This article in the U.K. Guardian sounds like it could come from the Onion. Key punch lines:

The agreement produced in the early hours of Saturday reinforces the promise made by rich countries at Copenhagen last year to mobilize billions for a green climate fund to help poor countries defend themselves against climate damage.

It was not clear how the funds would be raised. At Copenhagen last year, rich countries agreed to raise $100bn (£63bn) a year by 2020 for the fund. However, US officials said at the weekend that most of this would come from the private sector.

Like, we’re going to pass the hat around to corporations?

Cancún’s most significant result was putting off the tough decisions until next year’s UN summit in South Africa.

Environmental groups blamed the US for taking a hard line at the talks. But all ended well:

Despite those tensions, however, America and China avoided the mood of confrontation that undermined the talks at Copenhagen last year.

Now there’s real progress for you!

Grist reports that the talks ushered in a “a new era in international cooperation on climate change.” Kumbaya! All the nations of the world have now agreed to cooperate in doing nothing significant or effective!

Bolivia didn’t sound ready to jump on the self-congratulatory bandwagon. The agreement embraces a policy on “deforestation mitigation” known as REDD, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries. This gives polluters in the north a chance to buy carbon credits for protecting forests in the global south.

Bolivia, and most organizations on the ground and in the streets of Cancún for the past two weeks, object to REDD on the grounds that it commodifies the forests of the global South, endangers indigenous control over the forests and their right to livelihood, and allows northern polluters to keep polluting. Bolivian negotiator Pablo Solon said handing out carbon credits for protecting forests makes it easier for industrialized nations to achieve their emissions reductions targets without taking domestic action to rein in greenhouse gases.

Bolivian President Evo Morales gave an impassioned speech at the conference that refused to cut the industrial powers any slack:

We came to Cancún to save nature, forests, planet Earth. We are not here to convert nature into a commodity. We have not come here to revitalize capitalism with carbon markets . . .

We are familiar with the slogan “Country or Death,” but it is better now to talk about “Planet or Death.” To try and look for an intermediary solution is to trick people. It is the major powers here that need to abandon their arrogance in the face of the peoples of the world.

As the latest round of climate talks kick off in Cancun, the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific society is saying:

[T]here is now little to no chance of maintaining the global mean surface temperature at or below 2^°C. Moreover, the impacts associated with 2^°C have been revised upwards, sufficiently so that 2^°C now more appropriately represents the threshold between ‘dangerous’ and ‘extremely dangerous’ climate change.

The quote above is from the abstract of the article Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world, published in a special theme issue of the Royal Society of London periodical Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The reports contained in the issue, entitled “Four degrees and beyond: the potential for a global temperature increase of four degrees and its implications”, stem from the Four Degrees and Beyond Conference held in September 2009. Participants were asked to specifically address the questions of (i) how probable a warming of four degrees or higher might be, (ii) what the consequences of such a warming might be for ecosystems and society, (iii) how to adapt to such large changes, and (iv) how to keep the risk of high-end climate change as low as possible.

Even if global carbon emission curbs were to be agreed in the future, the emissions reductions would be insufficient to limit global temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius this century. To have a realistic chance of doing that, the world would have to get carbon emissions to peak within 15 years and then follow this up with a massive decarbonization of society. The odds of this happening are zero. It won’t happen – at least not voluntarily. The politics are simply too daunting.

We’ve already built in an overshoot of 2^°C, and are heading towards 4^°C. So what?

“In such a 4°C world, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world, while the limits for adaptation for natural systems would largely be exceeded throughout the world.”

The concluding piece by Rachel Warren, “The role of interactions in a world implementing adaptation and mitigation solutions to climate change,” suggests that adaptation may not be possible. The interaction of impacts is likely to be overwhelming as ecosystems collapse over large parts of the Earth:

[A] 4°C world would be facing enormous adaptation challenges in the agricultural sector, with large areas of cropland becoming unsuitable for cultivation, and declining agricultural yields. This world would also rapidly be losing its ecosystem services, owing to large losses in biodiversity, forests, coastal wetlands, mangroves and saltmarshes, and terrestrial carbon stores, supported by an acidified and potentially dysfunctional marine ecosystem. Drought and desertification would be widespread, with large numbers of people experiencing increased water stress, and others experiencing changes in seasonality of water supply. There would be a need to shift agricultural cropping to new areas, impinging on unmanaged ecosystems and decreasing their resilience; and large-scale adaptation to sea-level rise would be necessary. Human and natural systems would be subject to increasing levels of agricultural pests and diseases, and increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.

