The environment – Page 106 – a sibilant intake of breath

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller

Jeff Rubin is a Toronto-based economist for CIBC World Markets, and he has written a book predicting a future of “triple digit” oil, and some of the consequences it will have. While the book is interesting and many aspects of the hypothesis are plausible, the lack of rigour in analysis makes the work less convincing than it might otherwise have been. For one thing, “triple digit” oil covers an awfully broad range. For another, it isn’t clear whether the effects he predicts will unfold in the order he anticipates. For instance, if severe climate change impacts emerge before acute and permanent increases in the price of fossil fuels, the global consequences may look rather different.

When he says that the world is going to get ‘smaller,’ Rubin is reversing the normal sense of globalization having shrunk the world. What he really means is that the world will get larger, relative to our ability to travel and move goods, and that we will have a correspondingly more local focus as a result. That means less imports of all kinds, less travel, and the re-localization of industry. Rubin’s strongest points and arguments relate to the production and use of fossil fuels: such as the effect of domestically subsidized fuels in oil producing states, the limitations associated with energy efficiency, the problems with corn ethanol, and the importance of energy return on investment, when contemplating alternative fuels and sources of energy.

Rubin’s habit of mixing established fact with speculation, and sometimes dismissing important possibilities with a brief splash of rhetoric, makes this book more valuable as a prod to thinking than as a guide to what is likely to happen. The book also contains the occasional overt error, such as referring to prosperous South Korea as the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ – rather than the tyrannical regime to the north. The chapter on climate change was certainly lacking in ways that make me doubt the overall quality of Rubin’s understanding and analysis. He doesn’t really seem to grasp the concept of a stabilization pathway, technological wedges, or the physical realities that must accompany the stabilization of greenhouse gasses at a safe level. His discussion of electrical generation – in both fossil fuel based and alternative forms – is similarly lacking in detailed and rigorous evaluation.

In the end, Rubin’s work is an interesting way to set yourself thinking about the effect that constrained energy ability would have upon the world and your life. When it comes to evaluating the macroeconomic and societal consequences of such a development, the book would probably best be read alongside a more transparent and quantitative analysis, such as that in David MacKay’s book on sustainable energy.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

This film is worth seeing, if only to dispel the notion that all the electric vehicles that existed in the last few decades were awkward, short-range creations. The EV1 looks about as good as the forthcoming Chevy volt, got 260km per charge (with the second generation Ni-MH battery, apparently available from the outset), and was released in 1996. The film also helps to illustrate some of the relationships between lawmaking, regulation, and strategic industrial behaviour. Sadly, it also hints at the general willingness of political bodies and even bureaucracies to fold in the face of industry pressure, even when industries are acting against their own long-term best interest. Indeed, the film makes a reasonably compelling case that the American auto industry conspired to crush the electric vehicle as an alternative to the gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine car.

The film also does a decent job of highlighting that the hydrogen car has always been a deeply unlikely proposition; hydrogen is just an energy carrier, and it is a deeply problematic one. Fuel cells are expensive and don’t last very long. Hydrogen takes energy to produce and compress of liquefy. It is tough to store, and there is no fuel distribution infrastructure for it. Compared to all that, electricity looks very appealing.

The film does seem to contribute to the common argument that our current approach to automobile regulation lacks vision, especially given the degree to which auto companies are now creatures of government largesse. Given climate change, given the possibility of peak oil, given the geopolitical consequences of oil dependence, it really seems as though they should be under much stronger pressure to produce very efficient vehicles, as well as vehicles that do not derive their energy from fossil fuels. Now that the government and unions own GM, perhaps they can insist on digging up any corporate records that haven’t been destroyed, with respect to internal deliberations on electric vehicle strategies, as well as responding to California’s mandate for zero emission vehicles.

Individual vehicles won’t ever really be an efficient option, compared with mass transit. That being said, it is unlikely that we will see their abandonment in the developed world, nor much diminished interest in them in the rising middle classes of developing states. If we are going to keep building cars, we need to do so far more intelligently. Electric vehicles will likely be a big part of that.

[Update: 2:11pm In retrospect, some of the film’s conspiratorial allegations may be less convincing than they appear at first blush. It is certainly plausible that oil companies would have a reason to resist the widespread deployment of vehicles that are not dependent on their key product, but it is another thing entirely to prove that they actually took action in that direction.

