(Oct. 2, 2009) The media, polls and even scientists suggest the global warming scare is all over but the shouting.
The great global warming scare is over — it is well past its peak, very much a spent force, sputtering in fits and starts to a whimpering end. Continue reading
Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post
October 2, 2009
The media, polls and even scientists suggest the global warming scare is all over but the shouting.
The great global warming scare is over — it is well past its peak, very much a spent force, sputtering in fits and starts to a whimpering end. You may not know this yet. Or rather, you may know it but don’t want to acknowledge it until every one else does, and that won’t happen until the press, much of which also knows it, formally acknowledges it.
I know that the global warming scare is over but for the shouting because that’s what the polls show, at least those in the U.S., where unlike Canada the public is polled extensively on global warming. Most Americans don’t blame humans for climate change — they consider global warming to be a natural phenomenon. Even when the polls showed the public believed man was responsible for global warming, the public didn’t take the scare seriously. When asked to rank global warming’s importance compared to numerous other concerns — unemployment, trade, health care, poverty, crime, and education among them — global warming came in dead last. Fewer than 1% chose global warming as scare-worthy.
The informed members of the media read those polls and know the global warming scare is over, too. Andrew Revkin, The New York Times reporter entrusted with the global warming scare beat, has for months lamented “the public’s waning interest in global warming.” His colleague at The Washington Post, Andrew Freedman, does his best to revive public fear, and to get politicians to act, by urging experts to up their hype so that the press will have scarier material to run with.
The experts do their best to give us the willies. This week they offered up plagues of locusts in China and a warning that the 2016 Olympics “could be the last for mankind” because “the earth has passed the point of no return.” But the press has also begun to tire of Armageddon All-The-Time, and (I believe) to position itself for its inevitable attack on the doomsters. In an online article in June entitled “Massive Estimates of Death are in Vogue for Copenhagen,” Richard Cable of the BBC, until then the most stalwart of scare-mongers, rattled off the global warnings du jour – they included a comparison of global warming to nuclear war and a report from the former Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, to the effect that “every year climate change leaves over 300,000 people dead, 325-million people seriously affected, and economic losses of US $125-billion.” Cable’s conclusion: “The problem is that once you’ve sat up and paid attention enough to examine them a bit more closely, you find that the means by which the figures were arrived at isn’t very compelling… The report contains so many extrapolations derived from guesswork based on estimates inferred from unsuitable data.”
The scientist-scare-mongers, seeing the diminishing returns that come of their escalating claims of catastrophe, also know their stock is falling. Until now, they have all toughed it out when the data disagreed with their findings – as it does on every major climate issue, without exception. Some scientists, like Germany’s Mojib Latif, have begun to break ranks. Frustrated by embarrassing questions about why the world hasn’t seen any warming over the last decade, Latif, a tireless veteran of the public speaking circuits, now explains that global warming has paused, to resume in 2020 or perhaps 2030. “People understand what I’m saying but then basically wind up saying, ‘We don’t believe anything,’” he told The New York Times this week.
And why should they believe anything that comes from the global warming camp? Not only has the globe not warmed over the last decade but the Arctic ice is returning, the Antarctic isn’t shrinking, polar bear populations aren’t diminishing, hurricanes aren’t becoming more extreme. The only thing that’s scary about the science is the frequency with which doomsayer data is hidden from public scrutiny, manipulated to mislead, or simply made up.
None of this matters anymore, I recently heard at the Global Business Forum in Banff, where a fellow panelist from the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change told the audience that, while she couldn’t dispute the claims I had made about the science being dubious, the rights and wrongs in the global warming debate are no longer relevant. “The train has left the station,” she cheerily told the business audience, meaning that the debate is over, global warming regulations are coming in, and everyone in the room — primarily business movers and shakers from Western Canada — had better learn to adapt.
Her advice was well accepted, chiefly because most in the room had already adapted — they are busy trying to cash in by obtaining carbon subsidies, building nuclear plants, or providing services to the new carbon economy.
My assessment for those wondering where we’re at: Yes, the train left the station some time ago. And it is now off the rails.
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
David Solway
The Metropolitain
October 1, 2009
Global warming…has become the most powerful myth in human history, sending much of the world into a downward helix of economic decline. It is a tenuous hypothesis supported by ill-founded computer models and data from botched measurement, dubiously processed.
John Brignell, March of the Zealots
Global warmists, environmentalists and ecological redeemers are a mixed bunch and come in every shape, size and color. There are those, of course, who adopt a sane and responsible attitude toward preserving our natural heritage. One notable instance involves a new class of wealthy philanthropists, called eco-barons, such as the Chilean Sebastian Pinera, the American Douglas Thomas, and the Swiss Ernst Beyeler and Hansjörg Wyss, who have purchased, preserved and reconstructed millions of hectares in Chile, Argentina, the United States and South Africa. They are to be commended, not only because they are materially contributing to the planet’s well-being rather than whipping up public hysteria, but because they are not in the business of profiting from the latest environmental scare.
But the majority of our ostensible benefactors, it seems to me, harbor a different set of motives. Some are clearly in it for the big bucks, others are displaced religious zealots who have embarked on a messianic quest to purge the planet of the devil’s corrupting influence — aka, us — and still others are utopian primitivists who believe in restoring mankind to a presumably harmonious “state of nature.” All do inestimable harm.
For example, the cap-and-trade system proposed by the current American administration has already proved a dismal failure in Europe. According to Christopher Horner, author of Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed, cap-and-trade, which assigns quotas to individual companies that are otherwise compelled to buy hot air credits, has increased not only “energy costs and economic uncertainty” but has sent manufacturing jobs to other countries — all in the name of “a problem that evidence suggests does not exist.” Horner expresses the hope that the American government “will recognize that this once plausible theory, grounded solely in computer models, has suffered badly under the past decade of observations.” Climate modelling is notoriously capricious, which may explain why many of its forecasts are conveniently projected a century or more into the future when they cannot be refuted by opponents of the theory.