In such a 4°C world, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world, while the limits for adaptation for natural systems would largely be exceeded throughout the world. Hence, the ecosystem services upon which human livelihoods depend would not be preserved. Even though some studies have suggested that adaptation in some areas might still be feasible for human systems, such assessments have generally not taken into account lost ecosystem services.

If the conclusions of the scientists contributing to the Royal Society’s special issue are not worrisome enough, their models still do not incorporate the feedback effects of methane emissions from thawing tundra or melting methane hydrates.

Preventing global warming by giving up the burning of fossil fuels – and doing so quickly – is humanity’s only hope.  Peak oil could yet prove to be humanity’s best friend.

The U.S military, the German military, the U.K. financial community, and the U.S. investment community have all acknowledged the immanence and the potentially calamitous consequences  of peak oil. But the words “peak oil” have yet to slip from a politician’s lips (with the amazing exception of Representative Roscoe Bartlett, R-Maryland).

A political body may at last be poised to take notice.

In New Zealand, a new research paper done for the New Zealand Parliament by the Parliamentary Service predicts decades of economic turmoil and recessions face the world as oil supplies run low and energy prices surge.

The paper is titled The Next Oil Shock?. A summary is available here.

Here are the key points from the summary:

• Oil is “the lifeblood of modern civilisation”. This paper provides an overview of the global oil market. In particular, it examines the outlook for oil supply and demand over the next five years, and the economic consequences.
• Low-cost reserves of oil are being rapidly exhausted, forcing oil companies to turn to more expensive sources of oil. This replacement of low-cost sources of oil with higher-costs sources is driving the price of oil higher.
• While the world will not run out of oil reserves for decades to come, it cannot indefinitely continue to produce oil at an increasing rate from the remaining reserves. Forecasts indicate that world oil production capacity will not grow or fall in the next five years while demand will continue to rise.
• If oil production capacity does not rise as fast as demand, the buffer of spare production capacity disappears. In such a ‘supply crunch’ the price of oil ‘spikes’ to high levels. High oil prices can induce global recessions.
• Organisations including the International Energy Agency and the US military have warned that another supply crunch is likely to occur soon after 2012 due to rising demand and insufficient production capacity.
• There is a risk that the world economy may be at the start of a cycle of supply crunches leading to price spikes and recessions, followed by recoveries leading to supply crunches.
• New Zealand is heavily dependent on oil imports and will remain so for the foreseeable future. While there is potential to substantially increase domestic production, domestic oil production cannot insulate New Zealand from global oil price shocks because New Zealand pays the world price for goods like oil.
• Key export-generating industries in the New Zealand economy including tourism and timber, dairy, and meat exports are very vulnerable to oil shocks because of their reliance on affordable international transport.

We’re not quite ready yet in our political discourse to face hard reality. And we’re not yet quite ready to concede that peak oil means peak demand as well – that is, the growth that is assumed in our political and economic thinking is over:

The world’s oil production capacity may not be sufficient to match growing demand in coming years. The potential for short-falls arises from geological, infrastructure, and political/economic constraints limiting the ability of world oil production capacity to grow while demand continues to rise.

Note the conditional language “if” and “may”, in the passage above and in this passage describing consequences of oil supply shortfalls:

If oil supply cannot meet demand a price spike may be triggered, with major detrimental effects on economies, especially those heavily dependent on oil imports.

Nevertheless, an important milestone has been reached. One political body in a major developed country is formally entertaining the concept of peak oil, considering the consequences, and conceiving that there may be storm clouds on the economic horizon. Notable for its absence is any indication of awareness that there may be political consequences as well.

Pakistan is reeling from its worst flooding in recorded history – a predicted  consequence of global warming.  Er, make that “global climate disruption“:

Global warming is a misnomer. It implies something gradual, uniform, and benign. What we’re experiencing is none of these.  – John P. Holdren, White House Science Advisor

The floods washed away homes, roads, and bridges, wreaking destruction from northern Pakistan to the southern province of Sindh; and damaged millions of hectares of cultivatable land and crops, destroying seed stocks, and killing at least 1.2 million livestock and costing many farmers their store of seeds. Soggy soils could make farmers miss the September planting season, raising the specter of famine.

Now, Pakistan is faced with another threat: an energy crisis.

