Image above: To supply 25% of current energy by 2050 the U.S. will build 1,000 one-gigawatt nuclear reactors. From (http://pavelpodolyak.blogspot.com/2010/05/energy-independence-how-much-nuclear.html).
From the dust-blown steppes of Inner Mongolia to the waters off Shanghai, China installed more wind turbines in the first half of 2010 than any other country — 7,800 megawatts of potential power production, or more than the United States, the European Union, and India combined. In fact, in northeast China alone, autumn and winter winds now produce some 17 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, roughly 5.5 percent of the total power generation in the region. That’s up from 534 million kilowatt hours just five years ago.
But despite this rapid progress, wind energy still only generates a tiny fraction of China’s electricity. Indeed, even with aggressive government backing and green energy mandates, such “new energy” — including wind, solar, nuclear power plants, and biomass — accounts for less than 3 percent of China’s electricity production, compared to more than 70 percent provided by coal, which produces roughly 3 metric tons of carbon dioxide for every metric ton of the dirty, black rock burned. And as China’s economy continues to expand at a dizzying rate for the foreseeable future, wind and other renewable sources of energy will not even be able to keep pace with new demand, meaning fossil fuel burning will continue unabated.
This is hardly unique to China. In the U.S., electricity produced from the breeze has increased 13-fold in the past decade, yet still only provides 2.3 percent of the country’s electricity — compared to just under 50 percent provided by burning coal. Even Denmark, which has done more than any other country to boost wind power, struggles to integrate an intermittent generating resource into a grid whose customers expect the lights or the television to come on whenever they flick the switch.
As the world attempts to wean itself from fossil fuels — a result of the converging desires to combat climate change, improve energy security, and create green jobs — renewables such as the sun, wind, water, and hot rocks will play a larger role. So will energy sources, such as nuclear and natural gas, that are cleaner than the current favorites, coal and oil. The question is: Can any of these resources — or even all of them put together — begin to approach the scale needed to transform the world’s energy supply?
And even if the world’s economies can muster the resources and willpower to wean themselves off fossil fuels, how many decades will it take? And can we move fast enough to stave off the potentially calamitous effects of climate change?
“Renewables are growing at fantastic rates compared to conventional resources,” says David Rogers, general manager for climate change at the oil giant, Chevron. But “while it’s growing like gangbusters, it’s starting from such a small base that by 2030 it still takes a small part of the energy space.”
To meet a proliferating set of international goals, such as Germany’s plan to derive 80 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2050, will require completely changing the present energy mix. Despite more than 21,000 wind turbines and 13 million square meters of solar installations, Germany still gets more than 50 percent of its electricity from burning fossil fuels, including lignite, the most polluting form of coal.
“In some real sense, we need to replace all of the power-producing infrastructure that we have today within 30 or 40 years,” says engineer Saul Griffith of California-based Other Lab, an engineering and design firm working on renewable energy projects, among other pursuits. “The options that we have that are non-carbon [dioxide] producing are nuclear power, solar power at a very large scale, wind power at a very large scale, and geothermal at a very large scale — and then perhaps biofuels or carbon sequestration on existing power plants.”
In fact, at the global level, in order to shift away from a world that gets 81 percent of its energy from fossil fuels and to cut emissions of carbon dioxide to just 14 gigatons per year, here is what the International Energy Agency says will have to be built every year between now and 2050: 35 coal-fired and 20 gas-fired power plants with carbon capture and storage; 30 nuclear power plants; 12,000 onshore wind turbines paired with 3,600 offshore ones; 45 geothermal power plants; 325 million square meters-worth of photovoltaics; and 55 solar-thermal power plants. That doesn’t even include the need to build electric cars and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in order to shift transportation away from burning gasoline.
In addition, if the world’s economies hope to wean themselves from fossil fuels, they will have to significantly improve energy efficiency and begin to harness power from sources such as waste heat from factories.
One thing is certain: If the global economy does succeed in making the transition to renewable energy, the face of the planet will be significantly changed, with solar energy farms and wind turbines a common feature of many landscapes and seascapes.
“If 10 percent of the U.S. electricity generated in 2009... were to be produced by large wind farms, their area would have to cover at least 22,500 square kilometers, roughly the size of New Hampshire,” writes environmental scientist Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba in his book, Energy at the Crossroads. “These new energy infrastructures would have to be spread over areas ten to a thousand times larger than today’s infrastructure of fossil fuel extraction, combustion and electricity generation…. This is not an impossible feat, but one posing many regulatory, technical and logistic challenges.”
“Can we do this or not?” Chevron's Rogers asks. “Even at the best time we ever had we only did 20 to 25 nuclear power plants in a year... We need 325 million square meters [of photovoltaics] annually. We’ve done maybe 10 percent of that in our best year, which was last year.”
But there is reason for guarded optimism. Even in the throes of the Great Recession, renewables accounted for more than 50 percent of newly installed generating capacity in the U.S. and the European Union, while China added 37 gigawatts of mostly wind and hydropower in 2009, according to the United Nations Environment Program.
“It’s not going to be easy to make an energy plan that adds up; but it is possible,” says physicist David MacKay of the University of Cambridge, an expert on scaling up renewable energy. “We need to make some choices and get building.”
When it comes to such a large-scale shift in energy supplies, few places face more of a challenge than the United States. Americans burn through nearly 6.4 billion barrels of oil and 1.1 billion metric tons of coal per year on our way to getting 83 percent of our energy fix from fossil fuels. Renewable resources, such as the sun, the wind, the flow of rivers and fuels derived from crops supply just 8 percent of our energy needs. Take away ethanol and hydropower, and the sun, the wind, and geothermal power supply less than 1 percent of the U.S.’s total energy use, including gasoline consumption.
Just to supply one-quarter of its current energy mix from a resource that emits far fewer greenhouse gases — nuclear power — the U.S. would need to build 1,000 one-gigawatt nuclear reactors by 2050. Yet construction has begun on only two nuclear reactors in the U.S. since 1974. And just to power an electric car and truck fleet to replace the U.S.’s current gas and ethanol-fueled one would require 500 new nuclear power plants. There are currently 442 reactors in the entire world, of which the U.S. has 104 — the most of any nation.
U.S. attempts to wean itself from fossil fuels have never fared well, yet the Obama administration has committed internationally to an 80 percent drop in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Either alternative energy supplies will need to ramp up from nearly zero to almost 100 percent in just four decades, or large-scale carbon capture and storage will be required, including pulling CO2 out of the air after it has been put there by all of our automobiles. In fact, simply removing one gigaton of carbon from the atmosphere would require 273 coal-fired power plants with complete carbon capture and storage. At present, there is one in the U.S., capturing just 1.5 percent of its emissions.
“We are talking about a transformation across the entire country,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) chairman Jon Wellinghoff said in an interview with Yale Environment 360. “We are talking about potentially tens of thousands of new transmission lines to ultimately move large amounts of wind, solar, and other resources to loads. We are talking about in the scale of billions of dollars of investments in smart-grid technologies, all the way from the consumer level up through to the transmission and generation level.”
Assuming the U.S. will require roughly 4 terrawatts of power by 2050 (a conservative estimate, given that we already use more than three), replacing all that fossil fuel would require at least 4 million wind turbines — necessitating building 12, three-megawatt wind turbines every hour for the next 30 years, according to Griffiths. The numbers are similar for solar — 160 billion square meters of photovoltaic cells or concentrating mirrors. “We need to be making a square yard of solar cells or mirrors every second for the next 40 years to install that much in North America,” Griffiths calculates.
It’s not just a matter of making the necessary equipment, it’s also a question of finding the space for it. A coal-fired power plant produces 100 to 1,000 watts per square meter, depending on the type of coal it burns and how that coal is mined. A typical photovoltaic system for turning sunlight into electricity produces just 9 watts per square meter, and wind provides only 1.5 watts per square meter.
The challenge is worse for smaller countries: the United Kingdom would have to cover its entire landmass with wind turbines to provide enough electricity for the current Briton’s average consumption — roughly 200 kilowatt-hours per day, according to MacKay, the Cambridge expert.
Although daunting, the challenges of installing new energy technologies on a mass scale are by no means impossible. In the first half of the 20th century, it took the U.S. 45 years to increase its use of oil until that fossil fuel represented 20 percent of the total energy used. At the same time, the U.S. built a sprawling gasoline-fueling station infrastructure, the rudiments of a national electricity grid, thousands of miles of telephone lines, airplanes and airports, interstate natural gas pipelines, and local delivery infrastructure for home heating — and rolled out all the appliances (refrigerators, radios, televisions, etc.) of the modern age — all in the same few decades, at the same time. In other words, the U.S. seems to have “scaled up,” in the parlance of engineers, pretty rapidly in the past.
Transforming the global economy to run on renewable energy would require a similarly massive effort. For example, to provide the energy equivalent of present global consumption would require covering 1 percent of the Earth’s surface with photovoltaic devices, according to chemist Nathan Lewis of the California Institute of Technology. That’s less than the land area currently covered by cities, but a huge chunk of territory nonetheless.
“You can actually farm, you can actually graze, you can actually do things around that [wind] turbine versus if you are taking the top off a mountain produce some coal,” FERC’s Wellinghoff notes. “Ultimately, we are going to have to accept the fact that wind turbines and solar systems are going to take up fairly large pieces of land. But, fortunately, we have a lot of land in this country and we have the ability to have dual use of that land.”
But the U.S. also leads the major nations of the world in per capita consumption of energy. The average American used 7.2 metric tons of oil-equivalent in 2009 (a number that, to be fair, has gotten slightly better of late, down from 8.5 in 2005.) That’s double the amount used by the average citizen in Europe, and five times the global average.
To put it another way, the average American uses 250 kilowatt-hours per day for “transportation, heating, manufacturing, electricity, and so forth,” writes MacKay. “That’s equivalent to every person having 250 40-watt light bulbs switched on all the time.” Energy efficiency might bring that consumption as low as 168 kwh per day, according to MacKay. But that still means each American would require 80 square meters of photovoltaic panels, plus biofuels from energy crops on 4,000 square meters of land. In addition, the U.S would need to build one 2-megawatt wind turbine for every 300 Americans, plus one 1-gigawatt nuclear power plant for every city the size of Boston.
On the grander scale, more than half of the energy used in the U.S. — 56.3 percent — is wasted. That’s a result of the essential inefficiency of burning coal in a power plant or gasoline in an automobile engine, or even transmitting electricity over vast distances.
Industry is beginning to make use of this waste — a steel plant in Indiana employs the waste heat from a coal coking plant to generate electricity, enough to help run its steel rolling machines in another adjacent facility. And while U.S. energy use has grown over the past four decades, three-quarters of that growth has been met through gains in energy efficiency, not by burning additional fossil fuels, according to a 2008 report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). The energy used to produce every dollar of U.S. gross domestic product fell from 18,000 Btus in 1970 to just 8,900 Btus in 2008.
“The energy-related challenges of the 21st century require a dramatic shift in direction — from an emphasis on energy supply to an emphasis on energy efficiency,” says Jon “Skip” Laitner, ACEEE director of economic analysis. “The greatest American success story in dealing with energy in recent decades is also the least understood and the most invisible.”
In fact, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimate that waste heat from factories, oil refineries and other industrial facilities holds the potential for as much as 95 gigawatts (the equivalent of 95 nuclear power plants) of new electricity, which is cheaper to capture than building a new coal-fired power plant.
If this great energy transformation eventually comes, it will take decades to complete. But, as FERC’s Wellinghoff notes, “The scale is very large but, fortunately, it is something we can do incrementally and it is something that we have already started.”
If society’s efforts were turned in different directions, shifting from making fewer consumer products to making more devices to capture renewable energy, the transition might ultimately fuel itself.
After all, beverage makers now produce some 300 billion aluminum cans per year, Griffiths notes, which is enough production capacity to manufacture 100 or 200 gigawatts of solar thermal annually. “So we could do 1 terrawatt of solar in 10 years if Pepsi and Coca-Cola and all the breweries became solar companies,” he says. “We have the industrial scale. We are just right now prioritizing what we want to make with it and we are making disposable aluminum cans instead of solar mirrors. That gives me reason for optimism. We can do it.”
.
Green Energy’s Big Challenge
SUBHEAD: When it comes to such a large-scale shift in energy supplies, few places face more of a challenge than the United States.
By David Biello ON 20 January 2011 in Yale Environment 360 -
(http://e360.yale.edu/feature/green_energys_big_challenge__the_daunting_task_of_scaling_up_/2362)
Image above: To supply 25% of current energy by 2050 the U.S. will build 1,000 one-gigawatt nuclear reactors. From (http://pavelpodolyak.blogspot.com/2010/05/energy-independence-how-much-nuclear.html).
From the dust-blown steppes of Inner Mongolia to the waters off Shanghai, China installed more wind turbines in the first half of 2010 than any other country — 7,800 megawatts of potential power production, or more than the United States, the European Union, and India combined. In fact, in northeast China alone, autumn and winter winds now produce some 17 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, roughly 5.5 percent of the total power generation in the region. That’s up from 534 million kilowatt hours just five years ago.
But despite this rapid progress, wind energy still only generates a tiny fraction of China’s electricity. Indeed, even with aggressive government backing and green energy mandates, such “new energy” — including wind, solar, nuclear power plants, and biomass — accounts for less than 3 percent of China’s electricity production, compared to more than 70 percent provided by coal, which produces roughly 3 metric tons of carbon dioxide for every metric ton of the dirty, black rock burned. And as China’s economy continues to expand at a dizzying rate for the foreseeable future, wind and other renewable sources of energy will not even be able to keep pace with new demand, meaning fossil fuel burning will continue unabated.
This is hardly unique to China. In the U.S., electricity produced from the breeze has increased 13-fold in the past decade, yet still only provides 2.3 percent of the country’s electricity — compared to just under 50 percent provided by burning coal. Even Denmark, which has done more than any other country to boost wind power, struggles to integrate an intermittent generating resource into a grid whose customers expect the lights or the television to come on whenever they flick the switch.
As the world attempts to wean itself from fossil fuels — a result of the converging desires to combat climate change, improve energy security, and create green jobs — renewables such as the sun, wind, water, and hot rocks will play a larger role. So will energy sources, such as nuclear and natural gas, that are cleaner than the current favorites, coal and oil. The question is: Can any of these resources — or even all of them put together — begin to approach the scale needed to transform the world’s energy supply?
And even if the world’s economies can muster the resources and willpower to wean themselves off fossil fuels, how many decades will it take? And can we move fast enough to stave off the potentially calamitous effects of climate change?
“Renewables are growing at fantastic rates compared to conventional resources,” says David Rogers, general manager for climate change at the oil giant, Chevron. But “while it’s growing like gangbusters, it’s starting from such a small base that by 2030 it still takes a small part of the energy space.”
