Planet A of the Humans

“I wanna decide who lives and who dies.” Crow T Robot

In the late 1980s, I took a very smart woman to Michael Moore’s film, Roger and Me, showing at a small theatre in NW Washington DC. As the lights came up, we found that Moore had been watching along with us. He was friendly and accessible, explaining that he wanted to see the audience’s reaction to different scenes. I’ve seen almost all of Moore’s subsequent films.

I recently watched Planet of the Humans, which has become controversial for its accusations that environmental groups and CleanTech businesses are promoting ‘green’ industries that promise a renewable future but actually exacerbate energy depletion and climate change. On Earth Day, the film was posted for free on youtube, and will be available for a month. Jeff Gibbs is credited as writer, director and producer, and Ozzie Zehner was a producer, while Moore’s name is on the film as Executive Producer. Like Moore, Gibbs hails from Flint MI, and has been involved in several Moore projects since serving as Field Producer on Bowling for Columbine. Zehner is also the author of Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism (Our Sustainable Future).

Some notable environmentalists and groups were called out in the film and in response, Gasland documentarian Josh Fox called for Moore to retract it. The Guardian quickly offered a mostly favorable review, as did blogger Travalanche, though he noted the film offered no solutions. Forbes couldn’t resist a smirk at any attack on environmentalism, but felt the message was too apocalyptic. Six days later Vox called the film a gift to big oil, as The Hill’s Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball invited Moore, Gibbs and Zehner to Rising to defend the film, and the following day, brought on Josh Fox to explain his criticisms. One of Fox’s accusations was that the film advocated population control/eco-Fascism, which he reiterated even after Ball and Enjeti reported that Moore had denied it the day before. 

Several days later, Jacobin offered a strangely critical article, Planet of the Anti-Humanists, which admitted that film point after film point was true, but ultimately concluded the film was too Malthusian. (I’ve argued before that Malthus himself wasn’t all that Malthusian – if you bother to read what he actually wrote.)

On May Day, Rolling Stone posted, A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Movement: Michael Moore Damages Our Most Important Goal, in which Bill McKibben responded angrily and called out several errors in how he was portrayed in the film.

On Cinco de Mayo, Moore, Gibbs and Zehner hosted a livestream discussion with Clare Farrell of Extinction Rebellion. Moore explained once again that the PotH team respected and felt kinship with environmentalists like Josh Fox and Bill McKibben, but simply had disagreements as to the severity of the situation and the efficacy of the solutions. But the film’s errors were an own goal that will help critics.

I’m not familiar with Extinction Rebellion, but I have encountered a few serious doomers in my research on energy depletion. Guy MacPherson and Carolyn Baker spoke at Age of Limits II in 2013, but either declined or weren’t invited back for the session I attended in 2014. They remind us that “Nature Bats Last” and believe that humans face Near-Term Extinction (NTE) and will soon disappear from the earth. Two of the 2014 AoL attendees told me that the NTE folk were a cult-like presence, but another said Baker offered counsel about dealing with loss.

We do face loss. The Planet of Humans viewpoint is not quite as apocalyptic as NTE, but they do feel that we need to advocate more serious change than trying to continue business as usual by clear-cutting forests for wind turbines, or buying cheap PV panels that entail dumps of unregulated waste products somewhere in Asia. They don’t think technology has improved that much in ten years that we can continue our present levels of consumption.

In The Life of Brian, the Pythons offered a lasting joke about there being more enmity between Judean factions than for the Romans who enslaved them. So perhaps it is not a surprise to see a scathing battle between optimistic and pessimistic factions in the climate movement. We do have a thriving youth movement against climate change, talk about a Green New Deal, etc, but we have yet to see them win any significant battles or reduce consumption. And there is a thriving CleanTech industry with the ear of government that is burning through tax revenue and investment capital. That is the battle this film tried to address.

US Open Finals & Climate Crisis Town Hall

I’ve been watching tennis for a long time. The US Open has come down to two compelling finals. In one, Serena Williams faces Bianca Andreescu. By winning, Serena could tie Margaret Smith Court’s record of 24 wins in majors. Eleven of Court’s titles were Australian Opens during an age when not all the players chose to take the long flight down under – but she did win them. But Court’s homophobic religious views have become extremely unpopular inside and outside the locker room, so a lot of tennis people want Serena to consign her to the history books.

Andreescu, though, is a solid player. Just a teenager, she moves well, hits hard off both sides, and competes well, having mowed down every top ten player she’s faced in the last several months. She’ll be tough to beat.

