Climate Change-Peak Oil Feedback Loops

From The Harbinger:

Mike Flannigan, a University of Alberta wildland fire professor and Canadian Forest Service researcher, told the Globe & Mail that climate change was one of the causes of the forest fire that burned down 485 homes and businesses in Slave Lake, Alberta Canada. “I think it’s consistent with what we expect from climate change. We’ve already seen increases in fire activity in Canada,” he said. The boreal forests are warming and drying out; lightening strikes start 35% of fires; and the pine bark beetle is attacking and killing the weakened trees, making them more vulnerable to fire. Thus far in 2011, 264,000 hectares of forest have burned in Alberta, three times the 2010 total.

A further consequence of climate change is, paradoxically, that the forest fires caused the shut down of oil production from the tar sands, Canada's chief source of carbon emissions and climate change. The Globe & Mail reports that "nearly 150,000 barrels of oil-equivalent production has been halted amid a massive string of blazes in the oil patch that has threatened some energy infrastructure and created major logistical hurdles for many crude operators. . . With roughly 150,000 barrels of shuttered crude production, Alberta companies are losing more than $10-million per day in revenue. . . For Alberta, that translates into roughly $1.7-million per day in lost royalties, a tally that adds to the significant blow already faced by a province that has committed $50-million toward massive rebuilding costs after the fires."

And again, paradoxically, climate change has also caused a reduction in the demand for gasoline in the United States, Canada's chief importer of tar sands oil. Massive flooding of the Mississippi River has actually shut down parts of the highway system and forced people to cut back on their driving.

Fadel Gheit, a senior oil analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc, sites three causes of the US drop in demand for gasoline:

"First, the price of gasoline has stretched above the psychological breaking point for American drivers – hovering around $4 (U.S.) per gallon – prompting motorists to leave the car keys at home. Second, several major centres are suffering from massive floods, making highways impassable, again hampering driving habits. States in the Mississippi River Delta are staring down the threat of record floods as water spills over the banks of powerful rivers, with some Interstates closed and cities under water. Southeastern Missouri and southern Illinois have also been hit, and earlier this spring parts of northern states including Minnesota and North Dakota were under water. Third, a soft economy is once again hurting oil demand, Mr. Gheit said."

This is an unexpected confluence of the twin crises of climate change and peak oil: oil production is causing climate change, which is in turn creating climate conditions that are shutting down the production and consumption of oil. It is an ecological feedback loop of global proportions that has become directly observable.

UN population projection: 2010 update

The UN recently released its 2010 Revision of World Population Prospects (press release, access to data). The update projects that the current world population of close to 7 billion will reach 9.3 billion by the middle of this century and 10.1 billion by 2100. Stated another way, global population is expected to increase by 1/3 in the next 40 years.



Not surprisingly, the news has precipitated another round of quasi-Malthusian musings: Can the planet support 10 billion people? This is certainly a legitimate question, but the focus on the global picture -- which really hasn't been significantly affected by the update -- obscures the real news in the update.

As the Economist notes:

The most dramatic changes are national, not global. America's population, now 310m, is likely to rise to 400m in 2050 and 478m in 2100. China's is forecast to fall by 400m between now and 2100. Russia’s population is now 142m; Afghanistan’s slightly more than a fifth of that; Niger’s barely a tenth. But by 2100, Afghanistan is forecast to have the same population as Russia (111m) and Niger will be larger. Such forecasts need to be taken with a bucketload of salt: tiny shifts in today’s birth rate extrapolated over 90 years produce huge changes. But the general picture is probably right. Sub-Saharan Africa’s current population, at 856m, is little more than Europe’s and a fifth of Asia’s. By 2050 it could be almost three times Europe’s and by 2100 might even be three-quarters of the size of Asia. By any measure, Africa is by far the fastest-growing continent.

The most eye popping element is the rapid decline in China's population -- the result of the one child policy playing itself out over time. Two major lessons come to mind: 1) major transformations to social systems can be consciously planned and implemented when there is the political will but 2) successful implementation plays itself out in a span of decades rather months. In other words, such transformations are much harder in social systems dominated by quarterly-returns and the horse race politics of seemingly constant elections.

The new realities of Canadian climate policy

A few days ago a Canadian tweeted "A Royal wedding, tornadoes of the century, Osama is dead and we have an election. My head is going to explode!"

Well, the election has come and gone and, as Brian Walsh has noted, the results aren't particularly good for climate policy.

