Tag Archives: Environment

Energy Connections: Shocking climate change vs. shocking solar power

One of the most important realizations of climate change research is exemplified in this graphic from Weather Uderground:

Caption from original: "Rate of temperature change today (red) and in the PETM (blue). Temperature rose steadily in the PETM due to the slow release of greenhouse gas (around 2 billion tons per year). Today, fossil fuel burning is leading to 30 billion tons of carbon released into the atmosphere every year, driving temperature up at an incredible rate.:
Caption from original: “Rate of temperature change today (red) and in the PETM (blue). Temperature rose steadily in the PETM due to the slow release of greenhouse gas (around 2 billion tons per year). Today, fossil fuel burning is leading to 30 billion tons of carbon released into the atmosphere every year, driving temperature up at an incredible rate.:

The point is this. The PETM (Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, millions of years ago) was a period of high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere which caused significant warming. It is an example of both relatively rapid and intense climate change caused by CO2 acting as a greenhouse gas. The red line is, of course, our current estimated rate of change given current rates of release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere. This gives scientists pause because the rate of change in a system is often a more significant factor than the state of a system after the change. A simple example is motion. Assume you are standing on a commuter train moving at 50 km/h. If the train suddenly sped up to 100 km/h it might knock you down and even cause injury. But if the train increased its speed by 1 or 2 km/h every minute or so, you would not even notice and eventually you would be cruising along happily at double the speed.

It isn’t just the high rate of change in climate that concerns us. It is also the fact that this rate of change has never been observed in nature; we have no record of such a rapid and large change happening in the paleo record. For many aspects of the Earth’s climate system, we simply don’t know what would happen under such rapid change because there is no point of reference, no precedent, for such a thing.

But there is another graph that also shows a very high rate of change, in a different system, that may allow us to feel a bit better. One way to avoid such an increase in release of fossil Carbon is to rapidly transition to non-Carbon sources of energy such as solar. One way for that to happen is if solar energy become economically more viable very quickly. Ideally, the rate of change in the economic viability of solar energy would be very fast, enough to knock you off your metaphorical feet. And, apparently, that is the case. From a study described here:

From the source: "Solar is now – in the right conditions – cheaper than oil and Asian LNG on an MMBTU basis. Yes, we are using utility- scale solar costs in developing markets with lots of sun. But that describes the growth markets for global energy today. For these markets solar is just cheap, clean, convenient, reliable energy. And since it is a technology, it will get even cheaper over time. Fossil fuel extraction costs will keep rising. "
From the source: “Solar is now – in the right conditions – cheaper than oil and Asian LNG on an MMBTU basis. Yes, we are using utility- scale solar costs in developing markets with lots of sun. But that describes the growth markets for global energy today. For these markets solar is just cheap, clean, convenient, reliable energy. And since it is a technology, it will get even cheaper over time. Fossil fuel extraction costs will keep rising. “

There are caveats, as noted. But solar power is, seemingly going to have its day in the sun sooner than later.

Peak Oil vs. Peak Chocolate Chip Cookies

Peak Oil is a controversial concept. Some people actually think that the production of oil in nature is continuous (which is a tiny bit, but hardly at all, true) so we can keep pumping oil out of the ground and it will just keep being produced by tiny microbes. But aside from that particular, and annoying, made-up controversy, “real” Peak Oil (or should I say Peak Real Oil) is still controversial. Peak Oil is defined as the moment when the maximum rate of petroleum extraction occurs, and thereafter production declines steadily, like on a bell curve. But that is, in my view, the wrong way to look at it. I would like to propose a different way, and to understand this approach we first must understand chocolate chip cookies. Which is not difficult.

If you make a batch of chocolate chip cookies, then everyone in the house starts to eat them, when does “Peak Chocolate Chip Cookies” occur? Obviously, this occurs the moment the chocolate chip cookies are pulled out of the oven. That is when the maximum number of cookies are available. Subsequent “extraction” rates are not a function of cookie availability, but rather, the social politics of the household, the number of hungry people, and other factors. The cookies will be “extracted” at any one of a number of rate functions. Often, the initial number of cookies extracted from the cooling rack, cookie plate, or cookie jar starts out very slow because they are too hot and have not achieved structural stability so they are hard to eat, especially for dunkers. But then the rate may go way up and then, because the cookies are being consumed rapidly, and/or people become sated, it may go down. Or, the baker of the cookies may bake them in secret and hide them in the cookie jar until after dinner, then reveal the existence of the cookies at which time peak extraction commences. Or there may be house rules as to how many cookies everyone can eat which will affect the rate of extraction. And so on. But no matter what, Peak Cookie happened the moment the cookies were pulled, baked, from the oven. (We will leave the consumption of cookie dough prior to baking for discussion at another time.) The point is, it is easy to see that “Peak Cookie” happens at the moment baking ends, and the variation in extraction rate thereafter is a function of many factors that will vary from household to household and from time to time. And all those factors are important events or processes. Peak Cookie, as a concept, is uninformative of the social dynamics, demographics, and collective individual proclivities of the household, which really are the things that matter.

