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:
the 13 subjects logged 76% more miles
22% were ghost errand trips
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.
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.
Last month I expressed personal alarm at the weather and the unexpected speed of change. Since then the global weather continues to break records, and I’ve thought of something slightly more constructive to say.
The asteroid which brushed passed the earth on Thursday was only identified as such the day before. Presumably our instruments calculated that it wasn’t a risk and the alarm wasn’t raised. But had the trajectory been six earth diameters to the side, how much notice would we have had to prepare ourselves for a 30 Hiroshima-bomb impact somewhere on the earth? What if the authorities decided not to tell anybody because there wasn’t time to prepare and it would just cause unnecessary panic?
Sometimes climate change feels like that. We know time is running out, but governments are failing to tell the truth (for whatever reason) so we don’t have the information or the political power to respond appropriately. No wonder people are waking up to the shortness of time and wondering how long they’ve got.
But the question in that form is poorly articulated perhaps because of the panic behind it. Who is we? What do we need time for? Do we really need to know? Might living in unknowing be wiser than planning for one specific possible future?
This post is an attempt to answer for myself. I want to avoid conflict and oppression in my own life and contribute to attempts to reduce harm. How long do I have for that?
It seems to me that no-one wants to be so irresponsible as to make a prediction too short. The shortest predictions are the most dangerous and potentially embarrassing, because they invoke the maximum panic and will be proven wrong the soonest. Mavericks like Guy McPhearson are marginalised and even belittled for advising us that “Only love remains“.
At the more respectable end of the panic spectrum the UN is pushing countries to make 2050 commitments which could be even more irresponsible. This date could be even more irresponsible and less accurate if by being slow to incorporate the latest science, it gives anyone the impression that we have wiggle-room.
So how long have we got? If someone would just give us a clue, we might make better decisions. If I knew an asteroid might hit my city 24 hours from now I might try to escape the impact zone, or seek or construct some kind of shelter; but if I had ten minutes I’d be lucky to get my children out of the building and underground. Less than that, and at least I could follow the advice of the Chinese/World government in the apocalyspse action thriller The Wandering Earth to go back to my family and be with my loved ones.
However climate change is not a Newtonian body in constant motion through space, but a very large and complex system which has yet to be accurately modeled by computers. We don’t know how long we’ve got or what event we dread. Every number you hear representing a target, threshhold or deadline, such as 12 years, 1.5 degrees, ‘2050 tipping point’ is chosen by Public Relations advisors as a strategic target for policy makers and should be taken with a large pinch of salt. The body which has promoted most of those numbers has failed us badly by implying those things were knowable, and then placing them far too far in the future. But even if the models were accurate it wouldn’t help very much because our well being depends in large part not on the weather but on society, another complex system which is premised on the first. That’s not including the economy, another system which nobody understands, and which is designed to fail suddenly, unexpectedly and catastrophically.
The future most of us should be concerned about is not death in a heatwave or hurricane, or drowning in a rising tide, but social and political failure in a civilisation unable to adapt to changes in its environment.
So how long have we got – until what? I’m concerned that there’s too much vague fearmongering and not enough thinking about how our society is most likely to fail. It probably won’t be a distinct ‘event’ as its known in prepper-speak, a jump from capitalism to cannibalism, but could unfold in different ways and lead to different outcomes, some more preferable than others. Fiction can help us imagine possible futures like the charred landscape and fearful encounters of the The Road or living in a sealed dome of Logan’s Run. The best prediction we can hope to make is to project forwards from now in a straight line, and for me Children of Men is the movie that does that best. Notice the police and the public, the dirt and decay, the slim hopes!
The continuing shocking weather will lead to poor harvests this year and probably poorer next year. Kudos to AllFed for their work on food security already. Around that time, maybe the year after, global food markets will go crazy as the rich countries begin hoarding food in earnest. It won’t be the shortage itself so much as the political handling of it which will be brutal. Even now many humans are already starving for political reasons while food rots in vast warehouses. Lloyds of London predicted that Africa would be hit hardest and soonest. Maybe we could feed ourselves for a few years, but without improved yields it wouldn’t be long before we saw food rationing in developed countries and governments using emergency rhetoric, political repression and of course debt-slavery to maintain order.
This at least seems like the harsh direction of the capitalist road we are on. The self-entitled, super-wealthy business and political classes will requisition everything to sustain themselves in militarised island ecovillages.
They would manage the rationing system while infrastructure decayed and schools and hospitals services failed and closed. Growing numbers of unemployed destitutes would be left to fend for themselves, dying younger than their parents from poverty related causes, including disease and violence.
So if I told you how long you had, would you wait until the last minute? One thing is for sure that you don’t want to get caught in the rush for the exit. Once everyone else starts to panic, considered, conscientious action becomes much harder.
In his Deep Adaptation paper Jem Bendell put his neck out and guessed we had 10 years before ‘societal collapse’. After a year of reflecting on this and of reading alarming science, I’m currently guessing that widespread food panics will come to dominate international politics in the next 2-4 years. The introduction of rationing will herald the crumbling of our political and financial freedoms.