What does the Canadian election mean for environmental and climate policy? As it turns out, nothing very good. I'll explain why in a second, but first of all, there's something you need to know about Canada. Americans like to picture Canada as a progressive, friendly, extremely green and Kyoto Protocol-signing sort of country—and in many ways it is. But the truth is, Canada is also a petrostate. The country has 175.2 billion barrels of oil in reserves, third-most in the world, and it produces 2.6 million barrels of crude oil a day. When we think of foreign oil in the U.S., most of us imagine a Saudi sheik or a Venezuelan despot, but the single biggest supplier of foreign oil to the U.S. is our friendly neighbor to the north. And thanks to the growth of oil sands (or tar sands, depending on how polluting you consider them), petroleum and fossil fuel energy in general has only become more important to the Canadian economy, moving the country's power center to the West, where politicians like Harper hail from.

So Harper's clear victory means you can expect more industry-friendly policies from the now ruling Conservative Party, which is a little bit like Republicans-lite. That also means that Canada will continue its antagonism on the global climate stage, where it has long since abandoned any possibility of meeting its Kyoto carbon reduction targets, not that it was going to happen anyway. (Harper, back in a 2002 letter, referred to the Kyoto Protocol as a "socialist scheme.") Like his ideological counterpart George W. Bush, Harper doesn't seem to have much interest in dealing with climate change or energy, aside from the oil and gas that has helped Canada thrive recently. His position was in stark opposition to the opposition NDP, which offered more support for clean energy and—importantly—was ready to offer a carbon cap-and-trade program. But the Conservatives argued—in very familiar language—that carbon pricing would be increase energy prices and be a drag on the economy. Last night—in a possible example of what Roger Pielke Jr.'s "iron law of climate policy"—the Conservatives won, meaning that for now, carbon pricing in Canada is even less likely than it will be in the U.S.

Canadian climate policy analyst George Hoberg has some suggestions on how to cope.

Nonetheless, the results are in and we need to adapt to the new reality. I recommend focusing on three core strategies:

1. Build a much broader and deeper climate action movement outside the formal political process, focusing on youth. The root cause of the failure of the climate movement is the inability to mobilize sufficient public pressure on government. This effort needs to be intensified.

2. Put pressure on Stephen Harper to deliver cost-effective policies that have a realistic prospect of achieving their near term target of a 17% reduction in greenhouse gases below 2005 levels by 2020. The silver lining in a Harper majority is that he is a man of Alberta, and the leader most likely to be able to convince the oil patch and the Government of Alberta of the need to act. If he is going to be Canada’s Nixon, let him be like Nixon going to China and deliver Alberta and its industry on climate action. We need to promote an effective national dialogue and steer Harper away from his platform’s peculiar focus on command and control regulations and towards a cost-effective strategy to meet his platform’s emission reduction targets. He won’t do this without strong political mobilization (see strategy 1).

3. The one bright green lining in the blue Tory storm is the election of Elizabeth May to the Green Party of Canada’s first seat in the House of Commons. This position will give Ms. May a distinctive opportunity to focus attention on the cause of climate action. This voice of commitment will need support.

On the Royal Wedding, Emergence and Political Discourse in the US and Britain

I had no plan to watch the royal wedding this morning, but it happened to coincide with my morning coffee. And, as I watched, I was struck by a peculiar philosophical difference between American and British political discourse and its relation to the concept of emergence.

While the wedding had lots of pomp and ceremony, I was surprised at the clear, explicit and didactic nature of the statements made by the Cardinal. He literally provided numbered reasons for the benefits of marriage ... one, to have children; two ...; etc. It was not just a ceremony for those involved, it was also a message to the British about the intended role of the Royals. And, looking at the larger structure of the discourse, here is what was articulated:

1) The wedding ceremony involved a 'fusion' of William, Kate and God. Significantly, the point was made explicitly and repeatedly that the result of this process -- making God an operative element in their lives -- should not be seen as forcing them to 'conform' to a particular moral or ethical code. Rather, fusing themselves with God was meant to be transformative -- to provide them with access to the Holy in a way that allows them to navigate novel situations with a moral compass informed by God about what is good and what is not.

2) Later in the ceremony, there was some explicit discussion of the future and, in particular, the obligations of the Royals in facilitating it. This was, as one would expect in a nation where formal political decisions rest with the elected officials in Parliament, a bit more subtly phrased -- but the intended meaning was still clear. The Royals, using their moral compass informed by God, have an important role to play in defining the direction of British society and, interestingly, its relation to nature.

