The Danger of Inspiration: A Review of On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal

Naomi Klein’s new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, has one crippling flaw—it’s inspiring. At this moment in history, inspiring talk about solutions to multiple, cascading ecological crises is dangerous. Republished from the Resilience site……

At the conclusion of these 18 essays that bluntly outline the crises and explain a Green New Deal response, Klein bolsters readers searching for hope: “[W]hen the future of life is at stake, there is nothing we cannot achieve.” It is tempting to embrace that claim, especially after nearly 300 pages of Klein’s eloquent writing that weaves insightful analysis together with honest personal reflection.

The problem, of course, is that the statement is not even close to being true. With nearly 8 billion people living within a severely degraded ecosphere, there are many things we cannot, and will not, achieve. A decent human future—perhaps any human future at all—depends on our ability to come to terms with these limits. That is not a celebration of cynicism or a rationalization for nihilism, but rather the starting point for rational planning that takes seriously not only our potential but also the planet’s biophysical constraints.

Klein’s essays in this volume make it clear that she is well aware of those limits, but the book’s subtitle suggests that she is writing not only to inform but also to mobilize support for Green New Deal proposals. This tension runs throughout the book—when Klein reports on and analyzes the state of the world, the prose challenges readers to face difficult realities, but when making the case for those policy proposals, she sounds more like an organizer rallying supporters.

That’s not a dig—Klein is a writer who doesn’t sit on the sidelines but gets involved with movements and political projects. Her commitment to activism and organizing is admirable, but it can pull a writer in conflicting directions.

This critique should not lead anyone to ignore On Fire, which is an excellent book that should be read cover to cover, without skipping chapters that had been previously published. Collections of essays can fall flat because of faded timeliness or unnecessary repetition, but neither are a problem here. As always, Klein’s sharp eye for detail makes her reporting on events compelling, whether she’s describing disasters (natural and unnatural) or assessing political trends. And, despite the grim realities we face, the book is a pleasure to read.

Before explaining concerns with the book’s inspirational tone, I want to emphasize key points Klein makes that I agree are essential to a left/progressive analysis of the ecological crises:

• First-World levels of consumption are unsustainable;
• capitalism is incompatible with a livable human future;
• the modern industrial world has undermined people’s connections to each other and the non-human world; and
• we face not only climate disruption but a host of other crises, including, but not limited to, species extinction, chemical contamination, and soil erosion and degradation.

In other words, business-as-usual is a dead end, which Klein states forthrightly:

I feel confident in saying that a climate-disrupted future is a bleak and an austere future, one capable of turning all our material possessions into rubble or ash with terrifying speed. We can pretend that extending the status quo into the future, unchanged, is one of the options available to us. But that is a fantasy. Change is coming one way or another. Our choice is whether we try to shape that change to the maximum benefit of all or wait passively as the forces of climate disaster, scarcity, and fear of the “other” fundamentally reshape us.

On Fire focuses primarily on the climate crisis and the Green New Deal’s vision, which is widely assailed as too radical by the two different kinds of climate-change deniers in the United States today—one that denies the conclusions of climate science and another that denies the implications of that science. The first, based in the Republican Party, is committed to a full-throated defense of our pathological economic system. The second, articulated by the few remaining moderate Republicans and most mainstream Democrats, imagines that market-based tinkering to mitigate the pathology is adequate.

Thankfully, other approaches exist. The most prominent in the United States is the Green New Deal’s call for legislation that recognizes the severity of the ecological crises while advocating for economic equality and social justice. Supporters come from varied backgrounds, but all are happy to critique and modify, or even scrap, capitalism. Avoiding dogmatic slogans or revolutionary rhetoric, Klein writes realistically about moving toward a socialist (or, perhaps, socialist-like) future, using available tools involving “public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption, and taxation” to steer out of the existing debacle.

One of the strengths of Klein’s blunt talk about the social and ecological problems in the context of real-world policy proposals is that she speaks of motion forward in a long struggle rather than pretending the Green New Deal is the solution for all our problems. On Firemakes it clear that there are no magic wands to wave, no magic bullets to fire.

The problem is that the Green New Deal does rely on one bit of magical thinking—the techno-optimism that emerges from the modern world’s underlying technological fundamentalism, defined as the faith that the use of evermore advanced technology is always a good thing. Extreme technological fundamentalists argue that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology. (If anyone thinks this definition a caricature, read “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.”)

Klein does not advocate such fundamentalism, but that faith hides just below the surface of the Green New Deal, jumping out in “A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” which Klein champions in On Fire. Written by U.S. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (the most prominent legislator advancing the Green New Deal) and Avi Lewis (Klein’s husband and collaborator), the seven-and-a-half minute video elegantly combines political analysis with engaging storytelling and beautiful visuals. But one sentence in that video reveals the fatal flaw of the analysis: “We knew that we needed to save the planet and that we had all the technology to do it [in 2019].”

First, talk of saving the planet is misguided. As many have pointed out in response to that rhetoric, the Earth will continue with or without humans. Charitably, we can interpret that phrase to mean, “reducing the damage that humans do to the ecosphere and creating a livable future for humans.” The problem is, we don’t have all technology to do that, and if we insist that better gadgets can accomplish that, we are guaranteed to fail.