On the men’s side, Rafael Nadal seeks to move to only one win behind Roger Federer’s twenty major titles, with the realistic prospect of winning another Roland Garros next year. After a tired-looking loss to Grigor Dimitrov, Federer’s chances of extending his lead seem about as compelling as his spaghetti commercials. Opposing finalist Daniil Medvedev is fast, powerful and a strong competitor, but has a history of behaving poorly on court, so the wealthy crowd will likely be rooting for Rafa.

Who will win? One strategy is to minimize errors, another is to go for winners, but tennis seems to come down to a balance of consistency and aggression. You can’t just get the ball back in play, but you also can’t give the opponent lots of free points by going for winners on every shot. And, you have to deal with the increasingly intense summer heat.

A few days ago, CNN hosted a Climate Crisis Town Hall for all the major Democratic presidential candidates except Tulsi Gabbard, who is on military duty. Climate activists wanted there to be a climate change-themed debate, but the always timid Democratic National Committee wouldn’t allow it. So instead – over seven hours – each candidate was interviewed in a town hall format by CNN anchors and concerned citizens with prepared questions. In past town halls, these “ordinary citizens” have turned out to have industry connections or concealed agendas, but this batch seemed mostly on point. In fact one flummoxed Joe Biden by asking about him attending a fossil fuel-sponsored event directly after the Town Hall. I’m still amazed CNN let that happen.

Who won the Town Hall? Well, as in the debates, the tone was essentially set by the progressives. Naomi Klein considered it a victory to simply have the words Climate Crisis in large red letters on television. With category 3 Superstorm Sandy shocking NorthEast elites and category 5 hurricanes like Matthew, Irma, Maria, Michael and now Dorian becoming yearly events, even conservative people are realizing that severe weather events are occurring much more frequently than ever before.

How do you win a town hall? Most of the candidates tried to minimize errors, reciting the green talking points they learned from Governor Jay Inslee, who recently ended his candidacy. Some candidates assured us we could still eat hamburgers and use plastic straws – business as usual – while they pursued some incarnation of a Green New Deal.

Several candidates pledged to eliminate waste, or increase efficiency in this or that, which sounds good on the surface. But there will always be a certain level of inefficiency in human endeavors. After hearing decade upon decade of such pledges, I now take them as a veiled promise to not structurally change the status quo.

“Whether they need it or not, government always spends the money it is allotted,” is a standard issue talking point, one I’ve heard since I worked a summer job for county government. Accordingly, Julian Castro recounted an anecdote about Air Force pilots dumping their fuel in the ocean to maintain a yearly allotment of fuel.

Only Bernie Sanders actually went for his shots. Unfortunately for his candidacy, Sanders is proposing to revamp several of our major industries – government/lobbyists, banking, military, pharmaceuticals, insurance, automobiles, prisons – and while he assures us that the workers in those industries are not his enemies, management of those industries will certainly see Sanders as their enemy, as does management of the major media. It remains to be seen whether the Sanders plain-spoken populist agenda constitutes an error or a winner.

Robots Need Power

I’m seeing a lot of articles predicting a future determined by Robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI). I grew up watching animated cartoons and live action shows featuring both metal robots and human-looking androids. Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy featured a robot intended to replace the inventor’s dead son, and in The Living Doll, Julie Newmar played Rhoda the Robot for laughs and sex appeal. Since this was fiction, both robots had lots of unexpected personality, and we related to them as sympathetic characters. But at the same time, children’s TV shows often used robots as villains because a hero could destroy scads of them without coming off as a callous killer, or running afoul of the TV codes against violence.

I later read Asimov’s stories about robots programmed to obey three embedded laws to ensure human superiority. In other science fiction stories, robots were often a threat, often superior to, and sometimes hostile to humans. Think of the giant robot, Gort, in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

And now we are being warned that robots are going to take away our jobs. We are also being warned that computer systems using AI are going to manage our lives. I’ve been skeptical of both of these ideas, but there is no doubt that each is happening in the short term, though in limited ways. Robots are used in manufacturing, in check out lines and may even drive us around in cars. AI seems poised to permeate internet marketing and inventory operations, even to monitor our every shopping whim.

But unlike Commander Data, these systems require electricity. Right now we create most electricity by burning fossil fuels: coal, oil, natural gas, and some by splitting atoms in nuclear power plants. We generate a negligible amount of power with wind and solar, but not enough for industrial robots or AI server farms.

And there’s the rub. Almost everything we do to generate power creates more of the greenhouse gases that drive man-made climate change. Are the oligarchs going to cut back on electricity to combat climate change? Not willingly, I suspect.

To make up for dwindling conventional oil reserves, we have increasingly turned to the mining of tar sands, hydraulic fracturing , and ‘clean’ coal. Hanford, Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima have damaged any public feeling that reactors are safe, but more importantly, less famous reactors around the US have frightened away investors by being persistently unprofitable.