Subsidized oil in producing states

It is widely understood that oil-producing states like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Iran provide huge fuel subsidies to their citizens: selling them oil for a fraction of what it would fetch on the global market. Indeed, Iran is a major importer of gasoline, partly because domestic refineries are only able to produce and sell it at a loss. The most egregious example of all may be electricity in Saudi Arabia, about half of which comes from oil. A 2006 royal decree set the price paid by power plants for oil at 0.46 cents per million BTU: equivalent to $3 per barrel of oil, or $0.07 per gallon. That this is happening while companies are using up huge amounts of natural gas to produce synthetic crude in the Canadian oil sands is a demonstration of how irrational global energy use can be.

Indeed, with oil consumption growing at 5% per year in OPEC countries, between 2004 and 2007, they have actually contributed almost as much to increased global consumption as China has. One estimate holds that continued increases in domestic usage by OPEC states will cut their exports by 2.5 million barrels per day by 2010. That is about a quarter of total American oil use.

Hedging against ‘peak oil’

Previously, we have had a discussion about how to invest in a way that protects you from inflation, at least to some extent. Another risk worth considering is that fossil fuel availability and affordability might decline sharply in coming decades. This could be the product of any combination of declining output and rising demand, resulting in greatly increased prices and reduced availability. Such an outcome is especially likely if we resist the pressure to chase down every unconventional oil and gas deposit as conventional fields continue to decline in their production.

Both in terms of life choices and investments, it seems like there are behaviours that can be adopted to reduce vulnerability to peak oil. Of course, there are associated costs. Putting solar panels on your roof to reduce dependence on the grid is expensive; so too is investing in assets that are less vulnerable, but which have a lower return associated. The challenge, then, is to assess whether peak oil is a genuine risk across the next half-century or so, as well as identify the most cost-effective responses to deploy if it is decided that the risk is a meaningful one.

Steven Chu on the oil sands

Apparently, Energy Secretary Steven Chu thinks that technology will somehow make oil sands extraction compatible with climatic stability. While the The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers was quick to praise his statement, it is wrong for a series of reasons. When it comes to emissions from the extraction and upgrading of bitumen, many are to dispersed to be compatible with carbon capture and storage (CCS), even if it does emerge as a safe, effective, and affordable technology. More importantly, about 85% of the emissions associated with oil derived from the Athabasca oil sands are generated when the fuels are burned. On one hand, that means that oil from that source isn’t enormously dirtier than oil from other sources (when considering only greenhouse gas emissions). On the other, it isn’t really the relative dirtiness of fuels that will determine how much warming we experience, but rather the cumulative quantity of greenhouse gasses added to the atmosphere. Climatic stability depends on keeping most of the carbon in coal and unconventional oil buried: not putting it into fuels that will be burned in the atmosphere, with waste products emerging to warm the planet.

Chu is a good enough scientist to realize that we cannot square the circle of unrestrained hydrocarbon usage and climatic stability. Unfortunately, it seems that politics still haven’t advanced to the point where not using fossil fuel resources is seriously contemplated. That is short-sighted and a shame, not least because it perpetuates the development and emergence of techological and economic systems that are fundamentally unsustainable. Rather than coveting the hydrocarbon resources of western Canada, North American leaders need to get serious about harnessing the renewable resources of the continent, while cutting total energy consumption towards the point where it can be renewably provided.

Anthony Cary on climate change and the recession

Earlier today, I saw a presentation by Anthony Cary, the British High Commissioner to Canada. He was talking about why this recession has involved less of a diminished interest in environmental protection than previous ones, as well as about the upcoming climate change negotiations in Copenhagen.

Detailed notes from the presentation are on my wiki, along with notes from other presentations on climate change.

Carnot efficiency

For a bit of light entertainment, I have been reading Tom Rogers’ book Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics, which basically covers the same terrain as his entertaining website, though at greater length and with more detail. Of course, one can never entirely escape climate change related information, and the book includes a discussion of Carnot efficiency: the maximum theoretical efficiency with which heat engines can convert thermal energy into useful power.

The efficiency depends on two factors: the high temperature produced using combustion, solar energy, geothermal energy, etc, and the cold temperature where the heat is expended into the surrounding environment:

Efficiency = ( 1 – Cold temperature / Hot temperature ) * 100

This has implications for technologies like the co-generation of heat and power. If the heat source for a power plant is 375°C (648°K) and it is dumping waste heat into 10°C (283°K) outdoor weather, the Carnot efficiency is about 56.3% (the actual efficiency is lower, for various reasons). If, instead, it is dumping the heat into buildings at 25°C (198°K), the Carnot efficiency falls to 54.0%. In a case where the heat source is just 200°C (473°K), the difference between a 10°C cold area and a 25°C cold area cuts the Carnot efficiency from 40.2% to 37.0%. In many cases, cogeneration is still worthwhile, despite the loss of useful electrical or kinetic energy, but it should be appreciated that the redirection is not without cost.

