Big Gav has an interesting post at The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand on solar energy, and approaches being pursued to make it economically competitive with coal fired power generation.

Bill Gross, founder of the Californian company IdeaLab, offers some lessons learned:

• Use software to analyse and optimise performance of plants.
• Don’t build plants, get utilities (customers) to.
• Avoid environmental conflicts and transmission line costs by building smaller plants on brownfield sites near cities.
• Leverage energy storage and volume of scale in manufacturing to reduce costs.

Big Gav expands on these points in his post. It’s worth checking out.

On the other hand, John Michael Greer has a post voicing cautionary notes about the prospects for solar:

The first is that familiar nemesis of renewable energy schemes, the problem of net energy. It would take a pretty substantial amount of highly concentrated energy to build that hundred square mile array of mirrors, counting the energy needed to manufacture the mirrors, the tracking assemblies, the pipes, the steam turbines, and all the other hardware, as well as the energy needed to produce the raw materials that go into them – no small amount, that latter. It would take another very substantial amount of concentrated energy, regularly supplied, to keep it in good working order amid the dust, sandstorms, and extreme temperatures of the Nevada desert; and if the amount of energy produced by the scheme comes anywhere close to what’s theoretically possible, that would probably be the only time in history this has ever occurred with a very new, very large, and very experimental technological project. Subtract the energy cost to build and run the plant from the energy you could reasonably (as opposed to theoretically) expect to get out of it, and the results will inevitably be a good deal less impressive than they look on paper.

The second is another equally common nemesis of renewable energy schemes, the economic dimension. . . . If investing billions of dollars (and, more importantly, the equivalent amounts of energy and resources) in mirrors in the Nevada desert doesn’t produce as high an economic return as other uses of the same money, energy, and resources, the mirrors are going to draw the short end of the stick. Political decisions can override that calculus to some extent, but impose an equivalent requirement: if investing that money, energy, and resources in mirrors doesn’t produce as high a political payoff as other uses of the same things, once again, the fact that the mirrors might theoretically allow America’s middle classes to maintain some semblance of their current lifestyle is not going to matter two photons in a Nevada sandstorm.

Stuart Staniford at Early Warning takes issue with Greer, noting that photo voltaic systems can produce a positive energy return in the range of 4.8–13.9.

Still, if – as Greer suggests – the future is unlikely to comply with our cornucopian fantasies, it need not be grim:

When concentrated energy is scarce, local production of relatively diffuse energy for local use is a far more viable approach for a great many uses. This will allow the highly concentrated energies that are left to be directed to those applications that actually need them, while also shielding local communities from the consequences of the failure or complete collapse of centralized systems. The resulting economy may not have much resembance to today’s fantasies of a high-tech future, but the barbarism Frank Shuman feared is not the only alternative to that future; there’s something to be said for a society, even a relatively impoverished and resource-scarce one, that can still reliably provide its inhabitants with hot baths, warm rooms in winter, and well-done pot roasts – and, of course, good brandy.

Automatic Earth riffs on this quote by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, speaking to the House Budget Committee on Wednesday (2/24/10):

Without growth, we cannot begin the process of restoring fiscal responsibility. . . . before the federal government can begin attacking soaring deficits and a massive national debt, it needs to increase jobs and ensure economic growth.

Calculated Risk points out housing (not existing home sales!) is historically the best leading indicator for the economy and unemployment, using Residential Investment (quarterly from the BEA’s GDP report), monthly data on Housing Starts and New Home sales from the Census Bureau, and builder confidence from the NAHB. How do these look?

Total starts had rebounded to 590 thousand in June, and have moved mostly sideways for eight months. Single-family starts were at 484 thousand (SAAR) in January, up 1.5% from the revised December rate, and 36% above the record low in January and February 2009 (357 thousand). Just like for total starts, single-family starts have been at about this level for eight months.

Housing starts are moving sideways . . .

The housing market index (HMI) was at 17 in February. This is an increase from 15 in January.

The record low was 8 set in January 2009. This is still very low – and this is what I’ve expected – a long period of builder depression. The HMI has been in the 15 to 19 range since May 2009.

More moving sideways . . .

