Totem Poles Of Power  

WorldChanging has a post on "Native Wind" which looks at the development of wind power generation on Native North American reservations, which will helpfully help to alleviate some of their problems as well as being a good example to their neighbours. I like the suggestion that the "Indian" nations could sign onto Kyoto - which would be a good way of giving George the finger.

We're accustomed to talk about leapfrogging as a process that happens elsewhere. But nearly every advanced industrialized country has pockets of poverty that are as damaging and as pervasive as you'd find in the developing world. They're also opportunities for leapfrogging -- and Native Wind may have the key.

In the United States, among the locations most in need of transformation are the Native American reservations. Native Wind wants to turn the reservations around by making them centers of wind power development. Most reservation areas in the western and mountain states have some amount of wind power potential. But it turns out that some of the richest areas for wind power can be found on reservation territories in the northern plains states: twenty reservation locations have a combined potential of around 300 gigawatts of wind power.

The Native Wind project is bringing together wind energy experts and tribal leaders to work out ways to build wind farms on tribal lands. Two wind facilities have already been built -- a 750kW turbine at the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation and another at the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota -- and two more should be completed by the end of this year. Fort Berthold alone is believed to have over 17 gigawatts of wind power potential. In 2006, the Rosebud location will be expanded into a 30MW wind farm, and another 80MW of wind farms are in development.

Next week will see the Native Renewables Energy Summit in Denver, Colorado. Among the questions the conference will tackle: should Native American tribes, as sovereign nations, sign on to the Kyoto treaty?

WorldChanging also has a post on the "Greening of China" - which discusses some positive steps. Given the huge number of new coal fired power stations they are building its hard to see that a few green urban developments are going to compensate for all the additional damage caused by Chinese growth though.

As China goes, so goes the future.

A successful bright green world requires a green China. A China that continues to spew tons of coal smoke into the air, tear up the landscape for dams and minerals, and push the adoption of the automobile as a "pillar industry" is a China that could drive the world past the environmental tipping point, regardless of the efforts of the rest of the planet. A year or two ago, the likelihood of Chinese leaders seeing this disaster unfolding and changing direction in time seemed slim. Now, we may well see a glimmer of hope.

The last month or so brought us a bonanza of reports about the new choices the Chinese leadership is making regarding the environment. Some are doubtlessly motivated by wanting to look good for the 2008 Olympics. But many of the proposals look to be the kinds of steps necessary for China to head off further environmental disaster -- big, risky steps, with the possibility of significant benefit should they succeed.

The BBC has a report on the large energy shortfall facing Britain.

Britain is facing a shortfall in energy supply in the near future, according to a major report. Within a decade, the country may be generating only about 80% of the electricity it needs.

A panel of 150 experts says fossil fuels will remain the mainstay of supply, with renewables expanding and nuclear power almost certainly needed. The panel urges the government to take steps quickly to solve the issue; doing nothing, it says, is not an option.

...

"Doing nothing is not an option," commented Shaun Fitzgerald from the BP Research Institute at Cambridge University. "If you don't want nuclear, there are hard choices to be made on other issues."

However, there was clearly some dissent from these conclusions among experts consulted for the report. "In the case of nuclear, the government should take a decision soon, and the decision should be 'no'," the chief executive of the solar energy company solarcentury Jeremy Leggett told the BBC News website.

"More than 50% of Britain's greenhouse gas emissions come directly or indirectly from buildings; and the key to reducing that lies in renewables and energy efficiency."

Tom Whipple has another article out in his series on peak oil at the Falls Church News Press that looks at the new resolution proposed by Roscoe Bartlett to the House of Representatives.

In a perfect world, the US Congress would have recognized decades ago that one day the world would run short of oil and would have initiated programs to mitigate the consequences. The initial steps are obvious: start a major conservation program and start moving the nation as quickly as possible to alternative sources of renewable energy— wind, solar, biomass, and waves. Along the way it might be nice to prepare for rationing, and the considerable social and economic distress that will ensue when oil depletion sets in, but conservation and alternatives would be a good start.

