Hubris and Ecological Retribution

I’ve spent the last month painting and re-roofing the house and enjoying the slow emergence of spring in the rockies as the aspen grove turned a vibrant green.  I’ve also been watching the bear market rally in stocks as less bad news leads investors to believe that the fed can induce another debt bubble of false prosperity and growth.  So as the rain falls and temperatures hover in the low 40’s, I’m inspired to comment on the symbolism of the GM bankruptcy.  Amid all the chatter about “Government Motors” I was struck by Dan Neil’s (the L.A. Times) view of the larger lesson within our nation’s largest bankruptcy.

“This is the lesson of GM’s bankruptcy, and it has little to do with market share and miles per gallon.  It’s a rebuff of the notion of exceptionalism.

Any organization that fails to sufficiently safeguard its means of self-correction and reform, that forsakes long-term investment for short-term gain, that piles up debt year after year, will eventually fail, no matter how grand its history, or noble its purpose.  If you don’t feel a tingle of national mortality in all of this, you’re not paying attention.”

Neil doesn’t go beyond the “tingle of national mortality”, but it is no secret that the U.S. is technically bankrupt and avoids default only because of our reserve currency status and foreign purchases of our growing debt.  But the inevitable decline of the American empire only begins to describe Neil’s “rebuff of exceptionalism”.

American hubris, our excessive pride in our specialness or “exceptionalism” was born in ernest as we exited victorious from WWII.  With the rest of the  world’s industrial capacity lying in ruin,  GM and corporate america dominated the world industrial stage and American quickly transformed its vast war economy and productive capacity into a consumer economy that would eventually lead us onto a treadmill of crushing debt.  Post war retail analyst Victor Le Beau best describes the reasoning that would lead to America’s 5% of the world population consuming 30% of the world’s resources.

“Our enormously productive [war] economy…demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…. We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

Such reasoning rested on the post war belief that American ingenuity and the miracle of science and technology would overcome any limits and endless growth would lead us to a utopian future.  In his forward to William Catton’s “Overshoot”,  Stewart Udall posits the exact date that America’s post war euphoria jumped the Happy Day’s shark.

“It is easy to fix the exact date when our euphoria reached a zenith.  It was the July week in 1969 when the astronauts walked on the moon.  We celebrated this triumph with a mixture of awe and self-congratulation.  President Nixon proclaimed that it was “the greatest week since the creation of the earth.”  A NASA official opined that the feat demonstrated we were “masters of the universe.”  This proves that we can do what ever we decide to do,  Americans concluded from this climax event.”

However the 70’s would mark the first cracks in our shinning edifice of hubris.  Domestic oil production would peak in 1970 and OPEC would give us the first taste of our dangerous dependency on oil.  Honda and Toyota quality and fuel efficiency would begin to threaten the supremacy of GM.  Reacting to the costs of our failed adventure in Vietnam, Nixon would take us off the gold standard and set the stage for massive deficit spending.  Real incomes would begin to decline, saving and thrift would lose favor and combine with debt and two income families in an attempt to keep the consumer economy  alive and growing.  Our post war euphoria would be replaced with the lament, “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we ….”

President Carter attempted to raise the issue of limits and lead us in direction of conservation and renewable energy, but Fed Chairman Paul Volcker’s war on Nixon’s policy induced inflation set the stage for Reagan’s promise of a return to post war euphoria.  Reagan delivered with a “deficits don’t matter” war on the evil empire and launched a 20-year bull market built on a phantom foundation of deregulation, easy credit, and a mountain of government and private debt.  As W added more to the national debt than all previous presidents combined, our national house of cards collapsed in a pool of financial sector greed and overreach.

As GM attempts to pull itself from the ashes of bankruptcy and politicians around the world promise the oxymoron of “sustainable” growth, nearly 7-billion humans are still mostly blind to the reality of ecological limits and harsh retribution of overshoot and collapse.  This is the ultimate hubris—the hubris of human exceptionalism.

“The whole human enterprise is a machine without brakes, for there are no indications that the world’s political leaders will deal with the realities until catastrophes occur.  The rich countries are using resources with extravagant disregard for the next generation; and poor countries appear to incapable of acting to curb the population increases that are erasing their hope for a better future.  In such a world, declarations and manifestos which ignore the imperatives of the limits of growth are empty exercises.  All the available evidence says we have already passed a point of no return, and tragic human convulsions are at hand.” – Stewart Udall, Charles Conconi, and David Osterhout,  The Energy Balloon

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Peak Food or an Agrarian Ideal?

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. Thomas Jefferson

On March 30th, the Post Carbon Institute released their Food and Farming Transition document.  As I’ve come to expect from this organization, it is a carefully researched and offers both a clear and concise description of the current situation combined with a broad roadmap for a transition to a post fossil fuel food delivery system.  I’ll provide a brief summary, however I would encourage anyone to read the entire document.  You can download a PDF version by clicking here.

The document starts with premise that industrial agriculture and our global food delivery system, both of which are highly dependent on fossil fuels, is patently unsustainable.  We have managed to triple the world’s agricultural output in the last hundred years, but the entire system depends on the exploitation of fossils fuels which are non-renewable and whose extraction rates will eventually peak and decline.