Benny Peiser, editor of CCNet science network, speaking at the Heartland Institute’s 2009 climate conference in New York, sounded the death knell of the green movement in Europe owing to enormous costs and minimal results (Climate Realists, March 11, 2009). Environmentalist Lawrence Solomon quotes Spanish economist Gabriel Calzada whose studies show that “every green job created ploughs under 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy” and that green jobs are proving to be unsustainable since the creation of even one such job costs $1 million in government subsidies (National Post, March 31, 2009). These are costs that may be suffered in other ways as well. The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) in its 2008 Annual Report, published in 2009, jubilates over the replacement of motorized vehicles by “bicycle rickshaws” — which, it must be admitted, will certainly help to decongest Los Angeles traffic. That it would reduce America and the West to Third World Status does not trouble UNEP overmuch. Perhaps that is the plan.
Then we have the much-ballyhooed T. Boone Pickens strategy of introducing large-scale windmill technology, which is now proving to be a thoroughly quixotic project, unsightly, land-consuming, expensive and totally inadequate to its declared purpose of meeting even a fraction of our electricity needs. (Pickens has interesting cinematic company: the limp and effeminate Eloi in the film version of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine are also keen on windmills.) Alex Alexiev of the Hudson Institute has laid the cards on the table for all to read: green electricity bills are rising exponentially. Europe is gradually abandoning its green energy programs and reverting to nuclear power, as are India, China and Japan. And, as of the end of 2008, American solar and wind-power stocks had lost 80% of their value (FrontPageMagazine, March 31, 2009). New Zealand has repealed its carbon tax scheme and Australia is poised to follow suit. The U.S. Congressional Budgetary Office gauges that green legislation, such as the Waxman-Markey bill, will cost the average American household $1,600 per annum, which, given the guesstimation record of government bureaus, is obviously a lowball figure (U.S. News, June 25, 2009).
This bill has been championed by scientists domiciled at the Woods Hole Reseach Center who in an open letter of June 19, 2009 to the members of the U.S. Congress proclaimed that “The Waxman-Markey bill now being considered by the Congress offers a powerful advance and must be enacted this year. But at its best it will be only a first step in the direction that scientists now recognize as necessary to protect local and regional climates.” The denizens of Woods Hole might be better advised to read geologist Dale Allen Pfeiffer’s analysis in GlobalResearch.ca for August 17, 2009. Pfeiffer calculates that the U.S. would require 59% of the planet’s entire land surface to generate sufficient solar energy “to replace its current daily oil consumption.” Biofuels, “which are dirty and environmentally destructive,” are equally unproductive. Perhaps Woods Hole should be renamed Wookey Hole, famous for its caves where cackling witches cast spells to entertain tourists.
And yet the ignorance and preposterousness of such people is by no means the whole of it. There is another group of crusading zealots who would go even further. David Graber, a National Park Service biologist, reviewing Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature for The Los Angeles Times (October 29, 1989), writes: “Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet…Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” David Foreman, leader of Earth First!, is chillingly explicit: “It may well take our extinction to set things straight” (cited in The Freeman, Volume 40, Issue 11, 1990). Then there is Paul Watson, Greenpeace co-founder and head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, who famously described human beings as the “AIDS of the Earth.”
We seem to be involved in a strange conflict between the otherwordly and the primordial. On the one hand we appear to be striving for transmundane existence, an angelism of the mind and heart. On the other, we seem to be willing a kind of phylogenetic regression to the level of the early primates, as if we were eager for the day when we might find ourselves once again swinging from the trees and munching greenery.
I have little doubt that Jim Jones and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon would today be staunch environmentalists. In fact, Jones’ “apostolic socialism” movement was called the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, which culmimated, as we recall, in “revolutionary suicide.” And one of the central concepts in the Reverend Moon’s Divine Principle is the responsible stewardship of the earth and a caring attitude for the entirety of nature, although this did not prevent him from incarcerating and brainwashing the members of his Unification Church, operating a car manufacturing plant in North Korea, dealing in munitions and maintaining mansions, castles and large properties around the world. For some of the shadier characters in the salvation business, solicitude for nature can become a most profitable proposition.
More to the point, predictive failure does not deter an ideological extremist, who feels sure that a disaster must arrive some day to confirm his predictions and justify his program for salvation. It matters little if his timetable is off by 10, 20 or 1000 years since, under the aspect of eternity, a cataclysm is bound to happen in seculae seculorum, proving him right. And even it it doesn’t, the mathematics can always be redone in the light of a grisly but accommodating future to which only he has privileged access. It is he who stands before the burning bush of the world and hears the voice of the Lord. For this pixilated mentality, being wrong over and over is a sure sign that he will be right once, the psychology of the end-of-the-world fanatic who merely keeps revising his calculations, relying on “new” information to perfect his reckoning and reinforce his delusion. But what he has really accomplished is to turn science into divination.
Abetting this strategy of endlessly renewable computation is the complementary trick of selective disinformation. A good example of this technique is provided by the recent controversy over the discovery of a “mutant” fish near Lake Athabasca in northern Canada, which was immediately blazoned in the media and among environmental groups as indisputable evidence of oil sands pollution. Unfortunately for the proponents of this canard, the “mutation” was nothing of the sort but a natural development that follows on decomposition. Only one scientific journal, Fort McMurray Today, reported on the reassessment of the find. Like enthusiastic anglers, environmentalists reel in any fishy story they can find and immediately amplify its size to impress their audience. And the media follow suit.
