Can airlines be saved?

SUBHEAD: The Seneca Cliff - Alternatives energy sources for commercial aircraft will not replace fossil fuels. 

By Ugo Bardi on  30 October 2017 for Cassandra's Legacy -
(http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/biofuels-can-they-save-airlines-from.html)


Image above: It's easier to paint a plane green than to run it on biofuel.  Rainy day for a new Boeing 747 that rests on tarmac ready for testing before certification and an airline paint job. From (https://www.flickr.com/photos/1337n00b/847065645/in/photostream/).

"Can the airlines be run on biofuels?" As it often happens, this simple question doesn't have a simple answer. First of all, it is a question that makes sense only in terms of a "sustainable" plane, that is one that doesn't run on fossil fuels. That's a major technological problem.

Whereas cars can be made to run on battery-powered electric motors, the power/weight ratio of the combination is simply unacceptable for a passenger plane that could provide a performance comparable to that of current jet planes.

Hydrogen planes have been proposed, but they are a nightmare for several reasons and it is unlikely that they could become practical in the short and medium term future.

That would leave only biofuels as a "sustainable" fuel that could power the current fleet of jet planes. Indeed, a small number of tests have been carried out showing that it is possible to fly planes using biofuels. But can it be done on the large scale needed to get rid of fossil fuels?

The first problem is whether biofuels are truly carbon-free. Most likely, the current fuels made from crops are not; in the sense that they involve extensive use of fossil fuels for their manufacturing. In many cases, however, even the current generation ("1st generation") of biofuels can provide a significant saving in the use of fossil fuels for the same amount of energy produced.

This is the case, in particular, for ethanol produced from sugarcane in Brazil. But there is a more fundamental question is: what would be the consequences of ramping up biofuel production to the levels needed to power the current airline fleet?

In a recent paper on Nature, Rulli et al. discuss the effect of the large scale cultivation of 1st generation biofuels on various parameters of the world's economy, including the global food supply.

They don't specifically examine the needs of airlines, but we can use their results for analyzing this sector.

First of all, the total amount of jet fuel consumed in the world is reported to be 6,000,000 barrels per day. It corresponds to about 7% of the total world combustible liquids production, but note that jet fuel is a refinery product, so the actual fraction is larger. But let's stick with 7% for lack of better data.

We may consider this value as approximately the fraction of transportation energy used by airlines since crude oil represents 93% of the total.

Rulli et al. estimate that if we were to arrive at a 10% reliance on biofuels for the world's transport, that would leave food for no more than 6.7 billion people and, since the current world population is about 7.6 billion people, almost one billion people would starve.

Now, since the airlines consume about 7% of the world's transport energy, feeding the airlines with biofuels would move us dangerously close to the threshold that would lead to killing a large number of people for the purpose of keeping planes flying. Maybe that won't happen if we are careful, but it is not impossible.

Of course, these data are for first-generation biofuels. There is much enthusiasm for 2nd and 3rd of second and third generation biofuels from cellulosic plant tissues or algae which, theoretically don't impact on the food supply.

Sure, but today the production of these fuels is non-existent or at best negligible. How long will it take to ramp up their production to the levels we are discussing here? And are we sure that they will work as promised?

The problem, here, is not just a technological one. We are dealing with a complex system, the world's economy coupled with the planetary ecosystem. In these systems, you can't change just one thing and leave all the rest unchanged.

Once we start to produce biofuels on a very large scale, it becomes extremely difficult to stop at a certain threshold. If we have a product and a market for it, both tend to expand and it is nearly impossible to stop the expansion of something that generates a profit.

That would bring big problems, to say the least. Rulli et al. estimate that arriving to supply 1st generation biofuels in an amount corresponding to 20% of the transport energy would leave no more than 4.4 billion people alive in the world.

That is, it would kill some 3 billion people.

Or, if dealing with 2nd or 3rd generation biofuels, it would lead to whatever disaster generated by the appropriation for humankind an even larger fraction of the planetary photosynthetic activity than it is done today. The ecosystem has limits, after all.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that ethical considerations would affect decisions in this field. The system is made in such a way that if producing fuels for the rich is more profitable than producing food for the poor, which is normally the case, the system will produce fuels, even though that implies killing billions of people.

So, we can only hope that biofuels will turn out to be too expensive even for the rich; but that may not be the case.

With so much research and development ongoing, production costs might be lowered enough to turn biofuel into an effective weapon of mass destruction (and I wouldn't be surprised to discover that this is one of the reasons why biofuels are promoted so aggressively in some quarters).

Or, more simply, we may hope that the Seneca Collapse of the world's economy will take care of the "airline problem" once and for all. As I said many times, the Seneca Cliff is not a problem, it is an opportunity.

