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The Generator news service publishes articles on sustainable development, agriculture and energy as well as observations on current affairs. The news service is used on the weekly radio show, The Generator, as well as by a number of monthly and quarterly magazines. A podcast of the Generator news is also available.
As well as Giovanni’s articles it picks up the most pertinent articles from a range of other news services. You can publish the news feed on your website using RSS, free of charge.
 

  • The dirty topic of peak oil : get ready to reduce your reliance

     

    No one can say with certainty how much oil is left in the ground nor how much it will cost to take it out. As with climate change, the search for certainty in relation to oil supply is a fool’s errand. But while no-one can say with certainty how much is left, virtually no economists or oil industry analysts disagree with the statement that oil production cannot keep growing forever. The notion that oil production must one day peak is now referred to as ‘peak oil’.

    While there is virtually no debate that oil production must one day peak, there is much debate about the timing and significance of such a peak. For those who have become accustomed to talking about emission reduction targets for 2020 and 2050 it may come as some surprise to learn that the mid-range forecasts for the peak in global oil production are 10-15 years. This does not mean that there will be no oil in 10 or 15 years time, but it means oil is going to get a LOT more expensive. Put simply, if demand continues to rise and supply starts to fall the days of the average Australian driving their Landcruiser to work will be over.

    Peak oil concerns exploded during the rapid escalation of oil prices prior to the 2007 global financial crisis. These concerns have been underscored by official bodies such as the IEA warning of a possible “supply crunch” brought about by a lack of new investment following the crisis, and of rising depletion rates from existing fields.

    According to the CEO of Lloyds Insurance, there are three factors combining to create deep uncertainties in how we will source energy for power, heat and mobility, and how much we will have to pay for it. These are the growing constraints on “easy access” oil, the urgency of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and a sharp rise in energy demand from the emerging economies, particularly China.

    As with climate change, the debate about peak oil is not simply confined to whether it exists or not, but whether it is worth worrying about. Some economists simply argue that as prices rise rapidly people will be forced to use a lot less fuel. While this is no doubt true, the potential disruption to the broader economy of people not being able to afford to drive to work are significant, to say the least.

    World economies are built on oil. As occurred in response to the OPEC oil shock of the 1970s, skyrocketing oil prices are likely to result in severe disruption to those economies, with central banks raising interest rates to slow inflation, people out of work, and famine and civil disorder in the third world, as much agricultural production depends on oil.

    The obvious policy response to the inevitable peak in oil supply is to begin to reduce our reliance on oil well before we are forced to do so. But what would that entail?

    Subsidies for oil use are common around the world and need to be phased out. Wastefully low rates of fuel tax in the US should be changed. Countries like Australia, while small in terms of their contribution to demand, have a role to play. Fuel and road-pricing regimes need to be altered to encourage fuel efficiency. A congestion tax and investment in public transport would help to shift people from the least to the most fuel-efficient forms of transport. Alternative fuels like natural gas can be promoted and fringe benefits tax concessions on company cars that encourage owners to drive more to pay less should be scrapped.

    Some of the alternatives to conventional oil are becoming economic at current prices, and might offer a way around peak oil. But it must be recognised that they can involve extremely high and possibly unsustainable costs in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. The extraction of oil from tar sands, for example, or its processing from coal and natural gas generates enormous amounts of greenhouse gasses. This poses a potential dilemma for policy, but the answer is actually quite simple — a price on carbon.

    As luck would have it, the policy prescriptions to prepare for peak oil are almost identical to those required to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Let’s hope that policy makers who are disinterested in saving the planet will pay a bit more attention to saving the economy. It’s inevitable that we will run out of cheap oil, but it need not be inevitable that our economies grind to a halt.

    But if we are to avoid another big and permanent increase in the price of oil, we need to invest in early adaptation. It will be costly and difficult to redesign cities, switch the vehicle fleet to new forms of fuel and invest in public transport. Ironically, it will be much cheaper and easier to make such investments before the price of oil surges, rather than after. Early investment in adaptation measures will pay high dividends in the future.

    And who knows, if in 20 years someone finds an enormous new oil field in the middle of Australia, all that preparation might have served only to avoid catastrophic climate change. And wouldn’t we feel silly then.

    *Dr David Ingles is a Research Fellow at The Australia Institute, a Canberra-based think tank. He is the author of Running on empty? The peak oil debate.

  • Running on empty? The peak oil debate.