This analogy reveals the fact that the “peak” (measured as production) is only part of a function of how much substance (cookies, oil) there is, and is, until the amount of substance is just about to run out, more a function of other things. For oil, this includes knowledge (of oil deposits), technology (to extract harder to get at oil), geopolitics (some oil is in countries that are currently in a snit, or that we don’t talk to), and of course, economics.

And, really, what I want to know about, and what you want to know about, is our own personal peak oil, or more manageably, our encompassing society’s peak oil. For instance, if a large deposit of oil is unavailable because we say so (for conservation reasons unrelated to petroleum) or political reasons (because it is buried beneath an enemy’s territory) then we can’t count that oil in our calculations of availability, and thus, extraction. Oil that is in our own country and not under a national park, on the other hand, is different.

In this way, perhaps a better way to think about Peak Oil is to look at the historical complexity of the process of bringing this fossil (oil is a fossil) to a place and refine it to a form that we can burn in our homes, cars or factories. Looked at it this way, from the perspective of the United States, we have had several “Peak Oil” moments.

Not counting whale oil, we experienced our first Peak Oil moment when the vast oil fields in Texas and Oklahoma and a few other places started to dry up. When that happened we started to buy more oil from countries that we really had very little respect or love for. Today, we get a fair amount of oil from a region of the world where we occasionally have to go to war to keep that oil supply open. And, we have to look the other way when the governments of those countries continue with highly objectionable policies. Imagine having a two grocery stores near your house. One of them is run by a really nice family, pillars of the community, your kids go to school with their kids, everything is fine. The other is run by a paroled sex offender who is also suspected of being a mass murderer. Plus he is a jerk. At first you always get your groceries at the store run by the nice family. But then they retire and move to Florida and you are now forced to do business with the child molesting, mass murdering jerk, because you really have no other option. That is a moment when the cost of grocery shopping, no matter what the cost of the actual groceries, becomes very high. That is a kind of peak groceries. It has little to do with the economics of the groceries. And yes, “Peak Oil” as traditionally defined is usually embedded in an economic model. This is why my suggestion of what “Peak Oil” means is different: When you (metaphorically) sell your soul to continue to obtain a resource, you’ve reached a moment in time that is very important.

The initiation of serious off shore drilling is another moment in the extraction of oil. Off shore drilling is expensive and dangerous at many levels. In the United States we shifted towards off shore drilling as our on-land deposits were worn out, and because it is somewhat cheaper (sometimes) to take nearby offshore oil than foreign near-the-surface on-land oil, and for geopolitical reasons. Those costs may not always be expressed in the “spot” prices of oil in dollars per barrel. But they are real costs.

Fracking is something that has been done for years. It is a nice trick to extract more from a deposit that has started to become tenacious. The technique is used for water, liquid petroleum, and gas. It is messy and expensive and usually results in a flow of product that soon diminishes, so whatever investment was made in the process initially does not have long term benefit. When you start fracking, that means you’ve reached one of those peaks. You are doing something you really didn’t want to do because availability or cost of the same product through other means is diminished.

The Canadian Oil Sands and other tar sands type oil has been known of for years, but it has been very little exploited. It is dirty, dangerous, expensive, and often inconveniently located. But we have been using more and more of this undesirable resource, and we are talking about using a LOT more of it in the near future. The costs of using this type of resource, aside from the continued pouring of fossil carbon (as carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere, are huge. But we are doing it. Another peak.

The alternative way of thinking about Peak Oil proposed here has the benefit of being more realistic and useful because it identifies not one peak but rather multiple peaks. Also, and this is important, one aspect of this definition of Peak Oil that is new is not to measure price or some overall measure of availability which might exclude significant costs (known as “external costs”), but rather, to identify the things we really do to continue to extract the resource. Over time we are doing more and more difficult and costly things, with many of these costs going well beyond price of the product. Such extra costs include deadly warfare and allowing governments and media to be taken over by the petroleum industry with all sorts of negative side effects that go well beyond the extraction, refining, and shipping of petroleum products.

Every major shift in strategy of access to ancient petroleum can be interrogated as a possible “Peak Oil” moment.