In this case, it could lead us to develop better transportation technologies; more efficient and more benign for the ecosystem - although probably slower. But that's not a problem, either. It is an opportunity to travel only when you need to, and to enjoy the trip, too!

Some further data on the extent of land needed for the cultivation of biofuels for airlines:

First of all, the total amount of jet fuel consumed in the world is reported to be 6,000,000 barrels per day . It corresponds to about 7% of the total world combustible liquids production. Now, we need to compare the values measured in barrels with the needs of the airlines, measured in liters. A barrel contains 159 liters, so 159*6=1000 makes about 1 billion liters/day, or 3.6x10^11 liters/year.

Let's now consider the most efficient biofuel production: ethanol from Brazil's sugarcane. It can produce 6000 liters/ha per year (http://biotechnologyforbiofuels.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1754-6834-1-6)

Note that ethanol is not as energy dense as jet fuel. It has only about 70% of the energy density of gasoline http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/fuel_comparison_chart.pdf. Which means that the airlines would consume 3.6*10^11/0.7 = ca. 500 billion liters of ethanol per year.

So, assuming that the whole production of Brazilian ethanol is dedicated to airplanes, we would need more than 80*10^6 hectares (eighty million hectares). The total arable land in Brazil is reported to be: 75 Million ha. (http://www.tradingeconomics.com/brazil/arable-land-hectares-wb-data.html).

It means that the whole agriculture of Brazil should be dedicated only to produce fuel for the airlines.

That is, of course, absurd, but it is also true that the world's total arable land is = 1,407 x10^6 ha (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land), about 20 times the area available in Brazil.

So, the airlines would need only about 5% of the total which is, by the way, just slightly larger than the global arable area used for biofuel production today (about 4%) (http://www.nature.com/articles/srep22521).

But note also that not all the arable land has the same good productivity as the land used for sugarcane production in Brazil, so the real fraction needed would have to be considerably larger than 5%, probably still less than 10%. How many people would starve if we were to arrive to that, it is impossible to say.

Solar Impulse crosses USA

SUBHEAD: Flying coast-to-coast has always been a mythical milestone full of challenges for aviation pioneers.

By John Upton on 8 July 2013 for Grist Magazine -
(http://grist.org/news/solar-plane-completes-cross-country-trip-despite-torn-wing/)


Image above: Solar impulse over American city. From (http://grist.org/slideshow/solar-impulses-u-s-adventures-in-photos/).

You know a plane is hot when wing damage actually hastens its arrival.
That happened Saturday night, when the solar-powered Solar Impulse completed a historic stop-and-start transcontinental voyage across America that began May 3 in San Francisco.

• Total flying time: 105 hours and 41 minutes
• Distance flown: 3,511 miles
• Average speed: 33 miles per hour
• Gasoline consumed: 0 drops

From Reuters:

The Solar Impulse, its four propellers driven by energy collected from 12,000 solar cells in its wings to charge batteries for night use, landed at John F. Kennedy Airport at 11:09 p.m. EDT, organizers said.
The experimental aircraft had left Dulles International Airport outside Washington for its last leg more than 18 hours earlier, on a route that took it north over Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey.

The spindly aircraft had been expected to land in the early hours of Sunday, but the project team decided to shorten the flight after an 8-foot (2.5 meter) tear appeared on the underside of the left wing.

The wing damage forced organizers to cancel a planned Statue of Liberty flyover, but it wasn’t enough to prevent them from achieving their dream of coast-to-coast solar-powered flight.
Between San Francisco and New York, the plane stopped over at Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Washington D.C., holding public events and meeting public officials.
 
“Flying coast-to-coast has always been a mythical milestone full of challenges for aviation pioneers,” Solar Impulse copilot and chairman Bertrand Piccard said. “During this journey, we had to find solutions for a lot of unforeseen situations, which obliged us to develop new skills and strategies. In doing so, we also pushed the boundaries of clean technologies and renewable energies to unprecedented levels.”

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Solar plane to cross America 5/23/13

And read more about the Solar Impulse: Solar plane crosses U.S., injects sexiness into the green conversation

.

TSA 'Logic' Doesn't Add Up

SUBHEAD: The numbers don't add up to security, neither for the GAO auditors nor for a professional mathematician nor even for a video toting pilot, but do the infringed upon public follow the money and numbers?

By Keith Devlin in December 2010 for Mathematical Association of America - (http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_12_10.html)

 

Image above from http://www.meetup.com/WeWontFlyLA/calendar/15697784/

If ever I wanted to find a good example to illustrate the importance in today's society of ensuring that citizens achieve a basic level of quantitative literacy, the recent activities at the nation's airports provided it. Rather than spend increasing amounts of money, to say nothing of trampling on key provisions of our nation's founding constitution (in this case the Fourth Amendment), chasing a patently unachievable target, by spending a fraction of the money on elementary mathematical education we might achieve a lot more. 
 

