What Are Your Energy Policy Recommendations?
Posted by Robert Rapier on February 2, 2007 - 12:15pm
Let’s brainstorm some solutions to our fossil fuels crisis. Let’s say that you have been made dictator of the world. Your policies are going to be implemented without question. What energy policies would you enact? (Let’s restrict this to energy, as this could really get way off topic otherwise.)
Here is what I would do (with respect to the U.S.) I would go on TV and just have a frank conversation with the public. I would hit on both Global Warming and Peak Oil, explaining that we have to find other energy solutions because 1). Peak Oil is going to force us to; and 2). Global Warming is strongly suggesting that we do it ASAP. I would go on to explain that there are no magic technological solutions waiting in the wings to save us. We aren’t going to go to the filling station and fill up on E85 or hydrogen. At least not any time soon. Sacrifice is required, for the sake of future generations. I would explain some of the possible scenarios if we don’t begin to sacrifice now. We either plan it now, or it hits us later with no parachutes for the fall.
The problem, I would explain, is that fossil fuels are simply too cheap. We use them too casually. We must stop doing this. We have to stop and really think about our fossil fuel usage. So, starting today, the tax on fossil fuels will be increased by $3/(barrel of oil equivalent) each month for at least the next 3 years, at which time this tax will be reviewed. The tax will apply to crude oil, natural gas, coal, tar sands, shale oil, etc. All fossil fuels. This tax increase is only $0.0714 per gallon per month (with an additional increment of $0.0714 per gallon each month), and a tax credit will be initially be provided for those making less than $50,000 a year (because I am a benevolent dictator). The tax credit in the early years will be high enough to offset the impact on the average consumer’s life. However, given that you know prices are going to be increasing, there is a tremendous incentive to begin conserving. Our ultimate objective is sustainability.
The money raised from this tax will be funneled into public transportation, alternative fuel research, conservation incentives, and the development of walkable communities. Proposals will be reviewed by a panel of scientists and engineers from the appropriate disciplines in academia and industry. Suggestions from the public are welcome, and will be considered based on technical merit. (No cars that run on water, though).
So, that would be the cornerstone of my energy policy. What are your suggestions? What are some alternatives to this? Or do you believe the market will provide, and such steps are unnecessary?
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Dang R2, now for a second repost!
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I think you misunderstand what I am trying to get at. Let me be a little more elaborate on what I was thinking. Contrary to what many might say, there is more then enough uranium and thorium to allow us to produce most if not all of our electricity via nuclear fission. The current breakdown in energy generation in the US is:
18% Nuclear
15% Hydro
2% Wind and Solar
5% Oil
14% Natural GAs
46% Coal
From my understanding, Coal and Nuclear are considered 'base load' energy producers, as they can not be turned off and on quickly enough to meet rising and falling energy demand. Instead we use oil, gas and hydro with a dash of renewable energy generation to meet peak load.
As per these limitations, its hard to have more then 50% nuclear energy generation unless you have a viable way to either store the energy, or export the energy to other countries. France does the latter, but no one does the former.
Hydrogen of course is extremely difficult to store for long durations, and very difficult to transport from one location to another for on site use, such as in transportation. But it seems to me that people have largely ignored one option.
What I'm suggesting, or at least asking questions about, is what is preventing the US, aside from political opposition, from increasing our nuclear energy generation ratio to around 60%, and using the excessive energy generation for hydrogen production from electrolysis. The hydrogen could be stored in large containers at night time when not needed, and used in hydrogen fired power plants during the day to meet peak load, as opposed to using NG.
Any excessive hydrogen generation could be processed into ammonia for fertilizers and for upgrading very heavy hydrocarbon deposits for limited oil use in earth moving equipment or transportation. Granted, such a schemed would reduce the already extremely high EROEI of nuclear from 100+ to 1 to perhaps 33% less, as energy is obviously lost in creating and storing hydrogen than can be produced by using hydrogen in a gas fired plant.
The benefits of such a setup are numerous:
1. As I already mentioned, the hydrogen can be used for a variety of critical fields.
2. We would not require a complete retooling of our infastructure to store energy, unlike other proposals to have giant molten salt flats or huge caverns of latent wind energy, or even pumped water storage in a mountain hold.
3. It would replace most, if not all of our electrical carbon pollution in the long term.
4. We could build both nuclear and hydrogen fired gas plants at the same site, eliminating much of the transportation costs.
Assuming such a plan were put into place, I could easily see a setup like this:
60% Nuclear
15% Hydro
25% Hydrogen Gas
+10% Hydrogen 'storage' and 'upgrading'
In short, to me it seems to be a win-win situation for all. But that brings me back to my original question:
Assuming this setup in which hydrogen generation is obviously not a problem, what are the technical limitations to using hydrogen instead of natural gas in a gas fired power plant?
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Now, in addition to this, I would mandate that all new vehicles produced would be hybrids, followed by plug in hybrids and eventually full EVs. This transition would take 5-10 years until every new vehicle produced is an EV. I would also ban incandescent light bulb sales from the beginning, and set up a new building code that requires one light switch operated power outlet to be placed in every room in the house. Think of all the 'phantom load' energy we would save :P
Hothgor - If the issue is one of short term energy storage why not use compressed air in salt caverns? The geology can accept a high degree of overpressure; Spindletop proved that. When generation is greater then demand you run compressors rather then the generators. When peak loads come on you begin to draw down your compressed air storage.
I may be wrong here but it seems this would be a lot cheaper to implement then hydrogen storage. As for storage locations, I understand the USA has something called an SPR which will probably empty out pretty quick once peak oil arrives.
Cheers!
There are only certain geographical areas where compressed air or water storage is actually viable. For the vast majority of the country, no such options are available. The hydrogen storage is not really a costly part of this setup: we are talking about storing hydrogen over night to be used during the day. Some leaking is expected to happen, but the point is that you can build these storage tanks on site of your dual nuclear/hydrogen gas power plants and use it as needed. The rest could be siphoned off for ammonia production and heavy hydrocarbon upgrading, as I already mentioned. The total EROEI of the nuclear plant would most likely only be reduced by about 33%. When your talking about a setup that has 100+ to 1 EROEI, its a non-issue.
From an economic standpoint, I think it would be FAR cheaper to do this then to build high capacity power lines to 'ship' power from storage sites to where its needed, not to mention build the infrastructure required for geological energy storage. And as I mentioned on another thread, the cost of such a system is probably dramatically cheaper then trying to build enough wind turbines to meet our base load. Someone mentioned it would cost $600 billion to 1 trillion to build the 240 nuclear power plants needed. How much would it cost to build 1.2 TWh of wind turbines?
Edit: I seem to recall that our power grid was estimated to need 1-2 trillion in funding to upgrade it for variable energy production. The economic benefits of this setup should speak for itself.
If you are dictator of the world, you can build as many nuclear power stations as you like. You can even elect to throw 50% of their power output away to sattisfy peak without storage because on this massive scale you can build them so cheaply that even that won't matter. And since your underlings can't complain when a couple of them blow up because you chose not to install any safety measures, even that won't matter. That's how the USSR used to deal with problems. Look how well it worked for them.
The bottom line is that if you are a democratically elected politician, you can't do any of this.
The challenge is therefor posed in the wrong way. Not every technical solution that would work in principle will be practical in the real world.
"Not every technical solution that would work in principle will be practical in the real world."
true, but EVERY solution that will be practical in the real world will work in principle. So RR is proposing a brainstorming session to come up with technically feasible strategies. It is like in an intro physics class when they say "assume no friction" it is to make the problem work with the pure equation. There are thousands of environmental and political/economic factors in the experiment but are ignoring those for the initial session. Hammer out the details later.
Thats why I'm focused on liquid nitrogen or frozen C02 storage. Liquidfied methane or other organic or cheap refrigerant is a possibility.
Liquid nitrogen is the most interesting IMHO.
Use corn or other biological material instead oil,gas,coal for generation of electicity seems like an obviously solution. Railroad instead of trucks must be a very good idea the energy consumption is much lower and maximum allowed speed for freighter trains at least in sweden are 120km/h = 74.6mph which is faster than the maximum allowed speed for trucks.
Great discussion topic. Thanks, Robert.
Tradeable credits (or, somewhat less effectively, a tax credit that is independent of quantity consumed) give a strong incentive to conserve. When this was suggested a few months ago, numerous flames erupted, and that response puzzled me. If you're rich, you can still drive your Hummer. If you're not, you can drive less and more economically, share rides, and so on-keep your costs lower and make money on selling the credits. They could be made easily tradeable on the web or with ATM cards.
I'd not be keen on pouring lots of money into research, knowing how easy it is for working scientists to promise never to be realized benefits, and also knowing the very LONG (sometimes infinite) time lag between scientific feasibility and significant practical implementation. We know lots of actions that have large, early benefit, such as electrified rail and reducing the use of trucks and single person cars, hybrid or diesel vehicles.
If dictator of just the US, I would make Nevada (yes 3% of the US) into the national Solar panel.
Why not every southern aspect rooftop first, with a mandate of all new construction has a roof corresponding to its latitude and one continuous slope facing south?
If you solar panelled all of nevada how would that power get to Miami?
At the same time why not place offshore wind up the whole eastern seaboard and great lakes? The population densities are high along those coasts as is the wind resource.
Oilrig medic writes
"Why not every southern aspect rooftop first, with a mandate of all new construction has a roof corresponding to its latitude and one continuous slope facing south?"
I couldn't agree more. Use the grid to transfer N,S,E,W,
:-)
Except for a few differences and an addition, I think you are right on. Basic negative incentive is a carbon tax, possibly with some loopholes for use in food production persuits (fertilizer, farming etc). I wouldn't say what would or will not replace fossil fuel, leave that to the market. In addition to a major effort to invest in transit, I would also offer grants, education etc for localities persuing compact, walkable, sustainable communities. To me, this has to proceed with the investment in public transportation or else it won't work. These would mostly be offered as incentives to the private sector (deferred/waived taxes on land improvements in the right place of the right type). I would try to avoid negative disinsentives (other than the carbon tax).
Edit: Actually I see I missed the mention you made of walkable communities in your spend plan - so I guess you covered it all!
If something becomes expensive enough the price will encourage illicit activity: theft, smuggling etc. I have visions of security guards at every gas station, observation cameras along every pipeline. You can drain most vehicle gas tanks in a few minutes by simply undoing a plug at the bottom. And so on. Look what the recent price of copper has done for the theft of everything from brass plaques on monuments to live telephone cable. Otherwise this is a great idea. I don't have a better one.
Remembering the Archdruid's triage article from the other day, I think silicon-based microelectronics and PV power are two technologies worth hanging on to...
Cap and trade is not a nonsensical loophole. It allows the market to most efficiently reach a particular level of emissions.
"A carbon tax, with no cap-and-trade or other nonsensical loopholes. Repeal most other taxes and replace them with the carbon tax. It would serve 2 purposes:
* Encourage conservation;
* Make the price of fossil-based energy more constant, or at least predictable."
There are 2 actors in every tax scheme. This one would make gov't more dependant on carbon use for its income base, thus creating a motivation for them to encourage it
Ahh, but I'm the dictator of the world. If the carbon tax isn't supplying enough revenue, I'll just demand tribute from all my li'l subjects out there :-)
The main point of the tax is to make carbon-based fuel relatively expensive and thereby discourage its use. There is, of course, the sometimes conflicting goal of maintaining a steady, consistent price for FFs to keep the economy going.
Sound's like you have this "dictator" thing figured out according to the "traditional" model from history, pity that.
You could have chosen to reduce consumption with a non-price based system i.e. rationing, (The "Oil depletion protocol" would be an example of such a scheme) but instead you chose a price based one i.e. a "consumption tax".
The critical difference is that consumption taxes on universally consumed goods are highly regressive i.e. the bill is paid disproportionatly by the poor vs the rich.
This will make the worlds rich happy, and as we know any tyrant requires a base of support, yours will come from the rich far more than from the poor....
A modest tax yes that's fine. A significant tax on an item central to the economy, well that's now where DIYer's tribute comes from, he can't stop receiving tribute That is to say if you tax the heck out of oil to the point it becomes a large part of government revenue, don't you run the risk of the government now having a vested interest in seeing that revenue protected. "Vice taxes" on less lucrative things are fine. I'm just saying I'd be a little careful with setting things up so that the government receives a significant portion of its revenue from carbon being expelled into the atmosphere. Sure the right things will be said but some of those conservation measures might just die in committee. Also a large tax might kill off innovation not to mention wreak havoc with the economy that you'll need to implement solutions. So I'd say yes to a tax increase, maybe even an additional 50% but I think a a very large tax increase could backfire in a number of ways. In general though I agree with most of the proposals and well-researched ideas for moving forward I've found here. If I can think about it for a while I'll try and post some myself, but just as a silly pet peeve. Why the heck do mopeds get such relatively bad mileage. A 1.2 liter gasoline car can get 45 mpg and has 80 Hp why can't Honda make 0.2 liter moped that gets 225 mpg and has 12 hp?
Regarding mopeds:
First, a small point: Moped engines are only 0.05 liter i.e. 50 cc. and you'r right, the fuel consumption per unit power is pretty bad compared to a car.
I drive a 0.25 liter scooter, Honda "Big Ruckus", the manual says the engine produces 23 h.p. max. Running at highway speed I get about 80 miles / Canadian gallon (All figures actual measure, not some "standard" test results), about 75 m.p.g. city I had a moped at one time, and only got about 100 m.p.g. in city driving even though the engine was 1/5 the size of my current bikes engine
http://powersports.honda.com/assets/images/model/model_hero_shot/Scooter...
My wife drives a Toyota Echo (automatic transmission), which is one of the better cars for fuel economy short of going to a hybrid. 1.5 liter engine, manual claims about 100 h.p. max Running at the same highway speed she gets about 43 Miles /Cdn Gal.
The Echo power plant is a lot more complex than my scooter: Fuel injection, and computer engine control for things like ignition timing etc. Also a sophisticated transmission and cleaner aerodynamics than my scooter. Other than electronic ignition on the other hand my scooter is all mechanical i.e. carb., rather than injected, no engine computer etc. etc. If it was built with those systems the fuel economy gap would probably be a lot narrower. But the engine would probably also be bigger, heavier, and more expensive all of which I suspect were factors that got put above fuel economy in the design decision process.
At least the scooter is a 4 cycle, and does have a catalytic converter, and cool air injection into the exhaust, so they did put a lot more effort into the pollution side of things than they used to. No cloud of blue stink behind this bike unlike the scooters of days past.
Lets assume that I drive 6,000 miles a year on my scooter. at 75 m.p.g. that would be 80 gallons of fuel. Lets assume that gas goes to $3 per gallon in the near future, thats $240 a year in fuel. Now if Honda was to say double the fuel economy of my scooters engine that would save me $120 a year, which would be nice, but at the cost of great increase in the complexity and other trade offs of the bike. And how much would they have to increase the sticker price of the bike to get that savings in fuel?
If PO really bites soon however and fuel goes way up and stays there I have little doubt that more efficient bikes will appear.
I noticed 2 years ago that some sporting goods stores in Houston were selling both Chinese 50cc 2-stroke and electric scooters for $199. This got my attention because the listed top speed and range were about the same for both models. It appears that if you make a scooter small enough, the price advantage of gas disappears.
Therefore, what we might as well do is ban 2-stroke scooters entirely, letting the electrics take over on the bottom end and presumably 4-strokes hanging on in bigger ones until better Chinese batteries crowd them out. This is hugely relevant to transportation needs in the fastest growing economies like China, India, and whomever strikes oil next. Get 'em hooked on electrics now and they'll view open-bodied gas vehicles as vile and smelly for the rest of their lives.
This dependence can be reduced to almost nothing by making the tax revenue neutral. Just divide the total tax revenue equally among all citizens. This could also make the tax an easier sell because most people would mistakenly think that they are lower than average users (just like 70% of drivers consider themselves better than average).
Using the 2000 statistics for per-capita Canadian gasoline consumption, a 25-cent per litre revenue neutral tax, would give every Canadian a yearly check for $305.25. Obviously, that figure matches the average rate of taxation for the scheme. If all fossil fuels were similarly taxed that figure would probably be in the $500 range.
The thing I haven't figured out is how to apply the tax to business. Obviously, we want to encourage business to conserve and explore alternatives, so the tax has to apply to them as well. It seems like imports would have to be taxed based on their embodied carbon emissions or else local manufacturers couldn't compete on the local markets. Locally produced product intended for export markets presents thornier problems. Any export that is taxed would be unable to compete on the global market. Excepting the tax on companies producing exported goods doesn't seem like a good solution to me.
The best way to collect a tax, or, conversely, to require permits is at the level of the carbon emitter. (if the government awards no permits to existing polluters, and auctions them, then the effect is as of a tax.
If the US had a tax of $100/tonne of carbon, that would be $200bn or about $600/American in 'energy credits'. A family of 4 would be $2400 off per annum. This is more or less the system used in Alaska, to dividend out its revenues from oil and gas.
So in short, require permits at the oil refinery gate, at the gas pipeline mouth, and at the coal mine head.
http://www.cramton.umd.edu/papers2000-2004/02ep-tradeable-carbon-permit-...
*that* plus some arrangement for industrial processes (cement manufacture) would cover something like 90% of the carbon in the economy.
How that would play out in consumer prices is unknown although we have some good estimates.
In practice, like a VAT, the companies would simply pass it down the value chain into the hands of the consumer, eventually. This is true of all taxation on companies.
The Stern Review (the UK Treasury Report on Climate Change) looked quite carefully into the question of corporate location. There are certain industries which would be heavily affected competitively-- most particularly aluminum smelting. However in general, a carbon tax wouldn't increase their input costs by enough to change radically their location decisions.
I think, practically, it is difficult for Canada alone to do something-- companies would switch production to the US (unless we grandfathered existing polluters with carbon permits which they would lose if they relocated).
However NAFTA would be a large enough bloc. NAFTA +Europe + Japan would definitely be a large enough bloc- something over 60% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.
That was essentially my idea. Get rid of the personal income tax, which has evolved into a very regressive, uneven tax and invades everyone's privacy. It might even be popular even though it would make everyone's transportation fuel more expensive.
Since I'm the dictator of the world (not my local precinct, county, state etc.), your Mondo Megacorp won't avoid that tax by moving to Mexico. Being dictator solves a lot of thorny problems...
If I were world dictator, I would:
1. Nationalize the entire oil industry
2. Do away with the commodities market
3. Tell Americans to learn to live without cars
4. Bring consumerism to an end
5. Transfer wealth from the prosperous North to the impoverished South (hemispheres).
6. Do away with the world's militaries
7. Dismantle the world's stockpile of nuclear bombs & WMDs
8. End all coastal development immediately
9. Bring an end to the coal, natural gas and nuclear power industries
10. Insist that the prosperous people of the world wean themselves off of the technological crutch
11. Bring an end to all industries that pollute the air, land and water
12. Stop the destruction of the rain forests in Brazil and elsewhere, and allow the forests to regrow in the deforested areas
That's just a beginning. Humankind's destruction of the world must end. If humans won't make the necessary sacrifices, Nature will.
David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1
In addition, and justification for these most severe of recommendations, there is this news today:
I don't know how your local area will be impacted by global warming, but I live in Florida -- a state which is remarkably flat and close to sea level. A three foot rise is sea levels would constitute a major catastrophe for Florida (the loss of the entire coast and Everglades National Park to the ocean), and a 20 meter rise in sea levels result in the loss of half the peninsula (including the loss of Miami, St. Petersburg, Tampa).
At least Orlando would survive. Disney World is safe.
Ironically the best estimate IPCC is:
4.2 degrees centigrade.
NOT 3 degrees.
Your measures would work out to completely destroy the planet because within weeks your people would go hungry, grow desperate and start cutting trees and ripping out everything from the ground they could get their hands on. 400 million Mexicans, Americans and Canadians would loot the things they can get their hands on after the oil is gone.
Either that or you will have to open death camps and systematically eradicate your people "to save the planet". Those who are forced into submission and will not fertilize the fields with their bodies will starve to death more slowly.
Industries like the oil industry and markets like the commodities market are infinitely more efficient in organising the world than an ideological position like yours can be. Look at the former USSR and NK for guidance what happens when ideology trumps pragmatism (and industries are nothing but applied pragmatism, despite what you might think). So if you think that the current system is bad, you might be right, but if you can't imagine how much worse your ideas are (and that is an experimental fact), you might want to think some more about it.
Hello I.P.,
I expect that Americans, Canadians and Mexicans will burn up everything during this terminal phase of human history. We've built an entire civilization upon the principle that humans should consume everything and burn the entire world up. That's why I am certain that the ultimate outcome of technological civilization is humankind's extinction.
I am not impressed by the work of industries and markets. The world looks like a mess to me. Humans have transformed the only living planet in the Universe into humankind's sewer. The future promises to bring more horrors as humans desperately burn everything up to maintain a lifestyle which is both unhealthy and unsustainable. The outcome of this experiment is bleak: Either a planet without life or a planet with Homo sapiens.
David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1
"I expect that Americans, Canadians and Mexicans will burn up everything during this terminal phase of human history."
Why would they do that? If you can give them the same amount of comfort for twice the price they will do nothing like that. They will simply restructure their spending habits around the new price schemes and live happily ever after. Of course, in order to do that, you have to leave pretty much everything in its place as it is and simply make renewables available as replacement for carbon. Which is exactly what many nations are already doing. Not everyone is so far behind the times as the Americans.
"That's why I am certain that the ultimate outcome of technological civilization is humankind's extinction."
Did you consider that you might be wrong?
"I am not impressed by the work of industries and markets."
I am. But then... I was born in a socialist country. I have seen what happens when you don't have markets and properly regulated industries. I can only give the advice to go to a country like NK and look for yourself. I promise, you will change your mind if you have any interest in the truth, at all.
"The world looks like a mess to me."
That does not mean the world is a mess. It only means that you seem to have a perceptual problem.
"The future promises to bring more horror..."
The future never promises anything. We can't tell the future except for a few pretty hard core things like the sun becoming a red giant. But none of those are relevant. If you see bad things in the future it is an artefact of your way of thinking. Maybe you see what you want to see?
What I see is that the immediate future depends on my actions and that the far away future depends on the sum of my actions. I am responsible for the future. Which also means that I have to WORK HARD today to shape the future into what I want. There are no excuses for me to slack. But what I get from your way of looking at things is that you don't really care about the future. You only care about your own desperation. You are like the teenager who is laying on the sofa all day long, blaming his parents for having ruined his future before he was even born. Well, that teenager has an excuse: puberty and messed up hormones. You, David, you don't have that excuse. You are expected to get a grip and start working on a better future for all of us, teenagers included.