To meet a proliferating set of international goals, such as Germany’s plan to derive 80 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2050, will require completely changing the present energy mix. Despite more than 21,000 wind turbines and 13 million square meters of solar installations, Germany still gets more than 50 percent of its electricity from burning fossil fuels, including lignite, the most polluting form of coal.
“In some real sense, we need to replace all of the power-producing infrastructure that we have today within 30 or 40 years,” says engineer Saul Griffith of California-based Other Lab, an engineering and design firm working on renewable energy projects, among other pursuits. “The options that we have that are non-carbon [dioxide] producing are nuclear power, solar power at a very large scale, wind power at a very large scale, and geothermal at a very large scale — and then perhaps biofuels or carbon sequestration on existing power plants.”
In fact, at the global level, in order to shift away from a world that gets 81 percent of its energy from fossil fuels and to cut emissions of carbon dioxide to just 14 gigatons per year, here is what the International Energy Agency says will have to be built every year between now and 2050: 35 coal-fired and 20 gas-fired power plants with carbon capture and storage; 30 nuclear power plants; 12,000 onshore wind turbines paired with 3,600 offshore ones; 45 geothermal power plants; 325 million square meters-worth of photovoltaics; and 55 solar-thermal power plants. That doesn’t even include the need to build electric cars and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in order to shift transportation away from burning gasoline.
In addition, if the world’s economies hope to wean themselves from fossil fuels, they will have to significantly improve energy efficiency and begin to harness power from sources such as waste heat from factories.
One thing is certain: If the global economy does succeed in making the transition to renewable energy, the face of the planet will be significantly changed, with solar energy farms and wind turbines a common feature of many landscapes and seascapes.
“If 10 percent of the U.S. electricity generated in 2009... were to be produced by large wind farms, their area would have to cover at least 22,500 square kilometers, roughly the size of New Hampshire,” writes environmental scientist Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba in his book, Energy at the Crossroads. “These new energy infrastructures would have to be spread over areas ten to a thousand times larger than today’s infrastructure of fossil fuel extraction, combustion and electricity generation…. This is not an impossible feat, but one posing many regulatory, technical and logistic challenges.”
“Can we do this or not?” Chevron's Rogers asks. “Even at the best time we ever had we only did 20 to 25 nuclear power plants in a year... We need 325 million square meters [of photovoltaics] annually. We’ve done maybe 10 percent of that in our best year, which was last year.”
But there is reason for guarded optimism. Even in the throes of the Great Recession, renewables accounted for more than 50 percent of newly installed generating capacity in the U.S. and the European Union, while China added 37 gigawatts of mostly wind and hydropower in 2009, according to the United Nations Environment Program.
“It’s not going to be easy to make an energy plan that adds up; but it is possible,” says physicist David MacKay of the University of Cambridge, an expert on scaling up renewable energy. “We need to make some choices and get building.”
When it comes to such a large-scale shift in energy supplies, few places face more of a challenge than the United States. Americans burn through nearly 6.4 billion barrels of oil and 1.1 billion metric tons of coal per year on our way to getting 83 percent of our energy fix from fossil fuels. Renewable resources, such as the sun, the wind, the flow of rivers and fuels derived from crops supply just 8 percent of our energy needs. Take away ethanol and hydropower, and the sun, the wind, and geothermal power supply less than 1 percent of the U.S.’s total energy use, including gasoline consumption.
Just to supply one-quarter of its current energy mix from a resource that emits far fewer greenhouse gases — nuclear power — the U.S. would need to build 1,000 one-gigawatt nuclear reactors by 2050. Yet construction has begun on only two nuclear reactors in the U.S. since 1974. And just to power an electric car and truck fleet to replace the U.S.’s current gas and ethanol-fueled one would require 500 new nuclear power plants. There are currently 442 reactors in the entire world, of which the U.S. has 104 — the most of any nation.
U.S. attempts to wean itself from fossil fuels have never fared well, yet the Obama administration has committed internationally to an 80 percent drop in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Either alternative energy supplies will need to ramp up from nearly zero to almost 100 percent in just four decades, or large-scale carbon capture and storage will be required, including pulling CO2 out of the air after it has been put there by all of our automobiles. In fact, simply removing one gigaton of carbon from the atmosphere would require 273 coal-fired power plants with complete carbon capture and storage. At present, there is one in the U.S., capturing just 1.5 percent of its emissions.
“We are talking about a transformation across the entire country,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) chairman Jon Wellinghoff said in an interview with Yale Environment 360. “We are talking about potentially tens of thousands of new transmission lines to ultimately move large amounts of wind, solar, and other resources to loads. We are talking about in the scale of billions of dollars of investments in smart-grid technologies, all the way from the consumer level up through to the transmission and generation level.”
Assuming the U.S. will require roughly 4 terrawatts of power by 2050 (a conservative estimate, given that we already use more than three), replacing all that fossil fuel would require at least 4 million wind turbines — necessitating building 12, three-megawatt wind turbines every hour for the next 30 years, according to Griffiths. The numbers are similar for solar — 160 billion square meters of photovoltaic cells or concentrating mirrors. “We need to be making a square yard of solar cells or mirrors every second for the next 40 years to install that much in North America,” Griffiths calculates.
It’s not just a matter of making the necessary equipment, it’s also a question of finding the space for it. A coal-fired power plant produces 100 to 1,000 watts per square meter, depending on the type of coal it burns and how that coal is mined. A typical photovoltaic system for turning sunlight into electricity produces just 9 watts per square meter, and wind provides only 1.5 watts per square meter.
The challenge is worse for smaller countries: the United Kingdom would have to cover its entire landmass with wind turbines to provide enough electricity for the current Briton’s average consumption — roughly 200 kilowatt-hours per day, according to MacKay, the Cambridge expert.
Although daunting, the challenges of installing new energy technologies on a mass scale are by no means impossible. In the first half of the 20th century, it took the U.S. 45 years to increase its use of oil until that fossil fuel represented 20 percent of the total energy used. At the same time, the U.S. built a sprawling gasoline-fueling station infrastructure, the rudiments of a national electricity grid, thousands of miles of telephone lines, airplanes and airports, interstate natural gas pipelines, and local delivery infrastructure for home heating — and rolled out all the appliances (refrigerators, radios, televisions, etc.) of the modern age — all in the same few decades, at the same time. In other words, the U.S. seems to have “scaled up,” in the parlance of engineers, pretty rapidly in the past.
Transforming the global economy to run on renewable energy would require a similarly massive effort. For example, to provide the energy equivalent of present global consumption would require covering 1 percent of the Earth’s surface with photovoltaic devices, according to chemist Nathan Lewis of the California Institute of Technology. That’s less than the land area currently covered by cities, but a huge chunk of territory nonetheless.
“You can actually farm, you can actually graze, you can actually do things around that [wind] turbine versus if you are taking the top off a mountain produce some coal,” FERC’s Wellinghoff notes. “Ultimately, we are going to have to accept the fact that wind turbines and solar systems are going to take up fairly large pieces of land. But, fortunately, we have a lot of land in this country and we have the ability to have dual use of that land.”
But the U.S. also leads the major nations of the world in per capita consumption of energy. The average American used 7.2 metric tons of oil-equivalent in 2009 (a number that, to be fair, has gotten slightly better of late, down from 8.5 in 2005.) That’s double the amount used by the average citizen in Europe, and five times the global average.
To put it another way, the average American uses 250 kilowatt-hours per day for “transportation, heating, manufacturing, electricity, and so forth,” writes MacKay. “That’s equivalent to every person having 250 40-watt light bulbs switched on all the time.” Energy efficiency might bring that consumption as low as 168 kwh per day, according to MacKay. But that still means each American would require 80 square meters of photovoltaic panels, plus biofuels from energy crops on 4,000 square meters of land. In addition, the U.S would need to build one 2-megawatt wind turbine for every 300 Americans, plus one 1-gigawatt nuclear power plant for every city the size of Boston.
On the grander scale, more than half of the energy used in the U.S. — 56.3 percent — is wasted. That’s a result of the essential inefficiency of burning coal in a power plant or gasoline in an automobile engine, or even transmitting electricity over vast distances.
Industry is beginning to make use of this waste — a steel plant in Indiana employs the waste heat from a coal coking plant to generate electricity, enough to help run its steel rolling machines in another adjacent facility. And while U.S. energy use has grown over the past four decades, three-quarters of that growth has been met through gains in energy efficiency, not by burning additional fossil fuels, according to a 2008 report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). The energy used to produce every dollar of U.S. gross domestic product fell from 18,000 Btus in 1970 to just 8,900 Btus in 2008.
“The energy-related challenges of the 21st century require a dramatic shift in direction — from an emphasis on energy supply to an emphasis on energy efficiency,” says Jon “Skip” Laitner, ACEEE director of economic analysis. “The greatest American success story in dealing with energy in recent decades is also the least understood and the most invisible.”
In fact, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimate that waste heat from factories, oil refineries and other industrial facilities holds the potential for as much as 95 gigawatts (the equivalent of 95 nuclear power plants) of new electricity, which is cheaper to capture than building a new coal-fired power plant.
If this great energy transformation eventually comes, it will take decades to complete. But, as FERC’s Wellinghoff notes, “The scale is very large but, fortunately, it is something we can do incrementally and it is something that we have already started.”
If society’s efforts were turned in different directions, shifting from making fewer consumer products to making more devices to capture renewable energy, the transition might ultimately fuel itself.
After all, beverage makers now produce some 300 billion aluminum cans per year, Griffiths notes, which is enough production capacity to manufacture 100 or 200 gigawatts of solar thermal annually. “So we could do 1 terrawatt of solar in 10 years if Pepsi and Coca-Cola and all the breweries became solar companies,” he says. “We have the industrial scale. We are just right now prioritizing what we want to make with it and we are making disposable aluminum cans instead of solar mirrors. That gives me reason for optimism. We can do it.”
.
Image above: To supply 25% of current energy by 2050 the U.S. will build 1,000 one-gigawatt nuclear reactors. From (http://pavelpodolyak.blogspot.com/2010/05/energy-independence-how-much-nuclear.html).
From the dust-blown steppes of Inner Mongolia to the waters off Shanghai, China installed more wind turbines in the first half of 2010 than any other country — 7,800 megawatts of potential power production, or more than the United States, the European Union, and India combined. In fact, in northeast China alone, autumn and winter winds now produce some 17 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, roughly 5.5 percent of the total power generation in the region. That’s up from 534 million kilowatt hours just five years ago.
But despite this rapid progress, wind energy still only generates a tiny fraction of China’s electricity. Indeed, even with aggressive government backing and green energy mandates, such “new energy” — including wind, solar, nuclear power plants, and biomass — accounts for less than 3 percent of China’s electricity production, compared to more than 70 percent provided by coal, which produces roughly 3 metric tons of carbon dioxide for every metric ton of the dirty, black rock burned. And as China’s economy continues to expand at a dizzying rate for the foreseeable future, wind and other renewable sources of energy will not even be able to keep pace with new demand, meaning fossil fuel burning will continue unabated.
This is hardly unique to China. In the U.S., electricity produced from the breeze has increased 13-fold in the past decade, yet still only provides 2.3 percent of the country’s electricity — compared to just under 50 percent provided by burning coal. Even Denmark, which has done more than any other country to boost wind power, struggles to integrate an intermittent generating resource into a grid whose customers expect the lights or the television to come on whenever they flick the switch.
As the world attempts to wean itself from fossil fuels — a result of the converging desires to combat climate change, improve energy security, and create green jobs — renewables such as the sun, wind, water, and hot rocks will play a larger role. So will energy sources, such as nuclear and natural gas, that are cleaner than the current favorites, coal and oil. The question is: Can any of these resources — or even all of them put together — begin to approach the scale needed to transform the world’s energy supply?
And even if the world’s economies can muster the resources and willpower to wean themselves off fossil fuels, how many decades will it take? And can we move fast enough to stave off the potentially calamitous effects of climate change?
“Renewables are growing at fantastic rates compared to conventional resources,” says David Rogers, general manager for climate change at the oil giant, Chevron. But “while it’s growing like gangbusters, it’s starting from such a small base that by 2030 it still takes a small part of the energy space.”
To meet a proliferating set of international goals, such as Germany’s plan to derive 80 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2050, will require completely changing the present energy mix. Despite more than 21,000 wind turbines and 13 million square meters of solar installations, Germany still gets more than 50 percent of its electricity from burning fossil fuels, including lignite, the most polluting form of coal.
“In some real sense, we need to replace all of the power-producing infrastructure that we have today within 30 or 40 years,” says engineer Saul Griffith of California-based Other Lab, an engineering and design firm working on renewable energy projects, among other pursuits. “The options that we have that are non-carbon [dioxide] producing are nuclear power, solar power at a very large scale, wind power at a very large scale, and geothermal at a very large scale — and then perhaps biofuels or carbon sequestration on existing power plants.”
In fact, at the global level, in order to shift away from a world that gets 81 percent of its energy from fossil fuels and to cut emissions of carbon dioxide to just 14 gigatons per year, here is what the International Energy Agency says will have to be built every year between now and 2050: 35 coal-fired and 20 gas-fired power plants with carbon capture and storage; 30 nuclear power plants; 12,000 onshore wind turbines paired with 3,600 offshore ones; 45 geothermal power plants; 325 million square meters-worth of photovoltaics; and 55 solar-thermal power plants. That doesn’t even include the need to build electric cars and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in order to shift transportation away from burning gasoline.
In addition, if the world’s economies hope to wean themselves from fossil fuels, they will have to significantly improve energy efficiency and begin to harness power from sources such as waste heat from factories.
One thing is certain: If the global economy does succeed in making the transition to renewable energy, the face of the planet will be significantly changed, with solar energy farms and wind turbines a common feature of many landscapes and seascapes.
“If 10 percent of the U.S. electricity generated in 2009... were to be produced by large wind farms, their area would have to cover at least 22,500 square kilometers, roughly the size of New Hampshire,” writes environmental scientist Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba in his book, Energy at the Crossroads. “These new energy infrastructures would have to be spread over areas ten to a thousand times larger than today’s infrastructure of fossil fuel extraction, combustion and electricity generation…. This is not an impossible feat, but one posing many regulatory, technical and logistic challenges.”
“Can we do this or not?” Chevron's Rogers asks. “Even at the best time we ever had we only did 20 to 25 nuclear power plants in a year... We need 325 million square meters [of photovoltaics] annually. We’ve done maybe 10 percent of that in our best year, which was last year.”
But there is reason for guarded optimism. Even in the throes of the Great Recession, renewables accounted for more than 50 percent of newly installed generating capacity in the U.S. and the European Union, while China added 37 gigawatts of mostly wind and hydropower in 2009, according to the United Nations Environment Program.