Yes, yes, I fully understand that I’ve strayed very far away from the usual definition of Peak Oil. But in so doing, I think I’ve pointed out a more important reality inherent in the business of extracting a non-renewable resource from the earth. A simple Peak Oil curve is the subject of a great deal of argument and speculation. The problem is, this argument and speculation tends to miss the point. We are like an addict with easy access to some drug that is highly addictive, gets you really high, is not too expensive, and can be easily obtained. Then the drug source runs dry so we seek out shadier sources and start to get in trouble. Then those sources start to dry up so we turn to different drugs with more severe health effects. But that starts to become less available, and paying for it gets more difficult so, eventually, we start rooting around under the sink for anything that looks consumable and might serve to get us high or at least, knock us unconscious. Eventually, we hit the drain cleaner. That kills us. There was not a smooth curve of availability of opium that went smoothly up and down. Rather, there was a series of shifts from a not so bad thing to a worse thing to an even worse thing to the horrid end and they find our body under the back porch where we were rooting through the recycling looking for spent cans of shaving cream.

Peak Oil is a gloss. The real story is a tragedy with several acts.


Peak Oil graph from Wikipedia

Nonferrous Mineral Mining in Minnesota: An Issue of Science Policy

This is mainly about copper mining in a part of Minnesota that has previously seen extensive iron mining. Most mineral rights across Minnesota are owned by the state, which then may lease rights to miners. Recently, 31 nonferrous mineral leases were approved by the Minnesota Executive Council, which consists of Governor Dayton, Secretary of State Ritchie, State Auditor Otto, Attorney General Swanson, and Lt. Governor Prettner-Solon. It was a four to one vote with Otto voting no.

The reason that Rebecca Otto voted no is that she felt the science based policy justifying these leases was not fully developed, and that there are potential significant long-term effect that had not bee fully accounted for. Matt Ehling wrote a piece for the Star Tribute, reposted on Otto’s state web site, which stated in part:

… During the comment period before to the vote, industry representatives framed the approval of the leases as just one part of a longer process. Lieutenant Governor Prettner-Solon offered similar sentiments, and stated that rigorous environmental oversight – along with public comment – would follow in the event that major exploration or mining project proposals were submitted.

Upon inquiry from Governor Dayton, Department of Natural Resource (DNR) Commissioner Tom Landwehr stated that such project proposals would constitute public information, but would generally not be made available to the public short of a Data Practices Act request. Governor Dayton then directed Commissioner Landwehr to affirmatively make any lease-related proposals available to the public.

The council’s lone “no” vote, State Auditor Rebecca Otto, stated that she had had “a revelation” early the morning of the meeting that informed her vote. “We have not done copper sulfide mining in this state yet,” said Otto. She expressed concerns about potential fiscal burdens associated with copper sulfide mining that might be placed on future generations. Secretary of State Ritchie expressed concerns about the process generally.

And in a Minnesota Public Radio interview with Cathy Wurzer, Otto explained:

My concern really boils down to the financial assurance that we’re going to require. Really what that is is it’s a damage deposit we’re going to require from the mining companies so that if something goes wrong, that they are on the hook for the cleanup costs.

They’re estimating 500 years of water treatment after operation at the PolyMet’s mine. My concern, then, is how do we calculate the cost for that to make sure we get an adequate damage deposit. Five hundred years.

That’s an awfully long time, so do we really know how to calculate these numbers right so that taxpayers aren’t left with the cleanup costs after these mines close? And do we know what form of financial assurances to get? These companies quite often have gone bankrupt, and are taxpayers going to be protected if there’s a bankruptcy? Severe weather events.

We’ve had more of those recently. Are we going to factor in the cost potentially of a severe weather event and what that could do?

So it’s really about being proactive and preventative and making sure these companies have real skin in the game in their financial assurances that they must provide so that they’re incented to get this right and don’t damage our water quality and leave cleanup costs to the taxpayers.

Mining equals jobs and is good for the economy. But mining is one of the most environmentally destructive activities we undertake as a species, especially in terms of local effects. Also, mining is one of those industries that in the past has often been carried out, it seems, without proper attention to “external” costs, meaning the costs not paid by the mining companies and thus not on the hypothetical spreadsheet of inputs and outputs. In that interview, Otto was asked, “Those who support copper-nickel mining say we have more to gain financially than to lose with more jobs, tax revenue. As someone who has argued for protecting taxpayers, does that argument hold water for you?: Her reply:

It could. There could be gains. There could be loss. I’ve looked at U.S. Government Accountability reports kind of looking at the track record of this type of mining around the country, and quite often the taxpayers are left on the hook.