Reasonable people can, and do, disagree about this claim. (For example, “The science is in,” proclaims the Nature Conservancy, and we can have a “future in which catastrophic climate change is kept at bay while we still power our developing world” and “feed 10 billion people.”) But even accepting overly optimistic assessments of renewable energy and energy-saving technologies, we have to face that we don’t have the means to maintain the lifestyle that “A Message from the Future” promises for the United States, let alone the entire world. The problem is not just that the concentration of wealth leads to so much wasteful consumption and wasted resources, but that the infrastructure of our world was built by the dense energy of fossil fuels that renewables cannot replace. Without that dense energy, a smaller human population is going to live in dramatically different fashion.

Welcome to the third rail of contemporary political life. The question that the multiple, cascading ecological crises put squarely in front of us is, “What is a sustainable human population?” That question has to be split in two: “How many people? Consuming how much?”

It’s no surprise that political candidates ignore these questions, but progressive writers and activists should not back away. Honestly engaging these issues takes us well beyond the Green New Deal.

On the second of those questions—“consuming how much?”—Klein frequently highlights the problem, but with a focus on “profligate consumption.” She stresses the need to:

• “scale back overconsumption”;
• identify categories in which we must contract, “including air travel, meat consumption, and profligate energy use”; [I do wish people would get off the back of meat consumption and point the finger at industrial scale agriculture instead…]
• end “the high-carbon lifestyle of suburban sprawl and disposable consumption”;
• reject capitalism’s faith in “limitless consumption” that locks us in “the endless consumption cycle”; and
• make deep changes “not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system.”

No argument with any of those statements, especially because Klein rejects the notion that simply improving efficiency will solve our problems, a common assumption of the techno-optimists. But challenging “overconsumption by the comparatively wealthy” focuses on the easy target: “The bottom line is that an ecological crisis that has its roots in the overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by improving the efficiency of our economies, but also by reducing the amount of material stuff that the wealthiest 20 percent of people on the planet consume.”

My goal is not to defend rich people or their consumption habits. However, constraining the lifestyles of the rich and famous is a necessary but not sufficient condition for sustainability. Here we have to deal with the sticky question of human nature. Klein rightly rejects capitalism’s ideological claim that people’s capacity to act out of greed and short-term self-interest (which all of us certainly are capable of doing) is the dominant human trait. Human nature also includes the capacity to act out of compassion in solidarity with others, of course, and different systems reward different parts of our nature. Capitalism encourages the greed and discourages the compassion, to the detriment of people and planet.

But we are organic creatures, and that means there is a human nature, or what we might more accurately call our human-carbon nature. As Wes Jackson of The Land Institute puts it, life on Earth is “the scramble for energy-rich carbon,” and humans have gotten exceedingly good at grabbing lots of carbon. Not all cultures go after it with the same intensity, of course, but that scramble predates capitalism and will continue after capitalism. This doesn’t mean we are condemned to make the planet unlivable for ourselves and other creatures, but public policy has to recognize that we not only need carbon to survive but that most people—including most environmentalists—like the work that carbon can do for us when we burn those fossil fuels. And once we get a taste of what that carbon can do, it’s not easy to give it up.

As Klein points out, curbing our carbon-seeking is not merely a test of will power and matter of individual virtue; collective action through public policy is needed. I believe that requires a hard cap on carbon—limits that we can encourage people to accept through cultural advocacy but in the end must be imposed through law. A sensible approach, called “cap and adapt,” has been proposed by Larry Edwards and Stan Cox. In a forthcoming book, Cox will expand on a cap-and-ration strategy that could help in “drawing the human economy back within necessary ecological limits,” a follow-up to, and expansion of, his earlier book that made a compelling case for a rationing.

There’s no simple answer to how much energy and material resources we can consume without undermining the ecosystems on which our own lives depend, but I’m confident in saying that it’s dramatically less that we consume today, and that reducing aggregate consumption—even if we could create equitable societies—will be difficult. But that’s the easy part. Much more difficult is the first question—“how many people?”

On the question of population, On Fire is silent, and it’s not hard to understand, for several reasons. First, the Earth has a carrying capacity for any species but it’s impossible to predict when we will reach it (or did reach it), and failed attempts at prediction in the past have made people wary. Second, some of the most vocal supporters of population control also espouse white supremacy, which has tainted even asking the question. Third, while we know that raising the status of women and educating girls reduces birth rates, it’s difficult to imagine a non-coercive strategy for serious population reduction on the scale necessary. Still, we should acknowledge ecological carrying capacity while pursuing social justice and rejecting anti-immigration projects. Progressives’ unwillingness to address the issue cedes the terrain to “eco-fascists,” those who want to use ecological crises to pursue a reactionary agenda.

There’s no specific number to offer for a sustainable human population, but I’m confident in saying that it’s fewer than 8 billion and that finding a humane and democratic path to that lower number is difficult to imagine. [I’ll offer one, and it’s well below one billion – https://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/losing-our-energy-slaves/%5D

The fact that these questions are troubling and/or impossible to answer does not mean the questions do not matter. For now, my answer—a lot fewer people and a lot less stuff—is adequate to start a conversation: “A sustainable human presence on the planet will mean fewer people consuming less.” Agree or disagree? Why or why not?

Two responses are possible from Green New Deal supporters: (1) I’m nuts, or (2) I’m not nuts, but what I’m suggesting is politically impossible because people can’t handle all this bad news.

