Desalinering, fattigdom og hvete

... hva koster desalinering nå for tiden? Vi holder oss til Australia i første omgang. I følge New York Times ligger kostnaden der et sted mellom 1 og 2 dollar per kubikkmeter:

Mr. Young of the Water Services Association said desalination in Australia costs $1.75 to $2 per cubic meter, including the costs of construction, clean energy and production. The prices are probably the world’s highest, said Mr. Pankratz of the International Desalination Association, adding that desalination was cheaper in countries with less strict environmental standards. He said the cost at a typical new plant in the world today would be about $1 per cubic meter.

(Arid Australia Sips Seawater, but at a Cost; NYT, juli 2010)

Dette må vel tolkes dithen at kostnaden for bygging og drift med kullkraft-strøm (Australias hovedkilde) og uten å gjøre noe særlig for å beskytte miljøet mot det konsentrerte saltvannet som er et biprodukt er ca 1 dollar, mens å produsere med fornybar energi og ansvarlig håndtering av avfall opp mot dobler prisen.

Fra CSIRO (den australske offentlige vitenskapsorganisasjonen) finner vi Desalination in Australia (Hoang et al, februar 2009, PDF!). Der står det mye interessant, blant annet at

The product water cost per kL is mostly in the range of less than $1.25 for potable water and $1.25-$2.00 for industrial water. The higher cost for industrial water can probably be attributed to the lower plant capacity and lack of economy of scale. In addition, the cost of supply to industrial customers is generally higher as a result of the shorter capital recovery period for industrial projects compared with municipal projects.

(s. 5)

The survey data show that the average energy consumption is 3-3.7 kWh/kL for sea water RO, 0.7-1 kWh/kL for brackish water and 1.2 kWh/kL for industrial effluent.

(s. 9)

og så har de denne fine tabellen over internasjonale kostnader:

(Hva er det israelerne gjør? Are they just that good?)

Om det er US eller Aus dollar spiller liten rolle for vårt formål, kursene er iflg Norges Bank nå hhv ca 5,5 og 5,8 kroner, vi runder med god samvittighet opp til 6; og med et stadion-estimat på 1$ per kubikkmeter/kiloLiter ender vi opp med 6 tidels øre pr liter for avsalting.

Så for australiere, som er rike i global sammenheng, er kostnaden nærmest neglisjerbar: 200 liter per pers per dag koster ikke mer enn 1 krone og 20 øre (per person og dag).

Det ser nokså annerledes ut for verdens fattige. I følge o store Wikipedia, så

The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than US $1.25 (PPP) per day, and moderate poverty as less than $2 a day (but note that a person or family with access to subsistence resources, e.g. subsistence farmers, may have a low cash income without a correspondingly low standard of living - they are not living "on" their cash income but using it as a top up). It estimates that "in 2001, 1.1 billion people had consumption levels below $1 a day and 2.7 billion lived on less than $2 a day."

(Jeg må jo si at jeg stiller spørsmålstegn ved å gjøre et sånt estimat uten å prøve å sette en pengeverdi på utbyttet fra subsistence farming, men men)

Og fra FAO:

A good yield of wheat under irrigation is 4 to 6 ton/ha (12 to 15 percent moisture). The water utilization efficiency for harvested yield (Ey) for grain is about 0.8 to 1.0 kg/m³.

(Wheat - versjon 2002)

og også

Under irrigation a good commercial grain yield is 6 to 9 ton/ha (10 to 13 percent moisture). The water utilization efficiency for harvested yield (Ey) for grain varies then between 0.8 and 1.6 kg/m³.

(Crop Water Information: Wheat)

Ser ut til å være to forskjellige versjoner av samme artikkel; den første er eksplisitt Last update: 16 October 2002, mens den andre sier bare "Copyright FAO 2011" -- men det er bare en arv fra nettside-templaten, og sier ingenting om når artikkelen ble skrevet. Men den siste er nok nyere. Fra 1,0 til 1,6 kg/kl maks "vannavkastning" er ganske enormt! Og det er bevegelsen fra 4-6 til 6-9 tonn/ha også. Men så er formuleringen i den første "a good yield of wheat", mens den andre er "a good commercial grain yield" (min utheving), så det er mulig at det er en epler-og-appelsiner -- sammenligning her: at den første snakker om hva som er vanlig på verdensbasis, den andre snakker om hva de største industridyrkerne oppnår. All den tid FAO ikke oppgir noen middel- eller medianverdi eller sier noe mer kan vi bare gjette.

Og siden vi først er i gang med stadionestimater så stadionestimerer vi at det går med en kubikkmeter vann til ett kilo hvete.

Dersom alt dette vannet skulle bringes til veie ved desalinering -- si hvis vi ville dyrke hvete i ørkenen i Australia (ja det høres perverst ut, men jeg har i vinter og vår kunnet kjøpe billige poteter fra Saudi Arabia(!) i Norge (!!!)) --
så ville desalineringskostnaden utgjøre ca 6 kr/kg.

Dette er direkte sammenlignbart med prisen for en kilo hvetemel, en detail, i Norge i dag.

Hvis vi antar at produksjonskostnaden er ca. en fjerdedel av butikkprisen, så innebærer det en kostnadsøkning på 300% eller deromkring.

Og de som lever på 2 dollar dagen som ikke er sjølvergingsbønder vil være ettertrykkelig priset ut av markedet.

Michael Lardelli

... er i utgangspunktet australsk genetiker. Men han er også en Peak Oiler (og medforfatter av Peak of the Oil Age (pdf!) -- intervju med ham i den anledning på Scitizen), som har skrevet en rekke strålende essays om problemene vi står ovenfor, publisert på det australske nettstedet On Line Opinion.

Jeg er faktisk litt sjalu. Han skriver NØYAKTIG det jeg mener, men klarere og med mer tyngde enn jeg kan... Les:

Peak oil means peak food as well

Common myths of the population debate

The oil-economy connection

Samma gamle leksa (nesten)

Serving Two Masters(Forbes)

Call it the Sophie's Choice of globalization: make middle-class consumers out of the global poor and they create new business, but they deplete resources and damage the environment. Move to conserve resources and protect the planet, and you condemn hundreds of millions of people to life as second-class citizens.

But it doesn't have to be that way, says C.K. Prahalad, a professor of corporate strategy at the University of Michigan's business school. He's the creator of something like a Grand Unification Theory of Globalization: that environmentalism, development and profitmaking are not only compatible but also interdependent.

Som en kan forvente av et finansmagasin, artikkelen handler om hvordan man kan tjene penger på å følge miljøforskrifter og produsere for de mange som ønsker å ta steget inn i den globale middelklassen... argumenter vi har hørt før, fra økonomer som Galbraith d.y. og Reinert. Overbevisende nok, så langt de går; men det er økonomer vi snakker om her, og jeg er ikke overbevist om at de har klart å fri seg fra myten om infinite substitutability, at Den Hellige Hånd med teknomagi skal trylle fram alternativer til olje og gass (og mere vann, og ...) når vi trenger dem, i de kvanta vi trenger dem.

Getting governments on board with regulation is important, says Prahalad, but not nearly as much as convincing businesses to stop fretting over the cost of environmental laws. "The industrial system as we have it today cannot deal with another 4 billion people," he says. "What you see is the fairly early stages of the next industrial revolution, and the emerging markets are becoming the laboratory for that."

Vakre ord, men jeg har store problemer med å se at jordbruket som vi har det i dag kan håndtere fire milliarder til -- vi tapper allerede ned vannreservoarer fortere enn de fylles opp; og energiskvis sender gjødselprisene opp, som effektivt setter tak for jordbruksproduksjonen.

Dersom de fire milliardene skal kjøre Tata Nano... la oss si fire i hver, for en rund milliard Nano'er... så vil det ha en innvirkning på energiprisene.