This unprecedented achievement in humanity’s quest for food security and abundance was largely made possible by the development of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; new hybrid crop varieties; the application of irrigation in arid regions; and the introduction of powered farm machinery.

The leveraging of fossil fuels to create this tripling of food abundance has also supported and made possible an increase in human population from 1.6 billion in 1900 to about 6.7 billion today.  One way to look at this is that we have created an artificially huge increase in human carrying capacity based on a specious and temporary foundation of non-renewable and unsustainable resources.  In that context, the stakes become very high, as billions of lives will depend our ability to produce and deliver just as much food in the future without the leverage of fossil fuels.

Natural gas provides the hydrogen and energy used to produce most nitrogen fertilizers, and both gas and oil are the sources for other agricultural chemicals, including pesticides and herbicides. Meanwhile, oil fuels most farm machinery (often including irrigation pumps), and has enabled growth in the scale and distance of transportation of crop inputs and outputs. Today, food items are shipped worldwide and enormous quantities of food are routinely transported from places of abundance to sites of scarcity, enabling cities to be built in deserts.

The authors are hopeful but not certain that such a transition can produce sufficient food for the current and projected population, however under the best of circumstances the changes required will be both massive and disruptive.  They hope that these changes can be made gradually and proactively, but history suggests that they will be made reactively and in the clear face of a global food crisis.  There are many powerful vested interests dependent on the current system and agricultural giants like ADM and Cargil are not likely to quietly into the night.  If the powerful get their way, we are likely to revert to a version of ancient Rome’s latifundia, a crude industrialized agriculture dependent  on captive and abundant cheap labor and the huge land holdings of an agrarian oligarchy.

The Post Carbon Institute’s authors provide a more hopeful vision of the future than the slave labor model of ancient Rome and outline seven key elements that provide us with a transition roadmap:

1. More or Mostly Locally Grown Food (follow this link to learn more about Food Miles)
2. Smaller Farms Powered by Human, Animal, and Renewable Energy including bio-fuels grown to power a diminished fleet of farm machinery
3. Natural Soil Fertility based on Composting, Animal Manure, and Crop Rotation
4. Transforming the American Diet – Less Meat more Vegetables and Grains – A Diet that is Seasonal, Fresh, and Local
5. Knowledge-intensive, Holistic Farming Systems – Reviving the Tribal Knowledge of our Great Grand Parents crossed with todays best Organic Farming Practices – PermaCulture versus Mono Culture
6. Open-pollinated Seed Varieties adapted to Local Soils and Climates
7. Decentralized Processing and Distribution

Ideally a post carbon agricultural and food delivery system will look like a modern version of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian ideal married to business models like community supported agriculture (CSA) and using solar, wind, and liquid bio-fuel technologies to augment human and animal power.  With this new/old vision, the huge industrial farms of middle-america would be carved back into pre-industrial 100 acre operations and some 25-million americans would reverse migrate from the cities to re-populate the heartlands.  Imagine a section of land (640 acres) farmed by four well and newly educated families sharing 100 acres devoted to animal fodder, another 100 acres devoted to bio-fuels, and a few more acres given over to shared wind and solar power.  The balance of the acreage would be devoted to the free market ingenuity of each family.

None of this will happen quickly and as idyllic as it sounds, not without hardship and suffering.  It would have been interesting if the authors had devoted some space to what the transition might look like in crisis mode.  I can imagine victory gardens and backyard chicken coops to help build a tenuous food bridge to the future.  Homeowner associations turning the front lawns of suburbia into agricultural co-ops.  A massive natural agriculture training program to prepare us for the migration back to the heartlands.  A government sponsored mechanism to breakup large land holdings into smaller, family size parcels, along with government sponsored rationing, food relief programs, and the National Guard stationed in front of grocery stores and other food distribution centers.

Peak Oil makes this painful and hopeful transition not a question of if, but of when.  It may be sooner rather than later and it is likely that once in motion, events will unfold very quickly.

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A “Crash Course” in Reality

I recently took the time to wade through Chris Martenson’s (free) online Crash Course and found it to be a brilliant and accessible summary of the economic, energy, and environment forces shaping our very unsustainable future.  If you have that uneasy feeling that the current financial meltdown is much more than just another business cycle, then this course is a must.  Martenson makes the case that a financial system that must grow to survive married to energy and environmental systems that cannot grow is a ticking time bomb that will make next 20 years VERY different from the last.

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Footprints, Limits, and Human Carrying Capacity

Lately, I’ve been thinking about footprints.  I live in the Rocky Mountains near the Pike National Forest and often hike or ride my horse in the forest.  Counting my wife and neighbors about a dozen of us tramp through the woods on a regular basis.  We mostly followed faint game trails that over the years have become miles of well established two foot wide tracks through the Ponderosa, Lodgepole and Aspen environments of the adjacent public lands.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s a relatively small footprint.  A slight loss of carbon sink and still too faint to cause any erosion damage.  Judging by the animal prints and scat, it’s safe to say that that the local fauna also make frequent use of our primitive highway system.  Still, however faint, our impact is still visible, clear evidence of our small tribes foot and hoof fall on the local flora.