If I am nuts, critics have to demonstrate what is unsound about the argument, without resorting to the cliché that “necessity is the mother of invention” and the faith-based claims of the technological fundamentalists.

If I am not, then those Green supporters face a quandary. When mainstream Democrats tell progressive folks that the Green New Deal is doomed to fail because it is not politically viable at this moment, supporters counter, appropriately, by saying that anything less is inadequate in the face of the crises. Those supporters argue, appropriately, that the real failure is supporting policies that don’t do enough to create sustainable human societies and that we need to build a movement for the needed change. I agree, but by that logic, if the Green New Deal itself is inadequate to create sustainability, then we must push further.

The Green New Deal is a start, insufficiently radical but with the potential to move the conversation forward—if we can be clear about the initiative’s limitations. That presents a problem for organizers, who seek to rally support without uncomfortable caveats—“Support this plan! But remember that it’s just a start, and it gets a lot rougher up ahead, and whatever we do may not be enough to stave off unimaginable suffering” is, admittedly, not a winning slogan.

Back to what I think Klein is right about, and eloquent in expressing:

Because while it is true that climate change is a crisis produced by an excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it is also, in a more profound sense, a crisis produced by an extractive mind-set, by a way of viewing both the natural world and the majority of its inhabitants as resources to use up and then discard. I call it the “gig and dig” economy and firmly believe that we will not emerge from this crisis without a shift in worldview at every level, a transformation to an ethos of care and repair.

The domination/subordination dynamic that creates so much suffering within the human family also defines the modern world’s destructive relationship to the larger living world. Throughout the book, Klein presses the importance of telling a new story about all those relationships. Scientific data and policy proposals matter, but they don’t get us far without a story for people to embrace. Klein is right, and On Fire helps us imagine a new story for a human future.

I offer a friendly amendment to the story she is constructing: Our challenge is to highlight not only what we can but also what we cannot accomplish, to build our moral capacity to face a frightening future but continue to fight for what can be achieved, even when we know that won’t be enough.

One story I would tell is of the growing gatherings of people, admittedly small in number today, who take comfort in saying forthrightly what they believe, no matter how painful—people who do not want to suppress their grief, yet do not let their grief overwhelm them.

What kind of person wants to live like that? I can offer a real-life example, my late friend Jim Koplin. He once told me, in a conversation about those multiple, cascading ecological crises (a term I stole from him, with his blessing), “I wake up every morning in a state of profound grief.” He was neither depressed nor irrational but simply honest. Jim, a Depression-era farm boy who had been permanently radicalized in the 1960s, felt that grief more deeply than anyone I have known, yet every day he got up to work in his garden and then offer his time and energy to a variety of political, community, and arts groups that were fighting for a better world.

Klein speaks of this grief in On Fire, in what for me were the most moving passages, often involving her young son’s future in the face of this “planetary death spiral”:

There is no question that the strongest emotions I have about the climate crisis have to do with [Toma] and his generation—the tremendous intergenerational theft under way. I have flashes of sheer panic about the extreme weather we have already locked in for these kids. Even more intense than this fear is the sadness about what they won’t ever know. They are growing up in a mass extinction, robbed of the cacophonous company of so many fast-disappearing life forms. It feels so desperately lonely.

The escape from loneliness, for me, starts with recognizing that Jim’s “state of profound grief” was not only wholly rational but also emotionally healthy. When told that even if this harsh assessment is correct, people can’t handle it, I agree. No one can handle all this. Jim couldn’t handle it every waking minute. I don’t handle it as well as he did. At best, we struggle to come to terms with a “bleak and austere” future.

But that’s exactly why we need to engage rather than avoid the distressing realities of our time. If we are afraid to speak honestly, we suffer alone. Better that we tell the truth and accept the consequences, together.

Peak Copper is coming….

Elon Musk told a closed-door Washington conference of miners, regulators and lawmakers that he sees a shortage of EV minerals coming, including copper and nickel (Scheyder 2019).   Other rare metals used in cars include neodymium, lanthanum, terbium, and dysprosium (Gorman 2009).

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

***

Richard A. Kerr. February 14, 2014. The Coming Copper Peak.  Science 343:722-724.

Production of the vital metal will top out and decline within decades, according to a new model that may hold lessons for other resources.

If you take social unrest and environmental factors into account, the peak could be as early as the 2020s

As a crude way of taking account of social and environmental constraints on production, Northey and colleagues reduced the amount of copper available for extraction in their model by 50%. Then the peak that came in the late 2030s falls to the early 2020s, just a decade away.

After peak Copper

Whenever it comes, the copper peak will bring change.  Graedel and his Yale colleagues reported in a paper published on 2 December 2013 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that copper is one of four metals—chromium, manganese, and lead being the others—for which “no good substitutes are presently available for their major uses.”

If electrons are the lifeblood of a modern economy, copper makes up its blood vessels. In cables, wires, and contacts, copper is at the core of the electrical distribution system, from power stations to the internet. A small car has 20 kilograms (44 lbs) of copper in everything from its starter motor to the radiator; hybrid cars have twice that. But even in the face of exponentially rising consumption—reaching 17 million metric tons in 2012—miners have for 10,000 years met the world’s demand for copper.

But perhaps not for much longer. A group of resource specialists has taken the first shot at projecting how much more copper miners will wring from the planet. In their model runs, described this month in the journal Resources, Conservation and Recycling, production peaks by about mid-century even if copper is more abundant than most geologists believe.