Stigende energipriser vil tvinge fram flere kraftverk (det er Den Hellige Hånd god på); og siden kull vinner roughly 3:1 EROEI-messig over vind, som er den beste fornybare kilden med stort vekstpotensiale (kull vinner ikke like overlegent kostnadsmessig, men det har vel mere med det å gjøre at prisen settes etter den marginale produsenten, her har nok kull en hel del å gå på), så er utfallet nærmest gitt. Les f.eks. Gregor: Coal? Sold! to the Developing World, eller eller ta en titt på denne:

Hvor bærekraftig er denne utviklingen? Sånn rent bortsett i fra effekten på klimaet. Hvor langt unna er Peak Coal? Hirsch-rapporten trekker fram Coal-to-Liquids (CTL) som et effektivt tiltak mot Peak Oil; mine helter Höök & Aleklett er skeptiske:

Conversion ratios for CTL are generally estimated to be between 1-2 barrels/ton coal. This puts a strict limitation on future CTL capacity imposed by future coal production volumes, regardless of other factors such as economics, emissions or environmental concern. Assuming that 10% of world coal production can be diverted to CTL, the contribution to liquid fuel supply will be limited to only a few Mb/d. This prevents CTL from becoming a viable mitigation plan for liquid fuel shortage on a global scale. However, it is still possible for individual nations to derive significant shares of their fuel supply from CTL, but those nations must also have access to equally significant coal production capacities. It is unrealistic to claim that CTL provides a feasible solution to liquid fuels shortages created by peak oil. For the most part, it can only be a minor contributor and must be combined with other strategies.

(A review on coal to liquid fuels and its coal consumption, min utheving)

Peak gass er nærmere enn P. kull -- igjen, Hirsch-rapporten foreslår Gas-to-Liquids (GTL) som en (del)løsning, men det er utopisk på grensen til farlig.

Å tro at biodrivstoff kan fylle gapet (en synd jeg selv har vært skyldig i) er enda mer utopisk -- fra et rent fysisk perspektiv (god kommentar av "carnot" på TOD) er det tvilsomt om det er kan spille en stor rolle; fra et økonomisk perspektiv (Washington Post -- søk på "The unintended ripples from the biomass subsidy program" i google news dersom du stopper i en paywall) driver det opp prisen på trevirke til dels dramatisk, bra for deg hvis du er skogeier eller Norske Skog (hum, hum, Senterpartiet hype'r biodrivstoff og NS planlegger BTL på Follum...) men en smule fordyrende for alle andre; og fra et miljø/bærekraft/biologisk mangfold - perspektiv er det en katastrofe. Legg merke til at Biomass-to-Liquids (BTL) er den prosessen som ser ut til å være best fra et teknisk/kommersielt synspunkt; men det er essensielt den samme prosessen som CTL, men med langt mindre konsentrerte råvarer... Den mest bærekraftige prosessen ser ut til å være "biogass":

The greatest potential for biofuel production within the present agricultural system lies in using inedible fractions such as residues and organic waste, e.g. mould attacked matter and crops of inferior quality. Biogas production has a greater potential than ethanol production since a higher proportion of the residues can be used for energy production. The calculated global potential of biogas production is in theory sufficient to cover up to one fourth of the present consumption of fossil fuels within the global transport sector. However, there are infrastructural challenges with biogas production and distribution, and it is expensive to upgrade to motor fuel quality. Hence biogas could possibly be of better use in other applications than as motor fuel. Its use within agriculture would reduce agriculture’s dependency on fossil energy, improving food security.

(Johansson, Liljequist, Ohlander, Aleklett: Agriculture as provider of both food and fuel (PDF!), min utheving)

"[I]nfrastructural challenges" tolker jeg dithen at det er dyrt -- kapitalkrevende, både i realkapital og finanskapital. Og i dagens økonomiske klima betyr det at det ikke kommer til å skje så veldig mye i den retningen.

Så der jeg før mente at vi kommer til å dure rundt i farkoster med forbrenningsmotor også etter P. olje, men med syntetisert drivstoff, anser jeg nå det for å være en smule naivt.

Fremtiden går på strøm -- i den grad den går i det hele tatt.

Men også i strømproduksjonen er vi i ferd med å låse oss inne i en blindgate; vi gjør oss mer og mer avhengige av kull, som riktignok for øyeblikket har bra EROEI, men den vil falle, til dels dramatisk, og det er grunnlag for å mistenke at en P. kull ikke er fryktelig langt unna.

Vi trenger desperat en energikilde - av stor skala - med stabilt høy EROEI og lite fotavtrykk. Så vidt jeg kan se knytter det seg størst håp til "fjerdegenerasjons" kjernekraft (Höök, PDF!), det er bare en liten hake:

Fjärde generationens kärnkraftverk kommer att stå klara att användas kommersiellt kring år 2030 om allt går som planerat.

For å unngå trøbbel burde gen-iv kjernekraft ha den posisjonen kull har i dagens energimiks i 2030. Seriøs utbygging burde begynt FOR tjue år siden, ikke OM tjue år. (Men i det minste ser opinionen ut til å være i ferd med å snu -- Greenpeace endrer mening)

Det er for sent å lade muskedunderen med sølvkuler når varulven allerede har satt tenna i strupen på deg.

Nevermind at varulven ikke er alene, og du trenger et maskingevær, ikke en muskedunder...

Har jeg nevnt at jeg er utrolig glad jeg bor i Norge, som har rikelig med vannkraft og ferskvann, og som i globalt perspektiv har en svært moderat befolkning?

Kvalitet og kvantitet

I forrige post stilte jeg spørsmålet "Men hvordan [stoppe avskoging/starte reskoging] i praksis uten færre mennesker og/eller mer konsentrerte energikilder?"

Dette er kjernen i problemet. Fornybar energi har et mye større "fotavtrykk" enn fossile brensler; den er mye mer diffus og krever større arealer for å gi samme utbytte. Operasjoner som oljesandutvinning i Canada har et stort fotavtrykk; men å skaffe samme mengden drivstoff fra palmeolje har et mye større et...

Renewable energy is a popular concept, but there is a certain irony in this. Although environmentalists are quick to blame industry and fossil fuels, the environmental damage done to the world is only partly from industrial sources. The energy used in the industrial world is principally of high quality. It works in a focused fashion with concentrated side effects. In contrast, low-gain agriculture, a highly dispersed activity, is causing a substantial loss of species as well as environmental degradation. The distributed nature of agriculture means that habitat is removed and landscapes are greatly altered. Increased flooding, soil loss, and nonpoint sources of pollution are to a large extent caused by agriculture, as exemplified by the flooding of the Mississippi River in 1993 and the Ohio River in 1997. Although some observers criticize the environmental effects of agribusiness, Third World peasants at their present population levels have an aggregate effect that is substantial, and perhaps comparable. Similarly, the environmental impact of ants that use droppings is minimal compared to those that strip leaves from plants. The former are not considered agricultural pests, whereas the latter are. Environmental degradation is greater when the resource is of low quality and distributed but heavily used. Thus, a switch to renewable energy sources might bring, ironically, environmental damage comparable in scale to, or greater than, that caused by the use of fossil fuels. It is also ironic that, although industrialists have not rushed to embrace renewable energy sources, great profits would be made from building the infrastructure needed to capture and concentrate renewable resources. Politicians would be influenced less by road builders and more by businesses that recreate coastlines for wave capture and cover huge tracts of land with solar collectors or wind generators.

fra Resource Transitions and Energy Gain: Contexts of Organization (Tainter, Allen, Little, Hoekstra/Ecology and Society)(min uthevelse)

David MacKays "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air" er en strålende intuisjonsbyggende øvelse i hvordan dette ser ut i praksis. Ved hjelp av det han kaller "guerilla physics" - enkle overslag som enhver kan gjøre og forstå - gir han en god forståelse av størrelsen på utfordringen. (Urk... elendig setning. Pretensiøs formel-anmeldelse. Jeg gremmes. Men uansett, boka er veldig bra -- bør leses i filler av enhver journalist som skal skrive om energi...) Konklusjonen for UK blir "the UK's present lifestyle can't be sustained on the UK's own renewables (except with the industrialization of country-sized areas of land and sea)" (s. 114).

