Performance Governing: Getting Lucky and Staying Lucky
Posted by Robert Rapier on July 4, 2008 - 9:17pm
Gasoline prices give a a clear measure of consequences of making oil the lifeblood of our economy. As our economic lifeblood, oil is giving us:
- Heart attacks, unstable price spikes in this plateau of Peak Oil
- Leukemia, undermining our planets ability to support us with Global Warming
Facing the facts and acting to resolve them can defeat peak Oil and Global Warming, both civilization killers. A primary fact is that our current infrastructure is the cause of these killers. We built the infrastructure. We can build better. The purpose of this essay is a call to action to defeat these civilization killers by changing the way we govern infrastructure from specifying HOW to build it, to stating WHAT is needed and allowing a free market to find the rare individuals with lucky breakthroughs that can build sustainable infrastructure. We must get lucky and discover the energy equivalents of lasers, personal computers, cell phones, the Internet, etc....
Government control over infrastructure has created brittle and fragile structures completely addicted to finite and depleting oil. Example, urban transport is less than 4% efficient. Yet food distribution is 97% dependent on oil that is mostly imported.
Performance Governing changes HOW to WHAT. Dictates of HOW to build infrastructure becomes performance standards of WHAT is needed. The limited suite of government contractors becomes anyone willing and able to exceed performance standards. Exceeding standards will change the lifeblood of our economy from oil to ingenuity. Following are comparisons of results between HOW, a planned economy, and WHAT, a performance economy.
- Communications Infrastructure, Changes in How versus What are easily identified:
- How: AT&T's monopoly:
- Monopolized in the mobilization for World War I.
- Analog networks essentially unchanged in a century.
- Long distance calling was an expensive luxury.
- What: Creating a free market in 1984 allowed sweeping ingenuity:
- Re-tooling infrastructure from analog to digital.
- Re-tooling infrastructure from wire to fiber and wireless.
- Expansion in scope and quality of many services such as the Internet and cell phones.
- Economic driver and job creator.
- Long distance calling is virtually free
- Biofuels, How versus What:
- How: The President and Congress directed and subsidize ethanol production:
- Corn prices jumped from $2/bushel in 2005 to $7/bushel in Jun 2008.
- US Secretary of Agriculture expects 43% increase in food prices in 2008.
- Growing food riots in the world.
- Likely, first SUV famine in 2008-2009 as burning food in cars at less than 4% efficiency causes the first biofuel famine.
- What: Define sustainable efficiency standard, such as 100 miles per gallon.
- Efficiency, How versus What:
- How: The President and Congress passed a 50% increase in CAFE standards (gas mileage). For simplicity consider they are 20 miles per gallon. Government directing this efficiency improvement will:
- Start in 2012 and requires about 25 years to rotate out the current car fleet.
- Require everyone to borrow money to buy a car.
- A .02X solution to a 2X problem (50% divided by 25 years versus oil doubling in price in 2007)
- What: Set a standard and allow anyone beating that standard to implement. For example, inventors at JPods, SkyTran, SkyWeb, ULTra, MISTER and others easily beat 100 miles per gallon. A summary of their capabilities are:
- Provide urban transport as a service (no loans required)
- Achieve efficiencies from 100-400 miles per gallon. See CSX commercial for 423 miles per gallon.
- Operate at 1/14th the cost of oil-based transport.
- Move people and cargo 24 x 7.
- Zero-emissions, some are solar powered.
- Convenience of a chauffeured car at the cost to operate an elevator.
- Based on riders per day, the elevator is the most successful form of public transportation. Yet these inventors of a physical-Internet, of horizontal-elevators are not allowed access to rights of way. What is possible is disallowed by the current How. There is no conspiracy. Far worse, there are well-meaning rules and regulations of a bureaucracy.
- Oil, How versus What:
- How: Presidents and Congress directed and subsidize oil production. Subsidies distorted free market innovation.
- Borrow $700 billion a year to consume oil.
- Weakening dollar, increasing inflation, increasing trade deficit.
- Exposed to Peak Oil. We were warned of the geology in 1956. It was confirmed in US Peak Oil in 1970.
- Crisis in Economic Growth as Energy Growth peaked in May 2005.
- Government refusal to respond to Peak Oil, watch comments from EIA Administrator
Caruso. Policy makers created circumstances where spendable
incomes rose enough for people to risk their life's savings to afford a
mortgage and then allowed more and more of those mortgages to be
crushed between rising interest rates and rising gas prices. The 2007
foreclosure actions, 2.1 million, happened with 4.8% unemployment.
Foreclosures in 2009 will jump as $200+ oil increases unemployment.
- CO2 from automobiles contributes to Global Warming.
- Global Warming is the destruction of human and biosphere habitat.
- Yet governments are building more highways.
- From BBC, summer ice cover in the Arctic has declined sharply.
- Arctic ice loss in 2007 was horrific. Much worse than models predicted.
- Arctic ice flow in the winter of 2007-2008 indicates risk.
- Pentagon Study on Abrupt Climate Change.
- Cracks in old ice found in 2008 indicates more risks.
- This author spent 3 years as an Arctic Light Infantryman. I have been back several times and the changes are massive. The consequences are uncertain but again, massive.
- Government assume personal mobility equates to the
automobile regardless of the consequences.
This quote, written by Dr Patrick Driscoll, is taken from West Point's Decision Making in Systems Engineering and Management.In fact, one of the most significant failings of the current U.S. transportation system is that the automobile was never thought of as being part of a system until recently. It was developed and introduced during a period that saw the automobile as a standalone technology largely replacing the horse and carriage. So long as it outperformed the previous equine technology, it was considered a success. This success is not nearly so apparent if the automobile is examined from a systems thinking perspective. In that guise, it has managed to fail miserably across a host of dimensions. Many of these can be observed in any major US city today: oversized cars and trucks negotiating tight roads and streets, bridges and tunnels incapable of handling daily traffic density, insufficient parking, poor air quality induced in areas where regional air circulation geography restricts free flow of wind, a distribution of the working population to suburban locations necessitating automobile transportation, and so on. Had the automobile been developed as a multilateral system interconnected with urban (and rural) transportation networks and environmental systems, U.S. cities would be in a much different situation than they find themselves in today.
What is important here is not that the automobile could have been developed differently, but that in choosing to design, develop and deploy the automobile as a stand alone technology, a host of complementary transportation solutions to replace the horse and buggy were not considered.
- What: Tax oil for its true cost to secure and cleanup after use. This would have made alternatives financially attractive since the 1973 Oil Embargo. We would have had 35 years from the 1973 Oil Embargo to have iterated alternatives.
Ingenuity
There is no mystery to breakthrough insight or ingenuity. Ingenuity is a personality trait. Find more ingenious people, give their ideas a chance to work out and you will get lucky breaks. Here are some personalities:
- Edison, discovered 4,000 ways not to make a light bulb.
- Goodyear, after decades of work, twice in debtor's prison, dropped a rubber blob on a sooty stove and instantly recognized what had been missing to vulcanize rubber.
- Einstein, spent a decade unemployed and as a patent clerk refining ideas.
- Wright Brothers, relentless study matched by insightful testing.
- Pasteur, “chance favors the prepared mind”.
Their process is relatively simple. Invest and mortgage everything you have for very long periods of time without reward. If you are lucky you will clarify a breakthrough concept. Then find someway to navigate the commercial requirements to churn that clarity of thought into commercial acceptance. The process is simple and ruthless. It is an effort driven by passion, not a government job.
Relative to building infrastructure, government control over HOW creates three additional barriers, each nearly perfect at stopping ingenuity that changes WHAT. Innovators must convince government people to:
- Take professional risk for which there is no reward or precedent.
- Knowingly accept failures in the process of churning a concept from insight to breakthrough.
- Often wait years to decades for the iterative process of churning ideas into commerce have a successful breakthrough.
Government Actions, Changing What
By abandoning HOW, Leadership can define WHAT is needed and empower everyone to do what they can. As a starting point, here are some simple actions leaders can take to nurture ingenuity, self-reliance, getting lucky and staying lucky.
Self-reliance: Disciplined people, Discipline Thought, Disciplined Action.
Small steps, relentlessly taken will create durable people and communities, economic lifeboats. There may not be time to save everyone, but there is time for everyone to save themself. Start simple by asking everyone to plant a garden. This may seem insignificant but it accomplishes vital tasks
- Each person is responsible for self-reliance.
- Builds agricultural skills and a sense that we are part of the land.
- Cuts food-miles and reduces oil dependence.
- Strengthens the social fabric with confidence that we are durability from famine caused by oil shortage.
- Affirms by action that we can and will prevail. We need only exercise our liberty and responsibility.
- Community gardens strengthen communities with shared responsibility and knowledge.
Getting Lucky, Finding Rare Events and Odd People
Ingenuity is a personality trait. Forging ingenuity into insight and breakthrough require great personal investment with improbable chance of success. For governments and businesses to exploit such rare and extreme behavior requires organizations adapt their rules to be susceptible to such individuals.
For every breakthrough, there is vast “silent evidence,” failures that we do not pay attention to. Without failures we cannot find breakthrough. These failures cannot be avoided but they can be contained in scope by requiring attempts to be privately funded. People risking their own money are much more sober about the managing risks than governments.
The process is relatively simple. Invest and mortgage everything you have for very long periods of time without reward. If you are lucky you will clarify a breakthrough concept. Then find someway to navigate the commercial requirements to churn that clarity of thought into commercial acceptance. Vast numbers of truly brilliant ideas are weeded out. The process is simple and ruthless. It is an effort driven by passion ,not a government job.
Organizational Methods for Encouraging Ingenious Personalities
Two books outline some key concepts and mechanics of greatness and uncertainty:
- Good to Great defines the process of forging excellence from mediocrity, of transforming a good organization into a great one. We have good infrastructure and good government based on unsustainable assumptions of cheap oil. Building a great sustainable culture requires leveraging the Stockdale Paradox and exuding greatness from our commercial entities, our governments and our lives.
- The Black Swan is about rare events and getting lucky. This book is about how not to be a “sucker” in the face of uncertainty. We face the uncertainty of civilization killers.
- Performance Governing. Establish standards for infrastructure. Define what is needed and allow anyone willing to risk their capital to beat that standard a franchise to profit from performance forged from their ingenuity.
- Government grants should be very limited, or better, not
used at all. There are several problems with grants and
government funding for research:
- Breakthrough concepts are abnormal and are not likely to be funded. Example, Einstein could not get a teaching job until 5 years after publishing the Special Theory of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics via the photoelectric effect, and the other breakthrough clarities of 1905. Establishments like iterations of how not change in what (See CAFE above).
- Refining a breakthrough concept to clarity costs about as much as chasing a government grant. The passion for creating should focus on creating not chasing permission to create.
- Innovators of breakthroughs are not personally wired to wait for government handouts. Example: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are both college dropouts. Their breakthrough ideas on personal computers did not wait for the government or academia,
- Dependence on government money conditions capital markets to wait for such money. Venture capitalists are almost as risk averse as bureaucrats and policy makers. It also conditions innovators, always desperate for cash, to chase permission not insight.
- Government backed loans can be effective if:
- Private risk builds infrastructure. This keeps focus on what is practical.
- Infrastructure achieves public policy objectives.
- Infrastructure provides profitable service and can repay loans. Then low cost government back loans can refinance the infrastructure. These loans can be paid back from profitable operation of the infrastructure. The loans free the private capital to build more infrastructure.
- Care and transparency are required to get the benefits but not the corruption of a Transcontinental Railroad model.
Staying Lucky, Honestly Accruing All Costs
There are no lasting victories. Winning today yields the opportunity to compete again tomorrow. Embracing responsibility will enable us to compete again tomorrow:
- Accept that excellence is the process of relentlessly improving,
- Open our institutions to the odd personalities that find breakthrough.
- Assure all costs are accounted for and resources accrued to compensate.
Performance governing requires honestly accounting for
all costs. That is not easy. We have a tendency to
shove long-term costs off on the future. The failure to
prepare is illustrated by:
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Preparation and self-reliance are simple and tough standards. We need only return resources used in a condition we are proud to hand to our grandchildren; everything we waste stays with us. If resources can not be restored in pristine condition or if we are unsure if our actions cause harm, we must assume they cause harm and collect estimated costs to compensate as honestly as possible. If industries do not reserve these costs, then to protect the general welfare and common defense, it is the duty of government to assess, collect and exercise such funds to provide a sustainable habitat. Earth is a spaceship; the glass of water you use, your grandchild will drink.
As a conservative, I am amazed that conservative political leaders seem the least interested in the conservative principle that all costs should be accounted for, subsidies eliminated. Had we accounted for pollution costs, security costs and maintenance costs, today we would not be facing an energy crisis. Had governments declared what is needed and allowed free markets to carve profits from waste, today we would not be facing an infrastructure crisis. The civilization killers of Peak Oil and Global Warming would have been preempted. Had we accounted for all costs, gasoline prices would be only as significant as a cell phone bill; instead gas prices force home foreclosures as people choose between paying for their commute and their house.
As tough and dangerous as Peak Oil is, we are lucky it is impacting our economy faster than Global Warming is killing our planet. Gas prices force us to change the lifeblood of our economy from oil to ingenuity. As noted by Benjamin Franklin: “To be thrown upon one's own resources, is to be cast into the very lap of fortune; for our faculties then undergo a development and display an energy of which they were previously insusceptible.”
Performance Governing will result in a performance economy, an economy driven by profits and jobs created by preempting current waste. There will be many breakthrough ideas that will look like luck. Mobility and electricity costs will be reduced, our footprint on our environment minimized and our addiction to oil and borrowing money to pay for oil will end. It will only take 15-20 years of hard work. The process is waiting for government to allow a free market.
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Peak oil is like herpes....once you get it, you
always have it.
Peak oil is like herpes....once you get it, you
always have it.
HA! I hope not!