Once minds are set, it is very hard to change them, which would be like transmuting National Geographic into Playboy, as much as that result is to be desired. Playboy, at least, doesn’t disguise much, but in a damning spread on the Alberta oil sands, National Geographic suppressed every bit of positive copy: that reclamation efforts are extensive and ongoing, and that virtually 80% of the oil product derives from deep-extraction processes. But the enviro-activist frenzy continues unabated. Even Reuters wire service has joined the chorus, sponsoring a Facebook page and an environmental blog advocating the anti-carbon cause while filtering out all counter-evidence.
But the most damaging aspect of the movement for ecological purity is political in intent. Glen Beck in his just published Common Sense warns us about “what is really going on: leaders who want more government control over our businesses, economy and personal lives…need a vehicle to take them there…climate change is that vehicle.” Similarly, in his new book, Left in Dark Times, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy speaks of “the former Reds who have now turned Green and the friends-of-nature type of Greens who have now become greens of the revolutionary jihad variety.” President Obama’s (now former) Green Jobs “czar” Van Jones was very explicit about this blueprint, or greenprint, for the acquisition of centralized social and political power. “So the green economy,” he informs us, “will start off as a small subset and we are going to push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society” (Uprising Radio, April 2008). From small beginnings.
Frank Tipler, professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University, writing in Pajamas Media for August 9, 2009, has diagnosed the problem clearly. “How did we ever come to this?” he asks, and answers: “Government financing of scientific research caused it.” The political establishment, in its quest to gain ever-increasing control of public and economic life, has seen to it that AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) scientists are “the only ones with federal grants, and, moreover, these malleable scientists “are much more likely to get university jobs, since universities are now almost wholly dependent on federal money…Soon there are none but true believers in the field: a consensus has been reached!” Many of the major scientific journals have also been adulterated. Their editors “are no longer outstanding scientists—as was the case before federal funding—but people who took the job after they failed to get tenure at any research university.” In the absence of “independent checking by skeptics,” these frauds and true-believer scientists have proliferated.
And this is the real dilemma we are facing. Liberal environmentalism is the cutting edge of the movement for bureaucratized state control of both private life and free market economics, conscripting not only the media, the NGOs, government departments and the intellectual classes to advance its agenda but shrewdly operating through the very corporations it seeks to regulate by offering tax and other incentives to ensure compliance. And it seems to be working.
To take a recent illustration. The UK utility Npower has initiated a new promotional campaign inviting children to apply for a “free climate cops challenge diary” with a view to informing on their parents who might be committing “climate crimes.” Children are prompted to build up a “climate crime case file” not only on their parents but on “uncles, aunts or friends from school” (London Sunday Times, July 27, 2008). Shades of the communist and fascist dictatorships, and more recently of Taliban Afghanistan where, as Khaled Hossein writes in The Kite Runner, “the rafiqs…taught children to spy on their parents, what to listen for, whom to tell.”
An exaggeration? But, as in the Lenny Bruce joke about a Catholic murderer who confesses that his pathological career “started with bingo in the Catholic church,” we should never underestimate small beginnings.
C. Marchetti
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
October 25, 1978
10^12: A check on the earth-carrying capacity for man
Abstract—Much has been said about the carrying capacity of the earth and with most contradictory results, as the arguments have too often been used in the service of prejudices.
In this paper, we have: made a cross section of a world very heavily populated by present standards; examined with a system view the level of basic necessities plus luxuries for this population; and indicated the technology to satisfy them. Where problems of a global level appeared, a geo-engineering solution has been sketched. The result of this analysis is that, from a technological point of view, a trillion people can live beautifully on the earth, for an unlimited time and without exhausting any primary resource and without overloading the environment. The global view of the problems and of their solutions makes the difference and shows that most of the perceived physical limits to growth stem from an inappropriate frame of reference.
Although our result should by no means be interpreted as an invitation to multiply, it does cast some doubt on the reliability of resource investigations within too narrow assumptions about the adaptability of man to changing conditions and transfers the problem of the limits to growth where it belongs: to the areas of sociology, politics, and ethics.
NUMBER OFPERSONS
The figure 10^12 is based on a somewhat arbitrary maximum density, that of a "garden city" at the level of the globe (see Fig. 1). In practice, the natural trends of a megapolis will push toward zones of much greater densities, leaving the possibility of creating very low density patches of "sanctuaries" where everybody might go when he wished.
High densities such as those found in towns are under heavy criticism nowadays as being vastly inferior to the great open spaces of the country (which in the citizen’s ideology should be salvaged but should be maintained with a good infrastructure). This point appears to have escaped the country inhabitants who, since the invention of the city, managed to swarm into it whenever possible (see Fig. 2). Is that due only to plain ignorance on their part, or is man naturally a city dweller?
The great drawback of modern cities is that they are never built to the measure of man; they tend to be a patchwork of "machines to live in** where only a limited number of functions is considered essential. Medieval cities may hold the secret of the "human city" where a man will wish to spend all his life; intricate personal links and beauty may be the most important components.
Soleri’s and Craven’s 2 teams have produced very interesting projects, respectively, for land-and sea-based (see Figs. 3-5) cities conceived as tri-demsional single units. These structures may have positive feedback to the global system; the control of temperature and ventilation via proper control of the radiation coupling with the environment may also serve to control the albedo, which finally limits the amount of usable energy.
DISLOCATION
From the point of view of coverage of the earth surface, the Craven project of cities on floating platforms makes the ocean equivalent to the land. The Craven city should not be more expensive than its equivalent on land, the platform and the supporting "bottles" being gigantic but essentially simple structures with multiple functions.
We feel confident that structurally and functionally a "human city" can be devised. The great size of these agglomerates appears as a major obstacle to the attainment of such a goal, but the hierarchization of the system into units of growing size with some strong intra-unit couplings and some weak(er) inter-unit couplings may solve the problem, as it has done in the past.