IP, very nicely said. Thanks, I always like to read your point of view, it is lucid, and considered.
History shows us we can use technology to destroy. Our brains are wired to see and fear it.
But there is a difference in utility to the human species between reasonable fear - requiring immediate and determined action - and an incohate fear from deep within the brain that impedes the operation of the immensely powerful forebrain and subverts useful action to *deal* with the challenges of a presenting future.
The driver of action is 'seeing', putting fear aside, determining a logical course of action, and persisting as new knowledge requires 'unexpected' corrective action/additional action.
Decision requires information that is inclusive of as many ways of thinking about facts as possible, while parsing out communally held errors of fact and false premises.
People here bring many ways of looking at this challenge; the engineering coupled with commercial reality way is *outstandingly important* to this specific challenge.
Thanks.
Lorenzo
IP,
You're from North Korea?
Wow. You should check out some of the other socialist countries in the world. They have had a bit more success.
My solution? Just let nature do what it will do. Problem solved.
One way or another, we will have a change.
However, if the premise were to come true......
As dictator of the world I would inventory the planet, figure out how much arable land is available, figure out the water supply. Then I would work towards establishing local communities built around resources such that each community has what it needs to be self-sustaining and the right population for that resource.
All factories that do not recycle by-products and waste as per "Cradle to Cradle" will be given five years to reinvent themselves. These factories must also be entirely energy self-sufficient and deliver to a local community. International trade will be limited to sailships.
Ecologically devastated areas such as the industrial belt in China must immediately shut down all activities and focus on cleaning up.
Ninety-five percent of women and men on the planet must either have a vasectomy or have their tubes tied. This will be accomplished randomly. Everyone will undergo the operation, thus leaving a scar in order that no one can tell who is fertile. This operation will also be performed on ninety-five percent of all newborns. Medical care will cease for all people who develop a terminal condition. Only palliative care will be allowed. CIties will be inventoried for recyclable material. No more mining. All minerals will come from cannabalizing cities and from mining landfills.
All vehicles will carry its full capacity on pain of death. No new automobiles will be built. Bicycles will be allowed. Rail transport will also be allowed until the foodshed system is setup.
No food will leave its foodshed. No food will be transported more than one day's ride on a horse at a walk. Money will lose value to prevent its rising once again -- i.e. negative interest.
Information about craft industries such as raising sheep, carding wool, creating yarn, weaving clothes, blacksmithing, harness manufacture, permaculture, shoe-making, ceramics, cob, hay-bale housing, glass-making, first aid, midiwifery, and so on will be gathered and disseminated per each foodshed's microclimate. Guilds, designed to maintain knowledge, must be set up in every field. A schooling system must be designed to perpetuate the system for the time being. Once the earth regains its balance and the temptations of fossil sunlight fall to the wayside, the need to enforce the culture will subside. Nature will enforce the culture.
The random sterilization would not work at that high of a rate (95%). You would be better off sterilizing anyone with a genetic defect and anyone who commits a crime and couples who have one child. This would provide a slow draw down in population >50% per generation. Exceptions could be made for certain categories (high IQ for example) but the 95% would require a logans run euthanization at an age before retirement. elders need youth to provide food and shelter etc.
Your dictatorship would fall quickly if you only travel by horse and sail. in your low tech future the sterilizations would cease and a new dark age with guns and modern weapons would ensue (children of man mixed with current day sudan)
Shoot for population stability or slow drawdown, such a rapid method would destroy any remaining civility or technology.
Hello IP,
> Why would they do that?
IP, humans have already destroyed the Earth. Only the smallest fragments of ecosystems remain and all of these are polluted. The human values which have motivated people to abuse the Earth so horrendously are the same ones which will lead future generations to burn all that remains.
> Did you consider that you might be wrong?
Absolutely not. The collapse of civilization and the extinction of Homo sapiens are too events which are guaranteed to occur in the future. This present civilization is not an eternal civilization. Homo sapiens are not an immortal animal. Collapse is both inevitable & inescapable. Just as it is impossible for you to avoid death, it is also impossible for our species to avoid extinction.
> That does not mean the world is a mess. It only means that you seem to have a perceptual problem.
There isn't any perceptual problem. Humans have polluted the entire globe. Humans have eradicated entire ecosystems and driven species to extinction. Humans have modified the climate in a potentially catastrophic manner. Humans have invented weapons of genocide sufficient to drive our own species into nuclear annihilation. Humans are unhealthy, unfit and unable to handle the Earth's present climate without technological crutches. The Earth is a mess. Humans have transformed the Earth from a living planet into humankind's sewer.
> am. But then... I was born in a socialist country. I have seen what happens when you don't have markets and properly regulated industries. I can only give the advice to go to a country like NK and look for yourself. I promise, you will change your mind if you have any interest in the truth, at all.
The free market appears good but ends in global tragedy. The free market generates present day prosperity at the expense of future poverty. The free market generates present day luxury at the expense of consuming and polluting an entire planet. The free market will die in a horrendous fashion.
> The future never promises anything. We can't tell the future except for a few pretty hard core things like the sun becoming a red giant. But none of those are relevant. If you see bad things in the future it is an artefact of your way of thinking. Maybe you see what you want to see?
I see bad things in our future. More importantly, I see horrendous things occurring on this Earth right now. Billions of humans are suffering. Humans are destroying Nature at an ever-accelerating pace. Pollution is rendering the Earth inhospitable to human life. Thousands of nuclear weapons still remain a threat to human survival.
The future of civilization is also bleak for another reason: Our civilization was not built to endure forever. Our civilization will die. Just as all the previous civilizations have collapsed, the present global civilization will also collapse.
> What I see is that the immediate future depends on my actions and that the far away future depends on the sum of my actions. I am responsible for the future. Which also means that I have to WORK HARD today to shape the future into what I want. There are no excuses for me to slack.
You are seriously mistaken about your role in the Universe, IP. The Universe does not rotate around the Earth. Nature does not rotate around Homo sapiens. What you do does not determine your own fate or civilization's fate or humankind's fate. The forces of Nature are a great deal more powerful than humankind, they are also more powerful than humankind's technology, and they are certainly more powerful than you.
In other words: Civilization will end whether you work really hard or do nothing at all. On the other hand, Homo sapiens will go extinct a lot quicker if you work really hard rather than do nothing at all.
In other words: Your work to "save" civilization only serves to accelerate the extinction of humankind. Present-day gains come at the expense of future losses, except that in all cases the losses will exceed the gains.
> But what I get from your way of looking at things is that you don't really care about the future. You only care about your own desperation.
I care about the future, but (more importantly) I care about Nature and the crimes which humankind contines to commit against Nature. Homo sapiens have nearly destroyed the one and only planet hospitable to human life in the Universe. By working really hard we humans will finish this work of destruction and soon discover that our species has run out of time.
The end of technological civilization is the extinction of Homo sapiens. Those who work really hard at "saving" technology & the present lifestyle of the morbidly obese are accelerating the demise of our species.
I care about the future and that is why I advocate a cessation of all this work. The animals survived & prospered for millions of years without technology. Homo sapiens wouldn't survive for a century without technology. Don't you see that humankind's addiction to technology only serves to make our species weaker and at a great disadvantage from the standpoint of natural selection?
David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1
HEAR HEAR!!!
All hail David. You, yes you Dave, should be king. What you speak of is true. The silly tendency to anthropomorphisize nature creates the faulty reasoning we see in IP and many others.
I cannot add nor detract from what you say.
BRILLIANT JOB!!
Thanks for participating in this forum.
After reading through the 160+ posts today and noting the overwhelming amount of techtopian proposals, I ruminated.
My mind was drawn to Duncan's transient-pulse theory of Industrial Civilization, and the return to Olduvai Gorge graphic.
The current system will end, as a mathematical certainty, and the choice before society is not whether it will end, but how.
Ultimately cherenkov and dm1 may prove to be cornucopians.
DM1, I apologize for dismissively scrolling past your posts in the past.
I come from a farm family. Years ago, my uncle told that the piece of property adjoining his land was for sale at auction. Another neighbor outbid him and got the land. The next spring my uncle was working his field and the new owner was working his. He recalled that he was so busy looking across the fence, stewing and having bad thoughts that he drove into a mud hole and got stuck.
Guess who came and pulled him out?
None of us have all the answer, but all of us have some of the answer.
Thanks for the insights.
BTW, this guy really gets it:
http://stangoff.com/?p=12
Cornucopian? C'est moi?
Are you furkin nutz?
Wow.
Tongue in cheek on the cornucopian label.
I suppose i'm just doubting any cognizant descent path has much chance of success.
As you say nature will do what it will do.
David,
I trust you see the, er, "irony", in railing against technology on a computerized message board. I will also trust that your angst and revulsion at the state of humanity is from genuine outrage and concern and not from some misplaced sense of moral superiority. Certainly, there is no reason for a compete nihilist to reach out to a community to express a view unless they felt they had something meaningful to impart. Therefore , if rational discussion of problems as you have validated by posting about things which concern you is okay, then scientific inquiry into problems would seem to be validated as well. How then has technology become such an existential threat to humanity? from nuclear weapons to bioengineered viruses, to accidentally potentially altering the climate, etc, etc. I don't know, and in this I probably am closer to some of your views. Fundamentally, corrupt governments and/or amoral marketplaces seem to co-opt what often began as a more basic, scientific inquiry. Really what is needed is simply greater respect for the truth, because the truth is far stronger than us. Anyways, enjoyed the "man is a cancer", "we are all going to die", "nothing you can do will ever change anything" stuff but in your next post please, tell us what you really think.
"For this is all a dream we dreamed, one afternoon long ago" -Grateful Dead, "Box of Rain"
Combine hothgor and DIY's plan and you have a winner.
Decentralized electric production is such a no brainer that I envision an eighty per cent penetration of solar electric by 2020, especially with the arrival of "leased" or "rented" systems a la "Citizenre", where the user simply pays a small deposit for a 5 or 25 year lease on a system maintained by the company and buys out the remaining useful life of the system after the 25 year period ends.
Gone is the huge initial outlay for the system.
Solar will at best make for a few percent of electricity generation capacity in 2020. Wind will still be larger by half an order of magnitude, if not more. Please take a look at current generation capacity and, more importantly production capacity.
There is little chance that anyone can make the industry grow faster than it already is because the growth is not limited by money, right now, but by technical problems like silicon availability. If you cut the silicon out, you would run into similar limits with glass covers and probably some of the other meterials used to produce solar panels.
I suppose the challenge accepts that there are physical and practical limits in this world? If it does, solar is not going to dominate, until the 2040s. After that, it might, but even then it won't have much more than 30-40% of the electricity generation capacity simply because hydro, nuclear, wind, biomass etc. will also be around. You don't just turn off perfectly good solutions to go all solar.
There you go again, banging on solar limitations as if pv is the only way. You already know everything, I'm outta here.
Are you referring to OVERALL capacity or strictly residential?
A few percent residential? I respectfully disagree while taking into account DIY's scenario of co-refining silicon at a nuke-hydro plant.
With that in mind, increased availability and lowered prices why are you still thinking only a few percent instead of "solar shingles" integral with every rooftop?
With respect to gasoline, I think I would have a rationing system as a backup. I think we will be in for be in for a lot of problems, if we think that the market alone will solve the allocation system. Angry people have been known to retaliate with guns and explosives.
With respect to natural gas, I think we need a lot of planning, since it is my understanding that the gas can't be piped at partial pressure. If North American natural gas production is going off a cliff in the next few years, someone needs to figure out how we can effectively allocate the remaining supply - and I doubt that the answer is to only supply natural gas to subdivisions with $500,000+ homes because they can best afford the high price.
Angry people have been known to retaliate with guns and explosives.
My benevolence has limits. People respond today with guns and explosives. After I modify the jury system (OK, that's not energy related) it would be easier to deal with those people. ;-)
Seriously, I think people will be reasonable. This is for their kids' sakes. Change is coming, like it or not. Best to be prepared. And I think they will react just as badly (if not worse) to rationing. With higher prices, if you really, really have to take that trip, you can. With rationing, maybe not.
I don't think we are talking about changes affecting our kids' lives. We are talking about changes affecting our lives - especially those of us who are concerned about peak in the next year or two and a virtually simultaneous gas shortage. I know you have more optimistic views, but we need to be prepared for what very well may happen.
I have little hope for the monetary system in the case of a serious oil and natural gas decline (either the monetary system crashes all together, or money becomes virtually worthless), so I think we need some backup approach. Rationing, with special attention to agriculture and other required services, may be as good approach as any.
I think this is what every responsible government will do. It's what we've done in the past.
But I bet it's the military that will get first dibsies, at least here in the U.S.
If that military part is true, then foreign investors should pull the plug on their US factories and ship the machinery elsewhere. This is bad because the American manufacturers have often already closed down factories in those same regions because they were too inept to deal with labor. (See Honda in Ohio and Mazda in Michigan.) So manufacturing won't just decline based on the amount of the ration, but completely emigrate and use up the rations in other countries.
But I guess we could always invade those other countries, until the military uses up its own rations.
Military governments and foreign investors often get along very well.
There are no trade union problems and no pesky democracy under a military government.
If you make friends with the right general, irritating things like worker safety and environmental protection, not to mention the land rights where you want to build a plant, just disappear.
With rationing, you can buy part of someone else's ration. If you can afford it, you can still take that trip. If you don't have some form of ration, the wealthy - who also use the most energy per capita - will have basically no incentive to do anything.
I would start with the tradeable credits system proposed by Harvard Professor Martin Feldstein here. I would expand that system to all carbon-based energy use.
Then I'd go a few steps farther. For motor vehicles, I would expand the existing gas-guzzler tax. The worst gas guzzlers (worst 15% in any year) would have to pay a per-mile gas guzzler tax every year until they are scrapped. That means that if someone buys an Escalade this year, the owner of that Escalade will be paying an extra tax every year until it's scrapped. Each year the tax increases. The worst polluters pay.
Same for houses. Utilities are required to report household carbon-based fuel use for each household. At tax-time, this information is married with household tax returns and the 15% of households with the highest energy use per person pay an annually increasing carbon tax. The worst polluters pay.
Over time, until we reach a sustainable level of carbon emissions, I would slowly expand these taxes to the top 16%, 17%, etc., but never more than 50%. Each time the threshhold is lowered, the newly taxed would pay a small amount of tax, and the percentages above them would pay incrementally more at higher percentages. The worst polluters pay the most.
People are much more accepting of sin taxes than broad-based taxes.
You don't need a rationing system once you have high prices. People respond to price increases by saving. They respond to rationing by stealing. Look at the former USSR for guidance how this works. It was not the high prices that brought them down but the fact that some factories lost 50% of their goods before they even shipped because management and half the workers were engaged in large scale black market operations.
"You don't need a rationing system once you have high prices. People respond to price increases by saving.
IP, consider the following scenario: The year is 2012 and gas is $10/gallon. The wealthy continue to drive SUVs as before but the bottom 50% can't afford to go to work. For the sake of social stability, rationing and price controls becomes inevitable. This is not an ideal solution and has considerable drawbacks, but what else can you do?
"The wealthy continue to drive SUVs as before but the bottom 50% can't afford to go to work."
If you commute in one car with three colleagues, your cost is the same as if gas was $3.00 per gallon. I can only laugh at the arguments predicting that many will not be able to afford to commute. You might not be able to afford to commute in your own car all by yourself, that much might be true, but that is not the same as not being able to afford to commute at all.
Alternatively, people can take the bus. Contrary to popular belief it does not hurt. I can tell. I have been riding the bus all my life. I never had a car. As it happens I could go to the BMW dealer today and buy a 745i with cash. The 745 simply happens to be a car I like personally. One day I might buy one just for fun. But I would only drive it for fun and would continue to commute on the bus and the train.
So far, I have always managed to get to every one of my workplaces on busses and trains. Sometimes it was easy, sometimes it was very hard and took five hours every day. Sometimes I had to move. Big deal. Moving is far easier in the US than it is in Europe. Public transportation is far harder. It kind of averages out if you know what you are doing and if you know what you want in life.
In essence, my transportation cost per month is $100. I save approx. $3000 per year relative to owning even the smallest of cars. I am not poor but I also do not have the vanity of needing a car. Sorry for everone who does.
Or you can drive one of the 2008 Prius and get 80-90 MPG. The amount you spend on gas in those cars as opposed to driving one with 20 mpg are roughly the same. This is why it baffles me when people talk about no one being able to go to work at $10.00 a gallon gas. Its not like such a price will kick in before people start car pooling and driving super efficient vehicles.
Because then it wouldn't be America anymore.
The slaveowners of our South got non-slaveowners (like my ancestors) to put on gray uniforms and get slaughtered by training them over generations to accept that slavery was vital to their "way of life". Which it was - the South was a caste system, in which poor whites were at a competitive disadvantage to slaveowners, but perceived themselves as part of the Master Race because they could beat, abuse and frame other white's slaves in compensation. Note that when they were forced to give up slavery at gunpoint they quickly came up with a new way to define blacks that preserved all these atrocities for another century. I would argue that once that too collapsed, the politics of the South (expanding across America via the GOP) has been about keeping the rednecks believing that they've been cheated out of their natural superiority by liberals, gays, atheists, Moslems, welfare blacks, etc., while feeding them enough cheap gas and big trucks and debt to keep them from going KKK until we found a nice foreign war for them to re-estabish "their" "superiority". Whoops - War didn't turn out so nice. You make them car-pool like those queer-lovers in Europe, or drive cars built by pagans, and God know what will happen. Dick Cheney: "The American Way of Life is non-negotiable."
America's dirty secret - for 400 years poor white bigots have been the balance of military power here. They've been kept irrational to prevent them from realizing that. Their loyalty to capitalism is entirely based on a belief that God intended it to place them over the mud races. They will never consciously accept reduced resources without violence.
This would certainly help take the gilding off the lily. Once the car has lost its association with freedom and independence, some liabilities start to surface. You might as well be using mass transit and living closer to the office.
But what happens to all the people who are already carpooling or taking public transportation?
The jump in oil prices last year was very hard on public transportation. Ridership was up, because of the high gas prices, but the local governments running the trains and buses didn't have the money to expand, or even continue the current level of service. So even while demand was increasing, public transportation was cut back due to the high price of diesel. One school system eliminated a bus route. It was the longest one, to the poorest community, of course. Many of the residents didn't even have cars, so they couldn't drive their kids to school.
They sleep at work or in their cars or in 10-to-a-room flophouses during the week, driving only once instead of 5 times, and thus pay as much as when gas was $2/gal. Or they just pack more people into the cars, driving 30 miles with 3 men on a small motorbike or 15 in a minivan. And don't tell me it can't be done - millions of people do this every day.
The amount of fat that can be cut from American consumption habits before survival truly becomes an issue is astounding. When you see how urban poor live in places like India, you realize quite how lavish our lives are in the US, and those saying "$10/gal gas will cause a mass dieoff in America!!" sound utterly, utterly naive.
No one thinks $10/gallon will cause mass dieoff. Maybe a few think there may be some civil unrest if gas gets that high, but I don't know anyone who expects a dieoff because of high prices.
No, the dieoff, if it comes, will not be due to high prices, but to outright scarcity, and possibly the sociopolitical reaction to high prices.
Which is a much more uncertain and nuanced view than I often see; those who mention dieoff all too often say "when" rather than "if".
The monumental amount of slack available in American society vis-a-vis oil use means there's no need for any kind of Great American Dieoff, at least not for many decades. Most data-based models have oil production 20 years after peak being at least half of what it is now, which is more than enough to run a less sumptious but still pleasant society. If people have to carpool heavily or live near work, drive small cars, eat primarily in-season local produce, take local vacations, and buy shoes made in America instead of China, that's not so bad.
Sure, society could break down when oil prices go up (i.e., oil gets scarcer), but there's not too much historical precedent for assuming that. Previous fuel rationing in the West - in WWII and then after the Oil Embargo - led to little or no social unrest. Moreover, the default reaction of Western societies to scarce fuel is to raise its price, and - as we saw last year - higher prices lead to lower demand in the West, but effectively no social unrest.
Evidence strongly suggests that either high fuel prices or a physical lack of sufficient fuel would be met similarly calmly in the near future.
Which is sensible. In the West (especially America), there's a huge distance between what we use and what we actually need, and all we lose by cutting back is comfort and convenience. The collapse of society, though, is likely to be substantially more uncomfortable and inconvenient than even sharp reductions in the amount of oil we use, and I think most people understand that pretty clearly.
So absent a massive shock - which the smooth, shallow decline of most Peak Oil models does not provide - it's a massive leap of faith to expect a collapse of Western civilization or a dieoff any time soon.
Which is why, to outsiders, many doomers seem like apocalyptic cultists - irrational faith in impending doom.
That's not to say starting to transition away from oil now isn't a good idea - it is, for lots of reasons (climate change, funding of dangerous groups, diversification of fuels sources, etc.), most of which people here are familiar with, and most of which make good sense to John Q. Public. But whenever some wingnut starts talking about the collapse of society, 5 billion deaths, or fascism in America, well, that's when you start losing people, just like people ignore the crazy guy on the street corner ranting that the end of the world is nigh.
FWIW.
No one thinks $10/gallon will cause mass dieoff. Maybe a few think there may be some civil unrest if gas gets that high, but I don't know anyone who expects a dieoff because of high prices.
I think the amount of unrest will also be proportional to who benefits when prices get that high. If we gradually phase in energy taxes and phase out some other taxes, there will be less unrest. If the other taxes stay where they are, gas hits $10 because of Peak Oil, and the oil companies and OPEC are getting rich, there will indeed be a lot of unrest. Like I have said before, if you think the public hates Big Oil now, wait until gas is $10/gal and XOM earns $100 billion in a year.
Less as in none, at least as suggested by the European experience; some countries saw $7.50/gal prices last summer, and no real trouble materialized.
Does the public hate Big Oil now? Not much more than they did when profits were low, at least from what I've heard.
If people did start hating Big Oil enough to start threatening the fabric of society, though, I would imagine we'd see a return of windfall profit taxes, much like we saw last time there was a substantial oil crunch. Windfall taxes = lower profits = less hating = intact society is an equation I find rather more likely than high profits = social unrest = collapse of society.
I've never seen a serious explanation for why society is at risk in the near term. It seems like all the arguments go:
1) Oil gets expensive and less abundant.
2) ???
3) Society collapses.
What is Step 2, and how many assumptions does it require? 'cuz for all the complaining about "sheeple", history suggests that people have a remarkable ability to pull together when things actually do get tough. If Londoners could live in a bombed-out city during the Blitz without society collapsing, how is expensive gas supposed to do it?
As I understand it, it goes something like this: peak oil = peak fossil fuel, peak FF = peak energy, peak energy = peak economic growth, and peak economic growth = collapse. Apparently there is a theory somewhere that modern economies are like sharks: they must grow or collapse.
