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Embodied Energy: An Alternative Approach to Understanding Urban Energy Use
Posted by Gail the Actuary on August 12, 2010 - 10:45am
This is a guest post by David Fridley, Staff Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). David posts under the name Sparaxis.
Everyone knows that it takes energy to produce anything. The energy used in mining, transport, processing, manufacturing, delivery, and disposal is “embodied” in every product we consume, from food to diapers to televisions and insurance policies. Our traditional way of looking at energy, however, highlights only current consumption, traditionally disaggregated into agricultural, industrial, transportation, commercial, and residential sectors. As a result, the energy embodied in the food we eat, for example, is reported as energy consumption across all these sectors, making it difficult to assess the full energy impact of our consumption choices. Looking at urban energy consumption from this traditional framework diminishes the role of people in driving urban energy consumption.
Because cities are the source of the majority of energy consumption in many industrial and high population countries, much research is underway to promote development of “Low Carbon Cities,” a concept that to date has primarily focused on ways to reduce the impacts of current energy consumption in transportation and buildings. This is especially true in China, where urbanization has yet to reach 50% and the government is projecting the urbanization of an additional 350 million people—greater than the population of the United States—over the next 15 years. All of these new urban residents will need accommodation, schooling, health care, appliances, energy supply, transportation, food, clothing, water, sewerage, and other services, and the potential energy impact is enormous.
A typical Chinese urban resident consumes 3 times as much commercial energy as a rural resident (in total energy terms, rural residents consume more, but the majority is inefficiently combusted biomass, which is often ignored in energy reporting). Consequently, the Chinese government is looking to require cities to develop low-carbon action plans to respond to growing urban energy needs. For the most part, these low-carbon action plans focus on ways to reduce the growth of current energy consumption and to supplant some portion of it with non-fossil energy sources.
But is a focus on current energy consumption enough? Analyzing the current energy consumption of a city alone can lead to conclusions that urban areas, particularly dense urban areas, are relatively efficient, largely because per-capita current energy consumption is lower than in dispersed urban or suburban arrangements. This is indeed often the case. But what is not measured as part of the energy impact of urban areas is the built space itself—the streets, pavement, buildings, utilities, tunnels, etc.—that are required to maintain such a dense arrangement of humans, nor does it take into account the energy used to manufacture, transport, and sell the array of consumption goods and services that urban residents purchase. Since urban areas exist for people, looking at the urban energy footprint from the point of view of its inhabitants’ impact can provide additional insight into the nature of urban energy use.
The model used to make these calculations was built in support of an ongoing series of training workshops for city officials in China. The goal was to minimize data input requirements in order to make it user-friendly for city planners. Basic data on the city’s location, population and households, income and expenditures, building floorspace and building types, infrastructure (road, rail, subway length), and vehicle fleet are the basic input parameters. Calculations of current energy consumption and embodied energy use were based on intensity data in the China End-Use Energy Model at LBNL for the appropriate climate zone. In order to compare results on an annual basis, embodied energy calculations were (where relevant) divided by lifetime (e.g. 30 years for buildings, China’s current average).
The test city for the model was Suzhou (Figure 1), a large city of 6 million population located west of Shanghai in Jiangsu province. Suzhou is a prosperous city with an economy dominated by heavy industry, which accounts for 80% of the city’s energy consumption. It is home to Shagang, the 7th largest steel producer in the world with an output in 2009 of 26 million tonnes, equivalent to 45% of total US production in that year.
Much of this steel, however, is not consumed by Suzhou residents, and thus this large industrial component falls out of the model; instead Suzhou steel consumption is captured in the infrastructure and building use of steel and in the steel used to make products consumed by the residents, such as automobiles and refrigerators. Similarly, Suzhou residents eat food that is in part not locally grown, but the energy used to produce and transport this food to Suzhou is included in the calculation. In this way, the model creates a picture of Suzhou energy consumption oriented towards the people who are responsible for its consumption, and excludes energy consumption of those goods and services produced in Suzhou and consumed elsewhere.
Overall Findings
The results for Suzhou are shown in Table 1, indicating that the city’s energy footprint, in both current and embodied terms, totals about 111 billion MJ per year, equivalent in energy to about 18 million barrels of oil.
Of that amount, however, nearly three-quarters is energy that is embodied in the infrastructure and in the consumption of goods and services in the city (Figure 2), while only 26% is operational energy (current consumption)—the energy used to light, cool, heat, run equipment such as water pumps and televisions, and to run vehicles.
Not unsurprisingly, nearly 60% of the operational energy comes from transportation, with another 26% from the energy used in residential buildings, including heating, cooling, water heating, lighting, appliances, and miscellaneous plug loads (Figure 3). Suzhou is located in an area of China that did not formerly allow heating in buildings in winter, so heating today is supplied largely by mini-split heat pump air conditioners running on electricity. In Suzhou, nearly every household, urban and agricultural, owns a refrigerator, TV, clothes washer, and AC. Commercial building account for a lower share than residential buildings because of China’s overall lower building energy intensity and the higher share of the agricultural and industrial workforce.
Even though commercial buildings are generally more materially intensive (i.e., use more concrete, steel, aluminum and other building materials per square meter) than residential buildings, the dominance of residential floorspace in the total building stock (54 million square meters vs 23 million square meters for commercial) results in a larger embodied energy footprint for residential buildings (Figure 4). Even then, the embodied energy of all buildings along with the 63 million square meters of pavement in the city accounts for only about 20% of the total annual embodied energy calculation; the rest is contributed from the embodied energy in the products and services that the residents of the city consume each year.
Transporting People
The transportation infrastructure in a city serves to supports the movement of vehicles carrying both passengers and freight (including non-commercial freight such as mail). Owing to a lack of data from which to estimate freight turnover and vehicle use in Suzhou, it has been omitted from this version; the results here focus on the impact of moving people. As shown in Figure 5, transportation energy use is completely dominated by private transportation choices, with the public transportation system contributing only about 1% of the total.
Suzhou has a car ownership rate of 29 per 100 households, so it is not surprising that among private transportation choices, car energy use accounts for over 70% of the total (Figure 6). Suzhou is also known as China’s “E-Bike Heaven” with over 2.5 million e-bikes in use, the highest density in China. Even so, the greater efficiency of this mode of passenger transport results in the entire fleet consuming just 2% of total passenger transport energy consumption.
What People Buy
As shown in Table 1, the energy used to heat, cool, light, and operate appliances in Suzhou households totals about 11 billion MJ, accounting for about a quarter of total operational energy use. Of much greater consequence is the contribution from the embodied energy of the goods and services that these households consume on an annual basis. To determine this, we looked at the distribution of expenditures by income level, and used input-output calculations based on China’s 2005 input-output tables to calculate the energy use for each expenditure category.
Note: ¥6.8 = US$1
What is apparent in Table 2 is that even at the highest income categories, food still accounts for the largest portion of household expenditures, in contrast to the US where food expenditures (as a share of disposable income) has steadily declined since 1947, reaching 9.5% in 2009. Consequently, food dominates the share of embodied energy as well (Figure 7), accounting for nearly half of the energy footprint of household consumption.
Clothing purchases, accounting for about 10% of monetary expenditures, translated into nearly a quarter of total embodied energy consumption, in part owing to the high proportion of coal-based electricity in China’s textile industry fuel mix.
On a per-capita basis, however, the embodied energy of food remains fairly low in comparison to countries with advanced industrial agriculture such as the US or the EU. The embodied energy in the food supply totalled nearly 41 billion MJ, or about 18 MJ/person/day (Table 3). Assuming each person consumes about 9 MJ of food energy per day, this suggests that 2 MJ of energy were required to supply 1 MJ of food energy to each urban resident. In the US, the equivalent figure for input energy would be about 10 MJ.
Buildings for People to Work, Buy, Learn, Reside Temporarily, and Be Sick
The commercial sector of a city provides accommodation for the variety of activities that its inhabitants do on a daily basis. In this model, the commercial sector is divided into six types of buildings: retail, hotels, schools, hospitals, office buildings, and other. Different building types employ different construction methods and materials, and thus the embodied energy of each type differs. Similarly, the nature of the activity in each building type differs, and thus the operational energy use of each type varies. For example, hospitals tend to be low-rise buildings with high demands for hot water; as seen in Figure 8, the operational energy of hospitals is more than twice that of the embodied component. Similarly, in retail buildings, the extensive use of lighting, air conditioning and heating also keeps operational energy high. Office buildings constitute many of the high-rise structures of the city, with more intensive use of materials and have high embodied energy intensities but have fewer hours of operations each week than other building types.
Implications
This approach to looking at the energy footprint of a city based on the impacts of the city’s inhabitants shows, in the case of Suzhou, that personal consumption of goods and services accounts for the largest (59%) contribution to energy footprint of the city, and this figure would likely remain above 50% even with inclusion of details omitted in this version of the model (mainly freight transport, water treatment, and embodied energy of vehicles). For a policy-maker, this suggests that supply-chain issues need to be considered, and of these supply chains, food appears to be dominant. Developing long-distance or international food supply chains as in the US would dramatically raise the energy demand of each resident and further decrease the food energy return on investment to less than the 0.5 it is today. It also makes apparent the impact of increasing wealth as rising household income is translated into higher consumption. In addition, this approach highlights the impact of building lifetime: design and code requirements that would raise the lifetime of buildings from the current 30 years to a US average of about 75 years (or a UK average of over 100 years) would further decrease the contribution of the embodied energy in buildings to even a lower proportion than found here. Similarly, it suggests that “green buildings” with low or net-zero operational energy may not be “green” at all if the embodied energy of the materials used in the building are considered in the calculation. This exercise also adds a different perspective to the impact of such popular programs such as encouraging CFL use or buying more fuel efficient cars: though important in their own right as a matter of waste reduction, the contribution to changing the overall energy picture is quite small.
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Reduce, reuse, recycle.
This post contains one glaring example of how reliant westerners (especially in the US) are on cheap energy inputs for their food:
1/2 (China) vs 1/10 (USA) food EROEI. This 5 to 1 ratio correlates nicely to the % income spent on food (47% vs 9.5%). Interesting. It's clear that fossil fuels are the basis of our (nearly) free lunch.
So much for the efficiencies of modern western agriculture. I understand that this doesn't account for imports/exports and subsidies, etc, but I have long questioned the true overall efficiencies of the Green Revolution.
No wonder Americans are so fat.
Thanks, David/Gail. Great post!
Hmm. If the GR was not as good as it's cracked up to be, then how does this affect the estimates of the true sustainable (i.e. non fossil fuel requiring) carrying capacity of the Earth?