These cities, like the Amazonian forest, will be essentially closed systems where most of the materials, including water, will be recycled, the only physical input being free energy and the only output heat. If the input is in the form of negentropy, there will be no output at all. Hence the only factors that must be taken into account from the point of view of the material balance are the "dowry*’, i.e. the materials locked into the system and the losses in the recycling process.
If we assume for the dowry 100 tons of materials/man, of which 30 tons are "high energy" materials such as metals and organics and 70 tons are "low-energy" materials such as concrete, this will correspond to about 2x KfkWh/man for their production, or 40 years of "manufacturing" energy on the basis of our minimum hypothesis for energy available at equilabrium (see the next section). As the buildup of the system may well take 200 years, the ratio appears very reasonable.
ENERGYCONSUMPTION
The amount of energy available is calculated backward from the assumption that the thermal balance of the earth is not modified for reasonable large areas (e.g. 10,000 km2) and long times (e.g. one month). As the local (and global) thermal balance is controlled essentially by the albedo with respect to the solar radiation, i.e. by the percentage of solar radiation immediately diffused back, and by the emissivity in the longwave IR spectrum, any sizable energy input of non-solar origin should be balanced by a modification of these two factors.
The albedo of the sea is around 10%, that of cultivated land about 25%; the average input of the sun on the earth’s surface is about 200 W/m2. This means that, by changing the albedo by 10%, a very easy operation with sizeable fraction of the earth surface built-up, we can afford to dissipate 20 W/m2 or lOkW/man of nuclear or fossil origin. If part of the incoming solar radiation that would normally be absorbed is transformed into other forms of energy, e.g. electricity or hydrogen, the thermal balance of the earth will not be affected (Table 4).
The 10 kW correspond to about the present per capita energy consumption in the U.S.A., where, however, the second law efficiency in its use about 5%. Taking into account the natural evolution toward more efficient processes (Fig. 6), we have assumed it to be 50% in the future, i.e. man will get technological benefits equivalent to 100 kW consumed with present technologies.
The figures for the last three entries in Table 5 may seem unbalanced. But long-range transportation is assumed to be by vehicles suspended magnetically in vacuum tunnels and so requiring marginal amounts of energy to be operated; and communication and information processing will be at levels many orders of magnitude above the present ones. The power of lkW corresponds to a processing capacity of something of the order of 1020 bits/sec, at room temperature. Space conditioning may be done in the good old way, using essentially the sun and ingenuity to drive the system. Lighting is included in this block, but clever ways can be devised to store solar light, e.g. in liquids "pumped" by solar radiation and discharged by electric stimulation.
As our system is imagined as stationary, manufacturing will be essentially geared to maintenance and substitution. The 6 kW/man may correspond to 1 ton/yr of aluminum or magnesium. The production of food may require 0.5 kW, 5% of the total energy budget or 10% of the budget for manufacturing, a non-negligible but not a major fraction.
From the point of view of procurement, there seem to be no problems: e.g. uranium in the sea amounts to about 4.5 x 109 tons, corresponding for roughly JO20 kWh. This corresponds to 103 years for our 1012 men at 10s kWh/yr. As the cooling water of a nuclear power plant located on the sea carries about ten times the amount of uranium fissioned in the plant, this source already appears accessible with breeder reactors.
But this just scratches energy reserves. In fact, the minimum energy per nucleon in an atomic nucleus corresponds to the elements in the center of the periodic table (Fig. 7). The fact that we have just started nibbling at the edges is due to the relative ease of the corresponding nuclear transformations. But most of the elements can be used as nuclear fuels, conceptually, and the means will certainly be available in time. The capacity of profitably transmuting any element may also indicate the final solution for radioactive waste disposal.
Our system being homogeneously distributed over the surface of the earth, no particular problems of waste heat disposal may occur once the above condition of radiative energy balance is respected.
It must be remembered that our starting hypothesis—that the albedo is changed by ten percent only (out of the 70% available), and that solar energy is not really included in the budget—is on the conservative side. So perhaps a budget of up to 50kW/man may be feasible.
STAPLE FOOD
While talking about arable lands and irrigation schemes is the staple job of many respectable people, a simple analysis shows that this game cannot go very far. However, simple analysis from slightly wider point of view shows that the master clutch between the sun and the biosphere operates the trivial process of the breaking water up into hydrogen and oxygen, hydrogen being the energy vector to the biosphere.
The answer to the question whether hydrogen produced in other ways can perform a similar task is affirmative. The implications are clearly of revolutionary importance.
The simplest way of doing the trick is through microorganisms capable of using hydrogen as a reductant. These microorganisms are in fact very common and are under intensive study, because they permit the production of proteins, fats, and other chemicals using a completely inorganic substrate (CO;, ammonia, phosphorous, iron salts, etc.).
The mean energy input of a man is about 100 watts. The efficiency of the microorganisms can be between 50% and 70%, and between 50% and 90% for transforming primary energy into hydrogen. So we transformed these 100 watts into the 500 indicated in the energy budget for manufacturing, to take account of all the inefficiencies. Half a kW is then the amount of primary energy we earmark for the production of biosynthetic food.
The techniques that made it possible to produce such a splendid variety of wines and cheeses out of two insipid fluids can be deployed to reproduce the miracle.
The indoor growing of fancy foods such as capers or blackberries that is starting now may develop into a frenzy. A "wall-paper" of strawberries may give the owner great aesthetic rewards—and the thrill of searching for food in the wilderness—the year round.
Some conventional agriculture can be kept for the aesthetic enjoyment of flowers and wines, and forests may provide materials for the microbiological transformers. After all primary productivity in forests today is in the range of 100 TW, or the level of food consumption of our 10IZ population.
