Sacrificing Our Children to the 'Corn God'  

John Stossel and Andrew Sullivan have an article out explaining why Libertarians hate ethanol just as much as environmentalists do - low EROEI means subsidies and pork barrelling, not energy security or sustainability.

The idea that ethanol is the answer is a myth. Ethanol is one thing that both Republican and Democratic candidates agree on this campaign season. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani voice their support for the corn-based fuel, and Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., Barack Obama, D-Ill., and former Sen. John Edwards want the government to subsidize ethanol production. According to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, "The economics of ethanol make more and more sense."

Ethanol "makes sense" to these politicians because, they say, it's a clean and renewable energy source that will slow global warming, protect the environment and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Plus, it just sounds good: Ethanol's made from corn, and we grow corn, so it just seems natural.

But if ethanol made so much sense, we wouldn't have to subsidize it or mandate its consumption. Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute said, "If you can make a profit in this economy by putting something on the market, the government doesn't need to put a gun to your head."

But ethanol producers do need the help of government subsidies if anyone is going to buy their product, because without subsidies it would cost much more than gasoline. And critics point out that the idea that ethanol is good for America in terms of energy prices, foreign policy or the environment is a myth.

Tom Paine has an article on the global warming fueled "new land rush" in the Arctic.

Recent news reports state that global warming and the shrinking Arctic icecaps are opening new sea lanes and making barren islands suddenly very valuable. In fact, the international community might experience a new race of exploration, conquest and acquisition for this "new world" -- these newly available lands and sea routes. Conflicts could arise over shipping lanes, islands, fish stocks, minerals and oil that are now becoming accessible and commercially exploitable.

Governments are even now engaged in asserting their sovereignty over these areas and assets. Canada, Denmark and the United States are already involved in diplomatic disputes over these issues. For example, Canada and Denmark have sent diplomats and warships to plant their flags on tiny Hans Island near northwestern Greenland.

In 1984, Denmark's Minister for Greenland Affairs landed on the island in a helicopter and raised the Danish flag, buried a bottle of brandy, and left a note that said "Welcome to the Danish Island."

Canada was not amused by this assertion of Danish sovereignty. In 2005, the Canadian Defense Minister and troops landed on the island and hoisted the Canadian flag. Denmark lodged an official protest. In addition, Canada, Russia and Denmark are claiming waters all the way to the North Pole.

Moreover, the United States and Canada are disputing Canadian claims that the emerging Northwest Passage sea route is in its territory. The U.S. insists the waters are neutral and open to all but Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper states that he will place military icebreakers in the area "to assert our sovereignty and take action to protect our territorial integrity."

This kind of conduct is nothing new. It mirrors exactly the actions taken by European and American governments in the 15th -- 20th centuries in their race to claim the lands and the assets of the New World of the Americas, Africa, and other areas. ...

TruthDig has a piece on the differences between US and UK climate policies. Given that I'm a fan of "The Lorax" I liked this section on the "nation of Once-lers".

Let’s begin with the most simple of explanations for the cross-Atlantic climate divide, one shared with me by global warming guru Bill McKibben: “Americans are deeper in denial because they’re deeper in addiction.” Best-selling author of “The End of Nature” and “Deep Economy,” McKibben has an arsenal of cheerless facts to back him up. The U.S., with only 4.6 percent of the world’s population, is now responsible for 23.5 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide, the dominant greenhouse gas. “Per capita, we use twice the energy of Europeans,” McKibben noted, conjuring an image of Joe Average driving home from Wal-Mart in his SUV, stocked with carbon-coughing gadgets and grocery bags full of perpetual summer (mangos from China, anyone?).

The Brits, meanwhile, ranked 38th in world carbon emissions per capita in 2003—a less-than-saintly stat, to be sure, but also one that reflects the UK’s unique history of incentives to reduce coal dependency. David Demeritt, a climate change expert at King’s College, London, pointed me to Britain’s “dash for gas” in the 1990s as the origin of the country’s kinder carbon status—a period after the privatization of the electricity sector when coal-fired power stations were replaced by more efficient gas-fired plants. The key motive? Not former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s pursuit of good climate karma, but rather her attempts to break the National Union of Mineworkers and cut energy costs. Even so, the resultant carbon reductions helped the Brits meet their Kyoto commitments with relative ease, while inaugurating an ongoing national quest for cheap and renewable energy sources.

