Snippets from the Interwebs 3

China is installing the world's largest system (click link for Technology Review article) for generating electricity by collecting methane gas emitted by fermenting cow manure. Anaerobic digestion systems are very highly favoured in future to digest not only manure, which is what everyone is familiar with but also green and food waste – even special energy crops. It’s true that capturing methane and burning it produces CO2 but the carbon is from the planet’s “currrent account”, not the fossil fuel “deposit account” that contributes to altering the climate. Methane is also 23 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2 so it makes sense to collect and burn it anyway, particularly if by doing so, the obtained energy substitutes for and displaces the use of fossil fuel carbon.
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If all the toilet roll inner tubes produced every year in the United States were placed end to end they would stretch for a million miles, or 4 times further than the Moon
Scott paper have announced a new “tube free” toilet roll – click link to see original story
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Ocean acidification
This article from the geological society (yes, the original British, established in 1807, one) has more on ocean acidification. Scientists, from the University of Plymouth and the University of Santa Catarina, Brazil have studied the effect, on foraminifera (a species of plankton with a calcium carbonate shell) of increased levels of CO2 in the ocean. They state that at a mean pH of 7.8, the pH level predicted for the end of the century, calcified organisms begin to disappear, and non-calcifying ones take over. The current level is about 8.07. The pre-industrial level was about 8.18, thus ocean acidification is actually a reduction in alkalinity. Sea water des not need to actually become acidic before very serious effects happen.
Unless we curb CO2 emissions (forget climate change for the time being) we risk mass extinctions, degrading coastal waters and encouraging outbreaks of toxic jellyfish and algae. Similar lowering of ocean pH levels were closely associated with massive extinctions in the past.  Plankton are right at the bottom of the ocean food chain and they also sequester colossal quantities of CO2 in their shells, not to mention replenishing the oxygen supply of the atmoshere. We shouldn’t do anything to change them - but we sure as h*ll are doing.
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Peak Everything
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development reported, back at the end of last year, that an expert group had been set up by the European Commission  to screen a list of forty-nine "potentially critical" raw materials whose availability to industry could come under threat as global competition for natural resources intensifies. Of particular worry to Europeans are rare earths, collections of metals and elements found in a wide range of gadgets and consumer goods, including batteries used in electric cars. The Chinese are developing a stranglehold on supplies of many of the most important ones. Recycling will never mean as much as it will do when we can’t get enough stuff to make our stuff.
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Blade Runner meets Babylon

Text and picture adapted from from the New York Times 29/10/2010 (click picture for link to original story)
One family are going to live in this 27 story house in Mumbai. All five of them.
The tower, known as Antilia, is the new home of India’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, whose $27 billion fortune also ranks him among the richest people in the world. And even here in the country’s financial capital, where residents bear daily witness to the stark extremes of Indian wealth and poverty, Mr. Ambani’s building is so spectacularly over the top that the city’s already elastic boundaries of excess and disparity are being stretched to new dimensions.
Here’s the understatement of the year:
“A gawking city has greeted the new tower with a mixture of moralizing and astonishment, envy and condemnation, all sprinkled with Freudian analysis of the most basic question: Why did he do it?
“We are all sort of perplexed,” said Alyque Padamsee, a long-time advertising executive and actor in the city. “I think people see it as a bit show-offy.”
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One way to do “food security”
Land grabbing… or at least buying up land.  South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, India, Saudi Arabia, China, Qatar, Kuwait. are buying up large areas in Africa to supply themselves with food and other agricultural products. Also leading the rush are international agribusinesses, investment banks, hedge funds, commodity traders, sovereign wealth funds as well as UK pension funds, foundations and individuals attracted by some of the world's cheapest land.  Here’s a link to an Observer investigation of this trend.
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LONDON, Sept 28 (Reuters) - Scotland should produce enough renewable electricity to meet all its power demand by 2025, First Minister Alex Salmond said. "I'm confident that by 2025 we will produce at least 100 percent of our electricity needs from renewables alone, and together with other sources it will enable us to become a net exporter of clean, green energy”

That was then. What now?