After the black death, Europe filled up with people and then the population was for some time fairly stable up until the industrial revolution (I've seen numbers from 55 to 75 million). There was of course some increase as technologic innovations came online or improved but for several centuries growth was slow and people lived on the margin of existance with regional famines being common. Compare this to Europes current population of 500 million most of which has been added in the last century then this puts humanity much further into overshoot than the Wakernagel eco footprint model suggests.
Of the 10:1 ration of fossil energy use to food consumption in the US, 9 of those 10 fuel calories occur off the farm. They would be things like driving to the store, home storage energy, and home cooking energy. So, I am not sure the 2:1 China ratio is comparable to this 10:1 figure. Is the 2:1 the energy ratio from farm to processor, farm-processor-wholesaler, farm-processor-wholesale-retail, etc., and does it include all the domestic household energy costs too?
Energy doesn't care. According to the post, kcal for kcal it takes 5 times more energy to feed the average American than it does to feed the average Chinese. This means that, in an energy constrained future, Americans will have to adapt more, either in their method of food aquisition/utilization or in the amount they consume. I suspect that the numbers don't account for food waste, embodied energy in imports, etc. but it still got my attention.
WHAT !!
No more Chilean fruit air-freighted in !?!?
Alan
Canned Peaches from South Carolina, if you're lucky....
Ah, peaches...
When I was a lad, there was "peach season" when trucks showed up full of peaches from the Colorado Western Slope. Mom always bought a lug, and for the next 2-3 weeks, it was peach-this and peach-that. As much as I like them, it was always a bit of relief when the lug was gone.
Can we at least preserve that?
Electrified rail, with improved service, can certainly move in season fruits and veggies around, Today's RRs already have about 15% of the market share for fruits & veggies (up from 1% at deregulation).
Best Hopes for Fresh Fruit & Vegetables,
Alan
Our grow local movement has seen a major resurgence in recent years. The Saturday market on the town square has outgrown available space, canning is back in vogue and the 1500 mile produce in the grocery store wilts and rots this time of year.
http://www.asapconnections.org/
Many folks it seems, are growing extra these days.
Thanks, David, very interesting post.
Whenever I read stories about energy savings, I always wonder about the embedded energy that is being overlooked. For example, if one factors in the embedded energy in a Prius or in one of the new all electric cars, what is the real difference, compared to internal combustion engine. And how much of these energy inputs have to be in the form of petroleum, the way things are set up now.
I notice you have a link to an interesting USDA Food energy analysis. Do you (or anyone else) have other broad energy analyses?
What many of may forget is that the first steam locomotive in the U.S. was in about 1830; up until that time objects of production were carried by either animal or water such as the Erie Canal.
It has been less than 200 years that our current life style was made possible. Do we really think happiness and being content became possible just during the last 200 years?
While our population has grown our ability to judge what is the meaning of life has shrunk to a simplistic concept of consumption.
The real problem we face is not one of fossil fuels or alternative energy sources, but rather the lack of imagination and understanding.
Bravo.
In 200 years, the fish have been eliminated from the Columbia River, which in turn has been turned into a series of lakes which function as a sewer and transportation channel. Of course it isn't really that bad -- they cleaned up the waterfront in Portland.
The trees have largely been cut down, and now most everyone is out of work.
Indians lived here for 10,000+ years.
What will we pass on to the next generation or two?
Hi David,
It would seem that a LEED certified building which was built with a 75 year expected life would have an overall energy use which was less than a standard building with an expected life of 75 years. Was your point that it would be better to build things that lasted 100 years than to build something that lasts 30 but uses no energy over those 30 years? I would say make the building so it lasts longer and make it energy efficient as well. Thanks for an interesting article.
dc
Some friends of ours retired to Scotland about 20 years ago and bought a 400+ year old tavern. Stone, heavy timbers and slate roof. All of the maintenance records for over 300 years were still there. The building's 3rd roof needed some repairs (copper flashing, some fresh copper nails, etc.) and they added modern insulation and a heat pump. Chuck said that these updates combined with the inherent thermal mass of the building made it much more efficient than his modern home in the US. While all of the energy inputs are lost in time, I'll bet, averaged over 400 years, they would be low compared to many modern builings.
Here's to building things that last.
I was struck by the assumed 30 year life for buildings in China.
Sending Chinese students to American Schools of Architecture was a *VERY* bad idea !
Best Hopes for Long Lived, Energy Efficient Infrastructure (including buildings),
Alan
PS: Training in German Passivhaus and Danish architecture would have been wiser.
The lifetime issue is one we've discussed many times with the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD) since it is irrationally low, but this stems largely from what they characterize as having gone through a period of rapid "makeshift" construction after the reforms started in 1979. They acknowledge the issue but don't see it changing substantially for another 20 years. One of MOHURD's vice-ministers Qiu Baoxing even noted that the average is 25-30 years (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-08/07/content_11113982.htm)
New estate building in the UK used a 30 year life guideline as the typical mortgage was 25 years ie the house would outlast the first mortgage so the lending company was happy. Those houses were built like c[redacted] and there is going to need to be a rebuilding program starting in about 10-20 years.
NAOM
I constantly hear about houses being built here in the states falling apart before they are paid for, and I have seen plenty of evidence of shoddy materials and poor workmanship myself.
But a typical wood frame stick built house built to code on a masonry foundation should ordinarily last at least a hundred years if it is kept dry and free of termites.
Keeping it dry will of course involve paying close attention to the roof , windows, siding,plumbing, and moisture levels in the crawl space..Some potentially expensive repairs are to be expected every ten to thirty yearsor so ;but there is also an excellent opportunity to upgrade these components of the house at the time of repair.
I once owned a little cracker box of a house that originally sold for only fifty five hundred dollars when it was built during the early fifties.
I saw it recently and it is easily good to go for another sixty or seventy years as it has recently had new siding, windows and roof installed,plus extra insulation, as well as a heat pump.It will probably only take about half as much energy to heat and cool it now as it did when I owned it.
The upgrades probably ran around twenty five grand-quite a bargain compared to new construction.
Good, traditionally built houses in the UK ie stone, brick, wattle and daub, have a life of hundreds of years with moderate repairs 30 to 100 years apart provided things such as painting and minor repairs are dealt with promptly. For example a stone house with 2' or 3' thick walls and a thatched roof will keep you toasty warm, have been around for 200+ years, may go 50 years between resurfacing of the thatch if good grade material is used, no need for complete re-thatching, just make sure the outside of the walls are kept painted and any thatch damage is taken care of before water gets in. Slate roofs may not need attention for 100-200 years.
NAOM
We haven't built such houses here because we have been blessed with very cheap timber, and the savings in labor have been so attractive that we went for the simple cheap wooden house.
Perhaps we will rediscover the beauty of working in stone one of these days;the cheap timber is eventually going to be a thing of the past.
I don't think people born after 1960 even know what the word "timber" means.
"Forests" these days are 25-50-year old trees that will make lots of 2x4's and 2x6's that will warp and twist when they are used for framing.
Of course, English homes are made of stone because they cut all their oak forests down thousands of years ago.
Yeah, the days of 100-year-old hardwood forests are pretty much gone. But there are large areas of the West where you can hike through thousands of square miles of original growth forest. It's still not "natural" forest, but harvesting is not the problem. 100 years of active fire suppression have resulted in overcrowding of the live trees and an enormous amount of downed timber on the ground. Forest fires, which are an important part of the ecology, used to be relatively mild, mostly burning quickly along the ground, clearing out the downed trees and underbrush, but with limited damage to mature trees and the soil. Today's fires are nightmares: crown fires that burn everything, and so hot that the soil can be baked into a waterproof crust where nothing will grow for years.
Take my opinions about forests with a grain of salt: I'm originally an eastern Great Plains kid, and my idea of proper "climax forest" is six-foot tall switchgrass and bluestem :^)
Absolutely not - and here's a map to look at for anyone who thinks there's much old growth left in this country: http://www.endgame.org/gtt-oldgrowth-map-us.html
I don't think many people really have an idea of how intensive and thorough logging has been. I grew in in the Pacific Northwest - Washington, Oregon, California, and while you can get the impression of large old forests by driving the interstates, much of what you see is the "beauty strip" along the road that loggers are required to leave. I still remember the first time I took a plane over Oregon and realized the "forest" I thought was there was a shabby thin patchwork, largely clearcut, for hundreds and hundreds of miles over the entire state...
The thing I wonder about is obsolescence of buildings. The most wonderful, energy efficient building in the world is of little use if it is located where it is no longer needed.
It seems to me that we will probably mostly need to be moving back to farming areas within 75 years, and we will mostly need to walk to the plots of land we are farming. There may be cities, but I expect them to be much, much smaller. If this pattern holds, many of the LEED certified buildings will be in areas where they are totally unneeded.
This issue of obsolescence also holds for other things. If we cannot keep up roads, the huge number of cars we build, at great energy expense, will become much less valuable. Wind turbines have a lot of embedded energy, but if the electrical system cannot be made to be kept operating (perhaps because transmission lines cannot be maintained, or replacement parts for some part of the system cannot be imported from overseas), the huge sunk investment may have little value.
if it is located where it is no longer needed.
Perhaps true of LEED buildings in Suburbs and Exurbs.
But in cities, the more energy efficient buildings are going to be preferentially occupied.
There may be cities, but I expect them to be much, much smaller.
Since fertility is not going to fall to 0.25 immediately (one child for every 4 women), and Suburbs & Exurbs will empty out first, the logical conclusion is you are forecasting a massive die-off (worse than the Black Plague). Few preparations will survive the chaos of such a massive and likely prolonged die-off. Investing in LEED buildings (some of which will survive) is as good a way as any to waste our time waiting for such a die-off.
Certainly MUCH better than trying to drill for more oil. Leave ANWR, deep off-shore oil, tar sands, etc. alone is the logical recommendation if we are facing a massive die-off.
Absent such a die-off, cities will remain populated as likely increase in size as the suburbs collapse inward.
the electrical system cannot be made to be kept operating
The electrical system, a la much of Africa, North Korea, Albania during their half century of isolation, Cuba during their "special period" after the Soviet Union collapsed, recently Iraq, will still operate most, or at least, part of the time.
Likely when the wind is blowing. Perhaps no more residential air conditioning and erratic power otherwise.
So the investments in wind turbines will not be wasted ! When most WTs are generating at near nameplate, perhaps the transmission system cannot transmit all the power. A minor loss.
