Oil’s next century

Spiky blue flowers

With oil prices at levels rivaling those during the crises of the 1970s, virtually everyone is clamouring for predictions about medium and long-term prices. Those concerned about climate change are also very actively wondering what effect higher hydrocarbon prices will have.

In order to know what the future of oil looks like, answers are required to a number of questions:

  1. How will the supply of oil change during the decades ahead? How many new reserves will be found, where, and with what price of extraction? How much can Saudi Arabia and Russia expand production? When will their output peak?
  2. How will the demand for oil change? How much and how quickly will high prices depress demand in developed states? What about fast growing developing states like India and China?
  3. At what rate, and what cost, will oil alternatives emerge. Will anyone work out how to produce cellulosic ethanol? Will the development of oil sands and/or oil shale continue apace?
  4. What geopolitical consequences will prices have? If prices are very high, will that prove destabilizing within or between states?
  5. Will the emerging alternatives to oil be carbon intensive (oil sands, corn ethanol) or relatively green (cellulosic ethanol, biomass to liquids)?

Of course, nobody knows the answer to any of this with certainty. There are ideological optimists who assert that humanity will respond to incentives, innovate, and prosper. There are those who allege that oil production is bound to crash, and that civilization as we know it is likely to crash as well.

Mindful of the dangers of prediction, I will hold off on expressing an opinion of my own right now. The magnitude of the questions is far too great to permit solution by one limited mind. What contemplating the variables does allow is an appreciation for the vastness and importance of the issue. Virtually any combination of answers to the questions above will bring new complications to world history.

Capturing waste heat

Insect on pink flower

Comment threads on this blog have previously been rife with discussion about boosting the efficiency of industrial processes through the use of waste heat. It does seem intuitively undesirable to have something like a nuclear power plant venting a significant portion of the total energy being expended from fission in the form of hot air or water being dumped out into the natural environment.

A machine installed at Southern Methodist University demonstrates that there are situations where waste heat can produce a decent amount of electricity (50 kilowatts) at an acceptable cost, and with a payback period of just three or four years. The machine uses an Organic Rankine Cycle, in which a high molecular mass organic fluid is used to convey the waste heat. This is necessary to produce useful work, and eventually electricity, from relatively low temperature sources. As energy prices continue to rise, you can expect to see more such equipment being developed and deployed.

Almost nothing is sustainable

Tree branches overhanging water

Sustainable development’ is an expression that you hear a great deal. It was famously defined by the Brundtland Commission as meeting the needs of the current generation without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This seems sensible enough, but it raises two major questions: how do we identify the ‘needs’ of this generation, and how do we anticipate the capabilities of future ones.

Most talk of sustainability these days is nonsense. The simple reason for that is that very little of what we do is sustainable. Nothing dependent upon fossil fuels is sustainable, so there go most of our forms of transportation, a lot of our electrical generation, and most of global agriculture. Nothing that destroys the long-term productivity of agricultural land is sustainable, but much of our agriculture does just that. Continually requiring more fertilizers to cope with loss of soil nutrients is not sustainable. Virtually no fisheries anywhere in the world are used in a sustainable way (none when you consider the impact climate change will have on them). Finally, nothing that contributes to accelerating climate change is sustainable; that doesn’t really create sharp categories between what is or is not sustainable. Rather, it gives an idea about the total intensity of all the greenhouse gas emitting things we undertake must be.

What does this generation need?

The matter of defining the ‘needs’ of the current generation is enormous and partially irresolvable. At one absurd extreme is the flawed idea that people have the right to continue living as they always have. Asserting this is akin to a French aristocrat facing the guillotine, arguing that his life of privilege so far justifies more privilege in the future. We cannot have a right to something that demands unacceptable sacrifices from others – particularly when that right hasn’t been earned in any meaningful way. At the other extreme is the assertion that nobody has any right to material things and that people starving around the world and dying from treatable, preventable diseases have no credible moral claim to additional resources. Somewhere between the two lies the truth. The important thing isn’t to work out precisely where, but to generate a universal understanding that constraint is going to need to be a part of human life, if we are to survive in the long term.

Arguably, ‘needs’ are entirely the wrong way to think about things. Instead of starting with who we are and what we want, perhaps we should start with what there is and what impact that has on how we can live, where we can be, and how many of us there can be at any one time.

How capable will future generations be?