Pakistan is bracing for a major shortage of petroleum products as the Pakistan State Oil company moves closer to a financial emergency, a source suggested. PSO is on the verge of defaulting on its international payments as $190 million in debt is due to foreign suppliers. An official at the company told Pakistan’s English-language Dawn newspaper that PSO was considering canceling a significant amount of oil imports.

“The situation is very bad,” the source said. “It has never been like this.”

Irfan Qureshi, the managing director at the company, in a series of “urgent letters” sent Thursday warned government ministries that the country was on the verge of a major energy crisis, the source added.

Islamabad was warned that PSO is unable to make its payments to refineries and exhausted its financing for future supplies.

The PSO source added that Pakistan was already short of diesel, furnace oil, jet fuel and gasoline.

A cutoff in oil supplies would be but another staggering blow in Pakistan’s ongoing energy crisis, suffering from chronic power failures that authorities fear could prove to be destabilizing.

Pakistan is the world’s seventh-most populous country (the average age is 21, and over 37% of Pakistanis are under 15 years of age). It has a nuclear-armed military and an intelligence service that provides financing, training and sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban. Pakistan is ranked the 10th most failed state in the world, just three places below Afghanistan.

What would a failed Pakistan look like, and what consequences may entail? We may soon find out.

Spiegel Online International reports A confidential German army study, warning of a looming oil crisis which could have dramatic political and economic consequences, has been leaked. The study – a product of the Future Analysis department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, a think tank tasked with fixing a direction for the German military – depicts the consequences of an irreversible depletion of raw materials.

According to Spiegel Online, the report concludes there is “some probability that peak oil will occur around the year 2010 and that the impact on security is expected to be felt 15 to 30 years later”. The study warns of:

[S]hifts in the global balance of power, of the formation of new relationships based on interdependency, of a decline in importance of the western industrial nations, of the “total collapse of the markets” and of serious political and economic crises.

The article provides the following summary of the report’s main points:

• Oil will determine power: The Bundeswehr Transformation Center writes that oil will become one decisive factor in determining the new landscape of international relations: “The relative importance of the oil producing nations in the international system is growing. These nations are using the advantages resulting from this to expand the scope of their domestic and foreign policies and establish themselves as a new or resurgent regional, or in some cases even global leading power.”
• Increasing importance of oil exporters: For importers of oil more competition for resources will mean an increase in the number of nations competing for favor with oil producing nations. For the latter this opens up a window of opportunity which can be used to implement political, economic or ideological aims. As this window of time will only be open for a limited period, “this could result in a more aggressive assertion of national interests on the part of the oil producing nations.”
• Politics in place of the market: The Bundeswehr Transformation Center expects that a supply crisis would roll back the liberalization of the energy market. “The proportion of oil traded on the global, freely accessible oil market will diminish as more oil is traded through bi-national contracts,” the study states. In the long run, the study goes on, the global oil market will only be able to follow the laws of the free market in a restricted way. “Bilateral, conditioned supply agreements and privileged partnerships, such as those seen prior to the oil crises of the seventies, will once again come to the fore.”
• Market failures: The authors paint a bleak picture of the consequences resulting from a shortage of petroleum. As the transportation of goods depends on crude oil, international trade could be subject to colossal tax hikes. “Shortages in the supply of vital goods could arise” as a result, for example in food supplies. Oil is used directly or indirectly in the production of 95% of all industrial goods. Price shocks could therefore be seen in almost any industry and throughout all stages of the industrial supply chain. “In the medium term the global economic system and every market-oriented national economy would collapse.”
• Relapse into planned economy: Since virtually all economic sectors rely heavily on oil, peak oil could lead to a “partial or complete failure of markets,” says the study. “A conceivable alternative would be government rationing and the allocation of important goods or the setting of production schedules and other short-term coercive measures to replace market-based mechanisms in times of crisis.”
• Global chain reaction: “A restructuring of oil supplies will not be equally possible in all regions before the onset of peak oil,” says the study. “It is likely that a large number of states will not be in a position to make the necessary investments in time,” or with “sufficient magnitude.” If there were economic crashes in some regions of the world, Germany could be affected. Germany would not escape the crises of other countries, because it’s so tightly integrated into the global economy.
• Crisis of political legitimacy: The Bundeswehr study also raises fears for the survival of democracy itself. Parts of the population could comprehend the upheaval triggered by peak oil “as a general systemic crisis.” This would create “room for ideological and extremist alternatives to existing forms of government.” Fragmentation of the affected population is likely and could “in extreme cases lead to open conflict.”