At the individual level, guilt-ridden UK carbon addicts tend to enjoy more accessible rehab options than their American counterparts. Want to start keeping track of your electricity consumption? British Gas customers can easily install a smart-metering device that allows them to monitor their electricity use in real time or track it on their computer screen. Want to calculate your eco-footprint? Grass-roots “CRAGS”—carbon reduction action groups—offer self-help sessions with volunteer “carbon accountants” as well as a variety of DIY tools. Want climate-friendly produce? Britain’s extensive local food networks offer organic fruits and veggies while sparing you, for instance, the 127 calories of fossil energy it would take to transport a single calorie of iceberg lettuce from California to London. For those who’d rather not give up the mega-store shopping experience, Tesco—the nation’s largest supermarket chain—will soon be labeling all 70,000 of its products with the amount of carbon generated from their production, transport and consumption.

But if Britain offers more opportunities for citizens to make ecologically informed choices, whether or not people actually do is another question altogether. As appetites for cheap flights, big cars and big-screen TVs prove increasingly insatiable, the UK-U.S. addiction differential to which Bill McKibben points grows smaller by the day—and not because America is decreasing its carbon generation. Soon enough, Britain may be whistling to the tune of Dr. Seuss’ The Once-ler, that infamous corporate grump from “The Lorax” who currently holds America under his thumb: “I meant no harm. I most truly did not. But I had to grow bigger. So bigger I got.”

Technology Review has a look at a spark of hope for fusion. Maybe that race for the moon's helium reserves will be worthwhile after all. Bags not having the power plant anywhere near my house though...

A new device could bring high-yield nuclear fusion for generating electricity a step closer to reality, according to researchers at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, NM. The technology, developed by Sandia researchers in collaboration with the Institute of High Current Electronics, in Tomsk, Russia, can deliver very brief bursts of extremely large amounts of electricity and do it every 10 seconds thousands of times in a row. The researchers still need to use the device to produce a continuous series of miniature nuclear explosions that could heat water and drive turbines in a fusion power plant.

The Sandia device stores energy in a group of large capacitors and releases it very quickly, in just 100 nanoseconds. A new kind of physical arrangement of these capacitors prevents magnetic fields from forming and slowing electrical current, a major problem with previous devices. But while acknowledging that the technology is an important advance for delivering pulses of power, several experts say a power plant based on such technology faces significant hurdles, not the least of which is building the plant sturdy enough to withstand the strong explosions going off every 10 seconds.

While scientists have long known how to produce fusion--it's the heart of the hydrogen bomb--they've yet to find a way to harness that power in a power plant. Currently, the favored path to high-yield fusion that produces more energy than it consumes involves creating an ultrahot plasma and containing it within a magnetic field. An experimental machine designed to demonstrate such a concept is being built by a large international consortium in the south of France, and it's scheduled to be completed in about 10 years. (See "International Fusion Research.") But even if the project is successful, commercial-scale fusion power plants will still be decades away, as researchers will need to find ways to economically harvest the energy released by the fusion reactions.

Meanwhile, researchers have been routinely creating small amounts of fusion in the lab using a different technique, called inertial confinement. Here fusion starts when a small pellet of fuel is compressed by a burst of energy, which can be from different sources, including lasers. At Sandia, inertial confinement is now done with the Z machine, which uses electricity to create a burst of x-rays that compress the pellet. While such machines are good for helping to simulate nuclear weapons, they produce only a modest amount of fusion, releasing only a small part of the energy in the fuel. ...

Moving on from fantasies about the future to the grim reality of the present, TomDispatch has a good roundup of the history around our grab for the greatest prize of all - Iraq's oil fields. As the article notes, its a shame so little mainstream political debate talks about the actual reason for the war, as opposed to all the bullshit conservatives and their tame opponents blather on about. Its not like its just hippie protestors who understand what's going on - it seems every half-awake old company CEO or modern day tech mogul (using recent examples like lee Iacocca and Elon Musk that I've linked to) gets it - why can't politicians (other than people like Ron Paul and Mike Gravel) discuss reality for a change ?