The devil is in the details on this. Minnesota does not have experience with this type of mining, we have not calculated these numbers before. I don’t know that even with the mining we’ve got now we’ve gotten the financial assurances right, nor the right forms.

As a state there are things we don’t know all the time and we’ve made mistakes. In this day in age with some of the pressures we have with the economy and people retiring, we must get this right and spend the time. Otherwise what we could end up doing is privatizing the gain and socializing the pain.

What Otto is looking for is not a way to stop mining, but rather, a way to address the ultimate, true costs of the operation especially as they would be incurred by taxpayers statewide (that is what the State Auditor does!). Meanwhile, industry is naturally looking for ways to externalize costs and thus maximize profits. The problem is that we don’t know enough about the external costs, and it may be the case that the development of this economic activity is proceeding as though we do. This is an excellent example of well researched and developed science-based policy being very much needed, and at least one science-oriented elected official trying to see to it that this happens.

For Minnesotans, expect nonferrous mining to be an issue in several upcoming races. I hope that this does not become a slug-match between an unadulterated “pro-mining” stance and an unadulterated “anti-mining” stance because, surely, the science policy will be lost in such a fray. Let’s try to do this right, which means doing it intelligently.

The 4-methylcyclohexane methanol spill in West Virginia (Coal cleaning chemical)

4-methylcyclohexane methanol is a chemical used to clean coal before it is burned. As you know a region of southern West Virginia where upwards of 100,000 people live has been affected by a spill of this chemical; the water supply in this area has been made unavailable for human use. A 48,000 gallon storage tank for 4-methylcyclohexane methanol has been leaking the chemical into the Elk River, which is part of the municipal water supply in the area.

Apparently there isn’t a lot known about this particular chemical. It’s chemical name is scary looking, and resembles the names of other better known chemicals that are really toxic. But it is also a form of alcohol. How bad can that be?

I wonder if the various chemistry experts out there could comment on this chemical.

Given the nature of the molecule, is it likely to be toxic? To bio-accumulate? To evaporate over time, or not? Even though there is apparently no way to clean the water of this chemical in place would that be something that could be easily implemented?

Is this region of West Virginia now uninhabitable for the next few decades or is this chemical going to degrade and/or disperse to a harmless level in a few weeks?

Any ideas?

Sources of information:

PubChem

Wikipedia

Debora Blum

Gazette-Mail

Salon: Little is known

America’s Dangerous Pipelines

I think there is a belief that pipelines are safer than trucks,trains, or boats for shipping liquid hydrocarbon fuels. That may actually be true. I don’t know what would happen if we stopped all the pipelines and switched to vehicles. But the idea that pipelines are safe is absurd and it is time people started to realize this.

The Center for Biological Diversity has posted an interesting analysis by Richard Stover, which we can see in the form of a video.

This time-lapse video shows pipeline incidents from 1986 to 2013, relying on publicly available data from the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. Only incidents classified as “significant” by the agency are shown in the video. “Significant” incidents include those in which someone was hospitalized or killed, damages amounted to more than $50,000, more than 5 barrels of highly volatile substances or 50 barrels of other liquid were released, or where the liquid exploded or burned.

Most of what is spilled is oil, but there is also liquified natural gas, gasoline, diesel, propane, LP, jet fuel and other substances. The original post has a lot of other information, you should check it out.

Hat Tip: Paul Douglas.

The Problem With The Global Food Supply: New Research

Emily S Cassidy, Paul C West, James S Gerber and Jonathan A Foley, from the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment, have produced a very important study for IOP Science Environmental Research Letters. (This is OpenAccess so you can access it openly!) You know Emily as one of the participants in our CONvergence panel on food last July. The research Emily and her colleagues do is some of the most important work being done right now, because it is about the food supply.

ResearchBlogging.orgThe bottom line is this: When we look at our food supply, we find that a large amount of what is grown in agricultural fields does not make it into the stomachs of people. There is a lot of waste, there are problems with delivery and distribution, and so on. But what this study looks at is the percentage of potential calories that go to non-food final products, or do get into our diets but do so in a way that significantly reduces the efficiency of the system. There has been a huge increase (percentage wise) in how much field crop is used for biofuels instead of food, but the total amount now is still only 4%. Also, one could argue that this is good use of field crops if the production of biofuels reduces carbon emissions (which is only partly the case). More importantly, a huge amount of the corn and other crops (but mainly corn) that is grown is used as animal feed, and only about 12% of that, in terms of calories, ends up in the human diet. The reduction is because as we move up trophic levels, energy is taken out of the flow.