The study, Peak Oil: Sicherheitspolitische Implikationen knapper Ressourcen, is available here (unfortunately in German). Robert Rapier has posted a translation of the major points in the report at his R Squared Energy Blog.

China has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest consumer of energy, according to data from Paris-based International Energy Agency. The IEA said China consumed the equivalent of 2.25 billion tons of oil last year, slightly above U.S. consumption of 2.17 billion tons. The measure includes all types of energy: oil, nuclear, coal, natural gas and renewable energy sources.

This chart is posted at The Daily Reckoning:

As this chart posted at The Daily Reckoning shows, China has a long way to go to catch up with U.S. per capita energy consumption:

40% of the world’s population – China and India – uses two barrels of oil per person per day. In the US, we use 25.

China dismissed the IEA’s analysis, saying the IEA data on China’s energy use is unreliable. China’s National Bureau of Statistics said in a report in February that China’s energy consumption last year stood at 3.1 billion tons of standard coal equivalent, or 2.132 billion tons of oil equivalent. Even by China’s reckoning, China is fast approaching U.S. energy consumption levels.

In June, China consumed approximately 9.4 million barrels each and every day. Of this total, they imported 5.44 million barrels. Between them, China and India together now consume about 28 million barrels-per-day, nearly 33% of the world total.

But while China’s oil consumption is rising and China is busy locking up future oil supplies around the world, U.S. oil consumption is declining – and improved efficiency has nothing to do with it. Oil consumption has likely peaked in the United States because our economy is trashed and likely to remain so. In 2007, the last year before the crash, American oil consumption often exceeded 21 million barrels per day. Those days are over. U.S. consumption is now bouncing around 19 mbd, a decline of ~10%.

Andrew Rivken at the New York Times asks, is last year’s drop in U.S. CO2 emissions a blip or a trend?

According to the EIA report U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions in 2009: A Retrospective Review, U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide emissions fell by 7.0% last year. The downturn of the economy was responsible for only 2.4% of that reduction.

Population, per capita GDP, energy intensity of the economy, and carbon intensity of the energy supply all contribute to emissions. The only factor that increased in 2009 was population, by 0.9%. The remaining three factors – GDP, energy intensity, and carbon intensity – combined in roughly equal proportions to cause emissions to fall by 7.0%

The financial crisis hit the industrial sector of the economy the hardest, and energy usage by industry correspondingly fell the most – by 9.9%. Output from energy-intensive industries such as primary metals (-33.9%) and nonmetallic minerals (-17.4%) fell much faster than total industrial production, reflecting the fact that we’re outsourcing such production at the same time the service sector has been growing relative to the industrial sector of the U.S. economy. Also, carbon intensity fell due to fuel switching as the price of coal rose 6.8% from 2008 to 2009 while the comparable price of natural gas fell 48% on a per Btu basis.

But where CO₂ emissions occur doesn’t matter to the climate system. The fact that U.S. emissions (or those of other developed nations) are falling doesn’t matter much if those emissions are merely being “exported” elsewhere, primarily to China. And we’re exporting more than industrial production – we’re exporting energy and carbon intensity, as well. The result? China has now overtaken the U.S. to become the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases – and shows no sign of easing off. Coal is the basis of the Chinese economy, fueling over 80% of electricity generation. China’s already-enormous coal consumption – now three times U.S. consumption – is still growing, for example at an astonishing rate 28.1% from first quarter 2009 to first quarter 2010.

Even if falling U.S. emissions are a trend and not just a recession-related blip, falling U.S. emissions mean nothing if global emissions continue to rise.

As Gail the Actuary points out at The Oil Drum, what can’t happen, won’t:

Combine unprecedented consumption levels with furious growth rates and you quickly arrive at absurdities and impossibilities. As in, it won’t happen. The wheels will fall off the wagon first.

Reducing emissions will require reducing the production of “stuff” – and not only in the U.S., but also around the world. Global economic shrinkage is the only way out of our climate predicament, and our current focus on economic growth will have to be replaced by concern with economic justice.

Limited supplies of fossil fuels mean that “economic growth” as we know it will come to an end, sooner or later, whether we like it or not. The question that remains to be answered is, before the wheels do come off, will we have already set the world on a path to unstoppable warming? Or will we accept the inevitable and act in time to save the ecosystem that sustains us?