I fly a lot, over 100,000 miles a year, giving me a George Clooney like (Up in the Air movie), privileged 1.5 Million Miles status on United Airlines, and access to those exclusive lounges. Since a month rarely passes by without my sitting in an aircraft seat, airline safety matters to me in a very real way. My job requires that I travel a lot, so I am very aware of the risks. People die in aircraft disasters, and one day it could be me. But how likely is it? 

 In terms of my life being brought to a sudden, firey end in an aircraft, the cause is far more likely to be mechanical failure on the airplane or human error in the cockpit or in the airline traffic control room than it is to be a terrorist act. The airline security measures put in place shortly after 9/11 reduced the risk of dying in a terrorist attack well below the non-terrorist risks we accept every time we step on an airplane. 

There is absolutely no rational reason for the current level of panic-driven insanity, which as far as I can tell, having made many international trips in the past year alone, is not found in any other country, including the world's number one potential terrorist target, Israel. The only reason I can think of for the panic in the United States is a fundamental failure to appreciate the risks. We want our President to protect us - at least presidents keep telling us that. 

There are many ways a president could keep us safe. A smart move would be to allocate protective resources according to the numbers. A nation that was truly concerned about preventing avoidable deaths would ban smoking tomorrow. It kills 440,000 people each year, according to the CDC, which works out at 50 per hour. Unlike full body scanners and intrusive "pat downs" (and yes, I've had one), banning smoking, while unpopular in some quarters and a threat to the livelihood of some (not a factor to take lightly), would not ride roughshod over a constitutional right. 

Or how about the president getting serious about eliminating drunk driving, which kills 15,000 people in the U.S. every year, with roughly eight drunk driving fatalities involving teenagers every day. And don't let me start about diet, exercise, and obesity. 

Over 80M people in the United States have one or more forms of cardiovascular disease and over 150,000 Americans under 65 are killed by it each year; 73M have high blood pressure; 17M have coronary heart disease; over 6M suffer a stroke; and 6M have heart failure. I'm not preaching or talking morals here. In our society we are free to make our own lifestyle decisions. 

It's about the math. Spending $85M to buy 500 full body scanners at $170,000 each, and turning the simple act of boarding an airplane into a circus, to try to eliminate a risk that is orders of magnitude less than many other risks people accept in their daily lives is a total waste of public funds, and is possible only because large numbers of people apparently don't do - or don't understand - the math. It makes absolute sense to organize our lives and our society to minimize risks. 

But not at the expense of life itself. Life is risky. The risk of dying in your home due to a fall are far greater than of dying in a terrorist attack on an airplane. What do you do, stay in bed all the time? Actually, that isn't a good idea. In addition to the life threatening health risks that result from not getting up and exercising, there is also a greater risk of dying by falling out of bed than from dying in an airline terrorist attack. 

As a species, we find ourselves with a sophisticated brain capable of rational decision making. Since the seventeenth century we have known how to assign reliable, meaningful numbers to life's risks so we can organize our lives appropriately. 

When we worry about a danger - an airline terrorist attack - that is far, far less likely than dying by drowning in our own bathtub, something has gone drastically wrong with our ability to act rationally. Yes, the terrorist threat required action. (On a personal level, much of my mathematical research since 9/11 has been directed into ensuring we remain ahead of and catch the terrorists, so I do take the threat seriously.) We took that action in the early years after 9/11, and it has been highly effective. Have we eliminated the risk? No, that is not possible. But we have reduced it well below many of life's other risks. 

Sitting in a narrow metal tube 39,000 feet in the air is not a situation evolution prepared us for. As a consequence, at the back of my mind as I board my next flight will be all kinds of risks. But terrorism will be so far down the list as to be out of sight. The TSA does not give me much, if any, feeling of security. The math does. 

I'd stake my life on the statistics. In fact I do, several times every month. To repeat my original point. Life in today's society requires not only a workable level of literacy, it demands a basic level of numeracy as well. Until that level is reached, we will continue to squander scarce resources chasing unachievable and unnecessary goals, while far more important and easily attainable measures to improve lives and maintain the nation's safety and security are ignored. Now I am preaching.  
 

  Video above:  "Sacramento-area pilot punished for YouTube video" on local ABCNew10 on 12/22/10 from (http://www.news10.net/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=113529) • Mathematician Keith Devlin is the Executive Director of the Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute (H-STAR) at Stanford University and The Math Guy on NPR's Weekend Edition.