New Home Sales in January were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) of 309 thousand. This is a record low and a sharp decrease from the 348 thousand rate in December.

And it would be generous to even call this “moving sideways”.

Automatic Earth continues:

Sheila Bair’s report on the banks is abysmal, lending in the private sector is falling off a cliff while public lending is running up that same cliff, and in that quote above Geithner just told us that there are no plans to quit adding to the debt before spending gives birth to growth in some fictional fairy tale of immaculate financial conception. But it’s beyond foolish not to ask what happens if no such fairy tale ending exists, if only simply because the risk that pervades the entire endeavor is as palpable as it is terrifying.

The taxpayer funds presently spent on the thus far evasive dream of recovery and growth resumption could be spent on programs to soften the blow of possibility number two, where growth never resumes, or doesn’t do so for many years to come. It’s one thing for everyone to want growth, it’s quite another to actually get what you wish for.

Jim Kunstler has for years been predicting that we’ll blow our last wad trying to maintain business as usual long after BAU is over for good.

Given the reality of peak energy, it’s time to begin planning for “possibility number two, where growth never resumes”.   As economic activity is dependent on energy inputs, declining energy availability means return to growth simply isn’t in the cards.

Time for Plan B.

Sergio Gabrielli, CEO of Petrobras (a Brazilian multinational energy company headquartered in Rio de Janeiro), says global oil production (including biofuels) will peak in 2010 due to oil capacity additions from new projects being unable to offset world oil decline rates.

Gabrielli points out in his presentation that the world will need to produce oil from new sources equivalent to one Saudi Arabia every two years to offset future world oil decline rates – which he sees at about 5% per year.

Finding and bringing to production the needed magnitudes of new oil is simply not going to happen. Even managing to maintain historically observed decline rates may prove to be a challenge. Take Nigeria, for example. As the world teeters at the edge of economic and political collapse, Nigeria seems to be going over the edge. Nigeria, which in 2008 produced over two million barrels of sweet crude a day and today provides 9% of U.S. oil imports, could vanish as an oil exporter, virtually overnight. Despite its enormous reserves, Venezuela is looking none too stable as a producer and exporter, either.

Chris Nelder takes a close look at Mexico, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia and warns the oil export crisis has arrived – we just haven’t felt it yet:

[W]hen oil prices rise again, the pain will be far greater for the U.S. than it is for our top suppliers. Next time, the spear of declining oil exports will puncture a lung.

If the gap between demand and supply shown in the chart above cannot be filled with new supply, the only alternative is for prices to increase to reduce demand to equal supply: “demand destruction.”  That means economic shrinkage rather than growth, and a consequent financial crisis of epic proportions. Consequently we are going to find it harder to extract other energy and mineral resources. As George Mobus points out in a post at The Oil Drum, our net energy is already in decline and that is at the root of the global economic problems we are seeing. You cannot have a growing economy when the basis of all economic wealth production is in decline.

The economic tremblings we’ve seen over the last couple of years may prove to be mere foreshocks. No matter how many trillions we throw at the problem, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Rather than trying to save the irretrievably lost, we’ll have to accommodate ourselves to the new reality:

We can only start simplifying our societies and giving up the many discretionary expenditures of energy that we currently enjoy without much thought. We can learn to once again live on real-time solar influx via our food raising systems. And even then we are talking about an ability to support only a small fraction of the current population. Ironically the simplification of society involves the increasing complexity of individual lives. What this means in practice is that each individual must start to become more of a generalist in terms of the functions that support life. Everyone will have to become a food grower! Believe it or not that isn’t simple! Knowing how to grow your own nutrients is actually quite complicated and will demand a whole new set of cognitive skills.

For the environment, peak oil and economic collapse offers a glimmer of hope. For example, oil accounts for 43% of our CO2 emissions from energy use. Consequent economic collapse will mean that a lot of coal plants in the works will never get built, and maybe we’ll even see existing plants begin to wither away.

Architect and urban planner Andres Duany blames peak oil and global warming on the American lifestyle:

Seth Bauer at the Huffington Post quotes Duany:

It’s where we live, the size of our houses, the distances we drive for work, commerce, play–everything.

