wotfigo; Modern civilisation depends entirely on the two fundamental energy supplies notably, electricity & liquid fuels. There are many energy sources to produce electricity. But there are no substitutes for liquid energy. Liquid energy sources can include oil derivatives, and liquefied gasses. There are really no substitutes for liquid energy other than some possible conversion to electricity. We can convert a large part of our road transport infrastructure energy source from liquid energy to electricity. For example electric trains, electric cars, electric trams & buses. Even electric trucks. But it is not possible to convert our air or ocean transport to electricity in any meaningful extent. Also liquid fuels are the prime energy source in the farming, mining,  & construction industries. Complete conversion to electricity is not possible without loss of energy output. For this reason it appears that the imminent decline in liquid energy supplies will mean a decline in the quality of food and goods & services in our civilisation. Human population is tied to energy sources. As the energy that powers our civilisation declines so too will our population. Let’s hope that the decline is as gradual as this graph depicts.

wotfigo. Graph; The light blue line is the oil & gas production which peaks before the year 2025 & then declines. The dark green line is the worlds population which peaks around 9 to 10 billion people in about  the year 2050. Population then goes into decline following the loss of the hydrocarbon energy sources. This projection (& there are many others) predicts a low human population without hydrocarbon energy sources of only 1 billion people by the year 2200.

Graph from ; http://www.oilcrisis.com/laherrere/supply.htm

wotfigo; One of the main themes of Entropy Wins is the direct connection between energy sources & the rise & eventual fall of all civilisations. Fossil fuels have given modern humans the energy intensive culture we enjoy with motor cars, international air plane flights, electrified houses, modern communication & entertainment industries and modern medicine. But there has been a massive price to pay which includes overpopulation, factory food farming, huge environmental destruction and global pollution including greenhouse gasses produced by the fossil fuel bonanza. All civilisations over grow their resource base. We have done the same. Our addiction to high energy intensive fossil fuels will ensure their continued use as we watch the problems mentioned above continue to escalate.Government & private efforts to use fewer carbon based fossil fuels will not occur until the last economically viable chunk of coal or litre of oil is mined & burned.

Energy Use In 2030

wotfigo; The above graph is a BP prediction & it might be wrong but it probably won’t be far out.Yes, the total amount of energy produced by carbon free renewables plus hydro does increase. But so too does the amount of fossil fuel use. There is NO SLOWDOWN in carbon pollution. I have demonstrated in many other posts that the world is now locked in to a greater than 2.5 degree C temperature rise. By 2030 this guaranteed  future global warming rise will be close to a catastrophic 4 degrees.

Graph above from; http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9949#more

Despite the clean technology of the past decade, we continue to extract and burn fossil fuels more than ever before

The industrial revolution that kick-started the human impact on the climate was driven by just such a feedback. The steam engine enabled us to drain coal mines, providing access to more coal that could power more steam engines capable of extracting yet more coal. That led to better technologies and materials that eventually helped ramp up production of oil as well. But oil didn’t displace coal, it helped us mine it more effectively and stimulated more technologies that raised energy demand overall. So coal use kept rising too – and oil use in turn kept increasing as cleaner gas, nuclear and hydro came on stream, helping power the digital age, which unlocked more advanced technologies capable of opening up harder-to-read fossil-fuel reserves.

Seen as a technology-driven feedback loop, it is not surprising that nothing has yet tamed the global emissions curve, because so far nothing has cut off its food supply: fossil fuels. Indeed, though our governments now subsidise clean-power sources and efficient cars and buildings – and encourage us all to use less energy – they are continuing to undermine all that by ripping as much oil, coal and gas out of the ground as possible. And if their own green policies mean there isn’t a market for these fuels at home, then no matter: they can just be exported instead.

This extraordinary double-think is everywhere to be seen. Take the US. Obama boasts that American emissions are now falling due to rising auto efficiency standards and gas displacing dirtier coal in the energy mix. But the US is extracting carbon and flowing it into the global energy system faster than ever before. Its gas boom has simply allowed it to export more of the coal to other countries such as China – which of course uses it partly to produce goods for US markets. Not happy with increasing US carbon extraction, Obama is also set to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline that will enable Canada to flood the global markets with crude produced from dirty tar sands. So much for carbon cuts.

Or take Australia, which in the same year introduced a carbon tax and started debating plans for a series of “mega-mines” that would massively increase its coal exports, helping build confidence among the companies and governments planning no fewer than 1,200 new coal-fired power stations around the world. Even the UK, with its world-leading carbon targets, gives tax-breaks to encourage oil and gas recovery and has been growing its total carbon footprint by relying ever more on Chinese factories – and therefore indirectly its reliance on American and Australian coal. And not just that. Although it rarely gets commented on, Britain – along with other supposedly green nations such as Germany –regularly begs Saudi Arabia and the other Opec nations to produce not less oil, but more. As journalist George Monbiot once put it, nations are trying simultaneously to “reduce demand for fossil fuels and increase supply”.