I don't know squat about Anglican doctrine, previous royal weddings or any particular role that Charles (and his well known green bent) might have had in crafting the reference to preserving nature. But the general philosophical tone of the ceremony was clear: rather than leading through adherence to a rigid code, the Royals are expected to channel God and provided enlightened and emergent leadership that addresses novel problems in novel ways.

This view is, interestingly, in stark contrast with American political discourse where the dominant theme has to do with the infinite wisdom of the founding fathers and the merit in finding solutions that conform to their ideas. This orientation is most explicitly present in the legal philosophy of 'strict constructionism' but the invocation of the founding fathers is a standard trope in Congress as well.

So this is where the English speaking world currently finds itself. On one side of the pond, moral leadership is invested in an in-bred group of Royals who are expected to channel God in order to help Britain find its way. But they have no formal political power. On the other side of the pond, God has been replaced by a group of long dead men -- the founding fathers -- as the source of enlightened governance. Moreover, rather than adaptively addressing new problems, solutions are found though conformity to the ideas of the founders. Personally, I don't find either of those options -- adaptive leadership based on the Divine right of Kings and the spiritual connection of the Royals to God or rigid doctrinal adherence to a civil authority constrained to the ideas of a group long dead men -- particularly attractive. Can't we some how find a way to get adaptive governance integrated into a civil authority structure?

And now for a REAL Sociologist, Max Weber

"This order [i.e. capitalism] is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with the economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.”

—Max Weber, 1905

(from The Oil Drum, April 2011)

Major shifts in fuel are possible

In light of all the latent pessimism present in the previous posts about the Nisbet Report -- that the current strategy of climate change advocacy in the US is unlikely to succeed -- it is useful to revisit a case where significant change in fossil fuel usage did occur.

Most electricity is generated by boiling water in order to create steam that is used to power turbines. The major difference among power plants is the fuel used to boil the water -- whether it be coal, oil, nuclear power, natural gas or whatever. As shown in the graph below (taken from chapter 3 of the IMF's 2011 World Economic Outlook report), the use of oil as a fuel to generate electricity in the OECD countries grew rapidly during the 1960's, accounting for over 25% of electrical power generated in the early 1970's. The proportion of electricity generated from oil has progressively declined to the present level of 2.5%, a 90% decrease over 40 years.



Here is how the report explains the shift:

Most OECD countries saw a big switch away from oil in electric power generation in the early 1980s. After oil prices rose sharply compared with the prices of other fossil fuels in the 1970s, the power sector switched from oil to other inputs (Figure 3.6): some countries went back to coal (for example, the United States); others increased their nuclear capacity (for example, France) or turned to alternative energy sources. .... Today, however, the power sector is no longer an important oil consumer in OECD or emerging market economies. In fact, the transportation sector currently accounts for about 50 percent of total oil consumption. A substantial part of the remainder goes to the petrochemical industry and for other miscellaneous uses outside the power sector. Given current technologies, it is harder to substitute other factors for oil in these sectors, explaining the break in the estimated elasticities.

Back in the 1970's as oil prices rose there was a big debate: was oil a price elastic or an inelastic commodity. In other words, as the price rose, would shifts occur to other fuels or would the higher costs be absorbed and passed on because no suitable substitutes were available. The answer, it turns out, depends. Thus, in the power sector where there were cost effective alternatives, substitution occurred. In the transportation sector, where cost effective substitutes were not available, people adjusted by purchasing more fuel efficient cars rather than adopting a technology powered by another fuel.

In short,
1. Significant energy shifts do occur.
2. Under the right conditions, the shift can occur fairly quickly (the bulk of the decline came in a period of about 10 years), though the entirety of a transition can take decades.
3. Rapid shifts are driven by economics (in this case, substituting a cheaper fuel source) rather than regulatory policy.
4. Shifts are dependent on the availability of substitutes.

The Nisbet Report: Climate Shift (Take II)

Here's an update on the earlier discussion of Nisbet's ClimateShift report.

Bradford Plummer over at the New Republic has a thoughtful review of the Nisbet Report, Blame Game: Has the green movement been a miserable flop? The article does a good job of both describing the niche controversies surrounding the report while at the same time maintaining focus on the larger issues that the report raises; specifically whether or not the emphasis on public education is a sensible strategy for getting the US to adopt climate change legislation. Unfortunately, in an attempt to end on an up note, the article goes seriously off track in the last paragraph.