Interessant for min del er at han fremhever ca. de samme løsningene som Lillestøl: CSP og kjernekraft.

Så jeg går litt i sirkler... Eller i spiral, iom at jeg er over samme punktet nå som for et år siden, men forhåpentligvis på et høyere nivå...

We're damned if we do and damned if we don't. Utbygging av en energikilde som er mer konsentrert og rikelig enn fossile brensler kan, dersom den gjøres tilgjengelig for verdens fattige, bremse/reversere nedhugging av regnskoger og overutbytting (tenk saiga, eller se her (via Desdemona D.)... jeg kan ikke se at en fullstendig rasering av verdens gjenværende skoger (og da tenker jeg ikke på norske granåkre) kan unngås på noen annen måte.

Men uten et omslag i holdninger, verdier, tenkemåte, vil det bare stimulere til vekst, mer industrialisering... større problemer på sikt.

Det hjelper ikke å bytte ut glødepærer med "sparepærer". Det som hjelper er et samfunn som dypt forakter individer som har uplights i hekken som lyser hele natta, hele året; kriminaliserer varmekabler i oppkjørselen; lar SUV-eiere og folk med mer enn to barn forsvinne i natt og tåke på Guantanomo Bay...

Pescicid

Aquacalypse Now (Daniel Pauly / The New Republic)

Bra om overfisking av verdenshavene:

I myself was trained as a fisheries biologist in Germany, and, while they would dispute this, the agencies for which many of my former classmates work clearly have been captured by the industry they are supposed to regulate. Thus, there are fisheries scientists who, for example, write that cod have “recovered” or even “doubled” their numbers when, in fact, they have increased merely from 1 percent to 2 percent of their original abundance in the 1950s.

Yet, despite their different interests and priorities--and despite their disagreements on the “end of fish”--marine ecologists and fisheries scientists both want there to be more fish in the oceans. Partly, this is because both are scientists, who are expected to concede when confronted with strong evidence. And, in the case of fisheries, as with global warming, the evidence is overwhelming: Stocks are declining in most parts of the world. And, ultimately, the important rift is not between these two groups of scientists, but between the public, which owns the sea’s resources, and the fishing-industrial complex, which needs fresh capital for its Ponzi scheme. The difficulty lies in forcing the fishing-industrial complex to catch fewer fish so that populations can rebuild.

It is essential that we do so as quickly as possible because the consequences of an end to fish are frightful.

Kjell Inge Røkke hører hjemme i fengsel, for "pescicid" elns. Ikke et hår bedre enn democid i mine øyne; sluttresultatet er mye av det samme, bare oppnådd via omveie isf direkte.

Biodrivstoff...?

For å fortsette tråden fra Encroachment:

Indonesia battles illegal palm oil (Emirates Business247)

A 2007 United Nations report found forest conversion for palm oil plantations was the country's leading cause of deforestation, with illegal oil palm, illegal logging and illegal land clearances by fire occurring inside 37 of 41 national parks. Leuser, Sumatra's largest rainforest expanse, and one of the last refuges for endangered Sumatran tigers, elephants, orangutan and rhinos, was one of the worst affected, it said.

Det er mange andre sånne artikler der ute, dette var bare den jeg hadde for hånden i dag... poenget er at det er vanskelig, å så vanskelig å erstatte fossilt brennstoff. Det vil i beste fall ta plass. Effekten med at etanolproduksjon går ut over produksjon av mat er behørig diskutert (i det siste har det forøvrig blitt rapportert at antallet sultende mennesker nå er rekordhøyt, ca en milliard); men andre alternativer går ut over andre ting som er minst like viktige. Som regnskog i Indonesia.

(TODs Robert Rapier har forøvrig nylig hatt en strålende artikkelserie om biodrivstoff, siste del her (med linker til de to første): Renewable Fuel Niches (Robert Rapier / The Oil Drum))

Men mens å kutte ned uerstattelig regnskog forferder meg, gir det strålende mening for de fattige lokale:

"The forest is seen as a green tangle with little real use and filled with dangerous animals and diseases," explained Jutta Poetz, Biodiversity Co-ordinator at industry environmental standards body the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).

"If this green tangle can be converted into something profitable, with the dangers largely removed, isn't that good? Plantations will develop the country, create jobs and improve people's lives. This appears to be the prevailing sentiment in Southeast Asia."

Det som er trist er at noe av det samme skjer her hjemme. For eksempel så er det Betydelige råstoff-ressurser i landbruket og spesielt i norske skoger. Ehh, ja det er masse energi i norske skoger, men skogene våre drives ganske intensivt allerede og jeg kan ikke helt se at det er nødvendig å forske frem enda flere måter å bruke dem opp på. Ja det er "fornybart" men det er også encroaching.

Hypen rundt biodrivstoff er skremmende - jeg lot meg lure en stund, jeg også. Som det påpekes igjen og igjen på TOD, biodrivstoff kan bidra litt, men aldri erstatte mer enn en brøkdel av dagens oljeforbruk. Overdreven entusiasme for biodrivstoff vil forværre encroachment, forværre matsituasjonen for verdens fattige, og ikke bidra til å bevare BAU.

Curb your enthusiasm.

EDIT: The Biofuel Prayer (Gregor McDonald)
"Chasing the biofuel dream looks increasingly like a prayer."

Encroachment

Det er mange mennesker på planeten, veldig mange.

Da bestemoren min ble født var det ca to milliarder.

Da jeg ble født, var det ca fire.

Nå nærmer vi oss sju.

Dette har ganske mange uheldige effekter.

Den kanskje mest uheldige er at alle disse menneskene tar plass, jævlig mye plass.

Plass som tidligere var villmark.

Dette er ikke noe nytt; dette er noe jeg har visst siden jeg var en liten nerde-snørronge og fikk lov til å stå opp for å se på Life on Earth med David Attenborough.

Men det er ikke før nå nylig det har gått opp for meg hvor katastrofal og endelig denne prosessen er. Vi er i ferd med å fjerne de aller siste villmarkene på planeten, og med dem forsvinner store mengder dyr og plantearter. De kommer ikke tilbake igjen, selv om vi på en eller annen mirakuløs måte klarer å unngå total kollaps (og da snakker jeg ikke om kollaps av sivilisasjon/menneskeheten, men om en masseutryddelse av dinosaurutsletterskala). Iflg E. O. Wilson i "Diversity of Life" tok det i de forrige fem masseutryddelsene rimelig lang tid før det biologiske mangfoldet var tilbake på sitt tidligere nivå: " In particular the Ordovician dip needed 25 million years, the Permian and Triassic (together because they were so close toghether in time) 100 million years, and the Cretacious 20 million years" (s. 29).

Dette er ganske kritisk. Vi er i ferd med å gjøre verden om til en stor monokultur; monokulturer er langt mindre stabile enn store økosystemer, som gjør at det ikke skal store uhellet til før alt klapper sammen.

Dette er sannsynligvis det alvorligste problemet vi står ovenfor, langt større og mer umiddelbart enn løpsk drivhuseffekt. Se for eksempel

New doomsday map shows planet's dire state:



Engelsk har et bra ord for sånne prosesser: Encroachment. Jeg kan dessværre ikke komme på noe godt norsk ord på det...

Chomsky om krisene

Crisis and Hope - Theirs and ours (Noam Chomsky / Boston Review)

Chomsky favner bredt og bruker mange ord, men som han selv sier innledningsvis, "There are numerous very severe crises, interwoven in ways that preclude any clear separation". En smakebit:

In substantial measure, the food crisis plaguing much of the South and the financial crisis of the North have a common source: the shift toward neoliberalism since the 1970s, which brought to an end the Bretton Woods system instituted by the United States and United Kingdom after World War II. The architects of Bretton Woods, John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White, anticipated that its core principles—including capital controls and regulated currencies—would lead to rapid and relatively balanced economic growth and would also free governments to institute the social democratic programs that had very strong public support. Mostly, they were vindicated on both counts. Many economists call the years that followed, until the 1970s, the “golden age of capitalism.”