So in my mind as a Western European, that 2-4 years is my window to do whatever I think necessary, desirable or possible with relative freedom. After that I think life will become harder, and choices narrower.
We can not now prevent a massive die-off of all that sustains us, starting with the insects now, expanding to the fish, trees, and surely also the grasses we depend on for food. However bleak the outlook seems – it could be worse. Maybe we’ll go extinct and maybe we won’t; wise choices could make the difference between the two. It is still possible to reduce the coming anguish and suffering; to reduce the mess and leave opportunities for the cockroaches to thrive after us; to face the future with dignity and open eyes.
I think many of us should be looking at quitting our jobs in the commercial machine, preferably with a spectacular act of nonviolent industrial sabotage, cashing in our pensions and investing in real things we care about, whether it be survival, justice, personal or collective redemption, or just pleasure.
I believe there may still be important political/collective options which would both lessen the suffering and increase our survival odds. Neither of those things seem to matter to many people I talk to, but Extinction Rebellion is closest to my way of thinking right now. To me the wonder of the universe is enough to make me want more of it, so I expect I’ll be working on system change as long as there is a system to change – not only with the hope to make things less bad, but because that is what I do.
This was the light bulb that came on after listening to a couple podcasts where there was some discussion over cow size, and it’s attribution to the current agricultural system today. It’s funny how the more I think about these things, the more I see how a lot of the dots start connecting with each other. I’ve talked about the environmental concerns that people have over cattle grazing. I’ve also heard quite a bit about concerns regarding the fact that grains are commonly fed to cattle, particularly to those that are being finished during the last few months of their lives. There’s also quite the lamenting about how much cows eat, how much they defecate, the methane they emit, generally the amount of stuff that is put into them to meet consumer demand for beef and milk.
What’s ironic is that while many people are busy pointing out how cows are bad with this issue and this issue, very few have pointed out how the modern cow has gotten so big compared to what cows were like over 100 years ago. And fewer still—have connected the dots in reasoning out why the majority of North American 21st century cows have an average body weight of 1600 pounds (720 kg), why they’re eating and pooping so much, and why they’re even being fed grain in the first place.
If we look back to the cattle that populated the West back over 100 years ago, they were quite a bit smaller. They average cow size then was only around 800 to 1000 pounds. Those were truly some “rangy” cattle; they didn’t need grain and thrived on forage only.
But why the significant change in cow size? And why do we have “modernized” cows now that basically can’t be as productive without that little extra supplemental grain every so often?
I may not have all the pieces of the puzzle in hand to explain this, but I will do my best.A Brief History of the Shift of North American Beef ProductionA lot of things happened that shifted agriculture from the organic, animal-powered, manual labour, subsistence agricultural model to one that we have today. The only thing that comes to mind was the discovery of fossil fuels, and I’m not just talking about coal. Some marketing genius saw the future use of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal extraction) booming to the point that we’ve become so incredibly and heavily reliant on it today it ain’t even funny.
I mean, look at all the things that were invented just so that farmers could buy into using (and purchasing) more fossil fuels: the “iron horse” or now known as the tractor, and the various implements associated with it, including the now-rare moldboard plow; the discovery of four “essential” nutrients plants need to grow (NPKS—nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur), and the Law of the Minimum to go along with it; the conversion of ammonium nitrate from being used in bombs during the Second World War to being used as nitrogen fertilizer for farmers (now illegal in most countries because of the ease of use in terrorist activities); and the markets and marketing that has grown up around all that comes with growing annual crops. I probably missed a few items there, but that’s the gist of it.
Many farmers got sucked right into the popularity of having a tractor with a whole lot of implements to go with it and the ease of applying fertilizers so much that the amount of grain that was being produced was becoming far beyond what most people could even eat. With quite the glut of grain, someone else had to come up with a solution. The best solution was to start feeding all that excess grain to animals, primarily pigs, chickens, and cattle.
While it was pretty easy to change diets of monogastrics like pigs and chickens to be eating grain in a confinement operation, with the cows of the 1950s, it wasn’t so easy. It’s really hard to convert a ruminant that thrives on grass to one that can gain well on grain and not get so butterball fat so quickly.
That’s what was happening to those smaller-type feeder cattle back then. They would be pushed on, I would guess an 80% grain-based diet prior to slaughter. The resulting amount of fat that the packers needed to trim off would’ve been incredible, so much that the meat packers really didn’t like it. Even today, if there’s a beef carcass that runs through the commercial meat packer facility and has a lot of excessive extra-muscular fat (and even intramuscular fat)—or, more fat than meat—it gets docked in price quite heavily. That’s not good for the feedlot’s bottom line.
The conundrum though, is that what the meat packers and feedlots want is not what the beef cow-calf producer wants. Let me explain: where the packers want a good sized, fairly lean carcass that doesn’t have much fat to trim off, and came from a feedlot where those cattle kept that lean muscling throughout the finishing period, the cow-calf producers would sooner have an animal that gains easily on just forage with little to no grain supplement, isn’t generally so big, and has no trouble being bred back on time to have another calf the following year.