It is not just governments that are in near-universal denial about what needs to happen to the fossil fuel sector. Blithely ignoring the fact that there is already far more accessible fuel than can be safely burned, pension fund managers and other investors are allowing listed fossil fuel companies to spend the best part of $1tn a year (comparable to the US defence budget, or more than $100 for every person on the planet) to find and develop yet more reserves.

From;  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/17/why-cant-we-give-up-fossil-fuels

CO2 emissions since 1850 (red); exponential growth (blue); cuts to hit climate target (dashed). Photograph: guardian.co.uk

Given what is at stake, it is no wonder that governments agree global warming must be stopped. But that is where the common sense ends and the cognitive dissonance begins. Because to have a decent chance of not exceeding the already risky global target, we need to start phasing out fossil fuels now at a fast enough rate to bring down emissions globally by a few percent a year, and continue doing so for decades to come.

Now compare that with what is actually happening. As with the climate, to understand the situation properly it is necessary to zoom right out to see the long-term trend. Doing so reveals something fascinating, worrying and oddly overlooked. As scientists from Lancaster University pointed out last year, if you plot a graph showing all the carbon emissions that humans have pumped into the air, the result is a remarkably clear exponential curve stretching all the way back to the mid-19th century. Zoom back in on the past decade and it is clear that for all the mounting scientific concern, the political rhetoric and the clean technology, nothing has made a jot of difference to the long-term trend at the global level – the system level. The growth rate in total carbon emissions in the past decade, at around 2% a year, was the same as that of the 1850s.

That might sound hard to believe. After all, thanks to green policies and technologies, emissions have been falling in Europe, the US and many other countries. Wind turbines and solar panels are ever-more common, not just in the west but in fast-growing China. And the energy efficiency of cars, light bulbs, homes and whole economies has been improving globally for decades. So why isn’t the carbon curve showing any let up? Some might instinctively want to blame the growing population but that doesn’t stack up. The rate of population growth has dropped like a stone since the 1960s and is no longer exponential, but the carbon curve doesn’t appear to have noticed that any more than it has noticed the Kyoto protocol or whether you cycled to work this morning. For whatever reason, cutting carbon has so far been like squeezing a balloon: gains made in one place have been cancelled out by increases elsewhere.

From;  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/17/why-cant-we-give-up-fossil-fuels

Japan and IAEA “grossly downplaying” Fukushima cesium releases — Chernobyl-like levels leaked from plant 

From;  http://enenews.com/japan-and-iaea-grossly-downplaying-fukushima-cesium-releases-audio

<nyt_headline version=”1.0” type=” “>Europe Faces a Crisis in Energy Costs

Europe is lurching through an energy crisis that in many respects parallels its seemingly unending economic crisis. Across Europe, consumer groups, governments and manufacturers are asking how their future energy needs can be met affordably and responsibly.

In some ways, Europe is a victim of its own success. It has made remarkable progress in switching to a future beyond oil and natural gas. For instance, last year, a hefty 23 percent of European power demand was met by electricity generated by renewable sources like wind and solar, compared with just 13 percent in 2002. This shift was “driven primarily by generous support policies for renewables,” said Susanne Hounsell, an analyst at the energy research firm IHS CERA in Paris.

But achievements like that have also brought problems. Most green electricity sources cannot compete with coal and natural gas on their own and require subsidies that are passed on to industry and consumers. The more power they generate, the higher those costs. Direct charges for renewables add about 18 percent to German household electric bills, with indirect costs putting on more.

In Britain, climate charges add 19 percent to the electricity prices that large manufacturers pay, according to Jeremy Nicholson, director of the Energy Intensive Users Group, which represents heavy industry. That helps make industrial processes that are heavy users of electricity, like aluminum smelting or steel making, endangered species in Britain.

Europe’s energy policies were conceived in a very different era, the early to mid-2000s and even before, when economic growth was robust and there seemed to be lots of leeway to add a few euros onto the cost of electricity, if that might help combat climate change.

In Europe today, to take only a couple of examples, steel production is down about 30 percent since before the financial crisis, and new car sales hit their lowest level last year since 1995. It is hard not to conclude that economic activity like manufacturing is decamping and moving to places like Asia

From;  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/business/energy-environment/18iht-green18.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y&_r=1&

(RealClimate) – In a major step forward in proxy data synthesis, the PAst Global Changes (PAGES) 2k Consortium has just published a suite of continental scale reconstructions of temperature for the past two millennia in Nature Geoscience. More information about the study and its implications are available at the FAQ on the PAGES website and the datasets themselves are available at NOAA Paleoclimate.