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003, oil was seldom mentioned. Yes, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz did describe the country as afloat "on a sea of oil" (which might fund any American war and reconstruction program there); and, yes, on rare occasions, the President did speak reverentially of preserving "the patrimony of the people of Iraq" -- by which he meant not cuneiform tablets or ancient statues in the National Museum in Baghdad, but the country's vast oil reserves, known and suspected. And yes, oil did make it prominently onto the signs of war protestors at home and abroad.

Everybody who was anybody in Washington and the media, not to speak of the punditocracy and think-tank-ocracy of our nation knew, however, that those bobbing signs among the millions of antiwar demonstrators that said "No Blood for Oil" were just so simplistic, if not utterly simpleminded. Oil news, as was only proper, was generally relegated to the business pages of our papers, or even more properly -- since it was at best but one modest factor among so very many in Bush administration calculations -- roundly ignored. Admittedly, the first "reconstruction" contract the administration issued was to Halliburton to rescue that country's "patrimony," its oil fields, from potential self-destruction during the invasion, and the key instructions -- possibly just about the only instructions -- issued to U.S. troops after taking Baghdad were to guard the Oil Ministry. Then again, everyone knew this crew had their idiosyncrasies.

Ever since, oil has played a remarkably small part in the consideration of, coverage of, or retrospective assessments of the invasion, occupation, and war in Iraq (unless you lived on the Internet). To give but a single example, the index to Thomas E. Ricks' almost 500-page bestseller, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, has but a single relevant entry: "oil exports and postwar reconstruction, Wolfowitz on, 98." Yet today, every leading politician of either party is strangely convinced that the key "benchmark" the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki must pass to prove its mettle is the onerous oil law, now stalled in Parliament, that has been forced upon it by the Bush administration. In the piece below, Tomdispatch regular Michael Schwartz follows the oil slicks deep into the Gulf of Catastrophe in Iraq. He offers a sweeping view of the role oil, the prize of prizes in Iraq, has played in Bush administration considerations and what role the new oil law is likely to play in that country's future.

The Struggle over Iraqi Oil
Eyes Eternally on the Prize
By Michael Schwartz

The struggle over Iraqi oil has been going on for a long, long time. One could date it back to 1980 when President Jimmy Carter -- before his Habitat for Humanity days -- declared that Persian Gulf oil was "vital" to American national interests. So vital was it, he announced, that the U.S. would use "any means necessary, including military force" to sustain access to it. Soon afterwards, he announced the creation of a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, a new military command structure that would eventually develop into United States Central Command (Centcom) and give future presidents the ability to intervene relatively quickly and massively in the region.

Or we could date it all the way back to World War II, when British officials declared Middle Eastern oil "a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination," and U.S. officials seconded the thought, calling it "a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history."

The date when the struggle for Iraqi oil began is less critical than our ability to trace the ever growing willingness to use "any means necessary" to control such a "vital prize" into the present. We know, for example, that, before and after he ascended to the Vice-Presidency, Dick Cheney has had his eye squarely on the prize. In 1999, for example, he told the Institute of Petroleum Engineers that, when it came to satisfying the exploding demand for oil, "the Middle East, with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies." The mysterious Energy Task Force he headed on taking office in 2001 eschewed conservation or developing alternative sources as the main response to any impending energy crisis, preferring instead to make the Middle East "a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy." As part of this focus, the Task Force recommended that the administration put its energy, so to speak, into convincing Middle Eastern countries "to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment" -- in other words, into a policy of reversing 25 years of state control over the petroleum industry in the region.
...

The specific prize in Iraq is certainly worthy of almost any kind of preoccupation. Indeed, Iraq could someday become the most important source of petrochemical energy on the planet.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Iraq possesses 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, third largest in the world (after Saudi Arabia and Iran). About two-thirds of its known oil reserves are located in Shia southern Iraq, and the final third in Kurdish northern Iraq. However, in energy terms, only about 10% of the country has actually been explored and there is good reason to believe that modern methods -- which have not been applied since the beginning of the Iraq-Iran War in 1980 -- might well uncover magnitudes more oil. Estimates of the possible new finds offered by officials of various interested governments range from 45 billion to 214 billion additional barrels, depending on the source; but some non-governmental experts see the final treasure exceeding 400 billion barrels. If the latter figure is correct, then Iraq would likely become the world's largest source of oil.