“It’s not going to be easy to make an energy plan that adds up; but it is possible,” says physicist David MacKay of the University of Cambridge, an expert on scaling up renewable energy. “We need to make some choices and get building.”
When it comes to such a large-scale shift in energy supplies, few places face more of a challenge than the United States. Americans burn through nearly 6.4 billion barrels of oil and 1.1 billion metric tons of coal per year on our way to getting 83 percent of our energy fix from fossil fuels. Renewable resources, such as the sun, the wind, the flow of rivers and fuels derived from crops supply just 8 percent of our energy needs. Take away ethanol and hydropower, and the sun, the wind, and geothermal power supply less than 1 percent of the U.S.’s total energy use, including gasoline consumption.
Just to supply one-quarter of its current energy mix from a resource that emits far fewer greenhouse gases — nuclear power — the U.S. would need to build 1,000 one-gigawatt nuclear reactors by 2050. Yet construction has begun on only two nuclear reactors in the U.S. since 1974. And just to power an electric car and truck fleet to replace the U.S.’s current gas and ethanol-fueled one would require 500 new nuclear power plants. There are currently 442 reactors in the entire world, of which the U.S. has 104 — the most of any nation.
U.S. attempts to wean itself from fossil fuels have never fared well, yet the Obama administration has committed internationally to an 80 percent drop in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Either alternative energy supplies will need to ramp up from nearly zero to almost 100 percent in just four decades, or large-scale carbon capture and storage will be required, including pulling CO2 out of the air after it has been put there by all of our automobiles. In fact, simply removing one gigaton of carbon from the atmosphere would require 273 coal-fired power plants with complete carbon capture and storage. At present, there is one in the U.S., capturing just 1.5 percent of its emissions.
“We are talking about a transformation across the entire country,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) chairman Jon Wellinghoff said in an interview with Yale Environment 360. “We are talking about potentially tens of thousands of new transmission lines to ultimately move large amounts of wind, solar, and other resources to loads. We are talking about in the scale of billions of dollars of investments in smart-grid technologies, all the way from the consumer level up through to the transmission and generation level.”
Assuming the U.S. will require roughly 4 terrawatts of power by 2050 (a conservative estimate, given that we already use more than three), replacing all that fossil fuel would require at least 4 million wind turbines — necessitating building 12, three-megawatt wind turbines every hour for the next 30 years, according to Griffiths. The numbers are similar for solar — 160 billion square meters of photovoltaic cells or concentrating mirrors. “We need to be making a square yard of solar cells or mirrors every second for the next 40 years to install that much in North America,” Griffiths calculates.
It’s not just a matter of making the necessary equipment, it’s also a question of finding the space for it. A coal-fired power plant produces 100 to 1,000 watts per square meter, depending on the type of coal it burns and how that coal is mined. A typical photovoltaic system for turning sunlight into electricity produces just 9 watts per square meter, and wind provides only 1.5 watts per square meter.
The challenge is worse for smaller countries: the United Kingdom would have to cover its entire landmass with wind turbines to provide enough electricity for the current Briton’s average consumption — roughly 200 kilowatt-hours per day, according to MacKay, the Cambridge expert.
Although daunting, the challenges of installing new energy technologies on a mass scale are by no means impossible. In the first half of the 20th century, it took the U.S. 45 years to increase its use of oil until that fossil fuel represented 20 percent of the total energy used. At the same time, the U.S. built a sprawling gasoline-fueling station infrastructure, the rudiments of a national electricity grid, thousands of miles of telephone lines, airplanes and airports, interstate natural gas pipelines, and local delivery infrastructure for home heating — and rolled out all the appliances (refrigerators, radios, televisions, etc.) of the modern age — all in the same few decades, at the same time. In other words, the U.S. seems to have “scaled up,” in the parlance of engineers, pretty rapidly in the past.
Transforming the global economy to run on renewable energy would require a similarly massive effort. For example, to provide the energy equivalent of present global consumption would require covering 1 percent of the Earth’s surface with photovoltaic devices, according to chemist Nathan Lewis of the California Institute of Technology. That’s less than the land area currently covered by cities, but a huge chunk of territory nonetheless.
“You can actually farm, you can actually graze, you can actually do things around that [wind] turbine versus if you are taking the top off a mountain produce some coal,” FERC’s Wellinghoff notes. “Ultimately, we are going to have to accept the fact that wind turbines and solar systems are going to take up fairly large pieces of land. But, fortunately, we have a lot of land in this country and we have the ability to have dual use of that land.”
But the U.S. also leads the major nations of the world in per capita consumption of energy. The average American used 7.2 metric tons of oil-equivalent in 2009 (a number that, to be fair, has gotten slightly better of late, down from 8.5 in 2005.) That’s double the amount used by the average citizen in Europe, and five times the global average.
To put it another way, the average American uses 250 kilowatt-hours per day for “transportation, heating, manufacturing, electricity, and so forth,” writes MacKay. “That’s equivalent to every person having 250 40-watt light bulbs switched on all the time.” Energy efficiency might bring that consumption as low as 168 kwh per day, according to MacKay. But that still means each American would require 80 square meters of photovoltaic panels, plus biofuels from energy crops on 4,000 square meters of land. In addition, the U.S would need to build one 2-megawatt wind turbine for every 300 Americans, plus one 1-gigawatt nuclear power plant for every city the size of Boston.
On the grander scale, more than half of the energy used in the U.S. — 56.3 percent — is wasted. That’s a result of the essential inefficiency of burning coal in a power plant or gasoline in an automobile engine, or even transmitting electricity over vast distances.
Industry is beginning to make use of this waste — a steel plant in Indiana employs the waste heat from a coal coking plant to generate electricity, enough to help run its steel rolling machines in another adjacent facility. And while U.S. energy use has grown over the past four decades, three-quarters of that growth has been met through gains in energy efficiency, not by burning additional fossil fuels, according to a 2008 report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). The energy used to produce every dollar of U.S. gross domestic product fell from 18,000 Btus in 1970 to just 8,900 Btus in 2008.
“The energy-related challenges of the 21st century require a dramatic shift in direction — from an emphasis on energy supply to an emphasis on energy efficiency,” says Jon “Skip” Laitner, ACEEE director of economic analysis. “The greatest American success story in dealing with energy in recent decades is also the least understood and the most invisible.”
In fact, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimate that waste heat from factories, oil refineries and other industrial facilities holds the potential for as much as 95 gigawatts (the equivalent of 95 nuclear power plants) of new electricity, which is cheaper to capture than building a new coal-fired power plant.
If this great energy transformation eventually comes, it will take decades to complete. But, as FERC’s Wellinghoff notes, “The scale is very large but, fortunately, it is something we can do incrementally and it is something that we have already started.”
If society’s efforts were turned in different directions, shifting from making fewer consumer products to making more devices to capture renewable energy, the transition might ultimately fuel itself.
After all, beverage makers now produce some 300 billion aluminum cans per year, Griffiths notes, which is enough production capacity to manufacture 100 or 200 gigawatts of solar thermal annually. “So we could do 1 terrawatt of solar in 10 years if Pepsi and Coca-Cola and all the breweries became solar companies,” he says. “We have the industrial scale. We are just right now prioritizing what we want to make with it and we are making disposable aluminum cans instead of solar mirrors. That gives me reason for optimism. We can do it.”
.
Interview With Derrick Jensen
SUBHEAD: Those of us who are working to stop this planetary murder are sometimes characterized as extremists.
By Mickey Z on 23 January 2011 in Press Action -
(http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/mickeyz01232011)
Image above: Mickey Z (l) and Derrick Jensoin (r) from (http://www.amovingtrain.com/transmissions1/?p=660).
Image above: Mickey Z (l) and Derrick Jensoin (r) from (http://www.amovingtrain.com/transmissions1/?p=660).
As you begin reading this interview, take a look at the nearest clock. Now, dig this: Since yesterday at the same exact time, 200,000 acres of rainforest have been destroyed, over 100 plant and animal species have gone extinct, 13 million tons of toxic chemicals were released across the globe, and 29,158 children under the age of five died from preventable causes.
Worst of all, there’s nothing unique about the past 24 hours. It’s business as usual, a daily reality—and no amount of CFL bulbs, recycled toilet paper, or Sierra Club donations will change it even a tiny bit.
As you do your best to convince yourself of the vast chasm between the two wings of America’s single corporate party, I suggest you listen carefully to hear if even one of the politicians mentions any of the following:
- Every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic
- Eighty-one tons of mercury is emitted into the atmosphere each year as a result of electric power generation
- Every second, 10,000 gallons of gasoline are burned in the US
- Each year, Americans use 2.2 billion pounds of pesticides
- Ninety percent of the large fish in the ocean and 80 percent of the world’s forests are gone
- Every two seconds, a human being starves to death
This is just a minute sampling, folks, and sorry, but your hybrid ain’t helping. That reusable shopping bag you bring to the market has zero impact. Your home composting kit is not gonna start a revolution.
In fact, even if every single person in the US made every single change suggested in the movie An Inconvenient Truth, carbon emissions would fall by only 21%—in contrast to the 75% emissions decrease that scientific consensus believes must happen … now.
None of this, of course, is news to Derrick Jensen. He is the author of essential works such as A Language Older Than Words and Endgame. His worldview has nothing to do with party politics, incremental reform, leftist in-fighting, corporate compromise, or anything that seeks to tweak but ultimately maintain the ongoing global crime we call civilization.
“My loyalty,” he told me, “is with the nonhuman and human victims (or targets) of this culture, and my work is toward stopping this culture’s assaults on nonhumans, on the land, on the planet itself, on women, on indigenous peoples, on the poor.”
If you’ve grown weary (and wary) of the entrenched Left and all the words left unspoken, you owe it to yourself to read the rest of our conversation below. Afterwards, you just might start realizing that you also owe it to the planet to get busy.
Our exchange took place during the week of January 17 and went a little something like this …
Mickey Z.: We’re starting this conversation as another MLK Day is observed. Not much of a chance that we’ll hear this Dr. King quote—“The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be”—mentioned much by the corporate media, huhDerrick Jensen: Just today I read an article stating that, no surprise, industrial-induced global warming will be far worse than estimated, and if carbon emissions continue as expected, could render much of the planet uninhabitable within 100 years. Even now, 150-200 species are driven extinct every day. This culture extirpates indigenous peoples. The oceans are being murdered. And today I saw a study of rates of fire retardant in every fetus. And on and on. And yet those of us who are working to stop this planetary murder are sometimes characterized as extremists.
I think the real extremists are the people who value capitalism over life, the people who value civilization over life. I cannot think of any more extreme position than valuing this insane culture over life.
MZ: Not surprisingly, another major African-American figure from the 1960s—Malcolm X—had some positive words for extremism in the name of toppling that insane culture. Using Hamlet as a springboard, Malcolm wrote:
“(Hamlet) was in doubt about something—whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—moderation—or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. And I go for that. If you take up arms, you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who’s in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time. And in my opinion, the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built and the only way it’s going to be built with—is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone—I don’t care what color you are—as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.”
DJ: I think the key has to do with wanting to change this miserable condition.
I try to be fairly inclusive of the people I would work with, but I’ve realized over the past many years that I’m not working toward the same goals as many of the environmentalists who are explicitly working to save capitalism or to save civilization, rather than the real world. In talks and interviews I often ask what all of the so-called solutions to global warming or the murder of the oceans, or biodiversity crash, etc, all have in common. And what they all have in common is that they all take industrial capitalism as a given, and the natural world as that which must conform to industrial capitalism. That is literally insane, in terms of being out of touch with physical reality. I mean, look at Lester Brown’s Plan B 4.0 to Save Civilization. What does he want to save? Could he be any more explicit? He wants to save civilization. But civilization is killing the planet. It’s like writing a book about how to save a serial killer who is murdering so many people he’s running out of victims. We see this attitude all the time. When people, for example, ask how we can stop global warming, they’re not asking how we can stop global warming; they’re asking how we can stop global warming without changing the physical conditions (burning oil and gas, deforestation, industrial agriculture, and so on) that lead to global warming. And the answer to that question is that you can’t. Likewise, when they ask how we can save salmon, they aren’t really asking how we can save salmon, they’re asking how we can save salmon without removing dams, stopping industrial logging, stopping industrial agriculture, stopping industrial fishing, stopping the murder of the oceans, stopping global warming, and so on.
A question I keep asking is: with whom (or what) do you identify? Where is your loyalty? Whom, or what do you want to save? And if what you really want to save is this “miserable condition”—capitalism, civilization, what have you—at the expense of the planet, then we’re not really working toward the same goal, are we? My loyalty is with the nonhuman and human victims (or targets) of this culture, and my work is toward stopping this culture’s assaults on nonhumans, on the land, on the planet itself, on women, on indigenous peoples, on the poor.
MZ: It’s a testament to the power of propaganda how even well-meaning folks will choose the options—both public and private—that work against their own interests. Gay rights activists are currently applauding the alleged repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” In the name of promoting diversity and inclusion, they are celebrating the ability to volunteer for an institution that exists to violently crush all diversity and inclusion.
The conditioning is so interwoven throughout every aspect of our culture that even respected Leftist thinkers simply cannot comprehend your comment, “civilization is killing the planet” and resort to retorts about “misanthropy.”
So, the question must be asked, Derrick: Can these people be reached with the message that we can’t have industrial capitalism as a given without all the murderous side effects?
DJ: There’s a great line by Upton Sinclair about how it’s hard to make a man [sic] understand something when his [sic] job depends on him not understanding it. I think that’s true even more for entitlement. It’s hard to make someone understand something when their entitlement, their privilege, their comforts and elegancies, their perceived ability to control and manage, depends on it.
So much nature writing, social change theory, and environmental philosophy are at best irrelevant, and more often harmful in that they do not question human supremacism (or for that matter white supremacism, or male supremacism). They often do not question imperialism, including ecological imperialism. So often I feel like so many of them still want the goodies that come from imperialism (including ecological imperialism and sexual imperialism) far more than they want for these forms of imperialism to stop. And since the violence of imperialism is structural—inherent to the process—you can’t realistically expect imperialism to stop being violent just because you call it “green” or just because you wish with all your might.
Here’s another way to say this: as I say in Endgame, any way of life that requires the importation of resources will a) never be sustainable and b) always be based on violence, because a) requiring importation of resources means you are using more of that resource than the landbase can provide, which is by definition not sustainable (and as your city grows you’ll need an ever larger area to harm); and b) trade will never be sufficiently reliable, because if you require some resource (e.g., oil) and the people who live with or control that resource won’t trade you for it, you will take it, because you need it. It’s inherent. One of the many implications of this is that if you don’t question imperialism itself, the solutions you present will be absurd, and either irrelevant or harmful.
