good news: the pending catastrophe is real

Things are looking up — an odd thing to say what with climate change, increasing world population, historic oil prices, destruction of habitat, decreasing biodiversity, increasing drought, and the increasing problems of finding enough fresh water for industry, agriculture, and home use, to say nothing of a pending recession/depression of the world economy. This strange optimism is based entirely on the now daily reports in the mainstream media underlining the dire state of world.

No, I’m not a people-hater. I don’t want to see the world devolve into a hunter-gather society. To the contrary, I wish to see some tangible evidence that we can collectively and intelligently take stock of where we are, why we got here, and what we’ve got left, and decide to take the necessary, difficult steps to ensure we will become good stewards of this planet and leave enough of its resources to provide a good life future generations.

The good news is that the mainstream media is being forced to report the bad news.

This is terrific. For several decades — take the publication Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 as a starting point if going back to Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population of 1798 seems like too much of a leap — many scientists have been branded as alarmists or kooks for pointing out evidence of environmental degradation and unbridled population growth. The focus, when anyone bothered to pay attention, has been on the more extreme claims which were not realized (with Paul Erlich being the usual whipping boy). Now, with the constant daily drum beat in the mainstream media, the problems can’t be denied.

Recently water and oil have been in the news.

water

Other than air, nothing is more fundamental to human life than water.

The Future Is Drying Up by Jon Gertner in the NYT Magazine investigates water resource issues in the western part of the USA.

Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir in Arizona and Nevada that supplies nearly all the water for Las Vegas, is half-empty, and statistical models indicate that it will never be full again.

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Water tables all over the United States have been dropping, sometimes drastically, from overuse. In the Denver area, some cities that use only groundwater will almost certainly exhaust their accessible supplies by 2050.

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The biggest issue is that agriculture consumes most of the water, as much as 90 percent of it, in a state like Colorado. “The West has gone from a fur-trapping, to a mining, to an agricultural, to a manufacturing, to an urban-centric economy,” Binney explained. As the region evolved, however, its water ownership for the most part did not. “There’s no magical locked box of water that we can turn to,” Binney says of cities like Aurora [a growing city of 300,000 near Denver], “so it’s going to have to come from an existing use.” Because the supply of water in the West can’t really change, water managers spend their time looking for ways to adjust its allocation in their favor.

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An even darker possibility is that a Western drought caused by climatic variation and a drought caused by global warming could arrive at the same time. Or perhaps they already have. This coming spring, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will issue a report identifying areas of the world most at risk of droughts and floods as the earth warms. Fresh-water shortages are already a global concern, especially in China, India and Africa. But the I.P.C.C., which along with Al Gore received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month for its work on global-warming issues, will note that many problem zones are located within the United States, including California (where the Sierra Nevada snowpack is threatened) and the Colorado River basin. These assessments follow on the heels of a number of recent studies that analyze mountain snowpack and future Colorado River flows. Almost without exception, recent climate models envision reductions that range from the modest to the catastrophic by the second half of this century. One study in particular, by Martin Hoerling and Jon Eischeid, suggests the region is already “past peak water,” a milestone that means the river’s water supply will now forever trend downward.

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I asked if limiting the growth of the Las Vegas metro area wouldn’t help. Mulroy [water manager for Las Vegas, Nevada] bristled. “This country is going to have 100 million additional people in it in the next 25 to 30 years,” she replied. “Tell me where they’re supposed to go. Seriously. Every community says, ‘Not here,’ ‘No growth here,’ ‘There’s too many people here already.’ For a large urban area that is the core economic hub of any particular area, to even attempt to throw up walls? I’m not sure it can be done.” Besides, she added, the problem isn’t growth alone: “We have an exploding human population, and we have a shrinking clean-water supply. Those are on colliding paths. This is not just a Las Vegas issue. This is a microcosm of a much larger issue.” Americans, she went on to say, are the most voracious users of natural resources in the world. Maybe we need to talk about that as well. “The people who move to the West today need to realize they’re moving into a desert,” Mulroy said. “If they want to live in a desert, they have to adapt to a desert lifestyle.” That means a shift from the mindset of the 1930s, when the federal government encouraged people to settle in the West, plant water-intensive crops and make it look like the East Coast. It means landscapes of parched dirt. It means mesquite bushes and palo verde trees for vegetation. It means recycled water. It means gravel lawns. It is the West’s new deal, she seemed to be saying, and I got the feeling that for Mulroy it means that every blade of grass in her state would soon be gone.

oil

Almost everything we associate with modern society is based on cheap energy and ultimately, because of its use as fuel for transportation, cheap oil.

An article by Ashley Seager in the Guardian is headlined Steep decline in oil production brings risk of war and unrest, says new study. It’s based on a report by the German The Energy Watch Group. See here for the report and its executive summary which includes these statements:

World oil production has already peaked and will fall by half as soon as 2030, according to a report which also warns that extreme shortages of fossil fuels will lead to wars and social breakdown.

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The major result from this analysis is that world oil production has peaked in 2006. Production will start to decline at a rate of several percent per year. By 2020, and even more by 2030, global oil supply will be dramatically lower. This will create a supply gap which can hardly be closed by growing contributions from other fossil, nuclear or alternative energy sources in this time frame.

The world is at the beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This change will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence almost all aspects of our daily life.