Alan
PS: And we can certainly find SOMETHING the Swedes will trade for transformers. I know for a fact that they want tickets to New Orleans Jazz Fest :-)
I just can't see all the large buildings and houses located well away from city centers being abandoned within the next few decades, once it is obvious that they will either rot or burn unless the owners/bankers turn loose of them, and local govts get a good dose of reality based laxatives shoved down thier throats,thereby abandoning today's anally retentive regulatory attitudes.
When the zoning is once relaxed, or no longer enforced, and the loans are written down to true market value, three or four fine Mexican families of the sort I know well will convert a five or six bedroom, three bath McMansion into three or four apartments, and do a fine workmanlike job of it too.They will plant fruit and nut trees, and convert a lot of the grounds into gardens, and they will ride to work six or eight of them in a four cylinder van.One of the women will stay home and run a child care service for all the rest.
Some sort of factories will be put into the empty big box stores-perhaps manufacturing clothing,or workshops of specializing in repair of furniture and appliances or else they will get partitioned into living spaces.
Or they can be converted into greenhouses by ripping off the roofs and replacing them with glass and framing salvaged from other buildings;skilled labor of the sort needed will be cheap and plentiful.
I could make a good living running a pool hall in one corner of such a building, charging a quarter a game and selling beer for a quarter markup if I were paying almost no rent, modest taxes,brewing my own beer in the back, and had a few hundred potential customers within walking distance but without money or ration tickets for gasoline.
I would be trading playing privileges for housework or bags of potatos or haircuts on a regular basis.
Stuffed shirt pompous MCA types will learn to drive sixty cc motorcyles when the weather is nice and 300 cc ultra minicars when it isn't, if theyt can't afford an electric.
People who are retired will trade houses with people living farther out so as to save on commuting expenses.A good many people will manage to get close enough to thier jobs to bke or walk or catch a bus or at least a jitney van.
Of course all these speculations are predicated on a gradual rather than an abrupt appearance of the oil crunch which seems to be in the cards and due to arrive within the next few years.
If the crunch arrives very suddenly, all bets are off, unless the states and the feds are able to institute emergency welfare programs, in very short order, adequate to keep the dispossessed from forming mobs which could happen within a matter of days.
Just how we will manage to keep all the people at work who currently have jobs dependent on cheap oil is probably the biggest single discrete problem we will have to deal with at crunch time.
Some sort of uber WPA will have to be instituted;I suppose a lot of people will be building bike lanes along the shoulders of existing roads, or partitioning off a lane for bikes, with hand tools,a lot of people will be planting fruit trees in medians, and a lot of people will be installing insulation and doors and windows -all getting paid with printed money.
Alan,
Absent such a die-off, cities will remain populated as likely increase in size as the suburbs collapse inward.
I see no reason for suburbs to collapse, even in the largest cities average work commute is < 60km/day, requiring 8-15kWh to power an EV, or about $1-2 per day. Why would people abandon a $150,000 home in suburbs to avoid this trivial electricity consumption??
There are lots of good reasons to live in high density urban regions but surely saving energy is not one of them. As people age we will see a continued lower person/household ratio, so will need more dwellings, expect to see more replacement of large single family homes in suburbs with medium density housing, and the creation of satellite urban regions around existing cities.
Higher-density housing inherently saves energy due to shared walls and ceiling/floors. Most buildings in the villages, towns, and cities of the world are connected, and the US is an oddity with so many small free-standing buildings with no shared surfaces.
While the connected structures of villages and towns around the world developed for many reasons, I am sure that the reduced energy requirements both for operation and for embodied energy contributed. Mostly this energy conservation was experienced as reduced cost for building materials and for wood, dung, or other biomass for heating, but I think saving energy (expressed in monetary terms) was and is a major driver for land use patterns around the world.
The spread of a drug-resistant bacterial gene could herald the end of antibiotics, researchers warned us yesterday.
"In many ways this is it," Tim Walsh at Cardiff University, UK, told The Guardian newspaper. "This is potentially the end."
Walsh's bleak prediction follows his research into a drug-resistant bacterial gene called NDM-1, or New Delhi metallo-β-lactamase 1, which was first identified in India.
Yes Alan, unlike peak oil, the culling of the herd that NDM-1 portends will be egalitarian in its scope.
Survival will pretermit money, social status, or refuge in protective enclaves. Worse than the Black Death, empowered by evolution, the smallest and humblest of Earth's living creatures will have once again reclaimed supremacy over the affairs of the human race.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5924a5.htm
Here is the address to the article you referenced:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/aug/11/antibiotics-efficiency-dru...
It was only a matter of time between such a thing came along. This is it, indeed.
Maybe we had better quickly institute free socialized health care here in this country so the need for medical tourism won't exist to begin with.
I was talking about health care with my Italian friend who owns an auto shop, just yesterday. He used to have health care through his wife's job, she is a cancer survivor, she lost her job about a year ago and hasn't found anything since. Their COBRA ran out so they now pay $1,100.00 a month for a policy. Here's the rub, he needs to go in for a colonoscopy they want to charge him $2500.00 and his deductible doesn't cover it. Guess what, as a native Italian he can get free health care in Italy. Since he has family in Italy it's cheaper for him to fly to Italy to get himself checked out. No offense but anyone who still argues that our health care is the best in the world needs to have their head examined.
Oh, BTW, antibiotic resistant bacteria don't really exist because that would be proof of evolution, and that would make all the fundamentalists cry!
Tax financed health care is ok but no democracy exept perhaps Norway can afford tax financed cosmetic surgery.
A world without effective injection & oral antibiotics# will certainly be different, but I wonder if suicides post-Peak Oil might not have as large an effect.
Surgery will be riskier (small incision surgery will be preferred), many more young deaths and maternal child-birth deaths. But a SWAG is a decline in life expectancy of 8 to 12 years. Not a massive die-off.
A growing fear of dying from complications of childbirth may have a greater impact on population than premature deaths.
Alan
# I assume silver, Mercurochrome and other surface antibiotics will still work since their effect is more basic.
More doomsday, I see?
Well I've done some research on this and have found that the answer to this is quiet simple. While this new disease may be lethal, it can easily be prevented. The article states that this new infection attaches itself to E. coli, which as we know exist in the colon and we also know that this new disease has its roots in India which is for the most part a very unclean place.
Now consider this, e. coli infections happen through sharing drinks and open wounds and if these gentlemen contacted it from India after aquiring surgery than that is where the disease probably began. Because as we know, surgery usually demands the surgeon to open up the patients body.
So lesson learned, wash your hands, don't let strangers mess with your open wounds and you should be fine.
I don't get why every year we have to hear about the latest, baddest sickness around. So ladies and gentlemen no need to hammer down your windows and doors.
Feedlots routinely use preventive doses of antibiotics to control infections that would otherwise decimate the herd. I see a clear impact there.
And it will take some time, but I can see the antibiotic resistance strain becoming fairly common, and exchanging DNA. It has an evolutionary advantage everywhere antibiotics are used, which is LOTS of places.
Alan
Come one you don't honestly believe this to be the next bubonic plague, do you? Are you saying humanity going to be reduced to just a few?
I think not, my plan is simple, just practice good hygene and there shouldn't be any problems. But I do have several concerns regarding the over use of anti-biotics. Which is the real issue here. The problem is most americans I know use antibiotics for everything, which isn't neccessary, and is in fact counter-productive in the long run. My strategy is, advocate awareness on the issue without fear mongering and warn people that antibiotics are for emergencies only and are not recommended for every little wound.
We had few treatments for bacterial infections in 1920, yet it was not "bubonic plaque". It was a shorter life span.
Your advice is appropriate for the first few years.
I suspect that factory farming of animals will be the first major impact. But in a dozen years, I could foresee a good % of infections not being treatable.
Alan
Well go on!
In a few decades are you saying that these antibiotic resistant baceteria will be able to transfer from person to person in the same manner one spreads the common cold? I'm still not buying it, simply because this new bacteria strain transfers via E. Coli which is spread through open wounds. Which is why it's important to wash your hands and know who you are trusting to operate on your body. Had these gentlemen took precautions and made sure these indian doctors preforming the surgery used cleaner equipment this new strain probably would have had very limited contact with the rest of the world.
Though I also blame doctors for giving out antibiotics so carelessly. I'm just now contemplating on what course of action should be taken to minimalize the impact of this new disease. But that could just be the problem, since there is always a small percentage of the population both eukaryotic and prokaroytic immune to whatever affliction ails them, so I'll try to be careful to not encourage the bacteria to involve to insane levels of immunity.
Though in good humor is there any device that can kill bacteria via heat without damaging the host?
Lots of "primitive" topical treatments for bacterial infections that will remain effective.
Internally, not so much. Lancing is an old and effective treatment and we will likely find improved procedures for lancing and draining infections. And means to increase the white blood cell count (like EPO for red blood cells) is a possible alternative.
I really doubt that the surgeons were the vector in India. More likely is the hospital environment. Dust in the air, staff, bedsheets, paperwork, etc. Coming to a hospital near you.
And I have a hard time seeing how a cattle feedlot can continue BAU once this bacteria spreads. This will have a major impact on the food supply and farm economics.
Best Hopes for Being Wrong,
Alan
Alan
Glad you made the points.
Too late to support you in this discussion, but doing risk assessment for genetically engineered organisms a couple of decades ago, we showed up the flow/inter-connection between human-hosted and cattle-hosted microflora. These genes will move and where new trait confers advantage under high selection pressure, spread will be a lot faster.
Hospitals will be particularly risky for women giving birth or for the elderly (they already are for the elderly). Even getting tooth extraction if you have a heart condition will not be as risk-free either; nor will recovering from otherwise non-life-threatening respiratory viruses. There are a large number of similar examples.
In a different world, hope could need constant re-definition?
Indeed. Not only do the livestock serve as a breeding ground for resistant bacteria, but feedlot use has introduced a certain level of common antibiotics into local water supplies, which has no doubt resulted in a certain degree of tolerance being bred into a lot of different pathogens.
It might be worth remarking that the two most effective ways to avoid exposure to resistant strains are: (1) stay away from hospitals and (2) don't eat out. The latter always surprises me, but studies seem pretty clear: the typical household is much better about following the proper basic sanitation and refrigeration practices than the typical restaurant.
Try to understand why NDM-1 is extremely dangerous.
First, in the 19th century, tuberculosis killed an estimated one-quarter of the adult population of Europe; by 1918 one in six deaths in France were still caused by TB.
Next, NDM-1 is a plasmid.