And goes on to summarize Duany’s rant:

And it’s all a vicious circle. The reason our houses are so big (and inefficient), he says, is because we have eliminated a healthy civic life. We build homes with giant foyers because we have no public squares. We need media rooms because it’s not easy or pleasant to drive to a multiplex theater, cross a parking lot through an ocean of cars, and pay a fortune for popcorn. We build bars in our basements because there are no neighborhood pubs. We have giant refrigerators and ever-growing storage needs because shopping is both far away and unpleasant (hello, Costco). The result? We heat and air-condition unused rooms in oversized unpleasant houses. And because our home bars and foyers are empty and our media experiences private, we’re lonely, to boot.

But the American lifestyle is really just a symptom of a larger disease – if not industrialization itself, certainly the ideology of growth that it has spawned.

Politicians and economists around the globe are focused on one thing: economic growth. When “the economy” falters, all efforts are towards returning the global economy to a path of growth. As Chris Martenson says in a piece titled Copenhagen & Economic Growth – You Can’t Have Both at the Energy Bulletin:

We need more jobs, we are told; we need economic growth, we need more people consuming more things.  Growth is the ever-constant word on politicians’ lips.  Official actions amounting to tens of trillions of dollars speak to the fact that this is, in fact, our number-one global priority.

Martenson is spot on in pointing out that any solution to global warming requires that carbon emissions be reduced by a vast amount over the next few decades. But economic growth and reduced emissions are mutually exclusive.  You can’t have both.

Even if we can’t muster the moral fortitude do do anything to avert catastrophic global warming, we still may fail in our desperate efforts to maintain economic growth. The primary implication of peak oil is that the era of economic growth is over. The current recession is very much energy-related. The whole concept of recession as a temporary period where growth is briefly interrupted within a long-term trend of economic growth is likely to become irrelevant in a world where oil is becoming ever more expensive to extract and oil supplies are decreasing.

We’re seeing a feedback loop develop with oil eerily similar to the feedback loops operating in the global warming context. The global financial crisis has resulted in oil investment shrinking by 20%, which in turn will result in less oil and more expensive oil in the future, causing more financial turmoil in an ever-worsening downward spiral.

We already are seeing the future beginning to emerge. As the election results in Massachusetts show, that future will hold ugly surprises.

Portland General Electric Co. is preparing plans to shut down Boardman – Oregon’s only coal-fired power plant – by 2020 – 20 years earlier than previously planned. The plant burns strip-mined coal shipped in by train from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, and accounts for about 25 percent of the power generation owned by PGE. Boardman is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon.

Jeff Bissonnette at Blue Oregon points out this is a very big deal. Boardman may be the first baseload coal plant in the nation to be shut down.

The Boardman coal plant is located about 150 miles east of Portland and provides a baseload output of more than 500 megawatts. Under the existing plan, huge investments would be required to control pollution – which would do nothing about the plant’s carbon emissions. If global warming legislation or a carbon tax were to be enacted, the resulting high price of its electricity might force the plant to close anyway. Based on its analysis of carbon and natural gas prices, PGE believes that a 2020 shutdown would be the low-cost, least-risk plan for utility ratepayers and shareholders.

The earlier shutdown needs approval from the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

PGE is proposing to fill the gap left by Boardman’s closure with two new gas plants: a base-load unit adjacent to the existing Boardman coal plant and a smaller unit next to its existing gas plant in Clatskanie.

California’s new carbon fuel standard will shut U.S. ethanol out of the biggest U.S. market. Why? Because the regulations will count the emissions created when corn is planted, harvested and ground into fuel as part of ethanol’s carbon output. The regulation also counts indirect land-use changes – the impact on other areas of planting corn in the Midwest for ethanol.

Naturally, the two largest ethanol trade organizations have sued California over the standard.

When you count everything, “green” may not be green after all.

A prime example is the newly rolled out “Greenroads” rating system developed by University of Washington researchers and the engineering firm CH2M Hill. The system (the complete version of which is available here) outlines minimum requirements to qualify as a “green roadway”, including a noise mitigation plan, storm-water management plan and waste management plan. It also allows up to 118 points for voluntary actions such as minimizing light pollution, using recycled materials, incorporating quiet pavement and accommodating non-motorized transportation.