The “golden age” saw not only unprecedented and relatively egalitarian growth, but also the introduction of welfare-state measures. As Keynes and White were aware, free capital movement and speculation inhibit those options. To quote from the professional literature, free flow of capital creates a “virtual senate” of lenders and investors who carry out a “moment-by-moment referendum” on government policies, and if they find them irrational—that is, designed to help people, not profits—they vote against them by capital flight, attacks on currency, and other means. Democratic governments therefore have a “dual constituency”: the population, and the virtual senate, who typically prevail.

Det burde vel ikke være nødvendig å påpeke at frihandelens profeter stadig hevder at "frihandel + demokrati = sant"; at det første og viktigste steget på veien mot demokrati er å åpne for frihandel med Vesten... Jfr også Galbraiths kommentarer om Kinas styrke og deres underutviklede kapitalmarked som jeg postet tidligere... Videre:

Large-scale state intervention in the economy is not just a phenomenon of the post-World War II era, either. On the contrary, the state has always been a central factor in economic development. Once they gained their independence, the American colonies were free to abandon the orthodox economic policies that dictated adherence to their comparative advantage in export of primary commodities while importing superior British manufacturing goods. Instead, the Hamiltonian economy imposed very high tariffs so that an industrial economy could develop: textiles, steel, and much else. The eminent economic historian Paul Bairoch describes the United States as “the mother country and bastion of modern protectionism,” with the highest tariffs in the world during its great growth period.

"The state has always been a central factor in economic development"... En sterk påstand i lys av de fremherskende neoliberalistiske/neoklassiske memene; men jeg er ikke i tvil om det er riktig, jfr. tidligere ref. til Galbraih jr. og sr, og Reinert.

... og vi leser kollapslitteraur

Reinventing Collapse - The Soviet Example and American Prospects (Dmitry Orlov)

og

Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (William R. Catton, jr.)

Reinventing Collapse er en klassiker. Orlov er morsom uten å bli flåsete, innsiktsfull uten å være belærende. Han vokste opp i SovjetUnionen (SU), men har bodd og arbeidet mesteparten av sitt voksne liv i USA (US), så han kjenner begge verdener godt. Blandt veldig mange interessante poenger han har å komme med er den grunnleggende observasjonen at SU og US er veldig like. Selvsagt også veldig forskjellige, men mange av forskjellen er bare propaganda - og SUs demonisering av US var svært lik US' demonisering av SU. Begge var teknologisk-industrielle imperier; forskjellen lå først og fremst i organisasjonsmodellen. Og Orlov er overbevist om at det er en relativt uviktig forskjell; SUs fall bør ikke sees på som et bevis for at US' organisasjonsmodell "seiret" og SUs "tapte", men som en advarsel: Hovmod står for fall. US' fall tar han for gitt:

I therefore take as my premise that at some point during the coming years, due to an array of factors, with energy scarcity foremost among them, the economic system of the United States will teeter and fall, to be replaced by something that most people can scarcely guess at, and that even those who see it coming prefer not to think about. This stunning failure of the collective imagination is the specific problem this book seeks to address. (s 15)

(Annetsteds sier han at årsaken til SUs fall var at sovjetisk oljeproduksjon gikk utforbakke - bratt.)

Orlov er en skikkelig russisk bjørn på Amerika:

Most alternative forms of energy - solar, wind, water, nuclear, garbage incineration, gerbil wheels or hot air piped in directly Washington - will have only a small overall impact. The United States will not have enough energy to keep its economy functioning. There is also not enough energy, nor enough time, to build a different, more energy-efficient economy, on the same scale as the present one. The best alternative by far is to reduce energy consumption by progressively shutting down all non-vital parts of the economy, while commandeering and redistributing resources to uniformly provide for the welfare of the entire population. Since such a revolution is not politically possible, the only remaining alternative is economic and political collapse.

My conclusion is that the Soviet Union was much better prepared for economic collapse than is the United States. America's economy will evaporate like the morning mist.

[...]

Economic collapse has a way of turning economic negatives into positives. The last thing we want is a perfectly functioning, growing, prosperous economy that suddenly collapses one day and leaves everybody in the lurch. Luckily, there is little prospect of such a scenario. (s 104 f)

Observasjonene om "Drugs and Alcohol" er også et sitat verd:

To a Russian, being drunk is almost a sacred right; to an American, it is a guilty pleasure. [...] The Russian can get furiously drunk in public, stagger about singing patriotic songs, fall into a snow bank, and either freeze to death or be carted off to a drunk tank. All this produces little or no remorse in him. Based on my reading of H. L. Mencken, America was also once upon a time a land of happy drunks, where a whiskey bottle would be passed around the courtroom at the start of the proceedings and a drunken jury would later render a drunken verdict. [...] When the economy collapses, hard-drinking people everywhere find all the more reason to get drunk, but much less werewithal with which to procure drink. In Russia, innovative market-based solutions were quickly improvised, which it was my privilege to observe. [...] In all, we should expect drugs and alcohol to become one of the largest short-term post-collapse entrepreneurial opportunities in the United States, along with asset stripping and security. (p 147)

----

Collapse er også en klassiker; utkom første gang i 1980, og kalt den beste boken om emnet av minst en kommentator på TODs "linkfest". Bokens uttalte mål er å frambringe et paradigmeskifte - det gamle paradigmet er vekstparadigmet fra "The Age of Exuberance" (roughly, pionertiden i USA); det nye, det økologiske paradigmet. Vi ser ikke verden bare gjennom øynene, sier Catton, men også gjennom våre idéer... paradigmet. Den første delen av boken snakker om vekstparadigmet, dets historie og svakheter... den andre om det nye, økologiske paradigmet. Det gis masse referanser, og tonen i boken er definitivt intellektuell. Det er mye interessant her, men bokens skop er bredt, så det er begrenset hvor dypt inn i materien den trenger... Dypest og mest interessant er beskrivelsen av The Age of Exuberance; Catton er i utgangspunktet sosiolog, og det merkes. Til å være en bok som forfekter et økologisk paradigme, snakker den veldig lite om økologi, annet enn å hamre inn på annenhver side at mennesket er et dyr som alle andre og er underlagt de samme naturlover... et standpunkt jeg deler, men det blir litt for mye misjonering og litt for lite argumentering og opplysning for meg.

Jeg kommer forhåpentligvis tilbake til Collapse her i et essay med mine reaksjoner på boken... men foreløpig, en av de mer interessante passasjene, en diskusjon av Malthus:

Malthus did indeed err, but not in the way that has been commonly supposed. He rightly discerned "the power of population" to increase exponentially "if unchecked". He rightly noted that population growth ordinarily is not unchecked. He saw that it was worth inquiring into the means by which the exponential growth tendency is normally checked. He was perceptive in attaching the label "misery" to some of the ramification of these means. Where he was wrong was in supposing that the means worked fully and immediately. (That this was his error has not been seen by those who reject his views.)

[..]

Despite Malthus's belief to the contrary, it is possible to exceed an environment's carrying capacity -- temporarily. Many species have done it. A species with as long an interval between generations as is characteristic of ours, and with cultural as well as biological aspects, can be expected to do it.

[...]

By not quite seeing that carrying capacity can be temporarily overshot, Malthus understated life's perils. He thus enabled both the admirers and the detractors of his admonitory writings to neglect the effects of overshoot -- environmental degradation and carrying capacity reduction.

Moyers-interview med Asimov

http://www.wesjones.com/asimov.htm

MOYERS: What about the subject you've written so much about - the population explosion? Right now, the population of the globe is over five billion. You've warned us about what will happen if it continues at its two percent growth rate per year.

ASIMOV: Actually, the growth rate is down to one-point-six percent, but with the higher population, it's the same amount in actual numbers: eighty million a year. By the year 2000, it's going to be perhaps six-point-five billion.