A recent post pointed out our actions belied any intention to actually do anything about global warming – we’re not really serious. Here’s another example.

First, Bloomberg reports Chinese president’s special envoy Xie Zhenhua vowing to “vigorously” fight “world scale climate destruction”:

The scale of economic destruction would be equivalent to that of the two world wars and the Great Depression combined” if global temperatures rise by 3 degrees (5.4 Fahrenheit) to 4 degrees Celsius, Xie said. “Human beings and the Earth cannot afford such disasters.

On the very same day, China Daily reports a huge jump in Chinese coal production:

China’s coal output grew 28.1 percent year-on-year to well over 751 million tons in the first quarter, the National Bureau of Statistics said Thursday. . . .

The report estimates China’s total coal production capacity has exceeded 3.6 billion tons.

Channeling Groucho Marx:  who are you to going to believe, Xie or your lying eyes?

Developed countries are “outsourcing” more than a third of their carbon emissions associated with products and services to other countries, according to a new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science. To be meaningful, regional climate policy thus needs to take into account emissions embodied in trade, not just domestic emissions.

This map shows the flow of carbon emissions embodied in trade among the major exporting and importing countries. Net exporting countries are in blue and net importers in red. China is by far the largest exporter of carbon dioxide emissions. Arrows indicate direction and magnitude of flow; numbers are megatonnes. (Steven Davis/Carnegie Institution for Science)

The study finds that, per person, about 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide are consumed in the U.S. but produced somewhere else. The United States is both a major importer and a major exporter of emissions embodied in trade. The net result is that the U.S. outsources about 11% of total consumption-based emissions, primarily to the developing world.

Says co-author Ken Caldeira, a researcher in the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology:

Instead of looking at carbon dioxide emissions only in terms of what is released inside our borders, we also looked at the amount of carbon dioxide released during the production of the things that we consume.

Caldeira and lead author Steven Davis, also at Carnegie, used published trade data from 2004 to create a global model of the flow of products across 57 industry sectors and 113 countries or regions. By allocating carbon emissions to particular products and sources, the researchers were able to calculate the net emissions “imported” or “exported” by specific countries.

For Europeans, the figure can exceed four tons per person. In Switzerland and several other small countries, outsourced emissions exceeded the amount of carbon dioxide emitted within national borders. Most of these emissions are outsourced to developing countries, especially China.

Davis explains:

Just like the electricity that you use in your home probably causes CO2 emissions at a coal-burning power plant somewhere else, we found that the products imported by the developed countries of western Europe, Japan, and the United States cause substantial emissions in other countries, especially China. On the flip side, nearly a quarter of the emissions produced in China are ultimately exported.

Where CO2 emissions occur doesn’t matter to the climate system. Effective policy must have global scope. To the extent that constraints on developing countries’ emissions are the major impediment to effective international climate policy, allocating responsibility for some portion of these emissions to final consumers elsewhere may represent an opportunity for compromise.

The report is published online in the March 8, 2010 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The U.S. posted its biggest-ever decline in CO2 emissions from fossil fuels in 2009, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). But the reductions are not expected to continue:

CO2 emissions from fossil fuels fell by an estimated 6.3 percent in 2009. Emissions from coal led the drop in 2009 CO2 emissions, falling by nearly 11 percent. Declines in energy consumption in the industrial sector (a result of the weak economy) and changes in electricity generation sources are the primary reasons for the decline in CO2 emissions (U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions Growth Chart). Looking forward, projected improvements in the economy contribute to an expected 1.5-percent increase in CO2 emissions in 2010. Increased use of coal in the electric-power sector, and continued economic growth, combined with the expansion of travel-related petroleum consumption, lead to a 1.3-percent increase in CO2 emissions in 2011. However, even with increases in 2010 and 2011, projected CO2 emissions in 2011 are lower than annual emissions from 1999 through 2008.

The drop in emissions in 2009 was the biggest since data collection began in 1949. The Great Recession was primarily responsible, as U.S. real gross domestic product dropped 2.4% in 2009, in the biggest decline since 1946. Emissions dropped 5.8% in 2008.

It’s hard enough to imagine the U.S. and other developed nations voluntarily sacrificing economic growth, much less embracing voluntary frugality. Can you even conceive that China and India would voluntarily give up their ambitions to join the developed world? The entire world has joined in a suicide pact.

It’s beginning to look like the only thing that will save humans and other living things from the ravages of global warming is global economic collapse.