Globalisation and Climate Change

Faith & Science Conversation
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I tend to be suspicious of those who seem to have nothing but criticism for all things “pro-environment” (i.e. solar, wind, electric this or that). It’s easy to think that they are merely registering their card-carrying identity with (or rather against) a certain tribe they’ve already decided they dislike for reasons quite unrelated to any material they actually present as their public face.

But despite my suspicions of all that, I’m not naive enough to think that no criticism is ever warranted of many major environmental initiatives. This BBC article seems to have a fairly level-headed critical approach of just such things, without (it seems to me) being motivated by tribal games or opaque anti-environmentalism. Our seemingly unlimited faith in technology and globalisation to deliver us from the very problem brought to us (in large part) by these very things does warrant a good critical discussion even if it is one none of us like to have.

Any thoughts, reactions, or discussion of Alf Hornborg’s observations?

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Interesting read. I think I agree with his assessment of technology. We all want to save the world, but we want to do it without making any major changes to our lifestyles or energy consumption. But I’m afraid that greater localization will lead to more inequality. And if it does, will our values shift to value equality less?

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That’s a good question. And one of our wishful presumptions about equality is that everybody below ‘me’ would be able to rise up to ‘my’ level (conveniently making it unnecessary for me to change any of my own behaviors.) And the ‘me’ thinking like this often has a lifestyle that is far too carbon consuming to accomplish any mitigation whatsoever. In short, nobody ever wants to work toward equality by giving up anything. We indulge our fantasies instead that all boats should rise to where we are.

The result? well… boats sure are rising. Literally.

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Does it continue to strike anyone else (in depressing ways) as we listen to the news that affluent societies are hopelessly conflicted (and that only in their better moments!) by motivational cross purposes?

What I mean by that is this. We are conditioned to want and celebrate good economics. Low unemployment, rising levels of wealth, anything that wards off or prevents the all-dreaded recession. And yet if I was purely motivated only toward carbon footprint reduction, I am forced in that environmentally conscious mindset to see ominous and damaging implications in all those same things that I moments before was celebrating. An economy that is ramping up and “getting busy” as it were means more of all the damaging things that sells away our environmental future.

Of course large corporate institutions turn an understandable blind eye to all that since they can only know and worship one mantra: grow or die. It’s the only life approach that has sustained them (if indeed they are among the survivors) for these last centuries. Mere sustainability = death in their minds (and with some justification). Nobody is in business to get smaller (or even stay the same apparently). Hence the need for governments to break up big monopolies - a battle that government has been soundly and roundly losing by any possible perspective. We don’t have any way in any of our economic models to shrink in any non-catastrophic ways. For all of our study of economics and all the experts out there on these things, how could such a gaping hole in our knowledge persist for so long? [It would be a bit like struggling up a mountain, and only later learning from your great height that no controlled descent is possible. Your only way to get back down is by falling off cliffs - walking down is deemed impossible.]

I know. Nobody is supposed to talk like this. It’s fighting against that god-word: progress. And nobody, I repeat nobody is ever against that!

There, my smiley face is pasted back on, and brain turned back off again so that I can resume the idiotic corporate intravenous drip-feed that we’re all so addicted to as we use it to talk to each other here. :grinning:

Have a great day everybody!
-Your daily pick-me-up from Merv

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In my opinion, Hornberg is right that the technology of energy consumption is tightly coupled to the rest of the economy.

However, I do question some of his assumptions. For example, much residential electricity can be generated from currently unused rooftops by solar tiles. The cost of solar technology has dropped quite a bit, so the rest of the world is not going to pay the same price Morocco paid a decade ago to build a solar farm. If we can shift ground transportation to renewable-powered electricity and reduce meat consumption and eliminate beef consumption, then we might be able to use bio-fuels to power ships and maybe even airplanes.

The economy I am envisioning is indeed significantly different than the existing economy, but not radically.so. Personally, I have altered my lifestyle by driving a gas-sipping Prius and sharply reducing my consumption of meat and dairy. When solar rooftiles become available, I will put them on my roof. And the electricity it generates will power my next car, an electric vehicle.

