Heinberg: A Beguiling Veneer of Normalcy

SHOOT: So we hear, through the contant noise of commercials and what not, news of a pandemic and today I read about Iraqi oil production falling precipitously. What does it all mean? Does any of this matter? Unfortunately these signals are lost in the noise of our time. They will become clearer and ring out in the crunch of contraction. Financial and otherwise. The sheer numbers of our species are about to contract also, although this may seem unlikely from the comfort of a living sofa with food in the refrigerator and the television's comforting drivel for company. Richard Heinberg addresses this issue below, which he calls the 'beguiling veneer of normalcy'.

Statements emanating from the White House, the Treasury, and the Fed are ambiguous but generally upbeat: president Obama says dark days still await us, but foresees a return to growth; and secretary Geithner and chairman Bernanke are careful not to talk the market down.

The indicators to which I pay attention lead me to a different conclusion. We are indeed seeing a let-up in the frighteningly rapid financial collapse that began to unfold late last summer. That’s to be expected: all the trillions that are being spent on bailouts and stimulus packages must have some effect—though ultimately it will only be to provide a brief interlude before the storm returns in far greater force.

In short, while surface appearances could lead one to think that not much has changed from the status quo ante, in fact the beams, rafters, and studs that hold up the façade of normal everyday existence in modern industrial society are rotting and crumbling. In essence, we are witnessing the shift from a century of unprecedented growth to a century of contraction.

Read This! This is an axcellent and constructive take on the world energy crisis

Want Cheap Oil? Reduce Demand! by Richard Heinberg

Ask the major oil companies or the US Department of Energy why oil prices are beyond ludicrous and they’ll tell you there’s plenty of oil out there, there’s just a lack of investment in exploration and production—particularly on the part of the national oil companies in OPEC.

Funny, the level of investment in the global oil industry hasn’t dropped off a cliff lately. Yet oil prices have shot up like asparagus in April. What’s going on here?

What the experts are really telling us is that a higher level of investment is needed now than was the case previously in order to produce the same increment of new oil.

Hmmm. Let’s drill deeper, metaphorically speaking.

In fact there’s still oil being produced today that could profitably be sold for $30 a barrel. Quite a lot of it. But—crucially—there’s not nearly enough to meet the demand that would exist if all oil were selling at such a price. That $30 oil comes from super-giant oilfields discovered back in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. The industry just doesn’t find oilfields like that anymore, and the old stalwarts are now entering their retirement years and seeing declining rates of production. Now what’s available for prospecting are plays in ultra-deep water, where it costs a half million dollars a day just to rent a specialized drilling rig (of which there are only a few in existence). We’re talking NASA moon-shot level of technology here. That’s not $30 oil; it’s $75, $100, or $150 oil. No one would be interested in it, except for the fact that $30 oil is getting so scarce.

If you prefer, there is lots of stuff that’s not really oil (tar sands) that can be turned into a synthetic liquid fuel, but it takes heaps of other resources to help the process along. So of course the dollar cost for the finished product is high—and it just keeps getting higher as the price of regular oil climbs, because some of the resources required to make this synthetic fuel are effectively tied to the price of oil. No answer there.

All of this helps explain the enigmatic response of the Saudis when they’re asked, on bended knee, by folks like George W. Bush to please, please produce a little extra oil so as to drive down the world price. The Saudis tell us that the market is in fact well supplied—there is no shortage of crude. Well, they’re right: there’s no shortage of $150 oil. Sure, they’re still producing oil that costs them less than $30 to pump, but they’re producing about all of that cheap oil they can. And anyway, the price of a particular shipment isn’t determined by its cost of production; it is set more by the cost of the incremental extra barrel produced somewhere else in the world that someone is willing to pay for. If the world’s refiners (and ultimately the world’s motorists) are willing to pay $150 or $200 or $300 a barrel for oil from ultra-expensive new wells off the coast of Brazil or future ones off California or in ANWR, that’s what the price will be—for all the oil that’s coming to market.

Meanwhile, high oil prices are already killing the airline industry, the automobile industry, the trucking industry, the fishing industry, tourism…the list goes on. In effect, the world is teetering on the brink of a Greater Depression because there’s not enough $30 oil to go around anymore.

So here’s the solution: We could reduce the price of oil just by reducing demand. If the world could be satisfied with the amount of oil that can still be produced cheaply ($30 is an arbitrary figure—by now $130 oil sounds cheap), then the price would fall to that level. We’d have to keep reducing demand to maintain that price since the cheaper oil continues to deplete.