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Aufitors Question TSA SUBHEAD: GAO Auditors question TSA's use of and spending on technology. By Dana Hedgpeth on 21 December 2010 for Washington Post - 

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/20/AR2010122005599.html)

Before there were full-body scanners, there were puffers. The Transportation Security Administration spent about $30 million on devices that puffed air on travelers to "sniff" them out for explosives residue. Those machines ended up in warehouses, removed from airports, abandoned as impractical. The massive push to fix airport security in the United States after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, led to a gold rush in technology contracts for an industry that mushroomed almost overnight. Since it was founded in 2001, the TSA has spent roughly $14 billion in more than 20,900 transactions with dozens of contractors. 

 

In addition to beefing up the fleets of X-ray machines and traditional security systems at airports nationwide, about $8 billion also paid for ambitious new technologies. The agency has spent about $800 million on devices to screen bags and passenger items, including shoes, bottled liquids, casts and prostheses. For next year, it wants more than $1.3 billion for airport screening technologies. 

 

But lawmakers, auditors and national security experts question whether the government is too quick to embrace technology as a solution for basic security problems and whether the TSA has been too eager to write checks for unproven products. "We always want the best, the latest and greatest technology against terrorists, but that's not necessarily the smartest way to spend your money and your efforts," said Kip Hawley, who served as the head of the TSA from 2005 until last year. "We see a technology that looks promising, and the temptation is to run to deploy it before we fully understand how it integrates with the multiple layers we already have in place like using a watch list, training officers at every checkpoint to look for suspicious behavior and using some pat-downs." 

 

Some say the fact that the United States hasn't had another 9/11-level terrorist attackshows that the investment was money well spent. But government auditors have faulted the TSA and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, for failing to properly test and evaluate technology before spending money on it. The puffer machines, for example, were an early TSA attempt at improving electronic screening in airport security lines. Designed to dislodge explosive particles by shooting air blasts at passengers, the detectors turned out to be unreliable and expensive to operate. 

 

But they were deployed in many airports before the TSA had fully tested them, according to the Government Accountability Office. The puffers were "deployed even though TSA officials were aware that tests conducted during 2004 and 2005 on earlier [puffer] models suggested they did not demonstrate reliable performance in an airport environment," according to a GAO report from October 2009. TSA officials told the GAO that they had deployed the puffers to "respond quickly to the threat posed by a suicide bomber" after incidents on Russian airliners in 2004. 

 

The agency stopped buying and deploying the puffer machines to airports in June 2006. The GAO said in its October 2009 report that 116 puffers were in storage. A TSA spokesman said the agency had "since disposed of" the machines or transferred them to other agencies.

Analyzing risk The government auditors expressed similar concerns that the TSA hasn't done good assessments of the risk, cost benefits or performances of other new technologies for screening at checkpoints. The GAO has said that the TSA has "not conducted a risk assessment or cost-benefit analysis, or established quantifiable performance measures" on its new technologies. "As a result, TSA does not have assurance that its efforts are focused on the highest priority security needs."  In other cases, equipment to trace explosives and other devices for screening passengers have had technical problems and projected cost overruns, according to a recent GAO report. The full-body scanners that have made headlines in recent weeks for their revealing images of passengers were tested more thoroughly than the puffer machines before being deployed, the GAO has found. But the auditors faulted the agency for not fully justifying their cost, saying that the agency's plan to double the number of body scanners in coming years will require more personnel to run and maintain them - an expense of as much as $2.4 billion. "They're adding layers of security and technology, but they need to do a cost-benefit analysis to make sure this is worthwhile," said Steve Lord of the GAO's Homeland Security and Justice team, who has reviewed the TSA's purchases. "They need to look at whether there is other technology to deploy at checkpoints. Are we getting the best technology for the given pot of money? Is there a cheaper way to provide the same level of security through other technology?" John Huey, an airport security expert, said the TSA's contracts with vendors to buy more equipment and devices often aren't done in a "systematic way." "TSA has an obsession of finding a single box that will solve all its problems," Huey said. "They've spent and wasted money looking for that one box, and there is no such solution. . . . They respond to congressional mandates and the latest headlines of attempted terrorist attacks without any thought to risk management or separating out the threats in a logical way." TSA officials disagree. They say there are responsible processes in place to research, develop and fund new technologies for airport security. And they point out that some gee-whiz equipment that vendors have pitched has taken too long to develop or has been too expensive to produce. "We have to be predictive and acquire the best technology today to address the known threats by being informed of the latest intelligence and be proactive in working on what could be the next threats," said TSA Administrator John Pistole. "It is a tall order." He said that technology isn't the only security effort underway. The TSA uses a combination of tactics, including terrorist watch lists, intelligence gathering and training security officers, to look for suspicious behavior. Trial and error The billions of dollars the TSA has spent on technology has been "a good investment,"Pistole said, but he said that developing devices is full of risk. "It is a lot of art with the science. We're always competing for the best technology at the best price. It is just a constantly changing dynamic environment." After 9/11, there was talk of cargo containers that could withstand explosions, for example, but airport security experts said they never came to fruition, in part because they were too heavy and airlines didn't want to pay for the extra fuel to carry them. Another much talked-about device, a shoe scanner that would allow passengers to keep their shoes on while going through a checkpoint, has not been fully deployed to airports. Twelve companies are vying to provide shoe scanners to U.S. airports, but the TSA has not chosen one.