Out of the forest, back in the neighborhood, our footprint grows ever larger.  Our homes cast their own footprint on the land.  The roads that serve those homes cast an exponentially larger footprint.  In Colorado, the electricity that serves those homes casts a carbon footprint of 1.8 lbs per kwhr and most of us contribute addition carbon with propane furnaces and supplemental wood heating.  We do a bit better with water.  We draw water from shallow wells that tap into the first water flowing out of the eastern slope of the continental divide and we return 85% of the that water to the local aquifer through our septic systems.   When you factor in some of our 100 mile round trip commutes to Denver and the vast global supply chain that delivers pineapples to our households in mid winter, you begin to just get a glimmer of the immense footprint that our small mountain tribe casts upon the world.

The concept of “footprint” used as a way to measure humanity’s impact on the earth first gained traction in the 1990’s when Rees and Wackernagel introduced the idea of “ecological footprint”.  The ecological footprint was and is an attempt to quantify the amount of land required to supply the world’s population with what they consume.  Recently we have added “carbon footprint” and “water footprint” to our lexicon ecological metrics.

Footprints are a very helpful way to visualize environmental impacts. In essence they are direct or indirect references to limits or to the concept of limits.  They help me to frame my mountain tribe and it’s forest tracks within the context of the 6.7 billion human inhabitants of earth hell-bent for growth and the pursuit of happiness in a closed and limited eco-system.

One way to think about limits is through the concept of carrying capacity.  For example, the carrying capacity of a biological species in a closed environment like an island is the population size of the species the environment can be sustained indefinitely, given the food, water and other natural resources available.  The concept of human carrying capacity is a bit more complex since one has to factor in the possibility of leveraging technology to increase the earth’s carrying capacity.  You also have to consider the equal possibility of unintentionally leveraging technology to decrease the earth’s carrying capacity.  Since the free market does not see any “carrying capacity price signals”, technological impacts on organic or natural carrying capacity tend to be skewed toward the negative.  William Catton, author of “Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change”, defines human carrying capacity not just in terms of population but also in terms of humanity’s “load” on the environment.

[Human] Carrying capacity needs to be understood as the maximum load an environment can permanently support (i.e., without reduction of its ability to support future generations), with load referring not just to the number of users of an environment but to the total demands they make upon it. For human societies, as for populations of other species, the relation of load to carrying capacity is crucial in shaping our future. Public comprehension of the concepts of carrying capacity and load is both vague and inadequate, and the need to correct these deficiencies is urgent.

When load comes to exceed carrying capacity, the overload inexorably causes environmental damage; then the reduced carrying capacity leads to load reduction (i.e., a crash). – William Catton

In the world of flora and fauna, a species will sometimes stumble upon an environment rich in nutrients creating a large and temporary surplus in carrying capacity.  The usual result is a sharp increase in population leading to an overshoot and a deficit in carrying capacity.  Tragically, this causes both a sharp degradation of carrying capacity and a total population collapse.

Whether humanity will suffer the same fate is subject to debate.  Some predict extinction while others believe that technology will continue to keep us safely in a state of carrying capacity surplus.  While either extreme is possible, I think the truth will end up somewhere north of extinction.

Our greatest danger today is that we rely too little on natural or organic carrying capacity and too much on borrowed or specious carrying capacity.  To use a quasi-mathematical formula:

Human Carrying Capacity = Organic Carrying Capacity + Specious Carrying Capacity

where (in simplest of terms),

Organic Carrying Capacity is a function of:

• the biosphere
• surface water and hydrologic cycle
• the atmosphere
• solar irradiation
• top soil

and, the Specious or Borrowed (from the past) Carrying Capacity is a function of non-renewable resources such as:

• fossil fuels
• minerals
• groundwater from slow recharge aquifers

In the case of human carrying capacity, both categories are acted on by technology and our economic systems of finance and trade.  The population explosion starting with the industrial revolution was made possible by the massive technological leveraging of non-renewable resources to create a temporary and specious carrying capacity surplus. The same technological advances caused and continue to cause a concurrent and accelerating degradation of our organic carrying capacity.  As a result, human carrying capacity now rests on an unsustainable house of cards.

As our total population and standard of consumption(load) have taken us back into a condition of carrying capacity deficit and we are now on the brink of collapse.  The tipping point will depend on Liebig’s Law which states that “whatever necessity is least abundantly available in an environment sets the environment’s carrying capacity”.

In our case, the Liebig trigger could be the peaking of oil production, food or water limitations, or a myriad of environmental ills that continue to further degrade organic carrying capacity.  It may even be systemic breakdown in our economy – call it “peak debt”.

Whatever the initial trigger, the question is how we will react.  Will we recognize it for what it is and navigate our way to a new state of equilibrium and balance, or frantically cling to “growth” as we compete for resources in a race to extinction?

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The Worlds Top Ten “Greenwashers”

According to WebEcoist these are the companies that are the most adept and audacious at spinning themselves “green”.

• BP
• American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity
• GM
• Exxon Mobil
• Monsanto
• Malaysian Palm Oil Council
• American Electric Power
• Dow Chemical
• Fur Council of Canada
• Fiji Water

Link to the full story and examples.  Also see Consumers see through Greenwash.

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Housing Prices Still Unsustainable?