This site is cool:)
This is my first post.
I have four addictions: caffeine, nicotene, reading science fact & fiction, and reading Peak Oil theory trends.
Peak Oil is addicting because...
1. It is funny! Human suffering is not funny. Human folly IS funny. It is funny because laughing at folly is more satisfying than pure frustration or depression. Part of the folly is that right NOW the technology exists to mitigate and adapt to Peak Oil with a minimum of hardship. The folly is that the optimum strategy(s) will NOT happen because they require rationality, lack of selfishness, planning very long term IE more than 30 years, and cooperation on a global scale...what are the odds of that? Humans will muddle through the problem with some brilliant solutions enacted locally, but without a global rational plan.
2. The worst case scenerio of Peak Oil is global disaster and catastrophic population reduction= big time drama of apocolypse.
3. Peak Oil is one of the BIG trends that will determine the quality of MY life and EVERYONE's life in the short to medium term (5 years to 30 years) IE reading Peak Oil theory is speculation on MY future and humanities future in my lifetime.
4. Could add more. Why do YOU keep up with Peak Oil theory?
There was an earlier thread "Will Wartime Mobilization Solve Peak Oil?" I'll describe fuel efficeincy improvements possible in that type of scenerio.
First I'll gaze into my nonexistant crystal ball and say that gasoline will be $25 per gallon in 2048 not counting inflation. A nice round and BIG number to work with. If you drive 1000 miles per month @ 10 MPG ? My calculation says that would be $2500 dollars per month OR $30,000 per year just for gas for one car. My guess is SUVs ( SUVS as they currently are, not super fuel efficient theoretical future ones) would be very unpopular with anyone who has an income under $250,000 if gas were that price.
How about a car that gets 150 MPG? That is 1/6th the cost...so with the same mileage and gas price you get $5000 per year= aprox $400 per month. $400/month is not chump change, however many people could manage it. And that is for a full 1000 miles per month! Halve your miles and most people could still afford to drive a car that gets 150 MPG. Appologies if I have math errors; I'm figureing in my head. Do you see how increased MPG has a dramatic effect on affordability of using a car?
Why 150 MPG? $30 MPG is the new standard milage for an average car; exludes SUVs, trucks, and sports cars. 50 to 60 is expected for current "super efficeint" cars (HA! HA! that is a laugh:-) There are a few production cars TODAY that get close to 100 MPG...IMO 150 MPG is not a big stretch of the imagination & I will describe why next.
150 MPG car: different options to get there
1. Heard of the Air Car from and only in Europe? If you had that you just plug it in at night most of the time. For long trips? Buy a Honda 1000 watt generator to run compressor on the Air Car. It would take some fiddling to get an exhaust system for the generator if you did this as a permanent setup, but it wouldn't be spendy. I don't know how the overall efficeincy would be with that setup, but my guess is over 75 MPG.
2. Prius is good, but ALL current batteries have a power to weight ratio that limits the practical maximum miles you get on a charge. I read one article on a kinetic energy storage device that sounded awsome: magnetic bearings (I didn't even know that was feasible! ), 100,000 RPM flywheel that would only lose 3% power in a month or two because the magnetic bearings were very low resistance, at that RPM a 300 pound flywheel has monstrous ineria...and thus power storage capability, motor/generator to control flywheel, and last is very strong one inch kevlar external frame because it had LOTS of inertia and thus a faillure would be dangerous. That is one invention that was probably bought by a car or oil company because they seriously disliked it! You hear rumurs about other improvements to fuel efficiency that 'mysteriously' never make it to market. With a "Wartime Mobilization" to improve fuel efficiency of cars IE if the US government said "You are REQUIRED to make 3 million cars per year that get 125 MPG within 2 years" IF the US government said that to the Big Three they would successfully do it because it wouldn't require new technology.
3. What powers a helicopter? Big planes? Tanks? Some trains? The answer is a turbine motor. How many 10s of Billions of dollars have been spent to make turbine motors efficient? Turbine motor is better than 90% efficient VS maby 30% efficiency of Prius engine
Prius gets 50 MPG today...guess how Toyota could make a prius in 2010 that gets 150 MPG? If youre guess was to swap out the Internal Combustion Engine for a small turbine engine...ding! youre right! Some might object that miniturizing a planes turbine engine to fit in a car woould be hard; I say it would cost less than $100,000,000 for R&D plus another $2 Billion to build a factory. That is not cheap from my perspective, however from the perspective of fuel $ savings if 5 million turbine/electric hybrids were made it is an excellant deal.
From my understanding global hydrocarbon liquids (all types ) has been on a plateau since 2005 or so. Being optimistic lets just say the plateu of oil production lasts untill 2014. A simple doubling of fuel efficiency for cars would extend the plateau for another ? years. Triple efficeincy and plateau extends longer. The extension I am talking about is not of the supply of oil but of the economic output and quality of life, and give humanity longer to adapt to Peak Oil. I don't think I was clear; I meant that a doubling or tripling of fuel economy of cars IS feasible and it would make the plateau and downslope of Hubberts Curve less traumatic.
Back to my original thought; solutions ARE feasible but humans will muddle along and continue to be idiotic.
Human Folly will continue to amuse me
Cheers
Question all assumptions. Never be satisfied with easy answers. Buffylives
Excellent post by Bill James. The way to solve our problems is certainly there.
Sadly Drizzt points out that human selfishness and greed are real obstacles.
By the way a 150mpg SUV is purchasable in the USA today - www.afstrinity.com - if I lived in the USA I'd order one. If the homo sapiens was as wise as his latin name suggests then AFSTrinity's technology would be bought out and shared to all automakers - who would have their gas-guzzlers taxed off the roads.
The AFSTrinity XH (extrem hybrid) SUV has better performance than its internal combustion engine version. It also doesn't need any petrol ever if you just are an inner city commuter. This is an SUV mind you - now if it was the battery/capacitor technology in a small car - maybe 500mpg for intercity driving and longer range for full electric daily commuting.
Get the F***ing Hummers etc (at least the ICE versions) off the road quick!
Pure marketing BS, it gets ~30 MPG in gasoline mode just like it says in the FAQ.
In all electric mode it gets infinite MPG because a kWh is not gasoline. If you make certain assumptions about driving habits it averages out to 150 MPG and an unspecified amount of miles per kWh which is curiously omitted.
In other words it's an electron-guzzler, with the option of working part time as a gas-guzzler. That's neither amazing new technology nor particularly commendable.
You're certainly doing your part to make sure sapiens is just an empty piece of flattery with this post.
The air car, excuse the pun, is just hot air. The air pressure it requires is incredibly high. Far higher than a home generator and compressor can provide, even if running all night. Far higher than the compressors used in automotive repair shops could provide.
I own a auto repair shop and know the limits of compressors of the size they typically use. What I did not know, until reading an article on the oildrum.com about the air car, is the magnitude of the difference between what the air car needs for pressure and the pressure that compressors most people are familiar with can provide.
http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/3388#more
This is why I like the oildrum.com. It gives me the opportunity to learn the science behind the idea. We all agree time is short. The more facts we share, the more likely we can make personal decisions in our best interest.
Drizzt: Your ideas for developing a 150 MPG Car are a bit off track.
First, energy storage solutions, be they compressed air, batteries, flywheels, or hydrogen powered fuel cells, do not address the core issue/problem/paradigm shift:
Total BTUs available for use in our economy are going to shrink.
The dilemma in front of us is: how fast, how far, and how evenly distributed, the decline will be.
Second, turbines are not more efficient converters of fuel to mechanical energy. Their advantage in aircraft is light weight and mechanical simplicity (reliability), in electrical power production, reliability and low capital cost / MW (compared with a coal fired or nuclear power plant) are the reason for the growth in natural gas fueled electrical power.
Forrest
PriorityX
I checked your link RE the Air Car thinking it would be a three minute 2 or 3 paragraph summary. ACH! It was a whole discussion, and technical...I read it all. Thanks
Vacosvc
1. Drizzt: Your ideas for developing a 150 MPG Car are a bit off track.
2. The dilemma in front of us is: how fast, how far, and how evenly distributed, the decline will be.
Hmmm...I am not a mechanical engineer. I gave examples AND meantioned there are likely OTHER solutions that exist but have been bought & sat on by Oil Cos because increased auto efficiency would reduce Oil Profits. So...I still believe that 150 MPG is feasible in JUST two years.
Regarding your second point; MY point was that a fleet of 5 million cars getting 15o MPG would reduce the speed of the decline and allow more time to adapt with less trauma. A fleet of 100 million if built over time or in multiple countries would extend the decline proportionately more.
3. Second, turbines are not more efficient converters of fuel to mechanical energy. Their advantage in aircraft is light weight and mechanical simplicity (reliability), in electrical power production, reliability and low capital cost / MW (compared with a coal fired or nuclear power plant) are the reason for the growth in natural gas fueled electrical power.
Regarding point 3, please provide a link! I disagree, and will explain why.
A four cylander engine has four cylanders that go UP/stop, then DOWN/stop a total of two times for one compression cycle. Each time the cylander stops it will leach NET energy from the energy to get the cylander to go the opposite direction. A turbine engine has no corrosponding STOP part of its cycle; it is simply ON. This is also why a wankle engine is mechanically more efficient than a cylander engine; Wankle engines don't have a STOP portion of the combustion cycle. Another point is that due to the drastically simpler design of a turbine engine there are less contact points to cause frictional losses.
First comment here, but super efficient vehicles already exist and are being sold in Europe.
Has anyone heard of the TWIKE? I would buy one if they were sold in Canada. Top speed is around 55mph (85kmh). It uses electricity and gets the equivalent of 250-500 miles per gallon. This would great for transportation within cities for a tiny fraction of the energy being used now.
It looks like it's really fun to drive and they don't take up much space to park either. You can even get some exercise while driving one (no joke). They just need to produce a lot more of them. The discovery channel show Daily Planet did a good show on this one.
Here's a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake_specific_fuel_consumption
I'm sure there are other links out in the ether, but this one has information on specific types of engines.
fly wheels won't work for cars. They will "precess" like gyroscope, so any attempts to steer (or go over uneven terrain depending on the orientation of the wheel) will result in the vehicle flipping over.
While there might be other feasibility issues, pressession was accounted for.
The inventors solution included TWO counter rotateing flywheels...so the net external torque would be zero.
BTW, while as a concept it seems awsome I am suspicious that maby the magnetic bearings need superconductors. That requirement would drastically change the total mechanical efficiency calculation because you would need to account for energy cost of coolant for superconduction.
Also, the article was in Nexus Magazine...which is an entertaining read, but should be read with signifigant skeptical inclination because Nexus is very speculative IMO.
Flywheels and other forms of power storage are very applicable to storing solar power. We have looked at locating them in the footings for the vertical supports. Long term it looks like ultra-capacitors will become extremely inexpensive.
Leukemia is actually an interesting analogy, as it hits home. There are basically 4 classes of leukemia, 2 acute and 2 chronic. ALL is curable, with the best prognosis for children. AML is dismal. CML used to be terrible as well, but now we have a wonder drug that can essentially cure people with very few side effects (knock on wood after 5 years or so of experience). CLL is dismal as well but hits people mostly late in life and usually takes longer to progress.
So where are we on the oil prognosis scale? Are we a young enough culture that we can ward off the bad effects? Are we waiting for a wonder drug that will save us? 'Or will it be horrendous? Or will we slide slowly into oblivion?
Transportation, the circulatory system for our economy is killing our planets ability to support our life. Judging from the Arctic, we are in very serious trouble.
I believe we can make the change to sustainable infrastructure but it has to start immediately and on a vast scale. By vast I mean distributed, not centralized. Facing an overwhelming task, take the ant approach to eating an elephant, small bites, lots of friends.
Peak Oil and Global Warming have a distributed cause, the accumulated effects of each of our use of resources. The process of killing the civilization killers is distributed. I believe that culture is the mirror in which we see our selves. If we see self-reliance, we will pretend to be self-reliant, and then become more self-reliant.
If everyone planted a garden; if everyone stopped buying gas on Sunday; if everyone rode a bike to work 1 day a month; if everyone wasted less, the impact would be a shift in behavior and then a shift in ethics. Waste would be equated to sloth, guttony and other vices.
Local action is the solution. Make an economic lifeboat for your economic community. Like the solution is like that of Black Death of the 14th Century, kill the rats and do not live in your own waste; end congestion and do not live in your own waste. They could not see microorganisms, we cannot see CO2. Both matter. Kill a disease by ending the cause and transmitter.
We already have these useful technologies, and have had them for decades. New and brilliant breakthroughs are always nice, but we don't actually need them to stop burning fossil fuels.
This is like McCain offering a $300 million prize for an electric car battery... we already have them.
My take on:
We must get lucky and discover the energy equivalents of lasers, personal computers, cell phones, the Internet, etc....
None of the above is a primary source of energy. It seems very likely that no amount of ingenuity is going to find a primary source of energy that can maintain the present level of agricultural production worldwide. I forsee starving people making maintenance of industrial civilization very difficult.
PLAN, PLANt, PLANet
Errol in Miami
The primary source of energy for agriculture is the Sun, as it has been since the dawn of agriculture 12,000 years ago. Not even the craziest of doomers claims that peak oil or climate change will make the sun go out.
We can grow food without fossil fuel inputs, worldwide around half of the food produced is produced with zero fossil fuel inputs, and we produce twice as much as food as we need (we divert half to livestock and biofuels).
We can heat and cool and transport with electricity. We have electric trains which can transport people with great energy efficiency. For generation, of technologies which do not use depleting resources and which are commercially-proven, we have solar PV, solar thermal, wind, tidal, geothermal, and hydroelectric. We also have biomass and biomass gasifiers, however even though they use renewable resources, it's not clear that we could use them without depleting them, since already deforestation is responsible for around a fifth of greenhouse gases. We have half-continent-wide electrical grids which already well deal with intermittency.