Climate change will also force humankind to change energy consumption patterns by reducing significantly the burning of fossil fuels. Global warming is a very serious problem. However, the focus of this paper is on the aspects of resource depletion as these are much less transparent to the public.

The now beginning transition period probably has its own rules which are valid only during this phase. Things might happen which we never experienced before and which we may never experience again once this transition period has ended. Our way of dealing with energy issues probably will have to change fundamentally.

I recommend reading the full report which is written in easily accessible language for the non-specialist. It makes a point of showing how and why its future projections differ from the IEA, the International Energy Agency which describes itself:

The International Energy Agency (IEA) acts as energy policy advisor to 26 member countries in their effort to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy for their citizens. Founded during the oil crisis of 1973-74, the IEA’s initial role was to co-ordinate measures in times of oil supply emergencies. As energy markets have changed, so has the IEA. Its mandate has broadened to incorporate the “Three E’s” of balanced energy policy making: energy security, economic development and environmental protection. Current work focuses on climate change policies, market reform, energy technology collaboration and outreach to the rest of the world, especially major consumers and producers of energy like China, India, Russia and the OPEC countries.

Yet the IEA’s projections of future oil availability appear to be quite at odds with any objective approach to the problem as the EWG-Series No 3/2007 report (the one quoted above) shows. Sadly, it appears that the IEA and the EIA, the Energy Information Agency of the US Department of Energy whose reports form the foundation of the IEA’s results, present a Pollyanna vision of the future based on wishes and hopes rather than objective evidence. They simply project what policy makers want to hear: supplies of cheap oil will continue indefinitely.

population growth

In both the oil and water reports presented here, there is only a brief mention of population growth. Many of us are used to this, but I wonder about people who are only now investigating these issues. Certainly without any population growth the situation is dire, steadily increasing consumption from China and India — and let’s not forget this is true of USA as well — increases demand for both water and oil, two critical elements of modern life as we have come to know it. People want the lifestyle Americans enjoy. Who wouldn’t? An abundance of relatively cheap water and oil have enabled North Americans to create a style of living that has never before been possible.

That’s exactly what is changing. Both water and oil, fundamental ingredients of any modern economy, are becoming more precious — very quickly. And the USA is the only modern economy with a steadily increasing population. These facts are typically not reported — not just under reported, but rarely reported at all.

In the face of the harsh reality of hitting the wall on water and oil use, the usually unspoken fact is we are on the way to adding 40 percent more people to the planet in the next 40 years making a dire situation even more dire.

catastrophe as net benefit

So we have oil production hitting a ceiling at the same time water use is forcing a decision between maintenance of agricultural production and metropolitan growth, a catastrophe for North America. We’ve never before faced these circumstances and, with our modern sensibilities, we have difficulty acknowledging it.

That’s what’s so wonderful about the change in the mainstream media over the past year. (Just my guess, but I think this is mostly due to the impact of the IPCC report appearing in February and its findings being driven home by Al Gore’s movie. The Nobel Peace Prize was especially well chosen.) The scientists and informed citizens who are pointing out the problem are, for the most part, no longer lampooned as alarmists and crazies, but instead being reported objectively. Put more cynically, the rich and powerful behind the mainstream media can no longer avoid the reality of what’s happening and are choosing, as often as not, to report the facts rather than feed what they’ve perceived as an investor’s Polyannish optimism — turns out that intelligent investors want accurate data to make hard decisions about where to put their money.

I hope it is abundantly clear: I’m not glad we are facing calamity. I’m glad that the reality of the pending catastrophe is being acknowledged in the mainstream media on a daily basis. I’m glad for that because it means we have a chance to respond collectively. We have a chance to back politicians who recognize these problems and the complexity of our situation. There is not one thing we can “go to war” against. It’s not climate change, water availability, cheap oil, decreasing biodiversity, or overpopulation. It’s all of them together. It’s a time when the world economy will change in a fundamental way — whether the powers that be like it or not. It’s a time when we need to be managing the future, not exploiting it as if it were another giant oil field.

How does one exploit a giant oil field? First you drill into it and pump out the easy pickings. You might then drill a few more wells to tap smaller pockets of oil. After that, you can employ a number of enhanced oil recovery techniques to get more oil out of the ground, each of which costs more money and produces oil that’s harder (more costly) to process.

So, given that, how does one exploit the future? First you have to convince yourself you are not robbing your children and grandchildren. That’s perhaps the hardest part. Next, you have to decide they will find a way to have a quality of life equal to your own in spite of having no access to cheap oil, having much less biodiversity, less per capita space, a different worldwide climate, fewer fish in the sea, etc. Once you’ve accepted that (gasp!), you can begin to reap the bounty of the current world, the one you find yourself in, with abandon. Just like exploiting an oil field, you take the easy pickings first, then go to greater and greater lengths to reap the benefits of what’s left.

I have a great faith that the vast majority of people would not do that. Most of us want to be good stewards of planet and leave as much as possible to future generations. We don’t want to steal from our own children. That’s why I’m excited about the current trend in the mainstream media towards reporting what’s really happening in the world. Even the Ruppert Murdocks think about the kind of world their children might inherit. They might want dominance but they are now forced to think about the quality of the thing they are dominating — to put it in the most jaded terms possible.

Greed, ambitious, future thinking greed, might very well be the thing that saves us.

[photo credit here, Catastrophe Waitress (Creative Commons license).]