Democracies, however, simply don't work that way. It is very nearly impossible to convince people and their elected representatives something very bad is about to happen until it actually does. The New Orleans flood is a perfect example of this reluctance to recognize and deal with looming disasters.

Peak oil, therefore, is yet another example of denial with potentially much more serious consequences. Nearly every unbiased observer who has looked seriously at the issue comes to the conclusion world oil production will peak within ten years— tops. Nearly everybody who has seriously studied what we can do about it is saying it will take 10 to 20 years to develop significant alternatives to our voracious use of oil- and gas-based liquid fuels.

To effect a policy change in America of the magnitude needed to deal with peak oil, a critical mass of administration officials, industry leaders, members of Congress, opinion makers, and just plain citizens will need to form before serious Congressional action occurs. How long, and what it will take to induce this critical mass to form is one of the more interesting questions surrounding the advent of peak oil.

Two weeks ago Congressman Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland, who heretofore had been the only member of Congress speaking out about peak oil, introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives to the effect that peak oil is coming and we had better do something about it — now.

The preamble to the resolution reads as follows:

"Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States, in collaboration with other international allies, should establish an energy project with the magnitude, creativity, and sense of urgency that was incorporated in the `Man on the Moon' project to address the inevitable challenges of `Peak Oil'."

What was interesting about this resolution was not that Congressman Bartlett introduced it, but that he had 14 other members of Congress, including Falls Church's Jim Moran, sign on to it. Fifteen is a start. Not enough to pass a peak oil mitigation program, but a lot better than one.

Past Peak points to another article by Bill McKibben which the UnPlanner might enjoy, this one on the Brazilian city of Curitiba (which I've seen mentioned occasionally in the Economist over the years as a good example of development in the third world as well - which is even-handed of them given that the Curitibans aren't following neo-liberal principles).

This city has slums: some of the same shantytown favelas that dominate most Third World cities have sprouted on the edge of town as the population has rocketed. But even they are different, hopeful in palpable ways. They are clean, for instance — under a city program, a slumdweller who collects a sack of garbage gets a sack of food from the city in return. And Curitiba is the classic example of decent lives helping produce a decent environment. Because of its fine transit system, and because its inhabitants are attracted toward the city center instead of repelled out to a sprawl of suburbs, Curitibans use 25 percent less fuel per capita than other Brazilians, even though they are actually more likely to own cars. [...]

And so the story of Curitiba begins with its central street, Rua Quinze...[Longtime Curitiba mayor Jaime] Lerner insisted...that it should become a pedestrian mall, an emblem of his drive for a human-scale city. "I knew we'd have a big fight," he says. "I had no way to convince the store-owners a pedestrian mall would be good for them, because there was no other pedestrian mall in Brazil. But I knew if they had a chance to actually see it, everyone would love it."

To prevent opposition, he planned carefully. "I told my staff, 'This is like war.' My secretary of public works said the job would take two months. I got him down to one month. Maybe one week, he said, but that's final. I said, 'Let's start Friday night, and we have to finish by Monday morning.'" And they did — jackhammering the pavement, putting down cobblestones, erecting streetlights and kiosks, and putting in tens of thousands of flowers.

"It was a horrible risk — he could easily have been fired," said Oswaldo Alves, who helped with the work. But by midday Monday, the same storeowners who had been threatening legal action were petitioning the mayor to extend the mall. The next weekend, when offended members of the local automobile club threatened to "reclaim" the street by driving their cars down it, Lerner didn't call out the police. Instead, he had city workers lay down strips of paper the length of the mall. When the auto club arrived, its members found dozens of children sitting in the former street painting pictures. The transformation of Curitiba had begun.

Cheapness is one of the three cardinal dictates of Curitiban planning. Many of the city's buildings are "recycled." The planning headquarters is in an old furniture factory; the gunpowder depot became a furniture factory; a glue plant was turned into the children's center. An old trolley stationed on the Rua Quinze has become a free babysitting center where shoppers can park their kids for a few hours. The city's parks provide the best example of brilliance on the cheap. When Lerner took office for the first time in 1971, the only park in Curitiba was smack downtown — the Passeio Publico, a cozy zoo and playground with a moat for paddleboats and a canopy of old and beautiful ipé trees, which blossom blue in the spring. "In that first term, we wanted to develop a lot of squares and plazas," recalls Alves. "We picked one plot, we built a lot of walls, and we planted a lot of trees. And then we realized this was very expensive."