All projections put great stress on this point, easily demonstrating that present reserves of copper, nickel, chromium, etc., will run out in the year 2021. But the rational way to set the problem is to stress the functions and then go back to the materials suitable to perform these functions.
To stay on the safe side, we suggest using as "staple materials" elements whose availability on the surface of the earth crust or from sea water can be considered as practically infinite. As an example clay, an exceedingly common material, can contain 30% A1203,65% Si02,5% Fe203 (expressed in equivalent form); and Mg contained in the sea amounts to 1015 tons or 103 tons/man in our 1012 scenario.
The reason why these large resources are not used at present is that the economics of their exploitation are marginally inferior to those of high-grade ores. But development is going on and could be fostered in view of long-range objectives—e.g. to develop processes consuming an amount of energy double the theoretical minimum, with a certain disregard for the level of capital investment. After all, a 1012 population with an income of the order of (1977) $10* per capita, in a static system, energy limited, may have some problems in placing their savings. A great potential lies in old but up-gradable materials, e.g. stones. Foamed glass can be an emblematic case.
The amount of material to make up the "dowry" of the system (1013 tons, or about 10* km3 of original material, or a cube with sides of 100 km) is really negligible amount on the geological scale. It may be considered almost a byproduct of landscaping.
Carbon compounds may constitute the backbone of sophisticated materials (biological systems give a striking spectrum of the potential). The source of carbon can be atmospheric CO:; the sea buffer; byproduct C02 in the production of metals from carbonates (e.g. MgC03); and coal and oil deposits. After all, humanity now extracts about 5 x 109 tons of carbon (coal and oil) per year, and reserves of reduced carbonaceous materials are well in the 1012 ton range, or one ton/man in the 1012 hypothesis. One can visualize the "dowry" in organics in the range of 5 tons/man, out of the 30 tons earmarked as metals and organics. Silicon can play a parallel role.
A non-negligible amount of carbon will circulate via the metabolism of this human population, about 200 g/man/day or 0.2 x 10′ x 10,: = 200 million tons/day, more or less what we burn now during one month. To this corresponds a metabolic power of 100 TW, somewhat striking if referred to humanity, but the same ball park of the present metabolism of land plants.
HOUSING
The conceptual structure of the city has not essentially changed from Babylonian times: a two-dimensional grid of communication (information) plus transportation lines (the streets), linking a set of living, working, and social places. The fact that energy is carried by electric cables or carts of logs is immaterial from the point of view of the conceptual structure of the system. The same is true when we use skyscrapers: the two essential functions, communication and transportation, are still operated on a two-dimensional grid.
The potential solutions offered by modern technology for construction, ventilation, lighting, transportation, and communication make feasible huge, truly three-dimensional structures, cathedral cities, capable of containing millions of people. The Archeologies of Soleri and the floating version of Craven give a hint of the future (Figs. 3-5). The necessity of building towns on the sea in places where the hinterland of existing cities is already choked (e.g. Hong Kong, Tokyo) may provide the proper ecological niche for realizing the ideas of Craven and Soleri and for their evolution into vital (and reproducing) systems.
The medieval city solved the problem of human interaction in a dense system, and the problem of separation from nature, by reconstructing nature sublimated in art. Modern technology may project the scale by two to three orders of magnitude by reducing the characteristic transit times in like measure.
The attainable densities fit the figures of our hypothesis reasonably well—we visualize 10% of the globe built-up (Figs. 8 and 9), all the rest being left wild—as do the materials and energy necessary to build and run these structures.
As the studies of the Craven team show, there is no essential difference between land and sea for siting one of Soleri’s Arcologies.
WATER
Water is fluid of life and much poetry has been poured over it. A free-living cell may require 1000 times its volume in water as its "Lebensraum"; a cell in our body is satisfied with ^ its volume in water: the magic word "recycling" makes the difference. This image parallels those of savage man drinking at the brook (and fighting for it), and of town dwellers whose water comes back in tighter and tighter circles.
The water for our megalopolis or ecumenopolis may come essentially from recycling, perhaps with some hierarchy to satisfy aesthetics. But as we assume a density of one man/500 m2, rain, at the present level, may provide a fresh input of about one ton of water/man/day: an excellent value even at the level of present consumption.
With our assumption of 50% thermodynamics efficiency for all processes, "compressing out" impurities to recycle water requires very small amounts of energy. Dialytic membranes pave the way to such very efficient purification systems. So in the absence of agriculture, large-scale desalination does not appear to be a global necessity, and we do not give it a place in our energy budget. As hydrogen will probably be, with electricity, the main energy carrier, its combustion may provide another important source of water, let us say 2001./man/day, at the level of final consumers.
COMMUNICATION
Information processing and transport are the core of our civilization, much more than the steam engine (or energy) as many people still think at the back of their mind. After all, the energy available per productive worker is today just an order of magnitude larger than for a medieval worker.
Information will be almost all in a 10^12 people world, because:
The different levels of hierarchy of organization will require internal processing for running the hardware and the software of the system.
The amount of information available as software of the civilization will have reached enormous levels. Actually it doubles every ten years for science alone, and no saturation is in sight.
Each person will require a multipurpose high-level link (super-videophone) to every other person, to any place in the system defined as public, and to the hierarchical information stores, even if only a small fraction of the information carried is actually used. After all, the eye is a narrow-angle, high-resolution, random scanner picking only the plum of what is available.
The extraordinary number of bits/sec we allocated to each person, requires highly efficient information manipulating equipment. A computer processing core has now an efficiency, second law, in the order of 10"u. The DNA duplicating system has an efficiency of about 0.1!
Clearly the system will be essentially wired, a solution that has evolved in all higher organisms.