I've asked previously about this, and in response, there was a post from "BobCousins":
"That is a good question, but the answer is somewhat complex.
Before Peak Oil doomerism, there have been plenty of other types of doomerism. One is financial collapse due to problems of fiat money, or more specifically debt not backed by "sound money". This one can be traced back to at least 1790, and the roots of the French Revolution. More recently, since the US and most countries abandoned the gold standard, there has been great unease in some quarters who don't trust a paper currency. This unease is unsurprisingly stoked by popular writers and traders specialising in gold (often the same people).
Financial doomerism joined up with PO doomerism in the following way. A limited resource can not support infinite growth (self evident). When resource utilisation reaches a maximum rate, growth must stop. No problem, you might think. But for doomers, who have to justify why cessation of growth leads to collapse, it has to be asserted that the current financial system relies on growth, and therefore will collapse when growth stops.
This assertion about the financial system is not widely supported. This is where theories about lending come in. I think because lending is sufficiently abstract and not very well understood (money is mysteriously created out of thin air), it is quite easy to come up with plausible sounding theories which impress the layman, but have little grounding in reality and are easily debunked by an expert.
While it is true that our money system allows financial bubbles to occur where future growth is expected, it is not clear that the corollary is true, i.e. that growth is required for the system to work at all. There are examples of economies that have had flat or neglible growth but which have not collapsed."
What do you think?
Yeah, that's sorta my take on things, too. There are a number of critical assumptions underlying the notion of an imminent collapse, and those assumptions seem to be little more than an article of faith and lacking evidence or even solid theory to back them up.
I think the assumptions are even more prevalent than BobCousins suggests, though:
This is not, strictly speaking, true, if efficiency advances fast enough.
If, for example, each year we require 5% less resource for each unit of production, but we produce 5% more units, we get a numerical series where the total historical amount of resources produced is (even in the limit) a relatively small number, even though the per-year production value quickly heads towards infinity.
This may seem like a theoretical objection, but when one takes into account things like burning fossil fuels to make solar power stations (plus recycling of the materials used for the next generation), it becomes an assumption that we - though we will probably still accept it - should at least look at.
(Of course, solar power is finite; however, any limits it presents are irrelevant to any but extremely long-term considerations, and technological change makes speculation on the order of millenia largely pointless.)
Same assumption as the above, more-or-less.
There is also the hidden assumption here that "peak oil = peak energy", which is probably false (thanks to abundant coal reserves). If we shift the discussion to "peak fossil fuels", then we get multiple peaks stretching out for decades to come and giving substantial time and warning to transition to other fuel sources.
So the additional assumption needs to be made that oil cannot be replaced by other fossil fuels, much less by other energy sources.
Some nations (e.g., Japan) have had non-growing economies for over a decade at a time, although it could be argued that they're imperfect analogies due to their trade with the outside world.
So the assumptions we need to see supported are:
The first one is probably pretty easy to make a case for, but the last two - the key assumptions - need to be really well supported to be convincing.
I really presented BobCousin's comment to deal with the economic stagnation = collapse argument. I think he stipulated the premise that peak oil = stagnation for the sake of argument.
I agree that the other links in the argument don't follow. As you note, peak oil does not equal peak fossil fuels, especially in the US which has enormous coal reserves (which are a GW problem, but that's different - coal will get used as a last resort).
As you note, peak FF clearly doesn't equal peak energy, with plentiful and high E-ROI wind and solar available.
Even if it were to happen, peak energy wouldn't equal "peak economy" in a bunch of ways. As you note, efficiency can grow for a long time. Also, there's no reason to think agriculture & manufacturing have to grow forever to support economic growth - it's perfectly clear that these things plateau, and economies move to services which are much, much less energy intensive.
For some people (like Kunstler, for instance), this comes from wishful thinking. People recognize the spiritual impoverishment of a consumer society, and think that less consumerism will push people to look at more meaningful things. This is, of course, completely unrealistic. Our best hope is to educate people that once their material needs are satisfied that they can move on to more meaningful things: poverty and fear don't help people go in that direction.
Some people just seem depressed, and pessimistic. I hope they find the spiritual help that the other group is aiming for. They might want to try focusing.com - it's a pretty good method for emotional healing.
I think you and nick must be about the only two people on these boards with a fairly reasonable take on the matter. Perhaps the rest just don't post as much, who knows.
There's another assumption often thrown in, though not always. To whit: Despite all current theory, evidence, and projections, population grows exponentially forever until we all die.
I'd also say that a lot of this is probably misunderstanding of technical arguments by non-technical people. Usually there's a lot of "but that's way too expensive." or "that'll never work." going on between various geeks, physicists, economists, etc... Generally what this means is not "That's way too expensive." but rather "That is not the cheapest and most effective solution, so people won't go for it." or something similar. This is of course interpreted in the other direction as "It's totally impossible, and will never work no matter how much technology or effort people are willing to put in." which is neither what is said nor what is meant.
Thanks for the compliment.
I agree on population, but I think you're last point is especially interesting. Often times technical debates are over fractions of pennies, whereas non-technical people think in terms of orders of magnitude, because they're not really familiar with how these costs work.
A good example is trucking vs rail. Trucking takes about 10x as much energy as rail, so if fuel costs rise by, say 3x, trucking would lose a lot of business to rail. Does that mean that trucking would no longer be economic where rail was unavailable? No - trucking costs would still be less than 1% of the value of goods shipped even after such an increase. So, no dramatic localization, no dramatic upheaval in globalization.
I think I explained your step #2 for America in my reply to Hothgor, above.
Our ancestors committed mass murder and enslavement to get rich, how many will we kill and enslave to prevent our riches from being redistributed away by any mechanism? The killing will be resisted, society will degenerate. If we blame foreigners we will commit mass murder in wars of conquest and the imperial regime will turn us into Nazis. If we blame each other it's civil war. If we blamed larger forces that our wonderful skin color can't overawe, then we might behave as you say, but our masters trained us to expunge the word "interdependence" around 1980.
You must admit, sometimes people do behave like Easter Island or Germany.
I disagree. I don't see much evidence that uneducated Americans would run rampant through the country, laying waste to civilization, if they couldn't gas up their trucks cheaply.
Everybody's ancestors (in the general sense) did that - that's how society worked back then. Generations of inculturation with modern societal norms, though, has largely convinced people that "rape&pillage" is not, in fact, a good thing to be doing.
Compare how US troops acted when conquering Baghdad to how conquering troops acted 1000, 500, or even 200 years ago. Today, stories of rape and murder by soldiers are rare and shocking, rather than a matter of course.
Two interesting examples, considering that (a) recent scientific evidence strongly suggests that Easter Island had no dieoff or collapse at all (i.e., the population stabilized at 2,500), and (b) modern Germany is peaceful and already as energy efficient as what we're talking about seeing in the US.
If you want people to believe that the teeming American masses are all that much worse than the teeming masses of any other country, and will tear down civilization's walls as soon as they stop getting their bread&circuses (cheap gas and big trucks), you're going to have to provide some solid evidence of that claim.
'cuz it didn't happen when gas was rationed and expensive after the Oil Shocks, so the examples of history ain't in your favour here.
1) Higher taxes on petroleum based liquid fuels.
2) Higher taxes on vehicles with 4000+ lb. GVW.
3) Raise NEV limitations to 40 mph/40 mph.
4) Increase wind and solar every year.
5) Require renewable aspect to every new coal fired power plant.
1) and 5) can be implemented much easier and more effectively with a net carbon tax. Wind and solar energy are increasing at breakneck speed all by themselves but won't catch up with demand until the 2030/2040 timescale. This is nothing that can be legislated effectively. Incentive programs can be given but at this time they are little more than a subsidies program to the wind and solar industry. Any additional government funding of projects will only keep prices for wind turbines and solar panels higher for longer because we are already supply limited on both. I certainly won't mind that my renewables stocks would skyrocket even faster but there would be little additional capacity growth. We should terminate the subsidies for ethanol, though, and let the industry figure out how it can stay profitable. That would actually increase their incentive to increase the EROEI of their ethanol processes.
A carbon tax on coal is an idea. How about a sulfur and mercury tax too? The money could be used to incorporate large scale trough solar plants all across the south.
Higher taxes on vehicles:
A purchase tax based on fuel economy would be pretty simple to administer, given that most jurisdictions collect a purchase tax anyway. The government's fuel economy ratings could be used to assess a proportional purchase tax on vehicles whose fuel economy was less than some number and a proportional rebate for vehicles with better mileage. The tax could be set up to be revenue-neutral (a likely story) and could be applied to used cars as well as new ones.
From today's Drumbeat:
The beauty of a fossil fuels tax is that options like poor EROEI corn ethanol and tar sands are much less attractive. Solutions that have low fossil fuel inputs would be favored. There would be a tax on natural gas as well, so there would be incentives to find replacements.
Here's a different manner of answering these questions:
1) What's your plan to deal with North American N.G.?
North America will have to learn within the constraints of its own resources. If America, Canada and Mexico burn up all their continent's natural gas they will have no choice except to live without. Or die without, if they cannot adapt to their natural environment.
2) Are you going to stop corn ethanol?
Corn ethanol is worse than foolish, it is a sin, it is passive genocide. Americans shouldn't convert corn to ethanol, nor should they convert corn to meat. The corn saved by the cessation of these activities should be sent to Africa and given to the impoverished for free. America owes Africa that much.
3) What is your position on developing oil sands?
The tar sands industry is a horrendous crime against Nature and should cease immediately. Canada should preserve its pristine environment and clean water because life is impossible without these. Life without cheap gasoline is very possible, and American consumers would become healthier if they were forced to walk a bit more.
David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1
Put your input directly to Senator Boxer and the Committee Hearings .....
http://ga4.org/pacforachange/gw_agenda_pub.html?member_key=wbxgd334p6dt86d&
Actually, that's exactly what got me to thinking about this. Someone sent me that link the other day.
In fact, in a day or so I will review all the responses in this thread and then go there and input my $0.02.
That's a lotta shoulds, and while I applaud your bold altruism I still remain firmly planted in the "reality based community" which figures on continued use of these resources. The trick is to find a way to avoid wasting and squandering them as if they are infinite.
The corn saved by the cessation of these activities should be sent to Africa and given to the impoverished for free.
If you feed starving people they breed then you have a future with more starving people. Short relief efforts for incidental famines makes sense. Turning a continent into a welfare state dependent on grain an ocean away is a setup for future disaster.
Teach a man to fish, he'll eat for life.
BTW why do we owe Africa anything? I am curious to the reasoning behind the statement.
Hello Oilrig medic,
The United States of America is the welfare state, Oilrig medic. The morbidly obese people of America are drawing natural resources and cheap labor from across the globe: Africa, Asia, South America, China, India, etc.
I believe that it is time for the impoverished people of the world to end this welfare state. All of the impoverished countries of the world should cease exporting oil and consumer products to the United States of America. The world would become a better place immediately. America is not entitled to 25% of the world's natural resources.
Why do we obese Americans owe Africa anything? Because of all the atrocities and genocides which America has committed against the continent of Africa over the last several centuries.
Don't you know, Oilrig medic, that the impoverished people of Africa also do not owe us anything? If the Nigerians want to drive out the oil corproations they should do so.
Venezuela doesn't owe America anything, either. If Hugo Chavez wants to stop exporting oil to America tomorrow he has every right to do so. He need not send the oil anywhere else, either. If Hugo wants to leave his oil in the ground for the sake of future generations of Venezuelans, he has every right to do so.
The Muslims don't owe America anything, either. If the Middle Eastern nations decided to cease all oil exports to the United States of America they have every right to do so. They aren't even obligated to export that oil anywhere else. They can leave it in the ground for the sake of Muslims living centuries from now.
Mexico doesn't owe America anything. The Mexicans have a collapsing oil giant. They probably should conserve whatever oil which remains for the sake of Mexicans living generations from now. Exporting that oil to obese America is an evil act.
Canada, on the other hand, does owe the United States a bunch. Canada is a colony of the United States of America. Canada's resources belong to America's consumers. So Canada has no choice except to export their oil and natural gas to America forever. Too bad for Canada.
David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1
You are making very unparallel arguments. Why is Canada less sovereign than Mexico. We provide aid to Mexico not counting the remitances sent home by illegals.
Third world countries export oil to get dollars so they can buy Ipods and Mercedes and weapons and food. We are not forcibly taking oil from any nation. I think most countries should renegotiate the price they sell their oil at, but they don't.
"Why do we obese Americans owe Africa anything? Because of all the atrocities and genocides which America has committed against the continent of Africa over the last several centuries. "
Which genocide in Africa did America commit. Has America been a country for several centuries? I have worked in Africa, and I did not like it. There is little good there, and we have more pressing problems here. You over simplify the scenario by suggesting we send them excess grain for free. Food relief is used as a weapon in the famine stricken areas. If they can't get it together and grow food on their own land....too bad, so sad. Move to greener pastures or let their bones bleach in the sun. Food shipments delay the inevitable and exacerbate the end result. If we sent consultants and teachers to help them develop their agriculture, and some infrastructure asssitance I would go for it. The political situations are what cause the famines in Africa. Until that is fixed we can do little with handouts.
Hello Ollrig medic,
Canada is a colony of the United States. For all practical purposes, Canada's natural resources are owned by the United States of America. Canada is a voluntary slave of the United States of America.
Mexico, on the other hand, is not. Mexico and the United States of America have fought wars. America has committed crimes against Mexico. Such experiences have led Mexico to remain fiercely independent of the United States.
There are no such thing as illegal Mexican immigrants. America stole a huge chunk of Mexico's land and natural resources. Mexicans have a substantial legal claim to residency in this country.
Remember the slave trade? Remember the crimes which American corporations are committing in Africa today in places such as Nigeria. The United States of America has committed numerous atrocities and genocides in Africa.
Before there were Americans the European countries were committing atrocities and genocides in Africa. Remember the colonial era? Africans did not volunteer to become colonies of Europe. European killed Africans by the hundred thousand in order to seize, enslave, exploit and pillage that continent.
Hatred, prejudice and bigotry against Africa. Why am I not astonished to find these emotions expressed by a person employed by the oil corporations which are presently committing crimes against Africa?
This is the very sort of attitude which does serve to generate hatred against the West. No wonder why the Nigerians want to drive the oil corporations from their delta.
It is absolutely essential that the impoverished people of the world stand up to Western corporations and drive these criminals from their own lands. They must also cease exporting oil to the West.
David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1
It is easy to label me a racist, knowing nothing about me. I volunteered in a clinic in Botswana for six months.
What are you responding to when you say "this sort of attitude"? I am clearly stating support for africa needs to be instruction/guidance/infrastructure not welfare grain. This makes me a bigot. You don't understand the politics and economics behind the food shortages obviously.
Oh yeah, Slavery!!!!!What some European did 200 years ago is not my debt to apologize for. BTW most slaves were captured in tribal wars and sold to the slave traders.
Where do you generate your opinions on Canada? Have you been there? You are confusing free trade with slavery.
This conversation bores me and I am sure you will repost and call me names and make other outlandish claims like you invented the question mark. Whatever........
When your magic wand starts working and you can fix social problems by decree email me and I will give you some suggestions. Until then I am done with you.
Hello Oilrig medic,
That's a wonderful thing to do, Oilrig medic. I am proud of you.
If Africa's problems were so easily solved they would have been solved a long time ago.
The Europeans were a lot more actively involved in the slave trade than you give them credit. And what of the crimes of colonialism?
Canada is a colony and a slave to the United States of America. Call it "free trade" if you will but the reality remains the same.
No more name calling. I admire you, now.
No one is solving the world's problems here. That much is certain.
You mistake cooperation for colonization.
Canadian nationalism was born in the crucible of American invasion. If you think that's been forgotten, you are gravely mistaken.
A girl I knew worked in Cambodia for a while. The poverty there was, of course, unlike anything you see in North America, and she was solidly anti-globalization - fight the Man! - and could articulate ways in which corporations take advantage of local populations.
She found herself confused and torn, though; when she talked to regular people in Cambodia, she found they were in favour of globalization. Hugely. It gave them jobs, it raised them out of poverty. It gave them opportunities.
She learned, and I learned, and maybe someday you will learn that the world is a more complicated place than simple black-and-white views allow. There are much better things a country can do for its people than kicking out all the Westerners; ask South Korea, Taiwan, or Japan.
I bet that's what you said about Afghanistan before it fell to the Taliban. Turns out the world's poorest people can hurt the world's richest people - or at least that's what our leaders claim.
And Europe is the creator of the borders of Africa and the Middle East - obviously it was in the Great Powers' interest to make them unnatural and unsustainable to prevent successful rebellion. They built only enough roads and rails to link the most valuable pile of resources to the nearest port they controlled - but didn't link the colonies to their enemies' colonies. The wealth European empires amassed from those colonies was turned into gold. During the two world wars much of that gold ended up at Fort Knox, allowing us to control the global currency system for a while, and America got to pick and choose from the collapsed empires. We chose places like Saudi Arabia, the Congo, Iran, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Jordan, Lebanon, South Africa, and rapacious guerrilla movements all over Africa. Usually our goal was to preserve unjust borders that we did not create, but which benefitted a global economy which we inherited control of.
We are like Michael Corleone, inheriting a crime empire from Don Vito Britain and trying to keep our own hands clean. Are we at Godfather III yet?
"Dictator of the world" opens up some pretty broad policy horizons. That implies that you don't need to consider any objections, and the humanity of any policy enters the equation only as much as you choose to let it.
I'll take you at your word, though. Dictator. Hmmm.
The underlying problem is not energy, it's population. That suggests where we need to start looking for our solution, so here's what a dictator could do:
There, that should fix it.
You may think I'm being facetious, but take this in the spirit of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal". I'm being way more than half serious. Absent population reduction and subsequent control, no energy policy on the planet is worth the paper it's written on. This proposal allows us to implement Mother Nature's solution in a more methodical, controlled and even-handed fashion.
Dictator of the world" opens up some pretty broad policy horizons. That implies that you don't need to consider any objections, and the humanity of any policy enters the equation only as much as you choose to let it.
That's right. It presumes that I know what's best, and I am not satisfied that such changes will be pushed through the present political system due to the cowardice of our leaders. However, given that I am benevolent, I listen. I have advisors, who are not just "yes men", but are out of the box thinkers with broad backgrounds.
Of course we all know the problem with dictatorships. Dictators aren't like that. The closest you might get is a benevolent philospher king. That's probably your ideal leader, but those never did grow on trees. You might get a king like that, and then his son is an idiot.
But, just assume you have the power to enact the policies you want. Population control is a tough nut. Education and universally available birth control are very important for achieving this goal.
But, just assume you have the power to enact the policies you want. Population control is a tough nut.
First off, I reject the notion that education and universal BC access will address the problem, which IMO requires frank and rapid population reduction. But if I can't just kill 5/6 of the human population, here's what I would do:
Make the charging of interest punishable by death.
We have to stop the damned growing. Unless we do, all the proposals here are nothing but window dressing.
"The closest you might get is a benevolent philospher king."
Actually, no. The closest you can get to succesful dictatorships are Switzerland and Singapore. Both are examples of democracies with choices that limit the voters to perpetually re-elect the same group of people who happen to run both countries like mid-sized, closely held businesses (rather than publicaly traded international corporations). The result is that you get all the business finesse of the management team, no external meddling of the stock markets and rather good returns on investment. And as long as the economy is good, people won't care much about not having any real choices. And business happens to be good...
I have to agree that this is the best plan given the premise, maybe a little tweaking to preserve family structure, education, etc.
I'm of the mind that a even a one percent change in energy consumption on an annual basis is just too much for most people. They can't handle it, psychologically. You're talking about making their lives harder, and people just are not going to do that. In fact, I think most either will start blowing energy like crazy or hoarding it once they find out that services are going to be restricted. For example, if you knew that all transaltantic flights were going to be cut off in 6 months, wouldn't you go to Europe? It will be your last chance...
I think the very first step is to expand people's framework for change, get them prepared mentally for what is about to occur. Preferably this should be done by a global group, such as the UN. There really hasnt been a lot of effort expended on this. Hire a good marketing firm and send out the message.
In my Peak Oil presentation (pdf warning), my first mitigation/adaptation proposal is for the UN to strike an International Panel on Oil Depletion (IPOD) similar in concept to the IPCC. You're right, it's the essential top-level step.
You'd want to change that acronym though... :-)
More seriously, as you GG said earlier, the real problem is "growth", thus the true essential top-level step is to create the International Panel on Steady State Economics. Thus far any talk of no-growth is in the far fringe, while the mainstream growth religion is rapidly destroying the planet. It's not Oil Depletion that's the problem, it's the culture that pushes for the depletion of everything as fast as possible.
I kind of liked that acronym! The kids would all remember it, but Apple might decide to sue the United Nations for trademark infringement...
I cringe a little everytime I hear proposals for managed population control. If you are willing to consider inhumane routes, then why not just stockpile ammunition and let everybody fend for themselves. There is one way to humanely reduce population and that is to lower birth rates and allow the die-off be administered by old age. This of course would be a slow process, and to buy the time necessary we would need to ration out our remaining energy supplies at a much lower rate than we are currently doing.
So as dictator, here is how I would do it:
1.) Birth control Birth control Birth control! This might have to be pushed pretty hard, and it might sound like eugenics, but its still more humane than executions.
2.) Free love! (with birth control of course) The populace needs to remain happy so they don't mind sacrificing their cars, meat, air conditining etc. All the uptight puritans would be alot happier if they just let their hair down and had some free love. Instead they try to fill the void with SUVs, McMansions, fuming about the harlots etc. We may have to go so far as to outlaw speaking of puritanical morals.
3.) Two day work week. Most economic activity burns more value in energy than it creates. Driving to work to write mortgages on McMansions etc. - it needs to go.
4.) Walkable communities, light rail, gardens, permaculture - you know the drill.
I don't have all the details, but my point regarding a die off is that old age is the only acceptable way to have one. It would require rationing of resources, but we still have a hell of a lot of slack (at least in the US).
I cringe a little everytime I hear proposals for managed population control.
I agree with that. While my tongue is in cheek as the benevolent dictator, I do want to consider policies that a politician might actually consider. They aren't going to be too crazy about radical population control. I think the best bet is to employ the things that we know reduce birth rates in a civilized fashion (birth control, education, more opportunities for women) and try to ride it out until the population starts to come back down.
You missed abortion. That thing that half the US population is against, one third of women have had, and 5/6 th of all US counties don't have a provider for.
People in the US abort because they were too stupid to use a condom. Population growth in the US is essentially equal to immigration.
http://www.susps.org/overview/immigration.html
This is what the Sierra Club says. Certainly they are not exactly what you call "conservative" despite being conservationists.