So, on one end of the spectrum there’s the meat-producing machine the meat packers want. On the other end is the easy-fleshing, maternal, smaller, fertile bovine that doesn’t need the grain nor to be so big and muscly. Somehow, these stubborn cow-calf guys needed to be convinced that they need to change their cows to satisfy the meat packers… not only that, but for the growing companies that were making their big bucks on fossil fuels.
In my view — and I may not get this totally right, so forgive me if I get some things out of whack — there were a few key strategies at play to get the beef cow-calf producers to succumb to the modernized beef market demand and give up their grass-based, small-sized, easy-fleshing cows.
The second was to force reduced market prices on small-sized weaned calves. Any cow-calf producer would suffer and start to re-examine what kind of cattle he’s running if and when he was to sell a bunch of calves and find that almost all of them went for a lot less than those bigger, much more muscly cattle. He wouldn’t be too happy, let me tell you. That in itself would force him to start changing his herd to where he would be focusing quite heavily on pounds of calf weaned, just so he can “ring the bell at the sale barn” and come home with a decent cheque.
The third, mainly as a result of the second, was to heavily promote the hell out of the “continental” European breeds that were being imported into Canada and the United States in the 1970s. Breeds like Charolais, Simmental, and Limousin were those big, muscly, lean type of cattle that the packers were looking for. They were marketed such that they would give producers calves that would bring them the most money. Conveniently so, though, the promotions never really mentioned that these big animals needed to have some supplemental grain to keep them in shape…
Since then, the packers and feedlots haven’t let up on their demand for large cattle that gained well with not a whole lot of extra-muscular fat to trim off—the United States Department of Agriculture actually formed a grading standard to tell producers and packers what kind of “muscle-to-fat ratio” was desirable. As a result, cow size has increased dramatically since then. Producers have done well to convince themselves that focusing on weight, and to get as big of calves as possible sold through the auction to the feedlot is the best way to go. This is certainly still something that’s alive and well today.
So far I’ve only focused on beef production. What about dairy production?The Big, Modern, Dairy Cow. The dairy cows haven’t stayed small either. The average size of a dairy cow (predominantly Holsteins) today is much the same as what the average size of a modern beef cow is. The story that goes with seeing an increase in cow size for dairy cows is pretty parallel with beef cattle, except that it wasn’t this need to convince any cow-calf guys to get bigger, not-so-grass-based cows. The explanation is a bit simpler than that.
With a higher demand by consumers for more dairy products, dairy farmers needed cows to produce more milk. I think I’m safe to say that the larger the cow that was also genetically selected for the highest milk production possible, generally the heavier milker she would expected to be. Holstein-Freisian cattle are the heaviest (and most popular) milk-producing breed in the world to date. And they’re not small cattle either. They may not have much for muscle, but they are certainly tall…
With dairy cattle, though, the selection must be for milk production, not size as in muscling ability. Some of the poorest milk-producing cows out there, like Charolais, are the best, well-muscled animals. In other words, if you’re going to be selecting for milk production, you might as well kiss the genetics for muscling good-bye.
Undeniably, the modern dairy cow has also been selected over time to be needing grain in order to not just produce milk, but also meet her body’s metabolic needs. She’s been basically turned into a fossil-fuel guzzling (indirectly, mind you), milk-producing genetic freak of a machine.
As for the modern-day big beefy girls, sadly, they’re not much different. So, Why are Cows & Cattle Fed Grain?? I’ve spent some time showing how commercially raised cows today have become so big and even grain-needy today. Now, it’s time to show you the why.
It’s actually pretty simple. Much of the cattle today have been selected for higher productivity—more meat, more milk—and as a result, their nutritional requirements have increased. These animals actually need more nutrition than their ancestors did just under 100 years ago. Their metabolisms have changed such that they can’t meet their body needs and be as fertile, milk-producing and/or muscling on just grass or forage, without some kind of extra supplement to meet their needs in terms of energy (carbohydrates), proteins (mainly non-protein nitrogen and amino acids), as well as minerals and vitamins, otherwise they will literally “fall apart.”
By “fall apart” I mean they lose weight, and aren’t as milky, reproductive, nor meat-producing as a farmer would hope for. If they are not properly fed, they can die of malnutrition. It’s that bad.
You know, sadly it’s become an established norm to feed cows grain or some alfalfa cubes or range pellets, even just a few pounds per head every second or third day, “just to keep ‘em friendly.” Not many people have stopped to think why it’s so normal to give cattle that extra supplement while they’re out on pasture, or even that they have to add grain to the diet during the winter months.
I know that if I told them that they weren’t allowed to feed their cattle any kind of grain or pelleted supplement, they’d look at me like I was crazy, and then they’d give me a good talking-to as to why those cows *need* to be fed some grain… let me guess, so that those animals don’t go downhill on you, right?
It’s no secret that the majority of cows and cattle today are fed grain of some amount. It’s no secret either that the bigger the cow, the more she’ll eat. But I don’t think that’s near as much of a concern as just the fact that the petroleum industry has forced producers’ hands time and time again to have big cows that can’t be productive without eating some grain every now and then.
