A great article

From what I've seen, very few economists take the view of peak oil seriously, or at least don't count it into their projections of what the economy will do and what it will look like soon. Except this guy. It's a fascinating article, with a slightly different view of why job growth and such has been so sluggish, and it's well worth a read. What he says about oil is true--it's not that we're really going to run out, it's that it will [fairly] quickly become too expensive. I think that we've been making it artificially cheap for a long time now, and it really hasn't done us any favors. It's long past time to remove government support for a dying industry and change over to newer, better ones. I realize there are problems with solar (like the efficiency factor) and wind and all of that, but if we actually put as much money behind these industries as we do into the oil and coal industries they'd quickly solve some of the bigger problems.

A paradox

If you ask most people what the number one way to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels is--what's quickest and easiest--they'll answer that efficiency is the way to go. After all, weatherizing your home can be rather cheap (compared to other remodeling you might do) and it's fairly easy. However, there is some evidence that efficiency of resources can actually promote waste. Thus I give you, the Jevons Paradox. Simply stated, the paradox is that when people use resources more efficiently they often end up using far more of them than when the resource was inefficient.
This happens for several reasons. For one, if something is efficient to utilize one often does it more. It's so easy! Why not turn up the heater a little bit more? After all, it just takes the push of a button. It's not like you have to shovel more coal in every time you want the house a little warmer. Or go ahead and take a longer shower. You've installed a low-flow showerhead! You deserve a little bit more time under the spray for being so eco-conscious.
The second reason is because the relative cost of the resource goes down with more efficiency. People feel freer to use something because, well, it's not going to cost that much more, right? And you're not using too much of it because you're being efficient! Go ahead, leave the lights on even when you're not in a room. After all, it's just the flick of a switch and it's all the way over there. It's not that big a deal, really, because the energy is so cheap.
Related to that is the fact that when a widely used resource is cheap, people have more money in their pockets to spend on other things. And as we've seen in the last few years, people are terrible at saving that extra money. After all, things are cheap! Buy more! By consuming more and more goods, we end up obliterating any gains we've made in the area of efficiency. All of the resources and energy that we're not using for Thing A end up getting used to produce Thing B, which usually would be a stupid thing to produce if the resources and energy weren't so cheap. But again, we're being efficient! We've got all the money in the worl...wait, the stock market crashed again?
Efficiency alone does not work. It needs to work in tandem with the idea of conservation. We need the perceived value of saving resources to match up with the value of making better use of them. That's the only true way to be efficient. I found a great infographic about some of the reasons electricity usage has gone up so much in our country in just the last 50 or so years. Digs against Republican views aside ("So much for the wisdom of the free market") it's very interesting.
On the subject of energy efficiency, light bulbs are now slated to be far more efficient soon. This is good news, at least in terms of how much money people will save. (Estimates say about $100-200 for the average household.) It would be even better news if people learned to turn off lights when they're not home or not in a room.
Also, fuel use in the U.S. went down by quite a lot last year. December reached a 15-year low. Since fuel use is so closely tied to economic health and employment (people buying things and going to work) why is it that so many politicians and articles are proudly proclaiming that we're out of a recession and on our way back to growth and prosperity? If you look at anything other than Wall Street and the stock market, the outlook is abysmal. The signs are not good. I'm not fool enough to think that the reduced gasoline consumption is because everyone in the country suddenly became concerned with the environment. I'm thinking it's more because they have to (can't afford it) or because they have no where to go (no jobs). Boy, I really can take some good news and make it depressing. It's a talent.
In other news, UAF was ranked as the fifth "most popular" university in the U.S. by USNews. Now, there is some debate and grumbling about how they defined popular (it's based on the number of applicants versus the number of enrollees) and I agree that it is bad, but it's also interesting. I think a lot of the naysayers were discounting the fact that we have some really good programs here. Anything involving biology, fisheries, and wildlife, or engineering, is fantastic. Even our Masters of Fine Arts program is in the top ten, last I heard. The fact that we retain 75% of students--that so many people are willing to tough out these conditions for their education--is a sign that our programs are worth it, I think. You can read their summary of UAF here. And then you can laugh with me that they define the setting as "urban". Anyone who comes from the big city expecting a truly urban setting is going to be seriously disappointed. (As is anyone who thinks they're coming to the middle of nowhere. I will never forget my sister-in-law exclaiming, "Oh, it's like a real town!")
Finally, here's a wonderful reminder that our actions affect not just humans but the animals around us too. "The mercury is believed to cause bats to act erratically, and in some cases to lose their adeptness at avoiding wind turbine blades." Actions that we take for the sake of human health and our environment positively affect the wildlife around us. Do we need any more reasons to change our behavior? Because I think that those two alone should be enough.
And next time you see an animal behaving oddly, remember that they might actually be suffering from mercury poisoning. And it's our fault.