Yet, a smattering of recent OpEd pieces advise the US to retool and try again with nukes. A Yale Environment 360 article reframes the well-known nuclear disasters as acceptable risks compared to those associated with extracting or mining fossil fuels. Wired Magazine predicts that Next Gen nuclear designs – many using molten salt – will be inherently safer than the ones that failed so famously.

I’m not happy about it, but given the dismal reports from the oil markets, I do expect that the US will turn to nuclear power again in the near future.

 

The Angry Blue Planet

My weekend morning ritual has been to watch reruns of Men Into Space (1959) at 7:30 AM on Comet TV. Although I was completely unaware of the show until a few years ago, I’m sure I would have loved it as a boy. Essentially the show presented space exploration as a serious military project with very little tolerance for any speculative elements and roughly zero dissenting social commentary. The technical aspects seemed real enough for the time, though the space suits are obviously not pressurized. The show revolved around Air Force Colonel Edward McCauley, who was Ward Cleaver in a uniform – an authoritarian, by-the-book officer that always turned out to be right about everything. When not traveling into space, the Colonel and his subordinate officers enjoyed cookouts with their wives and girlfriends, who were extraordinarily attractive despite wearing pointy bras and way too much makeup. On two occasions women astronauts made it into space, but the writers couldn’t let us forget just how different they were from men.

I watched The Angry Red Planet again last weekend, a well-meaning scifi flick also from 1959. My siblings and I watched this flick in the 1960s, and thought it exciting then. As an adult it is harder to ignore the flaws, but even though it relies on stock sets and characters that wouldn’t last a day under Col. McCauley, the special effects weren’t bad for the time, and the plot was straightforward. Basically, four Terrans travel to and land on Mars, where they are beset by bizarre local flora and fauna and are finally told to stay away by advanced inhabitants. Even with a doctoral degree, Iris Ryan didn’t fare much better than the women on Men Into Space. Colonel Tom could hardly stop hitting on “Irish” throughout the mission. Warrant Officer Sam is a fairly goofy sort who is in love with his ray gun, and Professor Gettell is one of those 60s scientists that apparently doesn’t specialize because he knows everything.

I also watched a recent apocalyptic scifi short called Rakka, starring Sigourney Weaver, which is available on youtube, and runs about twenty minutes. Rakka is set in 2020, and opens with narration by Weaver:

We were once mankind. We were humanity. And now, we’re no more than pests, vermin. They came here to exterminate us. They took our history and culture. They covered our landmarks in dying humanity. … They killed us in waves when they first arrived. They built these megastructures that spew methane. They’ve sewn their crops, snuffing out our plant life. Raising the global temperature, causing our cities to flood. They waged war on Earth. They set fire to our forests. It’s already hard to breathe, impossible to breathe if you are close to the stacks. … They hack into our psyche, into our minds, paralyzing us, taking control of our cerebrum and limbic systems, rendering us as slaves.

It occurred to me that much of this could have been a speech given by any of various indigenous peoples about more advanced conquerors. It could also be a speech about what the well-to-do are doing to the Earth right now.

 

Tranzit.ro has just posted two hour video of two short lectures and a panel discussion called Europe: Economic Crisis and Political Alternatives. I gather the lecture series took place at or near Petru Maior University in Romania.

As you watch the video, from left to right sitting at two flimsy tables are the moderator: Alex Cistelecan (Petru Maior University, CriticAtac)

Michael Roberts, a Marxist economist living in London, author of The Great Recession (2009) and The Long Depression (2016).

Mark Blyth, economics professor at Brown University and fellow at The Watson Institute, author of Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the 20th Century (2002) and Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2015).

On your far right is another moderator: Cornel Ban of Boston University, author of How Global Neoliberalism Goes Local (2016).

The sound quality is uneven, and photographer spends a fair amount of time scanning the crowd instead of the screen, which is hard to see. But some Romanian girls are quite attractive.

Where is Europe going and what can be done about its economic malaise? The final instalment of our series of lectures ‘Culture and Politics of Crisis’ focuses on the current European political and economic deadlock. As such, it sets the stage for a dialogue between two of the most important political economists of our time: Mark Blyth and Michael Roberts. For Roberts, the European crisis is diagnosed from a Marxist perspective. For Blyth, the analysis is infused by heterodox Keynesian views. Consequently, the two scholars diverge both in terms of situating the main cause of crisis and the main solution to it: for Roberts the emphasis falls on the general fall of the rate of profit affecting capital in our time, with anti-capitalism as the solution. For Blyth the crisis is caused by a lack of demand and investment and the way out is a different kind of capitalism. Between these diverging diagnostics and challenging solutions affecting the global and continental predicament, the fate of the East of Europe will also come in the spotlight: what are the limits of the semi-peripheral condition of this region and what remedies does it permit – Lexit, national sovereignty, regionalism à la Visegrad? Is a reformed, more social and egalitarian EU possible? Or, if not, how – or even why? – should we stop its nationalist disintegration?