Bacterial conjugation is the transfer of genetic material (plasmid) between bacterial cells by direct cell-to-cell contact or by a bridge-like connection between two cells. Discovered in 1946 by Joshua Lederberg and Edward Tatum. Conjugation is a mechanism of horizontal gene transfer as are transformation and transduction although these two other mechanisms do not involve cell-to-cell contact.
Schematic drawing of bacterial conjugation. Conjugation diagram 1- Donor cell produces pilus. 2- Pilus attaches to recipient cell and brings the two cells together. 3- The mobile plasmid is nicked and a single strand of DNA is then transferred to the recipient cell. 4- Both cells synthesize a complementary strand to produce a double stranded circular plasmid and also reproduce pili; both cells are now viable donors
Bacterial conjugation is often incorrectly regarded as the bacterial equivalent of sexual reproduction or mating since it involves the exchange of genetic material.
During conjugation the donor cell provides a conjugative or mobilizable genetic element that is most often a plasmid or transposon. Most conjugative plasmids have systems ensuring that the recipient cell does not already contain a similar element.
The genetic information transferred is often beneficial to the recipient. Benefits may include antibiotic resistance, xenobiotic tolerance or the ability to use new metabolites.
Such beneficial plasmids may be considered bacterial endosymbionts.
Tuberculosis or TB (short for tubercles bacillus) is a common and often deadly infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis in humans.
The bottom line, such deadly infectious disease as TB could gain total drug resistance by receiving NDM-1 through bacterial conjugation. I am sure you can think of other killers that you would not want to contract all of whom could gain total drug resistance in this way.
I see.
So now that we know that these new bacteria can possibly make other strains of infectious disease anitbiotic resistant, are we to do anything about it?
Looking back at your data, I still see a common trend that these new bacteria are able to thrive in filthy enviorments, since in the time period you listed, Europe wasn't the most sanitary of places they didn't understand the spread of bacteria as well as we do now. Which is why in era's like the Civil War, more people died from infection then they did in combat. Why? Because doctors didn't wash properly and smeared their defecated coated hands over open wounds. The tools they used didn't help either.
I said already this disease is pretty bad, but it can be minimalize with proper sanitation. If you don't let these new bacteria come in contact than you lessen the risk of the bacteria conjugating and sharing their resistance with other killers, like TB. This will be hard in third world countries and crowded areas, but I don't see why we can't do it.
Though it disturbs me that we seem so excited for the few and strong to regain control over human affairs.
So really, be careful, don't use antibiotics unless for emergencies (and I mean emergencies!), and enjoy life. Don't hammer down your doors just yet.
Yes, the point is definitely that building lifetime is very important. In the US, where our buildings are not particularly efficient but do last on average 75 years, embodied energy can be as low as 15-20% of the total over their lifetime. As buildings operations become more efficient, however, the embodied component becomes larger. The history of LEED revisions shows it moving in that same direction of accounting for materials.
The optimum solution appears to be eBikes (2.5 million for 6 million people = 2% of transportation energy use) and public transportation (1% of transportation energy use).
OTOH, the 29% of households with a car use 70% of the transportation energy.
China can keep it's urban population moving for a long time on eBikes and public transit it appears.
Best Hopes for eBikes and Urban Rail, in the USA and China,
Alan
Alanfrom BE:
Agree. I hav e been to Suzhou. This city - and Beijing - are elbike cities. Katie Meluhas "There are one million bicycles in Beijing" have become "two million elbikes" it seems. Suzhou is also surrounded by a (beautiful) canal system, and was by Marco Polo prized as "The Venedig of the East" around 12-1300 AD.
The ciy also is connected the the 1000km cesar/Kaiser canal, built 100 years ago across China from Beijing to Hangzou (SW of Shanghai). I tried it, it is an incredible efficient and trafficed canal!
One precondition to elbikes seem to be a flat countryside. Not so good in hilly environments (We have flat countrysidens in Norway, too, but some of it is vertical).
The chinese are very consiously preparing the country for low energy use.
LOL! The good thing is, once you expend the energy to get to the top you can take advantage of either gravity or a parachute, (your choice) to come down >;^)
Alanfrom BE:
Agree. I have been to Suzhou. This city - and Beijing - are elbike cities. Katie Meluhas "There are one million bicycles in Beijing" have become "two million elbikes" it seems. Suzhou is also surrounded by a (beautiful) canal system, and was by Marco Polo prized as "The Venedig of the East" around 12-1300 AD.
The ciy also is connected the the 1000km cesar/Kaiser canal, built 100 years ago across China from Beijing to Hangzou (SW of Shanghai). I tried it, it is an incredible efficient and trafficed canal!
One precondition to elbikes seem to be a flat countryside. Not so good in hilly environments (We have flat countrysidens in Norway, too, but some of it is vertical).
The chinese are very consiously preparing the country for low energy use.
I'll be working on vehicle embodied energy this fall, with this same question in mind. There has already been good work on this topic at UC Berkeley (Horvath and others), such as published at http://tinyurl.com/2a7mkxt (pay), that shows, for example, how much the embodied energy of rail infrastructure offsets the operational efficiency of the mode. But this is still highly location-specific: already a typical car built in China (which a heavy coal-dominated fuel mix) and driven 10k km a year for 15 years will result in 40% of the total energy expended on the car having taken place by the time of purchase. In the US, that figure would be closer to 20% given our fuel mix and higher operational rates. At first glance, no part of the life-cycle chain operates without petroleum, but quantifying that is difficult, though I will be working on another study specifically aimed at quantifying the petroleum (and other fossil input) dependencies of alternative energy development.
No society that burdens the productive for the benefit of the non-productive will prosper.
No society that elevates consumption over production will prosper.
The current paradigm of sprawl and suburban development was built upon past conditions of cheap and plentiful petroleum. That is no longer the case.
In short, the USA needs to consolidate population, reduce consumption of fuel, energy and resources while increasing output performance.
Though it is politically incorrect, electric traction rail based mass transit is the only long term viable option to substitute for petroleum fueled automobiles.
I think that burdening the productive for the benefit of the non-productive is the very definition of society, as opposed to purely selfish individualism.
A decent society does not let a poor sick person die on the street because they are "un-productive" but diverts some of the surplus from productive activities to those in need. A decent society does not ignore the education of children because they are "un-productive" but invests surplus from productive activities so that the children can be productive at a later date. This has been true as long as recorded history (some of the first writings were tax-collection records, used to re-destribute the proceeds of productive activity).
The proper allocation of resources between producers and consumers is also an eternal issue, but not one that has been or ever will be solved by allocating all resources to those deemed "productive".
Embodied energy calculations are tremendously sensitive to life span assumptions, since that forms the divisor. I would argue that the majority of urban infrastructure has lifetimes of centuries rather than decades. Certainly the street/roads, sewer systems, and many of the buildings in European cities have already survived centuries and can reasonably be expected to survive centuries more. The Paris metro system opened in 1900 so it has passed the century mark, not without massive maintenance and expansion, but much of the intervening work should endure for centuries too.
What do you consider to be "productive"? Are stock brokers productive? Are insurance agents productive? Are bankers productive? Educators? Soldiers and sailors? Law enforcement? Basic scientific researchers like astrophysicists or biologists?
One of the things that Shumacher pointed out in "Small is Beautiful" was that only 8% of the population was needed to produce all the goods used by 20th century society. He included those in agriculture, forestry, mining, and manufacturing as the workers needed to provide all the goods used by 12 times as many people. He also favored local production for local use as much as possible over the use of 3rd world labor using imported raw materials which made goods which were then exported to richer countries. Continuing automation improvements (if eliminating jobs is considered improvement) means even a smaller percentage of the population is needed to produce the goods we all use.
Perhaps the better quote would be the society which imports its goods will not long prosper.
"One of the things that Shumacher pointed out in "Small is Beautiful" was that only 8% of the population was needed to produce all the goods used by 20th century society"......enabled by an historically anomolous consumption of cheap fossil energy....
Well if this study's conclusion are correct then people like Bankers and Ad execs are actually detrimental to society...
tommy -- I think the emphasis was on non-productive and not sick or invalid. Ten's of millions of workers who are capable of adding no more to society than flipping burgers (or the equivalent) are the problem. I don't want to sound harsh about this group of folks but I believe the comment is referring to them. Many are victims of an education system that has failed them. But the sad reality is that much of our economy is based upon service industries which are largely unnecessary. These are the un-productive folks by my definition. Many take advantage of the services they provide but when the economy slows those services are much less critical than others. Playing Blackjack in Vegas is fun for many. But also easily cast aside (except for the gambling addicted). Such folks are unproductive in the sense that they do not furnish anything society requires to function. To varying degrees folks need doctors, farmers, car repairers, cops, firemen, etc. But they do not require a large portion of our exisiting work force. And IMHO, that's one of the greatest concerns as we slide towards the worse of Peak Oil: the productive will utilize what energy is available in a manner that delivers a REQUIRED outcome as opposed to a Desired outcome. We might desire to flop down in a Starbucks and have a 19 yo with limited skills serve us a $5 beverage. But it isn't required.
I do appreciate your humanitarian view. Your approach is fine in the Land of Plenty. But if we are sliding down a long decline: who do you share with: your elderly and unproductive neighbor in poor health or the 19 you with no productive skills if you resources allow only aid to one of them?
"who do you share with: your elderly and unproductive neighbor in poor health or the 19 you with no productive skills if you resources allow only aid to one of them?"
The wrong choice may be lethal. Maybe that's why they call it "dead weight".
Productivity is a real can of worms ethically and economically.
When we measure productivity by dollars,a hundred dollars worth of wheat, chicken, and veggies, at farm prices, which will keep a person healthy and his tummy happy for a month is only worth as much as( ? !! )a typical once a month visit to a hair dresser.
( I pay a local girl who is out of work five bucks cash to cut my hair, which is good money for a quarter hour of semiskilled work, considering I go to her and she doesn't need a baby sitter or have any expense except jiuce for the clipper.)
A surveyor comes by and charges five hundred bucks to certify that the stakes marking the corner opf your city lot haven't been moved since the last survey three or four years ago;a notarized statement from the adacent lot owners might cost only ten bucks or even less.A carpenter comes by and stays four times as long for the same money and fixes your rotten porch railings.
The problem for people like burger flippers is that they don't have a strangle hold on everybody elses money.
The problem -for the rest of us- with bankers, lawyers, most bueracrats, and lots of others is that they do have such a strangle hold on society, and extract a far larger share of what is produced than is justified by thier work.
At some point we will be forced by reality to redistribute the work and the rewards thereof.