It’s no wonder people think cows are so bad. We’ve turned them into fossil-fuel consuming, milk/meat-outputting machines, not the genuinely beneficial, grass-based, pasture-raised ruminant herbivores that they really should be. And that’s a right shame.
Most people think that selling your car, avoiding flights and going vegetarian are the best strategies for fighting climate change, but in fact, according to a study into true impacts of different green lifestyle choices, having fewer children beats all those actions by a very long margin…….
I’ve been saying this for years and years, but the graphic below might just about convince anyone……..
The greatest impact individuals can have in fighting climate change is to have one fewer child, according to a new study that identifies the most effective ways people can cut their carbon emissions.
The next best actions are selling your car, avoiding long flights, and eating a vegetarian diet. These reduce emissions many times more than common green activities, such as recycling, using low energy light bulbs or drying washing on a line. However, the high impact actions are rarely mentioned in government advice and school textbooks, researchers found.
Carbon emissions must fall to two tonnes of CO2 per person by 2050 to avoid severe global warming, but in the US and Australia emissions are currently 16 tonnes per person and in the UK seven tonnes. “That’s obviously a really big change and we wanted to show that individuals have an opportunity to be a part of that,” said Kimberly Nicholas, at Lund University in Sweden and one of the research team.
The new study, published in Environmental Research Letters, sets out the impact of different actions on a comparable basis. By far the biggest ultimate impact is having one fewer child, which the researchers calculated equated to a reduction of 58 tonnes of CO2 for each year of a parent’s life.
The figure was calculated by totting up the emissions of the child and all their descendants, then dividing this total by the parent’s lifespan. Each parent was ascribed 50% of the child’s emissions, 25% of their grandchildren’s emissions and so on.
The graphic shows how much CO2 can be saved through a range of different actions.
“We recognise these are deeply personal choices. But we can’t ignore the climate effect our lifestyle actually has,” said Nicholas. “It is our job as scientists to honestly report the data. Like a doctor who sees the patient is in poor health and might not like the message ‘smoking is bad for you’, we are forced to confront the fact that current emission levels are really bad for the planet and human society.”
Besides, who in their right mind would want to bring children into this dysfunctional world? Oh wait…… nobody is in their right mind!
I’ve been following Salatin for years, and he is truly inspiring……. my goal is to run the Fanny Farm as a scaled down version of Polyface Farm……. I do wish he wouldn’t put all ‘greenies’ in the same basket though!
The recent editorial by James McWilliams, titled “The Myth of Sustainable Meat,” contains enough factual errors and skewed assumptions to fill a book, and normally I would dismiss this out of hand as too much nonsense to merit a response. But since it specifically mentioned Polyface, a rebuttal is appropriate. For a more comprehensive rebuttal, read the book Folks, This Ain’t Normal.
Let’s go point by point. First, that grass-grazing cows emit more methane than grain-fed ones. This is factually false. Actually, the amount of methane emitted by fermentation is the same whether it occurs in the cow or outside. Whether the feed is eaten by an herbivore or left to rot on its own, the methane generated is identical. Wetlands emit some 95 percent of all methane in the world; herbivores are insignificant enough to not even merit consideration. Anyone who really wants to stop methane needs to start draining wetlands. Quick, or we’ll all perish. I assume he’s figuring that since it takes longer to grow a beef on grass than on grain, the difference in time adds days to the emissions. But grain production carries a host of maladies far worse than methane. This is simply cherry-picking one negative out of many positives to smear the foundation of how soil builds: herbivore pruning, perennial disturbance-rest cycles, solar-grown biomass, and decomposition. This is like demonizing marriage because a good one will include some arguments.
As for his notion that it takes too much land to grass-finish, his figures of 10 acres per animal are assuming the current normal mismanagement of pastures. At Polyface, we call it neanderthal management, because most livestock farmers have not yet joined the 20th century with electric fencing, ponds, piped water, and modern scientific aerobic composting (only as old as chemical fertilization). Hence, while his figures comparing the relative production of grain to grass may sound compelling, they are like comparing the learning opportunities under a terrible teacher versus a magnificent teacher. Many farmers, in many different climates, are now using space-age technology, biomimicry, and close management to get exponential increases in forage production. The rainforest, by the way, is not being cut to graze cattle. It’s being cut to grow transgenic corn and soybeans. North America had twice as many herbivores 500 years ago than it does today due to the pulsing of the predator-prey-pruning cycle on perennial prairie polycultures. And that was without any corn or soybeans at all.
Apparently if you lie often and big enough, some people will believe it: Pastured chicken has a 20 percent greater impact on global warming? Says who? The truth is that those industrial chicken houses are not stand-alone structures. They require square miles of grain to be carted into them, and square miles of land to handle the manure. Of course, many times that land is not enough. To industrial farmers’ relief, more often than not a hurricane comes along just in time to flush the toilet, kill the fish, and send pathogens into the ocean. That’s a nice way to reduce the alleged footprint, but it’s devilish sleight of hand with the data to assume that ecological toxicity compensates for the true land base needed to sustain a factory farm.