Your Evil Lawn

The other day, my wife saw our three cats in a circle staring at something in the yard. She and my stepson found that a rabbit doe – the one that seems to enjoy outrunning our cats – had just laid a litter of bunnies in a hole. The doe apparently finds a fenced yard with three big cats safer than the rest of the neighborhood. So my stepson puts a big bowl over the hole during the day, and takes it off at night. But we’ve told him: No more pets.

I grew up watching real and television Dads mow and weed their pristine lawns. In a dose of reality, I was once hit in the chest by a twisted old nail thrown from my Dad’s real gasoline-powered lawnmower. We later moved to an old farm, and he treated almost all seven acres like a big lawn, buying a small tractor to mow it, but hardly growing anything. Later I mowed, trimmed and weeded my own tiny lawns partly out of habit, and partly because the neighbors look at you disparagingly if you don’t. My latest lawn is a comparative disgrace because the soil is bumpy, full of shale, and often in shade.

Influenced by HGTV, my wife once suggested hardscapes would be a lot less work. Since we didn’t live in a desert, I preferred the green growing lawn, but now I am reading that aristocratic lawns are bad news. Healthy Land Ethic, which I found through various ScienceBlogs posts, recommends we go back to native prairie species:

Why prairies matter and lawns don’t

Prairies – those critically endangered and complex ecosystems understood by few and misunderstood and destroyed by millions of people.

Lawns – those myopically obsessive (and evil) urban, suburban, and increasingly rural monoculture eyesores that displace native ecosystems at a rate between 5,000 and 385,000 acres per day* in favor of sterile, chemically-filled, artificial environments bloated with a tremendous European influence that provide no benefits over the long term; no food, no clean water, no wildlife habitat, and no foundation for preserving our once rich natural heritage. And there’s the unbearable ubiquitousness of mowing associated with such a useless cultural practice, which creates a ridiculous amount of noise pollution, air and water pollution, and a bustling busyness that destroys many peaceful Saturday mornings. The American lawn is the epitome of unsustainability.

In my defense, I did use a push mower, and later an electric mower. And I never laid down all the lye and chemicals that my Dad once used. In the Tyee, though, a discussion of potlatch turns to a practical consideration:

Why Science Is Like One Big Potlatch

High-class Coast Salish families inherited rights to abundant salmon runs, and they consolidated wealth by marrying other elites. Heh goos — “head men” in the Tla’amin language — made decisions on when and how to fish, and their status was legitimized through the public ceremonies of the potlatch, when they gave away their wealth. The lower-class Coast Salish had little social mobility. Status, for the most part, was inherited and changes in the social hierarchy were rare. The lower class had a lot of incentive to cooperate with the wealthy. Soon after potlatches were outlawed in 1885, the chief of the Kwakwaka’wakw — ancestors of the tribes belonging to the Laich-Kwil-Tach Treaty Society — told anthropologist Franz Boas: “It is a strict law that bids us distribute our property among our friends and neighbours. It is a good law.”

Potlatches not only distributed wealth — a finite natural resource — they also distributed knowledge, which is not finite unless it gets lost. That’s always a danger, especially if it’s not written down. Washington is teary when she talks about knowledge disappearing. The Coast Salish way of living was hard won and will not easily be retrieved. “My Granny used to say something that I never quite understood until I got older,” Washington says. “She would look at expensive homes with manicured lawns and say, in our language, ‘Oh those poor people, they have no medicines or food in their yard. How are they going to feed themselves and take care of themselves if anything happens?'”

 

Chernobyl after thirty years

Thirty years ago, the staff running a test on reactor #4 at the Lenin Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, Ukraine, USSR were reading unexpectedly high radiation levels. They debated stopping the test, but decided to keep going to find the limits. When the temperature readings climbed too high as well, they tried to shut the reactor down by inserting carbon rods.

There was, however, a design flaw, known by upper levels in the government, but not by the staff doing the testing. Inserting those rods somehow increased the reaction, increasing the heat. Containment water became steam, the roof of the reactor blew off and some ten tons of radioactive uranium became airborne, and was carried southeast, contaminating a large swath of Europe.