What the rating system leaves out is everything important:

Decisions regarding the location, type, timing, feasibility or other planning level ideas are excluded. While planning is fundamental to roadway and community
sustainability, these decisions are often too complex or political to be adequately defined by a point system.

“Greenroads” is greenwashing at its finest.

For anyone concerned about the impact of emissions from the transportation sector on global warming (or complacent about peak oil), this chart posted by Stuart Staniford at his blog Early Warning should be sobering:

Heading Out at The Oil Drum reports the Chinese purchased 13.6 million cars and light trucks last year, compared to 10.4 million sold in the USA. China is now the world’s #1 auto market. Not surprisingly, Chinese oil imports are also up. In December, Chinese imports of crude oil rose to 20 million tonnes, or the equivalent of 4.7 million barrels a day. Chinese demand is helping keep oil prices firm despite the continuing global economic disruption.

Then again, this chart from another Staniford post looking at urbanization trends shows that urbanization and vehicle use are in lockstep, growing exponentially :

Of course, correlation does not establish causation. But Staniford shows that as the percentage of the population engaged in agriculture declines and as countries “develop” and become urbanized, per capita energy use tends to increase.

The global climate and energy outlook is grim as China begins to look more and more like us. And notice India, looming there on the horizon.

A new study published titled “Mountaintop Mining Consequences” published in the journal Science should put a final end to the myth of “clean coal”:

“Mining permits are being issued despite the preponderance of scientific evidence that impacts are pervasive and irreversible and that mitigation cannot compensate for the losses.”

Photo: Charles Pezeshki

The quote is from an article by Ken Ward Jr. in the Charleston (WV) Gazette.

A press release explains:

In their paper, the authors outline severe environmental degradation taking place at mining sites and downstream. The practice destroys extensive tracts of deciduous forests and buries small streams that play essential roles in the overall health of entire watersheds. Waterborne contaminants enter streams that remain below valley fills and can be transported great distances into larger bodies of water.

The paper calls on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the federal Army Corps of Engineers to stay all new mountaintop removal mining permits unless new mining and reclamation techniques “can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems.”

That will never happen. The only rational response: No more coal.

Dr. Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of “Limits to Growth” and its subsequent updates, has a powerpoint presentation and podcast of a recent talk available at the Population Institute site.

Most interesting is his view that the end of growth does not come directly from depletion, but indirectly from rising capital expenditures as the costs of exploiting resource sources and dealing with saturating sinks rise exponentially. And as he points out, that’s what we’re beginning to see already:

Most people assume that the major global difficulties would occur after the end to growth.

This is not correct.

The globe’s population would experience the most stress prior to the peak, as pressures mount high enough to neutralize the enormous political, demographic, and economic forces that now sustain growth.

We are in the early phases of that period now.

Meadows’ presentation finishes up with a chart showing CO2 emissions as a function of four factors:

1. Number of people.
2. Number of units of capital per person, which is a surrogate for living standards.
3. The amount of energy required to build and operate that capital.
4. The fraction of that energy that comes from non-fossil sources.

Meadows points out the key to our climate change predicament lies in reversing population and consumption growth. If we can’t change those, technology can at best only prolong the agony.

Gail the Actuary at The Oil Drum transcribes his finishing words:

So far, our concern about climate change had manifested itself through efforts to improve efficiency and to implement alternative energy sources–the so-called technology options. I will just close by pointing out that as long as we ignore demographic and cultural issues, the growth in the first two factors will continue to offset all of the improvement we make in factors 3 and 4. And so until we can understand how to begin reducing the growth in the first two factors, climate change is a foregone conclusion.

Richard Heinberg also has his presentation posted at the same site. Heinberg focuses on how peak oil and the consequent end of growth led to the financial crisis, one that will not be resolved in the way to which we have become accustomed. The end of growth means we have entered a new era.

Postings have been slim (like totally absent) over the past week. This wasn’t planned. It’s just that everybody seems to have shut down over the holidays. There’s been nothing that seemed important enough to report on or react to.

The down time and the days absent of rain (albeit cold and mostly foggy) gave me time to finish pruning the vineyard.

