November. Ice is reforming in the Arctic after a shocking thaw last summer. In the Antarctic it’s the northern equivalent of May. If you’ve hung around a pretty cold area ( I grew up in North Dakota and later spent over two decades at 11,000 ft) you would know in your frozen bones that there is a promise of relief in the air down there. In the Antarctic it’s too soon for the big melt, but the following weeks will have a story to tell. This year there are thousands of additional scientists crawling around on the ice trying to figure out what’s going on. Go guys, go. We need all the info we can get.
Meanwhile, there are bits and pieces in the news.
A Dandy Database
www.carma.org will take you to an splendid new site that will let you peek at the major carbon polluters of the world. Climate change is happening, carbon dioxide is doing it, and virtually at a glance you can see the problem in operation. What you get on the site is an expandable map of the world with the big emitters represented as big red blobs and smaller emitters, such as cities, represented as little bitty red dots.
On my brief visit to the site I didn’t get the background information on how to interpret the big red dots, but I came up with a pretty good idea of what they mean. There is only one west of Houston in this country. I recognized it as the Navajo Power Plant just west of Navajo Mountain on the Navajo Reservation. It’s a 2,000 MW plant – Boardman is only 400 MW and didn’t even warrant recognition on this map. Boy, do I know about the Navajo Plant. In 1970 another plant of 3,000 MW (half again as big) was proposed right across the river – oops, Lake Powell. ‘Twas on that sucker I developed my environmental teeth. The proposed Kaiparowits plant didn’t happen.
Should you visit that site, glance at the big red blobs in Korea, China and India. That will tell you a story.
The Fate of Cities
Last December we published a piece called “Worst Case” which talked about what could happen to major cities around the world, and more particularly what the waters could submerge in Oregon and Washington. At the time it seemed only a possibility. After what happened in the Arctic this summer it begins to seem a very real possibility.
The World Watch Institute, after consideration, concluded that 21 of the 33 largest cities in the world might slip below the waters as the sea rise (EB, 10/21). Scientists see a strong positive relationship between carbon dioxide and climate (there are those that don’t. They are guided by faith, not science.) If carbon dioxide reaches a certain level, the level of which is not really known because we’ve never experienced this before, the ice on Greenland and Antarctica will surely melt away and the seas will surely rise. By 250 feet (some estimates differ but not by all that much) say those who know best. We have previously determined that could put Corvallis and The Dalles under water and give us a straight line water route between what’s left of Portland and what’s left of Seattle..
We remind you that 3.1 percent is the measured annual rate of increase in worldwide carbon dioxide concentrations. We remind you that at that percentage we double concentrations every 24 years (give or take, depending on the compounding period.) We are about half way toward the first doubling, which Al Gore’s team says we hadn’t better even think of exceeding. But we’re chasing that magic number awfully fast at 3.1 percent. (Note: just in– The U.N. gives us seven years to get our ducks in a row. Or else!) And worse, much worse – if we instantly abandoned all uses of fossil fuels instantly carbon levels would still increase for about a century. We’ve turned on an engine and got it running full bore. Takes a little while for the beast to come to a complete halt. In the U.S. and East Asia no thought is being given to abandoning fossil fuel; not only that but the aim is to drastically increase usage. I’ve just finished reading a fascinating article on EB (11/14) in which oil company execs talk about peak oil. They say forget peak oil; we can supply enough alternate liquid fuels to make up any difference. They don’t mention the terrible energy efficiency factors irrevocably associated with those projects.
Portland. Again????
Yup. They just don’t quit. Having done its thing on peak oil, the city taking on climate change. Transportation accounts for less than 40% of fossil fuel consumption. The remainder is largely devoted to making interior spaces comfy, residential, office and commercial space. If you build a structure in Portland in the future and simply meet specifications it’ll cost you dearly. You must do more, much more, to escape the penalty. You must build with best available materials and most efficient appliances. As better materials and devices show up the new standard will automatically increase to that level.
In Portland, if the proposal is adopted, the buyer will have a choice between buying cheaper and facing higher utility bills forever, or buying a good one and feeling smug and snug comes time to pay the monthlies. I believe in the latter, most intensely. In California, after 18 years in a house I bought new, I tore out the furnace/air conditioner that came with the house and replaced with best available. Simultaneously and accidently that’s when Enron did its number and doubled utility rates in California. My bill remained constant. I was recapturing my investment at one heck of a good rate when I sold. If I’d kept the house I’d have been way ahead in the money game in short order. (The buyer liked the system and I got a better buck for the house so I didn’t lose anyway.)
If Portland adopts the proposal, those who occupy the new premises will be richly rewarded. Energy prices have nowhere to go but up, and the upward rate will go into a panic attack when reality moves home again. Blessings upon you Portland. Rather than of all the rest of us moving there, could we borrow your ideas for a little while? Go, Portland, go!