McClatchy has a very good article, Ruined Chernobyl nuclear plant will remain a threat for 3,000 years, in which they actually mention other nuclear accidents:

What they figured out was the worst nuclear-energy disaster in human history, far worse than the explosion at Kyshtym nuclear complex in 1957 in what was then the Soviet Union, which released 70 tons of radioactive material into the air, or the 1957 fire at the Windscale Nuclear Reactor in northwestern England, which forced a ban on milk sales for a month, or the Three Mile Island disaster in Pennsylvania on March 29, 1979, where a cooling malfunction led to a partial meltdown.

There are also persistent leaks threatening groundwater at Hanford in the US, and the ongoing Fukushima disaster in Japan.

CNN tries to consign the radiation problems to history, offering more upbeat articles about Chernobyl. In Meet the New Face of Chernobyl they focus on fetching young Yulia, who lives in a nearby community, Slavutych, and was chronicled over three years by Swiss photographer Neils Ackermann:

Ackermann isn’t interested in making you sit through another telling of that tragic tale about the firefighters who couldn’t put out the flames in 1986, or the technicians who failed to stop the poisonous radioactive particles from escaping the facility and raining down on nearby residents.

Instead, he wants to introduce you to Yulia.

“She’s intense, like an energy bomb,” Ackermann said, describing the 23-year-old woman he met in 2012. At the time, Yulia was kissing a man in a park in the center of Slavutych, a town near Chernobyl built for disaster evacuees.

…

Yulia was born three years after the disaster. Ackermann once asked her what she thought about its consequences. “She was looking at me like it was a really stupid question,” he recalled. “Because now, the scale of health consequences resulting from radioactivity in Slavutych are much more limited than what we may think about in the West.” Slavutych residents who work in Chernobyl are protected by strict control systems. The town’s attitude about radioactivity is much more realistic and pragmatic than it would be elsewhere. One young man showed Ackermann the tomb of his best friend in a cemetery and said more people in town die because of drugs and alcohol than radioactivity.

In another article, CNN emphasizes the precautions taken as Ukraine builds a new arched structure over the decrepit sarcophagus that was built quickly after the explosion. This New Safe Confinement structure is supposed to last at least one hundred years, but the buried mass will be a threat for at least three thousand years, so I wonder who will build the next thirty structures?

Clean Burst of D

Just after Thanksgiving I needed laundry detergent. I usually get the Seventh Generation in the recyclable cardboard container, but I didn’t see it at the Shoppers supermarket. They did have Arm and Hammer, but unfortunately I grabbed a plastic container with a blue cap instead of the clear cap my wife uses at our house. Clear cap is their fragrance-free Essentials. Blue cap turned out to be their Clean Burst product.

On Skype my wife told me to take it back, but I figured I’d just pay more attention the next time. Bad move. Within a few weeks I noticed a musty smell throughout the apartment. I had recently cleaned out moldy dryer lint, and at first I thought there was a new growth somewhere, but it was actually the perfume from the Clean Burst. The stuff is pervasive. On a holiday visit, as soon as I walked in the door at our house both my wife and stepson complained about the smell surrounding me. He is immune-compromised and very sensitive to perfumes and chemicals wafting into our yard from neighboring dryer vents. She washed my clothing repeatedly – rinsing with vinegar – and got some of the smell out.

But Clean Burst was also irritating to my skin. When I wore freshly-laundered clothing, I felt wisps of something across my face and hands. Later I felt pinpricks as if something was breaking out of, or into, my skin. Environmental Working Group (EWG) gives Clean Burst a D rating with moderate concerns for cancer, respiratory effects and skin irritation. The Arm and Hammer Essentials perfume-free version my wife uses gets a C rating, but thought it had no awful smell, I still felt some irritation from the clothing she laundered.

Though I never had a reaction to it, EWG also gives the Seventh Generation liquid detergent I used before a D rating – though for different concerns. EWG’s top ratings go to products I haven’t used, but will certainly try.

Master of the Middle

In, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale, the local laird has a problem – who to support in the final Jacobite rebellion of Charles Edward Stuart against the Hanovers. The Durie family is sympathetic to Bonnie Prince Charlie, but rather than risk aligning themselves entirely with the losing side, one son supports the status quo while the other goes off to join the insurgency. The plan was that no matter who wins, a Durie would keep the land and title. Stevenson’s plot gets a lot more complicated, though, as things often do.

In the climate change debate, a lot of people have picked a side, and are fightly fiercely in the media (and courts) to convince others of the cause. The climate, of course, is changing more obviously every month, but deniers are fighting a rearguard action. Like the Duries, many in the media are trying play to both sides. I have read claims that most mainstream media meteorologists accept climate change, but you’d never know that from watching the weather on television. I’m guessing most station managers expect only decreased ratings if they so much as mention climate change on air.