Best,
Chris

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I applaud and aspire to follow such practices myself - knowing full well it’s nothing close to enough; but becoming less of a problem still trumps remaining a bigger problem - every place, every time. Which is why I have little patience for naysayers who pretend the only two options are “saving the planet” (a nonsensical caricature from its inception) or “then just forget about it all - eat, drink, and be merry then.”

So what do you think of the author’s charge that the only reason solar will be (is) getting cheaper is because of carbon-costly outsourcing of such manufacturing to China? It would be interesting to see if a typical (now cheaper) manufactured solar panel today is able to make up for its manufacturing and shipping carbon footprint by the energy it then displaces away from fossil fuel electricity production over the expected lifetime of the panel. I’m sure somebody has probably researched that.

Good job on the fuel-sippage car! I’m about to use my “snack-sipping” bicycle for my run into town this morning.

[I’ve got this (or a similarly messaged one like it) posted on my wall in my classroom at school…]
image

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The charge is not entirely true. Much of the cost reduction comes from improved manufacturing and materials technology. The carbon cost of shipping the panels is vastly outweighed by the carbon savings they generate.

Best,
Chris

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As an evil oil man who spent 46 or so years in the search of oil, the biggest conflict I have is that if we can only engage in globalization because we have an abundance of oil to move the ships which ship solar cells from China to the rest of the world, along with our ipads, medicines, face masks etc. Windmill turbine blades are made from carbon black, which is manufactured from , you guessed it, fossil fuel. As a physicist, when I run the numbers on current technologies of wind and solar I can’t see how we could ever replace fossil fuel without killing millions of people, maybe killing billions.

It is hard to see how to run tractors on a 20 sq mile corn farm off of electricity. Tractors are necessary to plant 30,000 corn plants per acre and 1.5 million wheat plants per acre. Without fossil fuel, I fear that the per acre yields of corn of 160 bushels per acre would drop to pre-industrial levels of 25 bushels per acre. Secondly, corn and wheat require lots of fertilizer which is made of fossil fuel, not of solar electricity.

One needs loads of energy for irrigation. From an old article of mine on The Oil Drum:

Many areas of the world are involved with irrigation to support the agricultural efforts. My former sister-in-law lives on a farm in western Nebraska. They tap the Ogallala reservoir to water their land. Over the many years, the water level has dropped forcing wells to go deeper. This has happened throughout the world as the farmers try to get water to grow their crops. Vacuum pumps (the ones with the handle) can only bring water up from less than 32 feet deep. If you go deeper, you need either a bucket system or electricity. And therein lies the rub. As energy supplies grow scarce, electricity will begin to become less and less reliable. Consider these guys from India. Notice the depth of their water wells.
"Since the 1990s, India has been a major net exporter of rice, shipping nearly 4.5 million tons last year.

“But annual yield increases began to slow over the past decade. Farmers cranked up fertilizer and
water use, draining the water table. Many began planting two crops a year, taxing the soil. Punjabi *
area officials discouraged farmers from planting two crops and in some places outlawed it, but many
farmers ignored them.” **

I’m doing mischief against the government,’ concedes Kanwar Singh, a second rice crop*
recently on a stretch of flooded land near the northern India city of Karnal. He says he now*
has to pump water from 300 feet below the surface, compared with 70 feet 10 years ago.“*
‘In a year or two, maybe it will be finished,’ he says.” (Barta, 2007, p. A10)

Our food supply is merely a way to turn fossil fuel into food. Fossil fuel to run the tractors, fossil fuel to fertilize the crop; fossil fuel to pump the water for irrigation. Fossil fuel to haul the crop to the cities.

Can we do all this with lithium batteries? My guess is no. we would need to nearly triple our electricity grid. And even if we do go to electrical trucks, something has to generate the electricity. Today around 62% of electricity is generated by fossil fuel and it is far more efficient to use the fossil fuel directly in the vehicles than convert it to electricity and then charge the batteries. One gets a higher level of energy out of direct use than indirect use.