For the most part, Iraq's petroleum has "attractive chemical properties;" that is, its oil is considered to be of very high quality. Moreover, both its current fields and many of the potential new discoveries would be extremely cheap to access, if security weren't such a problem today in Iraq. James Paul of the international policy monitoring group, the Global Policy Forum, offers this positive view:

"According to Oil and Gas Journal, Western oil companies estimate that they can produce a barrel of Iraqi oil for less than $1.50 and possibly as little as $1…. This is similar to production costs in Saudi Arabia and lower than virtually any other country."

With the price of a barrel of crude oil today above $64 a barrel, the potential for profits is stupendous and the only question is: Who will pocket them -- the oil companies or the Iraqi government -- and, if the former, which oil companies those will be? It is not inconceivable that any major oil companies able to claim a large portion of the Iraqi oil spoils could double, triple, or even quintuple their already gigantic global profits. ...

Apparently oil has been discovered offshore from Cambodia. Guess they better not get in Chevron's wqy or they'll be in for another round of day zero...

Still clawing its way out of the ruins of its brutal past, Cambodia has come face to face with an extraordinary new future: It seems to have struck oil.

Exploratory drilling began two years ago, and the oil giant Chevron says it has found potentially huge deposits off the southern shore. The company has not made the results known, but together with other likely deposits nearby and with mineral finds being explored onshore, experts say, Cambodia could be a resource-rich nation.

Top officials, including Prime Minister Hun Sen, have been feeding the excitement this year, offering extravagantly optimistic estimates that the oil money could start to flow within two to three years.

But all of this is not necessarily good news. For many struggling countries, like Nigeria and Chad, oil has been a poisoned bonanza, paradoxically dragging them into deeper poverty and corruption in what some call the oil curse.

Exxon's Russian subsidiary has drilled the world's deepest oil well on Sakhalin island. This reminded me of various abiotic oil theorists who claimed that Russian wells were being drilled to vast depths - does anyone know just how deep "normal" oil would be expected to be found at before abiotic oil starts to become a somewhat rational explanation ?

The world's deepest well was drilled by ExxonMobil's Russian subsidiary on Sakhalin Island, near Siberia.

The 37,016-foot well is part of Exxon Neftegas's Sakhalin 1 project, which dug its first well in 2003. Known as the Z-11 well, it is a product of the Yastreb rig, which is the world's largest land-based drilling rig, ExxonMobil said.

"The physics-based modeling and experimental validations of our (integrated hole quality) technology allowed us to successfully design and drill the Z-11," said Steve Cassiani, president of ExxonMobil Upstream Research Co. "With this technology we were able to take into account a broad range of interdependent design variables including rock strengths, stresses, and wellbore hydraulics to successfully drill this well."

The project is expected to bring over $50 billion in direct revenues to the Russian state, as well as major infrastructure improvements, technology transfer and the supply of natural gas to people in the Khabarovsk Krai in the Russian Far East, ExxonMobil said.

Clive Hamilton notes in Crikey today that for 4c a litre, we can kill the greenhouse effect.

Among all of the bleak commentary on global warming, today’s third report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provides some very good news. In contrast to previous reports of the IPCC’s Working Group III, the latest is much more optimistic about the prospects of avoiding the worst effects of global warming.

It concludes that sharply reducing global Greenhouse gas emissions over the next decades can be achieved at very low economic cost. For example, cutting emissions by 50% by 2050 can be had by sacrificing only one to two years’ economic growth.

Put another way, if the world economy grows at 3% per annum through to 2050, then, without any measures to reduce Greenhouse gas emissions, global GDP will be around 350% higher than it is now. With measures to stabilise the concentration of Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at 550 ppm, the report’s figures indicate that global GDP will be 'only' 348% higher.

But 550 ppm is still too high to avoid dangerous climate change. The report of Working Group I in February indicated that stabilising at 450-500 ppm would be much less dangerous. According to today’s report, measures to keep Greenhouse gas concentrations to this more stringent target would see global GDP grow by 'only' 345%'.