Recently Pope Francis, the public face of the Catholic Church, issued an encyclical called Laudatum Si, (Praise Be To You) subtitled On the Care For Our Common Home, which recognizes climate change as a threat, and calls on the world to stop destroying the environment. Predictably, environmentalists have hailed Laudatum Si, and, also predictably, deniers have suggested the pope should stay out of science and politics. At the New York Times DotEarth blog, Andrew Revkin takes a cautionary tone, warning us, Beware Casting Pope Francis as a Caped Crusader, where he applauds the pontiff:

The greatest value in the pope’s decision to press on climate policy and environmental care, to my mind, lies in the reminder that, while science matters enormously in identifying the risks from an unabated buildup of greenhouse gases, the choices we make are shaped more by values and appropriately should involve every sector of society.

… but also quietly undercuts the message:

… “It’s important not to conclude that moral arguments for action on global warming, even conveyed by a pope, are a world-changing breakthrough. The reason is that the climate issue doesn’t exist in a moral vacuum. A powerful moral argument can also be built around the right of poorer countries to get out of poverty using fossil fuels. That argument bolsters Prime Minister Modi’s commitment to double coal production by 2020, for example, even as India also (at a much, much smaller scale) expands solar capacity and nuclear power.”

I’m excited to see such an influential and thoughtful figure pressing the case for action, and acknowledging the need for dialogue.

But Francis remains a man, not a Superman.

Dot Earth was moved from News to Opinion several years ago, and the Times dropped a lot of other ‘green’ blogs in 2013, so Revkin is politically smart to be cautious. But Greg Laden, who I follow on Science Blogs, has called him out for playing to the middle:

But then I look at Dot Earth, and I see two things. First is Andy Revkin’s tendency to occupy that space between serious concern about climate change and acceptance of consensus science on one hand, and questioning of the reality and importance of climate change, on the other. In other words, Andy likes to write, often, in the space between what deniers call “warmists” and what warmists call “deniers.”

And now there’s a lot of finger-pointing on both blogs.

IMO, it isn’t just DotEarth, it is the entire mainstream media, many so-called environmental groups and even people like me that accept climate change, but are trying not to alienate our spouses and bosses while slowly making a transition to a more sustainable existence. Just how long the climate lets us live in the middle is hard to predict.

Wasting Water in the West

In, Killing The Colorado, ProPublica looks at manmade projects as a culprit in the current drought. In the Explore the River section of the series of articles, each dam, each power generating station is shown to lose vast vast amounts of water to evaporation and seepage.

In the first article, Holy Crop, farmers feel compelled to grow thirsty cotton to benefit from, and survive on, government subsidies:

The water shortages that have brought California, Arizona and other Western states to the edge of an environmental cliff have been attributed to a historic climate event — a dry spell that experts worry could be the worst in 1,000 years. But an examination by ProPublica shows that the scarcity of water is as much a man-made crisis as a natural one, the result of decades of missteps and misapprehensions by governments and businesses as they have faced surging demand driven by a booming population.

Even in the face of a drought, the current laws actually encourage wasting water:

… He knows his fields could thrive with much smaller amounts of water — he’s seen them do so in dry years — but the property owners he works for have the legal right to take a large supply, and he applies the water generously. … Ketterhagen feels he has little choice. A vestige of 139-year-old water law pushes ranchers to use as much water as they possibly can, even during a drought. “Use it or lose it” clauses, as they are known, are common in state laws throughout the Colorado River basin and give the farmers, ranchers and governments holding water rights a powerful incentive to use more water than they need. Under the provisions of these measures, people who use less water than they are legally entitled to risk seeing their allotment slashed.

And moving that water takes a toll on the climate:

The power generated enables a modern wonder. It drives a set of pumps 325 miles down the Colorado River that heave trillions of gallons of water out of the river and send it shooting over mountains and through canals. That water — lifted 3,000 vertical feet and carried 336 miles — has enabled the cities of Phoenix and Tucson to rapidly expand. This achievement in moving water, however, is gained at an enormous cost. Every hour the Navajo’s generators spin, the plant spews more climate-warming gases into the atmosphere than almost any other facility in the United States. Alone, it accounts for 29 percent of Arizona’s emissions from energy generation. The Navajo station’s infernos gobble 15 tons of coal each minute, 24 hours each day, every day.

Will Renewables Be The Next Bubble?

There has been a lot of positive press for renewable energy lately, but despite international conferences and resolutions about greenhouse gas emissions leading to climate change, about 90% of the energy the world uses is still the result of burning some fossilized sink of carbon, whether coal, petroleum or natural gas. With petroleum I include tar sands bitumen which the Canadians cook to make synthetic oil.