Some English lady back around 1920 or 1930 is reputed to have said that she never imagined she would ever be rich enough to own a car, or poor enough that she could not afford a servant;but that she had experienced both states of wealth-silmantaneously..
I have also read that more young americans believe in flying saucers than believe in collecting social security.
I have read that about twenty percent of the residents of Paris were beggars at the time of the storming of the Bastille.
An economist writing for USA Today,iirc, wrote a few days ago that well over half-57 % -of the population of the US is now dependent upon govt for a major portion of personal income, and that the percentage will rise to the mid sixties within another two decades.
The day of reckoning may come sooner than we think.
I'll paraphrase a story I made up for my kids to to greatly oversimplify a point on something or other:
First, there were farmers, and everyone worked and did well. One day they decided it would be fine if they had houses to live in, so some of them became builders and the rest promised to work a little harder so they would all still have enough.
A little later, the farmers and builders started to think about their aches and pains, and decided that it would be fine if some of them became doctors, and the rest promised to work hard enough that everyone still had enough.
Then they thought of clothes, and shoes, and hats, and furniture, and so on. A great number began to make all those things that make life more enjoyable and luxurious, and a great number took up buying and selling and transporting and trading all those things. The farmers said - "its going to be some hard work to feed everyone still, but we'll keep at it since things are really shaping up well".
There were now lots of people busily doing their jobs, and everyone worked hard and did well, but there was no end of arguing over what work was worth and what belonged to who and how much everyone should have...so they decided to have a government to write rules and make everything fair. It was a big new burden and lots of people went into it, and the farmers had a hard time figuring how they'd still feed everyone, but it was worth it to not fight any more.
And everything got bigger and bigger...pretty soon the farmers were asking for help, saying that they just couldn't do it any more - there was just too much work. "We're busy" said the rest, "but buy these machines and you can farm a hundred times as much, and we'll all have plenty".
So the farmers got their new machines and farmed a hundred times as much, but before long they realized it was still hard work and everything was still getting bigger, and soon there were a hundred times as many people to feed. Most of the new ones were doing nothing at all, but still demanding the same share of things as the rest. "What's going on? We never agreed to this!" the farmers asked. No one answered and the new ones mostly just gave them snide looks, so the farmers went to the government and asked. A bunch of officials asked among themselves who were these dusty old people, and what should they say to them. One of the officials, an "economist", explained that they were "farmers", and as they only represented a static 5% of the GDP, they weren't really important enough to need an answer.
Excellent story, Daxr.
I might like to steal the gist of it for a story I'm working on myself if you don't mind.
No problem - and feel free to improve it!
For most of history, the "city" answer to low farm productivity has been to increase the stock of land, not change the methods of production. "Capture" land and farmers from other cities; kill the barbarians so farmers have more land available; build better transportation so more farmers can move their surplus produce to the city. Occasionally the "city" will undertake construction of infrastructure like large-scale irrigation systems, but historically those are exceptions.
Adaptation of city technology to farming uses -- and developing technology is what cities are about -- tends to be a pull from the countryside rather than a push from the city. For example, the gasoline-powered tractor was the result of a rural inventor who realized that the tech could be adapted for farming, not a push from the urban areas. It might be better to write this as "Farmers have been innovative in adopting city-developed tech for agricultural uses in order to continue to increase their productivity."
I'm a rural advocate: I have made consistent comments here that the standard urban methods for addressing future energy constraints will generally not work in rural areas, and that broader thinking is required. OTOH, I also note that in the 20th century, the US made a lot of conscious decisions intended to ensure that rural areas were not consigned to permanent second-class status. The TVA. The REA. A wide variety of price guarantee mechanisms. Direct subsidies. Indirect subsidies in the form of low-cost loans. State telephone tariffs with implicit urban subsidies for rural service. Extensive high-quality rural highway networks.
I think one can make a convincing argument that farmers have received a much better deal from the US urban areas over the last 100 years than farmers got throughout most of history.
I certainly wouldn't argue that in the real world the profit motive has driven the industrialization of agriculture, but much of my perspective comes from the large-scale disappearance of small and middle-scale farms in the US during my lifetime. I have always been under the impression that policy has favored the growth of large-scale mechanized farms, and the end of small "human-scaled" operations.
In any case, the actual result has been that productivity per farmer has increased approximately 100 fold, and the number of actual farmers in the US is about the same as we had not long after the revolutionary war.
I would judge that there have been a lot more policy decisions aimed at preserving mom-and-pop farms than there were protecting, say, mom-and-pop hardware stores from the growth of large-scale operations like Home Depot. Subsidized crop insurance is more valuable to a small farmer than to an industrial farming operation spread over counties or even states. Many states provide preferential tax treatment to family-owned farms. Small farms are exempted from many of the EPA's requirements on point-source pollution.
I have spent a lot of time in poor countries, far from the Land Of Plenty. My experience is that people the world considers very poor consider sharing and mutual aid a foundation value.
When I was hitching north thru Latin America as a skinny, confused teenager people living in cardboard shacks by the side of the road invited me in to share the food they had, without me asking, just because I was skinny. Nobody in a Mercedes offered me food or shelter, though I saw those people too.
So the assumption that mutual aid disappears as wealth dwindles is often incorrect. Think of the Grapes Of Wrath versus the "Me Generation".
And the assumption that the wealthy are "productive" by definition is ridiculous to me, since I live in a college town where I can daily see "Trust Funders" burning through their family money. I would much sooner take away the Trust Funder's Trust Fund than an old sick person's Social Security. But somehow taking the old, sick person's shelter or medical care (euphemistically labeled "entitlement reform") is a socially acceptable topic of discussion and taking the Trust Funder's coke money away is beyond the pale of acceptable discussion.
Well, you don't get rich by sharing -- if by "rich" you mean accumulated wealth.
For me, the measure of wealth is the strength of the community I belong to -- but it takes a while to see that if you are raised on television.
Where are the parents in this?
"Many are victims of an education system that has failed them."
As a high school teacher, with many more years in industry, it has been interesting to see how parents enable the lack of accountability and responsibility. I teach trades and job skills and it is about as easy as pushing a rope uphill. My buddy caught a kid smoking pot out in his car and kicked him out of a construction class. The mom insisted that her child was not smoking dope. (The kid's word against the adult). The administrator tried to pressure the teacher to take the kid back and it was incredible trouble to stand firm.
Another time my electronics buddy told a goof that if he persisted in trying to push the wire in the receptacle, he would get shocked and be kicked out of the program. Guess what....bzzzzzed, he did it. He got kicked out. The mom tried everything to get him reinstated including threats to the teacher. The administrator pushed for another 'new chance', it was a nightmare to stand firm.
I have tons of examples like this, from parents expecting math teachers to get a kid caught up because of missed classes due to a tropical vacation, or rewrites on exams not studied for. Parents are very enabling.
There is always a new Govt program that is going to fix the problem. The only problem is a lazy society.
Cheers....Paul
Please forgive me in advance for sounding like a right wing nut sometimes when I discuss public schools.
But if you look around and see how irresponsible adults are in all too many cases, and consider that even when a parent is responsible enough to stay straight and sober and go to work but to busy or detached or ignorant to be a good parent;
then it should come as no suprise at all when you hear that the inmates are in charge of the asylum in many schools-especially in the vocational wing of comprehensive high schools.
The law demands that the schools accept every student living within the district;it demands that nobody ever say anything harsh to a student, or correct a student by any physical means;the ENGAGED portion of the public demands that thier kids get a reasonably decent education;the teachers and management are in the position of drowning people in the water, each trying to keep his head above water by pushing his nieghbor under;hardly anybody is ever fired for good cause, other than sexual monkey business with a student.
The net result is that a vocational teacher may find himself or herself facing a classroom full of students who long ago learned that they don't have to do anything, and that if the teacher insists that they do, they can get rid of HIM ;his only option to get them to work, which is afterall not FUN BY DEFINITION, is to INSPIRE THEM.
A few rare individuals are actually able to do this, and deserve doctor and lawyer salaries.
On the other hand,any reasonably well organized person with a basic knowledge of the subject matter and a bit of enthusiasm can do a great job at the opther end of the building.HIS or HER students are after all the sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers, other teachers, cops, business owners, and other politically and educationally savvy parents, and they are EXPECTING to go to college, and understand , for the most part, that they have to work in high school in order to get admitted.
Damn few of them are hungry, or have a tooth ache, or a fat lip or black eye, or need eyeglasses to see;they have books and magazines in thier homes, and high speed internet, and they will be going to the prom in very nice, very new threads.
Things are DIFFERENT at the other end of the building.
When I quit, I was making 14,100 dollars with a twelve month contract.
I got a temporary job at the nuke and made 17,000 dollars in fourteen weeks before I was laid off when the shut down was finished up.
Please, forgive me for not really wanting the local guy who teaches welding at the local high school to succeed-but the fact is that I need the money I earn welding a day here and there, and there is too much competition out there already.
This is Darwinian reality.
(Let me clue any of you in who are contemplating enrolling your kid in welding school;there is not much work out there for welders, the trade has been mostly automated out of existence, or outsourced to Asia.It's only good as an ace in the hole for an electrician or pipe fitter or other tradesman who can use his welding qualifications as a useful extra skill to be listed on his resume.)
Most of the teachers, depending on thier personal ethics and the classes they find themselves teaching, in terms of both subject matter and student profile, fall somewhere in the middle-they work, they get paid, they keep thier mouth shut,they mostly try to take thier jobs seriously.
The rest , the ones who last, do what they can or must, or as little as they care to do, and still keep thier jobs, but enforcing standards and failing students who fail to try is not part of thier DEFACTO job description.
Incidentally I AM teaching a local kid to weld- FREE OF CHARGE-but only because he is a good helper and APPRECIATES what I am doing for him.
He has learned his lessons in the school of hard knocks since he was an unbearable pain in the xxx as a high school student who dropped out.
I don't pretend to have the answers, on the grand scale.
I certainly do believe the profession is much more interested in its own welfare than it is that of students, and that the people who are opposed to school vouchers are depriving millions of kids of a good education while accomplishing nothing of value to counterbalance this tragedy.
Any one who cares to investigate this subject will find that a lot of community leaders in poor nieghborhoods are in agreement with me- many of them are very liberal black community activists who have given up on reforming the system from within.
It probably cannot be reformed from within, and it certainly cannot be reformed on short order-meaning the generation of students trapped in failing schools will not get a decent education.A lot of them will get hardly any education at all.