 

"We don't always see a well-defined roadmap of what they want," said Tom Ripp, president of the Security and Detection Systems division of L-3 Communications, a major security contractor. Part of the problem is that experts disagree about what constitutes an effective airport security system, and policy makers are reluctant to embrace some techniques - such as profiling - that American society finds objectionable. "Since the introduction of metal detectors in the 1970s, technologies have been bought and cobbled together in a somewhat piecemeal approach," said Tom LaTourrette, a security expert at RAND Corp., a nonprofit research institute. "No one has been able to provide a satisfactory answer to the question of how to best structure aviation security," he said. Quick solutions The rush to improve security and quickly protect the public has also led to some shortcuts in contracting procedures, according to government reports. A March audit from the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general looked at 29 support service contracts that the TSA had issued to buy new technologies for baggage and passenger screening equipment, worth a total of $662 million. It found that the agency "did not provide adequate management and oversight" on the contracts. It concluded that the TSA "did not have reasonable assurance that contractors were performing as required, that it contracted for the services it needed, that it received the services it paid for, or that taxpayers were receiving the best value."... Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to the above report.

Above video "Sacramento whistleblowing pilot explains why he did it" on local ABCNew10 on 12/23/10 from (http://www.news10.net/news/story.aspx?storyid=113731&catid=2)

Thinking in Straight Lines

SUBHEAD: The future is certain to be nonlinear, but I am quite sure that there will be trees in it.

By Dmitry Orlov on 17 July 2010 in ClubOrlov -  
(http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/07/thinking-in-straight-lines.html)

  
Image above: A British 19th century adjustable mahogany T-Square used in drafting. From (http://archives.deskarticles.oneofakindantiques.com/3869_antique_mahogany_t_square_drafting_tool_2.htm). 

Let’s face it, we, the civilized, educated, enlightened part of humanity like things to be straight. Let primitive tribesmen live in picturesque and practical round huts—we require abstract boxes of steel and concrete clad in plate glass, with plenty of nice straight lines, true vertical and horizontal planar surfaces and lots of ninety-degree angles to please the eye. Let these tribesmen spend their days meandering up and down picturesque winding paths laid down by grazing animals—when we build a road, we take a map and apply a ruler to it, and anything that’s in the way of that ruler, picturesque or not, must be dynamited and bulldozed because everyone knows that traveling in straight lines is more efficient.

This is good enough for most of us, and so we have come to regard straight lines as natural. In fact, in our world there are just two types of natural phenomena that give rise to straight lines: objects drop or hang down in straight vertical lines, and light beams travel in straight lines; beyond plumb lines and lines of sight everything is either a curve or a squiggle. But since most of our environment is artificial—and crammed full of straight lines and flat horizontal and vertical surfaces—we hardly ever have to confront this fact. Of course, the more scientifically astute among us know that straight lines are but a convenient fiction. We start with a conceptual framework of space that consists of x, y and z axes, and proceed to coerce our observations to fit this framework until the mismatch becomes too obvious to ignore, as with objects dropped from orbit, or with light from far-away galaxies that’s so warped by nearby galaxies that the image looks like a smear.

But the fiction is indeed very convenient. To start with, all straight lines are interchangeable and compatible. When we build, we tend to put things either on top of or next to other things, and if they involve straight lines, then no intricate fitting is involved—we can just slap it together any which way and efficiently move on to our next box-building exercise.

When we go to a lumberyard, what we buy is not so much wood as straight lines cut through wood. Trees know a lot more than we do about constructing maximally efficient structures out of wood, but we like straight lines, and so we cut through the strongest part of the tree—the concentric rings of wood that make up the trunk—for the sake of making a perfectly straight stick. We could build beautiful, strong, long-lasting structures using round timbers grown to order (as some of us do) but generally we don’t because we are mentally lazy, always in too much of a hurry, and have made a fetish of straight lines.

Quite unsurprisingly, our preference for straight lines carries over into the way we think about relationships between things—the mental models we construct of our world. For instance, we consider it a matter of moral rectitude and straight dealing that the price be linearly proportional to the amount of stuff we get: if you pay twice as much, you should get twice as many potatoes.