Not so special after all

I stumbled across this article earlier today and it really struck a chord with me. The point the author makes in the beginning is that yes, humans are unique. But no more unique than any other species. We are characterized by several things, most of which comes down to our large brains and opposable thumbs (the latter of which we share with several types of primates). But why do we think that makes us so much better than other species, so graced by God? The author points out that the cheetah is unique in its ability to run over 60 mph, and the sperm whale can dive 2000 meters on a single breath. I would add that dogs are unique in the animal kingdom for their affinity for and relationship to us (what other species can read human facial expressions?), and cats are unique for being the only species which domesticated itself.
So what makes humans so special? We give preference to our own needs for water, air, power, and all the other resources of the planet. There are "acceptable losses" in terms of animal life when we decide to do things like build power lines and roads. What really gives us that right? We build zoos to cage animals. I'm not saying that zoos are bad. At the worst, they allow people to see and study animals, which makes us as a species feel more connected to them and we care for them more. At their best, zoos help to bring back species from the brink of extinction. But it's something we don't see other species doing. There aren't really human zoos out there with lions and elephants saying, "Ah, yes. I see now. The wild human...." We might have large brains, but in fact I think we've used them poorly for the most part. We've used them to treat the earth like it's ours alone, and treat other species as if they don't matter.
In the same way, I think we have a tendency to think of ourselves, individually, as special too. (And I'm as bad about this as anyone else is.) As just one example, what gives us the "right" to electricity? People lived without it for millenia. In fact, most people around the world don't have the easy access to electricity that we in Europe and North America enjoy. So what makes us special even among our species? We're poisoning the air and water and land with our use of electricity, and the ways in which we extract power from the earth that is absolutely unique. And it doesn't stay here, where we're doing the polluting. It travels in the wind and through the water. What gives us the right to do that to other people? So often it's the desperately poor who pay the price. They're the ones who work the mines, live next to the power plants and extraction sites. Why do they have to pay the price so that I can power my iPod, and do I have any "right" to these things when other people will be the ones to bear the harm?
I struggle with questions like these. Shane, I am absolutely certain, wouldn't consent to turning off our electricity, and I'm not sure I would either. It would be "weird". It would deprive me of a lot, especially light in the winter, which really can't be discounted around here. At the same time, it feels like such a hypocritical thing to enjoy all the modern comforts of the first world knowing what harm I'm causing others through my actions. Why am I so "deserving" of this?
I really don't know what the answer is. I suppose all I can do is my best. Cut back where I can, and try to do a little better every day/week/month/year. Someday, hopefully, I will have the perfect "sustainable" house of my dreams. Hopefully we as a species will finally learn to put our large brains to a good purpose, to the betterment of the entire world and not just ourselves. But I won't hold my breath waiting for that day, since I doubt even the sperm whale has lungs big enough for that.
And since this was depressing, here are some adorable pictures of baby animals to cheer you up.

More thoughts on "peak oil"