In a February 23rd interview on Yahoo Finance Dr. Robert Shiller makes the case that we are only half way to a bottom in home prices and that we may  experience another 25% in price declines as we approach the post WWII trendline. He also explodes the real estate industry myth of homes as investments.

However, since real estate is all about location-location-location, the impact of any further decline in values will probably depend on where you live.  See this report from the University of Virginia.

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Three Letters to Obama

The Obama administration has recently received three letters or petitions regarding energy policy.  As with any policy position they are shaped by the world views of the men and women who authored them.

Dr. James Hansen is head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a leading global climate change researcher.  It is not surprising that his proposal revolves around a tax policy aimed at decarbonizing the American economy and reducing greenhouse gases.

Edward Mazria is an architect and creator of the 2030 Challenge, a voluntary pledge that all new buildings and major building renovation be constructed to a carbon-neutral (using no fossil fuel GHG emitting energy to operate) standard by 2030. Mazria’s proposal is centered on achieving building energy efficiency goals rewarded with lower mortgage rates in the case of residential construction and by accelerated depreciation in the case of commercial construction.  If enacted, it claims to both create millions of jobs and reduce carbon emissions.

Richard Heinberg is senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and the author of The Party’s Over – Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies,  Powerdown – Options and Actions for a Post – Carbon World, and the Oil Depletion Protocol.   Heinberg and the other authors of Post Carbon Institute’s “Real New Deal” marry the imperatives of climate change and the peaking and ultimate depletion of our fossil fuel resources into a comprehensive plan to transition the U.S. to a new energy economy.

All three proposals are valid and merit serious review, but only the Post Carbon Institute’s proposal offers a comprehensive view of the challenges we must face.  As such, the Hansen and Mazria proposals are important subsets of what needs to be a much larger solution.

THE HANSEN PROPOSAL
Hansen sent an open letter to Barack and Michelle Obama.  Here are some relevant excerpts from the letter:

A rising carbon price is essential to “decarbonize” the economy, i.e., to move the nation toward the era beyond fossil fuels. The most effective way to achieve this is a carbon tax (on oil, gas, and coal) at the well-head or port of entry.  The tax will then appropriately affect all products and activities that use fossil fuels.

The public will support the tax if it is returned to them, equal shares on a per capita basis (half shares for children up to a maximum of two child-shares per family), deposited monthly in bank accounts.  No large bureaucracy is needed.  A person reducing his carbon footprint more than average makes money.   A person with large cars and a big house will pay a tax much higher than the dividend.  Not one cent goes to Washington.  No lobbyists will be supported.  Unlike cap-and-trade, no millionaires would be made at the expense of the public.

A carbon tax is honest, clear and effective.  It will increase energy prices, but low and middle income people, especially, will find ways to reduce carbon emissions so as to come out ahead.  The rate of infrastructure replacement, thus economic activity, can be modulated by how fast the carbon tax rate increases.  Effects will permeate society.  Food requiring lots of carbon emissions to produce and transport will become more expensive and vice versa, encouraging support of nearby farms as opposed to imports from half way around the world.

THE 2030 CHALLENGE STIMULUS PLAN
A Two-Year, Nine-Million-Job Investment Proposal

“The road to energy independence, economic recovery and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions runs through the Building Sector.” – Edward Mazria

The 2030 Challenge Stimulus plan is a two year investment commitment to create 9 million jobs overall and 4-million jobs in the construction sector.  It is a jobs growth and carbon reduction plan rolled into one.  In the residential sector it trades low interest rate loans off against investments to increase building energy efficiency.  For an existing home, the interest rate provided would be a function of renovating that home to some level below the existing energy code requirements in exchange for a lower mortgage rate.

Mortgage Interest Rate (subject to market conditions)  2030 Challenge Energy Reduction

4.0%    30% below code
3.5%    50% below code
2.5%    75% below code
2.0%    Carbon neutral

For example, a homeowner with a    current $272,300    mortgage with equity of $12,000, would have a mortgage balance of $260,300. At an interest rate of 6%, the current monthly mortgage payment would be $1633. If this homeowner wants to qualify for the 2.5% interest rate, they will need to renovate their home to use 75% less energy than that required by code, immediately creating jobs and putting construction teams back to work.

The cost of renovation would be approximately $51,250, which includes a solar system, which would qualify for a $7000 tax credit. The cost of the renovation, minus the tax credit, would be added to the mortgage balance, so that the new mortgage is now $304,550.    However, because of the significantly lower 2.5%    interest rate, the new mortgage payment is just $1203, a savings of $430 per month. With the additional monthly savings on energy bills of approximately $145, this homeowner would save a total of $575 per month.

Because building construction historically represents about 10% of GDP, Mazria thinks that the private building sector may be the key to reviving the U.S. economy.  He proposes that $96-billion be invested annually for the next two years in mortgage interest rate buy-downs and accelerated depreciation for commercial buildings.  As a result, Mazria claims that with a participation of only 5.8% of homes and 3.1% of commercial buildings the program would generate 9-million jobs and $1-trillion in private sector spending, and pay for itself in the form of increased tax revenue.

In addition to the economic claims, Mazria calculates that over the five year period, the proposal would reduce CO2 emissions by 504 million metric tons and energy consumption by 6.47 Quadrillion Btu.

