I’m seeing a lot of assumptions out in the Peak Oil blog traffic lately that really demand some critical response. To take a recent example, Dave Cohen yesterday wrote in Everybody’s Jumping on the Solar Bandwagon

Do we live in a world of ever flowing abundance, or do we live in a world of limits to growth?

If your answer is “abundance”, your approach to the future requires a shift in direction in a context of business as usual. If your answer is “limits”, your approach requires a shift in behavior in a context of living within your means. What follows examines possible constraints on the expansion of solar energy in the 21st century.

The assumed correct answer here is “limits.” However this doesn’t square with physics. In fact, the answer is that both are true. This is based on understanding what a system is, and what the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics actually says, and on our common thinking about natural resources and time.

What the 2nd Law says is that in a closed system not yet in equilibrium, entropy - the measure of disorder in a system - is always increasing. Clearly the Earth is not a closed system, thanks to the continuous inputs of solar energy, the vast quantities of which Cohen thoughtfully describes in detail. So from the perspective of systems thinking, the world is abundant from an energy and material perspective (since one can be converted into the other).

Systems theory has been around for a long time, and has been well-articulated in the last 70 years. One of it’s more popular incarnations has been Donella Meadows’, (et. al.) studies and books Limits to Growth and Beyond the Limits based on the systems work of Jay Forrester (Urban Dynamics, Industrial Dynamics, etc.). Big Gav recently had some interesting things to say about Limits to Growth.

Limits tried to predict, using a computer model, dynamic measures of world population, food, pollution and prosperity. Some aspects of systems theory were made clear by this work, including that systems behave in complex, non-linear and often counter-intuitive ways.

Where we come down on the side of limits is in the domain of natural resources: fossil fuels, minerals, forest and arable land for agriculture, air and water. Let me point out that the concept of “natural resource” needs further elaboration and critical analysis, being defined, as it is, from the viewpoint of economics. This analysis and the wildly undervalued way in which natural resources are priced will be the subject of a (near) future post.

Nobody (that I’ve read, heard or talked to) doubts that oil is a limited natural resource. The Peak Oil community has pointed out clearly that this limit is compounded by the shape of Hubbert’s production curve. Thus, “limit” is itself a complex concept, that has been assumed to be simple and straightforward in environmental discussions on both sides. A limit is a function of a system, not a hard and fast quantity in and of itself.

The POs also make clear that oil is basically millions of years of compressed sun-time. We have been living off our natural capital rather than natural income at least since the beginning of the fossil fuel age. They also rightly argue that the history of economics, that is of capitalism, is contiguous with the age of fossil fuels, and is dependent on many assumptions about the supply, demand and price of fossil fuel resources.

All of this discussion has profound implications for economic theory. This theory is still being worked out, by the way, no matter what Reagan-praisers and neo-Hayekian Thatcherites might say. Georgescu-Roegen is the key figure here, though his work is rarely mentioned in discussions on general economics. Not surprisingly, Georgescu-Roegen’s economic lineage inherits from Schumpeter and passes down to Herman Daly. A version of Daly’s famous “The Economy is a Wholly-owned Subsidiary of the Ecosystem” diagram can be seen here.

Underlying all this are my deep misgivings about concepts at the heart of economic theory and policy, including what we mean by cost, work, labor, value, trade, rationality, power and so on. These are the topics - energy, ecology, economics, sustainability, systems- I want to take up in the next several months. I’ve chosen to blog about them for two reasons: 1) I want your input, and 2) my method is what I would call “patch-and-mosaic”, to borrow a phrase from landscape ecology. What I mean is that I want the freedom to write topically, stochastically, in more of an essay form. My hope is that these threads and discussions turn into something more tangible, but for now my aim is to clarify our thinking on these muddy topics.

On Sunday, Sharon Astyk wrote at Casaubon’s Book about Victory Gardens. We must all be tapping into something here. There are a couple of links to sites that are promoting a new brand of Victory Garden, probably as part of the Relocalization movement. I’m going now to read the whole thing and maybe post a comment.

Hat tip to Energy Bulletin.

So WTI One-month futures hit $100 today for the first time. The end to Jerome’s countdown series. So I went back and read his second post from June 2005, which included this quote from a CERA study:

The balance of supply over demand has the potential to expand significantly over the next five years, and this could drive oil prices to the downside. If demand growth averages a relatively strong 2.2% through 2010, prices could weaken from recent record highs and slip well below $40/bbl as 2007-08 nears. If demand growth were notably weaker, a steeper price fall would be conceivable; however such a fall would likely slow capacity expansion and bring a market rebalance within two to three years.

