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Climate Change
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Peak Oil
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Transition
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I’m new to all of this, so please be gentle with me.
Climate Change
Overview: The average global temperature is currently 0.8 degrees Celsius above 1880 levels (when records first began) while concentrations of CO2 have risen by a third and methane has doubled.
Dr James Hansen, chief climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been a tireless spokesman explaining that earth’s relatively stable climate - which humanity has benefited from over the past 10,000 years at least - is in high danger of destabilising if we exceed atmospheric carbon concentrations of 350 parts per million. We are currently at 387ppm and adding 2ppm per year. How crucial is this 350 figure? Well, we have to go back 15-20 million years to find similar levels of atmospheric CO2. Back then, as one report suggests, ‘global average surface temperatures were 3C to 6C warmer; “there was little glacial ice on land or sea in the Arctic, maritime ice on Antarctica was not viable;” [and the] sea level was 25 to 40 meters higher.’
It is important to understand that man’s contribution to the make-up of today’s atmosphere is largely the result of industrial activity that took place some 30 years ago. This is because the earth is large and therefore able to absorb a lot of man’s carbon-releasing activities by investing that activity into carbon sinks such as the oceans and forests. However, with time and increased load placed upon these sinks, the additional carbon ultimately works its way through the system and is re-released into the atmosphere.
This means, even if we were to suddenly stop all CO2- contributing activity today, scientists know there’s at least 30 years of output still working its way through the earth’s system. That input equates to an additional 0.6C of average global temperature rise.
The adding of 0.6C to 0.8C means a minimum average global temperature rise of 1.4C by 2040. ‘That’s not a lot’ you may say, but remember that is the ‘average’ for the whole world. The poles, for example, will be more severely affected and may experience temperature increases of +10C. It is well understood that even a small temperature rise at the poles is enough to exacerbate the melting of glaciers and ice sheets. We are already witnessing this melting.
Climate Change is not just about retreating glaciers and ice sheets. Significant shifts in the world’s climate also affects the weather at the local level as well as biodiversity, rainfall, species migration, sea levels and temperatures, freshwater levels, human habitations, ocean acidity, and extreme weather events such as drought, fire and hurricanes.
Climate Change is not a future event, something that can be ignored because it’s a middle-of-the-century-thing. It is happening right now all around us, all over the world. We cannot stop or undo what has already taken place, but we can today reduce the contribution we make to the problem and all the days that follow.
Like to learn a bit more? You can discover additional information at any of the following:
Climate Change & Global Warming Introduction
How can I stop climate change?
How to talk to a climate sceptic
An Index debunking various popular media occurrences of climate-related nonsense
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Peak Oil
For most of human history we have harnessed the energy potential of humans and animals in order to build our civilisations, whether it be the development of settled agriculture some 10,000 years ago or the building of the Mayan and Egyptian pyramids. Much more recently, however, in order to achieve our aims we have found ways to tap into other natural resources that have given us greater energy return (and a lot less hassle from slaves and animals). Starting in the latter part of the 18th Century, the Industrial Revolution began, in part, with the increased use of refined coal and gained significant momentum in the late 1800’s with the advent of the internal combustion engine.
The social and economic world that surrounds us today has been largely shaped by the very thing that gave rise to the internal combustion engine - the harnessing of oil. In fact, so embedded has the use of this extraordinary fossil fuel become that it now defines virtually every aspect of modern day life. Hydrocarbons such as oil are extensively used in everything from fuels, fertilisers, plastics, pharmaceuticals and paints through to clothing, tyres, sporting goods and cosmetics. It directly and indirectly underpins 90% of the world’s transportation systems (cars, trucks, buses, tractors, planes, ships, military vehicles etc) and for every one calorie of food we produce we now use up to 10 calories of input energy to produce it. From an article by Norman Church, ‘97 calories of transport energy are needed to import 1 calorie of asparagus by plane from Chile, and 66 units of energy are consumed when flying 1 unit of carrot energy from South Africa.’