But there’s a problem to that solution: the most likely way that global demand will be reined in is by economic contraction brought on by high prices. That’s a nice way of saying bankruptcy, unemployment, and industrial collapse. It sounds bad, but that’s not the problem; the problem is this: once the price falls by any significant amount, demand will just pick back up again and we’ll be right back where we are now—with prices aiming for Alpha Centauri.

Or, we could hope for a cheaper, more convenient source of energy that would reduce demand for oil painlessly. But since no one has invented one yet, we can’t really bank on it happening (though throwing a few extra tens of billions toward energy research is not a bad idea).

In other words, there is no existing market-based fix for the fix we’re in.

Which means there is really only one way to get the price of oil down over the long term. That is to implement some kind of global agreement to ration oil consumption by quota, so as to reduce demand artificially. Just reducing demand in one country won’t help much, because some other country will quickly take up the slack. No, we all go on a diet together.

Everyone would kick and scream—but no louder than they’re currently doing. We already have rationing after all; it’s called price rationing. And price rationing simply ensures that poorer potential buyers are priced out of the market first (that’s why countries in sub-Saharan Africa are now verging on economic oblivion: they can’t afford oil to grow crops, transport goods, or operate the diesel generators that supply municipal power grids). To rich folks, price rationing may initially sound like the better deal, but they have to live in communities too, and if Orange County is going Mad Max, daily life even in a mansion behind an electric fence starts to be a bit of a bother.

Quota rationing is something North Americans haven’t faced since the 1940s—when it worked successfully to conserve fuel for the war effort. But it has also been used in other countries when supplies of fuel or electricity or water ran seriously low. Typically, quota rationing averts cutthroat competition while appealing to people’s community spirit. Nobody has as much as they want, but everybody has enough to get by.

On a global level, the quota agreement might be as simple as this: each country would agree to reduce its oil consumption by three percent per year (which is a little more than the world oil depletion rate). Then national governments would be free to find their own ways to implement that cut domestically—whether through fuel taxes, investments in efficiency, or personal quota rationing.

A global Oil Depletion Protocol is impractical, you say? Could never be negotiated? Of course it would be a tough bargain to accept. The alternative is even tougher, though.

Imagine the world without such a Protocol. Continually soaring prices will be a given. But for an increasing number of countries and potential users, this will translate into shortages. As in: the gas station down the street doesn’t have any fuel this week because the station owner can’t afford to pay cash on delivery (this is already starting to happen right here in the wealthy US of A). Worse, perhaps: nations will be tempted to secure essential fuel by military action or covert subterfuge. Just how well this is likely to work we may judge by events in Iraq over the past few years.

How badly do we want cheaper oil? Badly enough to cooperate internationally? Badly enough to lower our consumption? As soon as we want it that badly, we’ll have it. Until then, the market rules. Welcome aboard the oil-price escalator.

From here.

Richard Heinberg: It's Happening

There is a surreal quality to the experience of seeing the unfolding of unpleasant events that one has predicted. Plenty of times over the past few years I’ve said, "I want to be proven wrong!" Who in their right mind would wish to see economic collapse and famine? But it was obvious that, given the direction our society is headed, these must be the consequences.

Now, with oil at $117 a barrel, the US economy teetering, and food riots erupting in Haiti, Egypt, and Asia, one could perhaps gain some satisfaction in saying "I told you so." But what faint compensation that would be. We are all going to have to share the bitter fruits of our society's century-long growth binge, whether we have criticized it or participated wholeheartedly.

The only silver lining is the possibility that now, at last, as the trends (Peak Oil, the failure of growth-based economics, the failure of industrial agriculture, climate chaos, and so on) are becoming so starkly clear, policy makers will begin seriously to contemplate a Plan B (or C, as Pat Murphy insists). For those of us who have been lobbying in that latter direction for some while, this is no time to let up, but rather the ideal moment to redouble our efforts.

NVDL: Now is the ideal moment to redouble our efforts. Exactly.

Heinberg: The Great Coal Rush (and Why It Will Fail)

This MuseLetter, and several more during the next few months, will be chapters for a forthcoming book on coal, to be published by Post Carbon Press. This month's issue is the book's Introduction.