TRANSPORTATION
People and materials are now transported by vehicles that move within a fluid, dissipating most of the energy used to propel them. The necessary breakthrough to reduce this energy is to run the vehicles into evacuated tubes or tunnels. The evacuated space being expensive, it will be advantageous for this and other reasons to run the vehicles at high speed. Above 500 km/kh, wheels are not very suitable, and the various systems of magnetic suspension under development may provide the final, i.e. non-dissipative, solution. This may arrive through very strong permanent magnets or high-temperature superconductors, or perhaps in other ways. Such a system (a prototype is under very active development in Japan) has little limitation in speed and can have an enormous productivity (ton x km/hr).
However, it is very difficult to forecast the transportation needs of a system coagulated in clusters of 107 to 108 men, where materials are recycled, energy is produced locally, and high-level information transport and processing will make, in most cases, people travel a luxury and materials transportation marginal.
Intracity movements, on the contrary, will probably be very intensive, and this will account for most of the energy budget we have dedicated to transportation.
The three-dimensional city, e.g. as conceived by Soleri, through an appropriate space-function hierarchization, leaves much room for sheer walking as the main form of personal and light goods transportation.
Movements of fluids is essentially included under conditioning.
CONCLUSIONS
Glancing at the key problems of the 10’^12 scenario, it appears that the carrying capacity of the earth is not overloaded if a set of conceptually very simple solutions is adopted.
The quality of life taken as a reference is that of the very rich now, plus facilities technology has not provided yet.
The impact of man’s presence, and the consequent disruptions are kept to a minimum, essentially via a withdrawal of man from land resources. His coupling with the earth biosphere will be practically nil.
It seems that the problems of growth are basically of cultural character. The Judeo-Christian axiom that the earth is given to man to be dominated, very material to western aggressive and destructive attitudes, may progressively be substituted by the Buddhistic axiom that the earth is given to man to be contemplated. Thanks to an enlightened use of technology.
Michael Trebilcock
Financial Post
October 1, 2009
Wind reduces CO2 emissions at a subsidy cost of about $124 per tonne — one of the most expensive plans in the world.
Ontarians take note. A detailed new Danish study shatters most of the myths that the Danish-based wind turbine industry has been propagating in Canada and around the world as to the virtues of wind power. The study, Wind Energy: The Case of Denmark by the Centre for Policy Studies in Copenhagen, strongly reinforces reservations that I have noted in previous op-eds in this newspaper.
While proponents of wind power like to claim that almost 20% of Danish electricity is generated by wind power, in fact over the last five years wind power has accounted for only about 9% of domestic electricity consumption. The other 11% or so — generated when the wind was blowing in the middle of the night or at other times that power was unneeded in Denmark — was exported to Norway and Sweden at spot prices that were substantially lower (often zero) than the subsidized prices guaranteed to Danish wind turbine operators. Meanwhile, when the wind wasn’t blowing in conformity with Danish needs, Denmark needed to import balancing power from Norway and Sweden, typically at substantially higher costs.
The main attraction in wind is the elimination of CO2 emissions. To the extent that wind power reduces CO2 emissions in Denmark, this comes as a subsidy cost of about $124 per tonne of CO2 — one of the most expensive CO2 reduction strategies in the world.
In order to keep industry competitive, the Danish government protects industry at the expense of consumers. Electricity to industry is hardly taxed at all, making for an outsized disparity between what householders and industry pay for their electricity — Danish householders pay 2.5 times more than Danish industry. Even before taxes, the average consumer price for wind-generated electricity is 50% higher than that from fossil fuel generated electricity.
Based on the total subsidies to the Danish wind industry, the average subsidy for the 28,000 workers employed in this sector equals US$9,000 to US$14,000 per year per job. However, this average subsidy does not reflect the actual cost of the additional job creation. In most cases, creating a job in the wind sector has only moved that job from another sector and not resulted in any additional job creation. A very optimistic ball park estimate of real net jobs created is around 10% of the total wind power work force, or 2,800 jobs. In this case, the actual subsidy for each additional job created is US$90,000 to US$140,000.
The Danish study finds that the energy technology sector in Denmark from 1999 to 2006 underperformed the broader manufacturing sector in Denmark by an average of 13% in terms of value added, reducing Danish GDP by approximately $270-million compared to what it would have been if the wind sector workforce was employed elsewhere. The Danish Economic Council concluded in a report in 2006: “The wind power expansion in the 1990s is an example of a policy that was unprofitable from society’s point of view, even taking the economic advantages that the wind business enjoyed into consideration.” The Centre for Policy Studies study concludes: “Denmark needs a proper debate and a thorough reappraisal of the technologies that need to be invented, developed, and costed before forcing the country into a venture that shows a high risk of turning into an economic black hole.”
Partly mesmerized by Danish wind industry propaganda, the Ontario government has embarked upon a similar exercise in economic and environmental folly. When the full costs of this misadventure are revealed — billions of dollars over the next 20years — the province’s recent financial scandals at the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Commission and eHealth will seem trivial in comparison. This is the real political scandal in Ontario, upon which we should all be focusing our attention.
Michael Trebilcock is Professor of Law and Economics, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, and a director of Energy Probe Research Foundation.
(Sept. 25, 2009) If a new Little Ice Age soon sets in, as many scientists believe, Arctic shipping will not happen in our lifetimes. Continue reading
I recently blogged about the fact that EU member states have not agreed to binding national or EU-wide greenhouse gas emission limits for 2020—in spite of frequent reports otherwise. The member state have agreed to implement a series of important product standards, compliance with which could (but might not) achieve the European Commission’s "goal" of cutting EU-wide Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) 20% below 1990 levels by 2020.
The difficult experience that EU member states have had with the binding national targets they agreed to for the Kyoto First Budget period is largely responsible for the member states’ refusals to bind, again, to legally enforceable national GHG limits. As I pointed out in the story, the 2008 – 2012 GHG limit that the aggregate EU27 agreed to in Kyoto in 1997 was 14% ABOVE 1997 actual GHG discharges from the community. Obviously, trying to live with a commitment to reduce aggregate GHGs, absolutely (as opposed to living with a cap on the rate of growth) will prove a much larger challenge.