Predicting when production of any natural resource will peak is fraught with uncertainty. Witness the running debate over when world oil production will peak (Science, 3 February 2012, p. 522).

The team is applying its depletion model to other mineral resources, from oil to lithium, that also face exponentially escalating demands on a depleting resource.

The world’s copper future is not as rosy as a minimum “125-year supply” might suggest, however. For one thing, any future world will have more people in it, perhaps a third more by 2050. And the hope, at least, is that a larger proportion of those people will enjoy a higher standard of living, which today means a higher consumption of copper per person. Sooner or later, world copper production will increase until demand cannot be met from much-depleted deposits. At that point, production will peak and eventually go into decline—a pattern seen in the early 1970s with U.S. oil production.

For any resource, the timing of the peak depends on a dynamic interplay of geology, economics, and technology. But resource modeler Steve Mohr of the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), in Australia, waded in anyway. For his 2010 dissertation, he developed a mathematical model for projecting production of mineral resources, taking account of expected demand and the amount thought to be still in the ground. In concept, it is much like the Hubbert curves drawn for peak oil production, but Mohr’s model is the first to be applied to other mineral resources without the assumption that supplies are unlimited.

Exponential growth

Increasing the amount of accessible copper by 50% to account for what might yet be discovered moves the production peak back only a few years, to about 2045 — even doubling the copper pushes peak production back only to about 2050.  Quadrupling only delays peak until 2075.

Copper trouble spots

The world has been so thoroughly explored for copper that most of the big deposits have probably already been found. Although there will be plenty of discoveries, they will likely be on the small side.

“The critical issues constraining the copper industry are social, environmental, and economic,” Mudd writes in an e-mail. Any process intended to extract a kilogram of metal locked in a ton of rock buried hundreds of meters down inevitably raises issues of energy and water consumption, pollution, and local community concerns.

Civil war and instability make many large copper deposits unavailable

Mudd has a long list of copper mining trouble spots. The Reko Diq deposit in northwestern Pakistan close to both Iran and Afghanistan holds $232 billion of copper, but it is tantalizingly out of reach, with security problems and conflicts between local government and mining companies continuing to prevent development. The big Panguna mine in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, has been closed for 25 years, ever since its social and environmental effects sparked a 10-year civil war that left about 20,000 dead.

Are we about to destroy the largest salmon fishery in the world for copper?

On 15 January the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a study of the potential effects of the yet-to-be-proposed Pebble Mine on Bristol Bay in southwestern Alaska. Environmental groups had already targeted the project, and the study gives them plenty of new ammunition, finding that it would destroy as much as 150 kilometers of salmon-supporting streams and wipe out more than 2000 hectares of wetlands, ponds, and lakes.

Gold and Oil have already peaked

Copper is far from the only mineral resource in a race between depletion—which pushes up costs—and new technology, which can increase supply and push costs down. Gold production has been flat for the past decade despite a soaring price (Science, 2 March 2012, p. 1038). Much crystal ball–gazing has considered the fate of world oil production. “Peakists” think the world may be at or near the peak now, pointing to the long run of $100-a-barrel oil as evidence that the squeeze is already on.

Coal likely to peak in 2034, all fossil fuels by 2030, according to Mohr’s model

Fridley, Heinberg, Patzek, and other scientists believe Peak Coal is already here or likely by 2020.

Coal will begin to falter soon after, his model suggests, with production most likely peaking in 2034. The production of all fossil fuels, the bottom line of his dissertation, will peak by 2030, according to Mohr’s best estimate. Only lithium, the essential element of electric and hybrid vehicle batteries, looks to offer a sufficient supply through this century. So keep an eye on oil and gold the next few years; copper may peak close behind.

References

Gorman, S. August 30, 2009. As hybrid cars gobble rare metals, shortage looms. Reuters.

Scheyder, E. 2019. Exclusive: Tesla expects global shortage of electric vehicle battery minerals. Reuters.

Impact of climate change on Hydro Tasmania’s Dams

This is a guest post by Chris Harries, a consumate reader and follower of this blog. To my way of thinking, this shows yet again that renewables will not be able to power the future as we currently take for granted.

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Water inflows into Tasmania’s western river systems has been inexorably declining in recent decades. Furthermore, runoff is predicted to continue to decline in these catchments to the end of this century. This climate change trend has quite profound negative implications for Hydro Tasmania’s future business performance. A summary of these findings is attached – as extracted from Climate Futures for Tasmania CRC research document. It should be noted that the lowered water inflows are only partly caused by reduced rainfall. A bigger factor is soil dryness, caused by increased ambient temperatures. This factor reduces run-off more markedly, especially in the shoulder seasons (Autumn and Spring) Reduced runoff into the hydro-electric system can be notionally apportioned thus: 30% resulting from reduced rainfall as compared to 70% as a result of the soil dryness factor.

As a consequence of declining water runoff Hydro Tasmania officially downgraded the Long Term Average Energy Yield of its hydro system by over 10 percent in 2008. To graphically appreciate the scale of this, this equates to an equivalent loss of 130 MW of power generation capacity. To
replace that loss with new dam infrastructure would cost the business upward of $500 million. This downgrade was based on retrospective evidence from the previous 20 years performance data, showing that the performance of its whole system had been in decline, as shown in the

chart below. That time period was long enough for the business to accept the reality that this was an impact of climate change, not a temporal weather fluctuation issue.