While it’s true that at Polyface our omnivores (poultry and pigs) do eat local GMO (genetically modified organism)-free grain in addition to the forage, the land base required to feed and metabolize the manure is no different than that needed to sustain the same animals in a confinement setting. Even if they ate zero pasturage, the land is the same. The only difference is our animals get sunshine, exercise, fresh pasture salad bars, fresh air, and a respectful life. Chickens walking on pasture certainly do not have any more leg sprains than those walking in a confinement facility. To suggest otherwise, as McWilliams does, is sheer nonsense. Walking is walking — and it’s generally considered to be a healthy practice, unless you’re a tyrant.
Interestingly, in a lone concession to compassion, McWilliams decries ranging hogs with rings in their noses to keep them from rooting, lamenting that this is “one of their most basic instincts.” Notice that he does not reconcile this moral imperative with his love affair with confinement hog factories. Nothing much to use their noses for in there. For the record, Polyface never rings hog noses, and in the few cases where we’ve purchased hogs with rings, we take them out. We want them to fully express their pigness. By moving them frequently using modern electric fencing, polyethylene water piping, high-tech float valves, and scientifically designed feed dispensers, we do not create nor suffer the problems encountered by earlier large-scale outdoor hog operations 100 years ago. McWilliams has apparently never had the privilege of visiting a first-rate, modern, highly managed, pastured hog operation. He thinks we’re all stuck in the early 1900s, and that’s a shame because he’d discover the answers to his concerns are already here. I wonder where his paycheck comes from?
Then McWilliams moves on to the argument that economic realities would kick in if pastured livestock became normal, driving farmers to scale up and end up right where we are today. What a clever ploy: justify the horrible by eliminating the alternatives. At Polyface, we certainly do not discourage scaling up — we actually encourage it. We think more pasture-based farms should scale up. Between the current abysmal state of mismanagement, however, and efficient operations, is an astronomical opportunity to enjoy economic and ecological advantages. McWilliams is basing his data and assumptions on the poorest, the average or below. If you want to demonize something, always pick the lowest performers. But if you compare the best the industry has to offer with the best the pasture-based systems have to offer, the factory farms don’t have a prayer. Using portable infrastructure, tight management, and techno-glitzy tools, farmers running pastured hog operations practically eliminate capitalization costs and vet bills.
Finally, McWilliams moves to the knock-out punch in his discussion of nutrient cycling, charging specifically that Polyface is a charade because it depends on grain from industrial farms to maintain soil fertility. First of all, at Polyface we do not assume that all nutrient movement is anti-environmental. In fact, one of the biggest reasons for animals in nature is to move nutrients uphill, against the natural gravitational flow from high ground to low ground. This is why low lands and valleys are fertile and the uplands are less so. Animals are the only mechanism nature has to defy this natural downward flow. Fortunately, predators make the prey animals want to lounge on high ground (where they can see their enemies), which insures that manure will concentrate on high lookout spots rather than in the valleys. Perhaps this is why no ecosystem exists that is devoid of animals. The fact is that nutrient movement is inherently nature-healing.
But, it doesn’t move very far. And herein lies the difference between grain used at Polyface and that used by the industry: We care where ours comes from. It’s not just a commodity. It has an origin and an ending, start to finish, farmer to eater. The closer we can connect the carbon cycles, the more environmentally normal we will become.
Second, herbivores are the exception to the entire negative nutrient flow argument because by pruning back the forage to restart the rapid biomass accumulation photosynthetic engine, the net carbon flow compensates for anything lost through harvest. Herbivores do not require tillage or annuals, and that is why all historically deep soils have been created by them, not by omnivores. It’s fascinating that McWilliams wants to demonize pasture-based livestock for not closing all the nutrient loops, but has no problem, apparently, with the horrendous nutrient toxicity like dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey created by chemical fertilizer runoff to grow grain so that the life of a beef could be shortened. Unbelievable. In addition, this is one reason Polyface continues to fight for relaxing food safety regulations to allow on-farm slaughtering, precisely so we can indeed keep all these nutrients on the farm and not send them the rendering plants. If the greenies who don’t want historically normal farm activities like slaughter to occur on rural acreage could understand how devastating these government regulations actually are to the environmental economy, perhaps McWilliams wouldn’t have this bullet in his arsenal. And yes, human waste should be put back on the land as well, to help close the loop.
Third, at Polyface, we struggle upstream. Historically, omnivores were salvage operations. Hogs ate spoiled milk, whey, acorns, chestnuts, spoiled fruit, and a host of other farmstead products. Ditto for chickens, who dined on kitchen scraps and garden refuse. That today 50 percent of all the human edible food produced in the world goes into landfills or greenie-endorsed composting operations rather than through omnivores is both ecologically and morally reprehensible. At Polyface, we’ve tried for many, many years to get kitchen scraps back from restaurants to feed our poultry, but the logistics are a nightmare. The fact is that in America we have created a segregated food and farming system. In the perfect world, Polyface would not sell eggs. Instead, every kitchen, both domestic and commercial, would have enough chickens proximate to handle all the scraps. This would eliminate the entire egg industry and current heavy grain feeding paradigm. At Polyface, we only purport to be doing the best we can do as we struggle through a deviant, historically abnormal food and farming system. We didn’t create what is and we may not solve it perfectly. But we’re sure a lot farther toward real solutions than McWilliams can imagine. And if society would move where we want to go, and the government regulators would let us move where we need to go, and the industry would not try to criminalize us as we try to go there, we’ll all be a whole lot better off and the earthworms will dance.