MOYERS: That's just twelve years from now. How many people do you think the earth is able to sustain?

ASIMOV: I don't think it's able to sustain the five billion in the long run. Right now most of the world is living under appalling conditions. We can't possibly improve the conditions of everyone. We can't raise the entire world to the average standard of living in the United States because we don't have the resources and the ability to distribute well enough for that. So right now as it is, we have condemned most of the world to a miserable, starvation level of existence. And it will just get worse as the population continues to go up.

MOYERS: But you can't just say to a woman, "Don't have children."

ASIMOV: That's not the problem; it's that so many people are saying, "Have children." There is such a pro-natalist attitude in the world. We celebrate Mother's Day so enthusiastically, we say, "May all your troubles be little ones," we celebrate additional children. I feel sometimes that if we'd only stop pushing for children, somehow there would be fewer of them.

MOYERS: Why did you say that the price of survival is the equality of women?

ASIMOV: Because if women are allowed to enter into all facets of the human condition, if they can enter business, if they can enter religion, science, government on an equal basis with men, they will be so busy they won't feel it necessary to have a great many children. As long as you have women under conditions where they don't feel any sense of value or self-worth except as mothers, they'll have a lot of children because that's the only way they can prove they're worth something. In general, if you look through the world, the lower the status of women, the higher the birth rate, and the higher the birth rate, the lower the status of women. If you could raise the status of women, I am certain the birth rate would fall drastically through the choice of the women themselves. We're always saying that there's no fulfillment like having
children, but I notice mostly it's men who say that. You know, men get along without giving birth to children. They do that by finding other things to do. If women could find other things to do, too, they would have fewer children.

MOYERS: But once again, you are in conflict with a biblical imperative, "Be fruitful and multiply."

ASIMOV: Right. But God said that when Adam and Eve were the only two people in the world. He said, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." The earth was replenished long ago. That's one of the problems of fundamentalism. Fundamentalists take a statement that made sense at the time it was made, and because they refuse to consider that the statement may not be an absolute, eternal truth, they continue following it under conditions where to do so is deadly.

MOYERS: What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?

ASIMOV: It will be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call my bathroom metaphor: If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want to and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. And everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom; it should be right there in the Constitution.

But if you have twenty people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door: "Aren't you through yet?" and so on. In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies. The more people there are, the less one individual matters.

MOYERS: People say the United States is bringing its population under control, that many Americans are not even reproducing themselves, and that what the rest of the world does, we can't control.

ASIMOV: The population of the United States is still going up. The only time it went up really slowly was during the Great Depression, when there were no laws lowering the birth rate, there was just an economic depression, which made people think twice before they had children. But the United States is doing something else - it is absolutely refusing to help nations control population. Our feeling is that it's enough for us to make sure that the United States is in good shape, and what other nations do is their business. It's not just their business - it's our business, too.

MOYERS: Can we exist as a stable economy and a stable society if around us are turmoil and chaos?

ASIMOV: Absolutely not. Right now many nations are destroying the rain forests because they need the firewood, and they need the space for farms.

MOYERS: Why should we care about that?

ASIMOV: Because without the rain forests, we're going to have deserts. The food supply will dwindle. As a matter of fact, there's even the possibility that we're going to lose all kinds of valuable substances we know nothing about. Those rain forests have an incredible number of species of plants and animals that we know very little about. Some of them may produce chemicals of great pharmacological and medical importance. If properly cultivated, some of the plants might be new food sources. In addition to that, nothing produces the oxygen of the atmosphere with the same intensity that a forest does. Anything that substitutes for it will be producing less oxygen. We're going to be destroying our atmosphere, too.

MOYERS: What did you mean when you said once that we have to stop living by the code of the past?

ASIMOV: Times change. For example, in the past we felt motherhood was the most important thing a woman could do, and that to be a good wife and mother was the sum total of a woman's purpose in life. She didn't need an education or interests outside the house. You know, Kinder, Kirche, Kuche - the children, the church, the kitchen - or in English you say, "Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant." Well, we can't do that any more. We can't raise women to be baby machines. In the old days, we didn't worry about the future. Now we must. Things are changing so fast that we have to worry about the future all the time.

"We can't raise women to be baby machines"... Nei, ikke dersom vi skal skape et bærekraftig samfunn.

Men dette er et av de virkelig, virkelig store utfordringene: Å sette opp de sosiale spillereglene - på verdensbasis - slik at det ikke lønner seg for noen, det være seg familier, stammer, religioner, eller nasjoner, å gjøre sine kvinner til babymaskiner.

Problemet er at det er en veldig sterk seleksjonseffekt involvert: Kulturer som gjør sine kvinner til babymaskiner vil gjennomgå eksponensiell vekst (til de når sin Malthusianske grense); kulturer som ikke gjør det, stagnerer.

Selv om ordet "stagnasjon" er negativt ladet i daglig språkbruk, så er det nettopp stagnasjon vi ønsker å oppnå i vår situasjon... vi ønsker oss et paradigmeskifte her.

Problemet er at dersom du har to kulturer, den ene med en flat befolkningsutvikling og den andre med eksponensiell vekst, så tar det ikke lang tid før den første er vekk.

Eksponensiell vekst trumfer alt!

(jeg har snakket om dette tidligere)

Sniktitt på 'State of the Future' 2009

 

The planet's future: Climate change 'will cause civilisation to collapse'

 

An effort on the scale of the Apollo mission that sent men to the Moon is needed if humanity is to have a fighting chance of surviving the ravages of climate change. The stakes are high, as, without sustainable growth, "billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse".

This is the stark warning from the biggest single report to look at the future of the planet – obtained by The Independent on Sunday ahead of its official publication next month. Backed by a diverse range of leading organisations such as Unesco, the World Bank, the US army and the Rockefeller Foundation, the 2009 State of the Future report runs to 6,700 pages and draws on contributions from 2,700 experts around the globe. Its findings are described by Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN, as providing "invaluable insights into the future for the United Nations, its member states, and civil society".

The impact of the global recession is a key theme, with researchers warning that global clean energy, food availability, poverty and the growth of democracy around the world are at "risk of getting worse due to the recession". The report adds: "Too many greedy and deceitful decisions led to a world recession and demonstrated the international interdependence of economics and ethics." 

6 700 sider??! Massivt.

 

Mer vannmangel

I India: India prays for rain as water wars break out

It was a little after 8pm when the water started flowing through the pipe running beneath the dirt streets of Bhopal's Sanjay Nagar slum. After days without a drop of water, the Malviya family were the first to reach the hole they had drilled in the pipe, filling what containers they had as quickly as they could. Within minutes, three of them were dead, hacked to death by angry neighbours who accused them of stealing water.

In Bhopal, and across much of northern India, a late monsoon and the driest June for 83 years are exacerbating the effects of a widespread drought and setting neighbour against neighbour in a desperate fight for survival.

India's vast farming economy is on the verge of crisis. The lack of rain has hit northern areas most, but even in Mumbai, which has experienced heavy rainfall and flooding, authorities were forced to cut the water supply by 30% last week as levels in the lakes serving the city ran perilously low.

I California: Feds document shrinking San Joaquin Valley aquifer

California's San Joaquin Valley has lost 60 million acre-feet of groundwater since 1961, according to a new federal study. That's enough water for 60 Folsom reservoirs.

This is among the findings in a massive study of groundwater in California's Central Valley by the U.S. Geological Survey. It helps shed light on the mysteries and dangers of California's groundwater consumption, which is mostly unregulated.

According to the study, groundwater pumping continues to cause the valley floor to sink, a problem known as subsidence. This threatens the stability of surface structures such as the California Aqueduct, which delivers drinking water to more than 20 million people.

The Central Valley is America's largest farming region; it's also the single-largest zone of groundwater pumping.

