Deliberate obfuscation or what?

MSNBC presents this collection of articles written by John Schoen and titled, After Oil: What to do when the oil runs out. [John Schoen is a senior producer at MSNBC who helped launch the site.] Among the articles, Mr. Schoen points to the recent urgency to develop hydrogen as an energy source but later says 'hydrogen is what’s known as a “secondary” energy source' and then 'almost all of the hydrogen produced today is made from natural gas, a fossil fuel that is already in short supply'. The truth is that hydrogen is not an energy source at all (unless used in nuclear fusion - another subject altogether), but merely a repository for energy, like batteries.

Another important example of imprecision is Mr. Schoen's article on alternative energy where finally acknowledges that ' Some researchers say that these biomass fuels require more for fossil energy to make than they produce

Further on the energy cost of energy produced, see this blog entry based on this article. Besides the environmental degredation:

In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter “containing 44×10 to the 18 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet’s current biota.”(1) In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries’ worth of plants and animals.

In another article , Mr. Schoen refers to the role of efficiency as breathlessly propounded by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute. Mr. Schoen includes a caveat: 'some' assert that 'the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency has already been picked'.

Scientific American in its September theme issue, Crossroads for Planet Earth, published an article by Mr. Lovins entitled, More Profit with Less Carbon. Scientific American could have done much better where the fate of people (and science) on the Earth is concerned.

• The article regards climate rather than oil depletion as the main problem. There's no reference to Scientific American's important March 1998 article, The End of Cheap Oil.
• Mr. Lovins' arguments are hollow and unconvincing. As Vice-president Cheney has recently pointed out: we're twice as efficient as we were X number of years ago. So why then are we using twice as much oil?
• Mr. Lovins' article doesn't square with another article in the issue, Economics in a Full World: Society can no longer safely pretend the global economy operates within a limitless ecosystem. (See also this sidebar from that article.)
  

Scientific American's September issue is subtitled, 'The human race is at a unique turning point. Will we choose to create the best of all possible worlds?' This is reminiscent of Jared Diamond's book title, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. What choices do we really have?

Tying the pieces together

Earlier I criticized the Amory Lovins' article in the September's issue of Scientific American for not adequately addressing the depletion of fossil fuels. The next-to-last article in the printed version more directly addresses my concerns; it's entitled Economics in a Full World.

Society can no longer safely pretend the global economy operates within a limitless ecosystem.

the alternative to a sustainable economy, an ever-growing economy, is a biophysical impossibility.

the disaster will be felt eventually. Avoiding this calamity will be difficult. The sooner we start, the better.

The article points to the Laws of Thermodynamics as inviolable. Interestingly Lee Raymond, head of ExxonMobil , as noted earlier, refers to those same Laws when comparing oil to other sources of energy.

In a sidebar to the article, the author, Herman Daly, lays out 3 precepts that need to be followed for a sustainable future. We violate these precepts (call it a protocol, if you wish) at our peril.

Another blogger, in his Economist's View, quotes from the Sciam article: Measuring Human Well-Being.

if only a steady state

Under the heading of connecting the dots, what role does equilibrium (and especially homeostasis) play in our economy? Here's what Fed chief Bernancke said in July '08 before the Senate Banking Committee:

"I do believe we're going to start to see a stabilization in the construction of homes somewhere later this year, the beginning of next year. House prices may continue to fall longer than that because of the large inventory of unsold homes that we still face. There is uncertainty about exactly what the equilibrium is that prices will reach. It is that uncertainty that is generating a lot of the stress we are seeing in financial markets."

The book by Herman Daly, Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics, has a chapter (14) called the Impossibility of Sustainable Growth. The book is one of my list of peak oil books. Daly is also author of the important Scientific American article, Economics in a Full World, refered to in other posts here.

après moi, le déluge (attributed to Louis XV or Madame de Pompadour) - NY Times - Dr. Doom

one reader's book reviews

Regarding the tension between politics and science, Herman Daly says this in his September '08 Scientific American article, in the Economics in a Full World:

In choosing between tackling a political impossibility and a biophysical impossibility, I would judge the latter to be the more impossible and take my chances with the former.

Herman Daly is co-editor of an anthology on ecological economics, Valuing the Earth, including the classic essay The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin.

The Wikipedia article on Peak Oil has a list of books, some of which appear on this Amazon list by one R. Hutchinson.  James Howard Kunstler (of The Long Emergency) and I would call Mr. Hutchinson a cornucopian.

Sachs on Charlie Rose

Jeffrey Sachs was interviewed on Charlie Rose last week. Sachs is a Harvard-educated economist. Despite his credentials, he has a blind spot. When Rose asks about energy use, Sachs responds about climate change. The two problems are different. I just sent Mr. Sachs an email about his Rose interview; here's what I wrote:

I’m of the belief that peak oil [not climate change] is THE main problem our world faces in the next year or two, not 10 or 20 years hence.
Aren’t there economic models that conclude the worst? In your book and interviews, have you considered the work and [SciAm] article by Herman Daly, Economics in a Full World?
Since you use the word common in the title of your new book, I wonder if you’ve considered Garret Hardin’s essay, The Tragedy of the Commons, in your work.

The Ethics of Peak Oil

The cover article of the June '08 Scientific American is entitled The Ethics of Climate Change. The article has two basic flaws, as far as I can see. It ignores 'peak oil', which is the much more pressing danger, and (2) it ignores the thesis of an earlier Sciam article about ecological economics, Economics in a Full World. This is not the first time a Sciam author has ignored highly relevant earlier Sciam articles. See these posts of mine.

I also wonder who, if anyone, edits these articles. Here are two sentences from an article inset, Measuring Catastrophe, missing from the online version:

• A population collapse will cause the premature death of billions of people.
• If humanity becomes extinct or the human population collapses, vast numbers of people who would otherwise have existed will not in fact exist.

and elsewhere:

Is their nonexistence a bad thing?

plumbing the depths

Richard Heinberg explains the recession from an ecologist's perspective in:

Temporary Recession or the End of Growth?

and looks at where we are in on the curve of oil production in:

Is the Global Oil Tank Half-full, Is It Half-Empty...Or Are We Running On Fumes?

sciam update: Does Economics Violate the Laws of Physics?

all biophysical economists see only very bleak prospects for the future of modern civilization, putting a whole new spin on the phrase "the dismal science.

the well-being of our economy depends on a healthy natural world. To my mind, economics is a subset ofecology, and we place ourselves (nevermind our progeny) at great peril as we use up the world's non-renewable resources. For more on this alternative view of our global economy, visit these pages from:

NY Times, the SUNY-ESF conference, Revisiting the Limits to Growth after peak oil.