Hydro Tasmania is fully aware that this trend in gradually lowered water inflows, is predicted to continue for the rest of this century.

This chart, showing electricity yield of the Tasmanian system, clearly shows the trend described above. Look at the horizontal bars. This information resulted in a downgrade of the system’s rated output by a factor of 10 percent.

Why soil dryness matters

Just as increasing soil dryness is causing dramatic changes to wildfire incidences in Tasmania, the very same condition is having dramatic impact on the state’s hydro-electric system. To understand this it is informative to compare Tasmania’s monthly rainfall with its river flows. From this chart we can see that Tasmania receives fairly even distribution of rainfall throughout the year.

By contrast the runoff into our river systems markedly peaks in winter months. The chart below shows a fairly typical pattern in this regard. Why is this so?

This phenomenon is almost entirely explained by the effect of soil dryness (temperature related). When soils become saturated, as they do in Winter, any rains that fall will instantly run off into streams and rivers. However, in warmer months when soils are dry a frontal shower may wet the soil surface temporarily and then evaporate without running off at all.

This hyper sensitivity – between soil dryness and water runoff – is resulting in rather dramatic consequences as climate change increases ambient temperatures, shrinking the mid-year band, above, where water flows are relied upon to replenish storages.

This drying trend is continuing

This year the Bureau of Meteorology published further clear data showing that these trends are continuing right to the present. The two charts below record a high level of deviation from historic conditions from the early 1970s to the present.

This data applies to the whole of Tasmania. The negative trend would be magnified further in the state’s western river catchments. It is perhaps a sobering thought that had the Franklin Dam being built it would have served no purpose at all other than to shore up declining system output.

Looking into the future

As we look to the future now, this double whammy (less precipitation + higher temperatures) has serious consequences for the bottom line of hydro-electric production and profitability.

Hydro Tasmania’s currently estimates that Tasmania is 90% self sufficient in electricity supply (from hydro + wind energy capacity). This estimate may indeed be a generous, top end figure since longer term climate trends become statistically valid only over considerable time. A few drought years can be seen as an aberration, accepting that weather fluctuates from year to year anyway. Longer term trends tend to be accepted only after following a good many years of data collection.

Continued modeling is being undertaken to further refine analysis of these climate change trends for Tasmania.

Why this may be the main driver behind the Battery of Nation project. It is worth putting these regressive energy losses into a practical context. The hard reality for Tasmania is that climate change induced energy losses from the Hydro system mean that 9,154 new 5kW rooftop solar systems would need to be added each year, just to compensate for climate change losses alone. This is three times the current installation rate of solar in Tasmania.

Alternatively, this would be equivalent to adding 6 new wind turbines (of typical capacity) each year to compensate for loss of hydro-electric output. That is, a major new wind farm, comprising sixty wind turbines, would have to be built each ten years just to stop us slipping backwards.

It should be noted here that the predicted decline in Long Term Average Yield of our power system affects base load supply. Hydro Tasmania can only supply energy to meet base load demand according to how much water goes into its dams.

From this we can see why the corporation is so keen to pursue its much vaunted Battery of the Nation project. Pumped-hydro technology is much less rainfall dependent because it stores energy by cycling the same water (generating electricity then pumping the same water back up). Hydro Tasmania’s ultimate expressed aim is to switch its entire hydro-electric system from base load energy production to peak load supply for the national market, seeing this in the interest of optimising its business bottom line.

References
Cooperative Research Centre: Water and catchments summary
‘Climate Futures’ reports for Tasmania
State government website
Hydro Tasmania Annual Report 2009
Entura website reference (mainly focuses on managing drought)

WHO wants change………??

Hot on the heels of David Attenborough’s climate show, along comes this great article by Tim Watkins……..

Goldsmiths kebab

We learned yesterday that a British university had made a small contribution to addressing a climate emergency that its spokespeople argue is going to kill us all just 12 years from now.  As Katherine Sellgren at the BBC reports:

“A university is banning the sale of [beef] burgers to try to fight global warming.

“Goldsmiths, University of London, is removing all beef products from sale – and charging a 10p levy on bottled water and single-use plastic cups.

“It plans to install more solar panels across its New Cross campus, in south-east London, and switch to a 100% clean energy supplier as soon as possible.

“It will spend money on its allotment and identify other areas where planting could help to absorb carbon dioxide.”

Banning beef burgers and deploying a handful of solar panels (made in China in coal-powered factories and shipped to the UK on oil-powered ships; where their addition to the Grid will increase the risk of power cuts) is little more than a gesture which, in any case, involves no real sacrifice for those making the decision.  Indeed, this was called out by an interviewer on the BBC Radio4 Today programme, who pointed out that the meaningful changes suggested by the IPCC, such as refurbishing buildings to make them energy efficient would make a much bigger impact than a burger ban.  And so a Student Union representative was asked whether they would support such a major refurbishment… even if it meant that students at the college might have to pay additional tuition fees.  The predictable response was, “Oh no.  Students want free education.”