The people opposed to vouchers often argue that the less capable students will be left behind , thereby destroying the public schools;I do not believe this is necessarily the case; govt agencies have tightened up and gotten thier acts together on other occasions,in order to stay in business,the schools can too. At any rate, denying the current generation of kids trapped in such crappy public schools an opportunity to attend a better school when the current system shows no real sign of improvement is a travesty of the worst stripe.
Liberals are constantly lecturing conservatives about being the unwitting pawns of big business interests;thier arguments in this respect ring true to me.
I wish they would listen to conservatives in this particular case and realize that they are the unwitting pawns of big education;unfortunately so many liberals are teachers or govt employees , that they simply cannot bring themselves to consider the idea that less govt is sometimes a good thing, anymore than conservative bau types can recognize the reality of our environmental crisis, or that less govt is sometimes a bad thing.
Here is a little known fact-or at least I believe it is a fact-to help the reader understand the gravity of the situation: teachers are more likely to home school thier kids , or enroll them in private schools, than any the followers of any other profession.
...you can find many people blaming the parents, and many people blaming the teachers, and probably plenty of people would also blame the media, and the government, and anyone else who might be about.
I really don't get all that - at the bottom its just another narrative that removes responsibility from individuals. Which is to say: at some point a kid is a person responsible for his or her actions. If you start them off young telling them all their bad decisions and all their problems are really the fault of some force outside their own head, then they carry that into adulthood. Its a recipe for powerlessness, and you wind up with a bunch of adults who never felt the need to grow up and be responsible for their own lives.
I believe - both from my own experience and as the father of two kids - that an individual is best taught when young that they can and must make real decisions, that they deserve credit for making good decisions and efforts, and that sometimes they will make the wrong decisions and will have to deal with consequences.
In real life, it doesn't matter if you can call yourself the victim of some bad influence or other, and it doesn't matter if you can get someone else to take the blame - if you make a mistake and don't take responsibility, you learn nothing and amount to nothing.
I would share more with the youth who can give a return on a training investment for many years to come over just keeping my 80 year old mother alive for another 6 months. While rationing health care on the basis of age sounds harsh we must face the fact that in a world of shrinking resources return on investment of those resources becomes paramount. If I came down with say cancer I would choose to just manage the pain until I die over extraordinary and very expensive surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy that has little chance of success in a person of my age.
I think it's nice to be nice. But one area of supports for the non-productive in the USA is way out. We provide a paycheck to single mothers. This is basically an industry now. I heard a startling statistic, on NPR, about 55% unemployment in "black males between 18-25. I believe it was for Chicago's West side. Why no statistic for the female gender I wondered. I would imagine as a culture the females are single and pregnant with multiples of children, and therefore employed in the job of being single and pregnant, or with multiple children, and employed. I should think there should be stats on that? I am personally not for this sort of niceness. I think it really hurts society, in many ways. How can our society afford to go green if we are obsessed to go to any length either to prevent abortion, or to be just super nice, which is the ultimate justification, I suppose for these particular supports, which are based on our collective delusions of grandure.
Mentally ill people, many my good friends, don't work, and lots are legit, and lots are not.
Welfare for the rich. Read a book called "Free Lunch" an excellent treatment of the subject.
The agri industry, all the shenanigans, Unsustainable supports that get us a diminished balance sheets for soil, bad food, bad deal as a society, for what? Paid to plant nothing? Good for us, we're nice. But other countries are laughing hard and breaking their ribs. Our arrogance as a callous money first society is coming home to roost. We're hobbled by our niceness. The Fisheries problems are the finest example of this.
Money for nothing doesn't work. It will stop dead 80% of green initiatives. We have to change the thinking of society, and the freebies.
Perhaps a little thought about what makes a person "productive" is in order before we decide what to do with the nonproductive parts of society, how we are going to support them, etc. The distinction is not always obvious.
And then there are the questions of potential future productivity [as in children] and former productivity [as in people who are too old and sick for just about anything].
Is there such a thing as relative productivity? And just how productive are stock brokers? Should we compare their labor to that of garbage collectors, who are quite necessary in our society?
LF - "Relative productivity"? In the case of most of my relatives the answer is a very big NO.
I think this is much too broad a generalization. What about children? I would say that they are non-productive, except if you choose to count a dirty diaper as a work product. Yes they bring joy to parents and grand-parents. But productive? Really?
Where did this statement come from? Does anyone really believe this nonsense?
Yeah! Is someone like Warren Buffet productive? Seems to me, people like him who get rich 'investing' are the essence of non-productivity. They do, however, epitomize the cynic's version of the American dream. That is, 'something for nothing'.
Warren Buffet has always been hard working and started off as a boy delivering papers. He also managed businesses before he became super wealthy.
I doubt he ever has much free time despite being way past retirement age. By my definition he is a workaholic, as anyone in his place probably is.
ET didn't ask whether Warren Buffet worked. He asked whether he was productive. Of course we all know that he stayed busy and amassed personal "wealth", but my question (as is ET's, I believe) is has he produced any wealth for the nation.
And I don't mean this as a rhetorical question. I honestly want to know what is produced when someone trades stocks or bonds for a living. If I buy 50 shares of XYZ at $1.00 from Jones tomorrow and sell them for $1.50 to Smith next week I will have made $25 and Smith and Jones will have swapped positions, but how has anything been produced?
Warren Buffet is a value investor (at least he used to be) investing in companies that he perceived to be undervalued. In doing so, he was on call to provide said companies (like Coca Cola) with capital as and when it was required. The public (saving for retirement) could participate in his success through investing in Berkshire Hathaway, Buffet's investment company.
In my mind there needs to be clear distinction between this traditional form of true investment and modern electronic, automated trading of currencies and derivatives. No wealth can be created by buying and selling a bit of paper. But in the interim, doing so generates profits that can be taxed - hence governments are seduced by the mirage of "financial services", until the Ponzie schemes blow up and said governments need to inject billions into these hens that are laying still born eggs.
There is no question that companies controlled by Warren Buffett become more efficient and profitable.
Since he bought a good % of BNSF railroad (before buying 100%), they started talking and planning for electrification.
And when GE got in trouble during the Bush financial collapse, he bought preferred stock paying 10% (and convertible at three times ten stock price then). This allowed GE to NOT take more desperate measures.
Alan
Setting aside exchanges between cities, cities are open systems which import from their hinterlands fuel, building materials, ores and metals, food, and water. Cities export some manufactured goods and services to the hinterland, but they mainly export rubble, garbage, air pollution, and sewage.
A key function of cities is to maintain the priesthood, warrior and merchant classes which provide the rationale, control, and operation of the cities' dominance over and exploitation of their hinterlands. This has been true for some thousands of years, although our current system is more elaborate.
The embodied energy in "residential consumption" is suspiciously high. I think there is a lot of double counting in that category.
One large component is food. The only embodied energy in food that should be included is the energy for agribusiness and transportation to the city. Further embodied energy for processing, warehousing, distribution, added transportation, retailing, food services, and home preparation occur within the city system. These are the majority of food-related energy expenditures (at least in the referenced pdf for the US), and they should already be included in the operating energy expenditures of the city (or of another city if there is intercity trade).
Similarly for clothing. The non-city embodied energy is in the agribusiness production of fiber or the ex-urban production of petrochemicals for synthetic fibers. The spinning, weaving, knitting, cutting, sewing, transportation, warehousing, distribution, and retailing energy expenditures for clothing should be already included in the operating energy expenditures of commercial, residential, and transportation functions of the city.
In the way this is structured, the only possible overlap in counting would be the energy used in retail commercial buildings selling food and clothing and other residential goods, but this is minor. In China's energy statistical system, food processing, fabric production, and clothing production are all industrial subsectors and were excluded from the city's operational energy balance except for the portion consumed in the city itself and captured through the input-output analysis. City freight transport was also excluded because of lack of data (but should be included). Cooking and food prep (which is done much more at home in China than in the US) is captured under residential energy use.
If the intent is to compare energy use in urban and rural areas, then the energy embodied in residential consumption should be essentially equal. The embodied energy in a box of Cheerios, a pair of Levis, or a Sony flat screen TV would be almost the same regardless of whether they are consumed in a rural farmhouse, a suburban single-family dwelling, or an urban condo. Any average consumption differences would be due to different income levels in the three types of settlement.
You are correct. Minus transportation differences, the embodied energy of consumed products would be the same in both rural and urban households. What differs most strikingly in China is the level of consumption between the two.
Another point that can be made is that shipping food to cities acts to drain off a huge amount of nutrients from the soil from farm areas (and send them down the rivers instead, with our current sewer system). This sort of works, if there is a good system of applying artificial fertilizer, to keep soil fertility up. Otherwise, one has to have a system of getting the waste products from the people / animals in the city back into the soil in the rural areas.
Without fossil fuels, this will be much more difficult do. This (plus the likely lack of excess food to send to the cities) is the reason I expect cities to be much smaller in the future.
I just dropped a post over on today's Drumbeat about phosphate and potash from which it can be inferred that 'artificial fertilizer' will become much more expensive in the future.
The issue of nutrient and soil conservation is an important. We should be looking at both improved farming practices to reduce runoff and eventually returning waste to farms.
Agriculture should be thought of as an "extractive industry", similar to mining. As practiced since cities began in the Middle East, agriculture removes nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, and several other elements necessary for animal and human proteins and enzymatic systems from the soil and transports them to the cities, from which they are then flushed away via the rivers.
Places where agriculture has been practiced for a long time, such as the Nile Valley or Northern China, typically have a natural means of replenishing the soil's nutrients, e.g. seasonal flooding or dust blown from the Asian deserts.
While conservation measures can slow the extraction of minerals and other destructive processes, such as soil erosion, agriculture is inherently unsustainable at current levels of global population.
China also has a tradition of using "night soil"--bringing the nutrients back to the farm.
This is the lesson we all have to learn quickly.
On cities, also note that, before the age of ff, few cities exceeded one million population, and most of those were major centers of empires.
I hate to be bullish on the growth and prosperity of the human race, but I am. There are sound logical answers to using our waste, of course as opposed to treating it as a poison and trying to hide it. A book I am now in the middle of reading, and I highly recommend it: "Liquid Gold" by Carol Steinfeld; The Lore and Logic of using Urine to grow plants. I think it's impossible to be green minded and ignore the use of our bio-waste products. How to get them from A to B is a matter of plumbing, for which I would suggest the tripe system. And if we think this is some small issue: from the book, p.3
"A Golden Opportunity!
Every day, Americans excrete about 90 million gallons of urine. That day's urine contains an estimated seven million pounds of nutrients in the form of nitrogen. By some estimates, that's enough to fertilize up to 31,962 acres of corn for an entire year. And over one year, Americans "piss away" enough nitrogen to fertilize almost 12 million acres of corn-- about twice the corn grown in Indiana*."