Me, I don't care why the abortion is performed, it saves resources, probably marriages and lives as well. Sounds like I'm out of your framework for change and that's ok, but can one really be "peak oil" and "pro life"?
OMG I had no idea that many were being performed.
That IS a failure of family planning/contraception indeed.
Ouch.
Many don't/can't make plans. For all kinds of reasons. Orderly lives, planned in an orderly manner are not available to all.
This gruesome genocide fantasy is as ignorant as it is evil.
It presumes first that we are even close to not being able to sustain the human population, and second that the sustainable population just happens to be one billion. Why one billion and not 10 million or 100 billion?
And why is this any more fair than letting war and natural selection take the survivors anyways? Its a far more sensible policy, especially if your wrong.
Which you are.
Of course your procrustean solution will probably not work in any real world scenario, even in the hands of a dictator as powerful as Stalin... Although Pol Pot did manage to kill off about 1/3 of Cambodia, it was conducted as a (more natural, more human) genocide campaign rather than a random destruction spree.
That said, our population has burgeoned in the age of oil, and if it were to be suddenly reduced, the survivors would certainly have an easier time with the other environmental disasters we can see on the horizon.
But is the correct population figure one billion? How many people should ideally exist?
My objection to these sorts of schemes is that they put the cart before the horse in that they are an attempt to maintain the status quo. The first action should be to define what sort of society and economy can be sustained and then consider what should be done vis-a-vis energy.
To me, the number one problem is growth of population, energy use and consumption of non-durables. Stopping or reducing growth will cause the financial sector along with government to have a hissy fit :-).
I grant that action must be taken and should have been taken sooner. Maybe the initial action should be to reduce the work week to 2-10 hour days with a commensurate reduction in income. People with debt would have their payment period extended to avoid bankrupcy.
Todd
"The first action should be to define what sort of society and economy can be sustained and then consider what should be done vis-a-vis energy."
It seems that some people never learn... ALL examples of societies which were based on "definitions" have failed historically. The only survivors are societies which have grown organically and are the result of continuous change and adaptation. The first action should be to define what sort of society and economy can be sustained and then consider what should be done vis-a-vis energy. The current problems of the US can be atributed to people not having learned the lesson, yet. They will. After that, the US will be fine.
America's secret is that it has a definition, but it refuses to say what it is.
1. The market is always right.
2. Therefore, if white people on average are richer than black, Christian than non-Christian, Protestant than Catholic, men than women, then the market has proven the richer group superior in each case.
3. That which is superior is good and must be given total power.
4. If anyone who isn't white, Protestant Christian, or male gets rich, it's because
(a) they knew to be ashamed of their badness and repented by working twice as hard for the same money as a white Protestant man and aping his bigotry, greed and worship of private property in overdrive, or
(b) the market has been circumvented by liberal treason.
5. Therefore, when America is perfected all people will have wealth based on how much they have adopted the virtues of white Protestant men in their own lives. This is called Conservatism.
6. God decreed this. That's what makes us unique.
So far, we're getting away with it, InfinitePossibilities. #6 gives us the right to murder and steal from others when supplies get tight. We've used it on occasion.
RR, I think that your ideas are spot on with regard to energy policy.
I've recently been reading E. O. Wilson's wonderful little book "The Creation" which I very much recommend.
Wilson is a secular humanist, an elderly scientist, Harvard faculty, two-time Pultitzer prize winner. He was raised as a Southern Baptist in Alabama, and now writes an appeal to save "the Creation" with a niche in it for us humans. Here's a quote"
"Here is a chimera, a new and very odd species come shambling into our universe, a mix of stone age emotion, medieval self-image, and godlike technology. The combination makes the species unresponsive to the forces that count most for its long term survival."
Maybe some of us will really pay attention to the things that really count for long term survival, but it occurs to me that as we become more godlike in our technology we become a new Babel.
Unable to understand or trust each other, confused by stone age emotion and various medieval self images we turn to war.
Here in the USA, for example, a rational energy policy has for decades slipped through our grasp, and most people do not even know it. We fight a resource war in the Middle East instead.
Your points are spot on.
I might add an emphasis on funding local food production and reliance upon local resources, as this will become a central issue as reliance upon fossil fuels diminishes.
I beg to differ.
The problems of the US in the energy sector are not due to "mankind's technology becoming godlike". They are due to the simple failure of the US school system to produce rationally thinking adults who do not max out their credit cards, do not buy homes on interest only mortgages and can actually distinguish between "capital investment" and "running cost" when they purchase a car. There is nothing godlike about these people unless in your vocabulary "godlike" and "moronic" are synonyms.
Infinite: I wish you wouldn't attempt to bad-mouth every good post here in a futile attempt to make yourself look smart. God-like technology here means having a large influence on the planet. Ever heard of climate change? Given such power, and yet such stupidity in behavior as you mention (due to the stone-age emotions and medieval self-image), that's why we're in trouble. Can you grasp that we're in trouble? Yes there are infinite possibilites, but some are a lot more probable than others, unless we work hard on this. And no matter what we do about energy sources, the current profligate way of life will become impossible sooner than you think.
The great lesson of 5000 years of private property is that entrenched wealth always creates morons. And the Euros are a lot better educated and except for the UK a lot less indebted, but they're only a few years behind Anglo-America into the energy abyss. Dude, all the shortcomings you list were a product of indoctrination by business interests. Don't you recall all the lobbying to legalize home equity loans? The godlike power, as Lincoln warned, is "the money power".
Again another article that mentions solutions to peak oil, but fails to even mention the 200 pound gorilla in the corner – population and growth. The real problem is not peak oil, its growth in a finite environment. I loved your “I would go on TV and just have a frank conversation with the public” without even mentioning this. Sorry to be harsh because I agree with your article; but it makes me angry sometimes how we refuse to talk about this. When will the US president in a State of the Union Address instead of saying “We are addicted to oil” say “World population must stabilize and decline; the would must be sustainable and we must do everything in our power to get there, and the sooner the better.”? The Catholics would have a heart attack, the business community would revolt, stock markets might crash – who knows, but it must be talked about. When will the UN and the MSM really start talking about this? This is the real “frank” discussion we need, because any peak energy conservation would be quickly be absorbed in new growth without this change. Continued growth is the problem – not peak oil. Peak oil is just the first symptom. Sorry, but I’m tired of TOD mentioning conservation solutions without even mentioning the “real problem”. Over the next 100 or 200 years we will be sustainable; one way or another – the easy way or the hard way. This is the frank discussion that the world needs to hear.
Since dictator of the world is not possible; I’ll list reasonable and needed policies for the US that could be implemented today:
1. Implement the “fair-tax” (http://www.fairtax.org/) The fair-tax taxes ALL CONSUMPTION, and moves ALL INCOME tax to a consumption tax with a REBATE to the poor so they in effect pay NO taxes up to the federal poverty level. (Sorry for the capitals but some people can't read or understand how simple and elegant this idea is.) Since consumption needs energy, this taxes energy indirectly and unlike a fossil fuel tax or carbon tax this has a real chance of getting passed someday.
2. Tax fossil fuels to make the real impact of their use (global warming) be reflected in the price and allow renewables a chance to compete. Lower other taxes and decrease government spending and let the market take care of the rest. (Trying to pick which technology to invest government monies in is a waist of time; because it will just turn into pork spending – like ethanol and it's too complex for the government to pick correctly.) Implement stricter environmental standards, guidance and research when needed, tax fossil fuels, but mostly let the market decide.
3. Instead of giving money to every country in the world and instead of “Free AIDs” drugs for Africa – I would give free contraceptives for anyone and everyone in the world that wants them.
4. Reduce government spending. Bring the military home and faze-out our foreign military presents over time. Close all military bases in Europe for example, they are no longer needed.
5. Explain and talk about “reducing population, a sustainable world, expanding growth in a finite environment” until everyone “gets it”. A president should mainly be an educator.
6. Stop all road construction and start rebuilding our trains.
7. Tie all government outlays to income (social security benefits for example.)
This would be a good start. I’ve decided to run for president on the above ticket. Anyone want to vote for me?
Please go read up on population growth using professional text books and articles. The general outlook is that there is basically nothing that can be done to change the maximum number of people that will live around the late 21st century because most of these people are already born and they will have children.
Unless you are suggesting we start culling humans, population growth is not even worth talking about any longer. It already happened.
IP. I've noticed you seem to “pick-up on just one part" of what someone writes without thinking about the whole. You are obviously very knowledgeable and possibly even brilliant; but I feel this may go unnoticed by most people because of the tone of your response and how you respond way too often and much too quickly. Imagine a huge room of people talking and someone keeps dominating the conversation and blasting every little thing someone says as if their towering over everyone even before they can hardly finish a sentence. After a while, people would tend to just ignore that person; even if they had something very worthwhile and meaningful to say. (Other people, who post here very often, might also learn from this concept.) Now image thousands of people reading TOD and 10 people think they are the only ones in the room and you understand the problems here at TOD; it's a problem of scale like everything else.
In my above text for example, you seemed to pick-up on just one part of what I said and told me I should do more research because obviously I haven’t done enough. Maybe you should read “How to make friends and influence people” because I didn’t just mention population as being the “only problem” -- I mentioned “Population and Growth” and several other things including the "problems of not being able to openly talk about growth and sustainability" at a national or international level. I also mentioned that conservation and continued growth won’t work - we are not going to be able to conserve out way out of this as long as we're growing as fast as we conserve. Theses concepts are actually more important than peak oil, and yet I have lived my whole life and until fairly recently didn’t really understanding this. Obviously, I wasn’t alone.
But I will not give up trying and I do my best to be as realistic and optimistic as I can. (Not only for me because I know I will not see the end of the fossil age; but for my children now 18 and 22 -- who may see a totally different world than I grew up with. This bothers and saddens me greatly because as a father you want to protect and help your children succeed and have a better life than you had; which may or may not be possible.) Our current “education system” does everyone a disservice for not teaching theses things in school; Had I known I may have made different choices in my life. Even now, we are teaching a whole generation to consume with little regard for the consequences. I’m not as brilliant as you because it didn’t even understand theses things until recently --- now it seems totally obvious.
Sorry, but I don’t always share your Infinite Possibilities --- It’s more like “Realistic Consequences” sometimes because of the problems you just mentioned: “The general outlook is that there is basically nothing that can be done to change the maximum number of people that will live around the late 21st century” this doesn’t seem to abode well with your Infinite Possibility outlook at times…
Robert,
I generally think you are a very smart guy and I make sure to read your posts but the bit about "I would go on TV and just have a frank conversation with the public . . " tells me you are a woefully out of touch idealist when it comes to the nature of your fellow American. The real inconvenient truth is we want cheap gas, easy credit and free Big macs and will gladly ass-f--k the world to keep em.
As far as my energy policy, it would be to syphon off tax-payer money to build myself an underground, off-grid city with a harem and a lot of Blackwater contractors to protect me.*
Obviously, I can't tell the public the truth about my plans so I would need to hire a slick-talking front man (Bill Clinton) to do my talking for me.
Inevitably, however, even this plan would collapse most likely in one of two ways:
SCENARIO #1
At some point I fail to keep the Blackwater contractors happy. They initiate a coup and toss me out on my ass and take my harem for themselves.
SECNARIO #2
At some point I am unable to keep the harem happy. The ladies would then turn to lezbianism to keep themselves happy and (inevitably) a cadre of alpha-lezbians emmerge who then intiiate a coup and tosses me out on my ass and take my harem for themselves.
*Anybody who really, sincerely thinks they would actually do anything substantially different lacks awareness: of themselves, of their fellow (wo)man, and of the true parameters of our predicament.
This is why real-world dictators always implement a layered approach to security. That way they don't have to keep all the soldiers happy. Just an elite contingent of personal bodyguards, surrounded by a somewhat less-elite cadre of palace guards, and town police, and regional militia, etc.
Of course when the soldiering business starts to have a ROI of less than 1.0, things do tend to start falling apart...
This is what I've been trying to explain to non-Southerners for 20 years. The ordinary Southerner is descended from the Blackwater thugs of the old plantation elite - who tried to do exactly what Chimp-Driver suggests. Now just enough of them work as soldiers, cops, prison guards and (unpaid) Christian thought police to keep everyone else in line. If we coulda gotten them all killed off in Iraq we'd become Canada (pre-Harper), but they've finally learned from current plantation masters Bush & Cheney how to duck shooting wars. Cheney's plan was to win quick in Iraq, then bring 'em home to crush any opposition to dictatorial measures. But not enough volunteered. And too many who went are being crippled by the Unmentionable Thing (100,000 veterans of the currrent wars have already gotten disability ratings).
Shame. A World War III between our rednecks and every sentient being on the planet would have been a glorious and fitting end to our species, combining all the worst features of all past wars, plus religion, racism, and capitalism. Think The Book of Revelation done as a sequel to "The Wild Bunch."
Anybody who really, sincerely thinks everyone in the world thinks just like they do lacks awareness, period.
Do you really think Mahatma Gandhi, Che Guevara, and Adolf Hitler would all go for your little harem fantasy as their first option? Some people are not wholly self-centred. And many who are go about it rather differently.
You've got my vote. I have yet to hear anything from any candidate that even comes remotely close to fixing the problems of overpopulation (never mentioned), overconsumption, resource depletion, oil depletion, global warming, etc., etc. Everyone is for doing something as long as there is zero impact on the current American lifestyle and almost complete dependence upon the automobile.
And now the latest is that we "need" 245 billion additional dollars for Iraq.
all the above are good strong cases made, I am more questioning on thought I have, working on sundays. No working on the sabath remember that old one. Except for essential services such as police fire ambulance hospitals etc, this would reduce GHGs and fossil fuel consumption. Is this one plausible?
I would definitly take the subsidies and explore energy storage and grid upgrades. PV and Wind are viable if those who have them, also have a plug in hybrid. Bi-directional V2G
regards
Marvin
Hello RR,
This is a great idea! I would start off with Bush holding a nationwide address where he replays Pres. Carter's Sweater Speech:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_energy.html
Then he comes on camera and says we pissed away 30 years of mitigation chances, but now is the time to get serious if we wish to be smarter than yeast. He then refers everyone to study Bartlett's exponential growth videos and Dieoff.com instantly making these the top websites in traffic. He says these are the worst-case scenarios--the full on Thermo-Gene Collision--but we, as a nation, will cooperatively apply the brakes instead of floorboarding it into Olduvai Gorge. We will not repeat the horrific effects of the Zimbabwe Syndrome, but steamroll into full Peakoil Outreach, and we will use the best ideas of the experts worldwide to achieve Detritus Powerdown and Biosolar Powerup. He will list off sites such as TOD, EB, Peakoil, ASPO, LATOC, and relevant books. He will say no reason to act stupid and panic--just conserve and get informed.
Bush states simply that Overshoot is the natural aggregate population desire for humans to cram 30 people into a VW bug--stupid idea! We are going to shoot for quality of human life, not quantity of human life, therefore from this day forward any fertile woman is only allowed one child, exceptions allowed if her ovaries naturally conceive twins or more. No more in-vitro fertilizations and other FF-enhanced birth measures that allow stupid crap like 67 year-old women to be mothers. Infertile women will receive a taxbreak for adoption, and the death penalty is instantly automatic for any woman & sperm-donor who aborts a child based on sex--we will not screw up natural M/F birth ratios like China!
Police will monitor all sonogram operators immediately: Any sonogram operator signaling the sex of the fetus to the parents is immediately taken outside by the police and shot. No exceptions--we will not be like China and other countries that have male preferences. Automatic tubal ligation for all mothers, women evading this and having another child forfeit with their lives and their sperm-donor too--offspring put up for adoption. This reduction in population is the new social norm, and by far the most important social norm to reduce Overshoot.
Huge cash reward for reporting any pregnant woman that is not in the national pregnancy database. Conviction of rape, pedophilia, infanticide means automatic death penalty--we will protect the young for their future at all costs! No more of this crap of catch-and- release of child predators and rapists.
Prostitution made legal, medically supervised, for those women so inclined. Pimps shot on sight--all funds go to the prostitutes. Social norm is that this is a honorable profession with good pay and benefits to reduce violent tendencies in men, and vastly increase the wealth of women so they can help best provide for their child. Attacking a prostitute means automatic death penalty--no Jack the Rippers allowed! Deadbeat dads tracked down, wealth extracted to provide proper child support. Young males volunteering by vasectomy to never procreate a child get a big cash incentive.
Okay, this is just a start, but if reducing Overshoot is not the primary emphasis of a new dictator-- the other energy ideas will be a waste of time leading to higher levels of violence. Most TODers are familiar with my other suggestions of what to do next: Foundation, Earthmarines, Spiderwebriding, stop funding the military to halt the '3 Days of the Condor' scenario, building large Biosolar habitats to help protect other biota, etc, etc.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Then he comes on camera and says we pissed away 30 years of mitigation chances, but now is the time to get serious if we wish to be smarter than yeast.
Can you imagine the reaction? I dream about this. Every time I watch a State of the Union address, I am hoping for something like this. Something I could walk away from and go "Wow. It looks like we are really getting serious this time." But instead we get "let's produce more ethanol" so we can maintain our gluttony. We just haven't gotten serious about attacking the demand side, and until we do we will continue to have a problem.
It seems to me the taxation system that you propose would be the best idea.
If you want to get the US oil consumption down, an important aspect would be taxing SUV's, but it would be very difficult to do.
One of the reasons we didn't mitigate over the last 30 years has been the rise of the SUV -- now in the US one out of every three vehicles is an SUV -- operating profit margins in the late 80's and 90's for SUV production were up at 30%. No lawmaker would regulate that because SUV's were and to an extent still are Detroit's cash cow. The rise of the SUV did away with fuel standards and weight limits on cars because SUV's are classified as "trucks." -- some weigh more than 8,000 lbs or even higher.
Hello R-squared,
Thxs for responding. I just wanted to re-emphasize the importance of protecting natural birth ratios. This is probably a primary DNA driven event honed to perfection over millions or billions of years of evolution to maximize aggregate population adaptability to a changing environment. China amd other countries preference for males is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS in my opinion, if anything the preference should be for females in case bird-flu or some other pathogen starts driving us towards extinction. That surplus of females' wombs would allow a faster pop. rebound, if required, to try and avert the extinction. A surplus of females might lead to more postPeak cooperation and less violence too, but I am no expert on this, just a WAG. I gladly defer to expert geneticists, but my hunch is don't tamper with Mother Nature on this sex issue.
Attn female TODers: please don't mis-interpret my posting as women as just mobile wombs and/or sex objects--I hold by far the avg. woman as much more valuable to society than the avg. male. No flames please.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
"I dream about this .. ."
Robert,
I take it you are as dependent on the petroleum economy as the rest of us, correct? Put another way: you're not posting from some off-grid bunker where you provide for all your needs and can sustain yourself through a true collapse?
If Bush (or any president) did as you say - *and people actually took him seriously* - the markets would crash overnight. Gold would go to $2000, your FRNs would be worthless within a few months, the economy would collapse and the fat, overeducated members of the management class like you and me would likely find ourselves being roasted with sticks up our asses inside of 6 months.
At the very least, Ford and GM would tank which would decimate all those teacher and police officer pensions that are invested in their stock. The Saudis would pull their money out of the market quite possibly, etc. See where this is going?
It's going that way anyway, just a little later, after TPTB concentrate a bit more wealth. Capitalism is a pyramid scheme, and all pyramid schemes eventually collapse.
"If I were dictator" I'd go there now, coupled with frank talk on how and why, and actions to mitigate the effects. E.g., nationalization of all personal wealth in excess of 1 million US$, to be used in creating essential infrastructure and jobs, mostly in small-scale farming.
Quick note: I just wanted to say that most of these population ideas I give full credit to Isaac Asimov: he covered this topic years ago in his famous essays and books. Basically, if world human population starts getting dangerously low from these rules--you repeal them for a period of time and encourage people to have as many kids as they want again till population safety levels are restored without jeopardizing sustainability. Cheers!
Issue each adult the right to have one child or less. Make these child credits tradeable. The poor tend to have a lot of children. This will give them an incentive to have less children by trading their right to have children to the better off. This basic idea was proposed by Kenneth Boulding, the economist, a few decades ago. Apply the same concept to energy. The frugal will become richer. The rich will have to pay an inordinate amount of money buying credits from the frugal to maintain their SUV, giant home, jet setting lifestyle.
When you turned off the lights, you would not only save energy but you would make it more possible that you could sell some of your energy credits. I can envision a scenario where the super frugal (and those who live in dumpsters) could virtually live off these credits. This scheme would clearly help the homeless and those without the money or who chose not to have a car.
Under a straight taxation scheme, everyone pays the same amount for the marginal btu of energy. This is unfair. The rich and/or unfrugal pay the same as I do for their 100th gallon of gasoline for the month, even though I may only use one gallon. A energy credit/coupon system has a built in progressive nature. Those who exceed their credit ration end up paying on top of the price of gasoline to obtain those extra credits. This could all be handled by ebay.
For those who are retired and live in cold climates or whose employment is not location based, they can shut down their house for the winter and pay for part of their southern sojourn with the energy they saved not having to heat and the extra money they got from selling their credits.
Back to the population issue, I think we should have a goal to bring the U.S. population back to about 100 million. Of course, if the dieoff folks are right, we won't need a goal.
One child per adult is nearly replacement, and that's far too many. In fact, birth control is needed, but too slow to help. We need to both reduce population to something sustainable without so much brutalization of Gaia, which is probably fewer than one billion.
But if US could reduce its own population by two thirds or so, it will find it harder to fend off the invaders in small ships from across the Pacific, somewhat like the Vikings invading Great Britain 15 centuries ago or so.
Excuse me, but who are all these people pushing these absurd proposals? Most of us live in relatively free democratic societies and would like them to remain free societies.
Ahh forget it...not worth my time to point out all the absurdities.
They are brainstorming - suggestions may or may not be realistic at all for now. And some may become realistic someday after we "shed some load" and get through the crisis of the transition.
As for "free democratic societies" - I wonder how long those will be sustainable and at what scale. Worst case, they'll probably make a comeback after the Transition.
Hello Ener Ji,
Forgive me, but I am not exactly sure what precise proposals you are objecting to. But consider I am 51, no biological offspring--plenty of freedom, and I am sure there are others like me that have raised, or are raising stepchildren or adoptive children.. Lots of couples have only one child--plenty of freedom. Lots of couples have only two offspring--plenty of freedom.
See my post above: It is when we try to put 30 people into a VW bug as an analogy [metaphor?] that we lose our freedom. I assume you are familiar with the yeast culture in a petri dish example that doubles every minute. No freedom for anyone once the dish is filled at 12:00--only death and extinction--we are trying to come up with a better alternative to avert the Tragedy of the Commons; to roll back the clock from the present 11:59.9 to at least 11:58 or 1/4 filled.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
I agree with Ener Ji...Its ridiculous beyond belief.