Even at a participation of only 5.8% (over 4-million) of homes, Mazria’s proposal may have a scaling problem, as the country finds itself lacking the architectural, engineering, and code verification talent to transform that many homes in the proposed time-frame.  Conceptually however, this is a beautifully conceived plan and deserves serious attention.

POST CARBON INSTITUTE
The Real New Deal
Energy Scarcity and the Path to Energy, Economic, and  Environmental Recovery

“The energy transition cannot be accomplished in four years or eight…  What can and must be accomplished in a single administration is the essential change of direction.”

The Post Carbon Institute [PCI] argues that the current economic crisis provides the opportunity and potentially the political will to make a significant down payment on the transition to a renewable energy economy that would otherwise be inconceivable.  In fact if we don’t act now, the current crisis may just merge with “peak oil” and the effects of climate change to create a decades long global state of emergency.

PCI outlines a comprehensive program comprising five different solution sets.

1. A massive and immediate shift to renewable energy (Hansen’s proposal fits here)
2. The electrification of our transportation system
3. The transformation to a “smart” electrical grid
4. The de-carbonization and localization of our food production and delivery system
5. The retrofit of our building stock for energy efficiency and distributed power generation. (Mazria’s proposal fits here)

Since the cost of such a transition spread over 20 years would be in the order of $4.5-trillion the authors admit that given the current financial meltdown, private capital will not be forthcoming and deficit spending by the government along with significant policy changes will be required to launch the transition.  To direct policy, the authors recommend creating “an Energy Transition Office, tied to no existing agency, specifically tasked with tracking and managing the transition and with helping existing agencies work together toward the common goal”.

The authors do not underestimate the enormous and unprecedented scope of their proposal.  Aside from avoiding or mitigating the devastating impacts of peak oil and climate change the potential  benefits are enormous and would include:

• eliminating the need to police oil exporting areas of the world, saving billions of dollars a year in military expenditures

• saving billions per year by creating a food system that substantially reduces obesity, cancer, and asthma

• helping to create and foster skilled, self-reliant and resilient communities

Although the plan as presented merely serves to outline the possible solutions and the scope of the problems we face, what sets it apart is it all-embracing view of the resource depletion and environmental  perils we must resolve to survive.

Thoughts About a New Energy Economy
Calls for the transition to a new energy economy typically come from three main quarters.  All three are valid, but only one sees the forest for trees.

The national security quarter recognizes that we depend too much on imports from countries and regions that are either unstable and/or hostile to our national interests.  This argument for action plays well with the right, but does not recognize the environmental threat of global warming or greater economic peril of peak oil.  Although it forms the basis of an argument for an energy transition, it can equally be used to justify a more robust military policy.

The climate change quarter is currently dominant in the minds of the public and with policy makers.  It sees great peril and human suffering in the coming decades but doesn’t recognize that the peak oil is imminent and will soon take center stage.  The economic devastation of peak oil will likely be additive to the current debt crisis and put global warming on the back burner.  Ironically, the advent of peak oil will greatly reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the effects of global warming but the decline in oil supply alone will not be sufficient to drive atmospheric CO2 levels back to 350 PPM.

Peak oil is lesser known.  There is a peak oil caucus in congress, but there is little political will to take action in a county where nearly half the population believes in the battle cry of “drill baby drill”.  Unlike the effects of global warming which will be slow and indirect in coming, the effects of peak oil will be as sudden as the collapse of the World Trade Center and Lehman Brothers.  More shock and awe than a slow rising of the tides.  It will touch every corner of our economy with a combination of price shocks and shortages.  It will leave us with one chance and one chance only to transform our energy infrastructure to solar, wind, and geothermal using what remains of our rapidly depleting fossil fuel resources.

As I look to the future, I see three possible courses of action:

Option one is that we recognize the problem of resource depletion and take action well in advance of  the anticipated world wide peak in oil production.  Since peaking is imminent and the transition will take approximately two decades, unfortunately the ship has already sailed on option one. Looking back we will someday wish we had paid much more attention to Jimmy Carter.

With the election of Obama, option two is already in play, and we have begin to take some action based on fears of climate change and for reasons of national security.  However, our current actions are no where near sufficient to avoid extreme hardship.  The ship of state is on a collision course with the iceberg and we have only just given the order to reduce speed.  Our collision with destiny is now unavoidable and the question now is whether there will be a sufficient number of life boats.  In addition, just as we need it the most, we lack sufficient capital to make the transition in the face of the global financial meltdown.  This is not just another severe business cycle, this is the beginning of the  realignment of the the post WWII global financial system and the end of American economic dominance.  It is likely that peak oil will become evident just as the dollar loses its status as the world’s reserve currency and as a nation we may then be unable to fund the energy transition with either public or private funds.  Essentially bankrupt and losing our grip on global influence and power the country may lurch to the right in a desperate attempt to reclaim global dominance.

Option three is to maintain a posture of “drill baby drill denial” in spite of reality.  At this point the country may resort to engaging in “resource wars” to claim the world’s remaining oil reserves and to protect the American “way of life”.   This would be a policy doomed to failure and assured of increasing human misery.  It would also be a policy that will put us at risk of missing our only window to transition away from fossil fuels.  Call this the Mad Max policy.