This, of course, gets to the nub of the problem with addressing the growing environmental catastrophe.  Three-quarters of us (outside the USA) accept the science.  Two-thirds of us agree that “something must be done.”  Less than half of us are prepared to vote for anyone who promises to do something.  And less than ten percent of us are prepared to make meaningful sacrifices to lower our carbon footprints – and those who are, are seldom those who can most afford to do so.  As John Michael Greer points out:

“For years now, since that brief period when I was a very minor star in the peak oil movement, I’ve noted a curious dynamic in the climate change-centered end of environmentalism. Almost always, the people I met at peak oil events who were concerned about peak oil and the fate of industrial society more generally, rather than climate change or such other mediacentric causes as the plight of large cute animals, were ready and willing to make extensive changes in their own lives, in addition to whatever political activism they might engage in. Almost always, the people I met who were exclusively concerned with anthropogenic climate change were not.

“I can be even more precise. With vanishingly few exceptions, the people I met who were solely concerned with anthropogenic climate change insisted loudly that what needed to happen was that someone else, somewhere else, had to stop using so much carbon.”

The predictable result is that a host of climate change media stars with carbon footprints the size of small countries descend upon conferences around the planet – most recently the Google event on Sicily – to lecture the rest of us on why we must change our lifestyles to combat climate change; just before they leap back on board their carbon-belching private jets and luxury yachts to be whisked away to the next jolly.

The difference today, however, is that the people aren’t buying it any more.  In part, this is due to the hypocrisy of these media stars.  In large part, however, the people have wised up to the fact that while all of the costs of combatting climate change always seem to land on the shoulders of the poor; all of the benefits go to the same elite that the climate change media stars belong to.  As Greer notes:

“Some of what else is going on came to the surface a few years ago in Washington State when a group of environmental activists launched an initiative that would have slapped a fee on carbon. As such things go, it was a well-designed initiative, and one of the best things about it was that it was revenue-neutral:  that is, the money taken in by the carbon fee flowed right back out through direct payments to citizens, so that rising energy prices due to the carbon fee wouldn’t clobber the economy or hurt the poor.

“That, in turn, made it unacceptable to the Democratic Party in Washington State, and they refused to back the initiative, dooming it to defeat. Shortly thereafter they floated their own carbon fee initiative, which was anything but revenue neutral.  Rather, it was set up to funnel all the money from the carbon fee into a slush fund managed by a board the public wouldn’t get to elect, which would hand out the funds to support an assortment of social justice causes that were also helpfully sheltered from public oversight. Unsurprisingly, the second initiative also lost heavily—few Washington State voters were willing to trust their breathtakingly corrupt political establishment with yet another massive source of graft at public expense.”

This is the same phenomenon that caused what should have been a relatively simple increase in the tax on diesel fuel in France to erupt into widespread protest on a scale not seen since the heady days of 1968.  It is also why an Australian Labor Party manifesto that promised radical action on the environment, and that was apparently supported by the majority of Australians, resulted in a “miracle victory” for the pro-fossil fuel Liberal/National coalition at last May’s general election.

In the grossly unequal economies that we have spent the best part of forty years creating, unless the response to the environmental crisis begins at the very top, it isn’t going to begin at all.  And while this may cast ordinary people in the role of Luddites standing in the way of the progress that we supposedly need; the people may actually have a better understanding of the problem than the media celebrities. 

A new documentary Planet of the Humans by Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs – hardly right-wing climate change deniers – set out to understand how fossil fuel lobbyists and corrupt politicians had thwarted the increasingly urgent transition to a carbon neutral future.  What they found, however – and what the documentary details – is an equally corrupt “green energy” lobby that has no real solutions to the predicament we are in.  As Michael Donnelly at Counterpunch explains:

“The basic conclusion is that we have been following corporate foundation-financed, Democratic Party-tied misleadership and that is why we are where we are.

“The bottom line is that there are: Too many Clever Apes; consuming too much; too rapidly. And ALL efforts on addressing the climate costs are reduced to illusions/delusions designed to keep our over-sized human footprint and out-of-control consumption chugging along without any consumer sacrifices or loss of consumption-based profits…

“Forget all you have heard about how ‘Renewable Energy’ is our salvation. It is all a myth that is very lucrative for some. Feel-good stuff like electric cars, etc. Such vehicles are actually powered by coal, natural gas… or dead salmon in the Northwest.”

Donnelly goes on to list some of the documentary’s “inconvenient truths” such as that the top beneficiaries of solar energy subsidies in the USA turn out to be every leftist’s favourite cartoon villains the Koch Brothers…

“None of these technologies existed, nor could they exist, without fossil fuels. The grid cannot even operate without fossil fuel-derived steam-generated baseloads – in the spring when hydro is surging, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) cuts off wind power (and still has to pay its providers after a lawsuit), yet has to keep the Boardman Coal plant (Oregon’s top carbon polluter) running in order to balance the baseload. Even eCon Musk’s famed battery plant in Nevada is powered by…fracked natural gas. The huge bird and desert-destroying Ivanpah Solar array in California also has fracked natural gas as an essential ingredient.”

Worse still, the documentary catches leading stars of the bright green movement admitting in Clintonesque fashion that they have one message for the plebs and an entirely different one for the people who matter:

“Planet examines a range of policy influencers/professional environmentalists/opportunists, etc. and even lets them hang themselves. It not only takes on the obvious bad guys like the Kochs, it lets folks like McKibben, Al Gore, Richard Branson, Robert Kennedy, Jr, who are ostensibly on ‘our’ side, hang themselves by showing clips of them speaking to environmentalists and then clips of them speaking to industry about all the profits to be made.