This graphic from Cassidy et al shows the distribution of calories across food and non-food destinations:

Figure 2. Calorie delivery and losses from major crops. Calories delivered are shown in green (this includes plant and animal calories) and calories that are lost to meat and dairy conversion as well as biofuels and other uses are shown in red.
Figure 2. Calorie delivery and losses from major crops. Calories delivered are shown in green (this includes plant and animal calories) and calories that are lost to meat and dairy conversion as well as biofuels and other uses are shown in red.

The graphic at the top of the post is also from the paper, and has this caption: “Figure 1. Calorie delivery fraction per hectare. The proportions of produced calories that are delivered as food are shown.” The thing to note here is the unevenness across the globe in efficiency of calorie production-to-plate. There seems to be a latitude effect, and I wonder if that has anything to do with the environment and seasonality. But the largest contributor to this variation in efficiency is probably simply the amount of meat in regional diets. As Emily points out in the video that accompanies the paper, even small changes in dietary practices can result in large changes in ultimate agricultural productivity.

We, as a species, need to eat less meat. In particular, certain groups of people, like Americans, need to eat less meat. So let’s do that: Eat less meat!

As an aside, Emily is a friend and colleague and I’ve been really impressed with her work and have been very excited to see these important results coming out. Go Emily! (And co-authors, of course.)


Cassidy, Emily, West, Paul, Gerber, James, & Foley, Jonathan (2013). Redefining agricultural yields: from tonnes to people nourished per hectare IOP Science, 8 (2) DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034015

Do Neonicotinoid Pesticides Contributed to the Complex Thing We Call Bee Colony Collapse?

ResearchBlogging.orgA commonly used insecticide, and possibly an increasingly widely used form of that pesticide, could be a causal factor in bee colony collapse. It is not 100% certain that this pesticide’s effects can be counted as one of the causes this problem, but there is a very good chance that neonicotinoids can cause a drop in hive population, and thus, should be examined to see if there is a relationship in some cases. From the paper’s abstract:

Nonlethal exposure of honey bees to thiamethoxam (neonicotinoid systemic pesticide) causes high mortality due to homing failure at levels that could put a colony at risk of collapse. Simulated exposure events on free-ranging foragers labeled with an RFID tag suggest that homing is impaired by thiamethoxam intoxication. These experiments offer new insights into the consequences of common neonicotinoid pesticides used worldwide.

Continue reading Do Neonicotinoid Pesticides Contributed to the Complex Thing We Call Bee Colony Collapse?

What Happens to Habitats with Global Warming?

ResearchBlogging.orgAs global warming progresses, habitats change in their suitability for various life forms. It may be that moose will not be able to live in Minnesota in the future; Of the two resident moose populations, the one that lives in the area more affected by global warming has pretty much died out probably due indirectly to the effects of increased temperature. There are regions of the rockies where entire forests are dead because of temperature changes. And so on.

Continue reading What Happens to Habitats with Global Warming?

Public perceptions of energy consumption and savings

ResearchBlogging.orgThere are two quick and fairly easy approaches to reducing US emissions of CO2 by several percent. These reduction would be at the household level, possibly decreasing the household cost of energy by between 20 and 30 percent (or more, depending on the household) and decreasing national total CO2 emissions by around 10% or so.

But these approaches are nearly impossible to implement. Why? Because people are ignorant and selfish.
Continue reading Public perceptions of energy consumption and savings

The Plank’s Constant

… continued …

In the US, political parties have what is called a “platform” which is a list of assertions … “we want this” and “we want that” sort of assertions. The “platform” is made up, quaintly, of “planks” with each plank being about one issue. Like for my local Democratic Farm Labor party unit, one of our Planks is to get the damn road fixed over at Devil’s Triangle, a particularly bad intersection down on Route 169. That’s a local plank, but if we go to a party event, and a gubernatorial candidate is answering questions, she or he is expected to know what the heck is being talked about if someone brings up “Devil’s Triangle.”

Continue reading The Plank’s Constant

Pete Seeger joins the Nature Conservation Club (NCC)

… continued

The flames were so hot that we could feel it on our faces over 300 feet away as we stood near the corner of Delaware and Whitehall avenues. At first we gawked at the burning factory from about 100 feet away, but a large explosion caused us all to turn and run. But not too far. While watching from some 200 feet away, the police came by and pushed us back to the 300 foot mark just before several explosions in a row came along. The stuff that came down on us out of the sky was cooled enough to not burn, and some of the bits were recognizable as small fragments of colored billiard balls.

Continue reading Pete Seeger joins the Nature Conservation Club (NCC)