My hope is that we’ll stick with option two and muddle through to a new and sustainable energy economy.  It promises to be extremely painful and disruptive decade or two of transition, but in the end we will find ourselves in a much healthier relationship with our environment and possibly with each other.

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Obama and Global Warming – Cap & Trade or a Carbon Tax?

Taxes aren’t just too high, they’re too dumb. Whenever we put a tax on something, we get less of it. Yet, incomprehensibly, we continue to tax the things we want more of: income, jobs, and savings. Economists used to like that — they thought taxing good things was “neutral.” But it’s not. In a resource-constrained world, it’s much smarter to cut taxes on what we want — like jobs — and make up the difference by raising taxes on things we want less of: carbon, pollution, and waste. – Bill Shireman, President and CEO of the Future 500

The invisible hand of the market is blind to the effects of inputs and outputs that don’t provide any immediate price signals.  No where is that more true than in the fossil fuel derived energy markets, where the price signals for resource depletion, air and water pollution, and climate change are either non-existent, understated, or so delayed as to render any “natural” free market correction an economic and humanitarian crisis.

In the case of anthropogenic global warming [AGW], market forces may react to new shipping lanes in the Arctic or improved crop yields in certain parts of the world, but they will not react to species loss or rising sea levels until we are well past the tipping point of no return.  So the only way to drive the market to “decarbonize” our atmosphere is for the government to impose a price signal on fossil fuel generated carbon.

We can do this with either a system of Cap & Trade or with a Carbon Tax.  Either method would impose a cost on the release of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and adjust the price upward to reflect the environmental costs that the “market” fails to “see”.

In a recent letter to president elect Obama, Jim Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies proposes a carbon tax.  Here are some excerpts from the letter:

A rising carbon price is essential to “decarbonize” the economy, i.e., to move the nation toward the era beyond fossil fuels. The most effective way to achieve this is a carbon tax (on oil, gas, and coal) at the well-head or port of entry.  The tax will then appropriately affect all products and activities that use fossil fuels.

The public will support the tax if it is returned to them, equal shares on a per capita basis (half shares for children up to a maximum of two child-shares per family), deposited monthly in bank accounts.  No large bureaucracy is needed.  A person reducing his carbon footprint more than average makes money.   A person with large cars and a big house will pay a tax much higher than the dividend.  Not one cent goes to Washington.  No lobbyists will be supported.  Unlike cap-and-trade, no millionaires would be made at the expense of the public.

A carbon tax is honest, clear and effective.  It will increase energy prices, but low and middle income people, especially, will find ways to reduce carbon emissions so as to come out ahead.  The rate of infrastructure replacement, thus economic activity, can be modulated by how fast the carbon tax rate increases.  Effects will permeate society.  Food requiring lots of carbon emissions to produce and transport will become more expensive and vice versa, encouraging support of nearby farms as opposed to imports from half way around the world.

As a candidate, Obama supported a Cap & Trade policy that would require all pollution credits to be auctioned.  These credits would then be “traded” creating a new source of commission revenue for the financial markets.  A 100 percent auction policy would ensure that all industries pay for every ton of emissions they release, rather than politically giving emission rights  and credits away to companies on the basis of their past pollution.  Obama proposed that a small portion of the auction receipts (~$15 billion/year) be invested in the development of clean energy sources and that the balance be used for rebates to individuals, families, and communities to off-set the increased cost of fuel, natural gas, and electricity.

Personally, I like the administrative simplicity of Hansen’s plan and it’s relative immunity to political and financial gaming.   Obama has proven he is open to any good idea — let’s hope he is open to Hansen’s proposal.

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In a World of Nested Ponzi Schemes – Can we all Plead Insanity?

The latest twist in Bernard Madoff’s $50-billion dollar ponzi scheme sideshow is the rumor that Bernie’s legal team will have him plead insanity, claiming that he had some kind of mental break or suffers from a serious psychological disorder.  Given the age of  Madoff’s operation, my guess is that he started out with good intentions and slowly drifted into ponzi mode to maintain his self image as a respected and admired investment advisor – the guy you could only get to via invitation.  Only in the perfect redemption storm of 2008 would Bernie’s grand self delusion finally come to an end.
As Warren Buffet is fond of saying, “when the tide goes out we see who is swimming naked”.  In 2008, much was revealed and it seems that Bernard Madoff was just one of the smaller dolls in a world of nested ponzi schemes.  I sometimes feel as if we are collectively working our way out of the center of a Russian matryoshka or set nesting dolls.

At the core we have Madoff and probably a score of other financial wizards that the lowered tides have yet to reveal.  Next we have Wall Street itself, a casino of questionable securitized debt and 100’s of trillions of dollars of derivative side bets hypothetically backstopped by over-leveraged counter parties.  Then we have the U.S. economy — a debtor nation house of cards inhabited by consumers at the end of their credit line.
Coming to the rescue is the U.S. Government teetering on the edge of default.  Our massive debt funded by foreign purchasers of U.S. Treasuries is a ponzi scheme on its last legs.  In 2007, public debt in the U.S. was $10.6 trillion dollars or 77% of GDP.  In 2008, the percentage of debt to GDP has grown to over 100% and that excludes the liabilities of Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.  Given our current debt to GDP ratio the U.S. would not even qualify for admission to the EU.
However the final doll in our matryoshka of ponzi schemes is the belief that our world population and economy can grow forever in the closed ecological system of planet earth, and yet central banks and governments around the world are desperately trying to “jump start” the economy and get us back into growth mode.
So I wonder — will we all end up pleading insanity — and to whom?