The report suggests that the carbon price needed to achieve the reduction to 550 ppm would be in the range US$20-50 per tonne of carbon dioxide. This would see petrol prices increase by 4-10 Australian cents a litre and electricity prices for householders rise by 2-5 cents a kilowatt hour on top of the 12 cents or so they pay now.

These are only the economic costs of cutting emissions, without taking account of the economic benefits of avoided climate change. Although cautioning about the uncertainty in making judgements in the absence of more studies, the IPCC report concludes that “even for the most stringent of stabilisation pathways assessed” the costs of reducing carbon emissions are comparable to or lower than the economic damage avoided.

This is the same conclusion as the Stern Review; even in purely economic terms, it makes sense to sharply cut emissions. ...

I came across this (slightly old) post about a local solar concentrator technology company called Sunengy today on TreeHugger.

Yet more thinking-out-of-the-box when it comes to solar energy. This time around Sunengy reckons we should be building floating panels connected into rafts of solar arrays. A thin film Fresnel sheet, held distant from the actual photovoltaic cell by a supporting frame, focuses the sun’s rays. The heat generated on the cell itself, is dissipated by siting it in contact with the water. The Fresnel lens will rotate into the water to protect itself in the advent of strong winds. Because the lens and cell unit rotates it can track the movement of the sun throughout the day. Sunengy from Australia also suggest their design uses 50 times less ‘exotic materials’ than standard solar cells reducing costs per kilowatt.

"Development Crossing" points to a new report from the IEA, outlining a clean energy future policy scenario (ie. something along the lines of the one we should be implementing right now).

This report is a summary of the International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook, focusing on its "Alternative Policy" and "Beyond the Alternative Policy" scenarios – a deliberate distinction aimed to spur action by underscoring the impacts on the future of the policy decisions made today. It is written in non-technical language to make it accessible to as wide an audience as possible.

The report highlights that early moves to shift towards a more sustainable energy system are more effective and cheaper compared to delayed action. It outlines some policy approaches that can bring about this shift and the time scales involved in it, noting that a delay of 10 years in implementing the Alternative Policy Scenario, for example, would push back the date of being on a sustainable path by several decades. It concludes that there is no sensible reason – economic or otherwise – to delay implementation.

"Development Crossing" also points to Toyota's new "Volta" hybrid car while looking at if Americans are ready to move away from non-hybrid cars (they don't seem to know about pure electric vehicles yet).

Gas prices are on the rise again, sparking more grumbles and moans from drivers who now are paying around $3 a gallon. Once again, we discuss what should we do?

Many have made substantial lifestyle changes to adjust to this new era of high fuel prices. We've exchanged minivans and SUVs for more fuel-efficient vehicles. Some are ride-sharing, some are cutting back on leisure drives and some are driving slower on the highway to conserve gas. But are American drivers ready to take the ultimate plunge into fuel-efficiency? Is America ready to shift from the gas combustion engine of most cars to the cleaner, quieter, and more fuel-conscious hybrid vehicles?

According to CarGurus.com, an online automotive community, consumers want vehicles that are more fuel-efficient but they are not enamored with hybrids. When asked whether their next vehicle would be a hybrid, 80 percent of online consumers in a recent survey responded 'no,' according to CarGurus.com. There are a lot of reasons why hybrids aren't hot buys in the United States. For starters, hybrid technology comes at a hefty price. Furthermore, some car buyers want vehicles that can go from 0-60 in mere seconds, clocking 0-60 in 5 seconds versus 10 seconds is a big deal for some drivers. A greater issue may well be the limited choices in vehicles. If you could buy your desired vehicle with hybrid technology, would you do so?

ASPO Australia reports that peak oil expert Roger Bezdek will be visiting Australia in late June, to speak at a conference in Sydney .

Roger is a senior economist and a co-author of two crucial recent US reports about the economics of peak oil and countermeasures. Both studies were prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy (National Energy Technology Laboratory).

July 2006 "Bezdek Report":
Economic Impacts of Liquid Fuel Mitigation Options

• Assessed economic implications in U.S.
• Estimated detailed impacts of four mitigation options
• Derived policy implications for U.S.