I also took the opportunity to  do a little work in the cellar. A bit of hydrogen sulfide suddenly showed up in the barrels of ‘09, necessitating racking and aeration.

The hours spent pruning and winemaking offered plenty of time for reflection. Events and developments over the past year have made clear the futility of current approaches to “the economy” and to climate change.

The current great recession is the result of a crisis of the global financial system triggered by spiking oil prices, and is but a preview of the troubles ahead for an economics based on exponential growth when the underpinnings of that expansion – cheap and abundant energy – have vanished. We have seen that in our present economic system the absence of growth results in financial crisis, which in turn threatens the entire economic edifice with collapse.

Obama’s economic policy – and the ability to repay the trillions of dollars of debt taken on to bail out the financial system – is predicated on a return to robust economic growth.  How’s that likely to work out?

Global warming is similarly but a symptom of a more basic predicament: ecological overshoot of a population that has, due to its sheer numbers and to its impacts on ecological systems, overtaxed both the sources necessary to sustain itself and the environmental sinks which absorb the wastes that would otherwise kill it off. This condition of global ecological overshoot is what makes our current predicament unprecedented in human experience.

In an overshoot situation, traditional policy responses not only fail to work. They make the situation worse because they increase rather than decrease the degree of overshoot. Peak oil and global warming are predicaments that cannot be “solved” through more of the economic growth that caused them. Our situation demands not only the end of growth – it demands that the human footprint shrink, dramatically and quickly.

The approach to global warming embodied by the Kyoto accord – which finally blew up at Copenhagen – was a futile attempt to retain the objective of  industrial development of the world’s poor countries and growth in the rich countries, all the while imagining that the consequences of growth could somehow be made to disappear.  At Copenhagen, the world’s biggest polluters made it clear that they would have none of any effort which might stifle growth.

At least the nonsense that we can have growth without its consequences is no longer on the table. Forget targets, even the ambitious targets floated at Copenhagen of limiting atmospheric CO2 to 350 ppm or limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C. The target is not important. What is important is what must be done to avoid dumping so much carbon into the atmosphere that runaway global warming becomes inevitable – and that is, leave coal (and tar sands) in the ground.  We can’t wait for consensus among governments dedicated to sustaining economic growth at any cost. We is needed is direct action by people, everywhere and around the globe. No more coal-fired power plants. Phase out existing plants, the sooner the better. No more coal mining. No more coal trains. No more tar sands or other unconventional oil. No more pipelines stretching from Athabasca to fill gas tanks in Canada, the U.S., or anywhere else.

Peak oil and global warming demand that we craft a new economics, one that is capable of recognizing and valuing ecological reality. Every species has its economics, a way of living within its environment. Humans are no different. It should be obvious that an economics that destroys its environment and the ability to continue to exist is not one that produces prosperity. Prosperity, not growth, must be the goal and measure of a new economics: enough to eat, enough to drink, adequate shelter, loving and enriching community, within a stable and beautiful ecosystem, all imbued with a sense of the sacred.

All species survive by tapping energy available in the environment. Again, humans are no different. Over the last two centuries, tapping millions of years of ancient sunlight has fueled an explosion in both human numbers and human impacts. As the days of ancient sunlight draw to a close, even the best of us dream of new stores of unlimited power, waiting to be tapped.   We’re willing to trade our souls for nuclear, bequething upon the grandchildren of our grandchildren the burden of dealing with deadly waste and with dangerous facilities that will need tending for tens of millennia. This would require that a stable, complex, wealthy, and energy-intensive society also endure for tens of millennia – a feat never before accomplished, in all of human history. What hubris.

What’s needed is a rediscovery of humility. If we begin the work now, we may be able to put in place the infrastructure to enable the future to maintain some of the comforts of the present, as the foresighted leadership of Aruba has done in building a windfarm that will provide a very substantial portion of the island’s electricity. Solar thermal offers promise in sunny locations – Europe is betting its future on it.  Solar photovoltaic keeps looking more and more promising.

We can’t have it all, not without destroying ourselves and the Earth itself (at least the Earth as we know it). If we lower our sights, get to work, and do our best, we may be able to have enough.