If we can feed, heat, cool and transport people and their goods, then most of the issues we need to deal with are dealt with. It takes time and great effort and ingenuity, but can be done with current technology.
This is like McCain offering a $300 million prize for an electric car battery... we already have them.
Waiting for new technology before we make any changes would be like the Apollo Project waiting for NERVA to work before they took off - they wouldn't have made it by 1969. Instead they used existing technology and refined it a bit.
Ever heard of Peak Phosphorous?
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_...
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/33164
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/28720
I have indeed.
Ever heard of returning urine and faeces to the land? This was once the practice.
Depending on their diet, humans excrete a bit under 1g PO4 daily, half in each of their urine and faeces. Taken over 6,700 million people, this comes to some 2.45 million tonnes annually.
According to the FAO (p16) the world produces about 37 million tonnes of P2O5 annually, of which about 80% or 30Mt is actually used as fertiliser.
However, around half of applied phosphate is not taken up by crops and pasture but ends up as runoff - only 30% is taken up by the first planting. [Wilcock, R.J., J.W. Nagels, H.J.E. Rodda, M.B. O’Connor, B.S. Thorrold, and J.W. Barnett. 1999. Water quality of a lowland stream in a New Zealand dairy farming catchment. N. Z. J. Mar. Freshwater Res. 33:683–696] And so we can safely halve phosphate production and application if we can just do it smarter, reducing needs to 15Mt globally.
Applying fertiliser in bricks a few feet in the ground has been shown to improve yields 27-89% over conventional broadcasting. Taking the average of 50% increase, we can see that we could reduce phosphate consumption by agriculture by another third, assuming these sorts of things become widespread. This reduces needs to 10Mt globally.
By improving acidic soils with lime we can reduce phosphate needs by two-thirds in those areas. This drops overall needs to 9Mt or so.
Of all crops, most of the plant is not eaten. If it's returned to the soil directly rather than being consumed by livestock or biofuels, this approximately halves phosphate (and other fertiliser) needs, down to 4.5Mt.
As noted above, recovery of phosphates from urine and faeces can give us 2.45Mt annually. Let us suppose that crop yields absent phosphate fertiliser are zero; we then get a production of 2.45/4.5 = 54% of current.
Current world grain production is about 2,100Mt annually, or 313kg per person. 54% of this is 169kg per person. Grain is 3,500kcal and 80g protein kg, thus 169kg grain annually would provide 1,750kcal and 40g protein daily if nothing else were consumed. A few fruits and vegetables would easily make up the rest - up to 2,000kcal and 55g daily.
Of course, crop yields do not drop to zero if there are no fertilisers applied, typically the yield is at worst half of what it would have been.
Peddle dieoff dreams to people who have never even grown a tomato.
Could, could, could and could....
But will we voluntarily?
We've had alternatives, and saner ways of doing things for decades to no avail.
There are a host of actions which we could be taking but are not, and often it's that pseudoscientific religious cult of "economics" which tells us that it is not "cost-effective" to do the obvious thing.
We're going to push against all the limits instead of taking rational actions. And if and when we wake up it will be too late to avoid catastrophe.
Well, it depends what you call "voluntary".
Most doomers assume that with trouble ahead, humanity stumbles blindly towards the cliff and is then surprised when they fall off.
Whereas in fact people adjust if they can. Artificial fertiliser today is relatively cheap, cheap enough that like oil and coal we can waste it. When it becomes more scarce, we'll conserve it. We'll have to.
I mean, if your current vehicle takes 10 gallons a week to get you to work, and you spend another 2 gallons driving a mile to the shops during the week, and later the price goes up so you can only afford 11 gallons, or someone introduces rationing so you can only buy 11 gallons, you don't just drive through the 11 gallons and then come to a sputtering stop 1 gallon from home. You fold the four shopping trips into one, you get a more fuel efficient vehicle, you walk to the shops, you take the train to work, you move house to be closer to work or get a new job - you do something to adjust.
Likewise, if farmers find that the supply of artificial fertiliser becomes too expensive or scarce to waste, they'll stop wasting it.
That's normal human behaviour - hell, it's animal behaviour. "It's hot, I better get out of the sun" or "It's cold, I better move into the sun." People change, they adjust.
The only thing in question is,
Which will be faster, the changes or our adjustment?
The answer to that determines how much suffering we have along the way.
The point is that global resource constraints are not the cause of anyone's starvation; that's caused by political and economic decisions we make. It's our choice.
Now, you may believe that humans inevitably take the worst possible decisions, and simply keep walking until they plummet to their deaths. But that is not what history shows. People adjust. Societies certainly change a lot, and people suffer a lot, but we do not find that hundreds of millions of people die overnight. It just doesn't happen. People adjust. "Voluntarily"? Well, yes and no. They have to adjust or suffer, so they adjust. Usually before the actual suffering sets in.
The best way to get vast voluntary action it to create better service at lower costs.
In transportation that is very easy. If the government sets performance standards, it is ease, starting in small niches to built transport systems that provide the service of a chauffeured car at the cost to operate an elevator.
Morgantown's PRT was built in response to the 1973 Oil Embargo. It has delivered 110 million injury-free, electrically-powered passenger miles.
Modern versions can be solar powered. Using the distributed nature of the transportation network to harvest distributed power sources to drive the network.
More important than building a better transportation network is to build towns and cities that do not require motorized transportation.
it is ease, starting in small niches to built transport systems that provide the service of a chauffeured car at the cost to operate an elevator
BS !! cost estimates.
Hydraulic elevators (typically 2 to 5 stories) just have a hydraulic piston move back and forth. Electric cable elevators (4 and more stories) have a specially designed and VERY robust (took a few decades to work that out) electric motor and steel cables rolling back & forth.
One and a half centuries to debug any operational problems (note the stringent gov't regulation on elevators) and get costs down and reliability up. Otis is famous NOT for inventing the elevator, but for inventing a safety brake !
You have a "not quite out of the box" technology, doing a complex set of tasks and somehow expect it to rival elevators !
BS !!
Alan
People are adjusting all around me as we speak. My son's fiancee just bought a Honda Fit. He's looking at a Civic Hybrid.
There are 100 Million Cattle IIRC in the U.S. Dairy farms, and feedlots are putting in anaerobic digesters, daily. That could electrify 20 Million Homes, and supply great amounts of fertilizer for our fields. There's no reason to lose phosphorous just because crops are fed to livestock (or us.)
We pay farmers "Not" to Plant over 30 Million Acres in the U.S. There are, according to the latest Stanford study, at least a Billion Cultivatable Acres, worldwide, that are lying unused. Most of these are probably within 50 miles of a source of inexpensive limestone.
It'll probably get Painful for awhile; but, we should be alright.
Kiashu,
I'm not sure what you mean by 'overnight', but as a species we have never before been in the position where the population of the planet has been artificially increased to over 6 and a half billion by using the stored power of the sun.
It is not that we are 'doomed' that frightens me but how we are 'doomed'. Not a sudden doom but a long dwindling one that includes not only our possibly permanent demise but as well the end of our planet. We may guess how much damage we are doing to this planet but no one can say for certain that we will not leave it a ball of stone.
With us it is sort of like the day my uncle had reached the end of his patience with my cousin and his ability to manipulate words and said, "You are Smart, you are smart, but you are not so smart! Your ideas of 'increased efficiency' through a sort of 'natural' conservation and technology are quite clever but do not address the problem. We easily find ways to manipulate our environment but only for short term gains leading to problems which lead other short term gains, etcetera .
I realize that what I have said is no 'solution' but I do not think we have defined the problem leave alone have a realistic way of solving it and contrary to what you say it will not resolve itself. The only positive I see in your viewpoint is that of one of first aid while waiting for a miracle.
I think there are solutions to this dilemma but not if we keep running in the same direction, even if it seems in a more efficient way that we do run .
By "overnight" I mean the "dieoff" scenario presented to us by the doomers, where they tell us that population is proportional to fossil fuel energy used, so that as fossil fuels deplete, population will fall.
Past overall fossil fuel peak, we expect some figures like 2-10% annual decline in fossil fuel energy availability. According to the doomers, that means 2-10% of the world's population will die each year.
No.
No, but we've certainly been in the position where some particular society had a lot of people in a small area, more than the area could manage. The ruins of the Anasazi pueblos in the USA's southwest tell a story about that.
Millions did not die overnight. The society gradually fell over, over several generations, and the people went on over the generations to form new societies.
I didn't say anything would resolve itself.
I said that people would adjust so that we do not have a "dieoff". I am not saying things will be rosy, just that we won't all die overnight.
What I've said many times is that we are for some very difficult times, that leaving people to themselves will mean adjusting enough to survive but not prosper, but that with an organised and deliberate effort, with hard work and creativity using existing technology, we can live fairly well.
There will be changes, some of them uncomfortable for many people, but we can with effort and brains find some sort of way of life which is better than mere survival, and a bit short of the wasteful prosperity we now have.
Nowadays resources and energy are so cheap for us in the West that we can afford to waste them. It won't always be so. The first thing to go as prices go up and scarcity increases will be the waste.
How much energy and resources we'll have after we get rid of the waste, for what sort of lifestyle, that's another question. But there seem to be no obstacles other than political; and politics changes quicker than we sometimes realise. Good change always seems painfully slow and bad change terrifyingly fast.
Yep, I piss in my garden in off season. Not sure it helps but does kill weeds.
I agree that too many people discount human adaptability. They also think that you can control human behavior. You can influence behavior but you cannot control it. It like directing a herd of cats.
Hitech solutions seem great but its high tech that got us here. Complexity involves the law of diminishing returns. When I was a kid, there was almost no aspect of a car that I could not repair. Today, there is No aspect that I can repair. Ten years ago it cost $300 annually to do the recommended maintenance on a typical Honda. Today that has risen to $1300. And what is it for a Prius? Double that. Are cars better today than 40 years ago? I don't think so. They just cost 10-15X more.
Hi tech solutions will only work if ordinary people can afford them, which I doubt, as the costs keep going ever-higher. A huge part of the waste we engender is the result of endless tech change. What I buy today is obsolete tomorrow.
I spend less than $100 per year on maintenance for my Prius and that is recommended maintenance.
Hi Rearch24
What got us to Peak Oil is moving a ton to move a person at less than 4% efficiency. Recognize that 423 mpg per ton of freight is practical. Waste is wasteful.
Computers, memory, disk storage, telephone bill, and other aspects of high tech have greatly increased in value while dropping in price. Urban transportation can change from a capital requirement to own a car, to a lower cost service.
Building a Physical-Internet (packet-switched computer network that moves physical packets) will in 20 years make mobility costs similar to current cell phone costs.
Great post, Kiashu.
Do you have any ideas on how we could return the phosphorus that goes into the biofuel cycle back into the cultivated land, without a huge energy sucking loop in between?
I'm interested in this as I read that food crop and/or food crop arable land based biofuel cultivation is "going to grow" 3-5 times the current size in the next 5-10 years or so (this according to IEA, EIA and many others).
Now, without debating whether this makes sense or not (I don't think it does), I think it is going to be tried and on mass scale - both in US and in developing countries.
Now, let's assume that the trial scales to 3-5 times volume of current volume.
This will require a lot of biomass cellulose being removed from the soil (i.e. the stalk that was once left there) and turned into cellulose feed for biofuel reactors and then finally into biofuels.
Many of these biofuel plants will be situated far from the land where the biomass was grown and the refinery outputs may not include separated phosphorus that could be readily taken back to land.
Is there any work being done on this that could alleviate these systemic issues?
We need to change the way we treat our urine and faeces. We regard them as "waste" when in fact they're a resource.
There's quite a lot of work being done on processing urine and faeces for agriculture, mostly in Scandanavian countries. Of course sewage plants around the world have long used the biogas from the digestion process to power it all, with some excess going to the grid. But the materials themselves usually end up in the ocean. But generally we treat these resources as waste.
Much the same applies to the rest of our economy. In nature there is no "waste", only food for something else.
Unfortunately it seems to be a systemic thing, our treating everything as waste to dispose of - put out of sight.
I don't think biofuels are going to expand a lot, already there are biofuel plants shutting down due to high feedstock prices. Sure, the EIA and so on think so - but they also think oil production will hit 130Mbbl/day in 2030, that oil should be $20/bbl today, and so on. They're governed by ideology rather than actual facts.
Edit: I should note that as Colin Tudge describes, the simple process of good husbandry of land can go most or all of the way to keeping it fertile. If you alternate grains with legumes, you don't need to add any nitrogen fertiliser; having nitrogen fertiliser just lets you do grains twice in a row. That is, if you are lazy and impatient fossil fuel inputs are necessary; if you are hardworking and patient and practice good husbandry of the land then you don't need that stuff.
Thanks and yes, I understand industrial ecology.
However, I do disagree w/ the biofuel thing.
I think it is highly probable that we will do EVERYTHING to get more liquid fuels, incl. 3-5 timing biofuel volumes, almost whatever the costs. Huge subsidies will be poured into this and even though it would otherwise be economically stupid, it will be 'made to work'.
Barring of course economic & social crash so big that that extra biofuel production is something nobody really is interested in.
IEA has had a clear stance on this: so what if we are burning up the food for fuel and starving the poor - markets will fix it. EIA just denies the whole biofuel-food price issue. Politicians in US are ready to pour more subsidies into corn biofuels.
I see it as very unlikely that any of them will wise up through some magical enlightment of thermondynamics. And markets can be distorted for decades with subsidies. Western agricultural practises have shown that in the past 30-40 years or so.
But again, I could be and I hope that I am wrong.
You could be right, really it's too early to tell, honestly.
What I think is that biofuels will be limited in their expansion, as I wrote some time ago in fuelling the world. Basically, biofuels supply can never come anywhere near demand, and the process of trying to get them there is going to bring back agricultural protectionism, shutting down the markets.