“McKibben is shown twice praising Biomass (they gave him every chance to condemn it), interspersed with a scene of a mountaintop removal operation in his home state of Vermont – for a wind farm!

“Robert Kennedy, Jr. informs his fellow millionaires of all the profits to be made on ‘green’ energy. Al Gore basically admits it’s all about diversion and profits. Branson, like eCon Musk, of course, is solely in it for the money.

“Fellow billionaire Michael Bloomberg got down to it and basically bought the Sierra Club with tens of millions in donations tied to the Club promoting one of his cash cows, Fracked Natural Gas, as the ‘Bridge Fuel to a Green Energy future!’”

None of this comes as a surprise to those of us who regard climate change as merely one element of a broader three E’s – Energy, Environment, Economy – predicament that is itself driven by having roughly 6.5 billion too many humans on Planet Earth.  What is different, however, is that the realisation that the green techno-utopian celebrity crowd are con artists has begun to seep into the consciousness of the leftward end of the body politic in recent months.  As Donnelly notes, despite Moore and Gibbs fearing the reaction of people in the broader environmental movement:

“’Planet of the Humans’ premiered at the gloriously community-restored State Theatre July 31st at the 15th Traverse City, MI Film Festival with three sold-out/standing ovation showings followed by Q & A’s with the creators.”

Greer observes a similar shift at the leftward end of the US media:

“What sets this year’s conference apart from earlier examples of the same sorry type is that this time, the other end of the political spectrum has finally decided to start calling out absurd climate change hypocrisy for what it is. Here’s the redoubtable Rex Murphy of the National Post, for example, giving the Sicily conference and its brightly burnished celebrity attendees a good sound thrashing. You can find other examples easily enough if you step out of the airtight bubble of mainstream popular culture—and these days, the bubble is not quite as airtight as it once was and some of the criticism is starting to slip through.”

Ironically, the green energy snake oil salesmen have probably brought this reaction down upon their own heads.  By backing increasingly urgent messages about our imminent extinction to sell us billions of dollars’ worth of non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting devices; they have caused people to ask serious questions about why – if the emergency is so urgent – these people are not adopting lifestyles in line with their warnings; and why – if green energy technologies are the solution – governments around the planet have failed to adopt them in meaningful quantities.

The issue here is not with the seriousness of the crisis, but with the way just one solution is on offer; and it just happens to be the one that makes the rich even richer and the poor even poorer.  As Greer puts it:

“It’s as though your house was on fire and someone pounded on your door, insisting that you had to sign a contract giving him your property so he could fight the fire. You shouldn’t sign the contract, and the reasons he brandishes to try to talk you into signing it are bogus, but that doesn’t change the fact that your house really is on fire.”

The BBC too, seemingly, is beginning to grasp some of this cultural shift; and thus is prepared to kebab the “feel good” Goldsmiths story as little more than a futile gesture at someone else’s expense.  Gone are the joyous days of spring, when climate campaigners had the support of most of the media.  From here on in, even those outlets on “our” side are going to be casting a critical eye over environmental policies that will very likely be found wanting.

The stark reality, of course, is that as we slide ever further along the downslope of the industrial age, and as our ability to repair the damage wrought by the global weirding of our climate, higher education itself will be going away.  The lifestyles we are going to be living – whether we choose to adopt them ourselves or whether mother nature forces them upon us – are going to be far less consumptive, far more localised, and far more focused on the production of basic necessities… like food.  And in the near future, those Goldsmiths folk may well find themselves pining for one of those burgers they just banned.

Climate Change: the facts

Last night, I watched “Climate Change: the facts” presented by David Attenborough

https://iview.abc.net.au/show/climate-change-the-facts/video/ZW2018A001S00

That link won’t let me watch it in my Linux laptop, though it worked on my phone and the smart TV we watch in the house we currently rent to as we while away Winter as I try to get the house ready for Christmas…… I can’t in all honesty recommend it, it was just as disappointing as I expected. Most of my readers already know climate change is upon us, and will most likely realise it will be the demise of nature for millions of years, and our civilisation; watching this film will not make you change your mind….!

It presents why we have to act urgently, with well known talking heads like Michael Mann and James Hansen, though, for a British film, it left out Kevin Andersen…. It’s the heavily laid on hopium at the end that had had me writhing in my seat……

It also tells huge porkies. Like saying the UK generates 30% of its electricity from renewables while leaving out the fact all the wind turbines were idle for a week during a complete lull in the weather.

Then it presented electric vehicles, and hydrogen powered ones, as a fait accompli. But they really lost me when the BBC stated “the science is in, we have to stop eating meat”

As my friend Jacqueline recently wrote, “We need to change our entire agricultural system. ALL of it, not just the beef and dairy. We need local food production, agro-ecological, that means that it doesn’t damage the ‘environment’ in production, and that also means that the type of agriculture has to fit with the local ‘biome’. If we do that, we will have a healthy diet with small amounts of everything on healthy land, with healthy animals and healthy farmers and consumers. We’d be paying farmers directly and they wouldn’t be spending so much on pesticides, fertilisers and feed that only make the corporations rich.

As long as people say ‘get rid of cows’ instead of ‘change the entire industrial agricultural system’, we are still going to be destroying everything. 