Carnot efficiency also helps explain why waste heat is not always worth capturing. If the temperature difference between the source and an available destination for the thermal energy is not large, there isn’t much useful power that can be produced.

[Update: 4:47pm] Remember to express the temperatures in Degrees Kelvin, by adding 273.15 to the figure in Degrees Celsius.

Human rights and climate change

Over at Grist, there is a discussion about whether human rights are a useful perspective for thinking about climate change, as well as how they might be applied at the legal or institutional level to improve climate change outcomes. For instance, future generations could be appointed guardians within the legal system, in the same way in which children have legal guardians appointed to represent them in court.

The idea is a nice one, but it overlooks the degree to which legal and political decisions largely emerge as the products of political and economic influence, neither of which is possessed by future generations, within today’s political system. As such, these guardians would likely end up unpopular (for trying to block projects that would benefit those living and influential now) and powerless (for the lack of a real constituency to back them).

My general position on human rights is that they do not have moral force in and of themselves – they are just a shorthand way of encouraging good outcomes. For instance, it is the consequences of protecting free speech that make it a moral imperative to do so, not some metaphysical characteristic embedded in human beings. As with other areas of ethical thinking, human rights can be a useful heuristic when dealing with climate change, but what really matters is developing the mechanisms of thinking and action that will prevent the worst possible outcomes, while also seeking to secure the complimentary benefits that could accompany a global transition to carbon neutrality.

The value of private cars in cities

In the midst of the discussion about the ethics of traveling to Vancouver, the issue of how cars have benefited and harmed people living in urban areas came up. It is undeniable that they have been a major transformative force, when it comes to the shape and character of cities.

To me, it seems that private cars in cities do more harm than good, for a slew of reasons:

They kill a lot of people: both drivers and pedestrians.
They take up a lot of space and alter urban design in negative ways, contributing to sprawl and vast areas of just residential or just commercial zoning.
Sprawl reduces natural and agricultural space. It also leads to people commuting, which is a major waste of their time.
They pollute and emit greenhouse gasses.
They are loud.
They cause neighbours to know one another less than they otherwise would.
They help make many states dependent on oil exports, and frequently involve them militarily in Middle Eastern conflicts.
They have made roads into hostile spaces for everything but automobiles, whereas previously they were more versatile public spaces.
The roads they require are built with public money, though they do not provide value to everyone, and contribute to serious negative externalities.
They use energy quite inefficiently, since they move faster than is sensible, and the mass of the vehicle itself far exceeds that of passengers and cargo.

If it were possible to re-design cities, I think it would be better if they excluded cars entirely within their cores and had a lot of dedicated transit and bicycle routes. Stores could be permitted to have delivery vehicles for large items, and taxis could continue to exist, but the use of private cars within city limits would ideally be eliminated.

What points would people offer to defend private cars in cities? Also, are there and indictments against them I missed?

Balancing the environment and economy

When dealing with climate change, politicians often talk about the need to ‘balance the economy and the environment.’ I think this is a misleading categorization for two reasons.

Firstly, the balance has always been tilted virtually 100% towards the economy, in Canada at least. When the government talks about the need to scale back climate mitigation programs for economic reasons, they are talking about scaling back a handful of ineffectual programs that are not proving effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The ‘balance’ dial between environment and economy is already twisted sharply towards the latter.

Secondly, even if we completely ignore the natural environment, the need to mitigate emissions remains. The Canadian economy could not survive the consequences of unrestrained emissions and climate change, with a temperature increase of 5.5°C to 7.1°C by 2100. If we care at all about the state of the economy 20, 50, and 80 years out, we need to avoid catastrophic climate change.

The economic analyses of mitigation that have been undertaken in the UK, Australia, and elsewhere have painted the same broad picture: it is possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly at a modest cost, provided you start early. The costs associated with inaction are much higher than those associated with this mitigation programme. To succeed, the whole economy needs to be pushed in the direction of decarbonization – a fact that remains true regardless of what balance you care to strike between economic health across the long term and environmental protection.