EDIT: Se også WATER TABLES FALLING AND RIVERS RUNNING DRY (av Lester R. Brown, utdrag fra boken Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006))

Since the overpumping of aquifers is occurring in many countries more or less simultaneously, the depletion of aquifers and the resulting harvest cutbacks could come at roughly the same time. And the accelerating depletion of aquifers means this day may come soon, creating potentially unmanageable food scarcity.

While falling water tables are largely hidden, rivers that are drained dry before they reach the sea are highly visible. Two rivers where this phenomenon can be seen are the Colorado, the major river in the southwestern United States, and the Yellow, the largest river in northern China. Other large rivers that either run dry or are reduced to a mere trickle during the dry season are the Nile, the lifeline of Egypt; the Indus, which supplies most of Pakistan’s irrigation water; and the Ganges in India’s densely populated Gangetic basin. Many smaller rivers have disappeared entirely.

OPPDATERING: Heavy rain eases Mumbai's water woes Reddet av gonggongen.

Bare noen få vil overleve

...i følge James Lovelock:

 

One last chance to save mankind (Interview med Lovelock i New Scientist)

 

The Dark Side of Climate Change: It's Already Too Late, Cap and Trade Is a Scam, and Only the Few Will Survive (AlterNet)

 

 

There is another, fourth voice in the debate over cap-and-trade, one ringing out from shadows rarely approached by the media. In these shadows dwell scientists who believe the time has passed for any sort of legislation at all, no matter how radical. The best known of these frightening climate gnomes is the legendary British scientist James Lovelock, father of Gaia Theory and inventor of the instrument allowing for the atmospheric measurements of CFC's. In recent years, Lovelock has emerged as the world's leading climate pessimist, raining scorn on the new fashionable environmentalism and arguing that the time is nigh to accept that a massive culling of the human race is around the corner.

"Most of the 'green' stuff is verging on a gigantic scam," Lovelock told the New Scientist shortly before the release of his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia. "Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It's not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it'll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning."

Those who read Lovelock's controversial 2006 book, The Revenge of Gaia, know that hope junkies should keep a safe distance from the 90-year-old scientist. Lovelock, who has been compared to Copernicus and Darwin, years ago arrived at a disturbingly stark conclusion about Earth's climate future. His prognosis is now starker than ever. The small window of short-term hope he left open in Revenge is closed in this year's Vanishing. In its place is a long-term hope that humanity in some form will survive the present century, though barely. The result is a dark and contrarian work that seeks to demolish the terms of the climate debate while mocking our response to the crisis at the personal, national, and species level. (fra AlterNet-linken over)

 

 

Jeg har stort sett oversett Lovelock til nå, siden han er mannen bak Gaia-hypotesen... som jeg har sett på som et stykke mystisitisk kvasivitenskap. Som Dawkins påpeker ett eller annet sted, jorden er åpenbart ikke en organisme i evolusjonsbiologisk forstand; alt det vi beskriver som levende er nødvendigvis oppstått ved evolusjon... og Gaia kan ikke ha oppstått ved evolusjon. Hvordan formerer f.eks. den postulerte Gaia seg? Ved spaltning?

 

På den andre siden, det er mange komplekse, selvorganiserende systemer der ute, og om de ikke er "levende" i Dawkins' forstand så kan de kanskje tilhøre en mellomklasse... selvorganiserende systemer, på grensen mellom kaos og orden... kanskje menneskelig bevissthet også hører til denne klassen?

 

Problemet med kompleksitet/kaosteori er at når et system går inn i kaosland, så er det totalt uforutsigbart. Lakmustesten på "vitenskap" er at den produserer testbare forutsigelser... men i Kaosland kan du ha en perfekt modell av et fullstendig deterministisk system, og likevel ikke ha forutsigbarhet. Da står man igjen "forklaringer"  som ikke lar seg skille fra mystisisme hverken i form eller innhold... uten å egentlig ha gjort noe feil, fra et vitenskapelig synspunkt. Det er rett og slett bare det at systemet du studerer, under visse forhold ikke er åpent for vitenskapelig analyse.

 

Jeg skjønner at jeg er nødt til å sette meg inn i hva Lovelock egentlig mener med sin Gaia-hypotese; til nå har jeg bare lest andrehåndsbeskrivelser.

 

Vannmangel i Mumbai

Mumbai faces acute water shortage

 

 

The BBC's Prachi Pinglay in Mumbai says that rainfall figures are alarming compared with last year. In many areas of the state of Maharashtra and its capital, there has been only 25% of the rainfall received by this time last year.

If more rain does not arrive soon, the lakes which supply Mumbai will recede still further.

The drought in Maharashtra in the west comes as half a million people have been stranded as rivers burst their banks due to flooding in the north-eastern state of Assam.

[...]

India's capital, Delhi, is also reeling from depleted water supplies, while many towns and villages across the country still have woefully inadequate safe drinking water facilities.

They depend largely on bore wells, which have seriously depleted the country's water table.

The BBC's Zubair Ahmed in Mumbai says farm produce is also likely to be badly affected if the full monsoon does not arrive soon.

 (lett stokket)

Flom i en del av landet, tørke i en annen... Dette må vel skrives på kontoen for klimaforandringer.

Chris Nelder om fremtiden

The Seven Ways To Solve The Energy Problem (Business Insider)

Også publisert som How to Navigate Peak Fossil Fuels. . .And Profit (Energy and Capital)

Strålende oppsummering av situasjonen:

By the end of this century then, a mere 90 years from now, we'll need to have an infrastructure that runs exclusively on renewably generated electricity, biofuels, and possibly nuclear energy. That's where we're going.

Fortunately, there is more than enough available renewable energy to meet all of our needs, if we can harness it. Unfortunately, we're starting from a point at which less than 2% of the world's energy comes from renewables like wind, solar and geothermal.

Hydro provides about 6%, and nuclear about 6%, but for reasons too numerous to get into here, some of which my longtime readers have already heard, I don't believe either source will increase much in the future, and both could actually decline.

Our challenge then is to make that 2% fraction grow to replace about 86% of the world's current primary energy, in 90 years or less.

We are currently at peak oil, a short, roughly 5-year plateau which goes into terminal decline around 2012. All fossil fuel energy combined peaks around 2018, less than a decade from now.

All strategies for accommodating the fossil fuel decline require decades to have any significant effect. The now-iconic study "Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management" (Hirsch et al., 2005) demonstrated that it would take at least 20 years of intensive, crash-program mitigation efforts to meet the peak oil challenge gracefully. Another study, "Primary Energy Substitution Models: On the Interaction between Energy and Society," (C. Marchetti, 1977) showed that it generally takes decades to substitute one form of primary energy for another, and 100 years for a given source of energy to achieve 50% market penetration.

[...]

The final and most important factor is population. The few population models that actually take fossil fuel depletion into account assume that global population increases roughly out to the global fuel peak, and then stabilizes at that level or declines naturally while economic development promotes lower fertility rates and renewables and energy efficiency increase to fill the gap of declining fossil energy. I understand why this assumption is made—because the alternative is too ghastly to contemplate—and for the immediate purpose of this article I will go along with it. I will note however that history and scientific observation of populations suggest some sharp episodes of decline are more likely, and in my estimation we will end this century with a considerably smaller population than anyone forecasts, at some level well below today's.

Jeg er veldig, veldig glad for at jeg bor i Norge, som dekker kanskje 40% av energibehovet sitt med vannkraft (og ved ta enkle grep - som å forby "snømåking" vha varmekabler i oppkjørselen - kan redusere energi"behovet" betraktelig), som har rikelig med ferskvann, som er langt mindre overbefolket enn de fleste andre steder på kloden, som har en distrikspolitikk som i lys av PO framstår som clairvoyant, som faktisk bevilger penger til bygging av toglinjer og vindparker til havs... (Ja, det er vindparkene som skal bygges til havs, ikke toglinjene, altså).

Norge, kjempers fødeland!

