The Oil Drum: Local

Tomorrow we continue looking at the IEA WEO 2008. Tonight there is a press release by the Sierra Club. (Hat tip Jerome)

In a move that signals the start of the our clean energy future, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Appeals Board (EAB) ruled today EPA had no valid reason for refusing to limit from new coal-fired power plants the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming. The decision means that all new and proposed coal plants nationwide must go back and address their carbon dioxide emissions.

This is a guest post by Peter Salonius, a Canadian soil microbiologist.

According to Peter, humanity has probably been in overshoot of the Earth's carrying capacity since it abandoned hunter gathering in favor of crop cultivation (~ 8,000 BCE). The problem is that soil needs tightly woven natural ecosystems to properly recycle nutrients and prevent soil erosion. Earth's inhabitants have devised a whole series of approaches to increase the amount of food that can produced, starting first with hand-cultivation and culminating in the last century with the widespread use of fossil fuels. These approaches strip the soil of its nutrients and cause soil erosion. Even Permaculture cannot be expected to overcome these problems. According to the paper, eventually, to reach sustainability, the world will need to reduce its population to that of the hunter-gathers, and go back to living on the resources the natural ecosystems can produce.

Peter's paper begins below the fold.

This is a guest post by Alexis Ziegler. Alexis is a communitarian, builder, orchardist and environmental activist living in central Virginia. He is the author of a recently published book, Culture Change: Civil Liberty, Peak Oil, and the End of Empire. More information can be found at conev.org.

Abstract

The rapid expansion of biofuel production worldwide has paralleled a dramatic rise in food prices. The expansion of biofuels has been supported by a wide spectrum of people, from environmentalists looking for "sustainable" energy to conservatives wanting to reduce U.S. dependency on foreign oil. With food riots spreading, the U.S. remains committed to an expansion of biofuel.

Biofuels are part of a larger movement toward green capitalism, the idea that we can scale down our energy use through technologies that improve the efficiency of the consumer society. Biofuels are emblematic of the dark side of green capitalism, which is focused almost entirely on the well being of the global upper class. Biofuels are a form of nationalistic environmentalism that is creating a foundation on which more extreme nationalists will try to wed the racist tools of yesterday with a version of "sustainability" that will include the destruction of the global poor.

Real solutions are both impossibly difficult and simple. The cooperative societies in which most humans have always lived are capable of supporting a high standard of living with far less resources than the individualized, consumer society. Enlightened political leadership would be helpful, but we can create a sustainable society without it. Indeed, we have to.

The Oil Drum was recently ranked by Nielsen as the #4 sustainability site on the web (behind TreeHugger, WorldChanging, and Biopact). Biopact has a nice article on the report, which can be found here and from which the graphic below is duly appropriated.

The takeaway message: we have far to go with regard to making real progress on sustainability, folks. However, it is nice to see that our community is contributing in a small part. Keep it up. The more people who get the message, the more reason we have to be "sustainable," the more of a chance we have of lessening the pain. I'm not saying that I'm overly optimistic, but I'm saying that we have to continue to try to make the world a little bit better of a place. Thanks for helping us do so.

Below the fold is a link to the webinar and the report itself.

As I traveled through India on a recent business trip, the topic of energy was constantly on my mind (as it is every time I travel). I found out some interesting things about jatropha, toured a sugarcane ethanol plant, found a wind farm in the middle of nowhere, and encountered a native ethanol skeptic. Here are my impressions.

Stuart Staniford proposed a “way forward” for humanity in his article Powering Civilization to 2050. This article proposes an alternative vision: instead of trying to create continual, technological stop-gaps to the demands of growth, we must address the problem of growth head on. Infinite growth is impossible in a finite world--a great deal of economic growth may be possible without a growth in resource consumption, but eventually the notion of perpetual growth is predicated on perpetual increase in resource consumption. This growth in resource consumption causes problems: it brings civilization into direct conflict with our environmental support system. Growth is also one way of improving the standard of living for humanity by creating more economic produce, more material consumption per human. Growth, however, produces very unevenly distributed benefits, and there is little convincing evidence that the poorest, most abused 10% of humanity is actually better off today than the poorest, most abused 10% of past eras. Furthermore, if you accept my statement above that infinite growth is impossible in a finite world, then employing growth today to “solve” our immediate problems incurs the significant moral hazard of pushing the problem—perhaps the greatly exacerbated problem—of addressing growth itself on future generations.

With that in mind, my intent here is to propose one possible means for humanity to directly address the problem of growth itself. I am attempting to take what I see as an inherently pragmatic approach—one that does not rely on the universal cooperation of humanity, nor on the assumption of yet-to-be-developed technologies. My approach to the problem of growth is to stop trying to address its symptoms—overpopulation, pollution, global warming, peak oil—and attempt instead to identify and address the underlying source of the problem.

Introduction

I can be a very persistent (some might say hard-headed) person. If someone doesn't understand something that I think is important - and readily understandable - I will often continue to explain it until I am sure they either understand it and won't admit it, or they are incapable of understanding it. Because the topic of EROEI continues to be misunderstood (especially by those in the camp of "the only thing that matters is economics"), I will once again try.

Nate Hagens and I have discussed this subject at length on a number of occasions. He has written extensively on it, and I don't pretend that this essay can hold a candle to his magnum opus - and in my opinion best ever EROEI essay written at TOD - A Net Energy Parable - Why is EROI Important? (There's your dopamine fix for today, Nate.) This is just a little review of why I think EROEI matters.

Peter Newman is a hero of the sustainable transport movement in Australia. In this video he talks about the arrival of record oil prices and peak oil.

Peter Newman has spent thirty years of his career trying to prepare Australian cities for peak oil and he is one of the key people who helped push Perth towards its already very successful new rail infrastructure.

Click to watch the video

The figure above is taken from the 2004 edition of "The Limits to Growth". It shows the typical curves that the models of the study produce. These curves are similar to those of oil depletion studies based on the "Hubbert model". The similarity is not casual, the theory and the method behind the two approaches have a lot in common.

This is a guest post on energy and our agricultural system, by Jason Bradford, who has written here previously on "Relocalization: A Strategic Response to Peak Oil and Climate Change". Jason has a Phd in Biology and has written/published on the topics of relocalization and ecological economics. He is the founder of Willits Economic Localization (WELL) and runs a CSA in Willits, CA. (He also has a biweekly radio show "The Reality Report", where next Monday at noon EST he and I will be discussing evolution, addiction and economics. His show can be heard streaming online at www.kzyx.org.)