Here’s a story. A couple of weeks ago a tree fell down in a storm and knocked down an electric wire in this neighborhood. My neighbor told me about it, and when I saw the downed tree I looked and looked and looked for the stump, to see where the tree came from. I couldn’t find it. I’ve looked again every time I’ve gone by that place. Well, today I was walking and I saw where it came from. The top of a big tree had broken off. It was really obvious when I looked up instead of down. Point being (instant aphorism): You can search as thoroughly as is possible, but you’ll never find what you’re looking for if you’re looking in the wrong place.
This applies to everything from personal happiness to solutions to global warming.
But the problem is worse than mere entitlement. RD Laing came up with the three rules of a dysfunctional family:
Rule A is don’t.
Rule A.1 is Rule A does not exist
Rule A.2 is Never discuss the existence or nonexistence of Rules A, A.1, A.2
This is as true of dysfunctional cultures as dysfunctional families. So we cannot talk, for example, about the fact that this culture is only one way of living among many, that this way of living is based on conquest and the acquisition of power, that this way of life systematically destroys landbases, other cultures, and on and on. Systematically, functionally.
But it’s worse than this. In the 1960s a researcher attached electrodes to people’s eyeballs to track where they looked, and then showed them pictures. What the researcher found is that if the photo contained something that threatened the person’s worldview, the person’s eyes would not even track to it once: they would evidently see it out of the corners of their eyes, and know where not to look. So far too often you can make the point as reasonably as you can, and the person will have no idea what you are talking about.
MZ: Considering the glacial rate by which most humans—myself very much included—recognize and address destructive or self-destructive patterns in their personal life, it’s difficult to imagine a lot more humans allowing their eyeballs to focus in on global crises and their obscured causes. High Noon is approaching and it seems most of us don’t even know how to tell time.
Speaking of High Noon, I recently watched the classic 1952 film and found myself focused on the moment when Amy (Grace Kelly), the pacifist wife of Marshal Kane (Gary Cooper), shoots and kills a man to save her husband’s life. Earlier in the film, Amy had declared: “My father and my brother were killed by guns. They were on the right side but that didn’t help them any when the shooting started. My brother was nineteen. I watched him die. That’s when I became a Quaker. I don’t care who’s right or who’s wrong. There’s got to be some better way for people to live.”
However, she not only ends up shooting a man, she also fights off the main villain, which allows Marshal Kane to finish him. Now, before some readers run and tell Gandhi on me, what I’m proposing as the lesson is that when faced with the clarity a crisis can sometimes inspire, we can recognize that those clock hands are inching towards noon and surprise ourselves (as Grace Kelly’s character did) with our ability to take things to a new level.
If not, what chance do we (the animals, the trees, the eco-system, etc.) have?
DJ: Very little chance. Even if people don’t care about nonhumans, recent estimates are that billions, literally billions, of humans will die in what is beginning to be called a climate holocaust. This is if the temperature rises 4 degrees Celsius.
And the most recent estimates are revealing that global warming is far worse than previously believed (have you ever noticed how the previous estimates were always low?), and could go up 16 degrees C within 90 years, rendering much of the planet uninhabitable (“Science stunner: On our current emissions path, CO2 levels in 2100 will hit levels last seen when the Earth was 29°F (16°C) hotter—Paleoclimate data suggests CO2 ‘may have at least twice the effect on global temperatures than currently projected by computer models’”). This means that there are young people now who will die in this climate holocaust. And there are too many people who prefer this wretched, destructive way of life over life on the planet, and literally over their own children. We need to stop this culture before it kills the planet.
MZ: Although I feel there’s way too much hand-holding in the realm of activism and far too many progressives sitting idle as they wait for a leader to give them direction, I must ask you this: What types of immediate direct action might you suggest to those reading this interview, in the name of stopping this culture before it kills the planet?
DJ: I think the important thing is that they start doing some form of activism. I can’t tell people what to do, because I don’t know what is important to them and I don’t know what their gifts are. But the important thing is that they start. Now. Today.
So how do you start? The problems are so huge! Well, the way I started as an activist was the result of the smartest thing I ever did. When I was in my mid-20s I realized I wasn’t paying enough for gasoline (in terms of including any of the ecological costs, etc), so for every dollar I spent on gas I would donate a dollar to an environmental organization (never a national or international organization, but rather local grassroots organizations), but since I didn’t have any money I would instead pay myself $5/hour to do activist work, whether it is writing letters to the editor or participating in demonstrations. My first demos were anti-fur demos and anti-circus demos. And don’t let your perceived ignorance stop you: I had no idea what exactly was wrong with circuses, but I knew they were exploitative of nonhuman animals and so I showed up, and other people handed me signs. If anyone asked me, What’s wrong with circuses? I just pointed them to the person standing next to me. I went from there to other forms of activism, including filing timber sale appeals, and so on. The point is that I started. At the time it cost $10 to fill my tank with gas, and if I filled it once a week, that meant two hours per week. And I started having so much fun with the activism that I stopped keeping track of how many hours I was doing activism, and just did it. But the important thing is that I got off my butt and started doing something.
It’s also important that when people do activism, that it not simply be personal stuff: environmentalism especially has gone down the dead end of lifestylism, where people think that changing their own life is sufficient. Just today I read an article that said, about water, “First of all, turn off the water when you don’t need it. It’s that simple. I don’t want to sound too preachy, but, according to UNICEF and the World Health Organization, lack of access to clean drinking water kills about 4,500 children per day. The water won’t magically travel from our taps to someone in need, but creating a mind-set of conservation will certainly help. There is absolutely no purpose served by letting water you are not using run down the drain.” This is just absurd.
Yes, lack of access to clean water kills 4500 children per day, but it’s not because of my own water usage. 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. So all these environmental pleas for simple living are tremendous misdirection: these children (and what about the salmon children, and the sturgeon children, and so on) aren’t dying because I brushed my teeth: they’re dying because agriculture and industry are stealing the water. Just yesterday I read that Turkey is sacrificing all nature reserves to put in dams. This is not so people can have showers. It’s for agriculture and industry.
I live pretty simply, but that’s because I’m a cheapskate. I turn off the water while I brush my teeth, too. Big fucking deal. That is not a political act. There are no personal solutions to social problems. None.
So when I say that people should do some activism, I mean do something good for your landbase. Stop destructive activities. Do rehabilitation. Or if your primary emergency is violence against women, then do work against domestic violence, or against pornography, or against the trafficking in women. Get started.
Like Joe Hill said, “Don’t mourn, organize.”
MZ: I like to tell people that we live in the best time ever to be an activist. We’re on the brink of economic, social, and environmental collapse. What a time to be alive. We can take part in the most important work humans have ever undertaken. How lucky are we? In this era of “hope and change,” I say action is always better than hope. Or, as Rita Mae Brown said, “Never hope more than you work.”
DJ: Yes, I get so tired of people saying they hope salmon survive, or hope this or hope that. But what is hope? Hope is a longing for a future condition over which we have no agency. That’s how we use the word in every day language. I don’t say, “Gosh, I hope I put my shoes on before I go outside.” I just do it. On the other hand, the next time I get on a plane I hope it doesn’t crash. After I get on the plane I have no agency. Think of this: if a parent says to an eight-year-old child, “Please clean your room,” and the child says, “I hope it gets done,” we all know that’s ridiculous. I asked an eight-year-old what would happen if she said that to her parents, and she said, “Someone has to clean the room!”
That kid is smarter than a lot of environmentalists. It’s ridiculous to say we hope global warming doesn’t kill the planet when we can stop the oil economy that is causing global warming. I’m not interested in hope. I’m interested in agency, and I’m interested in people no longer waiting for some miracle to solve their problems. We need to do what is necessary.
MZ: When you first began writing and speaking about civilization and the eventual collapse, did you ever truly imagine that you’d be around to see things as bad as they are right now?
DJ: No. And even though I wrote in The Culture of Make Believe about the ways in which economic collapse can lead to more and more brownshirt-ism and fascism, I’m still kind of stunned at the way it is happening here. But more to the point, even though I’ve written something on the order of fifteen books about this culture’s insanity, I still cannot believe this isn’t all a bad dream, with this frenzied maintenance of this culture as the world is murdered. I keep wanting to wake up, but each time I awaken this culture is still killing the planet, and not many people care.
MZ: I’m sure you can’t even calculate how many times you’ve been interviewed but I’m wondering if there’s a question you always wished you’d been asked but so far, no one has done so. If so, by way of wrapping up, please feel free to ask and answer that question.
DJ: Four questions:
MZ: You’ve said many times that you don’t believe that humans are particularly more sentient than other animals. Where do you draw the line?
DJ: I don’t draw the line at all. I don’t see any reason to believe anything other than that the universe is full of a wild symphony of wildly different voices, wildly different intelligences. Humans have human intelligence, which is no greater nor less than octopi intelligence, which is no greater nor less than redwood intelligence, which is no greater nor less than flu virus intelligence, which is no greater nor less than granite intelligence, which is no greater nor less than river intelligence, and so on.
MZ: How did the world get to be such a beautiful and wonderful and fecund place in the first place?
JZ: By everyone making the world a more beautiful and wonderful and fecund place by living and dying. By plants and animals and fungi and viruses and bacteria and rocks and rivers and so on making the world a better place. Salmon makes forests better places because of their existence. The Mississippi River makes that region a better place because of its existence. Bison make the Great Plains a better place because of their existence.
Civilized humans do not make the world a better place because of their existence. They are collectively and individually making the world a less beautiful and wonderful and fecund place. How can you make the world a better place? What can you do to make the landbase where you live more healthy, more beautiful, more fecund? And why aren’t you doing it?
MZ: What will it take for the planet to survive?
DJ: The eradication of industrial civilization. Industrial civilization is functionally, systematically incompatible with life.
The good news is that industrial civilization is in the process of collapsing.
The bad news is that it is taking down too much of the planet with it.
MZ: So if industrial civilization is collapsing, why shouldn’t we just hunker down and make our lifeboats and protect our own, and basically take care of our own precious little asses?
DJ: I would contrast the narcissism and cowardice of this attitude with that expressed by Henning von Tresckow, one of the members of the German resistance to Hitler in World War II. When the Allies invaded France in 1944, anybody paying any attention at all knew that the Nazis were going to lose: it was just a matter of time. So some members of the resistance suggested that they stop working to take down the Nazis, and instead just protect themselves until the war was over, basically hunker down and make their lifeboats and protect their own. Henning von Tresckow responded that every day the Nazis were killing 16,000 innocent civilians, so basically every day sooner they could bring down the Nazis would save 16,000 innocent civilians.
There is more courage and wisdom and integrity in that statement than in all the statements of all the craven lifeboatists put together.
Between 150 and 200 species went extinct today. They were my brothers and sisters. It is not sufficient to merely hunker down and wait for the horrors to stop. Salmon won’t survive that long. Sturgeon won’t survive that long. Delta smelt won’t survive that long.
Here’s another way to say all this. I would contrast the narcissism and cowardice of the lifeboatists with the attitude expressed by my dear friend, and the person who really got me started in environmentalism, John Osborn. He has devoted his life to saving as much of the wild as he can, through organized political resistance. When asked why he does this work, he always says, “We cannot predict the future. But as things become increasingly chaotic, I want to make sure that some doors remain open.” What he means by that is that if grizzly bears are around in 30 years they may be around in fifty. If they are gone in 30 they are gone forever. If he can keep this or that valley of old growth standing, it may be standing in 50 years. If it’s gone now, it will be gone for a long, long time, maybe forever.
As you said, Mickey Z, we are living at a time when we have perhaps more leverage than at many previous times. Any destructive activity we can halt now may protect that area until the collapse: people couldn’t realistically say that in the 1920s. I believe it was David Brower who said that every environmental victory was temporary while every loss was permanent. I think we are quickly reaching the point where every victory can be permanent.
One final thing: the single most effective recruiting tool for the French Resistance in WWII was D-Day, because the French realized once and for all that the Germans weren’t invincible. Knowing that this culture is collapsing should not lead us into narcissism and cowardice, but should give us courage, and should lead us to defend the victims of this culture.
See also: Ea O Ka Aina: Ghost Slave's Carrying Capacity 9/8/09 Ea O Ka Aina: Thelma, Louise & Six Degrees 12/12/09
.
Permaculture as a Venture
SUBHEAD: We're into helping people to become responsible and effective Permaculturists. Grow your food. Pay your own way.
By Chuck Burr on 8 November 2010 in SOPI Permaculture -
(http://www.sopermaculture.org/SOPI/Blog/Entries/2010/11/8_Mark_Shepard%E2%80%99s_106_Acre_Permaculture_Farm_in_Viola,_Wisconsin.html)
Image above: Example of animal and plants in permaculture setting. From (http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/design/review7.php).
I recently had the pleasure of visiting Mark Shepard ‘s family permaculture farm in Viola, Wisconsin. Mark has planted an estimated 250,000 trees over the last 15 years on his 106 acre farm. Forest Agriculture Enterprises is known for its hazelnut, chestnut, butternut, nut pine and apple produce, scion-wood and value added products.
Mark has a lot of wisdom on not only farm operation but also community and staff and intern economics. The coulee district of south western Wisconsin is a beautiful rolling hill country. Mark has planted his trees and market garden patches on contour to retain water and to heal the land—the only exception is the hazelnut maze.
Mark follows the keyline technique and has made a vast network of small pocket ponds and spreader swales to slow and spread rain water and to heal gully erosion. His application of contour planting on the rolling coulee hillsides has a sublimely pleasing visual effect. Trees are planted in a much higher density than a typical Oregon or California orchard. “It's primarily for Luther Burbank style mass selection breeding If you're going to plant seedlings and if you're going to discover and sell new varieties, you've got to de-select a lot of material. Planting at low densities is like playing Yahtzee with only 3 dice, you can't do it. I like to play Yahtzee with a thousand dice!”
Propagation and Permaculture Business Model
Regarding propagation, Mark offered, “Most seeds are planted in a nursery bed, then transplanted one year later. Some seed, oak, butternut, black walnut, hickories is direct seeded. No pots. Pots represent too much embodied energy and are too much work to produce an inferior plant. For large lots of seed, korean pines, chestnuts and hazelnuts, I searched around to find somebody already in the nursery business who was really good at producing outstanding plants Whitewater Nursery, in Iowa. Once I found the person/people we entered into a long-term contract. The cost-per-tree works out quite well for both myself and the nurseryman. He doesn't have to buy the seed, I supply it, and he still gets his full wholesale price.
We both get a better deal. I only get screwed when I don't sell all of them, because I owe him per-tree whether I sell them all or not. You seem to be asking questions from the typical, western-materialist-reductionist point of view. We work from the other side of the equation. When it comes to plants, we don't ask what it will cost to plant a million trees. We ask how much we'll earn from planting a million trees. Remember, the problem is the solution line?