Fossil fuels are an incredible resource, seemingly a veritable gift from the mother nature. Their energy density is extraordinarily high. By comparison, if you burn dry wood in a wood stove you will enjoy the heating power of 7,000 Btu per pound. Coal, depending on its type, gives you 8,000 to 14,000 Btu’s per pound. But oil at nearly 20,000 Btu per pound beats them all hands-down.
Laid down by the deaths of vast seas of organic matter and then cooked and pressurised at great depth for millions of years, we have tapped into the most energy dense, highly scalable and versatile resource known to man on this planet. So vast are the world’s oil reserves that even today, it is estimated we are only half way through our known reserves of conventional oil.
If we’re only half way through, what’s the problem then? There are several answers to this.
Let’s start with the oil reserves themselves. Contrary to what many people may believe, oil isn’t just sitting around in great lakes waiting to be collected in buckets. It is, instead found in specific geological formations that each holds its oil between impervious layers of rock. Often there are three layers to a formation: natural gas, having the lowest density, floats on top; oil is in the middle and water, having a higher density than oil, sits underneath. These layers are not free floating, they exist intertwined within sedimentary rocks of the earth. At a stretch, it’s composition is more akin to an ice-cream smoothie than a glass of coke.
In the early phase of extracting oil from a field, very little intervention was required as the field’s own internal pressures did all the work. We only needed to cap the well-head and direct the output into a pipe before directing it to storage tanks or a refinery. As a field matures, however, we need to apply various techniques to maintain the underground pressure so that the hydrocarbons keep flowing smoothly to the surface. One such method is to pump water into the field. As water is heavier than the hydrocarbons it forces the gas and/or oil to rise to the surface. Importantly, once we are required to intervene by using more and more energy to keep the field at optimum flow, the whole game starts to change.
Recall the ice-cream smoothie analogy above? When you first put a straw into the glass and start to drink, the liquid rises easily - as is the case with a pipe first put into an oil reserve. But, as with your glass, once you get past the ‘easy liquid’ you are required to use more energy sucking on the straw to maintain a sufficiently good flow rate. You know there’s still plenty of delicious smoothie to be had, it’s just not in a form that allows for easy and instant gratification. You may still have a glass half full of smoothie, but the flow rate has significantly dropped because you are trying to extract blobs of ice cream rather than flowing liquid. In an oil field, there is what is known as ‘easy oil’ - which requires minimal effort to extract, and then there is everything that remains - requiring greater effort and energy expenditure to extract.
In summary, a field is tapped, its flow rate and productivity increases and then it reaches a maximum rate of output before beginning its inevitable decline into maturity whereby ever-increasing amounts of external energy are required to maintain a viable rate of flow. This geological fact is known as Hubbert’s Curve and it applies equally to both a single field and the world’s entire reserves.
Flow rates and EROI (energy return on investment) are additional parts of the answer to the dilemma we now face.
Oil fields all over the world are subject to pretty much the same forces of play.
In the 1930’s, for example, the average EROI of U.S. crude was 100:1. That meant it took a ratio of one barrel of energy to get 100 barrels of energy in return. By 1970 this had fallen to 30:1 and today it is down below 20:1. We are having to use more and more energy as part of the extraction process leaving us with less to resource to put to other uses.
The flip-side of EROI is the financial cost of extraction. When oil fields give up their treasure willingly, there is very little financial cost on the return made. That’s why we tapped all of the big reserves first (as well as being the easiest targets to find!). But as we have had to increasingly venture into less accessible regions of the planet in order to find new reserves, such as going off-shore and into the frozen north, the financial costs of discovery, production and distribution have risen considerably. There may even come a point in the not-too-distant future whereby the costs of extraction outweigh the financial rewards of bringing a field to market.
Another significant part of the peak oil problem has to do with demand i.e. consumption.
In the 21st Century we continue to thirst for oil. It’s an addiction for us all and we wage war to secure our daily fix. Dick Cheney’s 1999 London speech was a salient glimpse into what now become part of the historical record, “While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.” in 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, a leading White house hawk claimed oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq and that the real motive was that Iraq is "swimming" in oil.