AND here’s a lecture Joel gave in Australia last year……..
The internet is constantly bombarded with articles about how we need to go (or even ARE going) 100% renewable energy and get rid of fossil fuels…… now don’t get me wrong, I completely agree, it’s just that these people have no idea of the repercussions, nor of the size of the task at hand….)
Renewable energy zealots even believe that as more and more renewables are deployed, fossil fuels are being pushed out of the way, becoming irrelevant. Seriously.
Nothing of the sort is happening. In a recent article, Gail Tverberg wrote this…:
Of the 252 million tons of oil equivalent (MTOE) energy consumption added in 2017, wind ADDED 37 MTOE and solar ADDED 26 MTOE. Thus, wind and solar amounted to about 25% of total energy consumption ADDED in 2017. Fossil fuels added 67% of total energy consumption added in 2017, and other categories added the remaining 8%. [my emphasis on added…]
To put this in a graphic way, look at this…..
Primary energy consumption has almost trebled since 1971, and renewables still only account for 2%…… while oil coal and gas has grown as a total percentage at the expense of nuclear. And….. surprise surprise, OIL! Nothing to do with Peak Oil I suppose……
There is simply no way renewables will ever replace fossil fuels. California, with the aim of going 100% renewables doesn’t even have the necessary land available for the purpose according to some recent research…….
Last year, global solar capacity totaled about 219,000 megawatts. That means an all-renewable California would need more solar capacity in the state than currently exists on the entire planet. Sure, California can (and will) add lots of new rooftop solar over the coming decades. But Jacobson’s plan would also require nearly 33,000 megawatts of concentrated solar plants, or roughly 87 facilities as large as the 377-megawatt Ivanpah solar complex now operating in the Mojave Desert. Ivanpah, which covers 5.4 square miles, met fierce opposition from conservationists due to its impact on the desert tortoise, which is listed as a threatened species under the federal and California endangered species acts.
Wind energy faces similar problems. The Department of Energy has concluded in multiple reports over the last decade that no matter where they are located — onshore or offshore — wind-energy projects have a footprint that breaks down to about 3 watts per square meter.
To get to Jacobson’s 124,608 megawatts (124.6 billion watts) of onshore wind capacity, California would need 41.5 billion square meters, or about 16,023 square miles, of turbines. To put that into perspective, the land area of Los Angeles County is slightly more than 4,000 square miles — California would have to cover a land area roughly four times the size of L.A. County with nothing but the massive windmills. Turning over even a fraction of that much territory to wind energy is unlikely. In 2015, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to ban large wind turbines in unincorporated areas. Three other California counties — San Diego, Solano and Inyo — have also passed restrictions on turbines.
Last year, the head of the California Wind Energy Assn. told the San Diego Union-Tribune, “We’re facing restrictions like that all around the state…. It’s pretty bleak in terms of the potential for new development.”
Don’t count on offshore wind either. Given the years-long battle that finally scuttled the proposed 468-megawatt Cape Wind project — which called for dozens of turbines to be located offshore Massachusetts — it’s difficult to imagine that Californians would willingly accept offshore wind capacity that’s 70 times as large as what was proposed in the Northeast.
To expand renewables to the extent that they could approach the amount of energy needed to run our entire economy would require wrecking vast onshore and offshore territories with forests of wind turbines and sprawling solar projects. Organizations like 350.org tend to dismiss the problem by claiming, for example, that the land around turbines can be farmed or that the placement of solar facilities can be “managed.” But rural landowners don’t want industrial-scale energy projects in their communities any more than coastal dwellers or suburbanites do.
The grim land-use numbers behind all-renewable proposals aren’t speculation. Arriving at them requires only a bit of investigation, and yes, that we do the math.
“Without coal we won’t survive”. Yet coal will/could kill us all. It’s the difference between a problem and a predicament…. problems have solutions, predicaments need management. Here’s a trailer of a movie soon to be released….
Here’s a thoroughly modern riddle: what links the battery in your smartphone with a dead yak floating down a Tibetan river? The answer is lithium – the reactive alkali metal that powers our phones, tablets, laptops and electric cars.
In May 2016, hundreds of protestors threw dead fish onto the streets of Tagong, a town on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. They had plucked them from the waters of the Liqi river, where a toxic chemical leak from the Ganzizhou Rongda Lithium mine had wreaked havoc with the local ecosystem.
There are pictures of masses of dead fish on the surface of the stream. Some eyewitnesses reported seeing cow and yak carcasses floating downstream, dead from drinking contaminated water. It was the third such incident in the space of seven years in an area which has seen a sharp rise in mining activity, including operations run by BYD, the world’ biggest supplier of lithium-ion batteries for smartphones and electric cars. After the second incident, in 2013, officials closed the mine, but when it reopened in April 2016, the fish started dying again.
Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. Workers drill though the crust of the world’s biggest salt flat with large rigs. They are aiming for the brine underneath swathes of magnesium and potassium in the hope of finding lithium-rich spots. Since the 2000s, most of the world’s lithium has been extracted this way, rather than using mineral ore sources such as spodumene, petalite and lepidolite
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Lithium-ion batteries are a crucial component of efforts to clean up the planet. The battery of a Tesla Model S has about 12 kilograms of lithium in it, while grid storage solutions that will help balance renewable energy would need much more.
Demand for lithium is increasing exponentially, and it doubled in price between 2016 and 2018. According to consultancy Cairn Energy Research Advisors, the lithium ion industry is expected to grow from 100 gigawatt hours (GWh) of annual production in 2017, to almost 800 GWhs in 2027.
William Adams, head of research at Metal Bulletin, says the current spike in demand can be traced back to 2015, when the Chinese government announced a huge push towards electric vehicles in its 13th Five Year Plan. That has led to a massive rise in the number of projects to extract lithium, and there are “hundreds more in the pipeline,” says Adams.
But there’s a problem. As the world scrambles to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, the environmental impact of finding all the lithium required to enable that transformation could become a serious issue in its own right. “One of the biggest environmental problems caused by our endless hunger for the latest and smartest devices is a growing mineral crisis, particularly those needed to make our batteries,” says Christina Valimaki an analyst at Elsevier.
Tahua, Bolivia. Salt miners load a truck with lithium-rich salt. The ground beneath Bolivia’s salt flats are thought to contain the world’s largest reserves of the metal. (The Bolivian Andes may contain 70 per cent of the planet’s lithium.) Many analysts argue that extracting lithium from brine is more environmentally friendly than from rock. However, as demand increases, companies might resort to removing lithium from the brine by heating it up, which is more energy intensive.
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In South America, the biggest problem is water. The continent’s Lithium Triangle, which covers parts of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, holds more than half the world’s supply of the metal beneath its otherworldly salt flats. It’s also one of the driest places on earth. That’s a real issue, because to extract lithium, miners start by drilling a hole in the salt flats and pumping salty, mineral-rich brine to the surface.
Then they leave it to evaporate for months at a time, first creating a mixture of manganese, potassium, borax and lithium salts which is then filtered and placed into another evaporation pool, and so on. After between 12 and 18 months, the mixture has been filtered enough that lithium carbonate – white gold – can be extracted.
It’s a relatively cheap and effective process, but it uses a lot of water – approximately 500,000 gallons per tonne of lithium. In Chile’s Salar de Atacama, mining activities consumed 65 per cent of the region’s water. That is having a big impact on local farmers – who grow quinoa and herd llamas – in an area where some communities already have to get water driven in from elsewhere.
There’s also the potential – as occurred in Tibet – for toxic chemicals to leak from the evaporation pools into the water supply. These include chemicals, including hydrochloric acid, which are used in the processing of lithium into a form that can be sold, as well as those waste products that are filtered out of the brine at each stage. In Australia and North America, lithium is mined from rock using more traditional methods, but still requires the use of chemicals in order to extract it in a useful form. Research in Nevada found impacts on fish as far as 150 miles downstream from a lithium processing operation.
Rio Grande, Bolivia. An aerial view of the mineral formations along the Rio Grande delta, at the edges of the salt flats. The delta is mostly dry due to the effects of lithium mining, which is heavily reliant on water for its shallow artificial salt-pans, or solar evaporation ponds, in which saline solutions are left to dry out over a period of months, leaving the minerals behind. This drying out of the delta has led to a lack of stability in water levels, both on top of and below the surface. The river is home to a wide variety of freshwater fish, many originating in the Amazon basin
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According to a report by Friends of the Earth, lithium extraction inevitably harms the soil and causes air contamination. In Argentina’s Salar de Hombre Muerto, locals claim that lithium operations have contaminated streams used by humans and livestock, and for crop irrigation. In Chile, there have been clashes between mining companies and local communities, who say that lithium mining is leaving the landscape marred by mountains of discarded salt and canals filled with contaminated water with an unnatural blue hue.
“Like any mining process, it is invasive, it scars the landscape, it destroys the water table and it pollutes the earth and the local wells,” said Guillermo Gonzalez, a lithium battery expert from the University of Chile, in a 2009 interview. “This isn’t a green solution – it’s not a solution at all.”
But lithium may not be the most problematic ingredient of modern rechargeable batteries. It is relatively abundant, and could in theory be generated from seawater in future, albeit through a very energy-intensive process.
Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. Lino Fita, head of potassium extraction for mining company Comibol, looks out over his factory. The brine in this region is rich with potassium and magnesium, which makes it harder and more expensive to extract lithium. The brine is put in large ponds for many months to evaporate excess water and separate its salts. The remaining compound is then purified and processed. Very few lithium-processing experts work in the factory, as there is a nationwide shortage of staff. In the past, as few as three people have run the factory’s entire production line
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Two other key ingredients, cobalt and nickel, are more in danger of creating a bottleneck in the move towards electric vehicles, and at a potentially huge environmental cost. Cobalt is found in huge quantities right across the Democratic Republic of Congo and central Africa, and hardly anywhere else. The price has quadrupled in the last two years.