Well it's true, but I've re-worded it, Problem is the word Profit spelled incorrectly. For every tree that I've planted I've earned at least a dollar. Do the math. It works out much better than costs do.” Look around, how does the current economic system work? Now design a Permaculture business in order to fit into it, then get yer arse in gear! Like all of my many ventures, there is no one enterprise that is able to pay all the bills all by itself. Every venture that we do is small.
I don't have the job skills, tools or education to earn $100,000.00 and $100,000.00 seems like a big scary number to me. But I can a dollar. I can sell a dozen trees. I can sell a couple of sticks, some cut flowers, some asparagus, some mushrooms, some salad greens, do a couple tours, speak at a conference or two, teach a course, grow some peppers, sell some nuts, make some cider, sell some pigs and some beef, sell some firewood, etc.. and it all adds up. No one thing does it.
They all are key. Photo of Daniel with Swineziss and Cowie. A Permaculture Farm ideally has a polyculture of plants, animals and activities occurring on it. In a polyculture system there's always something that can be grown, made or exchanged in order to acquire dollars and pay the bills. Once you start looking at Permaculture as a profitable venture, you start seeing all of the opportunity.”
Forest Agriculture Enterprises
In a nutshell, pun intended, Mark’s approach to growing the farm nursery stock has been one of early extensive variety trials and then broad scale planting. This vision has matured into an edible woody crops nursery Forest Agriculture Enterprises. Mark’s mission is to “help people and organizations to do something positive and real to change the world.
One way to do this is to plant trees. Not just any trees, however, but trees that produce food, medicines, fuels and fiber. And not just trees!, but shrubs, vines, canes…in fact, entire ecosystems!” When Mark started there were no best, cold hardy hazelnut, chestnut or nut pine varieties for Wisconsin.
For example, Mark tried over 200 varieties of Apples to find out what grows best on his land. When it came to nut pines, Korean nut pines succeeded where Italian and Pinon varieties failed. When he found a variety or tree the succeeded, he propagated that out primarily by seed.
Most of the early yields have gone back to propagation and not market nut sales. This has been the key to producing the high volume of trees. Today Mark sells nuts and scion-wood to other farmers.
Making a Real Difference with Permaculture
“One person making a real change in the real world is worth a thousand virtual feel-gooders. You've got to learn how this economic system works in the same way that you learned how gravity works when you were little. When it comes to gravity, some people choose to walk or run only. Other people learn a little bit more about how gravity works. They then build planes and they fly. Permaculturists have got to get out of the poverty mindset and begin to fly. This planet needs us to succeed.
Zero equals zero is where we started economically umpteen years ago. In fact we actually started off in the negative. With no money, a fair amount of debt, no jobs, no prospects for employment, but with the observational perspective that Permaculture turned me on to, we were able to buy 100 plus acres of land, build our own home, plant zillions of trees, raise a family of pretty smart and talented kids, eat awesome food, and live a good life. Every ‘problem’ really is an opportunity!
We really are surrounded by nearly insurmountable opportunity. If you're looking at how daunting a task is, you're looking at the wrong side of the equation and you will find the things that will limit you and prevent you from succeeding. Put roots in the ground. Grow your food. Build your shelter. Create a Permaculture enterprise and provide real Permaculture goods and services, then link up with others that are doing complimentary things. This is the way we will create a new culture and economy.”
Permaculture Economics
I asked Mark about his farm economics three, five and 10 years from the beginning. “When designed properly, a conversion to a Permaculture farm need not lower the net income to the farmer. If done really well, it actually means an increase in income. Annuals play a more significant role in the early years than later on. Once upon a time I did 16 Acres of annual produce, now I can do zero and still make ends meet.
A very real statistic that in my opinion must be shared with prospective farmers and market gardeners, is that according to USDA Agricultural census data and corroborated by my experience in meeting with hundreds, maybe thousands by now, of farmers throughout the years, is that there are only 11 counties in the USA where the revenues from Agriculture exceed expenses. They boil down to 10 confinement livestock operations and Yuma county AZ where they grow produce on the Mexican border.
So, if virtually nobody is making any money farming, then why should you hold yourself up to such a high standard? The key is to figure out how to stay on the farm and pay the bills. Also from USDA agricultural statistics 80 percent of all farmers obtain the majority of their income off-farm. The economics that describe agriculture don't work. Many atypical farmers and especially organic farmers claim to be quite profitable but many of them are not sharing their data and have special circumstances.
Many folks inherited property or brought big piles of cash from previous jobs and investments. Far too many operations, especially CSA's and Organic farms, rely on the modern equivalent of slavery and that is interns. I even know of operations that charge interns to work for them! So, from day one the farm has been profitable. It has not paid all the bills.
My income is derived from farm products, edible tree and shrub sales, speaking and consulting and brokering products for other farmers. My wife is a massage therapist, which is essential. No single enterprise that we have going on, is able to carry the whole economic load. The system, does. All of the things working together; we designed it that way.
A Permaculture understanding of business entities and how the tax system works is an essential part of our economy. Realistic numbers? With no savings, no inheritance from Mommy and Daddy, with no jobs at first, we bought and are paying for everything you see here. Any student in any Permaculture course that you teach, can go out and within 18 months buy land and establish a profitable Permaculture paradise. The skills they need to do that, however aren't taught in the Permaculture Design Course (PDC) curriculum.”
Permaculture Marketing
“Anything and everything is for sale. There are nearly seven billion people on this planet. With these many people, niche markets end up being huge. You've got to actually have something to sell if you want to sell it. The advise from Extension and Universities that you should have your products sold before you put seed in the ground is somewhat misguided. Have a plan perhaps, but you've got to have something in order to sell it. When you grow or make something make sure you have enough of it. A big problem in polyculture enterprises is the fact that you don't necessarily have the economies of scale that a monoculture would allow.
Don't be afraid to do a lot of something. The Permaculture principle of Use small and slow solutions has been twisted by too many people to mean that Permaculture has to be small. Small-scale Permaculture systems are exactly what's needed in an urban-suburban setting as ones home turf. For an enterprise to have enough cash to sustain itself in this economy, however it has to be bigger. You can't pay your mortgage on a dozen hazelnut bushes. Most importantly though, what is it that you're trying to create? Observe the system conditions around you. View the world through your Observations, not your concepts.
Mimic what is effortlessly successful. Create your Permaculture Vision. Ignore your excuses as to why you can't or aren't and just figure out how. Not doing it serves no one. Do it! Hold your head up honorably. Act fearless!”
Land Access
“If John Q Pubic views reality through the concepts of ‘land is so expensive, and ,young people can't access land, guess what he discovers? He's right! If you're looking at how incredible a Permaculture paradise will be and if you're looking for opportunity, guess what? You'll find it!” I asked Mark,
Enterprising Interns
I asked Mark about his model for staff and interns. As usual, he had some pretty sage and innovative advice. “Our model is, that you are a collaborating enterpriser. As such, you learn how to do [something] by actually doing it. Your pay depends on your success. It is a model of the real world that businesses and farmers face every day. You have your enterprise going on at this location and I have mine. We design our enterprises to be mutually supportive. When we do business-to-business transactions it's done at current market rates. We are real businesses. We produce real goods and provide real services. We exist within the current economy while we create the productive systems of the future. The model is, that what you would call “interns” start their own businesses and earn whatever they can.
They are self-supporting entrepreneurs. We help them get their biz started, then get out of their way. Eight out of 12 of our past summer folk have gone on to create their own Permaculture ventures. We collaborate however we can, to create synergies between the businesses. We don't have staff interns. We have independent, collaborative relationships with individuals who freely choose to associate.
By current market rates, I mean what comparable services would cost if we were to pay for it by hiring somebody else. Let me give you an example here. Brad's Biz LLC doesn't own a tractor or equipment. He wants his fields tilled. He hires somebody to do that for him. He can hire New Forest Farms LLC or any other custom hire company that he wants to. I want some help planting trees, so I hire a custom tree planting company to put them in the ground. It could be Brad's Biz, Larry's Labor, or any other custom tree planting service out there.
By structuring things this way, a collaborator develops actual business management skills, they learn their way within the tax code, they develop a good credit rating, they learn how to write and read business contracts, offers to purchase real estate, they learn about how to Permaculturally stack various different business entities for optimum yield, they learn how to borrow and spend responsibly in the real world.
You can be a volunteer, an intern or an employee on a farm or in a Permaculture business forever and still not learn the skills needed for you do be a successful, independent Permaculture enterprise. All you’ll ever learn is how to weed the radishes or shovel compost. They don’t teach you that the real way a farming venture works is the ‘behind the scenes’ business management skills. We have no staff interns and therefore we pay no staff interns.
If a person wants shelter, they are responsible for it. The biggest lesson that most Americans need to learn, is how to take something from the virtual realm of thoughts and ideas, then bridge the chasm between intellect and the will. If I help people to learn one thing, it is to do just that. Start with the idea, then make it real. If it doesn't turn out the way you thought it would, accept that feedback, re-think and re-do. There are no mistakes, there’s only feedback.
Life and Permaculture are not spectator sports. And besides, If you don't make the bridge from thinking to action, there are places for you in somebody else's drama where you act and create their thoughts. You get the crumbs. The best way to learn how to build is to do it. Reading, blogging and going to workshops are fun and all that, but out here on planet earth, you build a shelter, or experience the consequences.
How you get that shelter is up to you. You learn through actual feedback of hot, cold, wet and dry if you've done things well. You get to live and directly experience the results of your efforts. Supplying slaves with free shelter is not what we're all about. We're into helping people to become responsible and effective Permaculturists. Grow your food. Pay your own way. Build your own shelter. Produce real goods and services for others. Isn't that part of what Permaculture is all about? Aren't we individually and collectively setting out to create a new culture?
A new biologically intact environment with new, socially just relationships? Earth Care, People Care, Equitable Share are not merely platitudes, they're the foundation of what we're all about. We live on planet earth. Planet earth works in certain ways. Observe how planet earth works, design a system to work within the system conditions of planet earth while creating Permaculture paradise. Blogging all day or sitting around bitching about all the things that suck in the world is not earth care. Providing comfy, crash-pads for lazy, virtual humans is not People care.
Giving somebody paper dollars when they do my bidding is not equitable share. Teaching people how to actually ‘for real’ apply Permaculture design on the actual planet and grow their own food, fuel, medicines and fibers in perennial, ecological systems, is earth care. Teaching people how to pay their own bills by starting their own businesses that provide goods and services to others while creating Permaculture Paradise is people care. Teaching people how to create their own abundance and pay their own way, puts them in the situation where they decide how their resources are used, gives them control of their own equity.”
Community and Living Permaculture
Mark collaborates with farmers helping them make the transition to Permaculture through workshops and one-on-one consulting. Even neighboring Amish farmers come to Mark to exchange ideas about sustainable farming practices.
When you talk to Mark you get a full explanation, wisdom and philosophy. I asked Mark, “are you trying to build community in the farm as well?” “Building anything is work. If you have to build community into a project, it's not a self-organizing organic organism and therefore is modeled after the hierarchical, paternalistic, pluto and kleptocratic socioeconomic system from which we are emerging.
We have a steady stream of casual visitors, refugees escaping from the collapsing empire, organized tours, alumni, close friends as well as customers. We don't have to build anything. It is what it is. We have an actual community. Several, in fact. We don’t attempt to force reality to conform to our personally held concepts of what a community should be, We accept it for what it is. Those who are not attracted to interacting as sovereign enterprising individuals and would rather be a part of a contrived community or would rather enter into a hierarchical, bossman-slave relationship, don't fit in here and they select themselves out.
I'm appalled at the percentage of people who come by here who have no idea how to self-start, how to work toward a goal that they choose and to keep at it with nobody looking over their shoulder and how to make the effort to actually take care of themselves. When your food and shelter depends on you actually getting it, growing it or building it, you go hungry in a hurry and leave. or, you finally get it your life is changed forever! One of our semi-regular visitors once came up to me and said ‘Hey, I thought you told me this was an all you can eat farm? What do you got me on, the Ethiopian diet?’ I said, ‘Eat whatever you want. food is all over the place everywhere.’ ‘But I don't want to pick food,’ he said ‘I just want to eat it!’ He sums up a huge demographic in this country and even within Permaculture circles.
Ninety percent of certified permaculture designers that I have encountered are not doing it. They're playing at the edges and fooling themselves. They're not creating a different culture, they're not growing their own food. Like the 55 gallon rain barrel, they deceive themselves by thinking that by toying with inadequately designed rainwater collection systems, that they have obtained absolution and don't have to really strive to create PermaCulture.
‘I don't want to pick my food. I just want to eat it.’
Thirty five thousand gallons of rain falls off my roof but I want to hold fast to the cute idea that a little 55 gallon barrel will hold it all and I can feel like I've saved the world. That’s simply poor design and living through your concepts rather than your observations. This farm is a part of our local community, like I said, several local communities. We're members of several co-ops and collaborative ventures, we're part of the real world.”
.
By Chuck Burr on 8 November 2010 in SOPI Permaculture -
(http://www.sopermaculture.org/SOPI/Blog/Entries/2010/11/8_Mark_Shepard%E2%80%99s_106_Acre_Permaculture_Farm_in_Viola,_Wisconsin.html)
Image above: Example of animal and plants in permaculture setting. From (http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/design/review7.php).
I recently had the pleasure of visiting Mark Shepard ‘s family permaculture farm in Viola, Wisconsin. Mark has planted an estimated 250,000 trees over the last 15 years on his 106 acre farm. Forest Agriculture Enterprises is known for its hazelnut, chestnut, butternut, nut pine and apple produce, scion-wood and value added products.
Mark has a lot of wisdom on not only farm operation but also community and staff and intern economics. The coulee district of south western Wisconsin is a beautiful rolling hill country. Mark has planted his trees and market garden patches on contour to retain water and to heal the land—the only exception is the hazelnut maze.
Mark follows the keyline technique and has made a vast network of small pocket ponds and spreader swales to slow and spread rain water and to heal gully erosion. His application of contour planting on the rolling coulee hillsides has a sublimely pleasing visual effect. Trees are planted in a much higher density than a typical Oregon or California orchard. “It's primarily for Luther Burbank style mass selection breeding If you're going to plant seedlings and if you're going to discover and sell new varieties, you've got to de-select a lot of material. Planting at low densities is like playing Yahtzee with only 3 dice, you can't do it. I like to play Yahtzee with a thousand dice!”
