Powering leviathan with renewables

Elizabeth Rosenthal's article in the New York Times entitled Life After Oil and Gas gives some hope that with enough resolve and investment, we too here in the U.S. can significantly power our ship with renewables like much of Europe and Canada seems to be committed to. While it can be considered a positive development that the mainstream media is modestly discrediting the fossil fuel industry's message that renewables will never be able to power our civilization alone due to issues such as intermittency and the daunting task of growing the renewables infrastructure, there is a grain of nasty truth to the claim by the greasers.  In fact, what we have built over the past 200 years as industrial and post-industrial civilization is a massive cultural infrastructure that requires fossil fuels to survive.  It is a systemic feedback loop that requires growth in the financial system, which Chris Martenson and others so eloquently describe, and feeding the growth that pays the interest on the loans is fossil fuel energy. No other energy can power the system so efficiently and so cheaply, at least up to now. Oil is the most energy dense fuel and has historically had the highest Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) or Net Energy.

Yet articles like Rosenthal's never touch on key aspects of our energy predicament.  These sticking points are very uncomfortable to raise because we want to cling to the hope that technology and our great resolve and ingenuity will always save us from our looming threats.  This is wishful thinking and we would be better served thinking about and planning for a new system rather than trying to save a system that is soon to be referred to in the past tense. Just to whet your appetite in regard to the predicament and perhaps begin to convince you that a new way of thinking is necessary, let me touch on a few sticking points.

Maintaining the System and its Features

Maybe you're reading this on your iPhone, iPad, or Galaxy Note. Boy, how could you live without that device. It's damn near 45 percent of your brain already and soon your functional and emotional dependence on this device will render you a blubbering mass if you misplaced it. And boy what fun! What would you do waiting in the airport or in line at the DMV if you didn't have a smartphone? You might actually have to look someone in the eye and talk to them. Sorry, I know I'm scaring you.

Ok, well I wonder what percentage of our energy infrastructure supports these devices such as, of course, the electrical system largely based on coal and natural gas. This also powers the servers, routers, cell towers, hotspots, and other elements that allow the telecommunications system to function.  Add broadcast television, radio, and other communications and media and it's pretty impressive.  Now add all the energy necessary to mine and refine the metals, process the plastics, package, transport, stock, sell, buy, use, discard, and deal with as solid waste and you have one hell of a system to support with energy. Each one of these countless steps has an industry and each industry creates jobs and has an industry group lobbying for its welfare and very survival.  Imagine the lobbyists for each of those thousands of industries seeking to make appointments with your senator or congressman on a daily basis and now you should understand a bit more about the scale of the problem.

Now think about other industries that require perpetual growth to survive. Among the largest still are the homebuilding and commercial construction sector, the automotive and truck industries, and next comes large consumables like household electronics and furniture, office supplies, hardware, kitchenware, and so on. Each of these industries has a great many suppliers who make the component parts of each final product. Each requires energy inputs from building and shipping the product to powering the vehicles their employees use to commute to and from work.  Most use some feedstock for their industry which have to be mined, processed, shipped, and so on.  Each of these industries must keep growing, be consumed, or die. They will fight like hell to save their business as if it were their own child. This is how most people feed their family and house and clothe themselves. Now see how daunting the task of sustainability is?

The point here is that we nearly always analyze our potential energy solutions through the lens of the present system and culture. It is assumed that we wish to continue our present lifestyles and standards and we are seeking energy solutions that will allow us to shut off one valve (oil) and open another (e.g. wind) simultaneously and expect the carousel of progress to continue on its merry way. Please contact me if this is what you believe or hope and we should sit down and talk. My take is that we need to rethink a home and office full of electronic gadgets, homes in cul-de-sac subdivision nirvana, microspecialization in jobs, and a whole host of other aspects of civilization.