The world uses 4.7bbl oil each, about 3.2bbl of which go to transport - presumably the oil not going to liquid transport fuels is more easily substituted than that going to liquid transport fuels. Broadly-speaking, for transport the developed nations use 7-15bbl, developing nations use 2-7bbl, and impoverished nations use 0-2bbl. So if we want to have biofuels entirely subsitute for oil, with no other changes (eg no change of how much we use cars rather than trains or walking, etc), those are the figures we have to keep in mind.
Developed nation: 7-15bbl
Developing nation: 2-7bbl
Impoverished nation: 0-2bbl
Okay, so what can we get? Again, the calculations are in the article, but briefly: if we put the entire world on minimum rations of grain, and consume no grainfed meat, nor fruit or vegetables, or vegetable oils, and maintain current high levels of food production, and if we can produce biofuels with zero energy input, we ought to be able to produce about a single barrel of mixed biofuels - 120lt or so of ethanol and 30lt or so of biodiesel - per person annually. A bit short of a barrel each.
The process of attempting to produce this single barrel of biofuels is going to draw so much food away from people that it just won't last politically. Countries like Malaysia and Argentina have already told the World Bank/IMF to bugger off, and if globalisation/free trade gives them famine, well then they'll abandon it. And of course with the recent leap in grain prices we've seen countries like Kazakhstan and Thailand ban exports of their grain.
So if people seriously try to produce that pathetically useless amount of biofuels, countries will just shut up shop - agricultural protectionism will be back. So they won't starve, and the biofuels producers won't have the feedstocks.
"Some 1.5 bln people may starve due to land erosion"
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUKL0223173420080702
Quote from the article:
"An estimated 1.5 billion people, or a quarter of the world's population, depend directly on land that is being degraded,"
Somehow, this doesn't seem exactly the same as saying: "1.5 Billion May Starve!"
On the other hand, as land becomes more valuable it will become better cared-for, one would figure.
Kdoliso, Cod used to be what poor people ate and before that on the East coast lobsters were used for fertilizer.
And:
Malcolm Glazer, a billionaire tycoon who controls Omega Protein, a corporation that claims to benefit society because every year it sweeps hundreds of millions of fish from the sea, grinds them up, and turns them into high-protein animal feed, fertilizer, and oil used in linoleum, soap, lubricants, health-food supplements, cookies, and lipstick.
I look in my local mega market grocery and see fish cheaper than local cod taken from all parts of the world because we pay better (so far). As fish become more valuable we don't seem to be caring for the sea better, so why would your statement "On the other hand, as land becomes more valuable it will become better cared-for, one would figure." be valid? Figure me that, okay?
Land has been becoming more valuable for centuries. Where is the evidence we are taking better care of it> And you want to use even more of our land currently out of production. Conservation apparently means nothing to you.
I think the article may be statistical a bit on the conservative side, though maybe it's just "serious" vs. "some" concern:
http://www.icrisat.org/gt-aes/TATA/images/concern.gif
It's all very well to "foresee" starving people. And remarkably emotionally detached.
But just because you fail to see a solution doesn't mean no effort should be expended in looking. Indeed, the starving people you foresee have the right to demand that we look.
Luce, you seem to think that "we" have a responsibility to look after the rest of the world in terms of their food and quality of life. Ever thought that "our" quality of life was a result of responsible decisions in our own societies?
"Indeed, the starving people you foresee have the right to demand that we look."
What rights do Zimbabweans for example have that we look for answers to their food problems? What do we owe them? Very little. At best to not facilitate their own stupidity. We are, due to history and culture, in a better position than most in the "developing" world, but we got there by also understanding the relationship between rights and responsibilities.
The change of the ICE to some other form of trnsportation motivator my get a boost if the rumour of bankruptcy at GM comes to past. The possibility of either Ford or Dodge-Chrysler failing, is growing with each report of declining sales. Out with the old and in with the new. I suppose something comparable would be the displacement of the battleship by aircraft. Looking back in history there are many other "quantum" jumps from one technology to another. Economic disruption leads from one paradigm to another. It may be happening before our eyes, but we haven't registered it yet.
The displacement you note is what I have seen termed "churn."
IBM, Cray, DEC were displaced by Apple, Dell and Compaq as networked computers displaced centralized solutions. Germany's policy of Feed-in Tariffs is allowing the displacement of centralized power to be displaced by distributed power generation from vast numbers of small wind and solar power generating companies.
What is causing normal commercial churn to become quantum leap in transport technologies is government management of infrastructure. Two and a half years ago I had two discussions with the Deputy Administrator Peterson of RITA (Research and Innovative Transportation Administration) about allowing small demonstrations of Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) systems. He stated that RITA only supports research in existing modes. At that time in a similar meeting with Bill Richard, legislative chief for Congressman Oberstar (current Chairman of the House Transportation Committee) he asked "Why aren't transit authorities requesting PRT?" My answer was "How many transit authorities have filed patents?" His reply was "Touche'"
Incremental innovation of know-what is not within the strength of innovators. We keep the same know-how until the crisis becomes extreme and the current know-how, like GM, start dieing without being displaced by better solutions.
You are messing with the forces of nature, the entrenched economic status quo. I do not really know if PRT is truly a good idea, but I do know that it would make GM obsolete if implemented across the board. On the other hand, all of the big 3 may go bankrupt in which case maybe we could begin to let a thousand small flowers bloom, lots of small companies filling different niches. This is the way the auto industry began; perhaps we could return it to its roots in some way.
Perfect. It is how the auto, computer, Internet, aircraft, etc... industries developed. A free market where all costs are accounted for nurtures a rich ecology. Mimicking nature works.
Nice offbeat post.
On unofficial behalf of disciplined ingenious odd people everywhere, I thank you for the vote of confidence.
However, most such folks may be keeping their heads down, since they are surrounded by undisciplined dumbass normal people with a predilection for shooting the messenger.
So you think you can control the world, eh? Everything would be so much better if those dumbasses would just do it YOUR way?
Naw, he just realizes he is just another powerless putz with the grandiose idea, like maybe, that some one will come up with an invisible hand to smite that other invisible hand a mighty blow to put it in its place.
Now if I were King of the world tra la ...:)
The PRT(Personal Rapid Transit) idea has an interesting history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit
The Austin(Texas)Citizens for Personal Rapid Transit has this web page for responding to skeptics.
http://www.acprt.org/PRTSkeptics.cfm
They say that the elevated PRT would cost about 65% of what light rail would cost, would not require additional real estate or interfere with street traffic and would operate 24/7 without schedules, etc. It would reduce congestion by 35% under the Austin plan.
http://www.acprt.org/index.cfm
http://www.acprt.org/RiskVsRewards.cfm
Kiashu & Drizzt: Thanks for some common sense. The oil drum is a great forum - but if you listen to 'cwirth' or 'gail the acutary' - We will all either die within the next two decades or sustain ourselves with vegetable gardens in our front lawn.
Do we have a few challenges ahead? Sure...... But I'm not of the club that says the end of civilization is at hand. The technology and solutions are there. Some pain and lifestyle changes? Yep - But you'll be amazed at how people can adapt if required to.
The idea that we'll all die within two decades is absurd fantasy. The idea of "dieoff" from a lack of oil somehow stopping us producing food comes from people who've never done any farming worth speaking of - neither conventional nor organic.
Likewise the idea that our front lawn will feed us entirely is absurd. But it can certainly go a long way to providing a good chunk of our nutrition; the things we can easily grow at home like tomatoes, carrots, oranges - these are things which are expensive to buy compared to basic grains and tubers.
I write more about this in the shape of food to come.
Certainly lifestyle changes are in the offing. But pain? Well, only for those with a very low pain threshold. Boof referred to the suggested greenish changes as like wearing "sackcloth and ashes". Apparently sleeper trains with dining cars cause people great suffering compared to economy class on aircraft; I would have thought the opposite was true.
You believe that the Earth can suport 6.7 billion people and (exponentialy) rising then?
How do you explain the extinction of 25% of the worlds spieces in the last 30 years if this is not carrying capacity errosion of humanity in overshoot?
Where do you get your 25% mispelled species qoute? Yes that was intentional.
Yes, the world can support 6.7 billion people.
We have 1,000 million overweight people, 300 million of whom are obese. We have 800 million hungry people. These numbers are no coincidence.
The problem is not that the world does not produce enough food, but that we don't distribute it at all fairly.
We produce 2,100Mt of grains annually, 313kg each, which can provide 3,000kcal daily - 50% more than required by a healthy adult doing moderate physical labour.
If we can maintain this - which as I say here, we can - we can feed 50% more people, or 10 billion.
The rate of population growth is slowing, approaching 1% now and the UN expects population to level out at about 9 billion around 2050.
Extinction of species is another matter.
And how long can we sustain that 9 billion for without causing extreme ecological damage?
One week? Two? :-p
Not much longer than we've "sustained" 6.7 without "extreme" ecological damage, me bets.
A slower "growth" rate is not really important when you've reached biological overshoot. Added numbers are. Damn I wish we WERE smarter than yeast.
Well, considering that we're already at the extreme ecological damage stage, I don't hold out much hope.
Kiashu, you write:
At the standard of living of North Korea, perhaps. Or with an average life expectancy of 35. Or both.
The book to read is:
How Many People Can the Earth Support? by Joel E. Cohen
http://www.amazon.com/How-Many-People-Earth-Support/dp/0393314952/ref=sr...
I've read it. I've no use for a book which doesn't even answer the question in its title. I prefer one which answers questions in thorough and well-documented ways, like So Shall We Reap, subtitled, "How Everyone Who Is Liable to Be Born in the Next Ten Thousand Years Could Eat Very Well Indeed; and Why, in Practice, Our Immediate Descendants Are Likely to Be in Serious Trouble"
That is as I've said - it's entirely up to us what happens. Just as today 800 million people go hungry while 1,000 million are overweight, so too in the future if millions perish of famine - it will be because of our choices.
The rest of your post is idle speculation which if based on anything other than doomerist fantasies, it's not shown.
Kiashu,
Thank you for your book recommendation -- I've already ordered a copy. I am curious to see how the author will address such issues as overshoot, resource depletion, birth control, etc. But perhaps this is the Holy Grail I've been seeking all these years. I'll keep you posted. :-)
Sorry, an awful lot of is is the by-product of requirements for the 6.7 billion of us. It is not another matter, it is very much tied up in the matter.
Since when has the human race acted fairly?
I didn't say they ever had. It's just that people say, "oh no! In the future we'll produce less food, so people will starve!"
Well, to that I say: "less food? Not necessarily - and anyway, starvation is not because the world doesn't produce enough food for everyone."
I do not say people will not starve in future; I do say they will not starve because of peak fossil fuels.
I've no doubt they'll continue to starve for the same reasons they starve today:- that we choose for them to starve.
And I've no doubt that no-one need starve today or tomorrow. It's our choice.
Again, to be clear: peak fossil fuels do not and will not cause anyone to starve, our choices cause and will cause people to starve.
This is the kind of pollyanna-ish thinking that got us into the mess we're in. We obviously can feed 6.7 billion people (now, at least). Can we feed 10 billion? 20 billion? 100 billion? A trillion?
You talk as if you understand farming, but what do you think caused the increase in yields that is commonly termed "the green revolution"? How are you going to feed people with reduced yields? And how are you going to get food from the farm to people without energy? How are you going to plow, weed, and harvest without energy? We have a very long history of doing those things without fossil fuels, and during that long history we could not support anything like 6.7 billion people. Why would be be able to support 6.7 billion if we have to go back to them again?
You also don't consider access to fresh water. Crops don't grow very well without water. Topsoil won't stay in place if the moisture content of the soil gets too low. And yet we are already facing acute water shortages across the Southern US from the Pacific to the Atlantic, as well as in Australia and other places, as we drain aquifers for irrigation and as global warming expands the sub-tropical arid zones poleward. And at the same time the mountain glaciers that feed the rivers of central and eastern Asia, as well as the NW of North America, are vanishing. Already the Yellow river in China sometimes doesn't have enough water in it to make it to the sea. Yes, we can desalinate sea water, but we will not be able to do it on a scale that replaces the flow of major rivers, at least not in the time scale we need it.
We are clearly stressing the world's ability to handle the 6.7 billion that are already here. Even if we don't increase the population by a single person, we are depleting our fresh water supplies, depleting the fossil fuels that allow for high-yield crop production and distribution, and fouling the atmosphere with the waste products of industrial society. One of the consequences of population overshoot is a reduction in the carrying capacity of the environment.
We are already in overshoot. If we don't do something radical, and quickly, the earth will not support 6.7 billion for much longer. And to do what is necessary on the scale required will require massive investments in new technology and infrastructure, which will require energy, lots of energy.
It is possible, barely, that we can do enough to make a smooth transition to a post-peak world that won't cause a forced reduction in the number of people on the planet. But to do that requires a sustained, massive, and coordinated effort. To say all we need to do is plant some more acres and do without fertilizers is delusional. It is also dangerous because is makes it less likely that we will actually do what is necessary. My personal opinion is that the future is going to be pretty ugly, not because it is impossible to make it better, but because people fail to grasp the seriousness of the situation.
That's a strange idea of being a "pollyanna", to say that when I say "people will starve, but they need not" I'm being a "pollyanna". I suppose that your definition of "pollyanna" must be "not a doomer".
Yes, we can feed 10 billion people. Probably we can not feed 20 billion. Certainly not 100 billion, or a trillion.
However, rather than engaging in wild speculation about impossible numbers, it seems better to look and see what the actual problem is that we face. Do we expect to have to feed 1,000 billion people? No. 100 billion? No. In fact, the UN tells us they expect that increasing prosperity (in this case "prosperity" means "getting more than $2 a day") and spreading literacy amongst women will stabilise world population around 9-10 billion by 2050.
So that's the problem we face, feeding 9-10 billion people for the next few centuries. Can we do that?