As they have begun turning to oil and natural gas, China’s coal consumption and production fell by 3% last year, but they still burned almost four million short tons, four times as much coal as the US. In the US we still produce 40% of our electricity with coal, “clean” or otherwise. India burns slightly less than the US, but it is often dirtier, low grade coal. Russia and Germany each burn less than a third than the US. Germany has quite a bit of wind and photovoltaic (PV) solar installed and probably leads the world in passive solar, but were also relying heavily on nuclear plants until the Fukushima Daichi failure. They then closed their nuclear plants and returned to coal, but even Japan is considering giving nuclear another go. Hardly any African nations burn much coal except South Africa which burns about 200,000 short tons. Australia burns less than SA and sells a lot to China. South Korea burns slightly less than Oz.  Canada burns relatively little coal, but after processing tar sands into dilbit, sells its dirty pet coke byproducts across North and South America where they are burned like coal. Coal is nasty stuff, and more deadly in the short term than nuclear, but we’ll probably have to see a lot more devastating climate events before we give it up.

Fracking is slowly being revealed as a financial bubble, but even with the boomlet, the US is still a net importer of oil. Canada exports its diluted bitumen (dilbit) to Asia, and wants to use the XL Keystone pipeline to move it instead of railway cars. Indonesia generates its electricity with oil. It used to export oil, now it is a net importer. Pakistan relies on Saudi oil, and Saudi debt forgiveness, for electricity, but experiences load-shedding so often that it has become a regular part of life.

The US has replaced many of its coal-fired electrical plants with cleaner natural gas plants. Russia sells natural gas throughout Europe. Canada uses natural gas to process its tar sands. But though it burns cleaner than oil, natural gas is not a renewable resource, and the output from gas wells can decline very quickly with little warning.

Despite the gloomy prospects for carbon fuel, a Deutsche Bank report notes that the Solar Investment Tax Credit drops from 30% to 10% in 2017, and new subsidies for renewables seem unlikely in an election season. Nevertheless, many media outlets, like Clean Technica, are quoting that study’s claim that the world will achieve “grid parity” by 2030 as evidence that we can smoothly transition from a world burning carbon to a world run with energy from renewable sources – meaning the sun, wind, trees and flowing water.

Deutsche Bank Predicts Solar Grid Parity In 80% Of Global Market By 2017

Investment bank Deutsche Bank is predicting that solar systems will be at grid parity in up to 80 per cent of the global market within 2 years, and says the collapse in the oil price will do little to slow down the solar juggernaut.

In his 2015 solar outlook, leading analyst Vishal Shah says solar will be at grid parity in most of the world by the end of 2017. That’s because grid-based electricity prices are rising across the world, and solar costs are still falling. Shah predicts solar module costs will fall another 40 per cent over the next four to five years.

Even if electricity prices remain stable – two thirds of the world will find solar to be cheaper than their current conventional energy supply. If electricity costs rise by around 3 per cent a year, then Deutsche’s “Blue sky” scenario is for 80 per cent of countries to be at grid parity for solar.

“We believe the trend is clear: grid parity without subsidies is already here, increasing parity will occur, and solar penetration rates are set to ramp worldwide,” Shah notes.

The technical definition of grid parity is when you can generate your own power, “at a levelized cost of electricity (LCoE) that is less than or equal to the price of purchasing power from the electricity grid.” That would seem to indicate that powering one’s home or small business with PV would make financial sense.

The reality of grid parity is less compelling. For example, Australia achieved grid parity in 2012, but less than two percent of their electricity is generated by solar energy. The electrical demand curve of a house or business is vastly different than the supply curve of an array of panels. The difference means that either each user only use electricity when the sun shines, store a great deal of power in a great many batteries for dark and stormy nights, or draw power from the wind and natural gas-fired grid when necessary.

As noted in the Washington Post, utilities are not excited about their delivery interface getting more complicated.

Electric utilities appear poorly equipped for how technology will transform the energy industry. For years there hasn’t been an incentive to innovate, in part due to a lack of competition. Plus, making their product cheaper means less revenue, so why innovate?

I’ve been reading about battles between early solar adopters and their local electrical utilities since the 1970s. It may be a tall tale, but back then I was told that one Western US utility expected to be paid for any electricity generated in the state, even if you were off the grid. I am still running across articles about disputes, but it seems that sometimes a developer or panel vendor can actually strike a deal with the local power company where the homeowner both generates power and uses the grid.

As an aside, we have no solar panels, but we just got an offer from Penelec to, “insure” the outside power lines for some amount of money per month. “Be a shame if something were to happen to our line where it runs across your property.”