We should be careful what we wish for. Killing off fossil fuel will starve most of us to death. I don’t want that because I have grandkids. If it were only I, well, I have a ticket out of here soon so for me, it wouldn’t matter much. For them, it is everything.

edited to add: When I owned my ranch of 100 acres I tried to go off the grid, but both wind and solar were required to be shut down if the electrical grid went down, so when you really needed that electricity, you couldn’t have it. this was to prevent electrocution of the electrical line workers. Secondly, at the time, Solar cells had a pay out time of 50 years but a physical life span of 30. Wind might have worked, but again, if I sold power back to the grid, then when I needed that electricity, I couldn’t have it.

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We may not be able to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, but we can all change our behavior so as to reduce its use. Here’s a small example: I have substituted soymilk or almond milk with pea protein for dairy milk in my diet. These products require far less farming than dairy.

I commute in a Prius rather than a SUV. My next car will be electric.

Kudos for thinking that way!

This is beginning to change.

It’s unfortunate that we have had to wait so long for the technology to mature. Today, the economics are much more favorable: Solar panels on a house reach break-even in less than a decade. A ranch might take longer due to the lack of tax deductions, of course.

i’ll close with this thought: With my bias toward pragmatism, I’m focusing on making the world a better place, even if we can’t collectively make it all the way to the ideal state this side of eternity.

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I am looking forward to reading this once home. I do agree that often I think it’s related to card carrying. I’m independent and I feel I see this on both sides. It’s always weird when one side calls me liberal and the other side calls me conservative and always with a negative connotation. But we all know you can’t please everyone. Can’t even fully please even one person lol.

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Part of the cost is still the governmental subsidies. My son, a very astute businessman and negotiator in Boston, got solar cells and was generating most of his own electricity, but it was economic because of the subsidies. My business partner had a early Prius and he got $7500 in subsidies, which made the car competitive. Technologies need to compete on their own terms without subsidies.

Loot at the fiasco of the 1 billion dollar Tonopah molten salt plant which was a subsidized liquid sodium solar electrical generator facility Tonopah solar plant could end up in bankruptcy, developer says | Energy | Business

The government guaranteed 737 million dollars of loans and the plant is already obsolete, leaving us taxpayers on the hook. A $1 Billion Solar Plant Was Obsolete Before It Ever Went Online - Bloomberg

Government bureaucrats have a very bad track record of picking winning technologies.

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Perhaps it would be fair to note that the government has a better track record for spotting the wicked ones though. How long was it that the private sector interests still pushed all the “cigarettes don’t cause cancer” or “leaded gasoline isn’t a problem” … etc. That is the kind of “science” that we can expect from the private sector. They can be counted on to lie, cheat, steal, and leave all of us to deal with their not-so-hidden-costs (externalities) while they run away with all the profits. The naivete involved with thinking that the private sector will ever voluntarily behave itself without independent regulatory oversight is breathtaking. Big government may be bungling, but big business is efficiently rapacious. Some mix of both together is probably the least evil balance we can hope for.

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That’s right. Those engineers at DARPA really went off the rails with TCP/IP. :slight_smile:

In a more serious vein, I am suggesting that it is hard to generalize from very small sample sizes. Some government-sponsored technologies fail, some succeed. The same is true for industry-developed technologies.

Yes, they need to eventually reach that point. Shockingly, the intangible drilling costs deduction and royalty payment reductions on federal lands still seem to be needed by domestic oil and gas producers to make production economically feasible. How else to explain that taxpayers are still funding these to the tune of billions of dollars annually?

Grace and peace,
Chris

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I agree with you. Most of the present onshore federal production is shale. Even with those reductions, no one is making free cash flow–that means not making money. The shale boom is an illusion based upon debt (because of low interest rates) and the dilution of present share holders by issuing new shares. While shale has boosted our production and delayed peak oil, it isn’t self sustaining, and because of that, I wish the industry had never gone to it.

But, without the oil from shale, your gasoline prices would be significantly higher because since 1985 we have found less conventional oil than we burn each and every year.

production vs discovery 2019
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I got into the oil business in 1971, putting production statistics into the first computer database for such a purpose. I began my exploration career in 1973 and while I as an individual contributor and as an exploration manager found a billion barrels of oil for my employers, and I was considered very good, that amount of oil is insignificant. We burn that much oil in less than 2 weeks.