Quantity discounts are acceptable and sometimes expected, but pricing on a curve is generally seen as underhanded. We mistrust curves. Stepwise functions are fine, though, because they are made up of straight line segments. We can put up with having tax brackets, but try taxing people based on a nonlinear formula, and there is sure to be a tax revolt. Were the potato market a product of biological evolution rather than of human artifice, it would perhaps work like this:

The price would be some nonlinear function that’s directly proportional to the customer’s net worth, and the number of potatoes dispensed would be some nonlinear function that’s inversely proportional to his net girth. Place your moneybags on one sliding scale, your flab-bags on the other, and some potatoes come out. Such a natural regulatory mechanism would prevent fat, rich gluttons from out-eating the rest of us, but it cannot be, for we have a very strong cultural preference for a simple linear relationship between price and quantity.

Straight lines are popular with grocers and their customers, but nobody loves a straight-edge more than the technocrat. Real-world data generally look like a collection of unique artifacts described by a multitude of qualitatively dissimilar properties and inferred relationships, all fluctuating unpredictably over time in a way that resists the direct application of the straight-edge.

Therefore, the first step is to quantify the properties and, if at all possible, ignore the relationships. The next step is to choose just two parameters and to plot these artifacts as points on a piece of graph paper. Then, finally, a technocrat can grab a straight-edge, slap it down on the piece of paper, move it around a bit to find what looks like a good fit, and draw a straight line. Voilà: a linear relationship between two complex phenomena has been found, which can now be treated as real and objective—something that can be shared with one’s colleagues and be used as a basis for setting policy—because it involves a straight line which tells that one thing is proportional to some other thing, so that we know what result to expect when we perturb one or the other.

Straight lines are popular with engineers as well. Engineers work hard to design linear, time-invariant systems in which the output is directly proportional to the input any time you like. To them, deviations from linear behavior are defects. They are to us as well: we can hear it if the audio amplifier has nonlinear effects because it distorts the sound, and we can see it if the optics distorts the image. We can tell a straight line from a crooked one without any tools. But the mathematical tools which engineers use when they design these linear time-invariant systems are particularly good, as mathematical tools go.

Mathematics can be quite fun as a sort of advanced parlor game for philosophers, but most math is rather problematic from an engineer’s point of view. You can describe just about anything using a set of differential equations, but most of the interesting phenomena—the behavior of an airfoil in an airstream, for instance, or the behavior of high-temperature gases in a combustion chamber—produce equations that can’t be solved analytically, and can only be approached using numerical methods, using a computer. A mathematical model is constructed, and random numbers are thrown at it to see what comes out.

But linear time-invariant systems are described using a singularly well-behaved class of differential equations which do have closed-form, analytical solutions that directly provide answers to design questions, and so engineering students are drilled in them ad naseam and then go on to design and build all kinds of machinery that behaves as linearly as possible, from humble volume knobs to complex aircraft control surfaces. In turn, this well-behaved, predictable machinery allows us to achieve linear effects within the economy: build more stuff—get proportionally more money; spend more money—get proportionally more stuff. But, just as one might suspect, this only works up to a point.

Let us recall: straight lines are but a convenient fiction. There is no physical analogue of a mathematical straight line that goes from minus infinity to plus infinity. The best we can do is use all of our artifice to create relatively short straight line segments. Truth be told, the engineers can’t create linear systems; they can only create systems that exhibit linear behavior in their linear region.

Outside of that region, nature does what it always does: make crazy curves and squiggles and generally behave in random and unpredictable ways. An example of what happens when we exceed the limits of the linear region from our everyday experience is the phenomenon of overloading an audio amplifier. The resulting effect is called clipping, and it sounds like a particularly unpleasant, harsh, grating noise. There are only two solutions: turn down the volume (return to the linear region), or get a more powerful amplifier.

In the economic realm, the effects of exceeding the limits of the linear region can be even more unpleasant. While within that region, building more houses generates more wealth, but just outside of that region strange things begin to happen rather quickly: house prices crash, mortgages go bad, and building any more houses becomes a singularly bad idea. In the linear region, having more money makes you richer, in the sense of being able to buy more stuff, but outside of that region one is forced to realize that since most money has been loaned into existence, it is in fact composed of debt, and once this debt goes bad, no matter how good your net worth looks on paper you are still facing destitution, greatly exacerbated by the fact that you are out of practice when it comes to being poor. In the linear region, investing more money in energy production produces more energy, but just outside that region it produces less energy, and may also inadvertently destroy entire industries and ecosystems.

If linearity is a fiction that is only useful up to a point, then what about time-invariance? Clearly, it too must have its limits. Stepping on the accelerator may produce the same acceleration every time, but the amount of fuel in the tank decreases monotonically until there is none left. When it comes to more complex, dynamic systems—industries, economies, societies—they may continue to respond to external stimuli in a linear and time-invariant manner up to a point, but behind this stable façade their capabilities erode, their resources dwindle, their complexity increases, and beyond a certain point an entirely different process begins: the process of collapse. Such systems generally do not become smaller, spontaneously become less complex or reduce their resource use while continuing to respond to external stimuli in a controlled, linear manner.