While I was writing, a European court ruled in favour of Poland and Estonia—two member states that challenged the European Commission’s constitutional authority to dictate CO2 allowance allocations for member states. An article by the New York Times mentions that six similar cases have been brought by other EU member states. The other states that have brought or threatened to bring cases include France, Germany and Italy.
"But the question of how much governments can intervene problem should disappear during the next decade,” the article says. “E.U. governments agreed last year that the commission, and not governments, will have the right, after 2012, to decide on its own how many carbon allowances are allocated to each industry sector across the 27-nation trade bloc."
I do not agree with the reporter’s assessment that the question of how much authority the European Commission/Union has will disappear post-2013. Over the last two years, EU governments agreed, effectively:
• That the European Commission does not have the authority to assign or enforce binding national GHG limits;
• Will be authorized to operate an EU CO2 cap and trade system, including the authority to dictate the formulae for free CO2 (not GHG) allowance allocations by sector (not by member state, as is the procedure for 2005 through 2012);
• The EU CO2 cap and trade regime will cover a theoretical maximum of 60% of member states’ national GHG inventories (after accounting for exemptions, the EU CO2 cap and trade system coverage will likely prove to be somewhere between 30% and 40% of national GHG inventories); and
• EU member states cannot, in domestic law, opt more sectors into the EU CO2 market than the EU rule elects to cover, but;
• EU member states retain the right, in domestic law, to exempt plants and sectors from the EU CO2 cap and obligation to surrender CO2 allowances;
• EU member states retain the right to block or limit inter-state and international trading in EU CO2 allowances;
• EU member states retain the right to block entities that do not operate regulated plants within their boundaries from participation in any member state’s EU CO2 allowance auction, and/or to limit any bidder’s right to acquire CO2 allowances at auction; and
• While member states have granted the European Commission the authority to administer an EU-wide CO2 allowance market, which market will cover a portion but not all of the EU-wide GHG inventory, a consensus does not exist that the the EU has authority to impose material penalties on any member state whose covered sectors fail to comply with the EU CO2 market caps or trading rules.
FACT: The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its most recent report, in 2007, reported a "discernible human influence on global climate."
FACT: The primary reference standard for this IPCC finding is data from the UK’s Climate Research Unit, established at the University of East Anglia in the early 1980s to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature.
FACT: Independent researchers, wishing to analyze this data, have for years attempted to obtain it, always without success.
FACT: The Climate Research Unit has finally explained why it won’t release this data: It doesn’t exist.
Europe’s climate change commitments credits the EU with having adopted legally binding GHG emission limits for 2020 and beyond. This is not the case.
While EU member states have agreed to implement a series of 4 legally binding standards for Greenhouse gas (GHG) emission limits—two of which are intensity-based. But there are no legally binding national or EU-wide GHG limits in the Climate Change Action Plan that the members of the EU voted to endorse in April, 2009.
In 2006, 2007 and 2008 the European Commission appealed to member states to agree to legally binding EU-wide and national GHG limits, but the member states refused. The member states did agree to work together to develop and bind to a series of intensity-based product standards, compliance with which may or may not result in achievement of the EU goal of cutting EU-wide CO2 emissions to 20% below 1990 levels by 2020.
In international meetings, EU negotiators consistently allow Canadian and US negotiators and reports to mis-characterize EU member states’ GHG goal for 2020 as "legally binding", largely in the hope that they will convince Canada and the US to bind to absolute GHG limits. This would deliver a massive trade advantage to EU-based energy intensive businesses. I suspect that some EU negotiators actually hope that if they can convince Canada and the US to take on binding national GHG limits that they might be able to convince EU member states to do so, as well—even though I doubt such an outcome is a possibility.
The EU cap and trade regime—which covers only CO2 and sources responsible for less than 50% of EU-wide GHG emissions—incorporates a number of provisions under which surplus free EU CO2 allowances can be freely allocated to regulated facilities. In this regard, it is similar to the Waxman-Markey proposal.
The EU Action plan goes something like this.
It will “set for each member state a mandatory national target for the overall share of energy from renewable sources in gross final consumption of energy— taking account of countries’ different starting points”. Note: these mandates are energy intensity-based limits, i.e. energy from renewable sources as a % of total energy consumption. "Each EU country will adopt a national renewable energy action plan setting out its national targets for the share of energy from renewable sources consumed in transport, electricity, heating and cooling in 2020 and will notify it to the Commission by June 2010."
Note that the EU’s cap and trade program covers CO2 discharges only, and covers less than 50% of the European Union’s GHG inventory. Many provisions in the EU cap and trade allowance allocation/auctioning proposal create the potential for free EU CO2 allowance supply to exceed the target of 80% of 1990 actual emission levels in the regulated sectors.
"Across the entire EU, greenhouse gas emissions from the relevant sectors—sectors not covered by the cap and trade rule—are to diminish by 10 % on 2005 levels by 2020, thus contributing to the EU’s goal (not mandatory limit) of a 20 % reduction in CO2 (CO2 only, not all GHGs)…across the entire economy. EU states with low GDP per head and strong prospects for economic growth may increase their carbon emissions by up to 20 % whereas those with high national income per head must cut CO2 pollution by up to a fifth."
In other words, if EU economies with lower GDPs grow faster then EU economies with high GDPs, the overall goal of a 20% reduction in CO2 over all sources covered by the EU cap and trade scheme will not be achieved. Note, as well, that unregulated CH4 emissions have been the primary driver of EU GHG growth since 1997.