Verdens matforsyning II

Et par interessante artikler:

Whatever happened to the food crisis?
(The Economist)

At the moment, the world’s population is 6.7 billion and 750m people are born each year. Though the rate of increase is declining, inertia means the total will go on rising until 2050, when the population will reach 9 billion. In Ethiopia, for example, 18m children are born every year, rising to 24m a year by 2040. That will double its headcount from 80m to 160m.

The FAO reckons that, to keep pace, the amount of food available in developing countries will have to double by 2050, equivalent to a 70% rise in world food production. If that does not happen, fears Joachim von Braun, the head of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, DC, there could be a return to the food conflicts of 2007-08 which caused riots in more than 60 countries and set off a controversial worldwide land grab—a rush by rich food-importers to buy swathes of Africa and South-East Asia on which to grow food. Even if the rise in output comes about but in the “wrong” way, there could be problems, since water in some areas is growing scarce and increasing food output will make it scarcer.

[...]

Almost all the increase in cereals output in 2008 came from rich countries: the harvest in those nations increased 11%. In developing countries, the rise was a mere 1%; if you exclude China, India and Brazil, grain output in poor countries actually fell. So while the costs of the food crisis bore heavily upon the poor, the benefits accrued more to farmers in industrialised countries. And nowhere were there signs that yields (output per acre) were rising. Harvests increased because farmers took more land under the plough.

The European Union shelved a programme that had obliged farmers to leave 10% of their land fallow; China scrapped a scheme that had allowed marginal arable to return to woodland. Both these actions boosted the amount of farmland. This was not bad in itself, and it was the quickest way to boost output. But it is only a first step. World food production cannot be increased by 70% just by increasing acreage: there is simply not enough unused land to go around.

Airdale på TOD kommenterer:

Corn futures have been dropping like a rock...

Sept corn was way down...this is going to be a very very interesting crop year.

The USDA gave corn reports on acreage that had no corn even planted on it as yet and so the market responded by dropping.

Illinois and Indiana hadn't even planted due to spring rains and the report came out..I think they are making this shit up out of thin air.

Most corn farmers are really pissed now.

Agriculture and Food in Crisis
(Monthly Review)

What are the prospects for the future? Are they really as dire as Lester Brown suggests? As we write this, a severe recession has set in around the world — deep and, perhaps, long lasting. It has already resulted in much more hunger and food insecurity in the United States and many other countries. How much worse can things get? Probably quite a bit, is the unfortunate answer

Geniale Dmitry Orlov

Dette er det beste jeg har lest om Peak Oil og tilhørende herligheter til nå:

Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation

(transkript av et foredrag, med bilder av de tilhørende slidene)

Orlov får det til å høres nesten morsomt ut, i tillegg til uunngåelig. Langt, men et absolutt must-read.

Link til et annet must-read i kommentarene:

The Cassandra of Toledo: A Requiem For Mitigation

"Michael, it's too late."

-- professor Craig Bond Hatfield

Som om ikke det var nok:

I The Slope of Dysfunction "kritiserer" Orlov Peak Oil-teorien...

Han begynner sånn:

Perhaps you have heard of the Peak Oil theory? Most people have by now, even the people whose job used to involve denying the possibility that global crude oil production would peak any time soon. Now that everybody seems a bit more comfortable with the idea, perhaps it is time to reexamine it. Is the scenario Peak Oil theoreticians paint indeed realistic, or is it firmly grounded in wishful thinking?

Dette virker jo som en hvilken som helst avisartikkel om PO, som begynner med å være bekymret og fornuftig - og så avskriver hele greia som tøys. Han følger dette mønsteret slavisk, helt ned til: "But they seem to have overlooked one little detail, which, I believe, is rather important".

Den lille detaljen er, hva gjør en nasjon som ikke klarer å produsere nok olje til seg selv (lenger)? Jo, den importerer.

Øøøø og hva skjer dersom det ikke er mulig å importere?

It just so happens that we have a convenient example of just such a scenario unfolding: post-Soviet oil production after the collapse of the USSR. There, production declined 43% between 1987 and 1996. The decline was arrested and reversed by the introduction of foreign investment and technology[.]

[...]

[T]he crash in oil production preceded collapse in USSR's Gross Domestic Product. The lag time between the two, and the severity of the collapse are clear enough to ascribe causality: to say that the oil crash caused the economic collapse. On the other hand, coal and natural gas production, which also crashed, did so after the GDP collapsed, again, with a significant enough lag time to say with confidence that it was economic collapse that caused coal and gas production to crash.

What actually happens to an economy and a society under such circumstances? With oil in short supply, industrial production plummets, the economy stalls, there is a financial crisis because of debts going bad, followed by a commercial crisis because of falling demand and lack of credit, followed by political collapse caused by dwindling government revenues, followed by social collapse as unemployment rises and crime becomes rampant. After a while of this, the idea of you and your friends going out to the oil field and pumping some more oil starts to seem rather odd, and so oil production heads to zero.

Jepp, sånn er det med den saken.

Men vi i Norge er jo heldigvis selvforsynt med olje og velsådet?

But modern oil production is a technically complicated business (the easy-to-get-at oil is all gone) while the field service equipment and parts delivery system is fully globalized and exceedingly complex. Shocks to any part of the global economy are very likely to disrupt the whole before too long.

Hvorfor har jeg dette merkelige suget i magen, tro?

Ranting på TOD

Ikke tilfredsstillende aktivitet her på bloggen fra min side... Men jeg har postet på TOD, her (to lengre innlegg).

Den første spinner videre på kommentaren til Bill Hannahan:

Technology is not the problem

I'm of two minds on this. On the surface I agree completely; technology per se is not a problem.

Scratch the surface a bit though, particularly in the context of Nate's essay, and the picture is suddenly very interesting.

There was an exchange in yesterday's DrumBeat on the malleability of human nature. Brif summry, hopefully not too inaccurate: Darwinian contends human nature is immutable, but has the ability to adapt to its environment.

The problem with that POW is that even small changes in environment can lead to large changes in behaviour... and further, as soon as some individuals start adapting to a new environment, the environment itself changes... other people are the most important parts of people's environments. And large numbers of individuals adapting to a perhaps rapidly changing environment, creating feedbacks left and right... This is a recipe for chaos; there's no telling what kind of society will emerge, no telling what the social norms will end up being.

Point is, there is no meaning without context. No word, no sequence of DNA has any intrinsic meaning; it only has meaning in a context. Change the context - the environment - and the meaning might change, qualitatively as well as quantitatively. The "meaning" of a gene is the phenotype. The exact same sequence of DNA can code for different proteins in different species... and males being mesmerized by female forms have wildly different effects in a hunter-gatherer society and in a context of abundant Internet porn.

Now, a change in technology is obviously a change in environment, and as such it is a problem, because our current individual and collective behaviour is a response to our technological environment. Whether those responses should be called "adaptive" is questionable. Is long nights browsing porn "adaptive"? (for some comic relief: Spent by Joe Matt) It's more like our systems have been hijacked by some superstimulus, like the red gape of the cuckoo chick hijacks the systems of its foster parents.

But we have a chicken and egg problem here. Is technology the prime mover of change, or is it, as you allude (I think?) just a symptom?

There is some evidence (must dig up sources later) that it is: That the prime predictors of technological/cultural/scientific level is population level and density. Which I think makes perfect sense: more people means more forceful feedback to new ideas, more deviant free thinkers producing odd insights (usually useless, but sometimes very useful). Tainter makes the case that the return on investment in R&D is falling in our society, and falling exponentially: I think his point is valid, BUT I think, also, that the rapidly expanding population so far may have countered that effect.

IF this is correct we're in an interesting bind. We have, then, technological development enabling/driving population explosion, and population explosion enabling/driving technology explosion, etc., a dual, mutually reinforcing spiral...

(Of course, population in the high-tech "west" has been rather stagnant these last decades, but I'd argue that the Internet has increased the "virtual population density", thus allowing the explosion to continue).