I believe we can. Plainly we can't do it as we feed half the world today, with huge fossil fuel inputs. But we can do it as we feed half the world already, without them.
All the problems you list, of aquifer depletion, topsoil loss and so on, these come about from human actions and thus from our decisions and choices. For example, Haitians eat mud cakes while those in the Dominican Republic - on the same island, with the same climate and soils - are fed well. The difference? The Haitians cut down their forests, so that if there were heavy rains the topsoil was swept away. When North Korea lost its fossil fuel inputs in the 1990s, the regime responded by telling people to cut down all the trees and plant more land, so when they got floods, they lost their topsoil, too.
While the Green Revolution increased yields for a while, those yields are now declining even in the face of increased applications of fertilisers. It ruined the soil, making it harder for the soil to hold moisture, so that they had to put more water on it, draining aquifers, and so on. They were overusing the land, dragging more out of it than they put in. Thus the Green Revolution gave us short-term gain with a long-term loss, a sort of subprime mortgage crisis of the soil.
Over-application of fertilisers, over-use of aquifers, deforestation, monocropping requiring over-use of pesticides and herbicides, all these things were our decisions, our choices. We can change our choices and decisions. We can do things differently.
It is indeed a delusion, a delusion that anyone said that. Neither I nor anyone else has said that. I find it always helps discussions if you respond to what people have actually said, rather than something you made up.
What I say is that in fact we need to plant less acres of crops, and more of forests, and that we certainly need fertilisers, but more natural fertilisers (since the artificial ones won't be cheap and widely available), and a smarter, more traditional approach to farming - mixed crops and so on. This will improve the soil, improve local rainfall and water retention in the soil, raise the fertility of the land, and so on.
And this will lead to different lifestyles and diets for people around the world. Less meat for Westerners (but 100+kg annually each is more than is good for us), more meat for Third Worlders (10kg each is perhaps a bit less than is good for them), more food grown locally, and so on. New York will no longer get fresh cherries from Chile at Christmas, but they can get potatoes from Virginia; I daresay that will not cause a famine in New York.
How many species have gone extinct in world history? Uncountable millions, so what's a few more. And yet millions still exist. Where did they come from? You think that life is some kind of chemical mixture that came into being by accident and can be extinguished. I say that life is not physical and cannot be extinguished.
The earth could be hit with an asteroid an hour from now and obliterated. YOU could get run over by a runaway bus. It amazes me that so many people believe that they can engineer human existence when they can barely control even themselves. They live a life trapped between their ears, and that is a very small space, indeed.
If life is not 'physical' what then is it?
The thesis that people are obese because of eating too much food may well be wrong. Rather, people are eating the wrong kind of food. Unfortunately, it may well be that eating 'higher on the food chain' (meat and dairy, low carb) is a much healthier way to eat, but likely impossible for the planet to sustain for ~7 bn people.
I think it is dubious to consider that we could distribute it easily to the hungry wherever they are to make it more equitable. Need cheap energy again for that! Or to move them to where food is in greater abundance.
Let's revisit basic economics: supply and demand. If demand rises, price rises, and supply will follow on up if it can. If demand falls, price falls, and supply will drop a bit if it can. The three are not linearly connected, since there exists a wide range of prices at which suppliers can make a profit; just because demand rises or falls by 10% does not mean supply will follow exactly. This is especially true since some of the largest food exporters have subsidised farming, so that they can sell their produce at a loss on international markets and not go broke.
If obese people ate less, the price of food would drop, and some poorer people could then afford the food. If obese people eat more, the price of food rises beyond the reach of the most poor.
Because we produce about twice as much food globally as we need for sustenance, there's a lot of slack in the system.
We don't necessarily need to distribute food our as rations in some kind of communist system. All that is needed for every kid at the party to get a piece of cake is to make sure the fat kid doesn't hog it all.
I was talking about people who happen to be starving far away from where the surpluses are. Soon enough your concern about local hunger may be a bigger issue than it is (though it certainly is not a non-issue already in the US - can't speak for elsewhere - it's just an issue almost everybody ignores. How does that realistically get changed?)
I honestly don't disagree with you that we could have arranged things better than we have and more equitably, and we could probably still do a lot to mitigate hunger. To call people doomers and be dismissive of them simply because they really don't think it is likely we will do that seems a bit harsh to me. How do we actually create this change in the powers and system that be to create this? And I'm not as optimistic as you that the alternative forms of farming will be nearly as productive as our looney cheap energy one, so I just don't think we're likely to get to that supposed plateau of 9.5 billion in any way that I can see happening.
If I am wrong, I will happily and gladly congratulate you for being right and figuring out the right thing and how to make it work. Honest. So don't quit, but try to focus on the whole picuture of eco-trastophe we've already amassed, beyond just our farming system, etc. etc., and how turning the agriculture system around could best be accomplished with the least spilling of blood. Or who would spill blood to actually change it if that's the only way.
That people are far from surpluses does not matter when we have international trade. Lest you reply that absent fossil fuels there will be no international trade, I say that in the first place fossil fuels will never be absent, only more rare and expensive, so that some trade can still happen using them, and secondly international trade existed long before the use of fossil fuels. Republican-era Rome fed itself from Egypt, after all.
It is not "doomer" to say "if we do nothing, then there'll be disaster"; but it is doomer to say, "nothing can be done, and even if it could, it never will be." To assume that mass death, destruction and misery are inevitable and nothing can or will be done is - well, the everyday name for it is "despair". One who makes a philosophy of and argues forcefully for despair is what we in the peak oil and climate change community call "a doomer".
Assertions that we can or cannot feed the world (whether 1 billion, 6.7 billion, 10 billion or whatever) without large fossil fuel inputs must be backed with facts. This article summarises serious studies which show that organic agriculture gives equal or larger yields compared to conventional farming, and yields which are sustained over years, build topsoil, require less water use, and so on.
Within the wide field of what people call "organic" there are a vast variety of practices, as in "conventional" farming. Some are good, some bad; some give a high yield at first which later declines, some a low yield which gradually grows, and so on. Some use resources well, and some with obscene profligacy and waste.
Looking at them all seriously, with a head clear of mindless cornucopianism or doomerism lets us decide what is good for us, and what are the prospects of humanity feeding itself without destroying its own future.
The studies I've presented give us some hope that with prudent choices we can continue to produce more food than needed to feed the world. I've no doubt that some parts of the world will have great difficulty in feeding themselves in the near future. If you have alternate studies which show that the world as a whole cannot feed itself, I will be interested to see them.
Whether that food will be equitably distributed, or rationed by trade sanctions, by subsidies, by biofuels or greed, those are in a way separate questions. They are of course connected - you cannot really be concerned about human rights without being an environmentalist, and vice versa. People are certainly starving today because of environmental damage; but starvation for more than a month or so is due to political choices.
For example, some 350 million tonnes of grain go to biofuels each year; this is 960,000 tonnes a day. A kilogram of grain grants 3,500kcal daily, so that the grains going to biofuels could feed one billion people - 200 million more than are going hungry. That we choose biofuels over human beings is a political choice. My tankful for the SUV is more important than some Sudanese.
We have the world we've chosen to have. But we can always change our mind, and I think that the pressures of peak fossil fuels and the desire to avoid catastrophic climate change will push people to change their minds. As Rebecca Solnit writes, revolutions are often subtle things. You think nothing is changing, then turn around a few years later and realise many things have changed without your realising it.
Kiashu, that 350 Million Tonnes (770 Billion pounds) is just So Wrong.
The world will produce maybe 10 Billion Gallons of ethanol from Grain this year. It takes, approx. 6 lbs of starch to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. 10 X 6 Billion = 60 Billion pounds, Not 770 Billion.
The Earth's population is barely rising linearly, let alone exponentially. This is DUE to economic growth and the education and comforts it affords, not inspite of it.
Too bad PRT wouldn't interfere with street traffic. That is exactly what we need, something that would seriously interfere with an eventually eliminate traditional street traffic.
Bill,
This is a doomer site; kindly take your optimistic capitalism elsewhere. You see, if civilization doesn't end, we will never make it out of our parent's basement and claim our rightful place atop the global hierarchy. Innovation? Bah!
Keith,
I have some money to invest in stocks, what are you currently pushing?
Why don't you just give your money to me so I can drink expensive wine. You'll get the same rate of return.
Might as well preach doom. You will all be dead soon enough anyway, so why not make everyone else miserable while you're still here.
Eat. Drink. Be merry, for tomorrow we die.
Actually, existentialism sucks. On the other hand, you could go shopping and make yourself happy with the latest cell phone or hi tech doodad. Or invent new recipes for stir-fried cockroaches with algae and bean sprouts. Weave a hair shirt or something equally retro.
Don't mind me, I'm just feeling frisky today. Tomorrow I'll probably be a doomster again.
Interesting concept. I like it quite a bit actually, but I need an example of how it would play out in a situation because I feel I am missing something.
Could you give an example of how the government (local, state, federal) would implement the 100mpg standard. So lets assume that JPods, SkyTran, SkyWeb, ULTra, MISTER and others all beat the standard and the government passes the 100mpg standard where only 100mpg or better solutions are allowed to be built.
How do you get from passing the standard to building JPods or ULTra? Walk me through a case where a city sets a WHAT of 100MPG or better and ends up with JPods. Or a comparable situation, not a historical case where phone companies are split up and deregulated but a future case where transportation makes a how to what change. I am unclear on the steps in between.
Thanks in advance,
Tim
OR, How do we change BAU to BAunU?
I don't see where an example is necessary. The concept is simple. Think of it this way, unless I have misunderstood: Gov't (I assume with public opinion in mind as well as just doing what is right) states a vision and gets out of the way to allow the market to provide an answer.
The flaws are thus: this is Pollyanna. It requires the government to STOP regulating. It requires Congresspersons to STOP porking the budget. It requires the Congress and Executive to act in the best interests of the NATION.
Any model that leaves the current banking/finance system intact will fail. It will result in never-ending growth.
Any model that leaves profit as the primary reason for economic activity will fail. Believing Big Business will do anything other than pursue profit is ridiculous.
It's a nice idea if we all were Thomas of Assisi. It's not a bad plan if one wants BAU to contiue or thinks we have no choice. Momentum and all that. Lesser of two evils as it were.
Cheers
I'm strongly inclined to agree with your pollyana critiques.
BUT! - the UK government is already doing this ends-instead-of-means in respect of the building regulations. They specify a standard of energy efficiency (only achievable with renewables by the way) and let the housebuilder decide the means. Ditto the electrical regulations.
Now if we could do the same with traffic reduction (continued overleaf).
But you're describing a policy that works at the consumer level. That's not really what the post was about. It's about new designs, new systems, so is at the industrial/wholesale level.
Do you see evidence of this as a policy, rather than just BAU dressed up in Green?
Cheers
Hi Tim
Here is my best guess how this will unfold:
The re-tooling of communications infrastructure since 1984 has been spectacular. From my point of view, it happened in the blink of an infrastructure eye.
Similarly, the re-tooling of power generation infrastructure happending in Germany is at a stunning pace relative to scale and complexity of the problem.
Current infrastructure in power generation and transportation are so inefficient that we do not even need brilliance to create profits that will rally action. In repetitive, congested, urban transport why are we moving a ton to move a person? Worse, why are we burning food in cars at less than 4% efficiency.
The system being built at Heathrow is a niche solutions that solves a problem at a profit. The system built at Morgantown has delivered 110 million injury-free, oil-free passenger miles. It is not a smooth process but things built in fits and starts.
Small steps that add to value and reduce costs can cascade into vast acceptance. The fact that we can create many jobs re-tooling to zero-emission transport at a 65% savings over oil-based transport will force governments to allow innovation.
This seems to the the process by which we iterate. Or my best guess at it.
Bill
Not Enough Time for Gadgetbahn !
Before "someone" will be interested in building a solution to a problem they will need to have good confidence in the following cost and experience issues.
1) How much will it cost to build ? Not promoter BS claims, but a dozen real world comparables.
2) Can I get it insured at a reasonable price ? Related to: What is it's safety record ?
3) How much does it cost to operate ? Again not BS claims, but a dozen systems operating fro a couple of decades (after the "new" has worn off).
4) Can it operate in adverse conditions ?
5) How many passengers will it attract ?
6) How long will the various components last ? Will replacements be available "off the shelf" from a variety of vendors, or just one monopoly source, or will the transit operator have to reverse engineer and have replacement parts custom built (with great delay and cost) ? (Miami has just this problem with their gadgettbahn PRT -like MetroMover).
7) Is it legal to build ?
It will take 30 years to reach this level of confidence and make some new gadgetbahn a "practical" choice. We do not have 30 years.
Instead of wasting any time or even TOD space on Gadgetbahn PRT we should build these.
http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_lrt_2007-04a.htm
PRT attempts to address a very small niche transportation "problem" and even if successful, will have no material impact on the Post-Peak Oil problem. One cannot legally even build PRT in the USA until you can figure out how a single wheelchair passenger can evacuate themselves if stranded in mid-air.
Best Hopes for Better Editorial Control on TOD,
Alan
BTW: Morgantown "PRT" has been an unmitigated economic disaster. About a decade to get it to work properly. Still sky high operating costs ! Lack of accidents is hardly the only criteria.
Hint: a second one was never built and the University of West Virgina has not expanded it.
Hi Alan
It is alway uninteresting to debate with you. You declare "Gadgetbahn" as if it is a property of physics. Please explain to me why the computer you write on is not a gadget, the cell phone you talk on is not a gadget, the laser that operates your hard drive is not a gadget, the car you drive is not a gadget. And then tell me, a tool maker, why I should not be delighted with creating gadgets?
My understanding is the "bahn" has been added according to Wikipedia as
The exact point of my article is that the current transportation experts are "empty suites". Here is a graph of EIA's forecast verse reality for oil prices:
They were catastrophically wrong. Experts in static pre-Peak Oil have no clue of what post-Peak Oil means. The same is true of "transit professionals". They are empty suites clinging to HOW they do things instead of opening the door to WHAT is needed.