A five minute video from the Post Carbon Institute.  Just about everything we have become used to over the last 300 years is dependent upon cheap, easily available, energy. What do we do now that “old road is rapidly aging” (Bob Dylan)?

In case people are thinking I’ve become lazy(ier) by just posting other peoples’ vidoes etc, rest assured I have loads of “draft” posts that just need a bit of polishing before they get posted. If other people can say stuff better, or in a different form, than I would, I’ll post them as well. The more the merrier.

 

 

 

 

Wishful thinking stymied by reality

The peaking of available oil supply has already happened a couple of years ago or will happen by 2013 or 2020 depending on who you listen to. Few credible sources deny its actual reality, they just bicker about the timing. It will mean the end of the last 300 years of unending economic expansion – the end of conventional economic wisdoms and the end of the credibility of those who continue to promote them. Are you listening, Deputy Chief Minister Ozouf?

Here’s a video featuring someone smart, competent and famous who realises the threats. As a businessman, he knows that forewarned is forearmed. Conventionally, business foreknowledge can enable great fortune. Maybe not in this case. Knowledge of what is likely to happen may bestow certain protection against the annihilation that will engulf those who are unprepared for it because they are not expecting it.

Richard Branson, Chairman of the Virgin Group, speaking at the launch of the 2nd Report by the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security

This next 28 minute video comes from Peak Moment TV. I just wish I had more time to watch more of their programmes.
Chris Martenson is interviewed about the fatal flaws in the foundations of modern industrial civilisation that will end “unending growth”. He speaks about the current financial crisis, peak oil, peak everything and touches on how few of the mainstream experts seem to realise (or dare say in public) the enormity of what we are facing.

"The next twenty years will be totally unlike the last twenty... We’ll face the greatest economic  physical challenges ever seen by our country, if not humanity.”

So opens Chris’ much-viewed online Crash Course (highly recommended insights into the irrationalities insanities and dangers with conventional economic thinking – NP) illuminating the relationship between economy, energy and the environment. Starting with the power of exponential growth, he tidily sums up our economic problems: Too Much Debt. Chris discusses the implications if we continue the status quo, and ways to prepare. He believes that if we manage the transition to a post fossil fuel, post growth era elegantly we can actually improve things.

 

Peak Moment TV is an online television series featuring people creating resilient communities for a more sustainable, lower-energy future. Programs range from permaculture farms to electric bikes, ecovillages to car-sharing, emergency preparedness to careers for the coming times. As of May 2010, over 170 half-hour programs are available online.

Why further conventional economic growth has become a very bad idea

There are quite a few "knowledgeable" pundits who are speculating that we might be heading for a double dip recession - which is where you have a recession then see "green shoots" for a bit but then the recession carries on down. A bit like a "dead cat bounce" in an individual share on the stock market.
We keep hearing about the "green shoots" from our economic advisers, both here and on the UK mainland, and those who trust in them, as they continue to believe, like Annie, that "the sun'll come out tomorra - bet your bottom dollar". Rose tinted spectacles.
The likes of Treasury Minister Ozouf and Economic Development Minister Maclean are wedded to the hope that a resumption in economic growth will solve all ills and they think that it's just a matter of the Island/World bunkering down until the recession ends. However, more significant figures are whispering the "D" word - Depression.

We've got to this point because of centuries of Ponzi scheme-like money systems and vast economic growth, fuelled by relatively easily available and cheap fossil fuels combined with a global population level, and average international "standard of living", that meant that the available resources of Planet Earth appeared ample (ish) and inexhaustible.
We are now at the point where we can say that Peak Everything will dampen the growth party - maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of our lives (yes, it’s from Casablanca).

The United Nation's Environment Programme (GEO4) identified a few years ago that we we are living at least 25% beyond what the Earth can sustainably supply. The current recession/incipient depression will slow the assault on our planetary life support systems down a bit but the end result will be the same.