The Uncertain Future
Peak oil and climate change are closely related problems. To slow down the juggernaut (that which completely crushes that which it encounters) of unendurable climate change we must bring fossil fuel consumption under control. Those who scrutinize the unknowable agree that the end of ever-increasing quantities of petroleum is about to be realized, perhaps even happening now. In any case, demand will exceed supply very soon, with results even a twit can predict. Nearly forty years ago I came to understand that when oil prices rise the prices of all forms of energy rise. Since then I’ve observed that phenomena – I don’t claim a one-to-one relationship between coal, gas and oil, – electricity too, but something not so far off.
So what to expect of future pricing? I don’t want to be crass, but we are a money society and things need money to work. There’s really never quite enough, is there? We are, or used to be, the richest nation on earth, even the lowliest reveling in marvels and luxuries unavailable to the highest and mightiest of yore. But we still can’t afford health care for many of us, can we? We have difficulty coming up with the scratch to educate our little darlings. So let’s look at the relationship between money and getting to work.
I don’t know whether you drive a motorized scooter or an eighty foot motor home, but let’s imagine you need fuel for a hundred miles. Since I can’t guess how much fuel you need, we shall make that quantity equal to a “blivet”. We’ll value one blivet as worth one “Yabut”, since I don’t know how much gas you need to buy and the buck isn’t stable these days anyway. Now let’s put that blivet underground to start with– how about under the sands of Saudi Arabia?
First we gotta get it outa there. Costs $0.01 to bring it to the wellhead – dollars sign indicating Yabut value. You’re paying for the whole blivet but only getting 99 percent of it.. I chose Saudi Arabia because it’s the cheapest place in the world in which to bring up the petroleum.
Now let’s transport what’s left of our blivet to the Alabama coast, refine it, and pipeline it over to the local wholesaler. That all costs. I don’t know how much. Let’s give it an arbitrary figure of a dime. Now your blivet operated machine can go 89 miles. Your local retailer gets a cut. Nickle? 84 miles. Still costs you one Yabut. Oil companies say take your mind off peak oil, don’t worry your little head about it. Petroleum isn’t the only fuel that can run your blivetmobile. We can sell you other liquids that will move you just fine. Sure they can. But for how much? They neglect that part. Perhaps for good reason.
Ethanol: Plow the field, disk and harrow, plant the field, pump water to irrigate the field. Send out those huge machines to harvest the crop. Truck the stuff to the plant, produce ethanol. Ship to your wholesaler for mixing – wouldn’t do to put the mix in the pipeline.
Guess what kind of fuel they were using all this while? Cheapest and best available? That’s petroleum. Can’t beat the stuff. And having used a blivet of the good stuff they’re selling you a blivet of ethanol with 70 percent of the energy content as petroleum. Such a deal we got for you.
Wait a minute – we just used a blivet of petroleum and a whole lot of people’s time and energy and the stuff still costs around the same as petroleum How can that be? Subsidize the stuff sufficiently, darling, and you’d be amazed what we can do. What is the subsidy, about $1.30/gallon, isn’t it?
Another interesting thing – twenty percent of the U.S. corn crop was converted into about two percent of our liquid fuel supply last year. The entire US corn crop would supply about ten percent of present demand for liquid fuel. Don’t worry? They’re the guys that killed street cars, aren’t they? Yeah, real pals.
Now the choke point. You use a blivet of petroleum to produce a blivet of ethanol. Both of them burned up and gone, both of them contributing to your own personal carbon footprint; the average American’s annual footprint is somewhere between 9 and 22 tons per year, depending on whose estimates you use. Ethanol should bump that up nicely, if that’s the term you would choose to use.
Well, okay, maybe ethanol isn’t going to save western civilization. But oil sand and oil shale – how ‘bout them? Be my guest. EROI is awful. A usable fuel is being produced from oil sand The producers are using petroleum to produce the product. In the case of either oil sand or oil shale I don’t think they can produce the product without truly large quantities of natural gas – which is a form of petroleum. In the end you pay more, get less, and are an increasing insult to the planet..
The cost of petroleum alternates is a multiple of the cost of petroleum. You will, one way or another, pay that price. Maybe the socialist form, in which the product is subsidized and the product is supported by you whether you use the product or not – just as we finance schools and cops. The only way to beat the subsidy is to get the stuff so expensive that nobody will buy it.
Which will inevitably happen in any event. Can’t drive anymore, good or bad? Not driving anymore will knock the stuffing out of your carbon footprint. Break your fifteen year old’s heart.
Oil company execs don’t dispute, in a general sense, what I said here. They’ve been telling us that the end of cheap energy is here but they will supply liquid fuel. I’m explaining why that is so. Oil company execs assuredly are not prepared to talk about carbon emissions when they do so. Shush about that.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 9:09 am and is filed under Energy Future, Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.