It gives the trolls lots to feed on. We just threw common sense on this website out the window.
Now you have opened the floodgates.
What was once a far more measured and reasonable state of affairs has with this topic degraded into the absurd.
If that was the purpose it has succeeded beyond measure.You have issued the clarion call to trolls everywhere.
No one who lives a reasonable life in the USA would allow such programs as suggested to exist nor continue. We would be fools to toss away any cultural advantages we have climbed up to. You don't create a nation dedicated to freedom and liberty and then trash it.
If PO comes ,and it will come, then you let the populace decide their own fates. Its bad governance that has brought us to this and I suggest governance cannot correct it.
It will be the landowners and those with ownership of sustainable property who will have to defend it from those who would attempt to take it by force or decree.
This is part of the reason for the beginnings of freedom in this nation. The right of property ownership and the right to defend it.
That is and should not be abrogated. Those who made bad decisions will have to live with those decisions. Those who can meaningfully contribute something of value may survive. If not they die off.
The land belongs to the owners. The rest have decided. You don't take what others have and have worked for and give it to the dogs.
Anyone who would come to take by force or decree what I have will have to face the consequences of their actions. The prime directive is to survive. That says it all.
Many are beginning to realize that they chose badly. They are in denial. Whether it plays out badly or not they have to live by their decisions. Its still a free country. They had the right to choose. Now they need to have the guts to face it and live with it.
end of a wasted rant
It's not a wasted rant at all airdale. You just spoke for many - especially those who have no clue thjis site or thread discussion exists (let alone the existance of the problem).
The funniest thing so far is the idea that the populace will behave "rationally." The "fireside chat" approach did not fair well for Mr. Carter and I doubt it will fair well for any US leader. You can't wake a sleeping titbaby, take the nipple from it's mouth, and expect it to behave rationally (euros will have a harder time - imagine the protests in Nipple-central France...)
A couple of words of warning for landowners or anyone else with "Wealth" - humility and generosity will likely serve them well in terms of goodwill with the locals in their world.
And don't bite off more than you can chew - the government will probably tax all landowners into the poor house before this is over... which would you rather have - 8 acres and a mule vs 80 acres and a diesel tractor (or 300 local farm hands)? Which do you think the government would rather take?
Ants in smoke and Homo da Sap have a lot in common going forward... bite-bite-bite.
//
You talk as if the property owners are entirely and absolutely innocent in the creation of the New World Order.
Your property rights are no more natural than those of a Palestinian grove owner or a Iroquois hunter, to be abolished by whomever has the numbers and technological might to exterminate you. Where do you think your ancestors got your property from? If you don't like this, consider the word Ronald Reagan abolished from American Engish: "Interdependence."
Hey, Mr. Meritocracy - you know what meritocracy meant in 476 AD? It meant being real good at chopping off people's heads on horseback. Now it's being good at phone scams, stock scams, government subsidy scams, religious scams, and investment bubbles. Things that even a dog wouldn't do.
I notice that in that speech, Carter said:
Does anyone know how much we spend per person on oil imports today? Also, does anyone know of a graph that shows US oil consumption per capita over the years, say 1970 to present?
12 Mbpd of imports at $60/bbl for a population of 300 million, comes out to around $900 per person per year. Carter's number was an overestimate because he did a linear extrapolation. The oil shock of 1980 was followed by a dramatic reduction of the oil intensity of the GDP, causing the real numbers to undershoot Carter's estimates.
If the US burns 20m b/d, at $60/bl, then it burns about $1460 per capita pa of crude oil (60% imported).
Now if we applied the Carter oil price ($100/bl) we would get $2433 pa per capita.
So Carter was wrong in the sense that:
- US oil production didn't drop to zero (although it continues its steady fall) - he probably underestimated the impact on oil drilling of the high oil price in the early 80s-- stripper wells etc.
- oil prices didn't stay at $100/bl in today's money
I don't disagree with what you said (about the shift away from high oil consuming industries, and general increase in energy efficiency/ lower energy to GDP ratio within the US economy).
My own thought is that Carter was perhaps right, but also too early.
But hang on here. Isn't the deliberate reduction of female births an effective way of reducing the population? Fewer females equals fewer births. It's females that have kids, not males.
Quite true. This is likely the reason for the widespread belief, world-wide, that males are superior to females. Makes it easier to commit female infanticide and such things if you think females are "not as human" as males.
I'll be the first to say I'm not as smart or informed as most of you, but I see this as a great opportunity and I'd like you to tell me why it wouldn't work.
The first step is education to the American people about the situation we're in and it's probably outcomes. Second, a frank address to the rest of the world that we are launching a revolutionary new program that will benefit the world. Explain that we are again choosing to lead by example and as expediently as possible withdraw our presence in the middle east and other nations whose resources we've exploited and people's we've oppressed. Explain that we're in a global emergency and ask everyone to join us and solve the crisis through peaceful means. We will meet and talk with "terrorist" groups around the world and exend an olive branch in exchange for cooperation and patience.
Now, how do we actually solve the problem here? With the same incentive that ALWAYS works: the chance to make $. We need generous feed laws for renewable generation under 1 MW. Something close to 15-20 cents a kWh guaranteed for 20 years. We also need generous compensation for residential energy storage, possibly through plug in vehicles. Any use of mass transit should be tax deductable. We obviously need a carbon tax, an end to subsidies for carbon intensive industries, an increase in garbage and disposal fees, and escalating electricity prices. The proceeds from these and the savings from a slashed defense budget would go towards the feed laws, updating the grid, research, and mass transit.
This would help to solve many problems. The first is the problem of motivation, it takes a lot to get Americans off their ass and to change their habits. The feed laws would spur ingenuity and productivity in millions of people. The vast expanses of land in the mid west and other regions would become valuable again and there would be massive migrations out of congested cities and back to farmland where it's needed. It would decentralize our power system, provide much needed revenue (that can't be outsourced), and increase energy awareness.
Maybe most importantly, it would repair our relations worldwide, avoid the presently unavoidable WWIII, and give the people HOPE which will beat DESPAIR everytime.
I know it's all too simple, so someone please tell me why this wouldn't work?
You mean (gasp) tell the truth? Only as a last resort.
Okay then, I would make something up and say that the CIA has intelligence that covert terrorist carbon cells are working to destroy America. :)
"need incentives for residential storage..."
Consider this: On another thread a commenter noted that in silicon valley the government had, as a carpooling incentive, reduced bridge tolls for cars w/ more than one occupant--but perversely, this only applied during rush hours! The commenter said on several occasions he'd heard co-workers say they wanted to wrap up a meeting soon so they could get to the bridge while the low toll applied.
IOW, people will take on what might seem to be inordinate burdens to save 50 cents. Same phenomenon is seen with newspaper-coupon-clippers who will drive to a store that's out of their way to save 50 cents.
So...as we bring more nuke plants online, offer homeowners cut-rate electricity--say, half the daytime rate--from midnight to 6 a.m., up to some max amount (say, 500 kwh per month). Only catch is that in order to get this freebie, the homeowner has to buy the necessary "smart" meter (which would cost 80 bucks or so). In six months you'd have 20,000 takers either charging their EVs or just shifting hot-water heating or laundry to off-peak hours. They'd recover the cost of the meter in two months, and would save $40 a month after that.
The local or state govt would split the cost with the utility--writing one check would be *far* less costly than some of the bureaucratic nightmares of socialist intervention proposed in some other threads. Some of the cost of the program could be paid for by tax credits to the utility, to make it almost revenue-neutral. (The power co should pay some part of the cost since in the long run this program will result in more sales.)
In a state like California, in two years you'd probably have a million consumer-purchased EV batteries being charged at off-peak hours at the cut-rate. If EV batts cost roughly $4000 per car, that's $4 Billion dollars of power storage *purchased by the consumer*--who also paid for the meters!
As more consumers sign up, gradually reduce the incentive--or keep the same saving per kwh as electricity rates gradually rise. At some point the differential could ease to just a penny or two per k. But keeping *some* differential would keep an incentive for off-peak usage, which would let nuke plants stay at a higher load factor (less thermal stress) all day.
RR: Is this for the US, or for the world?
As you say, there are 2 problems here.
1) global warming
2) peak oil
The solution to problem #1 is not as obvious as simply finding a 'sustainable' rate of fossil fuel consumption. I doubt that there exists such a rate of any significance because what ultimately determines the Earth's climate is the cumulative amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. That is, the total amount _not_ sequestered in the ground or water. Since the time scale is hundreds of years, then any rate that would consume all fossil resources within, say, 300 years would end up more or less like consuming them in 30 years. It might give a some extra time, but the end result would be the same. I don't think any rate that we set as a 'sustainable' amount will last over 200 years.
Ultimiately, we need to have as much CO2 sequestered in the ground or water as possible. Clearly, the amount in vegetation is limited. Most CO2 must be sequestered under ground, either in form of coal or waste CO2. We have to set limits on what we can burn and/or how we burn it.
Problem #2 complicates things. Given the tremendous value of liquid fossil fuels, I would say that if we are going to emit CO2, then using oil gives the most punch for the emissions. So, I would write off all crude oil as gone. It will be burned. The stuff is too good.
That leaves coal, tar sands, and oil shale. Since these give less return for cO2 emissions, this is where we need to set limits. Designate areas as 'no mining', or 'carbon-sequestered mining only'.
Natural gas may be in the same boat as oil.
My suggestion would be to ban oil shale globally. Move towards banning tar sands globally. Designate the most envirnomentally sensitve areas as 'no mining' zones. And figure out how much CO2 from the remaining coal must be sequestered.
As for peak oil, since the global warming issue is off the table for oil, the issue is simplified. State outright, that every nation has complete and unquestionable domain over its oil reserves. The oil reserves of any foreign country or region can not be of 'strategic interest' to any nation. If its Russia's oil, it's Russia's oil. No country has a 'right' to another nation's oil or gas.
Make nuclear technology a universal right of every nation. Use IEA to monitor and regulate. Make all alternative techologies available globally.
In short, minimize the damage from CO2 emissions, mining and petro-wars.
As for tax policy, that is up to each nation.
In the US, I think the Federal gov't should not tax oil any different than it would tax any other import/export. Let each state make its own tax policy and let the Federal gov't have a strong informative role. That is, do the econmic research and provide materials for the states to make informed decisions.
RR: Is this for the US, or for the world?
Technically for the world, but as the US is such a big offender I would concentrate my efforts there. I can't argue that the Europeans should cut consumption when they use half the per capita oil of the average American. They may have to cut, but I would go after the biggest offender first.
In the US, I think the Federal gov't should not tax oil any different than it would tax any other import/export. Let each state make its own tax policy and let the Federal gov't have a strong informative role. That is, do the econmic research and provide materials for the states to make informed decisions.
I say this because I see no compelling reason why it shouldn't be left up to the states. Although I am for a import tariff/export subsidy on all int'l US trade. This would add up to a tax on oil, but it wouldn't single it out.
I would be interested in what you think of my previous post. I see the problem from a different angle that most of the others. I look at the cumulative effects rather than some emssions rate. Since CO2 is non-linear, I believe this to be more appropriate/useful.
I really can't stress enough that all the oil is going to get burned and that we need to focus on the less efficient sources of CO2. Does anybody really think that the world isn't going to burn _all_ conventional oil. This site is practically dedicated to that fact.
The world needs to know how much total CO2 can be emitted, and every nation needs to know how much fossil fuel in total, it can emit. Then each nation can be advised on how best to use what is left.
I think that once it is clear that only a finite amount is available, and every nation knows exactly how much that quantity is, then they will see the need for encouraging family planning and proactive population management policies. They will soon realize that given the finite resource, fewer people means more for each. I think each nation should be left address this issue as they please, as long as they realize that they will have to sleep in the bed they make.
E.G., the US could stop giving a child dependent tax deduction. Rather than encourage more children, the nation should focus on less children and more investment into each child. Quality over quantity, that is the future.
I don't see that huge difference in per capita usage.
OECD Europe 2005 15479.479 thousand barrels/day
2005 OECD Europe population 295.864 million
19.09 barrels/person per year
USA 2005 20802.162 thousand barrels/day
2005 USA 296,677 million people
25.6 barrels/person per year
That is a somewhat significant difference, but Europeans don't look all that much more efficient to me.
I got my numbers from here
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/merquery/mer_data.asp?table=T11.02
http://stats.oecd.org/wbos/default.aspx?datasetcode=SNA_TABLE3
Am I missing something here?
That's a 34% difference. It looks very significant to me.
It's significant, but europeans are not dramatically more efficient than americans. If they are as efficient as possible, and our per capita usage was really twice theirs, we would have been using 10 million barrels/day more than we used in 2005.
If europe is what we want to strive for, it really won't buy us much time. If we dropped to the European per capita usage rate tomorrow, it would only drop our consumption by 5-6 million/barrels/day. Depletion would wipe out that savings real fast.
My numbers from here:
http://www.statcan.ca/english/research/11-621-MIE/2005023/tables/table1.htm
The difference is probably "all consumption" versus just oil consumption.
That's my understanding. Total energy consumption in the US per capita is twice what it is in the EU.
I expect a big factor in the energy consumption is the result of climate difference. Any idea what the increase in heating and cooling requirements for the US vs europe?
The big diffrence is average size of housing.
I love the internet. Somebody of course did a study on this.
Country (Degree heating days) (degree cooling days)
US 2159 882
UK 2810 66
Spain 1431 702
France 2478 241
Germany 3252 122
Italy 1838 600
Greece 1269 923
Netherlands 3035 68
It appears to agree with my theory that the US has more heating and cooling requirements than Europe. If you did a population weighted average for Europe vs the US, I expect we would have at least 25% more degree heating days and 50-100% more degree cooling days.
http://cait.wri.org/downloads/DN-HCDD.pdf
Once again I would argue that the US is not dramatically less energy efficient than Europe. Climate and lesser population density are the main reason we use more energy.
You have never been to Europe, have you?
You can see it everywhere:
- smaller, more efficient cars
- smaller, much better insulated houses (gosh, most are even made of stone!)
- lots of public transport, both local and long-range
- much less urban sprawl/suburbia, therefore much denser living
- walkable and bikeable cities - and many people do walk or bike
- at least in Scandinavia and Germany, a decent amount of combined heat and power with district heating
- a widespread concern for environmental issues and energy conservation
And Europe can still save a lot of energy, I guess easily 30% without any major pain.
Cheers,
Davidyson
Of course I have been to Europe. Of course I realize that in most ways, europeans have a lower energy footprint than americans.
what i am saying is that even switching to a european way of life does not drastically reduce energy usage. The first world way of life, whether is is european or american, sucks ups massive amounts of energy. furthermore, if europe had the same wide swings in temperature that many parts of the US does, they would use substantially more electricity than they do now, reducing the differences even more.
The european model of consumption is not a solution in a world of declining energy. It is just better than the american model.
You have to walk before you can run, though. We will have to go through a stage like Europe's before we can go lower. During this time, Europe will be working to go lower.
We obviously won't be able to cut consumption by 75% quickly (unless it's an involuntary cut).
the big factor seems to be GDP/head.
That said, the US is a relatively energy intensive economy (not as bad as China, say, but more so than any other developed country except Canada and Australia). Energy intensity per unit of GDP tends to fall as GDP rises, but the US is probably lagging that curve a bit.
I agree with you climate is something of a factor. The other would perhaps be distance/ density (although that means in the case of goods, for example, Europeans simply ship them across national frontiers).
In particular, I think climate is a factor because much of the US has *humid* summers. That must substantially increase the demand for air conditioning over what is prevalent in Europe (where it gets hot, but tends to stay dry).
What is really interesting is that California has one of the top 10 GDPs per head, but one of the bottom 10 electricity consumptions.
Since California has a high energy load (air conditioning), it is a tribute to the efforts they have made to conserve energy. Electricity consumption per head has been static in California since about 1980.
Populations (rounded):
US: 300M
UK: 60M
Spain: 40M
France: 60M
Germany: 80M
Italy: 60M
Greece: 10M
Holland: 15M
Population-weighted average:
USA: 2159/882 -- sum = 3041
Europe: 2480/313 -- sum = 2792
i.e., 9% higher in the US
Climate does not appear to play a big role (9% of heating/cooling); certainly not big enough to account for much of the 100% higher energy consumption that RR noted.
Population density is widely argued but I've never seen a good argument for why it makes much difference, considering that the vast majority of the US's population (and energy consumption) lives along the coasts in relatively-dense regions. According to this, the population density of many states in the US is not so different from European countries, ranging from Pennsylvania and Ohio (France) to New Jersey (Netherlands).
The 12 states listed represent 45% of the US population, and have a (population-weighted) average density of 390 people per sq mile, which is much higher than France and much lower than Germany, suggesting the US can't attribute all that much to population density.
In fact, considering that Germany has 150% higher population density than France but nearly identical per-capita energy consumption (link), evidence suggests that almost nothing can be attributed to population density.
So evidence suggests that climate and population density do not play a big role in the US's high per-capita energy usage.
I would suggest that history plays a very strong role. The UK has high gas taxes, despite having had a very strong oil & gas position for the last few years, because their strength in O&G is pretty recent. The US was the major oil force in the world until just 35 years ago (and still is a major producer).
The US hasn't adjusted to the change, yet. I wish we'd figure out a way to manage the transition. It would just take a little ingenuity on things like cushioning the impact on Detroit (and other domestic manufacturers), and the airlines.
The US has paid so dearly for it's lack of practical, political ingenuity in this area.
You are just looking at oil. Look at total energy consumption.
the population of OECD Europe is 472 million people from the OECD cite you have above.
2005 average consumption was 15510.904 thousand barrels/day from the data you have there, or 5.661bn barrels from the EIA spreadsheet (Cell F334)
Which is about 11.99 barrels per person pa.
Not sure where you got your population number?
That is a damn good question. I looked at this issue a couple of months ago, so I don't know why I can't find that number or explain the difference now.
If that is the correct population, I take back my theory about europe. They are really significantly more efficient. We americans really are energy sucking pigs.
I took my data from your cites.
Note Europe is a moveable feast. OECD Europe is (a bit) larger than the EU-25 (27!), which is almost twice as many countries as 5 years ago. (I think the difference is Norway, Switzerland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia).
I don't think Ukraine and Belarus are in OECD Europe.
France + G Britain + Germany + Italy + Spain is over 260 million people, and that leaves the other 22 EU states, of which Poland has 40 million people, and Rumania some 20 million something.
A fair defence of the USA is that:
- energy consumption has a strong relationship to GPD per head. The US has a much higher GDP per head than Europe as a whole (taken in the round, the EU has close to the US GDP, but with nearly 500 million people, not 300 million). Only a handful of European countries have close to the US per capita GDP (Luxembourg, Switzerland, Sweden I think) if you adjust on a purchasing power parity basis.
On greenhouse gases, Luxembourg actually is slightly ahead of the US per capita. I've never had that adequately explained, but they may have a big chemical industry.
The UK Stern Review on Climate Change modelled this pretty heavily. GDP and greenhouse gas emissions (a proxy for energy use) are pretty highly correlated. However there are structural 'break points' at $6l GDP per capita, and $25k. The US is about $40k per capita, whereas a lot of Europe is closer to $25k per capita.
- the US has a harsher climate. In particular, it is *hot and humid*. You can live in a lot of Southern Europe without air conditioning (although it is more and more popular) because it is dry in summer. You cannot in New York City and points south. Again, richer countries will buy more air conditioning.
It's probably more interesting to look *within the United States* at energy consumption.
In which case, California is quite striking. CA has the same electricity consumption per head that it did in 1980, whereas the rest of the country has risen by something like 50%. And CA remains one of the richest states in the Union (about number 10 per capita, I think). And generally, CA is also quite fuel efficient I believe, despite the 'car culture' (I don't have the stats of gasoline consumption per head).
The implication is there is a lot the US can do, just to get to the CA standard.
A snide, morally superior European tone about US greenhouse gas emissions was one of the major problems in the Kyoto Negotiations. Basically the US felt they were being blamed for the success of their society.
The fact of the matter is there are few countries which are moral leaders on this issue. Primarily, I would say, the Scandinavian countries. In an entirely different way, France-- extensive nuclear power and 70% of cars are diesels. But although France has excellent long distance trains (the TGV system is the best in the world, except perhaps the Japanese Shinkasen bullet trains), and good local municipal transport, I don't know too many people who think you can live in France without a car. The French love their cars.
The Brits are hopeless about energy consumption. The Germans prop up their lignite industry, the most global warming intensive way of generating power.
This European moral tone is a big issue between the 2 regions. Iraq will compound this, courtesy of injudicious remarks about 'old Europe' (read Nazis and their collaborators) by Mr. Rumsfeld, and vocal French warnings that it was going to be a disaster (which it was, and the French were vindicated). Bush and co. were smug bastards going in, and so Europe will return the favour.
Conversely smug self satisfaction as opposed to real action is a European tradition of great longevity.
People seem to forget that the biggest possible carbon sink is mineral carbonation, and its exothermic.
Any plan that fails to stabilize and then reduce the human population on the planet is bound to fail eventually.
That oughtta do it.
Edit: Does invoking Kodos violate Godwin's law?
We can't do anything about the planet. At least, no more than we already are.
However, we can do something about the U.S. population. We would have a flat or declining population growth rate, if not for immigration. Moreover, there is popular support for immigration control. Mandatory birth control or child quotas would never be accepted here. But there is already a groundswell of support for immigration control, and that is likely to increase as the American middle class is further squeezed. IMO, enforcing immigration laws is the easiest - and perhaps the only realistic - way to reduce our population.
Hello Leanan,
Your Quote: "Mandatory birth control or child quotas would never be accepted here."
I respectfully disagree. If PO + GW Outreach was hammered home across the whole NA continent, I think the entire population would breathe a huge sigh of relief with a fairly imposed and enforced one child quota. Those that refuse to accept the one child rule will be free to emigrate [but leave their wealth behind] to any country that stupidly desires to maximize their Overshoot. I think these wildly Overshot countries will thus collapse in record time postPeak.
I think Nafta creeping into SuperNafta is a done deal, otherwise SPP org. would have never been formed, and the borders would have been shut down years ago. The current demographic mismatch works out pretty well if blended in a proper and controlled fashion with a one child quota across the NA continent. We will see what the three Prezs decide because they will have to act soon if they desire to head off the worst. Time will tell.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
One child policy stricter than China's? Free to emigrate but leave your wealth behind? What kind of dystopia do you want to create?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopia
Hello Ener Ji,
We either go down violently by Nature and our own actions, or we gracefully cooperate and optimize our decline to save as much biota as possible for future generations--simple as that. We do not have to go down like Zimbabwe, Haiti, or Easter Island, but simply change our social norms and actions to avert the worst of the Thermo-Gene Collision.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Leanan wrote:
IMO, enforcing immigration laws is the easiest - and perhaps the only realistic - way to reduce our population.