Indefinite unending conventional growth in a finite world is not possible. That is not an opinion or an assertion – it’s a statement of a law of the Universe. Ye cannae change the laws of physics, Jim! He’s featured on this blog before but step forward one more time the 9 billion tonne hamster.


Global population is only forecast to stabilise at 9-10 billion using the assumption that a developed world standard-of-living spreads to the "undeveloped" world, as a higher standard of living (=impact on resources) is seen as part of the reason why population growth falls in developed nations. Clearly the "necessary" growth in the undeveloped world that is "needed" to stabilise global population will send us careering wildly even further into ecological overshoot mode.

If we don’t stabilise population, everything must go to hell in a handbasket. What is presented as the way to stabilise population means that, if we do it, we will end up also going to hell in a handbasket.

Tricky, huh?

Further conventional economic growth would be "uneconomic growth" where the bad consequences outweigh any benefits. In short, we cannot afford conventional economic growth any more. We have come to the end of that particular road. Unfortunately, conventional economics says that we need growth to resume to get us out of this current colossal financial mess, let alone the staggering levels of international debt that depend on a huge expansion of the global economy to ever be paid back. If the reader didn’t know what unsustainable meant before, they ought to by now!
Back to the current recession/depression. Here's a couple of sites to make Geoff Cook's (Jersey Finance’s Chief Executive) toes curl. The first - The Energy Report - is relatively optimistic (although you'd never know it until you read the second, much longer, one...). Brace yourselves for The Automatic Earth (which references the first article). It takes a while to get going, but stick with it.

By the way, sustainable or ecological economics shows us a way out of the dilemmas but, until the powers that be acknowledge the grave problems the world faces honestly and in public, nothing is likely to be done. While the general population still have some faith in unbearably stupid irresponsible people, like our glorious leaders and their advisers, the pressure for real sustainable change will never build up. Our leaders will continue to prescribe more of what they think worked in the past. It won’t help. People need to get the rocks out of their heads. Bob Dylan said "Don't follow leaders". Until our leaders start speaking reality, I think we should agree with him.

“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.” Well, that was then…

I almost titled this post "Peak Everything" but that will be for another day. Anyone who follows environmental matters will, by now, be sick of hearing about climate change - although it's going to have a huge impact on our future. If we voluntarily take action to avoid the worst by transitioning to a non-fossil fuelled sustainable economy A.S.A.P., then a whole lot of the ways we do things now will have to change, or be radically modified. If we don't take any action, or if we don't take enough action, then a whole lot of the ways we do things now will change, whether we like it or not. It won't be voluntary or under our control - we will be forced.

Food security in the future, although less publicised, is another huge problem that we are going to have to contend with. Conventional agriculture cannot give us the security of supply that the 6.7 billion (so far) inhabitants of Earth need. The only way we are feeding that many people is because of artificial fertiliser, which is made - in an energy intensive process – from fossil fuels. Literally, feeding the current world depends on us "eating" oil. If we take no voluntary action now to head off the forecast problems, they will likely overwhelm us as Nature forces changes on our civilisation that will be much worse than any possible effects of the prudent action we should have taken.

Which brings me to the title of this post. Perhaps even bigger than the food security problem is "peak water" which refers to the even less publicised problems ahead with fresh water. Both quality and quantity. Water is even more vital to life than food.

Below is, first, a trailer to “Flow” Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century - The World Water Crisis. After that, in bite-size 10 minute chunks, is the documentary itself. Interviews with scientists and activists intelligently reveal the rapidly building crisis, at both the global and human scale, and the film introduces many of the governmental and corporate culprits behind the water grab, while begging the question "CAN ANYONE REALLY OWN WATER?"

Here is a link to the website of the film.

As this is such a huge topic to cover, the film obviously has to simplify and skate over some aspects but that shouldn’t be a criticism – just concentrate on the overall feel of the narrative and the massive relevance to everyone’s future.