"You cannot win by reinforcing failure" is a military saying. Our current infrastructure is failing; the cause of Peak Oil and Global Warming. Minor modifications to failure is still failure.
The points in your argument are that we cannot invent because it would be hard work and cannot breach the barriers of the bureaucracty. That is the very point of the article. Government fails as a manager. Governments must start leading, define what is needed and allow innovators to fill the need to create economic lifboats for their local economic community.
The paradox about lifeboats is that if everyone builds one, they will not be needed. But if there is not enough lifeboats before a Platonic Fold, then those in lifeboats will build our next civilization. We cannot save everyone. We can show everyone how to save themself and their local economic community.
You are correct that in many locations governments will deny innovation. There is nothing I can do about that. Surviving the civilization killers of Peak Oil and Globlal Warming is a choice. My only skill is in building solar powered transportation networks. Those who do not want or need them can made those decisions for themselves.
If you want to debate about physics or even computer programming that is OK. This is my last response to your emotion declaration as if it is proof of "Gadgetbahn". To me it equates to the whining of an empty suite that their incompetence's is being questioned?
JPods, and the accompanying BS propaganda, is the result of incompetent non-engineering.
The technical faults are many and I will miss most of them.
1) By law you must provide ADA access, and this includes evacuation. I see no way for a wheelchair bound patron to escape a JPod when the small electrical motor catches fire (or comparable emergency). Simply stalling due to, say, a twig caught in the channel, on a hot and humid day, could result in an elderly person dying before a cherrypicker could get to them.
2) You show a profound lack of knowledge about basic engineering when you equate mass moved to energy consumed. It just ain't so !
With modern Light Rail, about 90% of the kinetic energy is recycled when stopping by regenerative braking. You can claim that JPods will do the same, but I think that they are too small to cost-effectively implement regenerative braking.
The major energy losses are in friction. JPod aerodynamic friction will be (I cannot say "is" because no working prototypes) dramatically higher per pax-mile than, say, Light Rail, due to the surface/volume ratio advantage of Light Rail and the "training effect" of a series of cars. (Incidentally, heating and cooling (do jPods have a/c ?) losses for JPods will be MUCH higher than, say, Light Rail due to the Surface/Volume ratio).
You have never shown details of the JPod drive system (do you have them ?) but suspended monorails generically suffer from quite inefficient drive systems. Small motors (small > inefficient & short life/MTBF when it comes to electric motors) have to use high friction wheels (not enough surface area for low friction steel on steel in many cases) to transfer enough power and torque.
Until shown engineering details otherwise, I will assume that jPod has substantially higher friction losses than, say, Light Rail.
BTW, what is the maximum slope that jPods can climb ?
3) You compare costs to elevators (a profoundly simple, mature century and a half old technology) and then compare JPods to "packet switching" and claim densities of 1 jPod every 3 seconds.
Yes. 12 elevators "packet switch" among 4 shafts and one arrives every 3 seconds.
4) Switching is a MAJOR technical obstacle ! Do you have switches in the line or in the jPods ? How long do they last ? What lubricating requirements do they have ? How do they operate with ice & snow ? With leaves and twigs ? With bird droppings ? With heavy rain ? (remember electrical contacts) With XX years of wear (remember 1 jPod every 3 seconds) ?
What is the failure mode for switches ? Again, remember one JPod every 3 seconds, switch fails on JPod 1, JPod 2 is 3 seconds behind !
5) How will jPods operate after dark (since they are 100% solar powered) ? Or even after a few inches of snow ?
6) Please give the name of an insurance company that has shown a willingness to insure a JPod system.
Your entire campaign is just throwing dust in the air and obstructing REAL solutions. Gadgetbahn is a quite apt description of your efforts.
Your ENTIRE effort is a waste of time.
Alan
Hi Alan
The point of the article is not to state that JPods, or even PRT is "THE ANSWER". The intent is to say there is no one answer. We need a process that is open to tinkering, to find 4,000 ways not to make a light bulb.
Your ending comment is emotional.
Maybe my efforts are a waste of time. That is a high probability as noted in the article.
I have spent a decade at them with precious little break through of the barriers to commercialization. But I am willing to make those efforts with my money. As a civilization we need people willing to work decades for little or no rewards to create breakthroughs. The vast majority of these people fail without recognition. Some find critical pieces that are used by those who do breakthrough, and yet die without recognition.
As I tried to note in the article, it is not a very rewarding job to invent. Complete moral commitment with years to decades of effort with very little probability of success. So when you claim I will fail, looking at the probabilities I have to admit you are probably correct.
What keeps driving me is the 100% certainty that our current infrastructure created civilization killers of Peak Oil and Global Warming. Our civilization will enter a precipitous decline within 15 years if we do not radically reshape our use of energy. The place I might contribute to this is to increase efficiency of urban transportation from less than 4% to better than 70%.
If I make a difference or not do not is not the point. Changing government's roll from management to leadership is critical, from the failed HOW to WHAT. We are facing civilization killers. We need to try everything that might help and build economic lifeboats for the high probability we will not make enough changes fast enough.
This is a factual and actual statement.
Your efforts, whether motivated by noble or ignoble reasons (I suspect the later) EVEN IF SUCCESSFUL ( >>1% probability) will be too late to make a difference. They are designed to slow down REAL SOLUTIONS that can be built in a half dozen to a dozen years in quantity.#
I note with interest your failure to address the detailed engineering issues I raised about your "hand waving" design.#
Alan
# The French have announced plans to build 1,500 km of new tram lines in the next decade. If one adjusts for population and work week (we do not take August off for example), that would be more than 5,000 miles of Light Rail in the USA by 2019, in every city and town of 100,000 or larger.
Given where the USA is today, we should be working at twice the speed of the French. A good start
http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_lrt_2007-04a.htm
This is a factual and accurate statement.
Your efforts, whether motivated by noble or ignoble reasons (I suspect the later) EVEN IF SUCCESSFUL ( >>1% probability) will be too late to make a difference. They are designed to slow down REAL SOLUTIONS that can be built in a half dozen to a dozen years in quantity.#
I note with interest your failure to address the detailed engineering issues I raised about your "hand waving" design
Alan
# The French have announced plans to build 1,500 km of new tram lines in the next decade. If one adjusts for population and work week (we do not take August off for example), that would be more than 5,000 miles of Light Rail in the USA by 2019, in every city and town of 100,000 or larger.
Given where the USA is today, we should be working at twice the speed of the French. A good start
http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_lrt_2007-04a.htm
Your thoughts that I am significant is far too complementary.
I wish everyone making an effort to deal with Peak Oil success. We need as many efforts as possible; we face imminent consequences from civilization killers.
An odd point is that several projects ramping towards implementation in the PRT niche is to provide feeder networks and cross connects between existing passenger rail networks. The "OR" choice, choose this or that, seems a false choice.
The "OR" choice, choose this or that, seems a false choice
NOT SO !!
If it had not been for Gadgetbahn salespeople like yourself, promising "new & better", Austin Texas (among others) would have a quite functional almost 20 mile long Light Rail line operating down the center of the city today.
The day after the referendum was defeated in 2000 by little more than 1,000 votes, the gadgetbahn sales people packed their bags and left, never to be heard of again.
VERY few cities in the USA have multiple Urban Rail lines to "connect", so what role does PRT have then except to kill viable starting systems ?
Streetcars make the best lower density connectors between Urban Rail lines, if Light Rail is "too much".
Alan
Dear Bill, your article is good but the faults in the jpod are sound. Please dump this idea and move on to something else that has at least some credibility.
Thanks for the comment on the article. If policies change from HOW to WHAT, what I do will not matter. I can fail or get lucky depending on technical and commercial skills. But there will the thousands of other taking their best shot. Maybe Allen will be right, maybe I will, may something else will shift our need for oil.
The important thing is that we will sort out ideas.
Let me boil your post down to a nice pithy soundbite: It's time to tell the government to &%$% off and get back to doing it's job.
It's job is NOT to police the world. It is NOT to enrich the wealthy. It is NOT to tax the citizens to death (16th amendment needs to be repealed). It is not to scour the world for synthetic terrorism/-ists. It is not to create so many barriers to basic human economic activity that one can't piss without getting permission.
Congress can regulate TRADE, not production. The Executive MAY NOT wage war of it's own accord. Congress MAY NOT abrogate its authorities and pass them to the Executive(see previous). The Legislative SHALL impeach the Executive for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Etc.
Cheers
So when you say "the government", you actually mean "the US federal government"?
A broader vision would be useful. Peak fossil fuels and climate change are after all global problems.
I said government and made references as an American. You may rest assured I believe all nations should be, and are best, ruled by the people at the end of the day. I don't, however, know all the faults of the 200+ nations on the planet.
You're getting a bit argumentative these days.
Cheers
What universe do you live in? The primary job of governments from time immemorial has been to enrich the wealthy. I agree that this situation needs to be changed, but such change is matter of social revolution rather than a matter of getting government to back off from frivolities.
I didn't say, "get back to doing what they do" I said "their job." I cited specific elements of that job as found in the Constitution. You may peruse the Constitution of the US for further specifics regarding my home country.
Cheers
It's my country too, and I have read the constitution. Yes, it's a big improvement over the French Monarchy, but it is still government of, by, and for the rich. If you think that lower taxes, and less government regulation will bring about economic justice in a resource poor world, then you are living in a dream. If our productivity stagnates or declines the only way to preserve the holy right of money to make money will be by destroying the middle class, and our government (whether it is run by Republicans or Democrats) will happily undertake this task since protecting that holy right is their primary job in life. Civil liberties are a wonderful thing, but if people do not have enough money to purchase food they are going to demand a lot more from society that the right to assemble and complain about their huger pangs.
The PerfectStormThatCometh seems to be making people cranky.
1. The US Constitution is not government for and by the rich. Our implementation makes it seem that way.
2.
Did I say that?
3.
By what mechanism do you extract a support of the above from what I posted? And, our government can do this because WE allow it. At the end of the day, the typical American must realize they are the problem and choose to change that. Or not.
4.
One can only hope.
Cheers
Yes, I am getting cranky, mainly because the discussion I am really interested in never takes place. You wrote about the job of the government:
Maybe I am misinterpreting what you wrote, but this reads like a standard libertarian screed about getting government off the backs of the people and letting venture capital cure all of our ills. Our government may not formally be a government for the rich, but any time large differential accumulations of private wealth exist, then government is run primarily for the benefit of those accumulations. This statement is not intended as moral judgment but as a statement of objective fact of the same order as the statement that water has a tendency to run downhill. In times of vigorous economic growth, of course, even those at the bottom of the wealth pyramid fare relatively well, but if wealth stagnates or declines, then the situation changes dramatically. Adam Smith emphasized this point over and over again in Wealth of Nations. When the economy stagnates the wages of blue collar worker descend to subsistence level, and when the economy declines people go hungry. The economy might be ten times more productive per capita than it was a century ago, but if it declines ten percent in a short period of time great suffering is generated. This suffering has nothing to do with physical necessity and everything to do with the existence of concentrated private ownership of capital and natural resources. Smith was not particularly critical of this tendency of private finance capitalism, although he was far less laudatory than modern neo-classical economists. His attitude was that these large concentrations of private wealth are inevitable, so get used to it and pray that you live during a period of vigorous economic growth.
If any hope exists of living reasonably well during a long period of economic decline a fundamentally new paradigm for economic investment and production will have to be developed. Voluntary simplicity and mutual support is the only path to some kind of reasonably democratic, prosperous society in a period of economic decline. If we have to innovate and create new infrastructure just keep wealth from decaying away then the venture capital model will not work. We will need some form of community investment the purpose of which is to maintain the productivity of community rather than to make rich people richer. Such changes are a matter of fundamental political changes. Economic power and political are not really different things. Earning a living needs to be about earning a living and not about accumulating wealth without limit.
Yes, a misinterpretation. Perhaps I was overly pithy. It's more get the government off our backs by establishing once and for all that we ARE the government. That is, we need to evict those working against the public good. We need to convene a Constitutional Convention, if necessary, and remove some of the horrid crap added to it. We need to roll back a huge portion of the law and regulations that exist that restrict our freedoms while giving advantage to business/wealthy people. Simply, if we trimmed our legal code to something akin to the ten commandments (without the religious BS) and/or Genghis Khan's rumored ten laws and left all distinctions to be drawn by juries, we'd be well ahead of the game. Bu the key is to reduce the role of goverment by reasserting our role as citizens, not by leaving it up to corporations. Corporations should be abolished, or, at minimum, deprived of the status of a "person."
All this is possible just by community and family becoming THE focus of our efforts rather than money and status. However, that is unlikely to be enough because people are greedy You'll eventually end up with the growth and conquer cycle reassertin itself. So... all this depends on a different point of view. A different belief system. A different values system.
I has to be community, family, harmony with nature, group decision-making... and a very different idea of what happiness is.
Yes. Because we allow it.
Which is why a paradigm shift is the only true answer. WE must, eventually, evolve ou thinking or be condemned to repeat the cycles of boom and bust, etc.
If any hope exists of living reasonably well during a long period of economic decline a fundamentally new paradigm for economic investment and production will have to be developed.
Yup.
Cheers
"Facing the facts and acting to resolve them can defeat peak Oil and Global Warming, both civilization killers."
The real problem behind both of these factors is overpopulation. If you dont adress this issue as well then theres no point in tackling PO and climate change.
If the problem was merely overpopulation you'd have to explain how a billion Chinese can live with the same or lower resource impact of the 300 million citizens of the USA.
The real issue is our unsustainable fossil-fueled techno-consumerist society (which we mistakenly call "civilisation").
Planetary population growth will, however, undermine any efficiency gains, which is, I believe, the real point.