But so strong and so deeply ingrained is our habit of thinking in straight lines that often we cannot imagine that we can ever leave the linear region, or, once we do, that we have done so, even when the evidence is staring us in the face. Forensic analyses of airplane crashes have revealed that sometimes, as his last act, the pilot ripped the control console off the cockpit floor—an act that requires superhuman strength—so hard was he pulling back on the yoke to bring up the airplane’s nose. I am sure that there are plenty of pilots—in all walks of life—who will prefer to crash, gripping the controls with all their might, gaze fixed on the distant, irrelevant or fictional horizon, than to push the eject button. Their entire life’s experience has been confined to the linear region, and so they cannot imagine that it can ever end.

One particularly significant example of this thinking is the belief in Peak Oil, generally expressed as the idea that global oil production already has or will soon reach an all-time peak, and will then gradually decrease over a time span of several decades. Oil depletion is being modeled as a linear function of oil production: a few percent a year, holding more or less steady from one year to the next. At the same time, the use of oil by industrialized societies is often quite usefully characterized as an addiction.

Let us exercise this metaphor a bit and see where it takes us. Suppose you have a junkie who has an ever-increasing heroin habit and who has to go out and hustle harder and harder to score his next fix. Now, suppose global heroin production peaks, prices go up, supply dwindles, and our junkie has to start cutting the dose. Not too far along what you then have is a sick junkie, in withdrawal, who cannot go out and hustle for his next fix.

And very soon after that you have a collapse of the heroin market because the junkies have all been forced to kick the habit to one extent or another. This disruption of the heroin market, even if temporary, causes heroin production to decrease even faster, production costs and associated risks to go up, and so forth. Beyond a certain point, the heroin market would no longer be characterized as a linear, time-invariant system where the more you pay the more of it you get any time you like, because there would be so little of it around.

Similarly with oil. Right after Hurricane Katrina there was some disruption of gasoline supplies in some of the southern US states. People have written to me to tell me that the result was instant mayhem. Society at all levels swiftly stopped functioning. The shortage was temporary and was quickly forgotten, but were it a long-term, systemic shortage, we would no doubt observe all the usual effects.

• Much extra fuel evaporated from topping off fuel tanks and burned from driving around with a full tank and full jerrycans in the trunk.
• Much fuel wasted from driving around looking for gasoline and from idling in long lines at filling stations
• A lot of siphoning of gas from tanks and motorists left stranded as a result,
• A lot of people unable to get to work,

And, shortly after that we'll see hoarding, looting and rioting, commerce at a standstill, use of federal troops to restore public order, curfews and limitations on all travel, bank holidays and a balance of payments crisis, and, finally, the general inability to pay for further oil production or imports.

All of these disruptions cause oil production to fall even faster, along with all other economic activity, until there is simply not that much demand for the stuff. As much of the global oil industry is idled, drilling rigs, refineries and pipelines fall into disuse and become inoperable. Instead of a nice few-percent-a-year gradual decline, we would have what Douglas Adams would have described as a “spontaneous existence failure.”

I am sure that some people would like me to whip out my straight-edge, plot some straight lines and make some projections: What is my price forecast? What production numbers are we talking about, ten or twenty years out? Well, that to me feels like a complete waste of time. I’d rather spend time learning how to train trees for round timber construction. The future is certain to be nonlinear, but I am quite sure that there will be trees in it. The reason I bring this up is that there are a few of pilots out there who I hope will have the presence of mind to push the eject button instead of clutching at the controls with their eyes locked on the artificial horizon..

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Butterflies over the Atlantic

SUBHEAD: We rely globally on over-complex, systems. We must simplify or suffer the consequences. Image above: Computer modified photograph of of a cloud butterflies changing the weather. An illustration of the concept of the "butterfly effect" in "chaos theory". From (http://www.microcuts.net/gallery/photo-muse-artwork-5-singles-14-butterflies-&-hurricanes---cd-4404.html) By George Monbiot on 19 April 2010 in the Guardian - (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/19/act-wait-nature-simplify-system-brutally)

Man proposes; nature disposes. We are seldom more vulnerable than when we feel insulated. The miracle of modern flight protected us from gravity, atmosphere, culture, geography. It made everywhere feel local, interchangeable. Nature interjects, and we encounter – tragically for many – the reality of thousands of miles of separation. We discover that we have not escaped from the physical world after all.

Complex, connected societies are more resilient than simple ones – up to a point. During the east African droughts of the early 1990s, I saw at first hand what anthropologists and economists have long predicted: those people who had the fewest trading partners were hit hardest. Connectivity provided people with insurance: the wider the geographical area they could draw food from, the less they were hurt by a regional famine.