In the book "$20 Per Gallon", the author points out that one of the most basic distinguishing features between the middle class and the poor are that the middle class owns cars. Now, I don't know that this is necessarily true in the U.S., since I've known plenty of poor people (myself included, back when I could truly describe myself as "poor") who've owned cars. But for most of the world, owning a car is a giant barrier to the middle class lifestyle. With a car, you have more mobility and more options. Thus, most of the world aspires to owning a car.
However, we're getting so backwards in the U.S. that not owning a car (or being "a one-car family") is becoming a sign of how well-off you are. It means that you can afford to live in an area with lots of choices in shopping and transit. And food. Most poor urban areas are considered food deserts, meaning that they don't have easily accessible grocery stores and farmer's markets. This leaves poorer people more dependent on their cars to get the basic necessities of life, as well as to get to and from work. It's a horrible cycle because most poor people can't afford nice cars, so the very thing they're dependent upon is also keeping them in a state of desperation by constantly breaking down and being very expensive to own and operate. I wonder how many people we could bring into the true middle class (as I think of it, noted more by a lack of debt than by car ownership) if we focused on making our cities and towns less dependent on cars? How many accidents each year would we prevent, and how many deaths and injuries? How much "car debt" would be erased in just a few short years?
I think that one of the changes we'll see as our nation changes, as oil gets more and more expensive, is that there will be a greater demand for walkability and mass transit. When gas hit $4/gallon, how many more people chose mass transit than cars? Since mass transit is still dependent on fossil fuels, how much more emphasis will there be on walking and biking in the future? Fewer and fewer people want to be dependent upon their cars. I know I don't, and I'm so glad I'm not. If we had to get rid of it tomorrow, it would limit some of the things we could do in the winter (like seeing friends across town) but wouldn't be a disaster. I'd like to keep it that way, thank you.
I do know that this past summer there was an uproar in downtown Fairbanks over an initiative that was started to make downtown more walking and biking friendly. I tend to avoid the downtown area, because it's across town so it's harder for me to get to and it's a warren of confusing streets. Not fun. But the houses there are affordable, so it's a place I've considered for living. (The transit station is there, so I would be able to bus to and from work.) The biggest factor against that is that it's not a friendly place for walking and biking. There aren't really any grocery stores, and all of the amenities I've gotten used to having nearby would more than likely have to be driven to.
The initiative that was up for a vote was backed by almost all of the downtown businesses, but was killed by the city council. (I don't know what the reasoning behind it was.) They've placed more of an emphasis on building big box stores at the fringes of town than on rejuvenating the downtown businesses and for that I'm upset since it can only hurt my community. And in the long run, I see the steps they turned down as being necessary for my community.
I'm rethinking already considering who not to vote for the next time city council members are up for reelection.
As far as the book, "$20 Per Gallon", it was ok. Not great. I think that as an overview for some of the changes we'll have to make in the future it's decent, but the author takes an overly simplistic view of things. He derides some of the clean technology that's been come up with (wind, solar) and praises nuclear as the best option for the future. Granted, this was before the Japanese earthquake and the disaster at Fukushima. But I still don't think that nuclear is the direction we're headed in. It's expensive, and unlike that author I don't gloss over the small amount of very, very harmful byproduct it creates. I think we'll just have to do better than that in the future. Honestly, I'm excited for the new technologies that we'll come up with to work our way out of this problem. I don't think that we'll ever go back to living the way pioneers did because people are resourceful. We're not going to essentially go back in time.
The author also claimed that electric cars are the wave of the future. And yes, I see a lot of people moving that way right now (or at least to hybrids--I now know at least two people who own Priuses) but no matter what people say, electric cars are not zero emissions. You have to plug them in, and roughly 50% of the country's electricity is powered by coal. So they don't have oil fumes spewing out of them, true, but unless you're purely powered by wind and/or solar, they're producing harmful fumes somewhere. They're not zero emissions, just better than anything else we have.