And from page 7
"Instead of investing billions of dollars to reduce nitrogen in waste-water and manage the pollution it causes, we should instead invest in the systems needed to transport wastewater to deserts and brown fields where it can grow biological alternatives to petroleum in North America. The result: less dependence on foreign fuel and foreign policy compromises, more work for Americans, and better environmental health -- which means better human health."
We need a green grid, which to me is smarter than needing a smart grid.
That is perhaps the most interesting thing I've heard today, but the idea is rather puke worthy. I'd hate to be the one living near a green farm operating on urine.
Obviously a city boy !
FAR, FAR better than next to a feedlot or a pig farm, or even chickens & turkeys.
Alan
Studying the ecological footprint of any settlement is indeed a great first step to understanding our overall consumption and input. There is an emerging methodology as to how to do this in the US and I think internationally, this will make it easier to compare one place with another.
It would be interesting to compare this analysis with a non-urban situation, both in China and the West. Cities have tended to get a bad image among 'environmentalists' in the past because of pollution and perceived environmental degradation, but the fact is they almost certainly are a good bit more economical in consuming the world's energy resources than far-flung pristine exurbs, on a per-capita basis.
On the point of length of a building's life versus embodied energy, a longer lasting building is of course in principle more sustainable. But not if it consumes more energy per unit time. It does not take many years for the embodied energy in a structure to be offset by the amount used (or saved) in its operation. My LEED house may have taken slightly more resources per square foot to get it right, but the payback is quick. And then it's smaller than the mass-market equivalent, and that's hugely important.
David,
Thank you very much for this lucidly written primer on some of the work your group is doing.
Do you know of any groups that are creating similar models for the US?
Or perhaps better, what would be involved in adapting the China End-Use Energy Model to a US city like Seattle?
The China Energy Group's work to create this type of analysis would be very interesting to many in Seattle's city government.
Jon
Most of the work I'm familiar with in the US is looking at the life-cycle energy use of specific products and individual buildings or building types in support of proposed programs of carbon labeling (though there's many pitfalls to this approach). I would be interested in adapting this approach to a US city, but the challenge is that it is very data intensive and location specific, although the US does have very good databases of material LCA analyses(such as at NREL). I do agree that this additional perspective on urban energy use could be useful to policymakers.
Fascinating post!
In my mind, every city in the US should commission a detailed energy study similar to this as an early step toward creating a city's policies focused on energy and based on data rather than politics.
But that seems unlikely...
DD
This analysis looks like Chinese greenwashing to support their Low Carbon Cities propaganda campaign.
Also in China people live in poorly insulated concrete apartment buildings that represent a lot of CO2 and embodied energy--overstating their embodied energy--but they surely last more than 30 years versus wood frame at 50 years?!
18 mboe/6 million people =3 boe per person?! Really!
A Canadian study for Toronto gives 60 boe/person of embodied energy(construction materials) in low density areas with 43 boe/person in high density areas. With a 50 year life that's about 1 boe per year for low density and half that for high density.This indicates that contrary to the poster, in Canada one can safely ignore embodied energy and look to get the huge reductions in Passive House, R-2000 and US Energy Star(LEED is completely bogus).
It gives 15 boe per person of annual energy expenditure for low density and 7 boe/person for high density areas.
The Canadian study also shows that the annual per square foot energy costs are about the same for low and high density conditions.
Living like sardines in a can does save energy! Who knew?
http://www.sb4all.org/uploads/Comparing_High_and_Low_Resedential_Density...
Canada energy expanse is largely loaded by heating. In Québec, this is about 2/3 of the energy expense. Added the fact that most canadian house are largely made of wood and you get the picture.
Wood is actually a good insulator compared to concrete or masonry.
A 1" thick softwood wall has the same heat loss as a 12" reinforced concrete wall. Concrete is a good air barrier but masonry and wood are both equally bad. The main advantage of concrete/masonry is its fire resistance, much greater strength and durability. OTH, wood sequesters carbon and as very low embodied energy. Wood is getting much more usable with technology but also more expensive.
We should be getting away from concrete sardine-can cities and more into a sustainable, habitable, low rise wood frame building stock.
I wish this article had debated this issue rather than wowing us with China's Low Carbon Cities phony 'achievement'.
Concrete and masonry has high thermal mass. The trick is to put the insulation on the outside. Studies have shown that this type construction is 12% more efficient than conventional construction.
My house is made of aerated autoclaved concrete (AAC) with 12" thick walls. The R value is about 12 but the thermal mass factor makes it equivalent to about R20-24. My gas and electric usage is low.
http://aeratedconcrete.blogspot.com/
Paul,
I presume your you must live in a place where the temperature varies enough on a 24 hour basis for the thermal mass of your house to contribute quite a bit to both staying cool during the day and warm at night.
I and many others I am sure would appreciate a few additional remarks in respect to your local climate and the way your house functions.
Our old house has a lot of thermal mass and the mass does contribute noticeably to both heating and cooling but only but only for a limited number of days;it still requires heating almost all winter and cooling most of the summer, if we want to be cool.
But if it drops to seventy two or so at night I can get thru a ninety plus degree the following day without ac if I open the windows and turn on a fan late at night.
I live on the Alabama coast and hurricanes, termites and rot were part of my motivation for using concrete.
There were published studies on AAC on the Internet showing performance in a dozen US locations, chosen by climate. AAC works best in the desert southwest because difference between day and night temperature is the main factor.
I have 8 inch interior walls and some 8 inch AAC ceilings, with fiberglass insulation on top. So I have about 75 tons of wall mass and 50 tons of insulated slab floor and my temperature is relatively constant. I can run the air conditioner in the morning and in a few hours it will drop the temperature a degree or two. Then I can raise the temp until evening when I turn it down again, meaning that I can make the AC work more efficiently. But the main savings is just from having good insulation (the AAC itself plus attic insulation)and good thermal windows. Also I have well positioned windows that do not gather summer sun.
My heating bill is really small. I use about 30 therms of gas/month + 300 Kw-hr/mo for the heat pump Dec-Feb.
With this type construction the temperature is uniform and constant so you do not notice lowering the inside temperature to 70-72 in winter or raising ti to 76-77 in summer, although those ranges could be comfortably extended, there is so little savings available it's not worth being less comfortable.
This mirrors a long, involved discussion 4 years ago on TOD. The conclusion, is that the right strategy varies with climate and, to a lesser extent, use.
For a house that is vacant during the day (weekdays at least) in New Orleans, low thermal mass + high insulation is the best solution. Even for a continuously occupied house, the same holds true but less strongly.
Alan
AAC is not load bearing and is not reinforced. It does have pretty good thermal properties, about that of wood. It's also pretty expensive.
Any concrete is going to require more embodied energy than wood.
Thermal mass doesn't make much sense.
The temperature inside a house should be constant all day long; thermal requires varying temperatures.
RE: Reinforcement
I have 7.5 cu. yards of high strength, super-plasticized (free flowing) concrete in cores and bond beams with over 1000 ft of #5 rebar.
The AAC blocks are cored with 3.5 inch dia. holes, through which rebar is run down to the footing and up to a horizontal bond beam, also reinforced. The Ceiling panels are reinforced from factory with cross tied steel.
Additionally, channels can be cut in the block for concrete columns, also reinforced.
Vertical cores w/rebar are supposed to be within one foot of all openings, at all corners and 4 feet max. spacing otherwise for 8 in. exterior walls.
I do not understand how you can can it not load bearing when it has compressive strength of 500 psi. My walls would carry at least 10 times more load than wood frame construction.
Regardless of what you did in your house it's not load bearing.
A compressive stress of 500 psi is nothing.
Pine posts have the design compressive stress of 375 psi across the grain and 500 psi along the grain(as in a stud wall).
A concrete masonry units(CMU) have a minimum design compressive strength of +1900 psi by ASTM(most around 4000 psi).
Cinder blocks, which are not 'load bearing' are about 1250 psi and are for filling in concrete frames.
For a two story house AAC might be 'load bearing' but we are talking about multistory apartment buildings.
Huh? Thermal mass smooths out temperature swings, resulting in a more uniform temperature throughout the 24 hour day.
If your house is well insulated you shouldn't have any temperature swings, right? Passive houses are 70 degrees +-1 degree 24 hours a day, unless the inhabitants decide to start a fire. If the temperature doesn't change what are you storing?
A passive solar house (by definition) takes in solar heat during the day, thus raising the temperature unless the heat is absorbed by thermal mass within the envelope. Thermal mass can mitigate the daytime temperature rise by absorbing the daytime heat gain. This stored heat is then released during the night when there is no solar gain and outside temperature falls.
Granted, an extremely well insulated house with no solar gain can maintain a fairly uniform temperature above outside ambient merely from the activity of the occupants (body heat, appliances, etc.), but if exposure to sunlight is available the economical trade off between cost of superinsulation versus thermal mass generally warrants a combination of insulation + solar + internal mass, the more so the colder the climate.
Great Stuff that concreter with the ash. A real Keeper. I read the web page you posted, and am very cemented to its logic as a good and green way. Thank you for the recommendation to the site.
Comparing embodied energy of various cities is problematic at best.
A hilly city has more energy embodied in roads and other infrastucture than a flat city. Even utilities make a huge difference. What is the embodied energy of tap water in LA vs New York? HVAC? Building codes for earthquakes, storms. Location makes a huge difference.
The embodied and operational energy of tap water in New York City approaches zero.
The recently completed 3rd water tunnel should be all that is ever needed for a population of 12 million or less (more with stricter water conservation) and the lifetimes of the three water tunnels are in centuries (lots of time to amortize, and a sunk cost today).
Hydraulic pressure (i.e. gravity) forces the water from the reservoirs to about the 6th Floor in NYC.
About the most sustainable system anywhere.
Best Hopes for NYC,
Alan
And Los Angeles?
Now there's some embodied energy. Just one of the many systems quenching SoCal's thirst.
Actually, the conclusions don't support China's "low carbon" cities program very much at all, since the "low carbon" this program focuses only on operational energy and ignores the embodied energy consequences of urban development.
As noted earlier, there are historical reasons offered why building lifetime is so low.
I'm familiar with the Toronto study, but the boundaries and conditions are quite different than in Suzhou. In Toronto, operational energy dominates (in buildings and transportation) and density savings are apparent. In China, residential and commercial energy intensities (MJ/m2) are already much lower than in the US or Canada and density is already much higher.