I looked at another historic EIA (eia.doe.gov) report from around the same time predicting we would be seeing $50 prices by now. Obviously these predictions are whacked. I can’t find specific demand figures, but only China and Russia seem to be above the 2.2% growth estimate here. What didn’t happen is all the additional supply coming online that was supposed to, assumed to. Maybe the Peak Oilers are onto something…

The Guardian reveals this morning that Gordon Browne’s government is planning to move away from EU targets for renewables.

At the very end of the article is this staggering line:

Analysis by Mr Hutton’s department suggests it could cost the UK £4bn a year to achieve a 9% share of renewable energy by 2020.

£4bn a year? That’s about $8bn. This is such a tiny investment to make a major move toward sustainability that it’s pathologically insane not to do it!

Today President Bush will ask Congress for another $46bn for another 6 months in Iraq. That would pay for 6 of the 13 years for the UK to make the move.

The article also states that Germany now produces 9% from renewables, and has gotten there in the last 6 years. This is all good news. It means that the switch can be made, despite the lunatic resistance of politicians and entrenched interest. And it’s not catastrophically expensive either.

I’m working on the design of my home landscape and wanted to start doing zone and energy input planning. In looking for a solar chart of my latitude I came across this nifty University of Oregon Sunchart Online tool. Just enter your zip code, time zone and a couple of other parameters and presto! a PDF or PNG of the chart for your area.

I just discovered a link to a press release about Rochester’s “Greenprint” which contains a link to the full report (PDF). I would have liked to have attended this event, but I also want to find out about opportunities to plug in after the fact. A friend who is a strawbale building expert said he met with Mayor Duffy a few weeks ago. So there appears to be some reality behind this. The fact that Hillary was behind the whole thing was encouraging.
The report seems to conflate “green” with alternate energy and energy conservation, which I view as a small subsection of green. Nevertheless there are some 12 specific action items, several of which have to do with training, awareness and education. The ethanol activity in the area is apparent. One of my goals is to push at the crop productivity issue of growing sugar beets instead of corn, so this might be a place to start to make some connections.

I’m often annoyed by projections that start out “given current rates of …” I’ve noticed there are a lot of stupid things we do as a society, which when changed on a large enough scale will start to bring us into alignment with reality once more. I rarely see anyone analyze what the effect of eliminating stupidity would have.

Here’s a quick list I came up with in five minutes.

1. Flushing toilets with drinking water

This clearly makes no sense in a world starving for fresh water. A simple fix is to use gray water for flushing. Run a drainpipe from a hand sink to the toilet reservoir. Here we run up against government bureaucracy and zoning regulations. Even a place as advanced as Berkeley, CA is attacking “gray water guerrillas” for re-plumbing their houses for gray water reuse.

2. Feeding food-grade grain to livestock

Energy calories are lost at every link along the chain from crude oil production to grain production, especially corn, and on to feed for cattle. Every calorie of beef requires many multiples of grain calories, which in turn use many multiples more of high-quality petroleum-based energy. The ROI on this energy is so far negative that no one in their right mind would even consider it. In fact, it is criminal insanity.

3. Feeding food-grade grain to machinery (ethanol)

At best, ethanol produces about 64% of the BTUs produced by gasoline. So does it make sense to grow corn, which is highly petroleum-intensive (as grown today) to lose at least 36%? Again the ROI is ridiculous here. In real estate, this is called an alligator. This doesn’t even start to get into the ethics of growing corn for energy or cattle feed when people are starving everywhere.

BTW, Sugar Beets yields double per acre what corn yields as an ethanol stock.

4. Deforestation, especially for ethanol crops or beef

Forests provide so many services, and are so productive, that there is not one good reason to cut them down. They create oxygen and soil, sequester carbon, filter and store water, maintain genetic diversity, prevent flooding, grow food, timber and medicine. Forests are a resource without a measurable opportunity cost, because the next best use is so far below and less than their use just as they are as to be wholly inaccurate. Therefore, all of our economic activity ought to be geared toward growing and harvesting forests. A friend of mine has just started an investment fund based on purchased forestland throughout the country. He suggested that the Southern Tier, rather than targeting switch grass for ethanol production, should be replanted to black cherry, which is in high demand for woodworking and grows in only a very small area in the world.