I second this. Phasing out immigration is almost the silver bullet re population. And it's a realistic possiblity politically if unemployment rises for any reason, peak oil or not.
Recent data in Canada has shown that during recessions, many immigrants don't stay anyway. If I recall, it's one big revolving door for about a third. For an immigrant, the west is a very forbidding place if you can't get a job. Pretty stressful for many immigrants in any event.
Hello Asebius,
Immigration is not going to end. The Democratic party has congress and will soon have the White House. This is not a battle that the anti-immigration (which I also call the Prejudice & Bigotry) crowd can win.
Should Mexico collapse, America will get millions of Mexicans immigrants. No laws and no walls will stop people from escaping from a collapsing nation. America will just have to deal with it. This is simply a non-negotiable circumstance.
The only good question is: When the United States of America collapses where will the Americans go?
Because America's days are numbered. We might live long enough to witness the collapse of the United States with our own eyes.
David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1
Population really is the key, but killing 6 billion people outright seems like a lot of hard work.
Instead, the major industrialized nations should begin paying the citizens of the developing world to have themselves sterilized. We would have to practice what we preached. We would also incentivize people in our own country to remove themselves from the gene pool: maybe a vasectomy or tubal occlusion upon high school/college graduation earns someone a tenured state or federal government job with a guaranteed pension. We could create a caste system of government bureaucrats who don't breed.
We would heavily tax having extra children beyond the target rate, and sick the non-breeding IRS workers on the breeding citizens to enforce the tax laws.
Increasing the gas tax also seems like a good idea.
As a starter we could stop paying people for having more children via tax deductions. This could be phased in and "grandfathered". At least that would be an official recognition of the problem.
And just because I bring up the problem of overpopulation doesn't mean that I'm proposing some sort of "Final Solution". (I had to look up Donwal's Law). I should think we can discuss issues like this without invoking Nazis and Star Trek plots.
with a guaranteed pension.
I am already snipped. where do I go to sign up for my pension?
Hello Kenny,
Pandemic Powerdown of billions is really quite easy to achieve, and at a very low cost, if a hybrid weaponized Ebola/Smallpox is released and the topdogs make sure that they are safely innoculated. But obviously, not a fair and just method of culling. Googling Bioweaponeers should get you a wealth of info on Preston's writings and Ken Alibek. Scares me to death, but should be the preferred topdog choice, instead of the full-on nuclear gift exchange, as it won't affect other lifeforms with radioactivity. I hope we choose timely mitigation instead of either of these two drastic, last gasp choices.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Hillary's Plan (from Drudge): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1PfE9K8j0g
IMO, this is why ExxonMobil asserts that we have trillions and trillions of barrels of remaining conventional and non-conventional oil reserves. They are going to argue that they need all of their cash flow to bring on the undeveloped oil reserves.
Call me paranoid, but I find it interesting that He Who Shall Not Be Named started launching pretty much non-stop attacks on Robert just as we started seeing an across the board push for more investment in and subsidies for biofuels. BTW, the tariff on imported ethanol is about $22 per barrel.
I'm not sure how much a tax on oil would solve these issues... maybe it would work but I'm a bit skeptical. I wouldnt want to chop into the profit margins of CTL when we need liquid fuels the most.
Now the most important immidiate energy policy would be to fasttrack nuclear licensing and ban coal for baseload electric power, and impose sunsets on all operating coal plants of 20 years. The last coal power plant would close sometime around 2030.
The next thing to be done would be to bring standardized LWR designs in for construction over three years to bring capital costs down for nuclear. A massive engineering program for liquid fluoride and liquid chloride reactors would be put in place for commercial thorium reactors and actinide incinerators sometime in 2020. In the meantime, large reprocessing facilities for uranium extraction (not MOX fuel, as its an economic hole) based on molten salt pyroprocessing are to be set up at enrichment facilities.
Tentative investigation of large scale nuclear thermochemical hydrogen production might also be investigated, as a 100GW liquid fluoride reactor might very conceivably be able to be built with massive economies of scale to produce hydrogen for less than natural gas reformation. The hydrogen would largely be used for CTL, oil refining, and other synfuel production. With enough hydrogen production, CTL carbon footprint becomes the same as the burning of ordinary fuel.
On the renewable energy front, convert all hydro dams with resevoirs that are flexible enough into peaking plants. Where there arent dams but appropriate geology, build pumped storage facilities.
I wouldn't fund public transportation, conservation incentives, walkable communities, or any of the other social engineering plans because I honestly believe that the market can address most of these issues. I would however fund the development of things that would be worthwhile like nuclear powered shipping, upgrading the global electric grid for better dispatching, upgrading rail lines around the globe, and other projects that require sums of capital too large to be met by any one extremely conservative corporation or squabbling consortium of corporate bodies.
Carbon tax is a very good idea. Use the money for research and to build a better electrical grid. No nuclear plants! Wind, solar, geothermal and biomass are the solution, they are cheaper and can be installed locally.
Invest in Stirling engines big time - this can be used to burn pellets made of straw for example. Stirling motors can generate power or move vehicles (not family cars).
One idea that was not mentioned here (or maybe I missed): FORCE TECHNOLOGY sharing. If 1 part of the world goes renewable and the other sticks with coal then we will not get anywhere.
Enforce birth control worldwide, to lower the population to sustainable levels. This is very important, because if we do not do this then the next thing we hit very soon will be Peak Water/Steel/Copper, etc.
Its a crude hammer.
Then you turn most of the lights off. Nuclear is the only baseload power capable of displacing coal. Just watch what happens in Germany, and what happened in Italy.
Sheesh, these things aren't magic. They're good for doing some low delta T heat reclamation in stationary locations, so they're valuable for some parts of the steel industry for example... but for most applications ordinary rankine or kalina cycles are superior.
Why do people assume that we aren't at 'sustainable' population levels now?
All these are derivatives of energy, and with nuclear power we'll have plenty of that for thousands of years. One might imagine sometime in the next thousand years we'll either make solar power competitive (perhaps even space based) or figure out commercial fusion.
Nuclear is the only baseload power capable of displacing coal. Just watch what happens in Germany, and what happened in Italy.
When I lived in Germany, we toured a nuclear plant that had been built at enormous cost, and never produced any electricity due to all the protests. What a huge waste of money. They just turned it into a tourist attraction. I forget the name of the town, but it's near the Dutch border.
What exactly is your point in bringing this up? Germany currently produces fully 30% of their electricity from nuclear power, and cant replace this capacity without resorting to coal power or flat out importing electricity from France.
That nuclear power in Germany has been tremendously unpopular and has faced great adversity. For example:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1115-05.htm
http://www.irna.ir/en/news/view/line-20/0701173465191404.htm
I am not anti-nuclear (in fact, I think we will desperately need nuclear), but it has had a tough time in Germany.
You misunderstood me then. I was illustrating the fallacy of trying to replace nuclear baseload because Germany is trying to and will fail, and Italy phased out nuclear and became one of the largest electricity importers in Europe.
The unpopularity of Nuclear in Germany is going to run smack in the face of high electricity costs and breaking Kyoto obligations.
Robert, I really like your market-based approach, but markets have their limits. Consider the following:
1) Markets depend on good accounting. How about a request to the National Academy of Sciences to calculate the external costs of fossil fuels and nuclear?
Carbon taxes will help solve that problem for FF's, but their externalities may not all be proportional to CO2. For instance, oil and coal may be worse than nat gas, per gram of co2 on security, index pollution, etc.
Nuclear costs should incorporate the costs of Price-Andersen and weapons proliferation. If you tax nuclear kwhrs based on the NAS calculations and nuclear is still viable, god bless it!
2) Regulation can be more efficient than taxes due to market/consumer limitations on information. Outlaw incandescent bulbs, single cycle coal and gas plants, and probably unsequestered coal. Building codes, appliance efficiency and CAFE regulations should be made tighter. Taxes and regulation will then complement each other.
3) CAFE has been blocked by Detroit. Why not give them some of the gas tax revenue? Heck, they pay healthcare costs that Asian and European manufacturers don't, so it would even be economically rational. Pay for their healthcare, or give purchase credits, or give R&D money like the recent battery R&D proposal.
4) The grid needs help to accelerate renewables: we should mandate time-of-day pricing/metering, net-metering, long-distance transmission, and negawatts (incentives for consumer efficiencies & conservation).
5) Accelerate military fuel efficiency & DARPA energy research (they do really great work).
Finally, I wouldn't say sacrifice, partly because it's mighty discouraging, and partly because I don't think it's really accurate. I think we need to work hard, and invest in a better future. Perhaps that's a temporary sacrifice, like WWII, but I'd put the emphasis on our good old puritan work ethic.
You can just get rid of Price-Anderson and the industry will just be self insuring. With coal too expensive, nuclear will be built anyways. As for weapons proliferation, the cost is zero. Foreign countries arent subject to your laws and will build nuclear weapons weather you have proliferation resistant reactors or not.
"You can just get rid of Price-Anderson and the industry will just be self insuring."
Wow. You really think so? Professor Cleveland felt strongly otherwise. I've seen hints from the Nuclear Energy Institute folks in that direction, but....I'll believe it when legislation is actually passed. It's a PR nuisance. Clearly the nuclear industry feels it has some value, or they'd volunteer to get rid of it.
"Foreign countries arent subject to your laws and will build nuclear weapons weather you have proliferation resistant reactors or not."
They will build weapons if they have access to weapons grade material associated with nuclear reactors. We can't say no to Iranian nuclear reactors (and Egyptian, and Jordanian,etc, etc, not to mention Pakistani & Indian in the past) if we're still building them. Perhaps as important, If we continue to spend 10 times as much on nuclear research (the DOE really ought to be called the "NRC Research Institute", after all) as we do on renewables we'll never be in a position to tell Iran etc that solar will do just fine, and they don't need a nuclear reactor.
Why does France have such a strong nuclear generation component? Because they're the only European country with it's own nuclear weapons arsenal. Nuclear electricity and weapons are joined at the hip, and that's probably the strongest reason Germans and other don't like it.
Nick: "Why does France have such a strong nuclear generation component? Because they're the only European country with it's own nuclear weapons arsenal."
Funny, I could've sworn that the U.K. was a nuclear power. There goes our seat on the security council then. ;)
And before you tell me we just subcontract and get trident from the Americans: that's the delivery system, not the warheads.
Nick: "Nuclear electricity and weapons are joined at the hip."
Sweden, Japan, Belgium and S.Korea just became nuclear weapons states? Jesus, I must watch the news more.
Not to worry - I didn't forget about you. I just thought you didn't really think of yourselves as part of Europe. My mistake.
Now, the other countries I believe have chosen to be under the nuclear umbrella of the US, unlike the UK and France. Of course, Japan didn't have that much choice....
Do you really disagree with the basic idea?
Professor Cleveland also swallows the storm/smith report. He knows nothing about nuclear.
All free money has value. This statement is ridiculous.
"All free money has value. This statement is ridiculous."
No, it's just obvious. As you acknowledge, the Price/Andersen liability cap has value. You're implying that the value is low and trivial, but clearly the value isn't so low that it outweighs the nuisance value of bad PR. On the other hand others disagree, like Professor Cleveland, who may not be a nuclear specialist but clearly knows something about it.
I'd like to have a reasonably disinterested and respected 3rd party evaluate the question. Would you disagree with that?
Let that strawman burn. I never said any such thing; Only that nuclear can survive without price-anderson, at least without coal to compete with it.
Good. Ok then, I think we are agreed on the following:
1)Price-Anderson has a significant value to the nuclear power industry
2) This value is not counted in the cost of nuclear power, and
3) It would be a good idea to either charge that cost to the nuclear power industry, or repeal Price-Anderson.
Get right around to banning coal for power production and I'll be with you.
I certainly agree with that general point of view, though it's not quite the market approach I was proposing.
I think new coal probably should be banned (unless it's CO2 sequestered, which seems a bit far off at the moment), but I think it would be unnecessary if we just did the accounting right, and charged coal for ALL of it's costs.
I think that coal plants should be taxed in order to account for the astonishing variety of external costs that coal creates. That would strongly encourage it's replacement with other things. That might well include nuclear, though I suspect that wind would have a fairly strong lead, even accounting for the costs of variability.
Wind for baseload replacing coal? Ridiculous.
"Wind for baseload replacing coal? Ridiculous."
You might want to support that assertion with cost figures, especially for the external costs of coal: GW, "criteria" pollution (mercury, etc), occupational health, mountaintop removal, water pollution, etc, etc.
Actually carbon tax (or tradeable permits) is the most subtle tool there is.
Let the millions of entities in the market decide how best to allocate their consumption, and how to minimise their emission of this harmful gas.
It works (well) for SO2, at a fraction of the projected cost.
Any top down prescription of technology is certain to be much less efficient.
Oh, please explain what "happened in Germany"! Did we have a blackout I didn't notice?
(Hm, guess I know what you could mean: The shutting down of several german nuclear plants during the extrem hot July of 2006, perhaps? There was no more river water to cool them ..)
Oh, and I may add this:
Currently the german nuke reactors can produce up to 19.6 Gigawatts total. That's about the same what german wind engines produced in 2005 (18.4 Gw). And that's only 18 Gw - compare that with the potential of 330 Gw on the US atlantic coast.
Nuclear is the past, renewable is the future.
Nuclear plants in Germany did not produce 18.4 GW in 2005, because this is a unit of power and refers to the energy generated (in Gigajoules) per second. In fact, it refers to the capacity: the amount all the windmills would produce each second if operating at their maximum.
If you want to know how much energy German windmills produced in 2005, then the answer is 26.5 TWh out of a total electricity German electricity consumption of 484 TWh. Hence, wind generates about 5.5% of Germany's electricity.
By contrast, Germany's nuclear power plants generated 154.6 TWh, which is 31.9% of the total. One nuclear reactor alone (Isar-2) generates 12.3 TWh, a figure equal to almost half of the entire wind generated electricity. And it provides stable, predictable power 24/7 for most of the year, rather than varying wildly in a matter of hours and produce too little when it's needed and too much when it isn't:
I'll certainly agree that the future is green. In fact, it
GLOWS!!!You are right; I wrote "Windmills produced ..", but I was meaning the potential of producing 18.5 Gigawatts.
I was struck by the speed of that ramp up.
Essentially the Germans have gone from 0% wind power, to 5.5% in about 10 years.
It's a measure of how fast you can scale wind power when you put your mind to it, as a country.
Gives a feel for what we can accomplish in the UK. I think 20% is entirely practicable and achievable, if we can speed up the local planning Appeals process.
New nukes are 10 years off. If then. It will require big subsidies (Sizewell B was about £5bn of subsidies-- essentially that 5% (?) Non Fossil Fuel Obligation on your electricity bill in the 90s paid for Sizewell B).
Calculate how many soldiers die per kms driven, then tell the consumer. Maybe they still have a conscience.
My first input to the Boxer Commission was ...
Increase incentives/rebates for wind and solar
55 mph max speed limit
electrify the rail lines
I would first have us simply enforce existing speed limits. Where I see 65mph signs most traffic hums along at 75 or 80mph. While driving my Prius I guess that the best mileage occurs around 60 - 65 mph. It seems paradoxical but slower driving can be less efficient. You need a certain amount of energy just to keep turning the engine. This is roughly fixed as the engine turns at about the same speed no matter how fast you drive. To minimize this fixed cost you want to drive as fast as possible. On the other hand, the cost of friction and air resistance increase rapidly with speed. At least for my Prius the happy medium seems to be about 62mph.
What are your energy policy recommendations?
*Advance towards world socialism and end capitalism.
*Become more localized and stop cheap products from being shipped around the world
*Lower the speed limit on highways
*Stop suburban sprawl and development
*Initiate a massive educational program on how to live in a low energy world
*Mandate a 25 to 30 hour work week with no overtime
It is saddening that there are still people believing that socialism is a solution to anything.
Withdraw all currencies and substitute with a global one tied to renewable energy. Let's call it, purely by coincidence of course, the Greenback. Say 1 greenback = 1 000 BTU produced by non-carbon sources. Initially there would have to be allowances for the transition from "black" to "green" energy, but that can be accomplished through control of money supply.
You need do nothing else. If you think through all the ramifications and extensions you will see why.
I will give you a hint: energy consumption = economic activity = money flows.
Regards
On Wednesday morning, January 31, 2007 at a press conference in Washington, D.C., ASES unveiled a 200-page report, Tackling Climate Change in the U.S.: Potential Carbon Emissions Reductions from Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy by 2030. The result of more than a year of study, the report illustrates how energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies can provide the emissions reductions required to address global warming.
http://www.ases.org/climatechange/
Since, however, no one can really be global dictator here is a real policy recommendation for the US (or any other single country or union of countries).
Tie money supply growth of whatever existing currency to that of renewable energy production growth, at a high ratio in the beginning and then decrease it gradually to 1:1.
Again, you need do nothing else. Really and truly.
If I ruled the world, every day would be the first day of spring. Every heart would have a new song to sing and we'd sing of the joy every morning would bring. If I ruled the world, every man would be as free as a bird. Every voice would be a voice to be heard. Take my word, we would treasure each day that occurred. My world would be a beautiful place, where we would dream such wonderful dreams. My world would wear a smile on its face, like the man in the moon has when the moon beams. If I ruled the world, every man would say the world was his friend. There'd be hapiness that no man could end. No my friend, not if I ruled the world. Every head would be held up high. There'd be sunshine in everyone's sky, if the day ever dawned when I ruled the world!
If I ruled the world, first of all I would put the cart before the horse. Subsequently, having released all the cruely wasted potential, talent, energy, intelligence, creativity; everything that's best and noblest in us; dealing with our energy problems, and creating a new society, with peace, liberty and justice for all, would be like a walk in the park for a reborn humanity.
I see trees of green, red roses too. I see them bloom for me and for you. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world. A world with liberty, equality and fraternity. Long live the Revolution!
Dr. McDougall MD has submitted to the Boxer Commission his input
Human Health and Planet Health—Same Solution
"Greed and Gluttony Are Still Winning"
http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2007nl/jan/warming2.htm
http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2007nl/jan/warming2.pdf
You are a funny man writerman
I personally would be a cruel and vengeful ruler, and all would cower in fear before me. I would turn the world back to the year 900. Peasants don't use much energy.
As long as taxes are considered, I would suggest taxing automobiles based on their gas mileage - better gas mileage = lower tax, worse gas mileage = higher tax. This would be an incentive for the automobile manufacturers to produce better gas mileage cars and for individuals to buy better gas mileage cars.
The problem with a carbon tax or a straight gas sales tax is that those taxes tend to be regressive; they hurt the poor more than the wealthy. Several of the posts have shown sensitivity to that point, but it is hard to construct a system with a gas tax that is simple, fair, and also non-regressive.
We should also work on rebuilding the railroad system, to put more freight back on rail. If this was combined with the auto mileage tax mentioned above, there would be synergy between the two: the tax could fund the railroad improvements, and because heavy haul trucks are gas guzzlers, moving freight to rail would become a more economical choice.
I would say to the American people that we can grow all we want. However, if we use more oil or more gasoline or more coal than the year before (in the aggregate), we have failed to do what we need to do.
So, the glorious GDP rises 5% but oil usage increases. Failure.
"The money raised from this tax will be funneled into public transportation, alternative fuel research, conservation incentives, and the development of walkable communities."
I agree that the gov't is well positioned to lead the way on infrastructure and research, but I wouldn't put tax money into public housing. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt-Igoe)
"What are your suggestions? What are some alternatives to this? Or do you believe the market will provide, and such steps are unnecessary?"
I think that a truly free market would be a good first step. I'd begin phasing out subsidies, earmarks, pork, etc that reward profligate energy use, hoping that the market will adjust the prices of energy to a more realistic level.
Part of the disconnect that conservatives have between population and energy use is that temporary labour shortages 'prove' we need more people. Current examples are tar sands, new coal basins, grain ethanol and building of gas pipelines all of which might not be so hot under correct carbon pricing. The next predicted labour shortage will be aged care and paying taxes to support the baby boomers, particularly towards year 2020 or so.
I think we should set long range carbon caps on mid 20th century population. Suppose a developed nation that now has 300m people average emitting 25 tons CO2 is assessed at 150m people emitting 10 tons. So the cap becomes 1,500 million tons compared to the current 7,500. More babies and immigrants will then dilute the average fossil energy use. Additional energy will then have to come from low carbon sources so it becomes a tradeoff more people vs. energy lifestyle.
Hear Yea, behold - here we have the great Robert Rapier, the energetic and knowledgeable one, the decider of what does or does not make sense (who just happens to be an employee and corporate ass-kisser in a Big Oil company) outlining for us what the contours of the energy debate should be.
HE will tell us what the paramaters of the debate shall be, and HE will tell us what the good and bad of our opinions shall be. So let us wait with baited breath what HIS judgement shall be. HE will evaluate what is good and bad about all the comments re 'what I would do if I were dictator'. (The very concept reveals, all too clearly, the direction where we are all going, but HE is too dense to realize the implicit assumptions). That's what happens when you let an engineer/scientist pretend to be a writer.
That very notion that one person here presumes upon himself the role of arbiter of what is correct or incorrect is the height of arrogance and egotism. Hey, give a rube a little leaway, and look at what you get.
Robert: you know everything, but you understand literally nothing. You are a fool, but the sad fact is that you don't realize it. And you probably never will.
And Leanan, et al: don't bother banishing me from TOD because I am truely tired and bored of this whole thing and, for my own benefit, shouldn't waste a minute more on it. So, as they say: I am out of here.
So, I hope you all enjoy wanking each other off. In the meanwhile, nothing will get done, and we will move further toward wherever we are going (which is nowhere).
Adios
The very concept reveals, all too clearly, the direction where we are all going, but HE is too dense to realize the implicit assumptions.
Yet the vast majority understood it as an idea-generating session in which we would not be constrained by the current political system. I guess some were too dense to understand this. If you need it dumbed down any further, e-mail me and I can attempt to break it down to your level.
So, as they say: I am out of here.
And who could have guessed that your last act would be to post more gratuitous ad hominems against me? It just seems so out of character for you.
I don't know about everyone else, but let me just say that I will truly miss your incessant ad hominems, charges of bias, and now unsupported charges of being a “corporate ass-kisser in a Big Oil company.” Some people can’t handle their liquor, I suppose. But they shouldn’t post and drink, as it lets their true colors seep out.