The application of this approach to a typical North American city would likely be quite different than for Suzhou.
Excuse me?
I assume that the 111 billion MJ came from the PRC data. To me this looks like propaganda from 'Green' China. (The Chinese have a lot of political capital wrapped up in this meme.)
Saying the Toronto is a different planet is baloney. 111 billion MJ/6 million people = 18500 MJ per person-yr versus 40058 MJ per person Toronto?
Bullshit.
If we look at the Passive House standard of 15 Kwh/m2-yr, we get 53 MJ/m2, versus 600 MJ/m2 for Toronto study buildings operation. If we assume the average Toronto building uses 600 MJ/m2 for heating and cooling and under a density of 40m2/person that's 24000 MJ/person which agrees with Fig.8.
http://www.sb4all.org/uploads/Comparing_High_and_Low_Resedential_Density...
IOW, Toronto makes sense, Suzhou is baloney. Suburbs with superefficiency housing probably beats Chinese High Density, Low Carbon.
Jay Hanson left the USENET and established energyresources on One List (now a Yahoo group) more than 10 yeqrs ago. The first poster questioned the embedded energy of bicycles.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/energyresources/message/2
Thank you Mr. Fridley. Are you aware of similar studies on other cities ?
You're welcome. I'm not familiar with other such studies which is why I have left this work at the "proof of concept" stage and inviting comment. A lot of work, though, has been done in the area of "urban metabolism" studies, which looks at the energy and materials flow in a city (including waste generation). This is all on a current consumption basis and quite interesting in its own right.
Sparaxis, great post, glad you followed up. So I learned something today. First surprise is that rural dwellers use more operational energy than urban dwellers. I heat my cottage using wood burners, fuel supplied by local saw mill, roughly $100 keeps me going for 2 years. 30% of cost is paying for delivery - its about 5 miles.
There's a lot to digest here. I was surprised by the 26:74 split between operational and embodied, but then see that 79% of embodied is consumption - which could be placed in operational by adjusting conceptual boundaries. I guess one of the clear messages here is consume less - and this leads to a paradox. How does a city designed to produce goods for consumption promote the concept of consuming less.
Finally I'd note that many UK houses are well over 100 years old, but most have had a few upgrades and extensions along the way. Our house in Aberdeen was built (from granite) in 1929, but was totally refurbished and extended by us in 1995. But this also upgraded its energy efficiency.
Pursuing your lines of energy logic will promote adaptation to less per capita enrgy and energy efficiency. We need to build (everything) to last - and then presumably we all play golf or go fishing every day.
At first I did not believe the 30 year number for building lifespan. Then I did some research and indeed those are the ministry's reported numbers. This is quite shocking. You need to have pretty unskilled designers or huge corner cutting to have a building last that short. In particular, you need more steel reinforcement to boost longevity. This would suggest to produce higher quality buildings China would be consuming much more steel than it is now, but not necessarily more concrete. I'm wondering if there are exceptions. Like, will those magnificent skyscrapers with > 100 stories I saw being put up in Shanghai will face a triple digit lifespan like the ones here in North America?
I recall garnering some criticism when I once mentioned the embedded energy in epithermal mineral deposits that were formed by geologic processes during the initial cooling of the earth.
I'm curious as to what you'd think about how this type of "embodied" energy use could be reduced (not just the obviously good "get less stuff"), and also how to supply more of it with non-fossil sources. Like how "green buildings" could be built while supplying a significant portion (at least) of the embodied energy from renewable source of energy. Any ideas, theories?
This post is fascinating, but I find it a bit opaque when it comes to how the figures were generated. I have a couple questions...
1> Surely the model is not double-counting operational energy that is among embodied energy for things like food consumption; that would be silly. I'm curious what methods are used to separate operational energy that is among embodied energy, and that which isn't.
2> Even considering a 30 year lifetime for buildings when calculating an embodied energy per year figure for buildings, wouldn't this figure be vastly affected by how fast the city is growing or changing in a given year? In fact, wouldn't a growing city not only see a lot of additional construction, thus affecting the numbers, but couldn't a country wide construction boom lower the average life time of buildings, thus raising the embodied MJ/year? How fast is Suzhou growing, and would the percentage of total energy that is embodied for American or European cities not be quite different? (For some perspective, here in San Francisco I'm currently typing inside a 90 year old apartment building, surrounded by buildings at least 40 years old. I grew up on a block not far from here where most houses are over 100 years old, and the average building age is perhaps still 70 years when rebuilds and remodels are accounted for.)
Finally...
It seems to me from the table that 111 billion MJ is just the embodied energy. Both would be 149 billion MJ.
Is this more of the work / energy confusion typical of the genre?
Measured how? As the thermal energy of the fuel combustion? Guess so, usually is.
... which you go on to say is nearly all electricity. But measured how, in your calculations? As electrical energy, or as the thermal energy of the (mostly, in China) coal combustion that made it?
If the former, then you are not adding like to like, so the result is junk. The error is about a factor of three!
Gergyly, you are perhaps asking some pertinent questions. You would do well to learn to phrase these more politely.
Wise advice Euan, but where I come from we still call junk, well, junk (though I can't tell whether that's remotely fair here). The soft literature on "energy" seems to me full of physical confusion. Perhaps it reflects how few take even PH101 these days, let alone introductory thermodynamics. BTW, I work for a firm that now has "energy services" as part of its consulting offer. We'd be as guilty as any.
i find the concept of energy embodied in objects quite fascinating and interesting. at the end of the day, the price we pay for an object is often directly proportional to the amount of energy that has been necessary to produce it.
on another note, i find this site an exceptional source of science and information, but i amazed to see that most of those who comment articles seem to be advocating the slaughtering of 80% of the world population, and the return to middle age of pre-industrial age in order to "save the planet" from more or less imaginary evils like global warming, resources depletion, booming population, and so on.
interesting discussions often end up being purely abstract and based on myths and legends, and totally detached from reality.
the flawed idea is that life in those time was long and happy. so i really cant understand, if life in pre-industrial age was so happy, healty and cool (it really wasnt unless you were part of the elites) why did we get into industrial era? guess the answer would be due to the greed of the capitalists.
some other comments are on the verge of being comic. if poor populations are so happy and healty in their condition, why the hell are they all trying to immigrate in europe?
while i cannot avoid to point out that those who really like to live a middle-age lifestyle are free to do so and have no right to impose that on me, i am really amazed to see how much misinformation and fabrication is spread around.
i keep reading about the disappearance of forests and timber. at least in europe, there is A LOT MORE forests and timber now than 100 years ago. and thats not the only myth.
unfortunately, most opinions i read here on how to solve some of the more or less real problems like cost and availability of energuy end up being something Stalin or Pol Pot would have been proud of, and assume that a "state", driven by hardcore environmentalists, should force the population into different lifestyles, transport systems, living standards, and so on, up to the point where resource allocation becomes totally centralized and resources themselves become scarce and expensive, with the final goal of eliminating large part of the planet population.
From the study of skeletons, the indications are that pre-agricultural hunter gatherers were roughly as healthy as current populations. That is, so long as warfare kept the populations safely below the carrying capacity of the environment and the density sufficiently low to avoid epidemics.
Once agriculture was introduced in the middle east, skeletons indicate reduced stature, poorer bone structure, more lesions due to disease, and heavy wear due to repetitive heavy labor. This condition of the vast majority of the population (slaves, serfs, and peasants) continues until the modern era.
hi gianmarko.
more or less imaginary evils like global warming, resources depletion, booming population, and so on.
I encourage you to read the articles in the "Peak Oil Overview" box under the masthead.
You misinterpret our thoughts on reducing population and returning to a pre-industrial state. It is not that we want to return to a pre-industrial state, and we don't actually want most of the population to die horrible early deaths. It's just that all that darn science you praise us for suggests a low-energy future, and that not all of us will survive.
It's not the next Stalin or Pol Pot you have to worry about. Mother Nature is not something you get to vote on or battle against. If your vision differs with what she wants, she'll win. There's only so much fossil energy and so many square feet of habitable planet, and things like consumer behaviour and demographic momentum take decades to change. We may not have decades. A prudent man would consider the worst case scenario and plan accordingly.
Just because something is unthinkable doesn't mean it can't happen.
Lloyd
The other known cases of civilizations facing rapidly (or not so rapidly) declining essential resources result in collapse and massive die-offs.
I would suggest reading Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed".
I think it is fair to say that I am one of the leading advocates of our societies succeeding (i.e. avoiding collapse) during the post-Peak Oil crisis (a crisis that will be aggravated by Climate Change, growing populations and depletion of various other resources).
For example, I investigated how Switzerland survived a 7 year, 100% oil embargo as a Western industrial democracy (they started expanding an Oil-Free Transportation system in the early 1920s, they drafted every able bodied person for agricultural work on the weekends, etc.).
I am working diligently on some phases of a practical, oil-free transportation system (electrified railroads, Urban Rail).
However, success (i.e. avoiding collapse) is *NOT* assured. 2001 to 2008 demonstrated that clearly. For example, if President Palin is sworn in on January 20, 2013, I would put the odds of the USA avoiding collapse in single digits.
OTOH, Scandinavia, centered on Sweden, seems a VERY good bet to avoid collapse. Hard times, quite likely, but not collapse.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Don't be a hater, Alan.
I am being dispassionately realistic.
Alan
Dear David, thank you for a detailed and thought-provoking post. Are you with the LB-China Energy group? Some very good work is being done by the group. My interest in your post is because of the need for doing assessments for India's urbanisation - there are 42 cities with over a million population, and the prognosis is that the number of million-plus cities will rise to 68 in 20 years, with many more entering the 0.5-1 million category. I work on research in agricultural and rural economics and the primary worry as you can imagine is: who is going to be left to grow the food needed to feed these people and themselves? The optimistic, growth-at-all-costs advocates (and there are many in our government) say that these cities will account for 70% of India's GDP 20 years from now. Given the trends that TOD and other site have been discussing in detail for 2-3 years now, I can't see this happening just as I can't see GDP remaining a defining measure of national progress. But that's a separate matter. What I have been attempting to do with little success is judging the comparative embodied energy in rural settlements (villages, hamlets) and urban settlements (towns and cities). Where social justice and food equity is concerned, an important issue is the flow of food. Because farming/cultivating households are both producers and consumers of food, and because urban dwellers are consumers only of food (in South Asia urban agriculture is negligible), food flows has a huge impact on rural food security. That's why your Suzhou methodology becomes important - for India's/South Asia's large cities, and just as important for the rural districts which supply towns and cities with food. Thanks and regards, Rahul