5. Depleting energy capital rather than energy income first

This is where I get annoyed with the current analyses, even at the Oil Drum, that show that solar, wind and biofuels will never replace the demand for petroleum-based energy. The point is we are outrageously and extravagantly liquidating the assets in our trust fund, when we could be living very comfortably off the interest.

6. Lawns

The American lawn represents one of the single largest agricultures in the world, the gross product of which is very nearly nothing. It uses more artificial fertilizer than the agriculture of India and requires endless hours of mowing, gasoline-powered equipment and chemical sprays. We could easily grow the bulk of our food by simply replacing our lawns and planting to vegetables, herbs and fruit trees. When we do this we see grass as it is: a weed.

7. Suburbs

Suburbs are clearly a result of car culture. I am not one to believe they need to go away, but need to be re-designed. There is a subdivision in Davis, CA called Village Homes that is built along sustainable lines. It includes a community garden, fruit trees everywhere, extensive swaling for water retention, and sidewalks in the back yards. All new subdivisions and housing developments can be designed and planned to avoid the suburban scourges, too much driving, water runoff from streets and parking lots, over-extended infrastructure and so on. Existing suburbs can be retrofitted to reduce need for driving and replanted to useful small-scale gardens and agriculture. Some reforestation can be started.

8. Seed Patents

I have nothing against intellectual property, but the idea of cornering parts of the food market is just plain wrong. The seed companies ought to be able to patent maybe the specific changes they’ve made to existing stock, but the original DNA belongs to no one.

9. Air Travel

George Monbiot has a lot to say about how destructive air travel is, so I won’t repeat that. High Speed Rail would be a much more efficient and cleaner way to travel long distances. This is practical today but would probably require infrastructure and subsidy on a national level. I’ve always found travel by train to be much more comfortable and enjoyable than air travel anyway. If you’ve flown recently, you might agree.

10. Market Fundamentalism

The Thatcher revolution, under whose cloud we’ve been forced to live for the last 30 years represented an extremist swing away from moderate liberal capitalism, where the excesses of capitalist redistribution of wealth from laborers to owners is moderated by democratic government. We have two hundred and fifty years of history to look at here. The laissez faire extremism of the last generation needs to move back toward the middle.

Just read an article in the Independent by a journalist who visits the Utopia Experiment in self-sufficiency for a month. The site is located just outside Inverness, Scotland. The good news is that people learn quickly, especially when the food is at stake. The less good news is that they haven’t gone a winter yet, with no water or electricity, or faced the “hungry gap” in March.

They must be aware that there’s a similar experiment just 20 miles east of there that’s been running successfully for nearly forty years. I had the good luck to visit Findhorn in my college years, if only for a month. My experience with the learning I can echo, as within a day or two I had adopted what I can only call the rhythm of the place. The pace there seemed much slower, and people rarely blinked. They kept their eyes open. And so did I, once I let go to this energy and let it carry me.

It was there on the Moray Firth that I, too, learned to cook: something for which I can never be sufficiently grateful. I learned about working in a bindery, about meditation, about demolition work, about pine trees and the connection between natural resources, sustainability and peace. George Galloway recently had a video piece with David Strahan (hat tip TOD)looking specifically at the recent wars and their connection to resources.

I finally finished my herb garden this weekend. This ended up being about a 6 week, $400 project. Aesthetically I’m pretty happy with the result. See for yourself.

I did this all by hand which, for me, is always a good thing. I think people may think I’m crazy or stupid for doing it this way, but there are a couple of clear arguments:

1. human labor is very fuel efficient
2. power tools make a lot of noise
3. tools seem to intermediate, and the higher the technology, the more the intermediation

What I find myself doing is creating these things in the landscape from a semi-baked design and then looking for a permaculture justification after the fact. This is backwards, obviously, but I’m also trying to include visual aesthetics in the design, something Mollison eschews completely. Actually I think there is something in the Permaculture Designer’s Manual about creating a new aesthetics- a thought for future posts.

Here’s a YouTube of James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute:

Elsewhere he states that the recent IPCC Report does not factor in the possibility of the South Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets melting, which would raise sea levels as much as 15-35 meters over the course of several centuries. There is geologic data to back this projection which results in what Hansen calls “a different planet.”