The US government reduced offshore royalties from 3/16th (which is what my wife gets on her privately owned leases onshore, to 12.5% because shelf activity had plummeted and it is in the government’s interest to get as much oil out even at a lower royalty. I first worked the Gulf of Mexico Shelf, but what is left out there is pitances in tiny reservoirs, generally not worth much effort.

Even the deep water Gom is so picked over now that it is exceedingly hard to find good fields today. The largest Gulf Field, Tahiti was hanging by 2 wells, when I retired in 2016. It was almost depleted. Thunderhorse, once claimed to have a billion bbl, only has about 350 million–that is a lot of oil, but not a billion and much of that oil is not in Thunderhorse proper, but in Thunderhorse North. (I worked that area for another company for the last 8 years of my career). One of my discoveries, Conger field, has been the most profitable Gulf of Mexico field, but it should start declining soon, having been discovered in 1999 or so.

One can keep the royalties high, but one ultimately will recover less royalty money in the long run.

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And of course, cheap oil and natural gas is what makes renewable energy sources economically unsustainable at present. And when energy costs go up, the cost of food will skyrocket, and the cost of goods will too. The human cost will be great, as people will starve. Jobs will disappear, hurting the poor the most.

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Or we steam full-speed ahead and hit a much more abrupt wall of peak oil with less prep and trying to spread the pain out earlier to soften the blows later. I wonder, rhetorically, which of those options our children and their children might prefer.

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Hornborg’s spot on. We’re addicted to cheap = globalization. We’re centuries away from the hive switch being thrown.

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But don’t forget that when energy costs go up rapidly, we often have a recession and lots of people lose their jobs. June 2008, oil hit $164/bbl(inflation adjusted values), 2009 was the financial crisis. Yes there were underlying issues, but oil was the trigger.

Martin Pelletier: History has proven that every time there was a major global recession it was immediately preceded by a large spike in oil prices followed by a large drop during the recession Is the oil price plunge a recession trigger? History says otherwise | Financial Post

oil price and recession
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If you want consistently high energy prices, lots of farmers will go out of business, raising food prices, we will have a recession and lots of people will be unhappy with the policies that led to that state of affairs. Any thing we would do has consequences, some of which we won’t like.

I remember back in 2008 I was at my ranch and went to fill up my pickup. A truck from the local electrical company came in to fill up and he had a very big tank. I commented that at that day’s cost per gallon, he was going to spend a lot of money. He laughed then got serious. He told me of the poor in the county who were having to make a choice between having heat and AC, OR gasoline to drive to their jobs. He said I wouldn’t believe how many homes he had shut off the electricity to because they were making the logical choice to have gasoline to get to work.

My point in this is that we all sit around and pontificate on what we need to do to get green energy, never ever thinking about what high energy costs would do to the poor. I was very, very poor early in life and have never forgotten that experience. The well off hardly ever even wanted to notice me. If they did they didn’t think about what might be good for me. I think that if we artificially raise energy prices to go to expensive green energy, we are doing nothing but hurting the poor and I don’t think Christians should do that, given what Jesus says about how we should deal with the poor.

Mervin suggested:

I don’t like any suggestion that even smacks of getting blood on our hands by doing anything that might kill our fellow humans. Morally, it is best to ride the train to the end. And this kind of thinking is getting scary with shades of Cambodia:

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It is technically possible to develop non-fossil fuels that can work in the same application, and even the same mechanical technology. For example, we could convert atmospheric CO2 into synthetic methane and power fuel production through non-fossil fuel means, such as nuclear. However, such technologies are not economically viable. Greatly improving battery technology might be a better long term solution.

Fossil fuel companies brought in $20 billion in US government subsidies last year. The European Union does the same.

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If they are economically unviable, then they are not relevant. We don’t want to spend more energy to create methane than we get out of the methane. I just looked again and none of the schemes seem to ever mention how much energy they use to create their end products vs. how much energy we get from that end product. I suspect they don’t mention it for a very good reason–it is energy negative.

As to subsidies, I would like NOTHING to get subsidies. Subsidies are rich companies be it oil, solar, electric cars or wind, stealing money from the tax payer to reduce their risk profile. This is crony capitalism, not real capitalism.