February 2005 "Hirsch Report":
Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management

• Assessed world mitigation supply and demand options
• Analyzed three mitigation scenarios
• Derived policy implications for required mitigation timeframes

"The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigationoptions exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking."

"In summary, the problem of the peaking of world conventional oil production is unlike any yet faced by modern industrial society. The challenges and uncertainties need to be much better understood. Technologies exist to mitigate the problem. Timely, aggressive risk management will be essential."

I listened to an interesting Ted Talk from Robert Wright this morning on his "non zero sum" theory of human development and his "grim optimism" that the arrow of history is still pointing upwards.

Author Robert Wright explains “non-zero-sumness,” a game-theory term describing how players with linked fortunes tend to cooperate for mutual benefit. This dynamic has guided our biological and cultural evolution, he says -- but our unwillingness to understand one another, as in the clash between the Muslim world and the West, will lead to all of us losing the “game.” Once we recognize that life is a non-zero-sum game, in which we all must cooperate to succeed, it will force us to see that moral progress — a move toward empathy — is our only hope.

Boing Boing reports that uranium futures are now trading on the NYMEX.

At 6 PM ET today, the New York Mercantile Exchange will offer a new market for uranium futures. The nucular stuff is hot. Currently trading at $113 a pound, it's up roughly 11 times from 2002 prices. I can't wait to see the investment scam emails this will inspire, soon to fill spamfolders everywhere: TH1S STOCK W1LL BL000W UP!!!11!1

GNN has a fairly in-depth article on bee colony collapse disorder called "Please Lord, not the bees". Some good news Monsanto - they think it unlikely GM crops are to blame. Not so good for you guys at Bayer (or the pesticides part of Monsanto) though - pesticides are still considered a likely culprit.

It sounds like the start of a Kurt Vonnegut novel:

Nobody worried all that much about the loss of a few animal species here and there until one day the bees came to their senses and decided to quit producing an unnaturally large surplus of honey for our benefit. One by one, they went on strike and flew off to parts unknown.

Among the various mythologies of the apocalypse, fear of insect plagues has always loomed larger than fear of species loss. But this may change, as a strange new plague is wiping out our honey bees one hive at a time. It has been named Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, by the apiculturalists and apiarists who are scrambling to understand and hopefully stop it. First reported last autumn in the U.S., the list of afflicted countries has now expanded to include several in Europe, as well as Brazil, Taiwan, and possibly Canada.

Apparently unknown before this year, CCD is said to follow a unique pattern with several strange characteristics. Bees seem to desert their hive or forget to return home from their foraging runs. The hive population dwindles and then collapses once there are too few bees to maintain it. Typically, no dead bee carcasses lie in or around the afflicted hive, although the queen and a few attendants may remain.

The defect, whatever it is, afflicts the adult bee. Larvae continue to develop normally, even as a hive is in the midst of collapse. Stricken colonies may appear normal, as seen from the outside, but when beekeepers look inside the hive box, they find a small number of mature bees caring for a large number of younger and developing bees that remain. Normally, only the oldest bees go out foraging for nectar and pollen, while younger workers act as nurse bees caring for the larvae and cleaning the comb. A healthy hive in mid-summer has between 40,000 and 80,000 bees.

Perhaps the most ominous thing about CCD, and one of its most distinguishing characteristics, is that bees and other animals living nearby refrain from raiding the honey and pollen stored away in the dead hive. In previously observed cases of hive collapse (and it is certainly not a rare occurrence) these energy stores are quickly stolen. But with CCD the invasion of hive pests such as the wax moth and small hive beetle is noticeably delayed.

Among the possible culprits behind CCD are: a fungus, a virus, a bacterium, a pesticide (or combination of pesticides), GMO crops bearing pesticide genes, erratic weather, or even cell phone radiation. “The odds are some neurotoxin is what’s causing it,” said David VanderDussen, a Canadian beekeeper who recently won an award for developing an environmentally friendly mite repellent. Then again, according to Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the top bee specialist with the Pennsylvania State Department of Agriculture, “We are pretty sure, but not certain, that it is a contagious disease.” ...

Case in point, this same story (among several others, to be fair) attributes a juicy but dubious quote to Einstein: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left.”