"Peak oil" might be right

I just started reading a book called "$20 Per Gallon" by Christopher Steiner. I can tell already that it needs to be read with a grain of salt, because it was written back in 2009. Statements like, "We could see $7/gallon gas by 2010" seem horribly dated by the eve of 2012, not to mention unbearably pessimistic. But that's not really what the book is about, anyway. It's an interesting thought project where he tries to imagine how the world would (will?) change at different price points for oil. He makes the excellent point that oil is in everything--only 40% of our total oil consumption is in the form of gasoline for cars. It's also in nearly ever commercial beauty product, every plastic, and in many synthetic chemicals. Think that ball is rubber? It's a synthetic petroleum substitute for rubber. (Real rubber comes from plants.) Your toothbrush is made of petroleum, and even most (if not all) of your food has either been shipped using petroleum, or packaged in some form of it.
So what makes me believe that peak oil might be real? Well, there's the price. It keeps going up and up and up. When I first started driving (in WA state) for a time the gasoline was $.97 per gallon. Halcyon days! For the last couple of years, gas has been hovering between $3.50-$4.00, depending on your area. That's with a huge decline in the amount of driving people have done during that same time period. The author points out that in the year 2008, people drove about 180 billion fewer miles than they had the year before. And the price still went up. Oh, not all at once. We might see big leaps every few years (as with the leap from $2/gallon gas to $4/gallon, which happened rather quickly) but for the most part I think prices will hold steady for the most part and rise rather slowly, without ever dropping significantly. $4/gallon has become our new normal hasn't it, after roughly 3 years of it? (At least, it's still about $4/gallon here, I don't know about your areas.) I have a hard time believing that speculation is the sole cause of the jump in price. Supply and demand are still the biggest indicators of price, and demand is still going up.
The more convincing argument to me, though, is simply to read the news and hear where oil companies want to get their oil from now. Places like the Arctic Ocean. I think of that as a place of last resort, because it's so damn difficult to get to and work with. There's no reason why any sane person would think, "I'll drill there! Fantastic!" unless they had no other choice. It's expensive, it's difficult, and it's dangerous. There's no way around those three facts.
Then there's the huge debate about the tar sands in Alberta. From what I've read, it actually takes more energy to get the oil out of the tar sands than it will create. (The difference is that the energy to extract is natural gas, rather than oil.) Even if it's not true, it's still a very energy intensive place to get oil from, so the profit margin is much slimmer. From any logical perspective, this makes no sense. Except that most things run on oil, not natural gas, so with that in mind (and factoring in the idea of profitability above any other considerations) it does make a weird sort of sense to go for it. But as with drilling in the Arctic, it's not easy and it's not cheap for the companies. In future prices, if they're allowed to move ahead with these projects, a certain amount of risk will need to be factored into the price of oil. Which means that prices will go up again. A lot. And since oil is so prevalent in our daily lives, everything else that's attached to or made from oil will also go up in price.
The last convincing argument for me is the fact that several oil industry insiders (most notably T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oil magnate) have said that peak oil is real. Pickens, last I heard, has started a wind energy project. I can see how one might suspect him of fanning the flames of peak oil to get a leap on making his new venture profitable. What I find less easy to believe is that he'd jump ship on a very profitable venture to start a riskier and often less financially rewarding one. As with most things, it's easiest to follow the money. If oil barons think that oil won't be as profitable in the future, they'll move onto other profitable things.
We might wonder why more isn't being done to create a more sustainable, renewable system of energy. As with a lot of things, the answer is money. As long as oil is profitable, they'll keep pushing it. As long as people keep buying it, they'll keep producing it and charging as much as they can for it. It's simple economics.
I don't think that oil is going to "run out", as the common wisdom goes, and I'm not a "doomer". I don't think society will totally collapse because I think that changes will occur over a period of time rather than all at once. Oil won't disappear overnight, it's simply going to get too difficult to extract, and too expensive to use. I'm torn in my hopes for the future prices. On the one hand, people would make many different choices if gas got up to $20/gallon, or even $8/gallon. They'd drive less, be more economical with their energy consumption, probably utilize more naturally sourced things (since plastic would go up in price, too) and generally be forced into living greener lives because not doing so would be too expensive. However, this would also disproportionately hurt the poor. So many people are struggling as it is. What would happen to them? For that matter, what would happen to us? Heating oil is already horribly costly (I haven't priced it out lately, but I know it's at least a dollar or two more per gallon than regular gasoline) and we use it for so much of the year. What would happen to our rent if the price went up another dollar or two?
Speaking of which, when I spoke to my brother in California the other day he was shocked by the fact that our landlord can raise the rent by 10%. I guess in Cali there's a cap of 3-4% per year. I did say, though, that this is the first time in three years that the rent has been raised, so it's basically only about a 3% average increase. I never thought of it in percentage terms before, though. $100 doesn't seem that bad, but 10% seems like a lot.

Smorgasboard

Just really quick, I wanted to share a couple of things. The first is this article about air pollution in Fairbanks. How to solve our problem is a really fraught question around here. Because of where we are and our climate, none of the renewable technology that's currently hot is a viable option here. We don't get enough sun when we need the most energy, we have very little wind, and we're not near coastlines. The only thing I've heard of which might work here are Bloom Boxes. I've also heard of clean wood burning technologies, but for just the University to switch to that, by one estimate they'd have to have 150,000 acres of forest. (Our trees grow very slowly.) Plus, the effort to cut down all of those trees and transport them to the power plant would wipe out pretty much any environmental benefit.
So for now, we're stuck with coal. The University power plant needs to be redone soon (it's approaching or has surpassed, I can't remember which, it's viable, useful lifespan) so maybe with the EPA's help we could come up with something better?
I also found this article about some food rules which Michael Pollan has added to his list. If you haven't read his books ("The Omnivore's Dilemma", "Food Rules", "In Defense of Food", "The Botany of Desire" are the ones I've read) he's a fantastic author and really good about getting to the heart of an issue. They're also very well researched and supported.
Today Shane and I are making chili in our new-to-us Crockpot and I'll be using the two last peppers from my plant. I hope they aren't really the last peppers! I've only gotten four. But that's also been four peppers we didn't buy at the store, and I know when and what meals we used them for. I'm very proud of my little pepper plant.
This is also my first ever use of dried beans (from Alaska Feed Co.) so wish me luck! I had them soaking overnight, so hopefully all will be well.