Propagation and Permaculture Business Model
Regarding propagation, Mark offered, “Most seeds are planted in a nursery bed, then transplanted one year later. Some seed, oak, butternut, black walnut, hickories is direct seeded. No pots. Pots represent too much embodied energy and are too much work to produce an inferior plant. For large lots of seed, korean pines, chestnuts and hazelnuts, I searched around to find somebody already in the nursery business who was really good at producing outstanding plants Whitewater Nursery, in Iowa. Once I found the person/people we entered into a long-term contract. The cost-per-tree works out quite well for both myself and the nurseryman. He doesn't have to buy the seed, I supply it, and he still gets his full wholesale price.
We both get a better deal. I only get screwed when I don't sell all of them, because I owe him per-tree whether I sell them all or not. You seem to be asking questions from the typical, western-materialist-reductionist point of view. We work from the other side of the equation. When it comes to plants, we don't ask what it will cost to plant a million trees. We ask how much we'll earn from planting a million trees. Remember, the problem is the solution line?
Well it's true, but I've re-worded it, Problem is the word Profit spelled incorrectly. For every tree that I've planted I've earned at least a dollar. Do the math. It works out much better than costs do.” Look around, how does the current economic system work? Now design a Permaculture business in order to fit into it, then get yer arse in gear! Like all of my many ventures, there is no one enterprise that is able to pay all the bills all by itself. Every venture that we do is small.
I don't have the job skills, tools or education to earn $100,000.00 and $100,000.00 seems like a big scary number to me. But I can a dollar. I can sell a dozen trees. I can sell a couple of sticks, some cut flowers, some asparagus, some mushrooms, some salad greens, do a couple tours, speak at a conference or two, teach a course, grow some peppers, sell some nuts, make some cider, sell some pigs and some beef, sell some firewood, etc.. and it all adds up. No one thing does it.
They all are key. Photo of Daniel with Swineziss and Cowie. A Permaculture Farm ideally has a polyculture of plants, animals and activities occurring on it. In a polyculture system there's always something that can be grown, made or exchanged in order to acquire dollars and pay the bills. Once you start looking at Permaculture as a profitable venture, you start seeing all of the opportunity.”
Forest Agriculture Enterprises
In a nutshell, pun intended, Mark’s approach to growing the farm nursery stock has been one of early extensive variety trials and then broad scale planting. This vision has matured into an edible woody crops nursery Forest Agriculture Enterprises. Mark’s mission is to “help people and organizations to do something positive and real to change the world.
One way to do this is to plant trees. Not just any trees, however, but trees that produce food, medicines, fuels and fiber. And not just trees!, but shrubs, vines, canes…in fact, entire ecosystems!” When Mark started there were no best, cold hardy hazelnut, chestnut or nut pine varieties for Wisconsin.
For example, Mark tried over 200 varieties of Apples to find out what grows best on his land. When it came to nut pines, Korean nut pines succeeded where Italian and Pinon varieties failed. When he found a variety or tree the succeeded, he propagated that out primarily by seed.
Most of the early yields have gone back to propagation and not market nut sales. This has been the key to producing the high volume of trees. Today Mark sells nuts and scion-wood to other farmers.
Making a Real Difference with Permaculture
“One person making a real change in the real world is worth a thousand virtual feel-gooders. You've got to learn how this economic system works in the same way that you learned how gravity works when you were little. When it comes to gravity, some people choose to walk or run only. Other people learn a little bit more about how gravity works. They then build planes and they fly. Permaculturists have got to get out of the poverty mindset and begin to fly. This planet needs us to succeed.
Zero equals zero is where we started economically umpteen years ago. In fact we actually started off in the negative. With no money, a fair amount of debt, no jobs, no prospects for employment, but with the observational perspective that Permaculture turned me on to, we were able to buy 100 plus acres of land, build our own home, plant zillions of trees, raise a family of pretty smart and talented kids, eat awesome food, and live a good life. Every ‘problem’ really is an opportunity!
We really are surrounded by nearly insurmountable opportunity. If you're looking at how daunting a task is, you're looking at the wrong side of the equation and you will find the things that will limit you and prevent you from succeeding. Put roots in the ground. Grow your food. Build your shelter. Create a Permaculture enterprise and provide real Permaculture goods and services, then link up with others that are doing complimentary things. This is the way we will create a new culture and economy.”
Permaculture Economics
I asked Mark about his farm economics three, five and 10 years from the beginning. “When designed properly, a conversion to a Permaculture farm need not lower the net income to the farmer. If done really well, it actually means an increase in income. Annuals play a more significant role in the early years than later on. Once upon a time I did 16 Acres of annual produce, now I can do zero and still make ends meet.
A very real statistic that in my opinion must be shared with prospective farmers and market gardeners, is that according to USDA Agricultural census data and corroborated by my experience in meeting with hundreds, maybe thousands by now, of farmers throughout the years, is that there are only 11 counties in the USA where the revenues from Agriculture exceed expenses. They boil down to 10 confinement livestock operations and Yuma county AZ where they grow produce on the Mexican border.
So, if virtually nobody is making any money farming, then why should you hold yourself up to such a high standard? The key is to figure out how to stay on the farm and pay the bills. Also from USDA agricultural statistics 80 percent of all farmers obtain the majority of their income off-farm. The economics that describe agriculture don't work. Many atypical farmers and especially organic farmers claim to be quite profitable but many of them are not sharing their data and have special circumstances.
Many folks inherited property or brought big piles of cash from previous jobs and investments. Far too many operations, especially CSA's and Organic farms, rely on the modern equivalent of slavery and that is interns. I even know of operations that charge interns to work for them! So, from day one the farm has been profitable. It has not paid all the bills.
My income is derived from farm products, edible tree and shrub sales, speaking and consulting and brokering products for other farmers. My wife is a massage therapist, which is essential. No single enterprise that we have going on, is able to carry the whole economic load. The system, does. All of the things working together; we designed it that way.
A Permaculture understanding of business entities and how the tax system works is an essential part of our economy. Realistic numbers? With no savings, no inheritance from Mommy and Daddy, with no jobs at first, we bought and are paying for everything you see here. Any student in any Permaculture course that you teach, can go out and within 18 months buy land and establish a profitable Permaculture paradise. The skills they need to do that, however aren't taught in the Permaculture Design Course (PDC) curriculum.”
Permaculture Marketing
“Anything and everything is for sale. There are nearly seven billion people on this planet. With these many people, niche markets end up being huge. You've got to actually have something to sell if you want to sell it. The advise from Extension and Universities that you should have your products sold before you put seed in the ground is somewhat misguided. Have a plan perhaps, but you've got to have something in order to sell it. When you grow or make something make sure you have enough of it. A big problem in polyculture enterprises is the fact that you don't necessarily have the economies of scale that a monoculture would allow.
Don't be afraid to do a lot of something. The Permaculture principle of Use small and slow solutions has been twisted by too many people to mean that Permaculture has to be small. Small-scale Permaculture systems are exactly what's needed in an urban-suburban setting as ones home turf. For an enterprise to have enough cash to sustain itself in this economy, however it has to be bigger. You can't pay your mortgage on a dozen hazelnut bushes. Most importantly though, what is it that you're trying to create? Observe the system conditions around you. View the world through your Observations, not your concepts.
Mimic what is effortlessly successful. Create your Permaculture Vision. Ignore your excuses as to why you can't or aren't and just figure out how. Not doing it serves no one. Do it! Hold your head up honorably. Act fearless!”
Land Access
“If John Q Pubic views reality through the concepts of ‘land is so expensive, and ,young people can't access land, guess what he discovers? He's right! If you're looking at how incredible a Permaculture paradise will be and if you're looking for opportunity, guess what? You'll find it!” I asked Mark,
“One of the most frequent things I hear from people is that they want to get landed to start their homestead, organic farm, etc. I would be interested in your advice to a young person or couple on gaining land access.”Mark answered,
“This can be done anywhere in the country in less than one year. The systems are in place. Anyone who doesn't believe so is either unaware of the systems in place or is unwilling to ‘play the game’ as it is currently rigged. If people really want land and really want to get into agriculture especially Permaculture designed agriculture, financing is available.
It is how the current economic system works. Learn how to manage your numbers. Set up your IRS Schedule F farm business yesterday! Build your credit rating, learn how to ‘exercise’ your credit, then borrow the money and buy a farm [FSA loans, bank loans, private investors, socially responsible lending funds].
Most young people that I know of who claim that they ‘wish’ they could buy a farm only want to exist within the life of their dreams. They don't want to undertake the realities of making that dream real. (i.e. long hours of physical labor, low pay, managing “the numbers”, being hot, cold, wet, tired) Land is accessible.The current economic system has a process in place to access it.
Observe. What are the system conditions? learn them! Learn how to access the financing, buy the land, then figure out how to keep it! Design your permaculture paradise to fit into the scheme of things. Accept feedback & redesign. Keep on keeping on.”
Enterprising Interns
I asked Mark about his model for staff and interns. As usual, he had some pretty sage and innovative advice. “Our model is, that you are a collaborating enterpriser. As such, you learn how to do [something] by actually doing it. Your pay depends on your success. It is a model of the real world that businesses and farmers face every day. You have your enterprise going on at this location and I have mine. We design our enterprises to be mutually supportive. When we do business-to-business transactions it's done at current market rates. We are real businesses. We produce real goods and provide real services. We exist within the current economy while we create the productive systems of the future. The model is, that what you would call “interns” start their own businesses and earn whatever they can.
They are self-supporting entrepreneurs. We help them get their biz started, then get out of their way. Eight out of 12 of our past summer folk have gone on to create their own Permaculture ventures. We collaborate however we can, to create synergies between the businesses. We don't have staff interns. We have independent, collaborative relationships with individuals who freely choose to associate.
By current market rates, I mean what comparable services would cost if we were to pay for it by hiring somebody else. Let me give you an example here. Brad's Biz LLC doesn't own a tractor or equipment. He wants his fields tilled. He hires somebody to do that for him. He can hire New Forest Farms LLC or any other custom hire company that he wants to. I want some help planting trees, so I hire a custom tree planting company to put them in the ground. It could be Brad's Biz, Larry's Labor, or any other custom tree planting service out there.
By structuring things this way, a collaborator develops actual business management skills, they learn their way within the tax code, they develop a good credit rating, they learn how to write and read business contracts, offers to purchase real estate, they learn about how to Permaculturally stack various different business entities for optimum yield, they learn how to borrow and spend responsibly in the real world.
You can be a volunteer, an intern or an employee on a farm or in a Permaculture business forever and still not learn the skills needed for you do be a successful, independent Permaculture enterprise. All you’ll ever learn is how to weed the radishes or shovel compost. They don’t teach you that the real way a farming venture works is the ‘behind the scenes’ business management skills. We have no staff interns and therefore we pay no staff interns.
If a person wants shelter, they are responsible for it. The biggest lesson that most Americans need to learn, is how to take something from the virtual realm of thoughts and ideas, then bridge the chasm between intellect and the will. If I help people to learn one thing, it is to do just that. Start with the idea, then make it real. If it doesn't turn out the way you thought it would, accept that feedback, re-think and re-do. There are no mistakes, there’s only feedback.
Life and Permaculture are not spectator sports. And besides, If you don't make the bridge from thinking to action, there are places for you in somebody else's drama where you act and create their thoughts. You get the crumbs. The best way to learn how to build is to do it. Reading, blogging and going to workshops are fun and all that, but out here on planet earth, you build a shelter, or experience the consequences.
How you get that shelter is up to you. You learn through actual feedback of hot, cold, wet and dry if you've done things well. You get to live and directly experience the results of your efforts. Supplying slaves with free shelter is not what we're all about. We're into helping people to become responsible and effective Permaculturists. Grow your food. Pay your own way. Build your own shelter. Produce real goods and services for others. Isn't that part of what Permaculture is all about? Aren't we individually and collectively setting out to create a new culture?
A new biologically intact environment with new, socially just relationships? Earth Care, People Care, Equitable Share are not merely platitudes, they're the foundation of what we're all about. We live on planet earth. Planet earth works in certain ways. Observe how planet earth works, design a system to work within the system conditions of planet earth while creating Permaculture paradise. Blogging all day or sitting around bitching about all the things that suck in the world is not earth care. Providing comfy, crash-pads for lazy, virtual humans is not People care.
Giving somebody paper dollars when they do my bidding is not equitable share. Teaching people how to actually ‘for real’ apply Permaculture design on the actual planet and grow their own food, fuel, medicines and fibers in perennial, ecological systems, is earth care. Teaching people how to pay their own bills by starting their own businesses that provide goods and services to others while creating Permaculture Paradise is people care. Teaching people how to create their own abundance and pay their own way, puts them in the situation where they decide how their resources are used, gives them control of their own equity.”
Community and Living Permaculture
Mark collaborates with farmers helping them make the transition to Permaculture through workshops and one-on-one consulting. Even neighboring Amish farmers come to Mark to exchange ideas about sustainable farming practices.
When you talk to Mark you get a full explanation, wisdom and philosophy. I asked Mark, “are you trying to build community in the farm as well?” “Building anything is work. If you have to build community into a project, it's not a self-organizing organic organism and therefore is modeled after the hierarchical, paternalistic, pluto and kleptocratic socioeconomic system from which we are emerging.
We have a steady stream of casual visitors, refugees escaping from the collapsing empire, organized tours, alumni, close friends as well as customers. We don't have to build anything. It is what it is. We have an actual community. Several, in fact. We don’t attempt to force reality to conform to our personally held concepts of what a community should be, We accept it for what it is. Those who are not attracted to interacting as sovereign enterprising individuals and would rather be a part of a contrived community or would rather enter into a hierarchical, bossman-slave relationship, don't fit in here and they select themselves out.
I'm appalled at the percentage of people who come by here who have no idea how to self-start, how to work toward a goal that they choose and to keep at it with nobody looking over their shoulder and how to make the effort to actually take care of themselves. When your food and shelter depends on you actually getting it, growing it or building it, you go hungry in a hurry and leave. or, you finally get it your life is changed forever! One of our semi-regular visitors once came up to me and said ‘Hey, I thought you told me this was an all you can eat farm? What do you got me on, the Ethiopian diet?’ I said, ‘Eat whatever you want. food is all over the place everywhere.’ ‘But I don't want to pick food,’ he said ‘I just want to eat it!’ He sums up a huge demographic in this country and even within Permaculture circles.
Ninety percent of certified permaculture designers that I have encountered are not doing it. They're playing at the edges and fooling themselves. They're not creating a different culture, they're not growing their own food. Like the 55 gallon rain barrel, they deceive themselves by thinking that by toying with inadequately designed rainwater collection systems, that they have obtained absolution and don't have to really strive to create PermaCulture.
‘I don't want to pick my food. I just want to eat it.’
Thirty five thousand gallons of rain falls off my roof but I want to hold fast to the cute idea that a little 55 gallon barrel will hold it all and I can feel like I've saved the world. That’s simply poor design and living through your concepts rather than your observations. This farm is a part of our local community, like I said, several local communities. We're members of several co-ops and collaborative ventures, we're part of the real world.”
