as I can and it's your problem to figure out how to survive on what's left when our party is over."
==============
Additional reading material:
1) A Global Water Crisis
2) Aquifer Depletion
3) The Hidden Freshwater Crisis
4) UN Highlights World Water Crisis
5) The Hidden Freshwater Crisis
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