    Peak oil concerns exploded during the rapid escalation of oil prices prior to the 2007 global financial crisis (GFC), and resurfaced recently when oil prices appeared to resume their upward trend. These concerns have been underscored by official bodies such as the International Energy Agency (IEA) warning of a possible ‘supply crunch’ brought about by a lack of new investment following the GFC.
    The paper suggests that a carbon tax rather than a trading system is the optimal method for pricing carbon, but ultimately the method is not as important as the existence of a price that is relatively uniform across countries and is sufficiently high to materially affect production and consumption decisions, particularly the decision as to whether or not to pursue the development of emission-intensive alternatives to oil. In the medium term, the circumstances created by a price on carbon will likely expand the use of natural gas, both for power generation and transport; in the long term, it is likely to expand the role of electric vehicles and non-fossil forms of power generation.
    As with climate change, the most cost-effective response to the inevitable but uncertain timing of peak oil is to invest in early adaptation. It will be impossible to redesign cities, switch the vehicle fleet to new forms of fuel and transform the location decisions of producers in a timely manner after the oil supply has peaked. Early investment in adaptation measures will pay high dividends in the future, whether in response to peak oil, climate change or simply better city design and reduced congestion on roads.
    The paper concludes by suggesting that the peak-oil issue is sufficiently important for regular official re-assessments of the situation to be designed and implemented. If mitigation actions are not planned in advance, the alternative may be for a future where periodic price spikes and shortages affect the nation’s ability to manage the economic cycle by causing the re-emergence of ‘stop-start’ economic conditions such as those experienced in the 1970s.

    Sections: Economy | Government and Accountability | Environment

  • The Scale of the low-carbon task is immense

     

    A new paper in Science by Dr Steve Davis and colleagues at Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, California, gives us a clear estimate. Davis says that our existing energy infrastructure will put about 500 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2 into the atmosphere during the course of its life (this is about 15 times the world’s annual emissions from all sources today).

    The paper calculates this number by examining the number of power plants, motor vehicles and homes around the globe and estimating how long they will remain in use. The research team found that in the past, the average electricity-generating station lasted about 35 years before being demolished. Cars typically run for about 17 years before being scrapped, lorries and buses nearer 30. Since we know when all the power plants in the world were constructed and the average age of the planet’s vehicles, Davis and his colleagues could estimate how much carbon dioxide will be emitted by existing infrastructure during the remainder of its life.

    Put another 500Gt of CO2 into the atmosphere between now and 2050, and the expected temperature rise will be about 0.5C of extra warming on top of what we have already seen. (Of course there is a very wide range to this forecast because of the uncertainties in the models of how temperature change is related to emissions). Davis and his colleagues make the point that if we stopped building new coal-fired power plants tomorrow and manufactured no new cars or trucks we would therefore keep warming well below the 2C increase which global scientists think is the maximum tolerable. Davis’s climate models suggest that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere would rise to about 430 parts per million (ppm), a rise of about 40ppm on today’s level and well below the 450ppm level that scientists often associate with 2C of warming.

    That’s the good news – today’s energy infrastructure probably isn’t enough, by itself, to topple us into wholly unmanageable climate change. The bad news is that this figure assumes that we build no fossil fuel power stations in the future and that all our new vehicles and homes are zero-carbon. That’s not going to happen and the scale of the challenge is grimly indicated by the current rate of growth in low-carbon electricity. Of the 1,300 gigawatts of new power station capacity built since 2000, 31% uses coal, 34% gas and 4% oil. This leaves 2% nuclear and 17% renewables. And even this number substantially overestimates the share of future electricity production coming from renewables since both wind and solar power plants only produce a fraction of their maximum output. The wind and the sun aren’t available all the time.

    In a perspective in Science, Dr Marty Hoffert of New York University looks at how much energy we are likely to need to meet the world’s requirements in future. Keeping the world’s economy going requires continuously production of about 14,000 gigawatts of energy. That’s equivalent to about 10,000 large-scale power plants. As the world economy grows, this is likely to rise to at least twice this level by 2050, even if we achieve major gains in the efficiency with which we use energy. So the challenge is to run down existing carbon-polluting energy sources rapidly and to replace them with atmosphere-friendly equivalents.

    The scale of this task is immense. My rough calculation is that the world needs to ramp up its yearly rate of installation of low-carbon energy about 30-fold from today’s levels within the next couple of decades.

    A few wind turbines aren’t going to be enough.