Last month, I asked David Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council whether the green movement needed to rethink its broader strategy. .... Hawkins, who has worked on air-pollution issues for four decades now, preferred to take the long view. “I’m a political optimist,” he said. “Over the last forty years, we really have seen significant environmental progress. There are always setbacks—we’ve weathered unfriendly political climates during the Reagan and Bush years, and we’ve protected the EPA’s authority. But, eventually, we'd win. The air would get cleaner, lives would be saved, and things continue to get better.” It's not the sort of conclusion that's going to grab headlines. But that doesn't mean he's wrong.

Hawkins is arguably right --- as long as you focus on environmental matters that can be addressed at the level of the nation-state or below. But climate change is of a different scale, requiring coordinated effort among all the countries of the world. This is where the navel-gazing fetish of America gets them in trouble. There are two big behemoths that have to be placated in any feasible solution to climate change: the US and China. The notion that internal political pressure will, at this point, get the US to move without some sort of tandem move by China is pure fantasy. I've addressed this issue in greater depth here and here.

Unfortunately, the track record of international cooperation on such a scale is not something that generates a lot of optimism. The only structure remotely similar to what will be needed -- that is an essentially global agreement with a legally binding enforcement mechanism -- are the trade agreements of the World Trade Organization. But ever since about 2000, when the developing world woke up to the fact that they were having the wool pulled over their eyes by the wealthy economies, further development of such agreements has ground to a halt. Stated another way, the WTO experience has seriously lessened the likelihood of getting international cooperation on a similar scale for another issue like climate change.

Yes, some will point to the Montreal Protocol and its success in taming the ozone problem and argue, as they have done for years, that it's cap-and-trade model provides a viable way to address the climate issue. While superficially attractive, this suggestion fails to account for three major differences. First, the ozone problem was, comparatively, a simple matter. Climate change is a wicked problem with many more complexities and uncertainties. Second, once they discovered an alternative for CFC's, the chemical industry was full scale in favor of the Montreal Protocol because they saw a clear path to increased profits. This is not the case with climate change where much of the fossil fuel industry remains resolutely opposed to effective climate change policy. Third, CFC's were a comparatively minor economic product and, hence, no one perceived a ban on CFC's as a fundamental attack on capitalism. In contrast, fossil fuels are a key source of the energy which drives the modern economy and which cannot easily and cheaply be replaced with another source. As such, the argument that weaning an economy off fossil fuels will necessitate a fundamental restructuring of the economy is not at all far fetched. Thus, climate change legislation is easily tied to concerns about the future of capitalism or the American way of life, a political burden that the Montreal Protocol never had to carry.

I'm all for optimism. But I prefer to take mine with a dash of realism thrown in.

P.S. A couple days after I posted this Robert Pielke Jr's posted on the ozone issue, fleshing out several of the above points with additional details.

The ClimateShift Controversy

It is the end of term and I'm weighted down by a pile of papers. So, not much time for the blog. That said, the world has thrown a pitch right down the middle of the plate and I can't just stand there looking. I have to swing .....

A couple days ago, Climate Progress released a pre-publication draft of a report authored by Matthew Nisbet ClimateShift: Clear Vision for the Next Decade of Debate along with a scathing attack on the report by Joe Romm. According to Romm:

The 99-page report’s two central, but ridiculous, claims are:

1. The environmental movement outspent opponents during the climate bill debate.
2. Media coverage of climate change has become balanced and was not a factor in the defeat of the cap-and-trade bill.

There are two basic problems with this representation. First, from my quick reading of the report, these supposed "central claims" are minor subthemes rather than major pillars of the report's argument. The report is basically an argument for what it terms a "deeper reconsideration" of the strategy for climate change advocacy. Simply put, the report argues that climate change advocates need a new strategy because the current one isn't working. The counting up of dollars spent by both sides is meant to buttress this argument by showing that the current message has been widely distributed. Thus, advocates can't claim they have failed because they haven't been heard.