The following statement applies only to the portion of the national economies that are covered by the CO2 cap and trade rule, not to the economies and/or national GHG inventories in their entirety: "The national trajectory of carbon emissions until 2020 is binding on member states and enforceable through the usual EU infringement procedure. If a country exceeds its annual objective it must implement corrective measures. In addition, the excess emissions will be multiplied by an abatement factor of 1.08 and deducted from the following year’s CO2 allowance."
Also in the limited context of the European CO2 cap and trade rule, "the Council has introduced several flexibility mechanisms, including the possibility of…carrying forward excess reductions to future years." This provision encourages European corporations to hoard their EU CO2 allowances and not to export them to other markets.
"The Council adopted a regulation setting the first legally-binding standards for CO2 emissions from new passenger cars, to apply as of 2012. The regulation will give legal effect to the EU’s existing goal of reducing average emissions from new cars to 120gr CO2 / km. This is to be achieved in two ways: A reduction to 130gr CO2 / km through engine technology plus an additional cut of 10gr CO2 / km through more efficient vehicle features, for instance air-conditioning systems or tyres. The new regulation makes these objectives binding for the average fleet of a given car manufacturer in successive stages: In 2012, 65 % of their car fleet must meet the target, in 2013 75 % and in 2014 80 %. From 2015, the whole fleet needs to comply with the CO2 emissions objective.".Note: These mandates are intensity-based GHG limits, i.e. tailpipe GHG/km. Actual "reductions" depend on the vehicle stock turnover rate, car ownership rates and car use rates.
"The revised directive introduces for the first time a reduction target for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from fuels. By 2020, fuel suppliers have to decrease by 6% climate harming emissions over the entire life-cycle of their products." Since most of the life cycle of a large share of the transportation fuels consumed in Europe physically occurs outside Europe, this target proposes that European fuel importers take credit against their European GHG inventories for reductions that might be realized outside Europe, particularly in non-treaty OPEC nations. Obviously, the 6% reduction target for transportation fuels falls short of the EU’s overall 20% GHG reduction objective.
Note that the two most critical legally binding product standards that the member states have agreed, in principal, to implement, are intensity-based.
Remember, the EU27 "cap" that EU negotiators agreed to at Kyoto in 1997 was 14% ABOVE the EU 27 membership’s 1997 actual GHGs. So at Kyoto in 1997 the EU negotiators did not agree to cut GHGs, but agreed to cap growth. In this regard, they utterly out-negotiated the Canadian, US and Japanese negotiators.
It appears to me that a similar play is currently in the works. I hope I am correct in concluding that it is much less likely the EU will pull off such a coup in this round of negotiation. Of course, this depends on Canada’s current negotiating team being much more astute than our Kyoto negotiating team.
Successful Canadian negotiations will depend on our negotiators becoming as aware of what certain language and commitments mean for Europe as they are of what they might mean for Canada—an awareness that was not apparent in 1997 or for many years following.
If asked, I would recommend that Canada implement the same 4 product standards that the EU proposes to implement, as well as product standards for electricity, natural gas and petroleum product stales that are comparable to but more efficient than those outlined in Title 1 of the Waxman-Markey bill. That is the basis for fair and free global trade in product standard over-compliance credits and does not commit Canada to international trade in government-issued (and manipulated allocations of) quota certificates.
Please note that as allowed under the EU Energy Tax Directive of 2003, all fuels and electricity sold to "energy intensive business" in France, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany and elsewhere is typically 100% free from ALL energy taxes (including but not just CO2 taxes).
By law, an energy intensive business is one in which energy accounts for 3% of more of productiion costs. So after France introduces its CO2 taxes, most energy intensive French businesses will pay lower aggregate energy taxes than are currently paid by Canadian corporations.
Over and above implementing the energy tax exemptions allowed in the EU Energy Tax Directive of 2003, some nations also exempt all participants in certain industries from CO2 taxes. Look up CO2 tax exempt industries for Sweden, Denmark, Norway, etc and scroll down to Exemptions in Environmentally-related taxes.
In most cases, you will see that 100% of fuel and electricity consumed by power producers, oil refineries, industrial chemical producers, commercial airlines, commercial marine vessels and commercial fishing vessels and consumed in the production of products that are exported, have always been exempt from CO2 taxes in most—but not all—European CO2-taxing nations. The net result is, for example, that CO2 taxes account for less than 0.95% of total government revenues in Norway and less than 2% of total government revenues in Denmark. This will be no different in France.
But because EU member states typically used CO2 tax revenues to finance corporate income tax cuts, and because government-owned agencies and enterprises, including hospitals, universities and schools, all pay CO2 taxes, the European CO2 tax shift constitutes a tax shift from corporate to government agency taxpayers.
OECD economic indicator data reflects this reality. The OECD database shows that tax-included household expenditures on energy increased a nominal 5% to 13% between 2000 and 2007, while household expenditures on health care increased a nominal 34% to 75% in CO2 taxing European nations. Health care fees and insurance premiums have had to increase to cover government-run and taxpayer financed public institutions’ new CO2 tax liabilities, while energy intensive corporations remain, generally, CO2 tax exempt.
Between 2005 and 2012 all energy intensive industries—not including power generation—were freely allocated sufficient EU CO2 allowances to cover or even exceed their forecast GHG emissions.
For example, BP’s reported GHGs subject to the EU cap and trade regime grew 23%, absolutely, between 2005 and 2007, but BP still held surplus, bankable, EU CO2 allowances at the end of 2008. BPs GHGs increased 23% even though production at their European regulated plants declined over the period. In other words, BP’s, European GHG/Gj of energy output ratio grew much more than 23%.
It’s a similar story for every European-based integrated oil and gas producer.
Energy Probe
September 21, 2009
http://www.tvo.org/video/tvoMain.swf
The show originally aired on September 8th.
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