Feeding the Renewables

You knew the renewables needed to be fed, didn't you? You didn't think that you would just be able to stick them out there and forget them, did you?  Renewables are no panacea and each takes energy to develop and maintain. There are so many wonderful authors out there like Heinberg, Kunstler, Greer, McPherson, Orlov, Tverberg, Martenson, Hagens, etc. who have each detailed this as part of the analysis of the concept of Net Energy.  Kunstler's The Long Emergency provides a full chapter that discounts the viability of just about every renewable or alternative energy source as a realistic means to replace the oil-based economy, either alone or combined.  A modest example of what they, and by extension I, am talking about is as follows.  You're probably aware that wind energy requires....wind. Therefore, it doesn't work well as an energy source just anywhere. That's obvious. Even where is does work well, those parts of the world where the wind blows constantly or fairly regularly, it sometimes dies down and the turbine comes to a halt. At that time, you either can draw upon the bank of batteries that you've connected to the turbine, begin to draw from the grid while it's "offline", or do without electricity.  This intermittency isn't such a big deal if it is every now and then or perhaps every morning between 10 and 12. But it is a big deal if there are whole seasons of dead air, like in the inland Deep South in the summertime.

The investment in a large-scale wind turbine is fairly large since it takes a large amount of steel and other primary metals and alloys to build the big tower or shaft, the base, the generator, and the blades.  There are many other materials that make up the apparatus such as rare earth metals including neodymium which are rare (really!), expensive, and difficult to mine and process. It takes energy to take all of these steps to make a turbine including mine the metal ores, process them, forge parts, assemble the component parts, ship them to the site, final assembly, and ongoing maintenance and replacement of parts over time. The energy of choice to do all of these things is largely fossil-fuel based. Get the picture? What if that fossil fuel wasn't so available or really damn expensive? Do you think all of the steps necessary to create and site an industrial scale wind turbine could be handled by renewables? Nope. Worried yet? Did you know that a utility scale wind turbine can't even start up without a boost of electricity?  Read it here.

Ignoring Scale

The laissez faire experiment called neoliberal capitalism has over the past 200 years developed an immense economy and a massive population needed to serve it. Since endless growth underpins this economic structure, both the economy and population must continue to grow until something supplies the brakes. That something is likely energy (although the financial system and its reliance on trust as part of the game can cut it short too).  Cheap energy fuels economic growth but when the price of energy climbs beyond the point that it's just a small cost of doing business, when energy emerges as one of the biggest expenditures that households, businesses, and armies make, then things start to grind to a halt. Once this happens, the economy contracts, jobs are lost, the consumption that underpins the economy dries up, and the death spiral of peak energy fibrillates for a while before the whole experiment comes to an end. At that point it's a rather serious and sober game of musical chairs. There will be some who are left standing without a chair to sit in.  The metaphorical chair is a means to survive, to pay the bills, to eat and feed ones offspring, and so on. We are way too big, too developed, too populous, and the crash will be very painful and miserable. For many it will be the end.

At some point, and I believe we've passed it several years ago, tax receipts at all levels dry up and government is no longer able to provide a support system.  Of course, we can artificially extend it for a while or we can artificially cut it off immediately as both primary political parties have situated themselves policy-wise.  At some point, probably way too late, we're going to realize that the entire cultural superstructure is going to fail and we need to develop a locally-based alternative. This local alternative must be a much smaller scaled project and many groups and organizations are beginning to develop the component parts of this replacement culture. Movements like relocalization, transition, permaculture, local food, local economy, and local small-scale energy are all moving in the right direction, with little help and often with significant impediment from government and business. Yet far too few people are involved in this, too few people are talking about these things, and much of what will no longer be in a few years and what is the core of the problem, remains the sole measure of progress in our culture.  I hope this will change soon and rapidly but my expectation is that it will not. Prove me wrong.

London Evening Standard: Kensington digs in with ban on 'mega basements'

Link: Kensington digs in with ban on 'mega basements' - London - News - London Evening Standard

Editor: Amazing. The desire for magaspaces seems boundless.

NYTimes.com: In Search of Energy Miracles

In Search of Energy Miracles

By JUSTIN GILLIS

While scientists race to develop a technology, probably nuclear-based, that can slake our energy thirst without a huge environmental cost, it would be folly to wait that long to tackle carbon emissions.

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By KATHERINE S. NEWMAN

Struggling Americans are worse off in regions with regressive systems for raising money.

Go to article here: http://nyti.ms/16hcVk9

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