Incidentally, cows kept under appropriate conditions (silvo-pasture for example) so they can graze and browse don’t drink millions of litres a year because they get their water from the grass. And believe it or not, there are good farmers who grow food appropriately and keep cattle in ways that actually improve soil health and sequester carbon.”

The problem with shows like this is that they only concentrate on one admittedly serious problem; as we know here, we’re heading into all sorts of trouble. I was recently asked on social media, which was worse: climate change, economic collapse, peak oil, or the 6th mass extinction? This is of course typical human compartmentalisation; it’s not a contest I replied, it’s a perfect storm…… To his credit, Attenborough did mention the 6th extinction, after all nature is his specialty.

The real problem with this show is that Attenborough’s credibility is right up there, especially when governments and politicians virtually have zero, and his opinion, even if shaped by the BBC, carries a whole lot of weight. After watching this, millions of people will believe “we’re onto it”, and the solutions are at hand. Except they are not….

It’s all happening…..

The amount of ice collectively lost last Wednesday and Thursday, all ten billion tonnes of it, would be enough to cover Florida in almost thirteen centimetres of water…… According to a Twitter post by climate scientist Martin Stendel, the amount of ice collectively lost on Thursday and Wednesday this week, the ice sheet’s biggest surface melt day since 2012, with around 60 percent of the frozen expanse undergoing at least 1 millimeter of melting would be enough to cover Florida in almost five inches of water.

Andrew Freedman and Jason Samenow reported for the Washington Post, Thursday’s melting event outpaced all data collected since 1950, when scientists first started tracking the ice sheet’s daily mass loss.

“This model, which uses weather data and observations to build a record of ice and snowfall, and net change in mass of the ice sheet, is remarkably accurate,” Ted Scambos, a senior researcher at Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), tells thePost. “I would accept the result as fact.”

In the Conversation, Australian National University climate researcher Nerilie Abram points out that the Arctic is especially sensitive to climate change. Rising temperature there are spurring rampant ice loss that, in turn, drives the thermometer even further upward in a self-reinforcing vicious cycle. (Melting snow and ice darken the ice sheet’s surface, enabling it to absorb more heat and melt at a higher rate.) As a result, temperatures in the region are rising twice as fast as the global average.

Almost as amazing is that this hardly gets a mention in mainstream media. I just don’t know what it will take to wake them all up, because this is a serious event that might even be evidence of a tipping point. We won’t know until it’s in the rear view mirror…

Jevons Paradox strikes again….

Automated vehicles: more driving, energy wasted, & congestion

Posted on August 1, 2019 by energyskeptic

Preface. There’s no need to actually worry about how automated vehicles will be used and their potential congestion, energy use, and whether there are enough rare earth minerals to make them possible, because they simply can never be fully automated, as explained in this post, with articles from Science, Scientific American, and the New York Times: “Why self-driving cars may not be in your future“.

There are two articles summarized below.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

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Taiebat, M., et al. 2019. Forecasting the Impact of Connected and Automated Vehicles on Energy Use: A Microeconomic Study of Induced Travel and Energy Rebound. Applied Energy247: 297

The benefits of self-driving cars will likely induce vehicle owners to drive more, and those extra miles could partially or completely offset the potential energy-saving benefits that automation may provide, according to a new University of Michigan study.

Greater fuel efficiency induces some people to travel extra miles, and those added miles can partially offset fuel savings. It’s a behavioral change known as the rebound effect. In addition, the ability to use in-vehicle time productively in a self-driving car — people can work, sleep, watch a movie, read a book — will likely induce even more travel.

Taken together, those two sources of added mileage could partially or completely offset the energy savings provided by autonomous vehicles. In fact, the added miles could even result in a net increase in energy consumption, a phenomenon known as backfire.

Traditionally, time spent driving has been viewed as a cost to the driver. But the ability to pursue other activities in an autonomous vehicle is expected to lower this “perceived travel time cost” considerably, which will likely spur additional travel.

The U-M researchers estimated that the induced travel resulting from a 38% reduction in perceived travel time cost would completely eliminate the fuel savings associated with self-driving cars.

“Backfire — a net rise in energy consumption — is a distinct possibility.

Mervis, J. December 15, 2017. Not so fast. We can’t even agree on what autonomous, much less how they will affect our lives. Science.

Joan Walker, a transportation engineer at UC Berkeley, designed a clever experiment. Using an automated vehicle (AV) is like having your own chauffeur. So she gave 13 car owners in the San Francisco Bay area the use of a chauffeur-driven car for up to 60 hours over 1 week, and then tracked their travel habits.  There were 4 millennials, 4 families, and 5 retirees.

The driver was free.  The study looked at how they drove their own cars for a week, and how that changed when they had a driver.

They could send the car on ghost trips (errands), such as picking up their children from school, and they didn’t have to worry about driving or parking.

The results suggest that a world with AVs will have more traffic:

1. the 13 subjects logged 76% more miles
2. 22% were ghost errand trips
3. There was a 94% increase in the number of trips over 20 miles and an 80% increase after 6 PM, with retirees increasing the most.
4. During the chauffeur week, there was no biking, mass transit, or use of ride services like Uber and Lyft.

Three-fourths of the supposedly car-shunning millennials clocked more miles. In contrast to conventional wisdom that older people would be slower to embrace the new technology, Walker says, “The retirees were really excited about AVs. They see their declining mobility and they are like, ‘I want this to be available now.’”

Due to the small sample size she will repeat this experiment on a larger scale next summer.