The matter of the capabilities of those in the future is similarly challenging. Our expectations about the future produce a ‘treadmill’ effect, where we expect added financial wealth and improved technology to make future generations better off despite how more resources have been depleted, more climatic damage done, and more pollutants released into the environment. If people in the future are super-resourceful technological wizards, the degree of restraint we need to observe in order to accommodate them is small. No wonder this belief is so popular among those seeking to defend the status quo.

Of course, it is possible that future generations will have less capability to satisfy their needs than we do. Most obviously, this could be because of the depletion of fossil fuels (a vast and easily accessed form of energy) or because of the impacts of climate change. To some extent, we need to take such risks into consideration when we are deciding what duties we owe to future generations. Any such consideration will require passing along more resilience, in the form of more resources and a healthier planet.

What might sustainability look like?

Quite possibly, the only people in the world living sustainably are those in small agricultural communities with little or no connection to the outside world. Since they do not import energy, they must be sustainable users of it. Even such communities, however, need not necessarily be sustainable. Unless they have a low enough population density to keep their food production from slowly degrading the land, they too are living on borrowed time.

Producing a sustainable global system probably requires all or most of the following:

  1. The stabilization of global population, perhaps at a level significantly below that of today.
  2. The exclusive use of renewable sources of energy, derived using equipment produced in sustainable ways.
  3. Agriculture without fossil fuels, and with soil and crop management sufficient to make it repeatable indefinitely.
  4. Sustainable transport of old (sailing ships) and new (solar-electric ground vehicles) kinds.
  5. The preservation of ecosystems that provide critical services: for instance, tropical forests that regulate climate.
  6. An end to anthropogenic climate change.

While it is technically possible that we could manage to build problems and solve them through clever technology indefinitely, it does seem as though doing so is risky and probably unethical. It may be more prudent to begin the transition towards a world unendingly capable of providing what we desire from it.

Selling ‘clean coal’

Milan Ilnyckyj in The Manx pub

In the spirit of the laughable ads from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, there is a new offering from the coal industry. The strategy seems to be shifting from “there is no reason to believe in climate change” to “anything that would harm the fossil fuel industry would cause unacceptable harm to consumers.”

‘Clean coal’ will always be a non-sensical statement, given the environmental damage done by coal mining, the toxic emissions, and greenhouse gasses. Even with carbon sequestration, coal will be a dirty way of generating power. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that coal in combination with carbon capture and storage will be a source of cheap energy. As the cancellation of FutureGen due to cost overruns suggests, clean coal isn’t cheap.

American climate change impacts report

Because of a 2006 lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, a judge in Oakland California ordered the release of the Climate Change Science Programs (CCSP) assessment of climate change impacts in the United States. In total, the public release of the report was delayed for three years. The report – Scientific Assessment of the Effects of Global Climate Change on the United States – is now available online. It is not unlike the impacts report previously released by Natural Resources Canada.

None of the contents of the CCSP report will be surprising to those who have been paying attention to what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been releasing. Indeed, that is not surprising. The IPCC is looking at the same scientific evidence when they reach their judgments. One thing that would have been helpful would have been a more comprehensive effort to estimate the total economic damages associated with different plausible levels of climate change. It is information of that kind that seems most salient to those making hard choices about what actions to take.

Border guards and copyright enforcement

According to Boing Boing, Canadian border guards may soon be in charge of checking iPods and other devices for copyright infringement. If true, the plan is absurd for several reasons. For one, it would be impossible for them to determine whether a DRM-free song on your iPod was legitimately ripped from a CD you own or downloaded from the web. For another, this is a serious misuse of their time. It would be a distraction from decidedly more important tasks, like looking for illegal weapons, and probably a significant irritant to both those being scrutinized and those waiting at border crossings.

Hopefully these rumours of secret plans – also picked up by the Vancouver Sun are simply false.

Monbiot to King Abdaullah

Sunglasses

British journalist and climate change agitator George Monbiot has written an interesting open letter to King Abdaullah of Saudi Arabia. He comments on the degree to which remaining oil supplies in Saudi Arabia are one of the biggest geopolitical mysteries out there, and how Saudi Arabia retains a unique influence to manage oil prices. He also comments on the contradictory policies of western leaders who both assert that they want to solve climate change and continue to envision a world in which oil is cheap and plentiful:

In other words, your restrictions on supply – voluntary or otherwise – are helping the government to meet its carbon targets. So how does it respond? By angrily demanding that you remove them so that we can keep driving and flying as much as we did before. Last week, Gordon Brown averred that it’s “a scandal that 40% of the oil is controlled by Opec, that their decisions can restrict the supply of oil to the rest of the world, and that at a time when oil is desperately needed, and supply needs to expand, that Opec can withhold supply from the market”. In the United States, legislators have gone further: the House of Representatives has voted to bring a lawsuit against Opec’s member states, and Democratic senators are trying to block arms sales to your kingdom unless you raise production.