Makes one wonder why anyone would ever want to post anonymously, eh Joule? I think everyone should get to feel the thrill of the pointed personal attacks that you have consistently made against me. It kind of gives one a warm feeling inside, which was I am sure what you were after here. I have always honestly wondered what your purpose is for these bitter tirades. I am still left wondering.
Enjoy your hangover.
The previous posts seem to be a fairly poor yield for the effort put into making them.
The first point that I want to make is that Peak Oil and Global Warming overlap, but are not the same issue. For the most part Peak Oil in North America is about transportation fuel. Stationary uses such as space heating, industrial power, lighting, etc. can be with by a combination of expanding the electrical grid, conservation, and some alternative power sources.
A reduction in the availability of oil without changes in the North American transportation infrastructure would bring transport (and the rest of the economy) to a grinding halt. A couple of policies seem to be fairly obvious and easy to implement immediately: 1) remove the SUV loophole in the CAFE standards. This one is doable. It is the reversal of corrupt influence creating bad law.
2) set a goal of a 40 mpg fleet within the next 10 years. Legislate penalties for companies that don't meet the goal. Technically, this shouldn't be impossible. I owned a 1986 Subaru station wagon that got something like that mileage. There might be a role for taxation here to create incentives. Again this one is doable.
3) Mandate a transition for light vehicles to be 90% electric powered within 20 years. Some research into batteries is necessary, but again not that much of a stretch.
4) It is also possible to attack the use of fossil fuels for space heating in a similar reasoned, doable fashion.
Global warming, on the other hand, is, to a large extent the result it of burning fossil fuels (in particular coal) for heating and industrial processes. There a number of reasonable policies that could be implemented:
1) make electricity use more efficient by incrementally improving the efficiency of electrical appliances for both consumer and industrial use. Increased electricity prices should work wonders for this one.
2) reduce electricity use for space heating by increased insulation, better housing design, and possibly reducing the size of housing units. Changed building standards and increased electricity prices should work here.
3) replace coal fired electricity generators with a combination of nuclear, solar, wind, and hydro. I think that this one needs both a carbon tax and stiff government regulations on burning coal to get the economics to work, but given 30 years or so it should be doable.
4) It is possible that it will be necessary to develop methods of scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere on a large scale. (Something like raise crops to process into biofuel, burn the biofuel and capture the CO2 for sequestration might work. The actual processes are beyond my expertise, but are worth some research.)
I would leave population control and the questions of whether or not economic growth to be settled somewhere else. They really are not energy policy.
One incremental improvement to your carbon-tax idea: People should be given better information about energy costs of appliances (including cars) at the given time and in the future. The "energy guide" labeling on household appliances is a good start, but an appliance with a 10 year lifetime should have a label that includes the cost of running it in the 10th year based on the estimated increased energy prices 10 years from now.
Car window stickers need to be more realistic and also have numbers for expected costs 10 years from now. Since many people that buy cars sell them in just a few years, the sticker on guzzlers should have a warning about the expected additional drop in resale value caused by the higher price of fuel.
Having the future costs at the time of purchase would probably help people choose even more efficient items than they otherwise would just based on the current energy costs. It also might mean that the $3/month increase in taxes could be changed to $1/month increase in taxes but for 9 years instead of only 3. The extended time period would allow people time to prepare. With just a 3-year timeframe, there would be a huge rush on home insulation, for example. The resulting frenzy would cause a even bumpier ride than needed.
Robert, I can see quite readily that your proposal will put $2.50/gallon additional cost on gasoline. However, I would like to also know the additional cost of a KW/hr of electricity (assuming generation remains the same mix as today). Gasoline will only double from $2.50 to $5 under your plan, but will electricity triple, quadruple, or more? Ditto for natural gas. How much will it change.
This all comes back to a general question... given my gasoline, electric, and natural gas bills for a year, I would like to know how to calculate my carbon footprint from direct energy use. Right now, if I wish to personally lower my footprint, I don't know how to achieve the best results with the least pain... buy a more efficient car or buy insulation for my house; I have the $$$ amounts spent, but no way to correlate that with carbon.
Deleted..wrong topic
We have a dictator. From the oil bidness. Sorry rr, no postions available.
That's awul bidness.
Ban incandescent light bulbs, and subsidise (for a transition time) compact flurescent lamps.(CFL's).
Ban decorative lighting on skyscrapers and business buildings.
Make street lighting 'traffic activated' like traffic lights.
Turn off TV transmitters after midnight. (cable TV still OK)
These and more measures will free up capacity for transport electrification.
Phase out V8's (and larger) in passenger vehicles.
To reduce FF use I would use conservation and solar production. On the production side we need to put windmills just about everywhere we can. Also use Concentrating Solar Power stations, CSPs, covering about 100 square miles of the desert areas out West. These CSPs would circulate high temperature oil through pipes at the center of concentrating reflectors to run turbines, creating electricity that would be transmitted all over the US. This is all tried and proven and can be scaled up as much as necessary.
On the conservation side we can use insulation to retrofit all building stock to reduce energy usage by half for heating and cooling. LED and CFL lights would replace all incandescent bulbs. New buildings would be super-insulated for minimal energy use. Air and ground loop Heat pumps would be required.
For transportation we would need to go to a 55 mph speed limit, have a big tax on gas (I don't know how big), only allow 4 cylinder cars and light trucks to be sold for personal use, promote bike use and bike path construction, subsidize 100% electric cars for commuting so they would be cost effective, public transport would be free and upgraded to a more modern standard. Buses would be able to achieve this quickly, flexibly and with minimal cost. Rail and barge would be upgraded and subsidized if necessary.
Public re-education would be needed to break our consume-all mentality. Community involvement in various group projects, ala Peace Corp, would be required of all able-bodied individuals for an active period of 4 years of life, to be on standby thereafter if needed. This would create some can-do community spirit that we really lack today.
Some nice ideas in there.
Agreed on concentrating solar and wind. I would add geothermal, strengthened grid, distributed stirlings and photovoltaics (themselves also possibly being concentrating) and the marine technologies (tidal, wave, offshore wind, OTEC in the Hawaiain and Caribbean island (Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands areas and possibly Gulf and Florida Atlantic coast as well)) to service the large East, West and Gulf Coast zones.
In general, agreed with the overall gist. Stem overconsumption via gradual population growth cessation and subsequent decline via strict birth control. Rehabilitate intercity railways including electrification on all heavily used mainlines (All E-W and N-S transcontinental lines and multi tracking/profile improvements etc. where necessary.
Taxation on carbon consumption and inefficiency in all its various forms is also a good ideaa.
Let's try to separate the parts of the economy a little, and then put them back together:
1) Energy infrastructure: based on wind and solar, with massively upgraded electrical grid so we could use wind from the Dakotas and solar from the southwest
2) Transportation infrastructure: based on rail of all sorts (subways, light rail, intercity rail)
3) Housing/Where people live/Land use: Most people live in big cities, car-free (a la crawford's "car-free cities)
4) Agriculture: Surrounding big cities, with 20% or so of population doing permaculture/sustainable agriculture (a la Polyface farms in "Ominvore's Dilemma)
5) Manufacturing: Surrounding big cities, with most manufacturing going to respective big city, all output of factories recyclable, cut back on paper, metal-making, chemicals and plastics, which according to Pimental use 85% of electricity in manufacturing
6) Organization of firms: All firms part of worker coop networks, a la Mondragon Coops in Spain, with Coop banks as finance system
Now let's bring these sectors back to an energy focus. Since agriculture and manufacturing are based around a city that is itself based on rail, transport costs are drastically lowered, and based on electricity, which is completely renewable. Worker ownership means companies stay interested in the consequences of their actions on their regions, as in environment, and don't outsource. Economies trade within a continental level (thus using rail), not global
Let it be decreed.
OK, there're a million things that needed to be done, I'll focus on just a few in this post. Please check out the link below:
http://www.loremo.com/content/information/downloads/loremo_de.pdf
OK, it is in German. It's about a new car that's going to hit the market in Germany in 2009. The specs are 2-cylinder turbo diesel, 20 hp, 5-speed manual, 2 seats, 0-60 in 20sec., top speed 100 mph. OK, so far not too impressive for the US market where folks are used to 8-cylinders generating 300+ hp. Nice thing about this vehicle is that is get 155 mpg (!!!) and can be run on bio-diesel.
Now we all know that home grown fuel can't sustain our wasteful driving habits. According to various Ethanol/bio-diesel studies we can grow anywhere from 7-12% of the fuel needed right here in the US of A (I am sure to be corrected if those numbers are too far of target). Now with 155 mpg versus 25 mpg we can go about 6-times as far...with a smaller vehicle of course. Yes, judging by the girl standing in front of the car, it is rather small...but still beats walking.
And yes, most people consider it absolutely necessary to have a 350+ hp 4-wheel drive monstrosity to get to and from work. That's why they are not offering the car in the US...uncertain laws about diesel engines and consumer demand. Anyway, the technology exists but gas has to reach the $20+ flood stage before people would even consider to be seen in a "thing" like that.
Some of the policies I would enact if I was the almighty evil dictator.
-gas rationing; everybody that works for a living gets the same amount.
"Cafe" standards wouldn't be needed anymore since thing would work itself out naturally. Everybody that doesn't work uses public transportation or rides their bike/walk.
- Bike lanes and public transportation. Ever been in Holland or Germany? People will actually use their bikes (thingies with 2 wheels, muscle powered) to get to places. Honestly, I'm not kidding.
-Geo-sourced heating/cooling systems offer substatial savings over regular air-sourced heat pumps see http://www.waterfurnace.com/content.aspx?section=residential&page=rez
I got one of these suckers, about $45/mo to cool a 2500 sqft house in NC (set @ 73F in summer & 70F in winter) and about $65/mo to heat.
-require much better insulation for new buildings.
- office buildings with windows you can actually open (what a concept!)
I'd like to point out that none of my suggestions require exotic or even alien technology. Everything I suggested is available today. We could easily cut our energy consumption to about 40% as a nation with a minimal investment. I suppose we're too fat and happy to even consider it unitl TSHTF.
Just my 2 cents.
I'm cheering for the Loremo to pass a crash test. Its steel-truss construction is interesting and if it checks out it should be easy to duplicate in all the newly industrializing countries, as a replacement for whatever dreadful Cherys and Hindustans they're currently building. But I would rather load that central bridge section with batteries. Check it out:
Claimed 100 mph on 20 hp (14 kw).
That's 14,000 watt hours per 100 miles, or 140 wh/mile.
As I understand it, that means it should use far less than half as much power at 50 mph. Let's say 60 wh.
That means one mile per 3 lbs of lead/acid battery, or over a mile per lb of lithium. Don't get me started on EEStor or zinc/air.
I bet that turbodiesel plus radiator and exhaust is close to 200 lbs. And $2000. It also has an aerodynamic penalty over an electric. This car could be brought in damn cheap as an electric.
If I were world dictator and had absolute power, I certainly could bring things in line. But that is a pipedream. Let’s scale it down a bit. Where would I focus attention:
1. Stop population growth. My attack would center on the Catholic Church and the far right. Massive amounts of money would go into birth control and sex education.
2. Refashion the WTO. Trade agreements must insure both the rights of labor and the rights of the environment. Labor and environmental arbitrage must stop. For those of you who do not know what principles the WTO embraces, I suggest you educate yourselves. The environmental and labor regulations are optional.
3. Energetically debate the “free marketers,” i.e., those who think that no government intervention and deregulation are answers. Attack the principle that the individual greed of each individual raises all boats. That principle is the beating heart of modern economics.
4. Attack the principle that consumption is good, that societies become richer the more they collectively consume. This principle is the lungs of modern economics.
5. Reform the financial system, both in the ways it uses credit and the way it uses the carry trade. Credit now has become the bellows of western economies. Financial markets presently drain monetary resources we will need.
6. Push for alternate sources of energy at all levels of society. Each town and each city must do all it can encourage residents to become part of the solution. Tax breaks….anything. Towns themselves must see what they can do to create their own energy sources. In short, localize the production of energy.
7. Spend real money on third world countries to give them energy sources they can use. In many places, simple solar power will be a great improvement.
8. Educate the rich elite, those who are profiting the most from globalization. Show them their the conditions of the poor will finally affect their own and their children’s lives. Huge salaries and huge homes are fundamentally immoral. We are all in this boat, together.
9. Reform the mass media. Big job. The media has become a Roman circus for the masses. It no longer educates and informs. It serves the purposes of greed and consumption.
In short, we need a new way of looking at the world and at our neighbors, one that is truly more compassionate, one that does not elevate greed to virtue status.
For city travel .....
http://blueskydsn.com/BugE_Concept_1.html
http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/Xebra_EV/
I'm not sure about the 'reform the mass media'.
How? Would a government-controlled media be any more enlightening?
I agree that the MSM must change it's methods, but many things would have gone unrevealed if it were not for the prospect of fame and fortune for an investigative journalist with a scoop story.
The only way of reform is to present an alternative. And here we are...
good ideas in here.. I would go further and go fao a direct command economy and rationing.
i see these above measure and complementary to a emergency style command solution
Boris
london
What about just expanding the SPR to, say, five times it's current size over the next decade?
This would keep prices high while at the same time providing a large hoard of oil for future contingencies.
Given the disasters that dictators have inflicted on the world during the last two centuries, I am very unconvinced that large-scale micromanagement is the best way to go. i.e. Society was *not* engineered in the first place: it's an organic thing that grew. It can't really be controlled or re-engineered, it can only be nudged and contained.
Truth is, we cannot know what the right solutions are. Maybe the best we can do is artificially create the incentives that might nudge toward a decent outcome. Hoarding oil plus making sure our environmental policies are
enforced might do the trick. Then let the world's greatest economy do it's thing.
Hello Asebius,
> What about just expanding the SPR to, say, five times it's current size over the next decade?
All of the world's oil does not belong to morbidly obese America. If America wants to hoard all of the world's oil, I would immediately encourage all of the world's oil exporters to cease supplying the United States of America with oil.
Actually, this is exactly the advice which I would give all of the world's oil exporters right now:
Oil exporting countries of the world: If you love your children and wish for your grandchildren to survive cease exporting oil to the United States of America right now. Allowing America's obese SUV drivers to burn away your only natural resource is both insane and an act of cultural suicide.
The United States of America is presently consuming 25% of the world's daily oil production. The world should end this disparity immediately. America has 5% of the world's population. America should consume only 5% of the world's daily oil production.
If that means that obese Americans have to become a little hungry and are forced to walk, so much the better.
David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1
I would add to my thing above that this is in many ways the same as a tax on energy as far as effect is concerned. But, in the public's mind it would likely seem quite different.
It could be a very concrete way of safeguarding the future.
Essentially, I see the basic problem as finding a way to keep the price of oil elevated in a politically expedient way.
High enough, that is, to guarantee substantial incentive for conservation and innovation.
The one sentence solution:
Switchgrass plantations staffed by credit card debt defaulters.
Well, this has been sad.
RR's original challenge must have seemed like a good way to inspire constructive debate, but it must have been that word "dictator" that set the old Napolean/Bismark/Stalin/Lenin/Hitler gene in motion. As the character said in Woody Allen's movie, "Hannah and Her Sisters", "people see films about Hitler and seem shocked that it could have happened. The great shock is how it doesn't happen much more often."
But the original challenge still hangs out there, if somehow a person had complete control of decision making, what choices do they think should be made? This of course depends a lot on the goal: If the goal is to come up with a workable solution that allows humans a similiar degree of choice, dignity, prosperity and freedom to which they have become accustomed, but on a sustainable energy base, one set of choices will be made.
If the goal, however, is to end percieved evils such as the hated automobile, a consumer/market economy, and Western style "liberal" multi party style government, the choices would very different. If the latter is the goal, it can easily be enforced on a platform of the need to reduce oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, but at great destruction of what many of us have come to know as our culture. If the former is the goal, this can be done through good elegant technical design and inventive social/community structures, and advanced and creative forward planning. The goal means everything.
With that, let's have a look:
>The current crisis is first and foremost a liquids fuels crisis, in particular a transportation fuels crisis. In a very, very good essay a few months ago, Stuart Standiford was able to provide evidence for what should have been a self evident fact: If you want to reduce transportation fuels consumption, build more efficient vehicles. This makes more difference than anything else IF you accept the the automobile/trucking age will continue to at least some degree. Frankly, there is only one way to force the public down this path, and that is with a climbing tax on fuel. Set a number, and let it be known that it will climb X percent per month, into infinity. The tax would be first on least efficient fuel (gasoline and ethanol) and move progressively to Diesel and then finally, other road fuels such as CNG and finally propane, and if it is around by that time, lastly to advanced bio fuels such as Butanol and Bio Diesel. The public would be pushed to more advanced efficient fuels, but as the tax moved across the spectrum, would be forced to (a) the electric power grid and (b) advanced design vehicles, such as plug hybrid, hydraulic hybrid, and finally electric cars. As the cost of fuel went up, mass transit train and bus would become competitive. After the tax, let the designers know that a market was being built for them, but other wise, let the buyers and designers work it out. Before long, the glut in fossil liquid fuel should become noticable, and the superiority of other drivetrains would become so apparent, that most folks would no more want to go back to a gasoline only type vehicle (except for the small amount of "vintage" collectors who kept older cars as art pieces). As Diesel became more expensive, more transport of goods would move back to the rail, where much of it always belonged anyway. Ten years from now, we would have an essentially non oil based transit system (using the grid, and the newest generation of synthetic liquid fuels such as bio butanol, and extremely advanced bio fuels such as switch grass based fuel and bio Diesel, and some recaptured methane and finally hydrogen. These would be made in factories using solar and wind in augmentation of production, and mixed and matched to be the most efficient and high performance fuels possible. At this point, we can see a Ford 500 class car, wih plug hybrid drivetrain, getting about 85 to 100 miles per gallon on the liquid fuel, which would be bio and methane/hydrogen based, and contained in a very high tech set of cannisters switched perhaps only 3 or 4 times a year, often less in the case of mostly in town local driving.
Now we turn to the grid: Pull out the stops on wind power and solar, both thermal and PV. Allow tax free income for any power produced with absolute zero consumption of fossil fuels and zero carbon release. Open up the "grey belts" of industrial blight that exists in or beside every major energy market city to wind projects, solar projects, and give them the places to work. Pour effort into energy storage to assure that the variability problem is not a problem: The goal: Preserve America's natural gas, and get us off coal consumption to as great a degree possible. Only after the above is targeted, do we look and look HARD at a set of standardized advanced nuclear plants.
Anything else? Yes. On the consumption side, incentive and education to do the easy stuff: Ground coupled heat pumps, solar water heating in the South and West first, spreading to everywhere, incentive and education on buildings bermed on the North side and earth sheltered with passive solar heating. The stuff we learned in the 1970's, and then walked away from when oil prices collapsed in 1982.
Some say we MUST begin mitigation strategy to be ready for peak. I think that is correct.
But we MUST begin a mitigation strategy for the opposite too: If a short term glut caused an energy price collapse, it will (not may, but WILL, we have seen it before) destroy the energy alternative/conservation strategy, no matter how good or bad it is. Humans are creatures of habit, and if the price of oil and gas drop, they will stay with the devil they know rather than go with the ones they do not. If there is anything we MUST do to protect the expansion of energy alternatives, it is this: Avoid the oil glut and price collapse at ALL COSTS, because in many ways, it could be more destructive than Peak Oil itself.
We do not need an oil price at $300 per barrel, a price that is most certaily not sustainable anyway.
Likewise, we do not need an oil price at $30 dollars a barrel, a price that likewise is not sustainable anyway.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom. Let's concern ourselves with holding consumption worldwide to the cubic mile, and then work from there on efficiency, elegant design, advanced alternatives, and advanced conservation. Our designers and technicians will astound us to the good side if we let them. But, there is one thing standing in the way of them developing and spreading their advanced designs. Cheap oil.
Cheap oil in many ways is as much the enemy as expensive and hard to get oil. Crude oil at $70 dollars per barrel only brings it back in line with the cost of other commodities and services in America. In only a few years, even $100 dollar per barrel oil will be easily sustainable on price, and will still be only a marginal part of most peoples income. I have said it before, but it is unpopular to say here, but in my judgement, it is still true: If peak oil and catastrophic production decline does not occur within ten years, it might as well not occur. It will be yesterdays crisis, like the killer bees of the '70's. The times and technology will have passed it by.
Roger Conner
We are still only one cubic mile from freedom.
(P.S. R squared, stay on this bio butanol thing, I have a friend and co-worker who is a micro biologist....I showed him a long report I pulled down concerning bio butanol work and production technique done in South Africa in the mid 1980's, very detailed and technical, and after reading it, he said "helll, I could make this stuff in a garden shed." I want to do a post here on TOD when the time is appropriate (a related string, etc) explaning how the first of bio butanol could be introduced and marketed, but I am starting to form a plan on this! Thanks for putting me on this path! :-)
Ladies and Gentlemen, you have chosen wisely in appointing me your energy dictator. I have only one very simple decree- from now on, ALL energy will be fully priced- its price will equal the cost to put the world back where it was, or better, when that energy is used. We will leave that number- the full cost- to the scientists and economists to figure out- and continue to figure out as new information arises. The results will be imperfect, but we must not allow imperfection to impede action.
This decree will be enforced -nobody will escape. Those who will suffer from this will have an income subsidy, but NOT an energy subsidy, thus all of us will see the same incentive to seek truly low cost energy, and/or use less of it.
With that full true price on energy, the market, at last having correct cost signals, will find the best ways to do what we want- to minimally burden our planet by our existence.
My next decree is even more fundamental- My position is too important for one so limited as myself to fill. My tenure should always be challenged. Anyone having this position should be constantly seeking someone better to fill it. I shall initiate a search committee to replace me with someone wiser. I expect my tenure- since I am the first one in this post- to be very short indeed.
R squared, stay on this bio butanol thing, I have a friend and co-worker who is a micro biologist....I showed him a long report I pulled down concerning bio butanol work and production technique done in South Africa in the mid 1980's, very detailed and technical, and after reading it, he said "helll, I could make this stuff in a garden shed." I want to do a post here on TOD when the time is appropriate (a related string, etc) explaning how the first of bio butanol could be introduced and marketed, but I am starting to form a plan on this! Thanks for putting me on this path!
I am interested to see what you come up with. Most of the guys involved in that are pretty tight-lipped. I can't get much information out of them, so I can't tell if some of their claims are theoretical, or have been demonstrated. But I agree, it has great potential.
The carbon tax is a great start, especially a phased tax that continues to increase over time. The longer people delay their conservation efforts the more painful it becomes. This tax should also apply to electricity from coal-fired plants.