Al Bartlett is always worth revisiting:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3402
The answer is easy: a lower standard of living. If you continuously lower the standard of living of the world, the first world in particular, you could pack in more people. The fly in that particular ointment is that the Chinese want a higher standard of living than they enjoy now. That fact is a significant input to the current food & energy crisis. It also begs the question as to whether or not China will be able to support 1 billion people in 10 or 20 years after the glaciers that feed Asias river systems have vanished and other effects of global warming have progressed.
I would, also, like to see some figures showing that air, and water are cleaner in China than in the U.S.
Yes, save the cars and trucks and SUVs whatever you do.
That's the ticket.
The perennial "ain't we got smarts" post. Gee whillickers, everybody, all we gots to do is just use some of that American know-how and gumption and soon all 30 billion of us will be driving cars that get 20,000 miles to the gallon!!!
Why is it utterly impossible for anyone here to think beyond the end of their ratchet set? Cars are the problem. THEY ARE THE GOD DAMNED PROBLEM!!!!!!!!
Ask yourself, "What is the end game?"
Here are the apparent answers according to the techno-worshippers:
1. We invent the super-duper hyper-diaper car that goes a lifetime on a gallon of gas and catches its own carbon poop. Population continues to grow because we are just that damned smart and of course we'll find out some way to make food from algae farmed in stacked goculators all monitored and optimized by just in time telecommuting whiz-kids who sit at home in their penthouse apartments in the 142nd largest city at 27 million.
2. We invent the best ever gee whiz way to GMO the whatever, switchgrass, plantain, casaba melon, or whatever to produce pure gasoline, and we then have enough gas to power enough cars for 30 billion people. We'll make the cars from spider silk and stack the highways on top of each other to give us enough ground to plant all the casaba melons.
3. And don't worry about the population cause as we all know the Chinese live on a land mass the size of the US and they have almost two billion people so that means that we can increase the population to 70 billion no problem. ALl the fish dead in the ocean? That's okay, we'll eat hamsters. Oxygen levels dropping due to dead seas, no problem. We'll just make oxygen from the byproducts of our corn-plastic manufacturing.
The endgame does NOT involve our current paradigm--at least an endgame which includes humans. After the metals are mined out, the seas are dead, the fresh water poisoned, used up, or controlled by corporations, after the soils are totally depleted, the land turned to sterile dust, and the people listening to the clink of a spoon in an empty bowl, we will be faced with the endgame of the techno-worshippers. All burned up. Everything gone. Just us little smarties all dressed up for a Star Trek convention and no food, potable water, or clean air to sustain life. Just a bunch of techno-worshippers with no corn-based fructose syrup products to scarf while we fantasize about the latest and greatest tech.
We need to stop thinking about how to save the cars. We need to start thinking about how we back down off the ledge. We need to relocalize. We need to reestablish wetlands, stop pouring chemicals on the land to create "food product," and we need to figure out how to safeguard our rivers and lands from the immense collections of poisons that await one techno mistake before they spill out into the environment. Disasters in waiting like tailings and leachate wastes at the head of the Arkansas River in Colorado where constant pumping is the only thing preventing the release of billions of gallons of the most contaminated water on earth.
We need to admit we are WRONG. That we have a problem. That we must recognize a higher power and that that power is called mother nature. And we must quit lying to ourselves that we can tech our way out of this mess like a bunch of gambling addicts constantly begging for a little more money because this time we finally figured out a system-give us one more chance!!!
NO.
No more chances. No more techno-stabs in the dark. We were wrong. We need to use the tech to disassemble itself. We need to run the film backwards. The effluents need to leap back into the pipe. Salad shooters must go back into their boxes and move onto ships where they are taken back to China, unloaded, and shipped to factories where they are disassembled. Each part goes back to its respective factory and they are disassembled. The raw materials are shipped back to the mine or forest or whatever from whence it came and the ores are restored to the land. And, all along the way, poisoned and dead animals leap back to life.
Ah, the metaphor. Such fun. Of course, the literal-minded techno-worshippers will make a fuss, but that is okay.
Why?
Because, in the end, NATURE BATS LAST.
How are stars born anyway?
Cherenkov does not cry over spilled milk because the glass was already half empty.
I like your last real paragraph but lets modify it so we just capture all the wastestreams and utilize them.
later dick
LOL, the perennial "Cherenkov rant".
Yep, we need to evolve back into fish, life was so much better then.
Maybe so, but he is right. We are trying to get out of this mess using the same technology that got us into it. We need to begin with car free cities. But we are trying desperately to perpetuate a system that is responsible for poisoning us all.
WHOA! Now that's a rhetorical blast! I've done one or two myself, but of course on the other side of the fence!
Still, ya' gotta' respect the raw rhetorical horsepower (at least I do), if your going to raise hell at least make it stand out! :-)
But I can't leave without having some fun...so Cherenkov, if "mother nature" created animals, and among the animals were humans, and humans over a long time span used the grey matter between their ears (created of course by nature, we had nothing to do with the wiring of the cerebral cortex) and in using that brain given to us by nature we developed technology, how is technology not a part of nature? So that if technology bats last, in reality that is nature batting last?
One can see how quickly rhetoric becomes sophistry, such as in
"Why is it utterly impossible for anyone here to think beyond the end of their ratchet set? Cars are the problem. THEY ARE THE GOD DAMNED PROBLEM!!!!!!!!"
Of all the oil consumed in the world per year, roughly 10% is used to make gasoline for American driven cars and SUV's. So scream all you want, even if you remove EVERY American car and SUV from the highway, you get a reduction of at most 10% of the oil consumed, or not even enough to stay up with depletion if you believe the ELP models, the Hubbert Linearizations and the ASPO models seen here on TOD often enough. I am going to go out on a limb and assume that the manufacturing of salad shooters accounts for even less oil consumed than does gasoline for cars! :-)
Now you would rightly ask, "why did you limit it to cars driven in America? What about the world's cars?"
Again I am going to go out on a limb and assume that even peakers and doomers do not believe the U.S. can easily tell other nations NOT to use automobiles...given the somewhat, how shall we say it politely, "doubtfulness" we see of American invasions to this point.
So we are left with working on American owned cars, or per your suggestion, doing away with them. Not that it will matter a piss in the sea to the peak oil issue, but we can make a difference for the future of our nation and maybe reduce carbon emissions a bit, but again, only a sliver, as the world increase in the car population is reducing the impact of American operated vehicles as a percentage of the total, i.e., the U.S. is becoming more marginal to the peak oil issue with each passing day.
Americans think they are BIIIIG! We think our power is BIIIG, so our guilt is likewise BIIIIG! What if we are actually much smaller than we think we are, as small as the statistics seem to indicate? The only thing that keeps me from buying that new 451 horsepower C-class Mercedes is NOT guilt, but economics, because I know that if every American bought one tomorrow it would have an impact on America's future, but NO noticable impact on peak oil or climate change. I am not overly awed by the myth of my own or my fellow Americans importance in the world.
It's been fun... :-)
RC
Cherenkov...excellant rant! I appreciate your pointed sarcasm;)
BTW your rant amused me, so thank you!
Why is it utterly impossible for anyone here to think beyond the end of their ratchet set? Cars are the problem. THEY ARE THE GOD DAMNED PROBLEM!!!!!!!!
Ask yourself, "What is the end game?"
Here are the apparent answers according to the techno-worshippers:
1. We invent the super-duper hyper-diaper car that goes a lifetime on a gallon of gas and catches its own carbon poop. Population continues to grow because we are just that damned smart and of course we'll find out some way to make food from algae farmed in stacked goculators all monitored and optimized by just in time telecommuting whiz-kids who sit at home in their penthouse apartments in the 142nd largest city at 27 million.
I take i you are critisizing moi because I mentioned three methods to improve auto fuel efficiency.
My reply will be brief as I do not want to address your entire rant.
Turbine engine + generator has been invented allready as a whole house power source...
The flywheel kinetic energy storage device could be scaled up DRASTICALLY as a power storage device for intermittant electrical energy sources; store power from solar & wind as kinetic energy and use as needed.
Chill and laugh at human folly.
And the bottom of the 9th is going to be a bitch.....
It's a pithy saying, but may be lost on those not familiar with baseball.
Cherenkov: Great rant. However, your post assumes a possible fantasy world where humans are not in direct competition with each other. Mother Nature (the Angry Grizzly Bear) is coming after us, and rather than work on a sustainable solution together we have decided to focus on our sprinting skills, so that our fellow humans will be devoured one by one before us. The American Dream is to win the race.
Hi Cherenkov
In the beginning, at every step and in the end nature trumps everything. We build our economies on nature's foundation.
Economies allow natural resources to support population overshoot. We should always recognize that we are in overshoot based on nature's treasures. Sustaining that overshoot requires maintaining the social and technical levers within nature's tolerance of our use.
My hope with this article is to note that government policies have not accounted for the cost to nature or the sustainability of the social or technical levers. Unaddressed, my guess is we will have rather spectacular famine. Oil mono-culture infrastructure looks identical to the potato mono-culture that resulted in famine. About 97% of food requires oil. Here is a very good summary of the worse famines of the 20th Century. Note that all were significantly caused by government policies collapsing the social and transport infrastructure into to fragile an ecology relative to population.
We are responsible for stewardship of nature, our social and technical structures. Or we can submit to civilization killers. In 1st Century Rome the population was 1.2 million, in the 3rd it was 12,000. The Inca Empire dropped from 20 million to 2 million in 40 years when their culture collapsed.
My belief is we can defeat Peak Oil and Global Warming by caring for nature. The mechanics for this include population control, efficiency, self-reliance and associated moral commitments to the long term.
Expecting those from governments is not likely. Wallowing in self-pity will not likely do it. Self-reliance and community action might.
We need to move to car free cities, if not car free countrysides. Enough with the techno solutions, already. Cut out the cancer. Leave a little and it will just grow. But I guess we simply just choose to poison ourselves.
I still don't get this, it seems to be one of those gee-whiz techno solutions to a problem which already has perfectly good solutions. It seems to combine the worst features of road vehicles with the infrastructure cost of rail.
The principal advantage here seems to be smaller lighter vehicles and solar power. This can already be achieved with conventional EVs. So why waste money on infrastructure, which would be better spent on rail?
Hi Bob
The intent of the article is identify the need for government to shift its roll from Management to Leadership. It was not intended to be about a specific technology.
But to answer your guestion about EV's. EV's still move a ton to move a person at about 20-50 miles per gallon energy equivalent. We know 423 mpg is practical. If the government shifted to leadership, setting standards there are many possible solutions that might develop to reach and maybe exceed the 423 mpg.
Efficient transportation will allow sustainable food distribution long enough to allow us to address population. Or, if we do not make the corner, those economic communities with self-sustainable transportation might form the foundation of the next civilization. I am hoping for the first.
Bill, the most efficient form of transport is
BEING THERE ALREADY.
In the uk many people are working on this via the Transition Towns movement.
Instead of a department for transportation there should be a department for being there already.
I the idea of designing cities to already be there. It makes a lot of sense. The problem is that we have to survive Peak Oil long enough to build cities and towns better.
It also seems that mobility is an aspect of liberty. The world has never been a liberated as in the age of oil. I believe we can retain mobility within a solar budget. We need to end waste.
[On the full disclosure, some of the academic projects I work on are supported by UK government grants.]
The points on this sublist miss a couple of points. Firstly, Einstein wasn't an experimentalist (well, I believe he worked on fridge design at one point) so working in or out of academia was relatively easy. Bill Gates dropped out after using the Harvard mainframe to do most of the development on Microsoft's first product, Steve Wozniak (the technical guy at Apple's genesis) dropped out of Berkeley after doing the initial development on his circuit boards (I can't find reference to whether he used university facilities), yahoo, google, the GNU project started out at universities either as research projects (a research proposal doesn't have to run to completion to have been worth starting, although funding agencies tend to give you black marks for them) or using the facilities before dropping out, many inventors (eg, Trevor Baylis of the clockwork radio, etc) have collaborated with universities with appropriate facilities and machinery to go from concept to concrete reality.
So there's a reasonable case that, with the exception of computing power which is now much cheaper than thirty years ago and can be bought by inventors themselves, universities are reasonable places to accumulate technical equipment providing ways/incentives for it to be rented or used by ingenious people. So the real question is what other contributions do we want from universities and how do we encourage them? One of the worries is that pressures to produce commercialisable stuff means that much government funding is being done on much the same grounds as commercial funding, whereas it'd be better to get variety in funding appraisal criteria.
I believe Universities and education are very important. They are critical in the churn of innovation into commercial scale.
They are just not the source of ingenuity.
Not only are universities not the source of ingenuity, they are the very arch-enemy of it. I speak on the basis of far more experience than I would like of the institutionalised researchers obstructing and suppressing not only my great works and others I know (e.g. cure for autism) but also of the greatest others. Extensive historical proof summarised at http://www.zazz.fsnet.co.uk/gen.htm
Why does it always boil down to doomers VS cornicopians ?
The doomers are always beaten with the cornicopians
stick that "it isnt as bad as mass die off yet"
While cornicopians are always poked with the stick about "Its getting worse and you cant deny it"
Thats the problem with both the future and history...
History as its happening is like riding in a fast car
looking backwards out the rear window.
The things closest like the gaurd rail and trees are
all a blur and only come into focus the further back they get.
The future is like riding in a fast car and looking
out thru the front windshield over the hood.
You cant see whats under your wheels or around the
next bend.
Acting like children and shouting "ARE WE THERE YET"
or protesting before the trip even begins "I DONT WANT
TO GO" has as everyone can attest...not been benificial or successful.
I agree that oil has been a blessing and a curse.
I admitt that collectively humans are like no other
entity on earth and have the capacity to destroy
their own habitat.
I was just wondering "Who's driving this hand basket"?
"Does anyone else smell smoke"?
"Is anyone else feeling its getting a tad bit warmer"?
The mere fact a person is on this site is because
they know or believe peak oil is real.