Every day, we gorge ourselves on some 82 millions barrels of conventional crude and unconventional (oil sands and biofuel) oil. In 2008, Shell president, John Hofmeister, summed it up like this, “During the course of today, the U.S. will consume 10,000 gallons of oil a second. That equivalent is 21 million barrels of oil a day...that’s a swimming pool of oil every second of every minute of every hour throughout the day.” Worldwide, it’s some 32 billion barrels annually - the equivalent of a cubic mile of oil (at 2006 levels of consumption). Yet, as the graph below shows, the peak of world discovery was way back in 1965. Today, for every 4 barrels of oil we use, we discover only 1 replacement barrel.
The blue bars represent all oil discoveries to date. The black line represents production.
For the past century and a half oil has been our preferred primary source of energy because of its abundance and versatility. A major energy source needs to be cheap if it is to underpin our primary economic activity. Historically, oil has traded at less than $30. Yet today, despite being gripped by the worst economic downturn in living memory, oil continues to trade at over $70 per barrel. Even with the best of human and engineering endeavour we haven’t been able to increase oil production above the levels of 2005 in order to bring oil prices back down to earlier levels.
The need for economic growth is the metric by which we measure and define our prosperity. It is such an entrenched ideology that it’s hard for us envision our world being any other way - just as it’s hard for a fish to know anything else but the water it lives in.
Peak oil is a story about access to and the use of cheap and abundant energy. Whether by good fortune or ingenuity on our behalf, over time each resource mankind has harnessed has given a higher energy density than its predecessor. Our linear view of history suggests we will just naturally progress to another resource that is more energy dense than oil. Renewables such as wind, wave and solar readily spring to people’s minds. But, as shown above, none of these alternatives come remotely close to the energy density of oil.
Oil has enabled us to dramatically increase our population (there is a close correlation between population growth and oil production). In a very direct way, oil because of its rich energy density, actually contributes to there being even more of ‘us’ on the planet. One litre of oil gives us the energy equivalent of one human labouring in a field for 150 hours. In Energy and Human Evolution, David Price writes, “Today, the extrasomatic energy used by people around the world is equal to the work of some 280 billion men. It is as if every man, woman, and child in the world had 50 slaves. In a technological society such as the United States, every person has more than 200 such "ghost slaves."
The needs and wants of billions of humans combined with oil’s remarkable strength and efficiency has way over-stretched the replenishing and carrying capacity of the only earth we have. That’s why we’re now losing 25 billion tonnes of topsoil each year, seeing the loss of 90 acres of rainforest every minute, and counting a species extinction rate that is 1000 times greater than the natural background level.
We won’t know the exact date of peak oil until it’s behind us. But one thing is known for sure. Its passing will redefine both our expectations of our individual and collective cultural lifestyles and how we will relate to the world around us in the future.
Like to learn a little more? You can discover additional information at any of the following:
Peak Oil Primer - The Energy Bulletin
The Deeper End of Climate Change and Peak Oil
Okay, you’ve got me very interested, I want to know more about the issues of climate change stuff and peak oil:
Climate Prediction The Coming Global Oil Crisis
The Global Warming Debate Matthew Simmons
Mark Lynas Life After The Oil Crash
Thanks for the links but I’m a bit pressed for time. Show me some quick hard data in graph form instead...
Solutions
There are many, many things you can do to be part of the solution by helping mitigate some of the issues we face. Becoming actively involved in the Transition movement would be a great start!
To begin redefining your lifestyle, read our Action page and pop a My Daily Vote card in your wallet or purse. Browse the links below and become inspired to engage with your local community in a way that feels right for you. All the best and thank you for choosing to act!
Transition Towns Permaculture Community Supported Agriculture Awareness Raising
Low Carbon Communities City Leaf Soil Association 100% Renewable Energy
Slow Movements 10:10 Landshare Carbon Footprint Reduction Ethical Shopping