(as dictator)
- implement a $1 Trillon introductory program to create high speed passenger and freight rail lines (potentially mag-lev)for electric trains along all interstate highway corridors, using the existing interstate highway right of way and medians for the real estate needed for track. If the highway grade is steel then incorporate a cog rail or similar concept, to maintain/control speed over those sections.
- implement a ten year moritorium on expansion of airports and prohibit government bail-outs of airlines. Penalize airlines that don't meet engine fuel efficiency minimums.
- implement another $1 Trillion program to redesign and reinforce the electrical and communications grids across the USA
- direct that all future automobile and light truck production (effective 2008 model year) be hybrid at a minimum, with an additional five year grace period to producing only plug-in flex-fuel hybrids or EV's. If that means dozens of models have to be cancelled, so be it (India only had two models of cars until recently -- black or tan.)
- provide a tax incentive to hybrid owners to get an upgrade kit for plug-in capability as soon as such retrofit kits become available (proceeds from the carbon tax.)
- conduct an X-Prize style contest with a $100 million prize to the winner developing a kick-ass battery that performs to a minimum standard that is 4x today's storage and stamina capability
at half the weight, and with a short recharge cycle time
- provide federal assistance to city governments to install metered power outlet infrastructures in parking lots or on city streets where parking is allowed.
- provide a tax incentive (part of the personal exemption) to employees who live within five miles of their workplace
- immediately disallow natural gas or heating oil connections for new home or office construction, and provide bond guarantees for solar roof funding (both water heating and electricity generation.) All new construction would require a solar or wind platform with grid intertie.
- dedicate a large portion of carbon tax proceeds to funding alternative transportation routes through and between cities that do not permit autos or trucks, only pedestrians, bicycles, and small personal electric vehicles (e.g. Segway or similar) that don't exceed 20mph.
- in cities, close every other street to autos and trucks -- only pedestrians, bicycles, or small personal EV's permitted.
- assign a tax penalty to companies who don't implement flextime schedules and telecommuting programs for non-presence-essential staff. Fund (with the carbon tax) massive improvement and robustness into the telecommunications grid for all those telecommuters.
- reinstate the nationwide Victory Garden program.
- provide start-up loan guarantees to encourage establishing more local family farms supplying their communities.
More later.
To the inhibited creativity of TOD I will add.
I would put a sweater on and go on national TV and ask people to powerdown.
We use 100+ times the energy we used in the 1700 BC, so we can do with much less.
so conserve, conserve, conserve. How difficult can it be?
As it is human nature not to do the right thing unless probed, I will add tax on energy use untill the econymy shows signs of collapse. The surplus will be invested into the best abvailable low energy infrastructure for power supply, transport etc. Fossil is saved for future generations chemical industry so they can experience plastic and medicine also .
All decisions will be made with an eye on LCA and energy system analysis results, avoiding the "feelgood" for the effective.
kind regards/And1
I particularly like the idea of a trillion dollars for mass transit and a trillion dollars to upgrade the electrical grid. Also, expand the victory garden idea (see the work of John Todd, for instance), as I commented in my earlier post, the agricultural system should be reoriented to be as local as possible, and as organic/sustainable as possible, because the current fossil-fuel-soaked agricultural system is unsustainable (see dale allen pfeiffer's "eating fossil fuels") and a huge energy sink. Great post, I want to see more later!
we are whistling past the graveyard
someone said much earlier - we don't have an energy problem, we have a liquid fuels problem
wind, and solar, and biofuels, are toys. the only reason we are enthusicastic for them is because we have had 100 years of energy over abundance. energy abundance creates high levels of wealth, which allows us the leisure time to play with these toys... and allows us time to sit and philospohize on web sites like this
the only fundamentals are coal, nuclear and oil. I believe we will waste trillions before we get back to fundamentals
and remember - oil drives inflation and inflation drives gold
Hi polytropos,
Thanks and a couple of Qs:
"...someone said much earlier - we don't have an energy problem, we have a liquid fuels problem"
What is the intersection between a "liquid fuels problem" and the more global term, "energy problem"? It seems there must be some overlap. For example, the electric grid (w. it's various source fuels, including natural gas; input varies by region) is constructed and maintained using vehicles run on "liquid fuels". How does a problem with the latter impact the former? Just as one example (attempting to be specific).
In other words, it seems to me that as long as there is:
1) intersection
2) hierarchy of dependency
a problem in one is a problem w. the other. What's your take on this?
Second, if I may put aside oil and coal for a moment. What is it about nuclear that has you place it in the "fundamentals" category?
Could you please explain this further? (I can guess, but I'd rather understand your points.)
Aniya,
Since polytropos has not gotten around to answering you, let me take a moment to comment on your questions since they are actually pretty good ones:
Your question: "What is the intersection between a "liquid fuels problem" and the more global term, "energy problem"? It seems there must be some overlap."
There is, and you touched on the edge of it. It's called "natural gas". interestingly polytropos did not bother to mention nat gas as a "fundamental" but listed oil, coal and nuclear. (interesting, what would make coal, with it's horrendous environmental liabilities more of a fundamental than nat gas?) However, it was not very many years ago that all assumed a century or so worth of supply of cheap, easily extracted natural gas. As long as that thought prevailed, the decline in crude oil was not that scary, because if we had to we could switch to natural gas or it's byproduct propane. These are actually EXCELLENT transportation fuels, clean, scalable, usable in vehicles from the size of lawn mowers up to farm tractors and road traveling tractor trailers. It was only since 2000 that the problem of rising consumption of natural gas clashing with leveling or declining production became known to the energy savvy (most average folks are COMPLETELY unaware that there is a natural gas problem at all! It is the great quiet crisis)
The other intersection "between a "liquid fuels problem" and the more global term, "energy problem" is storage. polytropos calls solar and wind "toys" (an interesting choice of words, that's what folks back about 1900 called automobiles!), but what defines them as toys? They are the only two non depleting energy sources that have proven workable on any scale at all. They are carbon clean, they can be diffused throughout the world, and provide real power control diversity, distribution, and local production. The EROEI is getting better with each year while the EROEI of fossil fuels is getting worse.
What would make them "toys"?
The issue is storage. Other than batteries, energy storage research has been a disgrace, with a few discoordinated efforts mostly by tinkers, almost no reasearch money provided, and little attempts to view how storage would be implemented and the full effect quality energy storage would have.
Once we begin to develop truly elegant and modern power storage at all scales, the grid becomes directly competitive with liquid fuels, solar and wind become directly competitive with coal, nat gas and nuclear, nat gas is freed up as a competive transportation fuel....well, you see the intersection, and the effect of development is one area "energy" in one of the many "sub-divisions" of energy, "fuel" and it's application, transportation.
Your closing question, what makes nuclear "fundamental"?
Nuclear cannot be easily dismissed, since once the capital costs are made, it is one of the few methods of power production that can deliver gigawatt scale power without great difficulty. The safety issue is there, but no greater in danger than many other industrial processes. The uranium is, despite what some say, still available in large enough quantity to provide for a very sizable expansion of nuclear power. The security issues are real as are the waste disposal problems, but it must be said that they are no worse than many other industries. As you can see, I am certainly not anti nuke, and think that it has a real role to play as baseline, large scale power in assuring the survival/expansion of the electric power grid on a national scale. It has the potential to be the backbone that frees up other power, offers potential hydrogen production for industry and other purposes (fuel cells?).
To me, nuclears problem is essentially financial. The nuclear industry, even more than solar and wind, has to rely on some type of mandated market. The expense of building a nuclear plant are huge. Would you like to sink a few hundred million dollars to over a billion, depending on the size of the plant, into planning, permitting, contracting and constructing a nuclear plant, with the promise of ever improving wind, solar, conservation and the possibility of a short term glut of natural gas if we have repeated warm winters or mild summers? Not with somebody to gurentee the loan, you wouldn't, and to assure a base market price no matter what happens for the next 20 to 30 years, because it will take that long for the plant to pay. Will todays impatiant investor wait that long? I think not. Nuclear has a very hard financial road ahead.
Don't know if you will ever bother coming back and checking for replies, but that's my case for the "intersection."
Roger Conner
Remember, we are only one square mile from freedom.
Hi Roger,
Just a quick note to say, yes, I'm checking...actually out of time tonight, but will resume manana. Thanks for responding.
An escalating energy tax is the way to go; trouble is the tax money will be stolen by the same special interests that brought us to where we are now.
Hi Bigelow,
Thanks and a q:
"...trouble is the tax money will be stolen by the same special interests that brought us to where we are now."
Is there any way at all to prevent this from occurring? Also, can you possibly be more specific about the "special interests"?
Aniya,
See Rumsfeld "We cannot track $2.3 trillion" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj1rT4bszWg
Estimate $3.3 Trillion Missing From U.S. Treasury
http://www.rense.com/general70/trill.htm
http://www.whereisthemoney.org/
I know where it went!
Check out the Duke Cunningham scandal. Nasty ex-Iran/Contra types create fake defense software firms that never deliver any product (Rumsfeld said the services weren't delivered, right?) which then turn some of their profits over to the nearest GOP congressman, who then votes for more Pentagon largesse.
How much evil do you think could be bought for even a few hundred billion? How many suppressed news stories? How much ignored evidence of Bush malfeasance? How many Iraqi exiles promising we'd be greeted as liberators? How many casino boats? How many voting machine manufacturers?
Missing indeed. I see it all around me. Good thing Rumsfeld announced it on September 10, 2001.
Waxman Probes Iraq Contracting, Missing $12 Billion
By Jay Newton-Small
“Feb. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Representative Henry Waxman, kicking off hearings on government contracting, questioned former Ambassador L. Paul Bremer today on what happened to as much as $12 billion in unaccounted-for cash spent when he was in charge of rebuilding Iraq.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aRfRyhT0yHzU&refer=us
There are only two ways to go on this. The first is to tax the fossil fuels used in power generation, mainly coal and gas. The second is to make the alternatives cheaper. The former won't work because a tax on fuels will increase the cost of electricity which will hit the most needy in society. If only the rich can afford to heat their homes then the regime that brings this about will fall. The obvious answer is to subsidise the alternatives namely wind, wave and nuclear. This could be paid for through general taxation and would therefore ensure that the old and unemployed would still have access to cheap energy. The subsidies should be high enough to make coal and gas uneconomic to produce which will force the hand of the generation companies to invest in renewables.
The American Solar Energy Association (ASES), says we can do it with renewables .. no nuclear
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020207R.shtml
RR,
Great idea, won't say a lot on this, I think most of the general consensus, attention to mass transit, focus on conservation, implementation of renewables, revisiting nuclear energy, etc. is all fine and has been considered in depth here at TOD. I do think that so many technologies, thin film solar, concentrating solar, stirling engine coupled solar, concentrating trough solar, building integrated solar, geothermal, thermal heat exchanger, wind power, offshore wind power, wave power, hydrogen fuel cell, conventional biofuels, biomass, second generation(algae) biofuels, hydroelectric, etc. are potentially able to make a great impact. It is important the government not overly screw things up by intervening in the marketplace. Some might argue this is already the case with corn/ethanol though I think this is likely a net benefit and certainly doesn't, as is most important, hinder the adoption of other technologies.
Still, I would throw a heck of a lot of government money at this problem. Yes if things are solved there is a good chance they will be solved by Walmart and GE until 15 years later the next crisis evolves, but this is serious enough to throw lots of government money at. Primarily I would throw the money at efficiency measures and let the market work out the rest.
Had a very interesting discussion at work as I was getting ready to leave on Friday. Won't vouch for the figures but I think they are likely close to accurate. We've spent 300 billion on Iraq in three years, they are 300 million people in the US, that's $1,000/person over three years or $333/year. Someone looked at me and said "you spend that much on coffee". Well, I have a guilty pleasure of a cup of Starbucks at $1.32/day most days, so really that's close to right. Won't get drawn into the is it fair or why is it etc, but what a beast of an economy the US has. So I will brew my own coffee and let's throw $100 billion/year of government money at PO. Unlike some of the magical, if I were in charge everyone would walk to work smiling approaches, this is entirely feasible. Heck I'll brown bag lunch and we can throw 200 billion a year at the problem. I don't normally like to see government involved in problems but when there is a very clear and universally recognized crisis it has tremendous power. So maybe we will see this going forward. Wow, 100 billion is a lot of solar panels or windmills or nuclear plants not too mention subsidies for 50 mpg vehicles.
PDM
One idea I saw on a truthout.org article on global warming would also help with peak oil. If I could, I would get auto insurance premiums to be assessed on a per mile basis. This would reduce mileage driven significantly.
Rationing.. direct command control of consumption.
I watch a MIt brainstorming session via policy pete the other day and was struck by how adverse people were to anything but some perception/market/behaviour solution.
Moreover I was also struck by how pathetic some suggestions were
1: declare the emergency
2:implement rationing based on some project use of fuels
3. implement some sort of plan to build a sustainable energy base like a gigantic Apollo project.. you just do what it takes via a command economy and everyone grits their teeth, you build 2000 nuke power stations and 300000+ windmills and 94 million solar panels (whatever) while slashing consumption by 50%+
You just do what has to be done.. it's that simple.. there is no modify peoples behavior or fiddling with carbon taxes etc.. pissing into the wind. peoples behavior will be modified by having a rationed amount of energy to play with... then its down to them, the "market" can then show what ii it can do because it will have to stretch the utility of a per capita cap on consumption
A bit stalinist 5 year plan some may say.. well maybe but just don't dismiss it out of hand .. some one needs to suggest it.
The strength of a command solution is you can focus attention on the task at hand.. everyone gets up in the morning and says "time to go save the world" because like WW2 that is what everyones job is.
you just do it... sometimes its that simple. iT totally runs against the grain of free markets etc etc etc...that is why it will work, because it is radical
Boris
London
Hello Boris,
Thanks for your post. I'm wondering if you could read the posts below and comment on how they relate to yours...?
Also, a couple of Qs
1) Do you see rationing as workable and if so, do you have examples? Could you possibly expand on this a bit? Can people trade or sell rations? Rations for what, exactly? Gasoline? What about industries? What about "middlepersons" - i.e, for example, industrial wholesalers whose business are supplied from China? (And so forth).
2) Given the post above on "disappearing money", do you see any downsides to your approach?
3) How do you figure out who to "command" and who to keep? i.e., do you keep research universities and/or their engineering depts? i.e.,Do you maintain any of the non-command arrangements?
4) What about agriculture?
1) well rationing has worked in WW2 were it was unpopular but seen as fair.. rationing was also proposed both during the 56 and 73 oil shocks and ration books distributed (suez and yom kippur).. business in the UK during the 3 day week were given Kwh limits (this is true!) society did not collapse into a mad max hell world..it was uncomfortable.. the entrepreneurship market thing works with in the limits of the ration system... efficiency increases utility without increasing demand because jervons paradox does not apply in a rationed system
2) a whole lot of people will oppose rationing as ..yes there wealth will disappear.. tough on them
3) as for who is in command and can you ration internationally the answer is as you point out more complex...however the premise is dictator of the world
the trick to rationing is not disallow any single activity just restrict its consumption...cheating will occur but yeah and so what?
rationing does not imply universities shut down as much as the students have to wear a jumper and jacket in class
4) agriculture is rationed in a different structure to meet basic needs..food itself can be rationed
it has been done before....
i suspect we will see countries starting to implement rationing with-in the decade.. its only thing that will work OR has a good chance of working
economic melt down and apathy is possible as is political volatility.. you stake the case and just do it
this is all done in tandem with population control and a host of other stuff etc etc etc
my core point is people dismiss rationing because they see the market "reformed" as the only moral if not ethical option.. i think the majority have this wrong ...especially about the ability of a population to accept it... for a lot (most? )of people in the developed world a "long emergency" would ADD meaning to their lives.. for the developing nations rationing must bring their living standards up so as to stabilize the globe geopolitically.. note equality is not as a immediate concern as much as the perception the developed world is constraining its consumption on behalf of modest lifestyle gains elsewhere
their will be winners and losers
i think rationing is the fairest workable system
Boris
london
Hi Boris,
I appreciate your reply. I wonder if there's any possibility you might expand this and propose it as a guest post to the editors. It might be helpful to go into a bit more depth, and perhaps add some references.
(I mean, I'd find it helpful. I'm very interested in getting a better picture of how this might work.) And, it would also be interesting to hear more from others on the forum in response.
I'm also wondering how this might mesh (or not) with proposals such as the "Oil Depletion Protocol", how it might work in light of the idea of export countries slowing (and perhaps stopping) their exports, and I'd really like to hear more detail about some of your statements, such as
"the entrepreneurship market thing works with in the limits of the ration system".
Again, thanks.
The question essentially is how to reduce the use of oil and coal. The solution must be simple and capable of easy global implementation by agreement amoung all countries.
With these objectives in mind I would also set a carbon tax, but in a more simple format. I will get to why in a minute but first I want to say why a would not implement a cap and trade system. This latter attempt at reducing carbon panders to the modern love of markets by governments as the solution to everything. Unfortunately the cap and trade system puts another layer of accounting and complexity and monitoring in place that is very difficult and expensive to implement and maintain.
As the reducing the use of coal and oil are the given objectives I would perform all the initial steps suggested by Robert (eg talking to the people etc) as a justification for substantailly or completely changing the basis for taxatuion from income to energy.
A carbon tax will be very simple to implement using systems that already exist in most countries. The tax needs to be based on two items:
1. A tariff. This would be an agreed mass of CO2 per barrel of oil or ton of coal by grade.
2. A rate per ton of CO2. This rate will be agreed for 5 years and include a built in escalator calculated to reduce CO2 output by agreed amounts and dates. Individual governments will be free to increase the rate by a multiplier (eg 1.2), but not reduce it. They will also remain free to levy other taxes such as sales, income and value added taxes. Of course the tax will be successful and therefore one of its biggest problems (as viewed by governments) is a shrinking tax base. This rate annual rate increase needs to incorporate increasing success in conservation and therefore carbon will become progressively more expensive. It will level off at a much higher level some time in the future.
The carbon tax will be levied by governments on the producers or importers thereby establishing a price for carbon at the most basic level. This will impact every subsequent product that these two resources are included in.
Carbon credits will be provided for secure locking away of carbon by registered users (eg power compenies and the like) based on the same tariff and rate.
In addition, adjustments will need to be made to social security sytems to counter the increased cost of goods and services.
Of course, in selling it to my subjects, I would initially make the implementation of the tax neutral. In other words other taxes such as income taxes would be reduced commensurately to compensate and ensure that no more money was being removed from the economy.
To offer something more useful than my "shoot almost everyone" proposal above, I would do the following:
1. Use market forces to reduce demand in areas where the regressiveness of a tax wouldn't hurt the poor too much. E.g. tax the bejaysus out of air travel. Put a 500% tax on the price of a plane ticket. This might require nationalizing some airlines to keep the service available for those that actually need it.
2. Nationalize all fossil fuel companies in order to make their data available for planning purposes, and to enable step 3.
3. Ration carbon. Don't tax it, everybody needs some. Use an "Oil Depletion Protocol" approach to determine the decline of the ration over time.
4. Make the waste of fossil fuel a crime. This includes banning most recreational uses - no more private planes, dirt bikes, snowmobiles or yachts.
5. Ban the transportation of food over any distance longer than 500 km.
When people think about energy policy and Peak Oil, they need to keep in mind that appropriate policies may be very different depending on the time frame. Short term policies would focus on preparing people for the decline of oil before it has started to bite. Medium term policies would focus on mitigating the effects of decline once it is under way. Long tern policy would focus on preparing the transition to a non-oil civilization. In the context of long term policy, some consideration of population limits would not be amiss.
Mr. Rapier, instead of going on TV and having this frank conversation with the American Public, Bush and Blair chose to go to Irak and invade the poor oil rich country instead. I wonder if you have noticed which is the largest cost in our present world: it is not human lives, not ecosystems, not global warming, not WMD catastrophes... it political cost. And that's pretty much it. When oil goes to 100 U$/bbl and/or current market systems collapse, it will be someone else's fault, not theirs.
There is, unfortunately, an unavoidable conflict between fuel economy and safety.
Better crash test resistance =more weight, = greater fuel consumption. Google on Daimler Chrysler's efforts to make the smart car legal in the United States. Mileage is going to decline by 10-15 mpg. We need to provide cars selling for less than $16,000 US and getting more than 45 mpg need meet only the European crash test standards. This would help GM and Ford meet increasing CAFE standards
I think we shouldn't give up on technical solutions. Solutions is a freighted word. I don't think that technology will solve our problems but new technology may alleviate the stress. The interesting thing about our technology is that, in principle, it lets us do more with less. Rather than retreat to an agrarian society I think it is possible to have a technological society but not one that looks like today's technology.
In the high tech world the problem is how to arrange some atoms into the desired arrangement. There is no requirement that this be difficult or consume much energy (except for the limits imposed by thermodynamics). It is something like finding solutions to chess problems. The more elegant solutions actually take fewer moves. The big problem is finding those solutions.
In the past twenty years we have made enormous strides in discovering more efficient electric motors, better high power electronics and learning how to build these for less cost.
It should be possible to build relatively cheap PV cells that are about 50% efficient. It should be possible to build relatively cheap inverters and controllers to go with them. It should be possible to build relatively cheap electric cars.
Most of my goals as dictator have been discussed above.
*Population is the biggest problem, especially first world population. It seems that the advanced nations have very low birthrates. Without immigration the US would be losing population like Japan. So first off, I'd restrict immigration. Population dominates everything else. North Americans have an enormous footprint compared to third worlders. However, even if they don't come here the developing world is rapidly adopting higher energy using life styles.
*Improved efficiency would buy us a lot of time. I'd dramatically raise CAFE standards in short order. I'd implement strict enforcement of existing speed limits. Eliminate the use of incandescent bulbs. I'd force all new coal plants to sequester the emitted CO2 and sulphur and mercury. I'd encourage most people to air dry their clothes rather than use gas or electricity. I'd improve funding for railroads and subsidize their use.
*I'd implement a carbon tax and a pollution tax and perhaps some others in order to internalize some of the external costs of energy fuels. Perhaps each new device should have a recycling fee attached to it. Kind of like the deposits on bottles. You could pay a $1,000 deposit on a car that would be refunded when the car was trashed.
*I'd invest heavily in R&D of all sorts. A big problem is that we have a huge installed infrastructure. Changing that will cost a huge amount. However, there may be ways to modify this infrastructure. Different tires could save 5% of fuel consumption. Perhaps some spray on film could dramatically improve home insulation, especially of windows. How about road coatings that reduce fuel consumption? Certainly we could find ways to build higher efficiency PV cells using less energy.
*I'd build concentrating solar plants to jump start the industry. Twenty or so 1,000MW plants would do a lot to reduce FF consumption and start the industry.
*I'd use nuclear as a last resort. I don't think that nuclear is terribly dangerous but I think that the external costs are quite high.