But beyond a certain level, connectivity becomes a hazard. The longer and more complex the lines of communication and the more dependent we become on production and business elsewhere, the greater the potential for disruption. This is one of the lessons of the banking crisis. Impoverished mortgage defaulters in the United States – the butterfly's wing over the Atlantic – almost broke the global economy. If the Eyjafjallajökull volcano – by no means a monster – keeps retching it could, in these fragile times, produce the same effect.

We have several such vulnerabilities. The most catastrophic would be an unexpected coronal mass ejection – a solar storm – which causes a surge of direct current down our electricity grids, taking out the transformers. It could happen in seconds; the damage and collapse would take years to reverse, if we ever recovered. We would soon become aware of our dependence on electricity: an asset which, like oxygen, we notice only when it fails.

As New Scientist magazine points out, an event like this would knacker most of the systems which keep us alive. It would take out water treatment plants and pumping stations. It would paralyze oil pumping and delivery, which would quickly bring down food supplies. It would clobber hospitals, financial systems and just about every kind of business – even the manufacturers of candles and paraffin lamps. Emergency generators would function only until the oil ran out. Burnt-out transformers cannot be repaired; they must be replaced.

Over the past year I've sent freedom of information requests to electricity transmitters and distributors, asking them what contingency plans they have made, and whether they have stockpiled transformers to replace any destroyed by a solar storm. I haven't got to the end of it yet, but the early results suggest that they haven't.

There's a similar lack of planning for the possibility that global supplies of oil might soon peak then go into decline. My FoI requests to the British government reveal that it has made no contingency plans, on the grounds that it doesn't believe it will happen. The issue remains the preserve of beardy lentil-eaters such as, er, the US joint forces command. Its latest report on possible future conflicts maintains that:

"A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity."

It suggests that by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10m barrels per day. A shortage of refining and production capacity is not the same thing as Peak Oil, but the report warns that a chronic constraint looms behind the immediate crisis:

"Even under the most optimistic scenario petroleum production will be hard pressed to meet the expected future demand."

A global oil shortage would soon expose the weaknesses of our complex economic systems. As the cultural anthropologist Joseph Tainter has shown, their dependence on high energy use is one of the factors that makes complex societies vulnerable to collapse.

His work has helped to overturn the old assumption that social complexity is a response to surplus energy. Instead, he proposes, complexity drives higher energy production. While complexity solves many problems – such as reliance on an exclusively local and therefore vulnerable food supply – it's subject to diminishing returns. In extreme cases the cost of maintaining such systems causes them to collapse.

Tainter gives the example of the western Roman empire. In the third and fourth centuries AD, the emperors Diocletian and Constantine sought to rebuild their diminished territories:

"The strategy of the later Roman empire was to respond to a near-fatal challenge in the third century by increasing the size, complexity, power, and costliness of … the government and its army. … The benefit/cost ratio of imperial government declined. In the end the western Roman empire could no longer afford the problem of its own existence."

The empire was ruined by the taxes and levies on manpower Diocletian and Constantine imposed to sustain their massive system. Invasion and collapse were the inevitable result.

He contrasts this with the strategies of the Byzantine empire from the seventh century onwards. Weakened by plague and re-invasion, the government responded with a program of systematic simplification. Instead of maintaining and paying its army, it granted soldiers land in return for hereditary military service: from then on they had to carry their own costs. It reduced the size and complexity of the administration and left people to fend for themselves. The empire survived and expanded.

A similar process is taking place in the UK today: a simplification of government in response to crisis. But while the public sector is being pared down, both government and private enterprise seek to increase the size and complexity of the rest of the economy. If the financial crisis were the only constraint we faced, this might be a sensible strategy. But the energy costs, environmental impacts and vulnerability to disruption of our super-specialized society have surely already reached the point at which they outweigh the benefits of increasing complexity.

For the third time in two years we've discovered that flying is one of the weakest links in our overstretched system. In 2008 the rising cost of fuel drove several airlines out of business. The recession compounded the damage; the volcano might ruin several more. Energy-hungry, weather-dependent, easily disrupted, a large aviation industry is one of the hardest sectors for any society to sustain, especially one beginning to encounter a series of crises. The greater our dependence on flying, the more vulnerable we are likely to become.

Over the past few days people living under the flight paths have seen the future, and they like it. The state of global oil supplies, the industry's social and environmental costs and its extreme vulnerability mean that current levels of flying – let alone the growth the government anticipates – cannot be maintained indefinitely. We have a choice. We can start decommissioning this industry while there is time and find ways of living happily with less of it. Or we can sit and wait for physical reality to simplify the system by more brutal means.

See also: Ea O Ka Aina: Military warning on oil shortages 4/14/09

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