Only after the last tree has been cut down.
Only after the last river has been poisoned.
Only after the last fish has been caught.
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.
Cree Indian Prophecy

From Nouriel Roubini of the RGE Monitor on March 11, 2009:

A reporter contacted  today with the following question:

“I am a reporter and I am doing a story on Bernard Madoff’s life after pleading guilty. As part of this I was wondering if you could comment on what significance he will have in the history of this period. Will he represent more than a scamster who stole a lot of money from a lot of people? As Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay came to embody corporate greed and deceit, what will Madoff symbolize? I would really appreciate your insights on this”.

Here is my answer fleshed out in full:

Americans lived in a Made-off and Ponzi bubble economy for a decade or even longer. Madoff is the mirror of the American economy and of its overleveraged agents: a house of cards of leverage over leverage by households, financial firms and corporations that has now gone bust.

When you put zero down on your home and you thus have no equity in your home your leverage is literally infinite and you are playing a Ponzi game.

And the bank that lent you with zero down, a NINJA (no income, no jobs and assets) liar loan that was interest only for a while with negative amortization and an initial teaser rate was also playing a Ponzi game.

And private equity firms that did over a $1 trillion of LBOs in the last few years with debt to earnings ratio of 10 or above were also Ponzi firms playing a Ponzi game.

A government that will issue trillions of dollars of new debt to pay for this severe recession and to socialize private losses may risk to become a Ponzi government if – in the medium term – does not return to fiscal discipline and debt sustainability.

A country that has – for over 25 years – spent more than income and thus run an endless string of current account deficit and has thus become the largest net foreign debtor in the world (with net foreign liabilities that are likely to be over $3 trillion by the end of this year) is also a Ponzi country that may eventually default on its foreign debt if it does not – over time – tighten its belt and start running smaller current account deficits and actual trade surpluses.

Whenever you persistently consume more than your income year after year (a household with negative savings, a government with budget deficit, a firm or financial institution with persistent losses, a country with a current account deficit) you are playing a Ponzi game; in the jargon of formal economics you are not satisfying your long run intertemporal budget constraint as you borrow to finance the interest rate on your previous debt and you are thus following an unsustainable debt dynamics (discounted value of your debt growing without limit in NPV terms as the debt grows faster than the interest rate on it) that eventually leads to outright insolvency.

According to Minsky and according to economic theory Ponzi agents (households, firms, banks) are those who need to borrow more to repay both principal and interest on their previous debt; i.e. Minsky’s “Ponzi borrowers” cannot service neither interest or principal payments on their debts. They are called “Ponzi borrowers” as they need persistently increasing prices of the assets they invested in to keep on refinancing their debt obligations.

By this standard media US households whose debt relative to income went from 65 percent 15 years ago to 100 percent in 2000 to 135 percent today were playing a Ponzi game.

And an economy where the total debt to GDP ratio (of households, financial firms and corporations) is now 350 percent was a Made-Off Ponzi economy. And now that home values have fallen 20% and they will fall another 20% before they bottom out and now that equity prices have fallen over 50% (and may fall further) using homes as an ATM machine and borrowing against it to finance Ponzi consumption is not feasible any more. The party is over for households, banks and non-bank highly leveraged corporations.

The bursting of the housing bubble and of the equity bubble and hedge funds bubble and private equity bubble showed that most of the “wealth” that supported the massive leverage and overspending of agents in the economy was a fake bubble-driven wealth; now that these bubble have burst it is clear that the emperor had no clothes and that we are the naked emperor. A rising bubble tide was hiding the fact that most Americans and their banks were swimming naked; and the bursting of the bubble is the low tide that shows who was naked.

Madoff may now spend the rest of his life in prison. The US household and financial and non financial firms and government may spend the next generation in debtor’s prison having to tighten their belts to pay for the losses inflicted by a decade or more of reckless leverage, over consumption and risk taking.
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The End of Petroleum for Personal Transportation

Every great company in the history of the [silicone] valley started in a technology down cycle. — Shai Agassi

Stories about electric cars usually don’t get me very excited.  They may not generate any emissions on the road, but their batteries must recharged from a national electric grid, which in America is 50% dependent on coal and 20% dependent on natural gas.  Essentially, electric cars always looked like a game of fossil fuel whack-a-mole – trading the limitations and pollution of oil for the limitations and pollution of coal and natural gas.  You could argue that we could power the grid with renewables, but the grid is a 7/24 dance of precisely matching up demand with supply and it can only tolerate a limited amount of intermittent power like wind and PV before the music stops.  Add to that the limited range of electric cars and the whole concept falls apart when you consider that potential buyers must be confined to a tight radius around the umbilical cord of their home’s electric meter.