Most of the arguments are nothing more then ego
preening. And every argument has been raised to a level of a rhetorical olympic gymnastic event.
Lets be honest
If we put people into two groups, Doomers and Cornucopians, it unfortunately creates a Republican vs Democrat model. Since I have yet to see any Republican or Democrat politician correctly describe the energy challenges ahead of us, will debates between Doomers and Cornucopians be equally frustrating?
What is desperately needed throughout the world are more Independent politicians and Independent voters. Gridlock at the government level is dangerous to our energy future. The same applies to all of us at the oildrum.com who are concerned about our energy future. Energy discussions must be based on the fact there is currently no replacement source of energy with the energy density of oil that can provide the scale of energy that oil does with a cost per BTU that is reasonably close. Energy density, energy scale, and cost per BTU are what the oildrum.com is about (in my opinion). Understanding this does not classify one as a Doomer or Cornucopian, it simply acts as baseline for discussions.
Speaking of cost of BTU. It cost 49% of Disposable Income in 1933 to buy 1,000 gallons of gasoline.
That's a very good question. I believe there is an evolutionary advantage to choosing sides. If the group tries to gather all the relevant information and then make the best decision, then it's likely no action will ever be taken. If instead the group splits into two then each takes action, you have the possibility that one group will be correct and survive.
For example, if your group is approached by a wild bear, do you climb a tree, run, or stand your ground? That correct answer depends on the type of bear, and perhaps the availability of suitable trees etc. The wrong answer, or even the correct answer arrived at too late, may lead to the group being wiped out. If the group splits into 3 and takes quick action then at least one sub-group should survive.
While a heated discussion may look to the bystander like primitive feces throwing, it has been in the past useful to divide into opposing groups. The problem nowadays, is that we are pretty much in a globally interconnected civilisation, and it would be hard for any subgroup to take unilateral action. The result is probably that we will arguing until whatever happens, happens.
Perhaps the modern subgroups are the uncontacted tribes http://www.survival-international.org/news/3340. If we disappear, at least they might have chance of surviving and returning the human race to the pre-technological state so desired by Cherenkov.
One of our primary problems is that we define transportation as a goal, not a means. Given our current structure, no advance in making it more efficient will be adequate. Instead of focusing on better ways of satisfying the status quo (happy motoring), we need to focus on ways of making medium and long distance mobility necessary. Our need for fast mobility is the killer. We are looking for better and better ways to perpetuate a paradigm that insists on personal automotive mobility everywhere all the time.
Yes, our mistake was not considering the auto as part of a system. We encouraged its development in a way that made it the system, the overriding technology for mobility. We consider reduced travel a tragedy, a problem to be overcome. And yet, one our great thinkers, rarely traveled more than a few miles from home. Even without the "benefit" of extensive travel, his mind comprehended the universe.
A lot of emphasis is placed on the EV. Unfortuantely, it is seen as plug and play. Just plug the EV into the existing, inefficient, and wasteful system and all will be well. No. Future towns and cities need to be self contained and structured in such a way that the vast majority of all trips are done by walking, bicycling, skate boarding, and scootering.
Personal automotive mobility is available with the current technology and is not threatened-the long daily commute is the main thing in peril (automotive) right now. A Prius driven 4000 miles per annum consumes maybe 70 gallons a year-quite affordable even at $15 a gallon. If you live in an urban area within 5 miles of your workplace you are fine.
EV's will be very valuable but our current approach seems a repeat of the problme noted by Patrick Driscoll:
In the niche of repetitive urban transport, taking a system approach we can drive parasitic mass (moving a ton to move a person) radically lower. Off-network EV use make great sense. The larger we build our 200-400 mpg equivalent networks the shorter the off-network trips.
In our drive for survivable cities I do think it is important to recognize that mobility is an aspect of liberty. It is like free speech and education. Access to mobility achieved under cheap oil has been a blessing. We should retain the blessing without keeping the waste.
Sorry, but I see all of this as ass-backwards. What is needed first are new societal, economic and governance paradigms before taking any physical action. I rather doubt that even what I call Business-As-Usual Lite has any chance of longer term survival.
I realize that it is difficult for people to envision a different society. However, as one of the old farts on TOD, I have had personal contact with people from vastly different eras. For example, my grandmother grew up in a log cabin and the local Indians used to come in at night during the winter to sleep by the fire. She had kerosene lights, later gas lights and, finally, electric lights. When I was a kid the only appliances we had we a stove, small refrigerator, toaster and a radio. We heated and made hot water with coal. The water heater was thermosyphon and beehive shaped unit.
My guess is that starting to change the infrastructure now will result in time and funds wasted just like suburbia.
Todd
Help me out here! Just WHO is going to start these changes? Am I correct in thinking that some new architects of a new world order are going to be appointed to carry out this great new reorganization of human behavior?
I hear lots of great ideas here but fail to detect any notion of how such things shall come to pass. Henry Ford perfected mass production of the automobile. How long was it before we had an intrastate highway system? About 60 years if memory serves.
Ergo, I think such notions as hurrying up to create some new system is a bit of a stretch. The future will evolve as it has always has throughout eternity, one step at a time. Neither you nor I nor anyone else is smart enough to pre engineer the future.
r24,
Actually, change has been occurring in my rural area for a long time. Let's look at a couple of examples:
1. Decision making - the norm has been for action based upon consensus. A group who want to undertake some action will continue discussions as long as necessary until everyone is satisfied. This also includes business ventures. Some years ago the food co-ops in my county decided to establish their own non-profit trucking company to reduce costs. Meetings went of for months but eventually the business was incorporated.
Now, it could be argued that some decisions have to be made "right now." My response is really? There aren't that many things that require an instant decision. It might also argued that some decisions are too complex for the average person to understand. My response is then time should be allocated to educate the people.
2. Power usage - there are hundreds of families in my area that live off the grid. Some use PV or micro-hydro and most have some kind of back-up generator. The costs preclude using "normal" amounts of electricity so the use, as a guess, 1/10th of urban and suburban people. It's also interesting that this is a distributed power system that has worked well for over 30 years.
3. Co-operation - unlike urban and suburban people, we cannot draw upon many formal resources. For example, I live on a mile long dirt and gravel road with three other families. Road maintenance is something we all have to co-operate on. This includes not only work time but also money.
Todd
Todd:
Can you give some idea of where in the world you live? US?, Australia?, South Africa?, ???
How dense is the local population? (i.e. nuclear families /km2 or /mi2)
Is it forest, steppe, savanna, ???
How far are you from the nearest world class full service hospital? (my favorite measure of boondocksness ;-)
My feeling is that there are many places in the world for which your description of human behavior is utterly unrealistic, but - there are other places for which it is quite workable.
I'm curious about what fraction of world population is resident in places like yours. And would places with even smaller populations than yours also serve as refugia for H.sap.?
I gotta say, proposing that free market innovation will cure everything if we just have a government commandment for right-of-ways for people pods and a commandment for minimum solar power production registers at least a 9 on the cognitive dissonance scale.
My intent was not to say there was a solution, but a process by which we can find break though ideas. Free markets lets us sort winners from losers better than a planned economy.
Government planned infrastructure is the cause of Peak Oil and Global Warming. Bureaucracies enforce the status quo. Government subsidies, failing to account for the total cost of oil, have artificially suppressed gasoline prices for 35 years. Government should have accounted for the total cost to obtain, use, clean up, protect supply lines, security risks, etc.... Had oil cost what is was worth we would not be addicted to it today and we would not be undermining our planet's ability to support us.
I did not understand your "minimum solar power production" statement about solar. Solar power is an integrated aspect of what we believe is essential. As applied to podcar networks, my guess is in the next 15 years they will gather 3.5 x 10^12 watt-hour per day of solar power (US only at the minimum level of sustainable infrastructure). My guess is that in 15 years the cost of solar collection and storage systems will drop in cost much as computer disk storage has dropped.
Had we accounted for the full cost of using oil, solar power collection would already be radically less expensive. It costs
Great comments here. My opinion:
The U.S. government is mostly controlled by corporations and works to enrich the few at the expense of the many. I sincerely doubt the U.S. will be the leader in developing new technologies. It would probably require too much sacrifice on the part of the wealthy. Solar and wind challenge entrenched oil interests. Solar with its 'free' and 'renewable' qualities just aren't easily exploitable by the rich -- although I'm sure they'll try.
Maybe some other country will be standard-bearer. The U.S. government will not be a leader in saving humanity. It's just not in our nature. Anyone thinking Obama will serve anyone other than a slightly different group of corporate interests is delusional.
I do agree though -- that there is a way to solve the energy crisis and feed everyone too. There have always been innovative people who develop great solutions. But the U.S. government will be nothing but a hinderance. It's just too corrupt to start changing now.
I know things are going to get a lot worse before they get better -- if ever. God help us all.
Definitely.
This diary is really appealing - to lots of existing prejudices and to mental laziness.
So the solution is:
1. Over-throw the existing government policies and ways of thinking (all bad and dumb)
Hollow talk about (golden age?) of invention, power of self-reliance and responsibility, etc.
2. Magically implement new ways of thinking that somehow won't be at all like old dumb ways.
3. ESPECIALLY: promote magic Disney Land-style car/mono-rail concepts that the author likes a lot (such as have been hyped and deflated several times here on TOD in the last year or so.)
I smell a stinky ruse at worst. Useless populist pablum at best.
Oh, and most inane of all (tough contest): It shall be our official policy to "Get and Stay Lucky". Wow! Why didn't we all think of that?
A modest suggestion: since government will have to be involved in managing our collective energy problems, it would probably be a smart idea to stop endlessly repeating the meme that all politicians are corrupt and all bureaucracies are inefficient and start insisting that all politicians demonstrate integrity (or else) and all bureaucracies start performing.
There are probably wiser heads than me about all these things and there are certainly plenty who are sure they are wiser; but I venture to guess that dealing with peak oil and global warming and various other resource and environmental problems will require a lot of trial and error. Since we can't guess in advance what we need to do, the best thing we can do is fix our political institutions to make them as responsible and transparent as we can.
Very important and provocative post, Bill James.
My meta-reading of the discussion:
Almost all of us missed the main point set a performance goal, give a spending budget (so not too much energy is wasted on failures) and let people at it. Reward success, but make sure the winners are measured on proper yardstick (i.e. systemic sustainable support, not just economic growth in the next two quarters). That is: finding out WHAT needs to be done, with some LIMITS to the 'what'.
Instead, we ended up bickering about which HOW we should implement, which HOW will not work, why, why somebody is wrong, why somebody's data is wrong, etc.: PRT, PHEV, bicycles, reversalism, GMO, organic farming, localism, vertical farms, PV future, whatnot.
And we still don't agree on WHAT, but we do spend much of our time fighting with words about HOW, instead of DOING the how.
Now, I'm not an expert or even a student of any of these matters, although I'm always eager to learn more.
That said, what makes me doubtful of the approach on the pragmatic level are two obvious factors:
Anybody who thinks fighting status quo in any system is easy, fast or historically very likely should read in to path dependence, technological lock-in,
In my opinion, the current and potential near-future entrepreneurs that would use the same existing mindset, are part of the problem, not the solution.
More often than not, entrepreneurs only want to replace the existing status quo (very hard) with another status quo that is equally systemically broken (and to do that, is even harder).
Now, this doesn't mean I'm a doomer or I think that the game is over.
It's just that I have hard time seeing how the solution can come from those who have most to lose by changing the status quo, i.e. the people at the very top.
So, to a breakdown of some sort we might go and from that might emerge something different. In my humble opinion, probably from the grass roots level (where I agree that the innovation comes from).
Here's hoping I'm not wrong and that the breakdown will be relatively mild, but emotionally/socially shocking enough to get that 'Apollo program' -style implementation process activated: whether that is Terra preta organic farming, GMO vertical rise hydroponics or something none of us has ever heard of.
I doubt we anymore innovations or lab research on this - we have plenty of solutions already. We just need to pick some and start implementing.
Whether that'll be enough - only time will tell, but it sure beats doing nothing.
We didn't do it before (it being personal pod transport) because the economics didn't work out for the U.S. Contrary to what Bill James says, what we have for a free market has already pooped all over his idée fixe; the investment required is humongous and takes too long to pay off for TPTB in the U.S. And no mythical innovator is going to figure out a cheaper way to pour concrete to get the cost down. We also don't do nuclear reactors, refineries, basic steel production, or a myriad of other things either that have high initial investment and long payouts. The free market has already decided.
Hi TJ
Things "decided" in the age of cheap oil will likely need to be reevaluated in current realities. Peak Oil does not seem to be factored in current business decision processes. If it were, then $4 gas going to $15 in 2010 would not be a surprise.
SamuM seems correct that we cannot look at long term sustainability with a 2 Quarter mentality. If business cannot then governments should assess long-term costs so free markets can adapt to sustainable realities.
They have not or we would not be at TOD talking about Peak Oil and Global Warming. Had the costs of excessively using oil been accounted for, these civilization killers would have been preempted and we would not even have names for them.
Free markets are not static where a decision is final. Free markets churn. Niche solutions exploit small advantages in solving niche problems; lifecycles of ideas, companies and industries flash by. Occasionally, a small niche solution will scale to radically shift the market (Black Swans). Saying we "don't do" nukes, steel and other things as final is like saying "Oil will always be plentiful and cheap."
Oil may always be cheap and plentiful in Saudi Arabia, but not in the US; we are in different niches. My hope in writing this article is to open opportunities to tinkering in niches. The more we tinker, the more we allow niche solutions to mature, the more likely we will have some scale to breakthrough.
Solar and wind power generation were "economic failures" in the age of subsidized oil and coal. As total costs of using those power sources are assessed, the economic viabilitiy of sustainable power generation takes on different values. I believe Germany is leading in this niche because they are partially accounting for the security costs of depending on Russia for the lifeblood of their economy.