     

    • Chris Goodall is a businessman, author and climate change expert

  • World bank hints Africa is ‘quick win’ for land grabbing investors

    World bank hints Africa is ‘quick win’ for land grabbing investors

    Ecologist

    14th September, 2010

    Report on land-grabbing reveals large-scale farmland deals amounted to 45 million hectares in 2009 alone with 6 million hectares expected to be added every year in less industrialised countries

    Activists have criticised the World Bank for effectively ignoring the harsh reality of land grabbing being faced by local populations and instead, showing the way for investors.

    The World Bank’s long-awaited report on the controversial issue of land grabbing in less industrialised countries looks at the scale of the situation and the risks to local populations. It also makes recommendations for how investors and governments should act in the future to ensure more responsible investments.

    As part of its detailed analysis of 14 countries, the report highlights Africa’s ‘large amounts of suitable but currently uncultivated land’, together with its history of weak governance.

    It states more than half the land that could potentially be used for expansion to meet commodity demands is in just ten countries, of which 5 are in Africa – making it a potential target for investors.

    Campaigners said the World Bank was effectively promoting Africa as a ‘quick win’ for investors and that there should in fact be a moratorium on all land grabbing.

    ‘What we are already seeing in many African countries is Neocolonialism; the land is being carved up,’ said Kirtana Chandrasekaran, Food Campaigner at Friends of the Earth.

    Chandrasekaran said local communities were not benefiting from land grabbing and the report showed there was no sustainable land model. She also accused the World Bank of ignoring the importance of strengthening governance and protecting the rights of local populations.

    ‘A lot of people are losing land and their means of livelihood with no compensation… It’s illogical,’ she said.

    While the report does stress the importance of respecting land rights it doesn’t appear to state how this should be enforced, nor how best to approach those local populations or farmers who are without, or who are unlikely to be aware of, such rights.

    Jodie Thorpe, Policy Advisor at Oxfam said it, ‘glosses over what needs to be done in order to ensure rights of local populations.’
    ‘Laws on paper can be good but the ability or capacity to enforce these laws is often lacking,’ she added.

    Useful links
    World Bank report ‘Rising Gobal Interest in Farmland’
    Friends of the Earth’s report ‘Africa up for grabs’
    FIAN’s campaign to ban land grabbing

  • The right’s climate denialism is part of something larger

     

    However! It does seem to me that the right’s climate denialism hasn’t been properly linked to the larger phenomenon of epistemic closure on the right. When Jim Manzi, everyone’s favorite sensible conservative, criticized fellow conservative Mark Levin for peddling intellectually shoddy skeptic arguments in his bestselling book Liberty and Tyranny, Levin went nuts, joined by a half-dozen other NRO writers. How could they not? The very same skeptic talking points in Levin’s book appear in thousands of blogs and comment sections across the interwebs. If they are intellectually bankrupt, a whole lot of people are going to look stupid.

    Regardless, to restrict discussion to climate science — how many scientists say what, who signed what statement, how many peer-reviewed papers say what — misses the forest for the trees. Climate denialism is part of something much broader and scarier on the right. The core idea is most clearly expressed by Rush Limbaugh:

    We really live, folks, in two worlds. There are two worlds. We live in two universes. One universe is a lie. One universe is an entire lie. Everything run, dominated, and controlled by the left here and around the world is a lie. The other universe is where we are, and that’s where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it. And seldom do these two universes ever overlap. …

    The Four Corners of Deceit: Government, academia, science, and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That’s how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper.

    The right’s project over the last 30 years has been to dismantle the post-war liberal consensus by undermining trust in society’s leading institutions. Experts are made elites; their presumption of expertise becomes self-damning. They think they’re better than you. They talk down to you. They don’t respect people like us, real Americans. Here’s Americans’ trust in institutions, also from Gallup data (click for larger version):

    Gallup: trust in institutions over time

    Of course the decline of trust in institutions is multi-causal, but the right’s relentless assault has certainly exacerbated matters. Here’s another graph to chill your blood, showing the only two institutions in which trust is rising:

    Gallup: trust in police and military

    (I was tipped off to these graphs by Chris Hayes, who has written about America’s institutional crisis and is working on a book on the subject, which I expect will be one of the big political books of 2011.)

    The decline in trust in institutions has generated fear and uncertainty, to which people generally respond by placing their trust in protective authorities. And some subset of people respond with tribalism, nationalism, and xenophobia. The right stokes and exploits modern anxiety relentlessly, but that’s not all they do. They also offer a space to huddle in safety among the like-minded. The conservative movement in America has created a self-contained, hermetically sealed epistemological reality — a closed-loop system of cable news, talk radio, and email forwards — designed not just as a source of alternative facts but as an identity. That’s why when you question climate skepticism you catch hell. You’re messing with who people are.