The main conclusion of the study is that the most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the 19th century, and which was followed by a warming trend in the 20th C. The 20th century in the reconstructions ranks as the warmest or nearly the warmest century in all regions except Antarctica. During the last 30-year period in the reconstructions (1971-2000 CE), the average reconstructed temperature among all of the regions was likely higher than anytime in at least ~1400 years. Interestingly, temperatures did not fluctuate uniformly among all regions at multi-decadal to centennial scales. For example, there were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age. Cool 30-year periods between the years 830 and 1910 CE were particularly pronounced during times of weak solar activity and strong tropical volcanic eruptions and especially if both phenomena often occurred simultaneously. 

From;  http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2013/05/graph-of-day-continental-scale.html

If Climate Change and Population Growth Are Going to Push Food Prices Up by 50%, What Happens When you Add in Peak Oil?

wotfigo; Note that economic growth has stalled in nearly every country in the world. In many countries (most notably in Europe) economic decline is well entrenched. high unemployment, low manufacturing, low GDP, low retail spending, growing poverty levels & so on are common.

However the financial elites still insist on trotting out the economic growth will return mantra. Here is another view on this absurd position.

From;  http://theautomaticearth.com/Finance/what-do-we-want-to-grow-into.html

What Do We Want To Grow Into?

“The world’s leading economies acknowledged on Friday that ‘further actions are required’ to put the global economy on track for strong, stable and balanced growth.”, writes the FT. The torture never stops.

Spend, Spend! is way better than Cut, Cut! Better for what? For getting back to growth as soon as possible (“strong, stable and balanced”, please). Because growth is the pot beneath the rainbow. On the horizon. Which recedes as you approach, but you just keep moving.

There’s an urgent need for ideas about what to do in case growth does not return. But there are no such ideas. Turns out that the Spend! and the Cut! sides of the controversy are one and the same. The only real discussion should be whether we do or do not need growth, but instead the discussion is about how much growth is needed. And the answer to that is indentical for both sides: as much as we can.

The only good thing about all this is that if and when it becomes clear that there is no growth left in the system, all its one-dimensional advocates, from both the Spend! and the Cut! parties, will disappear into a great void. They have no idea what to do without growth. There is no economics class that teaches them, and they don’t have the brains to come up with an answer themselves. Indeed, perhaps it’s even true that a “not necessarily growth” situation, simply of its own accord, selects for other “leaders”. That power hungry psychopaths, in all the various degrees to which they float to the top of the dungheap, are wiped out and alienated by such a situation.

That could be a very good thing. It’s on the way there, however, that we will see unimaginable damage, mayhem and bloodshed. The forever and always growth classes have an iron grip on everyone’s lives. If only because everyone believes them. Still, just because they can’t change their ways and views doesn’t mean you can’t. You can see quite easily that, in a material sense, you have more than enough already. And many of you have clued in to the destruction ever more growth brings to your children’s living world (not to mention their brains). Unfortunately, quite a few then fall for the “more growth, but more greener” delusion. Or some steady state one (we don’t do steady, we don’t stand still).

When you get down to the heart of it, the only reason we need more growth is to pay off our debts. Which we owe largely to the same small group of rich, psychopathic and powerful that incessantly repeat the “need for growth” message, and makes sure it’s the only message available out there. But we will have to have the discussion some day, and it won’t be initiated by the people and powers that rule our societies today; that one’s up to us.

Newtok, Alaska is losing ground to the sea at a dangerous rate and for its residents, exile is inevitable.

The immediate image that comes to mind of “climate refugees” is people of small tropical islands in the Pacific or of a low-lying delta like in Bangladesh, where inhabitants have been forced out of their homes by sea-level rise.

The broader phenomenon is usually taken to be people displaced from their homes by the impact of a changing climate – although the strict definition of a refugee in international law is more narrow including people displaced by war, violence or persecution, but not environmental changes.

With climate change occurring rapidly in the far north, where temperatures are warming faster than the global average, the typical picture of the climate refugee is set to become more diverse. Sea ice is in retreat, the permafrost is melting, bringing the effects of climate change in real time to residents of the remote villages of Alaska.

These villages, whose residents are nearly all native Alaskans, are already experiencing the flooding and erosion that are the signature effects of climate change in Alaska. The residents of a number of villages – including Newtok – are now actively working to leave their homes and the lands they have occupied for centuries and move to safer locations.

Unlike those in New Orleans forced to leave their homes because of hurricane Katrina, their exile is not set in motion by a single cataclysmic event. Climate change in Alaska is a slow-moving disaster. But its effects are already very real for the native Alaskans who will be America’s first climate refugees.

From; http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/interactive/2013/may/13/newtok-alaska-climate-change-refugees