At the same time, as luck would have it, most Brazilian cities were installing elaborate flood-control projects. Curitiba had federal money to "channelize" the five rivers flowing through town, putting them in concrete viaducts so that they wouldn't flood the city with every heavy summer rain and endanger the buildings starting to spring up in the floodplain.

"The bankers wanted all the rivers enclosed," says Alves; instead, city hall took the same loan and spent it — on land. At a number of sites throughout the city, engineers built small dams and backed up the rivers into lakes. Each of these became the center of a park; and if the rains were heavy, the lake might rise a foot or two — perhaps the jogging track would get a little soggy or the duck in the big new zoo would find itself swimming a few feet higher than usual. "Every river has a right to overflow," insists parks chief Nicolau Klupel.

Mostly because of its flood-control scheme, in 20 years — even as it tripled in population — the city went from two square feet of green area per inhabitant to more than 150 square feet per inhabitant...From every single window in Curitiba, I could see as much green as I could concrete. And green begets green; land values around the new parks have risen sharply, and with them tax revenues.

TreeHugger has an article on using micro-windpower to power wireless networks, along with another on people using biodiesel to heat their homes.

Wireless networks have freed us from miles of cumbersome wiring needed to carry information, but the electronic 'nodes' of such networks still need power. If geologists want to place hundreds of sensors on a mountain to monitor seismic activity, for example, they either have to supply electricity using cables or hike out to each sensor every six months or so to replace batteries." The windmill developed by Shashank Priya, an electrical engineer from the University of Texas, can get power from the most gentle breeze. It is about 10 centimeters (a bit less than 4 inches) across and it is attached to a rotating cam that flexes a series of piezoelectric crystals that generate a current as the blades rotates.

The Oil Drum has a report on the ASPO USA conference in Denver.

Next up was Chris Skrebowski, well known to the Peak Oil community for his recent MegaProject Reports. Chris is a long time oil industry person and has edited Petroleum Review for the last eight years. He basically gave a summary of his current views on the near term situation. In essence, he agrees with CERA that there are about 16-17mbpd of new capacity coming on between now and 2010, and the key differences are around depletion. He assumes 5% depletion of the fields in production, which gets us in trouble pretty quickly.

Following Chris's talk, he and Tom sat for a Q&A session. I think the dominant message sent during the first sessions was "Credible people believe this stuff". There was a limited amount of really new material for peak oil followers, but probably these talks were more aimed at the folks at the conference that hadn't already drunk the cool-aid.

...

One of the speakers that I personally got the most out of was Henry Groppe, founder of Groppe, Long, and Littel, an energy analysis firm. While he is now a gentleman of increasing years, he struck me as extremely savvy and thoughtful and likely to be calling the future better than anyone else I've heard.

On the supply side, he believes oil is pretty much at peak and will flatten out and then start declining. But what caught my attention was his opinion on the demand side. He believes that something like 20mbpd of the current 84mbpd of oil demand is going for heat and power generation primarily in developing countries. He thinks that with oil in the $50-$60 range, all of this will get converted to coal or natural gas, and that, along with vehicle fuel efficiency, will be the main initial responses to peaking, and will keep us out of serious economic pain for a decade or so.

I need to research it, but that story made a lot of sense to me. Fuel switching in heat and power was exactly what the US and Europe did back in the late 70s and early eighties, so it's believable that developing countries would do that this time around. Combine that with a lot of OECD fuel efficiency improvements (which have already begun) and we can probably maintain economic growth through quite a bit of the early post-peak era (except for geo-political shocks). That also buys us more time to start doing the harder things that will need to be done down the road.

And I'll close with a link to an article by John Cusack on where we are today, which includes a good quote from Winston Churchill.

"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."