Romm's piece gleefully notes that several reviewers have issues with the way the advocacy dollars have been counted in the report and have refused to have any further involvement with it. At heart, this appears to be a theoretical debate about how media affect opinion dressed up in the guise of an argument over facts. The simple rendition treats the public as dupes -- the more something is repeated, the more likely the public is to believe it. If you take this view, then volume matters. The guy with the big megaphone -- read the Koch brothers -- wins. Thus, the amount of money spent is important. The more complex rendition treats the public as interpreters rather than passive recipients or media content. People have predispositions and cognitive tendencies that result in selective perception. Thus, for example, liberals read Stephen Colbert as sarcastic while conservatives tend to take his proclamations more literally. The same phenomena was famously documented in relation to people's interpretation of Archie Bunker in the 1970's -- conservatives thought Archie won the arguments while liberals viewed Mike and Gloria as the sensible ones (See Archie Bunker’s Bigotry: A Study in Selective Perception and Exposure by Neil Vidmar and Milton Rokeach). But, as the report notes in Chapter 4, the distribution of such predispositions is not stable within the population. Attitudes are embedded in context and affected by things like the state of the economy. I'm not saying that the volume with which a message is repeated is irrelevant, but just because someone is shouting something doesn't make me accept it.

This brings me to my second, and more fundamental, objection to Romm's piece: it stirs up a controversy that takes away from a discussion of the real issues raised by the report. Keith Kloor has hit this nail directly on the head. It is tidy and simplistic to feel that there are powerful forces out there that are corrupting the public's view. The reality is much more complex. Unfortunately, Romm has drug the discussion down to a focus on simplistic and, if not irrelevant at least secondary, concerns. If the climate change advocacy community dwells exclusively on these matters and fails to address the need for serious attention to the content of their message and the way it is framed, Romm will have won the battle while helping lose the war.

Now ... back to marking.

The future according to Google

Resilience Science picked this up from xkcd. It speaks for itself!

Dualing Renewables

Washington state has a history of bold energy initiatives. Beginning with the construction of the massive Grand Coulee Dam during the Depression, the next 20 years turned the Columbia River into a series of lakes as dams were build to control runoff, provide irrigation and generate electricity. As a result of this investment, the state gets a large proportion of its power from hydroelectricity and has some of the lowest electricity rates in the US.

During WWII, Hanford served as one of the three original sites for the Manhattan project to build the atomic bomb, creating a local economy in the Tri-City region favorable to nuclear. Thus during the 1970's, as construction of nuclear power plants became progressively more problematic in much of the country, the state commenced construction on a set of six nuclear plants near the Tri-Cities. In contrast to the investment in hydroelectricity, this project ended poorly; in the early 1980's the project collapsed in debt and all but one of the plants were mothballed.

More recently, the state passed the Washington Energy Independence Act of 2006. As a result, electric utilities in Washington that serve more than 25,000 customers are required to obtain the following percentages of their electricity from "new" renewable resources:

o At least 3% by January 1, 2012

o At least 9% by January 1, 2015

o At least 15% by January 1, 2020

Significantly, the Act does not count hydroelectric power as renewable and, as a result, the last few years have seen the construction of several large wind farms. With 3500 megawatts installed capacity, the state gets three times more power from wind than from its one operating nuclear plant. As the graph below shows, the needs of the region at some periods, typically 5-8000 megawatts, are substantially less than generated by hydro alone (11-14000 megawatts). As a result, the bulk of the wind power is exported to California and other states outside the Northwest.



The massive growth in energy supply, however, has not been met by a similar increase in transmission capacity and the Bonneville Power Administration is considering shutting down the wind farms at certain times of the year. As described in the Seattle Times:

As the wind industry expands, the BPA has found it more difficult to transmit all that power and still meet other responsibilities, which include selling hydro power outside the region and spilling water over dams to aid the passage of migrating salmon.

Last June, the BPA balancing effort turned into a high-wire act as a late snow melt unleashed a gusher of water down the Columbia River at the same time that winds whipped up the power turbines.

BPA officials said that they couldn't divert all the water around the hydroelectric turbines without putting too much dissolved gas into the river and placing salmon at risk. So they ended up running more water through the dam turbines and giving away their surplus power to utilities all over the West.

That spurred the agency to develop a new proposal to periodically shut down wind-power farms to help balance loads. The plan was embraced by public utilities across the region.

The proposal to occasionally shut down wind production has met with a storm or criticism from the wind industry, which sees the initiative as an unfair burden on their industrial sector. For many wind-power producers, a big part of the payback is collecting tax credits for power production. Thus, not only revenues but also the tax credits would be lost during shutdowns.

Over the longer term, as described here, BPA is looking to improve the information infrastructure in ways that will allow them to more effectively integrate wind power into the existing distribution network.