---

I agree very much that the important thing to limit is population. A conspicuos rich-bastard consumer that only has two children may use thousands of times more resources than a poor subsistence farmer, but if that farmer has ten children, and each of those has ten children, etc., the farmer's descendants' resource use will swamp the resource use of the descendants of the rich person within a handful of generations. The sneaky enemy here is exponential growth.

Problem is, lots of individuals feel, and major religions teach, that having lots of children is not only a great joy but a holy duty. Go forth and multiply and all that...

Den andre et svar/utdypning til beatnikess, som mener jeg ikke bør angripe eksponensiell vekst og religiøse incentiver for å avle:

Yes, well, bit of a bee in my bonnet that, I must admit. And I didn't make myself entirely clear - well, not that I think "entirely clear-ness" is achievable, but at least I could be clearer... Longer though, but:

I agree, the global trend seems to be one of slowing growth.

The continued increases in population are almost solely due to the previous higher rates. Our own baby-boomer population has created an echo boom purely on the numbers, not high fertility rates.

Yes, the population momentum effect... Not to be underestimated, that. From the Optimum Population Trust:

The Earth faces the largest generation of young people in its history – a “youthquake” of some 1.2 billion people between the ages of 10 and 19, or three billion under the age of 25, many living in the new mega-city slums of the developing world. The “demographic momentum” they generate means global population will continue to grow for decades, even if replacement fertility is achieved. Their access to family planning services is thus crucial to achieving a sustainable population for the planet.

My emphasis - the OPT, for one, don't seem to take replacement (or lower) fertility rates as given.

In the meantime for whatever reason fertility rates have plummeted.

One of the salient points of the linked OPT article is that access to contraceptives seems to be the key to lower fertility rates, not greater affluence:

Many developing countries have reduced their total fertility rate (TFR) - their “average family size” - to close to two – and have done so about as quickly as China, but without the coercion that exists in China. They include Costa Rica, Cuba, Iran, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Tunisia, Vietnam and - surprisingly, perhaps - South India. These low-fertility “success stories” often involve vastly different developing countries or regions but have one factor in common. Their governments recognised the population-poverty connection and took steps to remove the barriers to fertility planning.

Studies of such very different locations which have successfully lowered their TFR show that whatever else applies, including changes in prosperity, the key requirement - which can also be implemented much more quickly - is the removal of barriers to contraception. These barriers are widespread and include simple lack of access to the contraceptive methods themselves, ignorance and misinformation, some of it deliberate - for example, exaggerating the risks of a method. When these barriers are removed, through education and good use of the media, and contraceptives become easy to obtain, education and per capita wealth have virtually no extra impact on the use of contraception or family size. The chances of per-person prosperity increasing are also much improved, since there are fewer persons to share in the country’s wealth.

So yes, there are examples of countries, even rather poor countries, successfully lowering their fertility rate. But, if what the OPT states here is accurate, the key success factor is education on family planning and availability of contraception.

And openness and lack of disinformation are prerequisites to those.

Obama rescinded the Global Gag Rule, which is a huge step in the right direction; but the Pope is not exactly helping:

He also warned them that African life was under threat from a number of factors, including condoms.

"It is of great concern that the fabric of African life, its very source of hope and stability, is threatened by divorce, abortion, prostitution, human trafficking and a contraception mentality," he added.

...but, of course,

Africa is the fastest-growing region for the Roman Catholic church

This is the core of the problem, and the reason I'm ranting, and will go on ranting:

In my home town, there are several christian-fundamentalist societies. At present, they constitute a pretty small percentage of the population... but, a very BIG but, they have a much larger than average number of children. This IS an artefact of their religious beliefs, their dogmas; and they DO pass those beliefs on to (the vast majority of) their children.

(These people are also ardent missionaries...

The 50 poorest countries in the world will more than double in size, from 0. 8 billion in 2007 to 1. 7 billion in 2050, according to UN projections published in March 2007.

and they are active in excactly these countries. They are not helping, not people at any rate: They are helping their selfish ideology. And they have real political power - the Global Gag Rule was put in place to help their missionary efforts).

This means that, while the overall fertility rate in my country is just above replacement rate, there are people pursuing exponential-growth reproductive practices whose children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on will almost certainly continue the same practices... Which means that the number of people following those practices will increase, exponentially, and much faster than the number of people not so indoctrinated. Which means the proportion of people following those practices will increase. Which means the low fertility rates in the west is likely a transient phenomenon...

(Some academic support: Demographic Projections Predict Fundamentalist Populations Surpassing Secular Counterparts)

The most striking and well documented example (quick search brings up this and this) of fundamentalist outreproduction is the ultra-orthodox jews of Israel, who are now up to about 25% of the Israeli population and increasing fast - fertility rate increasing.

This is not evolution in the strict Darwinian/biological sense, but it definitely is a selection effect, something closely related to evolution... Something in between pure memetic evolution and biological evolution; a breed of humans that "use" a symbiotic memeplex to out-reproduce the competition.

Some other commenters on this thread raise the point that to avoid being hijacked by the temptations of our techno-consumerist environment you must distance yourself from it. That is excactly what the fundamentalists do; they live behind memetic walls...

I propose that evolution is happening, right now, before our eyes, at breakneck speed. The people who let themselves be seduced by the sweet consumerist life, who pursue careers instead of children, who become addicted to internet poker (and by extension spend less time and energy on sex), who use contraception when they do have sex... are being out-reproduced. Their fitness in this environment is quite simply low.

Evolution will make religious fundamentalism triumph in the end. Isn't that a lovely piece of irony?

-------------------

To sum up, efforts to stop further population explosion is under a two-pronged attack from various religious groups:

Firstly, they are actively sabotaging the most effective brake on fertility rates.

Secondly, they are out-reproducing the people who lower their fertility rates, effectively torpedoing any hope of any long-term solution.

Still time to rail against them, I think, though you may be right that 50 years ago was the last chance to stop them.

Så kan man jo spørre seg om standpunktet i det andre innlegget egentlig er kompatibelt med det første. Uansett, jeg er helt med Hannahan når han sier at det å få barn bør være et privilegium...

Linker, matkrise

Global starvation imminent as US faces crop failure (advarsel: villedende tittel)

Phosphorus Famine: The Threat to Our Food Supply

Massive imbalances in global fertilizer use

Flere momenter

Vanskelig dette.

I forrige post skrev jeg "Men dersom vi stopper velstandsveksten og stopper befolkningsveksten, så har vi ingen umiddelbar energikrise".

Hmmm ja det var det da. Jeg ække helt enig med meg selv her... kanskje vi har det likevel. Grunner:

• Peak Oil. Selvsagt. Energien som faller bort kan erstattes, som pr. Hirsch-rapporten, MEN det vil være dyrt og tidkrevende OG ha økonomiske ringvirkninger. De økonomiske virkningene kan være svært alvorlige, sparke i gang en depresjon som kan vare i et tiår eller mer.
  
  
• Et punkt jeg tenkte en del på i vår, men som falt ut her: Økonomisk krise. Økonomi er på mange måter virkelighetsfjernt, men har også stor makt; i en del tilfeller kan økonomien faktisk definere virkeligheten. (Mer om det i en egen post. Forhåpentligvis... så mange ideer, så lite tid...) Krise i økonomien betyr mindre vilje til å bygge ut sårt tiltrengt ny energi-infrastruktur. Jeg er etterhvert overbevist om at den økonomiske krisen er relatert til PO; det som er cluet her er at det er en feedback-løkke. PO forsterker den økonomiske krisen, og den økonomiske krisen forsterker effekten av PO. Hold på hatten, her bærer det utforbakke...
  
  
• Verden har definitivt et vannproblem. Erstatning av krympende, overbeskattede vannkilder krever mer energi. Mye foreslått ny energiproduksjon, most notoriously den såkalte "shale oil", krever sinnsyke mengder vann for å kunne realiseres.
  
  
• Det er også svært sannsynlig at vi på sikt vil trenge mer, mye mer, energi for å holde utvinningen av en lang liste med mineraler konstant.
  

Med bare en liten undertone av ironi: Vi har en energiutfordring.