Unlike most metals, which are not toxic when they’re pulled from the ground as metal ores, cobalt is “uniquely terrible,” according to Gleb Yushin, chief technical officer and founder of battery materials company Sila Nanotechnologies.
“One of the biggest challenges with cobalt is that it’s located in one country,” he adds. You can literally just dig up the land and find cobalt, so there’s a very strong motivation to dig it up and sell it, and a a result there’s a lot of motivation for unsafe and unethical behaviour.” The Congo is home to ‘artisanal mines’, where cobalt is extracted from the ground by hand, often using child labour, without protective equipment.
Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. Brine is pumped out of a nearby lake into a series of evaporation ponds and left for 12 to 18 months. Various salts crystallise at different times as the solution becomes more concentrated. It is also treated with lime to remove traces of magnesium. When the minerals are ready for processing, they are taken to the nearby Planta Li lithium factory to produce the ions that will go into batteries. In 2017, the factory produced 20 tonnes of lithium carbonate
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There’s also a political angle to be considered. When Bolivia started to exploit its lithium supplies from about 2010, it was argued that its huge mineral wealth could give the impoverished country the economic and political heft that the oil-rich nations of the Middle East. “They don’t want to pay a new OPEC,” says Lisbeth Dahllöf, of the IVL Swedish Environmental Institute, who co-authored a report last year on the environmental footprint of electric car battery production.
In a recent paper in the journal Nature, Yushin and his co-authors argued that new battery technology needs to be developed that uses more common, and environmentally friendly materials to make batteries. Researchers are working on new battery chemistries that replace cobalt and lithium with more common and less toxic materials.
But, if new batteries are less energy dense or more expensive than lithium, they could end up having a negative effect on the environment overall. “Assessing and reducing the environmental cost is a more complex issue than it initially appears,” says Valimaki. “For example, a less durable, yet more sustainable device could entail a larger carbon footprint once your factor in transportation and the extra packaging required.”
Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. Graves such as this one are a common sight on the salt flats. The area has experienced very little rainfall over the last two years, which has affected the lives of local quinoa farmers. The lithium plants, which use vast amounts of water, have exacerbated shortages: in locations such as Pastos Chicas, near the Argentina/Chile border, additional water had to be shipped in from elsewhere to meet demand
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At the University of Birmingham, research funded by the government’s £246m Faraday Challenge for battery research is trying to find new ways of recycling lithium-ion. Research in Australia found that only two per cent of the country’s 3,300 tonnes of lithium-ion waste was recycled. Unwanted MP3 players and laptops can end up in landfill, where metals from the electrodes and ionic fluids from the electrolyte can leak into the environment.
A consortium of researchers, led by the Birmingham Energy Institute are using robotics technology developed for nuclear power plants to find ways to safely remove and dismantle potentially explosive lithium-ion cells from electric vehicles. There have been a number of fires at recycling plants where lithium-ion batteries have been stored improperly, or disguised as lead-acid batteries and put through a crusher.
Xiangtan, China. Workers on the production line at Soundon New Energy, a huge lithium-ion battery company in eastern China. Most electric vehicles in use today are yet to reach the end of their cycle. The first all-electric car to be powered by lithium-ion batteries, the Tesla Roadster, made its market debut in 2008. This means the first generation of electric vehicle batteries have yet to reach the recycling stage
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Because lithium cathodes degrade over time, they can’t simply be placed into new batteries (although some efforts are underway to use old vehicle batteries for energy storage applications where energy density is less critical). “That’s the problem with recycling any form of battery that has electrochemistry – you don’t know what point it is at in its life,” says Stephen Voller, CEO and founder of ZapGo. “That’s why recycling most mobile phones is not cost effective. You get this sort of soup.”
Another barrier, says Dr Gavin Harper of the Faraday Institution’s lithium recycling project, is that manufacturers are understandably secretive about what actually goes into their batteries, which makes it harder to recycle them properly. At the moment recovered cells are usually shredded, creating a mixture of metal that can then be separated using pyrometallurgical techniques – burning. But, this method wastes a lot of the lithium.
Linyi County, China. A production line at Chinese electric-car company ZD, in Linyi County. The company’s small, urban electric two-seaters are made exclusively for the Italian market, where ZD has a joint-venture company Share’ngo, a car-sharing startup in Milan. China is the world’s largest electric car manufacturer, and over the past few years, the country has been looking to increase the number of countries it exports to
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UK researchers are investigating alternative techniques, including biological recycling where bacteria are used to process the materials, and hydrometallurgical techniques which use solutions of chemicals in a similar way to how lithium is extracted from brine to begin with.
For Harper, it’s about creating a process to shepherd lithium-ion batteries safely through their whole lifecycle, and making sure that we’re not extracting more from the ground unnecessarily, or allowing chemicals from old batteries to do damage. “Considering that all of the materials in these batteries have already had an environmental and social impact in their extraction, we should be mindful of ensuring good custody,” he says.