The world appears poised for a headlong sprint toward greater dependence on coal. This book's purpose is to examine one crucial question that will shape this next great coal rush: How much is left?

The answer from conventional wisdom is, Lots. Coal appears to be the most abundant of the conventional fossil fuels, and everyone agrees that enormous quantities remain to be extracted. Most policy makers would prefer simply to leave it at that. Decades-old estimates assure us that there is 150 years' worth of supply at current rates of production; therefore we should be able to enjoy plenty of coal for several generations to come.

However, as we will see, this conventional wisdom is in need of substantial correction.

In Chapter One, we will see how coal supplies are estimated, and why new studies are challenging longstanding assumptions of abundance. As we will learn, estimating coal reserves is a complex task, and in many cases published figures are highly misleading. Then in following chapters we will look in some detail at coal reserves in China, the US, and the rest of the world, seeing how supply shortfalls are likely within decades - in some nations, within years. We will also examine the implications of this new information for our understanding of the crisis of global climate change, and will explore the likely impacts of supply constraints on the various industries that depend on coal - principally, electrical power generation and steel production.

Why Care About Coal?

1. The Economy

If coal were of declining importance in the world's energy mix, the problems of depletion and declining availability would not be serious. Instead, however, coal is at the center of energy planning for many nations - especially the burgeoning Asian economies. Despite environmental concerns, coal is experiencing the fastest percentage growth in usage worldwide of any of the principal fossil fuels, and the fastest growth, in terms of BTUs delivered, of any energy source.
This resurgence was mostly unanticipated.

Coal was the first fuel of the industrial age; it was the world's primary source of energy from the end of the 19th century (when it supplanted wood) until the middle of the 20th (when it was overtaken by oil). More recently, natural gas has substituted for coal to some extent in electricity generation, partly because of growing concerns about greenhouse gas emissions (coal is the most carbon-intensive common fuel, natural gas the least); meanwhile oil has become the globe's most important fuel largely because of its role in transport.

The historic pattern was thus for industrial societies to move from low-quality fuels (wood contains an average of 12 megajoules per kilogram, and coal 14 to 32.5 Mj/kg) to higher-quality fuels (an average of 41.9 Mj/kg for oil and 53.6 for natural gas); from more-polluting to less-polluting fuels; and from solid fuels to a liquid fuel easily transported and therefore well suited to a system of global trade in energy resources.

During the 20th century, fuel switching yielded decisive economic and even geopolitical advantages. In 1912, Winston Churchill, as Lord of the Admiralty, famously retooled Britain's navy to burn oil rather than coal, thus helping to ensure victory over Germany in World War I. Throughout the second half of the century, the US economy became less energy intensive (measured as the amount of energy required to produce each dollar of GDP) largely by switching away from coal toward oil and gas. The reasons for doing so are explained in the following passage from Beyond Oil by Gever, Kaufmann, Skole, and Vorosmarty:

The advantages of internal combustion engines are such that a diesel locomotive uses only one-fifth the energy (in kilocalories) that a coal-powered steam engine needs to pull the same train. Moreover, oil-burning systems generally require less attention and burn cleaner than solid-fuel systems, as anyone will attest who grew up with a coal furnace in the basement. As a result, oil and gas generate from 1.3 to 2.45 times the amount of economic value per kilocalorie that coal does.1

As nations learned to take advantage of physical and functional differences in fuels, straining to get more economic bang for their energy buck, coal was nearly always in the position of being the older, less-efficient, less-desirable source. In short, the widespread assumption only a decade ago was that coal's moment in the energy spotlight had ended. While remaining an important fuel for electricity production, coal was, in many people's minds, an artifact of the 19th and early 20th centuries - the eras of steam-powered looms, majestic ocean liners, and smokespewing locomotives. Futurists in the 1980s and '90s assured us that, with the dawn of the information age, energy would soon become "de-carbonized" as nations shifted to cleaner energy sources and more concentrated fuels.

However, during the past three years, global production of crude oil has remained static, despite demand growth - especially from Asian economies. And there is every indication that worldwide petroleum production will begin an inexorable, inevitable decline beginning around 2010. This is the often-discussed phenomenon of Peak Oil (explained, for example, in the present author's The Oil Depletion Protocol).2 In the quarter century from 1980 to 2005, world oil use grew at an average rate of roughly two percent annually. During most of this period, prices were low - usually in the range of $US10 to $20.