.
What's Happening in Egypt?
SUBHEAD: Egyptians citizens denounce President Hosni Mubarak, and clash with riot police.
By Maggie Michael on 25 January 2011 for Yahoo News -
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110125/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_egypt_protest)
Image above: Anti-Mubarak protesters in Egypt tearing down poster of Hosni Mubarak. From original article.
An Egyptian Interior Ministry official says two protesters and one policeman have been killed in the anti-government demonstrations in Cairo and several other cities.
Image above: Anti-Mubarak protesters in Egypt tearing down poster of Hosni Mubarak. From original article.
An Egyptian Interior Ministry official says two protesters and one policeman have been killed in the anti-government demonstrations in Cairo and several other cities.
The two protesters were killed during a demonstration in the city of Suez. The official says one of them had respiratory problems and died as a result of tear gas inhalation. The other was killed by a rock thrown during the protest.
The policeman died during the protest in Cairo. The official says he was hit in the head by a rock.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release information to journalists.
Video above: Cairo on 25 January 2011. Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtTUsqra-MU
Thousands of anti-government protesters, some hurling rocks and climbing atop an armored police truck, clashed with riot police Tuesday in the center of Cairo in a Tunisia-inspired demonstration to demand the end of Hosni Mubarak's nearly 30 years in power.
Police responded with blasts from water cannons and set upon crowds with batons and acrid clouds of tear gas to clear demonstrators crying out "Down with Mubarak" and demanding an end to Egypt's grinding poverty, corruption, unemployment and police abuses.
Tuesday's demonstration, the largest Egypt has seen for years, began peacefully, with police showing unusual restraint in what appeared to be a calculated strategy by the government to avoid further sullying the image of a security apparatus widely criticized as corrupt and violent.
With discontent growing over economic woes, and the toppling of Tunisia's president still resonating in the region, Egypt's government — which normally responds with swift retribution to any dissent — needed to tread carefully.
But as crowds filled downtown Cairo's Tahrir Square — waving Egyptian and Tunisian flags and adopting the same protest chants that rang out in the streets of Tunis — security personnel changed tactics and the protest turned violent. Around 10,000 protesters packed the vast square, the Interior Ministry said.
The sight of officers beating demonstrators had particular resonance because Tuesday was also a national holiday honoring the much-feared police.
In Egypt, discontent with life in the autocratic, police state has simmered under the surface for years. It is the example of Tunisia, though, that appeared to be enough to push many young Egyptians into the streets for the first time.
"This is the first time I am protesting, but we have been a cowardly nation. We have to finally say no," said 24-year-old Ismail Syed, a hotel worker who struggles to live on a salary of $50 a month.
Demonstrators attacked a water cannon truck, opening the driver's door and ordering the man out of the vehicle. Some hurled rocks and dragged metal barricades. Officers beat back protesters with batons as they tried to break cordons to join the main group of demonstrators downtown.
Protesters emerged stumbling from white clouds of tear gas, coughing and covering their faces with scarves.
Some had blood streaming down their faces. One man fainted. Police dragged some away and beat a journalist, smashing her glasses and seizing her camera.
Crowds also marched to the headquarters of Mubarak's National Democratic Party, shouting, "Here are the thieves."
After remaining silent throughout the day, Egypt's government on Tuesday night called for an end to the protests. The Interior Ministry, which controls the security forces, said authorities wanted to allow the protesters the chance to express their opinions and accused the crowds of "insisting on provocation."
"Some threw rocks at police ... and others carried out acts of rioting and damage to state institutions," it said.
In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Egypt's government, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, is stable despite the outpouring. Clinton said Egyptians have the right to protest, but urged all parties to avoid violence.
At one point Tuesday, the protesters seemed to gain the upper hand, forcing a line of riot police to flee under a barrage of rocks. One demonstrator climbed into a fire engine and drove it away.
"I want my 3-year-old child to grow up with dignity and to find a job just like the president," said 50-year-old Eid Attallah, who works as a driver.
He said he had heard about the planned protests from friends but didn't expect them to be so big.
Many expressed similar surprise.
"We are fed up; this is just enough," said Sayid Abdelfatah, a 38-year-old civil servant who marched with an Egyptian flag. "Tunisia's revolution inspired me but I really never thought we would find such people ready to do the same here."
Video above: Cairo on 25 January 2011. Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KB1Oa-kSPk
During a lull in the clashes, lines of protesters bowed in unison to perform the sunset prayer as police stood aside. Several thousand remained in the streets after dark, and many promised to stay through the night in the square, steps away from parliament and other government buildings.
Organizers issued demands for Mubarak and his government to resign, for parliament to be dissolved and for a national unity government to be formed.
To the north, in the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, thousands of protesters also marched in what was dubbed a "Day of Rage" against Mubarak and lack of political freedoms under his rule.
Like the Tunisian protests, the calls for the rallies in Egypt went out on Facebook and Twitter, with 90,000 saying they would attend. Organizers used the site to give minute-by-minute instructions on where demonstrators should go in an attempt to out maneuver the police. By late afternoon, access to Twitter appeared to have been blocked.
In another parallel with Tunisia, the protests drew energy in large part from the death of one person: a young Egyptian man named Khaled Said whose family and witnesses say was beaten to death by a pair of policemen in Alexandria last year.
His case has become a rallying point for Egypt's opposition. Two policemen are on trial in connection with his death.
Tunisia's protests were also sparked by the death of one man: a poor Tunisian vegetable vendor who set himself in fire to protest corruption.
Last week, several people in Egypt — and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa — set themselves on fire in apparent attempts to copy his actions.
Mothers carrying babies also marched and chanted, "Revolution until Victory!" while young waved signs reading "OUT!" that were inspired by the Tunisian protestations of "DEGAGE!" Men sprayed graffiti reading "Down with Hosni Mubarak."
"We want to see change just like in Tunisia," said Lamia Rayan, 24, one of the protesters.
Some passers-by dismissed the protests, saying a few thousand of Cairo's 18 million people coming out on the streets was not nearly enough to force change.
"This is all just a waste of time," said Ali Mustafa Ibrahim, who works at a cigarette stand.
"These are a bunch of kids playing cat and mouse. ... It's just going to create more problems and more traffic in the city."
Nearly half of Egypt's 80 million people live under or just above the poverty line set by the United Nations at $2 a day. Poor quality education, health care and high unemployment have left large numbers of Egyptians deprived of basic needs.
• Hadeel Al-Shalchi, Hamza Hendawi and Tarek el-Tablawy in Cairo and Bradley Klapper in Washington contributed to this report.
.
Fuel from Sunlight?
SUBHEAD: Scientists reveal potential of new technology to produce "clean: fuel from sunlight.
By Jake Richardson 20 January 2011 for Care2.com -
(http://www.care2.com/greenliving/clean-fuel-could-be-made-from-sunlight.html)
Image above: Illustration of thermochemical solar powered reactor. From (http://blog.genericase.com/?tag=petrol).
Dr. Sossina Haile and her colleagues at CalTech have created a solar-powered reactor that can produce clean hydrogen gas, methane, or syngas which is a precursor to hydrocarbon fuels. This reactor type is known as thermochemical, because it uses solar power to create heat, and the heating and cooling of a type of metal oxide inside called ceria is the basic process which creates fuel.
Their prototype uses a large quartz window about two feet tall as a magnifying glass to concentrate sunlight into a cavity inside the reactor. Inside the reactor is a cylinder lined with ceria, which is a common material also found in self-cleaning ovens.
When cool, ceria absorbs oxygen, and sheds CO2 and H2O molecules which can be pumped into the reactor to make hydrogen gas for hydrogen fuel cells. It also sheds CO which can be combined with hydrogen gas to make liquid hydrocarbon fuel. Additionally, the process can be tweaked to make methane. These plants in turn generate more CO2, and H2O as byproducts which can be captured and re-used in the their reactor to create more fuel. When it is heated, ceria releases oxygen.
This cycle of “inhaling” and “exhaling” oxygen by raising and lowering its temperature can be repeated over and over in order to make fuel. Also, their thermochemical reactor might be employed at coal-burning power plants to capture their CO2, and use it to make fuel for vehicles. Such an application might be very helpful for the short-term considering the widespread use of coal for producing electricity, in terms of reducing climate change emissions.
However, burning coal also produces air pollution detrimental to people and wildlife. A report from last year said over 13,000 premature deaths per year in the United States have been linked to air pollution from power plants. Acid rain is a direct result of burning fossil fuels in power plants. So for the long-term for both public health and environmental reasons, it may be better to use the thermochemical reactor for creating hydrogen gas to run fuel cells, whether they are in buildings or someday even in vehicles.
Another more environmentally-friendly application might be at solar power plants, where some of the heat generated by concentrated solar technology could be used by her reactor to create fuel, which could then be used to run electrical generators at night, when solar power is not available.
.
By Jake Richardson 20 January 2011 for Care2.com -
(http://www.care2.com/greenliving/clean-fuel-could-be-made-from-sunlight.html)
Image above: Illustration of thermochemical solar powered reactor. From (http://blog.genericase.com/?tag=petrol).
Dr. Sossina Haile and her colleagues at CalTech have created a solar-powered reactor that can produce clean hydrogen gas, methane, or syngas which is a precursor to hydrocarbon fuels. This reactor type is known as thermochemical, because it uses solar power to create heat, and the heating and cooling of a type of metal oxide inside called ceria is the basic process which creates fuel.
Their prototype uses a large quartz window about two feet tall as a magnifying glass to concentrate sunlight into a cavity inside the reactor. Inside the reactor is a cylinder lined with ceria, which is a common material also found in self-cleaning ovens.
When cool, ceria absorbs oxygen, and sheds CO2 and H2O molecules which can be pumped into the reactor to make hydrogen gas for hydrogen fuel cells. It also sheds CO which can be combined with hydrogen gas to make liquid hydrocarbon fuel. Additionally, the process can be tweaked to make methane. These plants in turn generate more CO2, and H2O as byproducts which can be captured and re-used in the their reactor to create more fuel. When it is heated, ceria releases oxygen.
This cycle of “inhaling” and “exhaling” oxygen by raising and lowering its temperature can be repeated over and over in order to make fuel. Also, their thermochemical reactor might be employed at coal-burning power plants to capture their CO2, and use it to make fuel for vehicles. Such an application might be very helpful for the short-term considering the widespread use of coal for producing electricity, in terms of reducing climate change emissions.
However, burning coal also produces air pollution detrimental to people and wildlife. A report from last year said over 13,000 premature deaths per year in the United States have been linked to air pollution from power plants. Acid rain is a direct result of burning fossil fuels in power plants. So for the long-term for both public health and environmental reasons, it may be better to use the thermochemical reactor for creating hydrogen gas to run fuel cells, whether they are in buildings or someday even in vehicles.
Another more environmentally-friendly application might be at solar power plants, where some of the heat generated by concentrated solar technology could be used by her reactor to create fuel, which could then be used to run electrical generators at night, when solar power is not available.
.
WikiLeaks & Manning - Not Connected!
SUBHEAD: Julian Assange has held he had no contact with Bradley Manning prior to reading his name in a magazine.
By staff on 24 January 2011 for Huffington Post - (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/24/bradley-manning-wikileaks-_n_813445.html)
U.S. military investigators have been unable to find a direct link between jailed Army PFC Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks, reports NBC News.
However, the alleged source of the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables did download files illegally maintain military investigators. Reports NBC:
The officials say that while investigators have determined that Manning had allegedly unlawfully downloaded tens of thousands of documents onto his own computer and passed them to an unauthorized person, there is apparently no evidence he passed the files directly to Assange, or had any direct contact with the controversial WikiLeaks figure.
WikiLeaks founder Assange has repeatedly stated that he had no contact with Manning prior to "reading his name in a magazine." WikiLeaks has, however, provided $15,000 towards Manning's legal fees, and Assange has referred to him as a "political prisoner."
Manning has been in the media spotlight recently as stories of his prison conditions have emerged. He is currently being held at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, in solitary confinement. The military has strongly denied that Manning's detention conditions are punitive or "torture," as has been alleged.
2011- Year of Living Dangerously
SUBHEAD: Rising commodity prices and extreme weather events threaten global stability.
By Michael T. Klare on 24 January 2011 in Tom Dispatch -
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175345)
Image above: Hunger and anger - a large crowd waiting to buy cheap priced government rice in Manila in 2010. From (http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/article402262.ece).
Get ready for a rocky year. From now on, rising prices, powerful storms, severe droughts and floods, and other unexpected events are likely to play havoc with the fabric of global society, producing chaos and political unrest. Start with a simple fact: the prices of basic food staples are already approaching or exceeding their 2008 peaks, that year when deadly riots erupted in dozens of countries around the world. It’s not surprising then that food and energy experts are beginning to warn that 2011 could be the year of living dangerously -- and so could 2012, 2013, and on into the future.
Add to the soaring cost of the grains that keep so many impoverished people alive a comparable rise in oil prices -- again nearing levels not seen since the peak months of 2008 -- and you can already hear the first rumblings about the tenuous economic recovery being in danger of imminent collapse.
Think of those rising energy prices as adding further fuel to global discontent. Already, combined with staggering levels of youth unemployment and a deep mistrust of autocratic, repressive governments, food prices have sparked riots in Algeria and mass protests in Tunisia that, to the surprise of the world, ousted long-time dictator President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his corrupt extended family. And many of the social stresses evident in those two countries are present across the Middle East and elsewhere.
No one can predict where the next explosion will occur, but with food prices still climbing and other economic pressures mounting, more upheavals appear inevitable. These may be the first resource revolts to catch our attention, but they won’t be the last Put simply, global consumption patterns are now beginning to challenge the planet’s natural resource limits.
Populations are still on the rise, and from Brazil to India, Turkey to China, new powers are rising as well. With them goes an urge for a more American-style life. Not surprisingly, the demand for basic commodities is significantly on the rise, even as supplies in many instances are shrinking. At the same time, climate change, itself a product of unbridled energy use, is adding to the pressure on supplies, and speculators are betting on a situation trending progressively worse. Add these together and the road ahead appears increasingly rocky.
Breadbaskets without Bread
Let’s begin with food, the most important and volatile of these commodities. Food prices declined in October 2008 after the onset of the global financial crisis, but that seems to have been an anomaly. The December 2010 index of global food prices compiled by the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) hit a record 215, one point higher than in the spring of 2008. (In that index, based on a “bundle” of food staples, a baseline of 100 represents average prices in 2002-2004.)
In fact, some food products, including sugar, cooking oils, and fats, are now trading substantially above their 2008 levels; others, including dairy products, grains, and meat, are inching perilously close to record levels. As 2011 begins, food experts fear that, within months, prices for key staples will climb above the 2008 threshold and stay there, causing extreme hardship for poor people around the world. “We are at a very high level,” said a worried Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist at the FAO. “These levels in the previous episode led to problems and riots across the world.”