Batteries are getting better, and cheaper, but don’t last forever. Elon Musk and others are trying to invest billions to advance the technology for Electric Vehicles (EVs), and that may cross over to home batteries. Hence we see the idea of using your EV battery array as a storage unit for your home’s solar panels.

What is likely to happen? Over time, electricity will become much more expensive and more intermittent. People will adapt their schedules to the vagaries of the power grid, as they do in Pakistan now. I see rich people investing in solar arrays, inverters and battery arrays, as they do in Pakistan now, to stay up late and get through the downtime. Even though many condensers are natural gas-fired, I can’t see how forcing cold air through buildings the way we do now can continue on a renewable grid. Perhaps office dwellers will rediscover operable windows.

As far as transportation, wealthy people are already transitioning from gasoline to battery and fuel cell personal vehicles. Some middle class people are already driving smaller cars, hybrids and motorcycles, but the big tree falling will be when American pickup truck sales decline. Electric assist bikes are very popular in Asia, and will catch on elsewhere, but dirty two-stroke motor scooters are still faster and cheaper.

I can see more people accepting EVs. I already see buses with fuel cells. I have a hard time seeing industrial farm vehicles, which run all day, running on batteries or fuel cells instead of diesel. I can see construction workers switching their handheld tools from air compressors to batteries, but I can’t see battery-powered dump trucks and concrete mixers putting in a full day. I can see street lights being replaced by larger versions of those lawn lights with the little PV panel and rechargeable battery. In Pakistan now, manufacturers simply can’t run their textile machines during load shedding, so I expect there will be a series of ideas floated to solve that problem elsewhere, many of which will fail.

I’ve written about it before, but I’m still thinking back to a Harper’s article from 2008, The Next Bubble. That bubble was to be in renewables, or Cleantech:

There is one industry that fits the bill: alternative energy, the development of more energy-efficient products, along with viable alternatives to oil, including wind, solar, and geothermal power, along with the use of nuclear energy to produce sustainable oil substitutes, such as liquefied hydrogen from water. … Other ventures … are funding an array of startups working on improvements to solar cells, to biofuels production, to batteries, to “energy management” software, and so on.

… The Energy Policy Act of 2005, a massive bill known to morning commuters for extending daylight savings time, contained provisions guaranteeing loans for alternative-energy businesses, including nuclear-power technology. The bill authorizes $200 million annually for clean-coal initiatives, repeals the current 160-acre cap on coal leases, offers subsidies for wind energy and other alternative-energy producers, and promises $50 million annually, over the life of the bill, for a biomass grant program. …

There certainly has been a great expansion of renewable energy, but it hasn’t had the sheen and bluster of a bubble. Here and there, wind turbine ‘farms’ are built and subsidized by tax credits. Sometimes they stop turning when the credits dry up. Photovoltaic solar panels suddenly became more efficient, but local manufacturers were undercut by cheaper products from China, and concerns were raised about PV waste. Molycorp reopened an old mine, and attempted to break the Chinese stranglehold on rare earths, but as recently reported on 60 Minutes, has yet to turn a profit.

Supporting this alternative-energy bubble will be a boom in infrastructure—transportation and communications systems, water, and power.

Harper’s missed the call on US infrastructure. Although the media regularly raises alarms about rusting bridges, and despite President Obama championing infrastructure spending, federal, state and local governments are still reactive rather than proactive. Harper’s also missed that the next bubble was actually in unconventional energy sources like fracking and tight oil and tar sands, but they may be on the verge of being right about the next, next bubble:

… the gross market value of all enterprises needed to develop hydroelectric power, geothermal energy, nuclear energy, wind farms, solar power, and hydrogen-powered fuel-cell technology—and the infrastructure to support it—is somewhere between $2 trillion and $4 trillion; assuming the bubble can get started, the hyperinflated fictitious value could add another $12 trillion. In a hyperinflation, infrastructure upgrades will accelerate, with plenty of opportunity for big government contractors fleeing the declining market in Iraq. Thus, we can expect to see the creation of another $8 trillion in fictitious value, which gives us an estimate of $20 trillion in speculative wealth, money that inevitably will be employed to increase share prices rather than to deliver “energy security.” When the bubble finally bursts, we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry. …

Will Harper’s be correct? Or can we adopt aspects of renewable energy with careful consideration rather than believing the hype that we can continue to live a non-renewable lifestyle using renewable energy sources? It does seem clear that the financial industry knows that their customers are not going to be satisfied with slow steady returns. That’s why we see Deutsche Bank hyping grid parity into a done deal on renewable energy.