Einstein, in all likelihood, never said that, but if he did, it is a justifiable exaggeration. Bees certainly are important, and it will get ugly if we lose them. “It’s not the staples,” said Jeff Pettis of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service. “If you can imagine eating a bowl of oatmeal every day with no fruit on it, that’s what it would be like” without honeybee pollination. ...

Michael Bush felt compelled to put a message to the beekeeping world right on the top page:

Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites. I’m happy to say my biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through the winter and coming up with hives that won’t hurt my back from lifting or better ways to feed the bees.

This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I’ve gone to natural sized cells. In case you weren’t aware, and I wasn’t for a long time, the foundation in common usage results in much larger bees than what you would find in a natural hive. I’ve measured sections of natural worker brood comb that are 4.6mm in diameter. …What most people use for worker brood is foundation that is 5.4mm in diameter. If you translate that into three dimensions instead of one, it produces a bee that is about half as large again as is natural. By letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems. One cause of this is shorter capping times by one day, and shorter post-capping times by one day. This means less Varroa get into the cells, and less Varroa reproduce in the cells.

Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. ...

It is not an uncommonly held opinion that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems to have struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering agent), it is likely that some biological limit in the bees has been crossed. There is no shortage of evidence that we have been fast approaching this limit for some time.

“We’ve been pushing them too hard,” Dr. Peter Kevan, an associate professor of environmental biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, told the CBC. “And we’re starving them out by feeding them artificially and moving them great distances.” Given the stress commercial bees are under, Kevan suggests CCD might be caused by parasitic mites, or long cold winters, or long wet springs, or pesticides, or genetically modified crops. Maybe it’s all of the above. ...

Bees are finely tuned machines, much more robot-like than your average species. They operate pretty much like the Borg of Star Trek fame. A honey bee cannot exist as an individual, and this is why some biologists speak of them as super-organisms. They are sensitive barometers of environmental pollution, quite useful for monitoring pesticide, radionuclide, and heavy metal contamination. They respond to a vide variety of pollutants by dying or markedly changing their behavior. Honeybees’ stores of pollen and honey are ideal for measuring contamination levels. Some pesticides are exceptionally harmful to honey bees, killing individuals before they can return to the hive.

Not surprisingly, the use of one or more new pesticides was, and likely remains, on the short list of likely causes of CCD. But more than pesticides could potentially be harming bees. Some scientists suspect global warming. Temperature plays an integral part in determining mass behavior of bees. To mention just one temperature response, each bee acts as a drone thermostat, helping cool or warm the hive whenever it isn’t engaged in some other routine.

As you might expect, rising temperatures in springtime cause bees to become active. Erratic weather patterns caused by global warming could play havoc with bees’ sensitive cycles. A lot of northeastern U.S. beekeepers say a late cold snap is what did the damage to them this year. Bill Draper, a Michigan beekeeper, lost more than half of his 240 hives this spring, but it wasn’t his worst year for bee losses, and he doesn’t think CCD caused it. He thinks CCD might stem from a mix of factors from climate change to breeding practices that put more emphasis on some qualities, like resistance to mites, at the expense of other qualities, like hardiness.

According to Kenneth Tignor, the state apiarist of Virginia, another possibility with CCD is that the missing bees left their hives to look for new quarters because the old hives became undesirable, perhaps from contamination of the honey. This phenomenon, known as absconding, normally occurs only in the spring or summer, when there is an adequate food supply. But if they abscond in the autumn or winter, as they did last fall in the U.S., Tignor says the bees are unlikely to survive.

A bee colony is a fine-tuned system, and a lot could conceivably go wrong. This is presumably why some scientists suspect cell phone radiation is the culprit behind CCD. This theory holds that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bee navigation systems, preventing them from finding their way home. German research has shown that bees behave differently near power lines. Now, a preliminary study has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. The head researcher said the result might provide a “hint” of a possible cause. Maybe they should check to see if beekeepers suddenly started using BlackBerrys in 2004.

It should be noted that the CCD Working Group at Penn State believes cell phones are very unlikely to be causing the problem. Nor are they interested in the possibility that GMO crops are responsible. Although GMO crops can contain genes to produce pesticides, some of which may harm bees, the distribution of CCD cases does not appear to correlate with GMO crop plantings.