However, in the three years since May 2005, the rate of extraction of conventional crude oil has stalled, while prices have shifted to the $60 to $100 range. Many analysts believe that by 2015 oil production will be declining at an annual rate of over two percent per year and prices may be in the multiple hundreds of dollars per barrel.

While more exploration prospects for conventional oil exist, they are mostly in geographically remote or politically sensitive areas; meanwhile, shortages of drilling rigs and trained personnel are adding significantly to delays in bringing new projects on line. Enormous quantities of non-conventional fossil fuels exist that are capable of being turned into synthetic liquid fuels (the bitumen deposits of Alberta, the heavy oil of the Orinoco basin in Venezuela, and the marlstone or "shale oil" of Wyoming and Colorado); however, the rate at which these substances can be extracted and processed is constrained by physical and economic factors - such as the need for enormous quantities of fresh water and natural gas for processing.

World production of natural gas will likely peak somewhat later than that of oil; however, regional natural gas supply constraints are already appearing, primarily in North America (the most intensive consumer of the resource), as well as Russia and Europe. Because only a small proportion is traded globally in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG), this means it may not be possible to avert regional shortages by resorting to seaborne imports.

In the face of these constraints for oil, gas, and unconventional fossil fuels, coal by comparison appears suddenly attractive again. The industrial world has abundant experience with it, the technology for mining and using it is well developed, and there is purportedly an enormous amount of it waiting to be dug and burned. New technologies, such as integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) power plants and methods to capture and store carbon, promise to make coal cleaner (though not cheaper) to use. In addition, there is increasing interest in deploying methods to turn coal into a synthetic liquid fuel able to substitute for oil (we will explore these technologies in more detail in chapter 8).

Since economic growth generally implies more energy consumption, it should come as no surprise that nearly all of the current world expansion in coal consumption is occurring in the nations with the highest rates of economic growth - principally, China and India, but also Vietnam, South Korea, and Japan. The shift in the world's economic center of gravity away from the US and toward the great population centers of East and South Asia is being widely heralded as the primary economic trend of the new millennium.

In recent years, China's economy has grown at an annual rate of 7 to 11.5 percent (a seven percent constant growth rate implies a doubling of size every ten years: thus after 20 years the entire economy is four times its previous size, and after a mere 30 years it is eight times its former magnitude; at 11.5 percent annual growth, this eight-fold expansion comes in just 20 years).

According to most expectations, China's GDP will exceed US$10 trillion by the end of the current decade, and will surpass US$20 trillion by 2020, making China's then the world's largest national economy. India's economic growth rate was 8.4 percent in 2006 and 9.2 percent in 2007. Currently, India is the world's fourth largest national economy, but at current rates of growth it could advance to third place within a decade (current rankings according to the CIA "World Factbook").3 India is now the world's third-largest consumer of coal, which provides nearly two-thirds of the nation's commercial energy (compared to the world average of 26 percent).

China currently obtains nearly 70 percent of its energy from coal and is the world's primary coal consumer, using nearly twice as much as the next country in line (the US). The quantities are staggering: in 2007 alone, China added electrical generating capacity - nearly all of it coal-based - equal to the whole of France's or Britain's entire electricity grid. During 2007, China's installed electricity generating capacity grew 17 percent, reaching over 700 gigawatts, second only to the US's 900+ gigawatts.

It is entirely foreseeable that this enormous, rapid growth in coal consumption should entail an equally enormous environmental cost.

Why Care About Coal?

2. The Environment

If there were sound economic reasons for industrial societies to switch from coal to oil and gas during the 20th century, there were equally compelling environmental reasons.

Coal is the dirtiest of the conventional fossil fuels. Sulfur, mercury, and radioactive elements are released into the air when coal is burned and are difficult to capture at source. During the early phase of the industrial revolution, both the mining and the burning of coal generated legendary amounts of pollution. In cities like London, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, smoke and airborne soot reduced visibility to mere inches on some days. The following passage from The Smoke of Great Cities by David Stradling and Peter Thorsheim captures the situation:

One visitor to Pittsburgh during a temperature inversion in 1868 described the city as "hell with the lid taken off," as he peered through a heavy, shifting blanket of smoke that hid everything but the bare flames of the coke furnaces that surrounded the town. During autumn and winter this smoke often mixed with fog to form an oily vapor, first called smog in the frequently afflicted London. In addition to darkening city skies, smoky chimneys deposited a fine layer of soot and sulfuric acid on every surface. "After a few days of dense fogs," one Londoner observed in 1894, "the leaves and blossoms of some plants fall off, the blossoms of others are crimped, [and] others turn black." In addition to harming flowers, trees, and food crops, air pollution disfigured and eroded stone and iron monuments, buildings, and bridges. Of greatest concern to many contemporaries, however, was the effect that smoke had on human health. Respiratory diseases, especially tuberculosis, bronchitis, pneumonia, and asthma, were serious public health problems in late-nineteenth-century Britain and the United States.4

The mining of coal was, in its early days, no less grim. Digging coal out of the ground is an inherently dangerous and environmentally ruinous activity, and accidents (from asphyxiation by accumulated gas, as well as from explosions, fires, and roof collapses) were so common as to be an expected part of life in mining towns.

Miners and their families often suffered from respiratory ailments, including pneumoconiosis, or black lung disease. And mining altered landscapes, often resulting in polluted water and air, and the destruction of forests. From the standpoint of safety, coal mining has cleaned up its act, at least in the more industrialized countries.

The large-scale mechanization of mining means that today fewer miners are required to produce an equivalent amount of coal; meanwhile, improvements in mining methods (e.g. longwall mining), as well as hazardous gas monitoring (using electronic sensors), gas drainage, and ventilation have reduced the risks of rock falls, explosions, and unhealthy air quality. Even with these improvements, mining accidents still claimed 46 fatalities in the US in 2006; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, mining remains America's second most dangerous occupation.

However, despite technical advances, coal mining continues to destroy landscapes, as is infamously the case with the method used in the Appalachian region of the US called "mountaintop removal." This practice, which involves clear-cutting native hardwood forests, using dynamite to blast away as much as 1000 feet of mountaintop and then dumping the waste into nearby valleys, often burying streams, has been called "one of the greatest environmental and human rights catastrophes in American history."5 Families and communities near mining sites must contend with continual blasting from mining operations and suffer from airborne dust and debris, floods have left hundreds dead and thousands homeless, and drinking water in many areas has been contaminated.

While the environmental and safety risks of both coal mining and coal burning have been somewhat moderated in countries that industrialized early, in the nations where coal use is today the highest and is growing fastest, methods of mining and consumption often resemble the worst practices of the early 20th century. Thousands of China's five million coal miners die from accidents each year (3786 recorded deaths in 2007). Meanwhile, acid rain falls on one-third of China's territory and one-third of the urban population breathes heavily polluted air.6 China's coal burning has put five of its cities in the top ten of the most polluted cities in the world, according to the International Energy Agency.

Recently, very fine coal dust originating in China and containing arsenic and other toxic elements has been detected drifting around the globe in increasing amounts. In early April 2006, a dense cloud of coal dust and desert sand from northern China obscured nearby Seoul before sailing across the Pacific. Monitoring stations of the US West Coast found highly elevated levels of sulfur compounds, carbon and other byproducts of coal combustion - microscopic particles that can work their way deep into the lungs, contributing to respiratory damage, heart disease and cancer. But as terrible as all of these mostly longstanding environmental, health, and safety problems are, they pale in comparison to what many regard as the greatest crisis of our time - global Climate Change consequent upon carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) from the burning of fossil fuels.

While coal produces a little over a quarter of the world's energy, it is responsible for nearly 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Those emissions consist principally of CO2, though coal mining also releases methane, which is 20 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2 and accounts for 9 percent of greenhouse gas emissions created through human activity.

During the past decade, as the scientific consensus has solidified that global warming is due to human activity, the actual signs of that warming have often surpassed even the most dire forecasts. During the 2007 summer, Arctic sea ice reached a minimum extent of 4.13 million square kilometers, compared to the previous record low of 5.32 million square kilometers in 2005. This represented a decline of 22 per cent in just two years; the difference amounted to an expanse of ice roughly the size of Texas and California [the size of South Africa as a whole] combined. Moreover, the average thickness of the ice has declined by about half since 2001. Altogether, taking into account both geographic extent and thickness, summer Arctic sea ice has lost more than 80 per cent of its volume in four decades. At current rates of melting, the Arctic could be ice-free during the summer months by 2013.

While sea levels will not be directly affected by the total melting of the northern icecap, since it floats on and thus displaces ocean water, that event will severely destabilize Greenland's ice pack - whose disappearance would cause sea levels to rise by several meters, inundating coastal cities home to hundreds of millions of people.