This illustrates one of our leaders’ delusions. They claim to wish to restrict the demand for fossil fuels, in order to address both climate change and energy security. At the same time, to quote Britain’s Department for Business, they seek to “maximise economic recovery” from their remaining oil, gas and coal reserves. They persist in believing that both policies can be pursued at once, apparently unaware that if fossil fuels are extracted they will be burnt, however much they claim to wish to reduce consumption. The only states that appear to be imposing restrictions on the supply of fuel are the members of Opec, about which Brown so bitterly complains. Your Majesty, we have gone mad, and you alone can cure our affliction, by keeping your taps shut.

The letter is a somewhat cheeky way for Monbiot to make his points – appealing to the autocratic ruler of a foreign state to help temper the bad policies of his own government – but it does share the intriguing quality of most of his writing.

More and more, people need to gain an appreciation that concerns about climate change and energy security do not always push us in the same policy direction. Concern about climate change tells us to change our infrastructure, cut back on energy use, and use the energy we have more intelligently. Energy security often presses us towards a desperate search for alternative fuels, regardless of what environmental consequences their production may have.

Net neutrality

Curved bench in Toronto

Today, there is a rally on Parliament Hill in favour of net neutrality. Basically, these people are arguing that internet and telephone companies should not sift through the kind of data their customers are using: designating some for the fast stream and letting some linger or vanish.

In general, I am very supportive of the idea of net neutrality. On the one hand, this is because packet filtering has creepy privacy and surveillance issues associated with it. On the other, it recognizes that established companies will usually do whatever they can to strangle innovative competitors. Without net neutrality, its a fair bet that we would never have had Skype or the World Wide Web.

At the same time, there are legitimate issues about bandwidth. There are people out there exchanging many gigabytes a day worth of movies, music, and games. I am not too concerned with piracy and intellectual property, but that traffic is a real strain on the network and a burden to others. It pushes up costs for everyone as ordinary users subsidize excessive ones.

The best solution seems to be to allow bandwidth capping but disallow packet filtering. That way, sending a terabyte a month of illegally copied films will be restricted, but Skype-like new services will continue to emerge and there will be fewer general opportunites for telecom companies to abuse.

I cannot go to the rally myself, since I will be at work, but I would encourage those who are free and feeling a bit activist to attend.

Historical emissions and adaptation costs

Emily at a coffee shop in Kensington Market, Toronto

It is widely acknowledged that developing countries will suffer a great deal from climate change. They are vulnerable to effects like rising sea levels and increased frequency and severity of extreme weather. They also have more limited means available to respond, as well as other serious problems to deal with. Providing adaptation funding is therefore seen as an important means of getting them on-side for climate change mitigation. It could be offered as an incentive to cut emissions.

That being said, there is a strong case to be made that developing countries should not need to do anything in exchange for adaptation funding. Making them do so is essentially akin to injuring someone, then demanding something in return for the damages they win against you in court. The historical emissions of developed states have primarily induced the climate change problem; as such, developing states suffering from its effects have a right to demand compensation.

Very roughly, the developed world as a whole is responsible for about 70% of emissions to date. The United States has produced about 22% of the anthropogenic greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere; Western Europe is responsible for about 17%; Canada represents something like 2% of the total. It can be argued that – by rights – states like Bangladesh and Ghana should be dividing their total costs for adaptation and sending the bill to other states, on the basis of historical emissions.

That being said, it is only fair to say that developed states are only culpable for a portion of their total emissions, on account of how the science of climate change was not well understood until fairly recently. Exactly where to draw the line is unclear, but that doesn’t especially matter since developing states simply don’t have the power to demand adaptation transfers on the basis of past harms. States that developed through the extensive use of fossil fuels will continue to use the influence they acquired through that course of military and economic strengthening to make others bear most of the costs for their pollution.

Harper on gas prices and carbon taxes

One thing for which you need to give Stephen Harper some credit: unlike the American presidential candidates, he is willing to admit that the government cannot do much to reduce gasoline prices. Unfortunately, he is also using those high prices to oppose carbon taxes, probably the most economically efficient economy-wide mechanism for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.