Of particular concern to Abbassian and his colleagues is the rising cost of corn, rice, and wheat, the staple crops of billions in many of the poorest countries. According to the FAO, by the end of 2010 international corn and wheat prices were already approaching their 2008 peak levels (about $260 and $340 per metric ton, respectively). Analysts attribute the rise in grain prices to growing demand in both developed and developing nations, along with a number of cataclysmic weather-related events and speculation by investors.
An extreme drought and fierce fires last summer destroyed a large percentage of the wheat crop in Russia and Ukraine, while heavy flooding in India and the inundation of 20% of Pakistan damaged significant parts of the grain output of those countries. At the same time, unusually hot and dry weather suppressed production in a number of other key farming areas. What makes the picture look so worrisome today are indications that the severity and frequency of extreme weather events appear to be on the rise. In the past few weeks alone, several such events point the way to serious supply problems ahead.
Most significant has been the unprecedented rainfall and flooding in Australia that put an area more than twice the size of California largely underwater, significantly disrupting wheat cultivation there. Australia is one of the world’s leading wheat producers. Unusually dry conditions in the American Midwest and Argentina have also hinted at future problems in grain and corn output. It’s still too early to predict the size of this year’s grain and corn harvests, but many analysts are warning of a shortfall in supplies, along with sky-high prices.
Mainstream analysts and government officials are loathe to attribute this traffic jam of extreme weather events to global warming. Huge variations in rainfall can be normal, especially in places like Australia that are susceptible to El Niño/La Niña ocean-temperature oscillations, and politicians are fearful of assuming responsibility for a problem as massive as climate change.
But climate change theory has long suggested that the warming trend -- 2010 tied 2005 for the warmest year on record and nine of the 10 warmest years have come in the last decade -- will be accompanied by an increase in the frequency and severity of storms. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that recent events, including those Australian floods, are tied to rising global temperatures.
The Energy Crisis Returns
Soaring food prices are being driven as well by speculative investments and the rising price of oil. Partly in response to the diminishing value of the dollar, some investors are sinking their money into food futures (along with gold and silver) as a speculative hedge. At the same time, the price of oil is edging toward the $100 mark, making it increasingly profitable for farmers to switch from growing corn for human consumption to growing it for the manufacture of ethanol, which in turn reduces the amount of farm acreage devoted to staples.
Oil would have to fall below $50 per barrel to make the cultivation of corn as a food product competitive with ethanol production -- and that’s not likely to happen. So even if more corn is produced this year, less will be available for food purposes and the price of what remains is bound to rise. The precipitous rise in oil prices has startled the experts.
Not so long ago, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) was projecting a price range of $70-$80 per barrel in 2011, but as the year began oil was already trading above $90 a barrel and some analysts predict that it will reach $100 before the year is out. A few are even talking about the $150 barrel and gas prices at the pump of $4 or more. If prices climb above $100, global consumer spending could take another nosedive. “Oil prices are entering a dangerous zone for the global economy,” says Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency (IEA).
“The oil import bills are becoming a threat to the economic recovery.” As with food, the rising cost of oil is a product of growing demand, insufficient supplies, and speculative investments. According to the most recent projections from the IEA, daily global oil consumption in 2011 will average 87.4 million barrels, an increase of about two million barrels from the first quarter of 2010. Much of the extra demand is coming from China, where a newly-minted middle class is buying automobiles at a record clip, as well as from the United States, where previously cautious consumers are slowly returning to pre-2008 driving habits.
At a time when the oil industry is experiencing declining rates of output at many existing oil fields and finding it ever more difficult to add production, even two million extra barrels per day can be a daunting challenge (and greater demand is expected in the coming years). In the United States, for example, much hope was placed in oil exploration in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and offshore Alaska, but in the wake of the BP disaster, this seems like a forlorn prospect. Production in Mexico and the North Sea, two bright spots of recent years, is facing a sharp decline, while other key producers, including those in the Middle East, are struggling to maintain current output levels at existing fields.
Many energy analysts believe that the world is at (or will soon reach) peak oil -- the moment when global petroleum output achieves a maximum sustainable daily rate and begins a long-term, irreversible decline. Others contend that higher levels of output are still possible. Whatever the truth of the matter, at this moment the oil industry is finding it increasingly difficult, and ever more costly, to boost output above current levels.
This, combined with insatiable demand, is driving prices skyward. Under these circumstances, speculators are again being drawn into the oil market as a rare sure bet. Such speculators helped push oil prices to a record $147 per barrel back in 2008, but fled the market when prices crashed as the American economy headed to a meltdown. Now, they’re coming back. “Hedge funds and private investors are buying up financial instruments tied to the price of crude, and thereby helping push up oil prices,” the Wall Street Journal reported in late December.
Most analysts are expecting a price surge this spring or summer when American motorists hit the road. “We will have a spring rally that will take us to between $3.10 and $3.50 a gallon for gasoline at service stations in the United States,” predicted Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at the Oil Price Information Service. The rising price of gas will, in turn, hurt consumers just as they show signs of opening their wallets again. No less worrisome, oil-importing countries like the United States, Japan, and many in Europe will face soaring bills for fuel imports, further enfeebling economies already suffering from profound weakness.
According to some calculations, oil prices added another $72 billion to America’s mammoth balance-of-payments deficit last year. Europe had to cough up an additional $70 billion for imported oil and Japan $27 billion. “It is a very telling story,” says the IEA’s Fatih Birol of recent oil-price data. “2010 rang the first alarm bells and 2011 price levels could bring us to the same financial crisis times that we saw in 2008.”
Rising food prices leading to riots, protests, and revolts, mounting oil prices, mammoth worldwide unemployment, and a collapsed recovery -- it looks like the perfect set of preconditions for a global tsunami of instability and turmoil. Events in Algeria and Tunisia give us just an inkling of what this maelstrom might look like, but where and how it will next erupt, and in what form, is anyone’s guess.
A single guarantee: we haven’t seen the last of resource revolts which, in the coming years, could reach an intensity we scarcely imagine today.
.
By Michael T. Klare on 24 January 2011 in Tom Dispatch -
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175345)
Image above: Hunger and anger - a large crowd waiting to buy cheap priced government rice in Manila in 2010. From (http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/article402262.ece).
Get ready for a rocky year. From now on, rising prices, powerful storms, severe droughts and floods, and other unexpected events are likely to play havoc with the fabric of global society, producing chaos and political unrest. Start with a simple fact: the prices of basic food staples are already approaching or exceeding their 2008 peaks, that year when deadly riots erupted in dozens of countries around the world. It’s not surprising then that food and energy experts are beginning to warn that 2011 could be the year of living dangerously -- and so could 2012, 2013, and on into the future.
Add to the soaring cost of the grains that keep so many impoverished people alive a comparable rise in oil prices -- again nearing levels not seen since the peak months of 2008 -- and you can already hear the first rumblings about the tenuous economic recovery being in danger of imminent collapse.
Think of those rising energy prices as adding further fuel to global discontent. Already, combined with staggering levels of youth unemployment and a deep mistrust of autocratic, repressive governments, food prices have sparked riots in Algeria and mass protests in Tunisia that, to the surprise of the world, ousted long-time dictator President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his corrupt extended family. And many of the social stresses evident in those two countries are present across the Middle East and elsewhere.
No one can predict where the next explosion will occur, but with food prices still climbing and other economic pressures mounting, more upheavals appear inevitable. These may be the first resource revolts to catch our attention, but they won’t be the last Put simply, global consumption patterns are now beginning to challenge the planet’s natural resource limits.
Populations are still on the rise, and from Brazil to India, Turkey to China, new powers are rising as well. With them goes an urge for a more American-style life. Not surprisingly, the demand for basic commodities is significantly on the rise, even as supplies in many instances are shrinking. At the same time, climate change, itself a product of unbridled energy use, is adding to the pressure on supplies, and speculators are betting on a situation trending progressively worse. Add these together and the road ahead appears increasingly rocky.
Breadbaskets without Bread
Let’s begin with food, the most important and volatile of these commodities. Food prices declined in October 2008 after the onset of the global financial crisis, but that seems to have been an anomaly. The December 2010 index of global food prices compiled by the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) hit a record 215, one point higher than in the spring of 2008. (In that index, based on a “bundle” of food staples, a baseline of 100 represents average prices in 2002-2004.)
In fact, some food products, including sugar, cooking oils, and fats, are now trading substantially above their 2008 levels; others, including dairy products, grains, and meat, are inching perilously close to record levels. As 2011 begins, food experts fear that, within months, prices for key staples will climb above the 2008 threshold and stay there, causing extreme hardship for poor people around the world. “We are at a very high level,” said a worried Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist at the FAO. “These levels in the previous episode led to problems and riots across the world.”
Of particular concern to Abbassian and his colleagues is the rising cost of corn, rice, and wheat, the staple crops of billions in many of the poorest countries. According to the FAO, by the end of 2010 international corn and wheat prices were already approaching their 2008 peak levels (about $260 and $340 per metric ton, respectively). Analysts attribute the rise in grain prices to growing demand in both developed and developing nations, along with a number of cataclysmic weather-related events and speculation by investors.
An extreme drought and fierce fires last summer destroyed a large percentage of the wheat crop in Russia and Ukraine, while heavy flooding in India and the inundation of 20% of Pakistan damaged significant parts of the grain output of those countries. At the same time, unusually hot and dry weather suppressed production in a number of other key farming areas. What makes the picture look so worrisome today are indications that the severity and frequency of extreme weather events appear to be on the rise. In the past few weeks alone, several such events point the way to serious supply problems ahead.
Most significant has been the unprecedented rainfall and flooding in Australia that put an area more than twice the size of California largely underwater, significantly disrupting wheat cultivation there. Australia is one of the world’s leading wheat producers. Unusually dry conditions in the American Midwest and Argentina have also hinted at future problems in grain and corn output. It’s still too early to predict the size of this year’s grain and corn harvests, but many analysts are warning of a shortfall in supplies, along with sky-high prices.
Mainstream analysts and government officials are loathe to attribute this traffic jam of extreme weather events to global warming. Huge variations in rainfall can be normal, especially in places like Australia that are susceptible to El Niño/La Niña ocean-temperature oscillations, and politicians are fearful of assuming responsibility for a problem as massive as climate change.
But climate change theory has long suggested that the warming trend -- 2010 tied 2005 for the warmest year on record and nine of the 10 warmest years have come in the last decade -- will be accompanied by an increase in the frequency and severity of storms. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that recent events, including those Australian floods, are tied to rising global temperatures.
The Energy Crisis Returns
Soaring food prices are being driven as well by speculative investments and the rising price of oil. Partly in response to the diminishing value of the dollar, some investors are sinking their money into food futures (along with gold and silver) as a speculative hedge. At the same time, the price of oil is edging toward the $100 mark, making it increasingly profitable for farmers to switch from growing corn for human consumption to growing it for the manufacture of ethanol, which in turn reduces the amount of farm acreage devoted to staples.
Oil would have to fall below $50 per barrel to make the cultivation of corn as a food product competitive with ethanol production -- and that’s not likely to happen. So even if more corn is produced this year, less will be available for food purposes and the price of what remains is bound to rise. The precipitous rise in oil prices has startled the experts.
Not so long ago, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) was projecting a price range of $70-$80 per barrel in 2011, but as the year began oil was already trading above $90 a barrel and some analysts predict that it will reach $100 before the year is out. A few are even talking about the $150 barrel and gas prices at the pump of $4 or more. If prices climb above $100, global consumer spending could take another nosedive. “Oil prices are entering a dangerous zone for the global economy,” says Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency (IEA).
“The oil import bills are becoming a threat to the economic recovery.” As with food, the rising cost of oil is a product of growing demand, insufficient supplies, and speculative investments. According to the most recent projections from the IEA, daily global oil consumption in 2011 will average 87.4 million barrels, an increase of about two million barrels from the first quarter of 2010. Much of the extra demand is coming from China, where a newly-minted middle class is buying automobiles at a record clip, as well as from the United States, where previously cautious consumers are slowly returning to pre-2008 driving habits.
At a time when the oil industry is experiencing declining rates of output at many existing oil fields and finding it ever more difficult to add production, even two million extra barrels per day can be a daunting challenge (and greater demand is expected in the coming years). In the United States, for example, much hope was placed in oil exploration in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and offshore Alaska, but in the wake of the BP disaster, this seems like a forlorn prospect. Production in Mexico and the North Sea, two bright spots of recent years, is facing a sharp decline, while other key producers, including those in the Middle East, are struggling to maintain current output levels at existing fields.
Many energy analysts believe that the world is at (or will soon reach) peak oil -- the moment when global petroleum output achieves a maximum sustainable daily rate and begins a long-term, irreversible decline. Others contend that higher levels of output are still possible. Whatever the truth of the matter, at this moment the oil industry is finding it increasingly difficult, and ever more costly, to boost output above current levels.
This, combined with insatiable demand, is driving prices skyward. Under these circumstances, speculators are again being drawn into the oil market as a rare sure bet. Such speculators helped push oil prices to a record $147 per barrel back in 2008, but fled the market when prices crashed as the American economy headed to a meltdown. Now, they’re coming back. “Hedge funds and private investors are buying up financial instruments tied to the price of crude, and thereby helping push up oil prices,” the Wall Street Journal reported in late December.
Most analysts are expecting a price surge this spring or summer when American motorists hit the road. “We will have a spring rally that will take us to between $3.10 and $3.50 a gallon for gasoline at service stations in the United States,” predicted Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at the Oil Price Information Service. The rising price of gas will, in turn, hurt consumers just as they show signs of opening their wallets again. No less worrisome, oil-importing countries like the United States, Japan, and many in Europe will face soaring bills for fuel imports, further enfeebling economies already suffering from profound weakness.
According to some calculations, oil prices added another $72 billion to America’s mammoth balance-of-payments deficit last year. Europe had to cough up an additional $70 billion for imported oil and Japan $27 billion. “It is a very telling story,” says the IEA’s Fatih Birol of recent oil-price data. “2010 rang the first alarm bells and 2011 price levels could bring us to the same financial crisis times that we saw in 2008.”
Rising food prices leading to riots, protests, and revolts, mounting oil prices, mammoth worldwide unemployment, and a collapsed recovery -- it looks like the perfect set of preconditions for a global tsunami of instability and turmoil. Events in Algeria and Tunisia give us just an inkling of what this maelstrom might look like, but where and how it will next erupt, and in what form, is anyone’s guess.
A single guarantee: we haven’t seen the last of resource revolts which, in the coming years, could reach an intensity we scarcely imagine today.
.
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)