Meanwhile, as deserts expand and climate zones shift, many species that are unable to move or adapt quickly enough find themselves on the precipice of extinction.
The crisis is being exacerbated by the fact that carbon sinks (forests and oceans that soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere) are losing their capacity. The net carbon uptake of northern forests is declining in response to autumnal warming. And evidence suggests that the oceans' ability to take up atmospheric carbon is also slowing, and perhaps even reversing.7

Meanwhile, the seas are acidifying as levels of carbonic acid - produced by the reaction of water with carbon dioxide - are increasing at a rate a hundred times faster than the world has seen for millions of years. The oceans are naturally alkaline; but, since the industrial revolution, sea surfaces have grown increasingly acidic, and many millennia will pass before natural processes can return the oceans to their preindustrial state.

The sea life expected to be worst hit include organisms that produce calcium carbonate shells - including corals, crustaceans, mollusks, and certain plankton species. Larger sea fauna such as penguins and cetaceans would not be directly affected, but changes to the rest of the food chain would eventually impact these larger animals as well.

From the human standpoint, the potential consequences of climate change for agriculture are particularly worrisome. According to the UN's World Food Program (WFP), 57 countries - including 29 in Africa, 19 in Asia and nine in Latin America - have been hit by catastrophic floods during the past few years. Harvests have been affected by drought and heat waves in South Asia, Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay.8 In 2007 the Australian government said drought had slashed predictions of the coming winter harvest by nearly 40 percent, or four million tons.9

Altogether, human-induced climate change constitutes an environmental impact of a scale never before seen during the period of human civilization. Because coal produces higher emissions per BTU of energy yielded than does oil or gas, as these other fossil fuels deplete and become more scarce and expensive, and as higher-quality coal depletes and nations turn to lower-quality coals, the climate crisis will only grow worse - unless cleaner sources of energy are developed quickly, or unless total energy use declines.

Efforts to capture carbon at power plants and sequester it in deep geological deposits could theoretically reduce the environmental burden from coal consumption, but there are snags and tradeoffs to that solution, as we will see in chapter 8.
There is currently an enormous push underway to develop a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, using cap-and-trade mechanisms to ration rights to emit carbon. This may turn out to be the most significant global policy discussion in world history, and it will have enormous implications for, among other things, the problem of global economic inequity - since national levels of per-capita energy consumption correlate closely with per-capita GDP.

Such a policy would also significantly impact the development of coal industries worldwide, and entire national economies that depend on coal. But if size of the coal resource base is smaller than is generally believed, this would also have enormous implications for climate science, climate policy, and economic planning at all levels of society.
* * *
In short: two of the defining trends of the emerging century -
The development of the Asian economies, and
Climate Change- both center on coal. But coal is a finite, non-renewable resource. Thus any discussion of the future of coal must also intersect with a third great trend of the new century:
Resource depletion.
These three overarching trends, which will determine the future of our species, must inevitably coalesce - but how? Can current trends in coal consumption be sustained? If not, what does this mean for the global economy and for the environment? If such trends cannot be sustained, how will our energy future unfold? These are, of course, enormously complex questions - which we will attempt to unpack during the course of this book. But it is probably best to begin with a more rudimentary, apparently mundane question upon which these others directly or indirectly pivot:

How do we know how much coal we have?

Is the case for Climate Change Overstated?

Some that it was, tut this was before the summer Arctic ice melt of 2007.

This year, Arctic ice reached a minimum extent of 4.13 million square kilometers, compared to the previous record low of 5.32 million square kilometers in 2005. This represented a decline of 22 per cent in just two years; the difference amounted to an expanse of ice roughly the size of Texas and California [or the size of South Africa, or 5 X the United Kingdom] combined.

Between 1979 and 2005, the rate of Arctic ice retreat had averaged 7 percent per decade; in the two years from September 2005 to September 2007 that rate increased to more than 20 percent. Moreover, the average thickness of the ice has declined by about half since 2001.

Altogether, taking into account both geographic extent and thickness, summer Arctic sea ice has lost more than 80 per cent of its volume in four decades. While sea levels will not be directly affected by the total melting of the northern icecap since it floats on and thus displaces ocean water, that event will severely destabilize Greenland's ice pack - whose disappearance would cause sea levels to rise by several meters, inundating coastal cities home to hundreds of millions.