All of that is about to change as our model of personal transportation built around cheap oil and the internal combustion engine goes the way of the buggy whip.  Imagine a future work day that looks like this:

1. You enter your garage and pull out your electronic key. The logo on the key is blinking blue, indicating your car is fully charged.
2. You unplug your car from the wall, open the garage door, and head for work. Your electric system software analyzes the first few minutes of driving and determines your likely destination based on past history: “Work?” it asks to confirm. You answer the question in the affirmative and the system determines how much energy is needed for the day.
3. During your commute, the GPS enabled system finds and displays three open parking spaces near your office that are equipped with charging pods linked with your electric car’s subscription plan.
4. You pull into one of spaces and an automatic arm extends to plug into the car. The charging pod then communicates with the control center, and based on the your driving history,  picks the lowest rate time slot to recharge your vehicle.
5. Before your recharge is complete an unexpected cross town meeting comes up.  You climb into your car and enter the new destination, and the system software notifies you that there is insufficient charge to make the trip, return to the office, and commute back to your home.    To extend your range you order a battery swap.
6. The system software finds the most convenient battery-exchange location and books a bay. The old battery gets lowered onto a hydraulic plate, and the car moves forward on a car-wash-style track. In no more time than it takes to fill up your old tank with gasoline, a fully charged battery pack is in place, and you are on your way with another 100 miles of driving range.

If all this sounds like an episode from the Jetsons, think again.  Within 15 years, automobile transportation in Israel and Denmark will be carbon neutral, with electric cars powered by wind and solar energy, and the rest of the world may not be that far behind.  This all starts with a business model for the automobile that takes its cues from the mobile phone.

The idea, according to Shai Agassi, the software entrepreneur responsible for this new vision, is to sell electric car transportation on the model of the cellphone. Purchasers get subsidized hardware — the car — and pay a monthly fee for expected mileage, like minutes on a cellphone plan, eliminating concerns about the fluctuating price of gasoline.
As with cellphones the car will become secondary in importance to the network, “You’ll be able to get a nice, high-end car at a price roughly half that of the gasoline model today,”

Agassi’s vision is well on its way to reality.  His company, Project Better Place, has already attracted $200-million in venture capital, a commitment from Renault-Nissan to develop and build the software enabled electric cars, and commitments from Israel and Denmark to be the “beta sites” to prove the concept.  If any of this required some new technical breakthrough, I would find it all interesting in a wait-and-see kind of way.  However, what makes this real is that it all rests on a proven foundation of off-the-shelf technology.  The breakthrough lies in the vision – in the paradigm shifting business model.  The initial selling is done, what comes next is flushing out the partnerships, building he supplier base, creating the system software, and engineering the infrastructure.

The collection of park and charge spots across a country or city, together with software that controls the timing for charging the cars, creates a smart grid—synchronized and extending the country’s existing electric grid, matching excess electricity on the grid with the need to charge batteries flattening the demand curve in the process. When we put together the charge points, the batteries, exchange stations, and the software that controls timing and routing we get a new class of infrastructure—the Electric Recharge Grid (ERG). A new category of companies will emerge in the next few years which will install, operate and service customers across this grid—called Electric Recharge Grid Operators (ERGOs).—Project Better Place white paper distributed at EVS-23

The ifs and the maybes are past tense.  Renault-Nissan has promised to have the cars ready by 2011 and prototype testing has already begun in Israel.  These cars will not be glorified golf carts, but snappy full size sedans and small SUV’s.

The consumer’s contract for the EV must be the same – or better – than the consumer’s current contract for gas-powered cars.  We need to change the way consumers buy an EV so that it fits the current social contract we have with our cars, providing a normal car ownership experience even if the car has an electric drive train. -  Shai Agassi

Israel and Denmark provide ideal consumer markets to test the business model.  Each country enjoys low average miles driven per day that fall within the proposed battery pack range and a high likelihood that the electricity used for transportation will be renewable.  Denmark already generates enough excess wind power to supply all of it’s personal transportation needs and Israel has an obvious strategic need to be independent of Middle East oil.

With any infrastructure project of this magnitude, there will be unforeseen problems.  However, none are likely to be more than temporary engineering challenges.  The end result will be a new electric personal transportation paradigm that is equal to or better than the freedom and convenience provided by the internal combustion engine.  It is a business model that has the potential to greatly mitigate the impact of peak oil, positively impact climate change, and by providing a large storage sink in the form of batteries enable much greater use of  solar and wind power on utility grids.

It also extends the age of the automobile, along with the legacy of traffic jambs, suburban sprawl, and mind numbing commutes.  Better Place estimates the the cost to develop the necessary infrastructure in the U.S. is about $500 per car or about a year’s worth of oil imports.  Over $400 of that number is for investments in renewable energy to avoid the shell game of trading oil off against coal and natural gas, so the actual cost for the charging and battery swap infrastructure is only about $85 per car.  Since the U.S. electrical grid suffers from 30 years of under-investment and is a balkanized maze of 500 owners, the implementation of the Better Place model will mimic the cellphone industry and role out by metro region based on local politics and beliefs that favor an early adopter mindset.  It’s no surprise that the California cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose will combine to be the first U.S. adopters of the model.

A Utopian Future?

Once you have a system of electric cars – a system that knows where every car is and where they are going – it is not much of leap to imagine the end of traffic jams or even the end of actually having to operate the vehicle.  Phase II?

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