    Consider what the Limbaugh/Morano crowd is saying about climate: not only that that the world’s scientists and scientific institutions are systematically wrong, but that they are purposefully perpetrating a deception. Virtually all the world’s governments, scientific academies, and media are either in on it or duped by it. The only ones who have pierced the veil and seen the truth are American movement conservatives, the ones who found death panels in the healthcare bill.

    It’s a species of theater, repeated so often people have become inured, but if you take it seriously it’s an extraordinary charge. For one thing, if it’s true that the world’s scientists are capable of deception and collusion on this scale, a lot more than climate change is in doubt. These same institutions have told us what we know about health and disease, species and ecosystems, energy and biochemistry. If they are corrupt, we have to consider whether any of the knowledge they’ve generated is trustworthy. We could be operating our medical facilities, economies, and technologies on faulty theories. We might not know anything! Here we are hip-deep in postmodernism and it came from the right, not the left academics they hate.

    Scientific claims are now subject to ideological disputation. Rush Limbaugh is telling millions of people that they’ve taken the red pill and everything they once knew and could trust is a lie. They’ve woken up outside the Matrix and he is their corpulent, drug-addicted, thrice-divorced Morpheus. What could go wrong?

     

  • MIT Researchers Develop a Way to Funnel Solar Energy

     

    Strano and his students describe their new carbon nanotube antenna, or “solar funnel,” in the Sept. 12 online edition of the journal Nature Materials. Lead authors of the paper are postdoctoral associate Jae-Hee Han and graduate student Geraldine Paulus (pictured above).

    Their new antennas might also be useful for any other application that requires light to be concentrated, such as night-vision goggles or telescopes.

    Solar panels generate electricity by converting photons (packets of light energy) into an electric current. Strano’s nanotube antenna boosts the number of photons that can be captured and transforms the light into energy that can be funneled into a solar cell.

    The antenna consists of a fibrous rope about 10 micrometers (millionths of a meter) long and four micrometers thick, containing about 30 million carbon nanotubes. Strano’s team built, for the first time, a fiber made of two layers of nanotubes with different electrical properties — specifically, different bandgaps.

    In any material, electrons can exist at different energy levels. When a photon strikes the surface, it excites an electron to a higher energy level, which is specific to the material. The interaction between the energized electron and the hole it leaves behind is called an exciton, and the difference in energy levels between the hole and the electron is known as the bandgap.

    The inner layer of the antenna contains nanotubes with a small bandgap, and nanotubes in the outer layer have a higher bandgap. That’s important because excitons like to flow from high to low energy. In this case, that means the excitons in the outer layer flow to the inner layer, where they can exist in a lower (but still excited) energy state.

    Therefore, when light energy strikes the material, all of the excitons flow to the center of the fiber, where they are concentrated. Strano and his team have not yet built a photovoltaic device using the antenna, but they plan to. In such a device, the antenna would concentrate photons before the photovoltaic cell converts them to an electrical current. This could be done by constructing the antenna around a core of semiconducting material.

    The interface between the semiconductor and the nanotubes would separate the electron from the hole, with electrons being collected at one electrode touching the inner semiconductor, and holes collected at an electrode touching the nanotubes. This system would then generate electric current. The efficiency of such a solar cell would depend on the materials used for the electrode, according to the researchers.

    Strano’s team is the first to construct nanotube fibers in which they can control the properties of different layers, an achievement made possible by recent advances in separating nanotubes with different properties.

    While the cost of carbon nanotubes was once prohibitive, it has been coming down in recent years as chemical companies build up their manufacturing capacity. “At some point in the near future, carbon nanotubes will likely be sold for pennies per pound, as polymers are sold,” says Strano. “With this cost, the addition to a solar cell might be negligible compared to the fabrication and raw material cost of the cell itself, just as coatings and polymer components are small parts of the cost of a photovoltaic cell.”

    Strano’s team is now working on ways to minimize the energy lost as excitons flow through the fiber, and on ways to generate more than one exciton per photon. The nanotube bundles described in the Nature Materials paper lose about 13 percent of the energy they absorb, but the team is working on new antennas that would lose only 1 percent.

    Anne Trafton is a writer in the MIT news office.