The organization Carbon Equity issued a report last month, "The Big Melt: Lessons from the Arctic Summer of 2007" (www.carbonequity.info/PDFs/Arctic.pdf), which draws conclusions from this disturbing new information:

The data surveyed suggests strongly that in many key areas the IPCC process has been so deficient as to be an unreliable and indeed a misleading basis for policy-making. . . . Take just one example: the most fundamental and widely supported tenet - that 2°C represents a reasonable maximum target if we are to avoid dangerous climate change - can no longer be defended. Today at less than a 1°C rise the Arctic sea ice is headed for very rapid disintegration, in all likelihood triggering the irreversible loss of the Greenland ice sheet and catastrophic sea level increases. Many species are on the precipice, climatechange- induced drought or changing monsoon patterns are sweeping every continent, the carbon sinks are losing capacity and the seas are acidifying. . . .

The Arctic began to lose volume at least 20 years ago when the global temperature was about 0.5°C over the pre-industrial level. So we can now see that to protect the Arctic the average global temperature rise should be under 0.5°C.

According to the report, if this suggested 0.5°C precautionary warming cap were adopted, the target for allowable concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases would have to be about 320 ppm CO2 equivalents, a level that was passed more than 50 years ago.

Another report published this month, this one in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/oct/23/climatechange.carbonemissions), documents that carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere much faster than previously thought, and only adds weight to the Carbon Equity recommendations. While global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning rose annually by 0.7 percent in the 1990s, the new study shows they have increased by an average 2.9 percent each year since 2000.

What would targets of 0.5 degrees warming over pre-industrial levels, and 320 ppm CO2e, mean in terms of policy?

While the Carbon Equity report doesn't say so, if all nations were to bear the brunt of equal emissions cuts the latter would have to be huge - well over 90 percent in just three or four decades. But if international equity is also targeted, this means that for the wealthy nations more than 100 percent reduction would be needed. In other words, leaving aside the notion of carbon capture and storage (discussed below), not only would wealthy nations have to transform their economies to run entirely without fossil fuels (which currently supply 85 percent of world energy), but they would need to spend considerable capital on efforts to capture and sequester existing atmospheric carbon - for example, through massive reforestation projects.

One has to wonder: With all the energy and investment that would be needed to de-carbonize industrial economies (by developing renewable energy sources, building public transportation infrastructure, and so on) and store carbon, what money and energy would be left to run existing economies, much less to fuel growth in goods and services to the population?

Politics: An Alternate Reality

Climate science exists in a different world from the one peopled by politicians. Inhabitants of both worlds think of themselves as realists: while scientists study the real physical world, politicians are arbiters of what can and will get done in the real human socio-economic world.
In general, any policy that means voluntary economic contraction of any noticeable magnitude doesn't stand much of a chance in the real world of politics. At least in the current political climate, absent a massive public education effort, voters will not support it and no politician will stake her career on it.

This in itself constitutes an enormous roadblock to the achievement even of the IPCC recommendations, much less the far more stringent targets (but more "realistic" ones in the scientific sense) that Carbon Equity is proposing. Faced with this roadblock, climate activists typically respond by minimizing the estimated cost of de-carbonizing economies, and by assuring one and all that economic growth can continue into the indefinite future while industrial nations radically reduce their consumption of the very fuels that made the industrial revolution possible. But if this sanguine, politically acceptable notion is at least arguable in the case of the IPCC reduction targets, it is hardly credible when it comes to the emissions reduction trajectory suggested by Carbon Equity.

Take the US as an atypical but essential example. One can realistically calculate a possible 50 percent reduction in fossil fuel consumption for the country through conservation (though that will be an enormous job, requiring extensive new electrified public transport infrastructure, new housing codes, subsidized energy retrofit programs, and so on). Another 25 percent of current fossil fuel consumption could be offset with renewable energy sources. All of this would take a few decades, and during that time we have to assume no population growth and no economic growth. That gets us to 75 percent reduction from current levels. Beyond that, it is difficult to see how more could be achieved - unless America continues burning fossil fuels but captures and stores the carbon. Suddenly with that possibility a relief valve is opened: coal-based electricity could flow in to fill the void.

Extract from Richard Heinberg's Museletter.

NVDL: Is the case for Climate Change overstated? Unfortunately, far from it. We all wish it was.