Honey bees are not native to North America or Europe. They are thought to come from Southeast Asia, although some recent research based on genomic studies indicates that their origin is actually in Africa. (21) Regardless, they represent only seven of the approximately 20,000 known species of bees. Apis mellifera, the most commonly domesticated species of honey bee, was only the third insect to have its genome mapped. These useful, and very prevalent, bees are commonly referred to as either Western honey bees or European honey bees. Although it is a non-native species, the honey bee has fit in well in America. It is the designated state insect of fifteen states, which surely reflects its usefulness.

Apis mellifera comes in a wide variety of sub-species adapted to different climates and geographies. Behavior, color and anatomy can be quite different from one sub-species to another, the infamous killer bees being a case in point. The Native Americans called the honey bee “the white man’s fly.” It was introduced to North America by European settlers in the early 1600s, and soon escaped into the wild, spreading as far west as the Rocky Mountains. Thus, there are significant numbers of feral hives in North America, though most of the honey bees you will see are working bees.

But you may not have even seen one for a while. These days, many gardeners are discovering that they must hand pollinate garden vegetables, thanks to widespread pollinator decline. It is more than fair to say that the extreme importance of honey bees as pollinators today stems from the fact that native pollinators are in decline almost everywhere.

The pollination of the American almond crop, which occurs in February and March, is the largest managed pollination event in the world, requiring more than one third of all the managed honey bees in the United States. Massive numbers of hives are transported for this and other key pollinations, including apples and blueberries. Honey bees are not particularly efficient pollinators of blueberries, but they are used anyway. We depend on managed honey bees because we are addicted to a monoculture-based managed agricultural sector.

There has been criticism that media coverage of the CCD story, perhaps in its quest to achieve the requisite ‘balance,’ has been too rosy. Some stories note that other pollinators are more significant than honey bees for many crops. But these stories seldom go on to tell how other pollinators are facing problems too. The BBC recently reported on the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, which is currently enlisting the public’s help to catalogue bumblebee populations. The story noted that several of the U.K.’s 25 species are endangered, and three have gone extinct in recent years.

Another recent story in The Register stated that several U.K. bumblebee species are “heading inexorably for extinction.” According to scientists, the process is caused by “pesticides and agricultural intensification” which could have a “devastating knock-on effect on agriculture.” The disappearance of wildflower species has also been implicated in the British bumblebee decline.

Bumblebees are, however, doing well in one region, Neath Port Talbot, which was declared the bumblebee capital of Wales in 2004 after experts found 15 different species thriving there. This is almost certainly because the local council allows roadside verges to become overgrown with “weeds” and wildflowers.

Surprise — it’s an ecosystem thing. As with honeybees and CCD, the root of the bumblebee problem lies in our modern rationalist drive toward endlessly ordering the world around us. The long-term solution is a return to a more natural ecological order. This interpretation needs to be conveyed when mainstream media tell the CCD story.

Of course, with all the parasites, pathogens, pesticides and transit to stress out our hardworking honey bees, they are in peril. Even if some silver bullet saves us from CCD, it is more than obvious that we need to pay more respect to bees, and to nature. This truth may be generalized to most facets of our agricultural existence; the bees are just a warning. Wherever you look, pests are getting stronger as the life forms we depend on get weaker. Adding more chemicals isn’t going to help for much longer.

Beekeepers are a busy and underpaid lot, and we should pay more heed to their services. Even now, with the vanishing bee story headlining on major networks, government players appear to have their eyes elsewhere. “There used to be a lot more regulation than there is today,” says Arizona beekeeper Victor Kaur. “People import bees and bring new diseases into the country. One might be colony collapse disorder.”

“The bees are dying, and I think people are to blame,” is how Kaur puts it simply. “Bee keeping is much more labor intensive now than it was 15 years ago. It’s a dying profession,” he eulogizes. “The average age of a beekeeper is 62, and there are only a couple of thousand of us left. There are only about 2.5 million hives left. …It’s too much work.”

If CCD proves to be more than a one-time seasonal fluke, the job of beekeeping just got a lot harder. Pollination can’t be outsourced, although it isn’t too difficult to imagine fields full of exploited underclass laborers pollinating crops by Q-tip. Let’s hope we never have to go there.