The crisis under the ice  

The LA Times has an op-ed from Jeremy Rifkin about the melting arctic - "Global warming enabled Russia's Arctic land grab, and now it could get worse."

Any lingering doubts about how ill-prepared we are to face up to the reality of climate change should have been laid to rest this month when two Russian mini-submarines dove two miles under the Arctic ice to plant a Russian flag made of titanium on the seabed. The government of Vladimir V. Putin claims that the seabed under the North Pole, known as the Lomonosov Ridge, is an extension of Russia's continental shelf and therefore Russian territory that will be open for oil exploration.

Russia is not alone in making such a claim. Geologists think that 25% of Earth's undiscovered oil and gas may be embedded in the rock under the Arctic Ocean. No wonder Norway, Canada and Denmark (through its possession of Greenland) are all using the continental-shelf argument to claim the Arctic seabed as an extension of their own sovereign territories. The sudden interest in Arctic oil and gas has put a fire under U.S. lawmakers to ratify the 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty, which allows signatory nations to claim exclusive commercial exploitation zones up to 200 miles out from their coastlines.

What makes this development so depressing is that the interest in prospecting the Arctic seabed, and subsoil, is only now becoming possible because climate change is melting away Arctic ice.

For thousands of years, the fossil fuel deposits lay locked under the ice and inaccessible. Ironically, the very process of burning fossil fuels releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide, or CO2, and forces an increase in the Earth's temperature, which in turn melts the Arctic ice, making available even more oil and gas for energy. Burning these potential oil and gas finds would further increase CO2 emissions in coming decades, depleting the Arctic ice even more quickly.

But there is an even more dangerous aspect to the unfolding drama in the Arctic. While governments and oil giants are hoping the melting ice will allow them access to the world's last treasure trove of oil and gas, climatologists are deeply worried about something else buried under the ice that, if unearthed, could wreak havoc on the biosphere, with dire consequences for human life.

Much of the Siberian sub-Arctic region, an area the size of France and Germany combined, is a vast, frozen peat bog. Before the most recent Ice Age, the area was mostly grassland, teeming with wildlife. The coming of the glaciers entombed the organic matter below the permafrost, where it has remained ever since. Although the surface of Siberia is largely barren, there is as much organic matter buried underneath the permafrost as there is in all of the world's tropical rain forests.

Now the permafrost is thawing on land and along the seabeds. If it occurs in the presence of oxygen on land, the decomposing of organic matter leads to the production of CO2. If the permafrost thaws along lake shelves, in the absence of oxygen, the decomposing matter releases methane. Methane is the most potent of the greenhouse gases, with a greenhouse effect 23 times that of CO2.

Katey Walter of the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks wrote in the journal Nature last year, and in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in May, that the melting of the permafrost and subsequent release of methane is a "ticking time bomb." ...

AP has a report that is somewhat encouraging - the head of Ford showing that he understands part of the bind they are in - US should consider gas tax: Ford chief. Make that a carbon tax chief. And then start making electric cars.

The United States should consider imposing a European-style gasoline tax if it hopes to improve energy security and tackle global warming, the head of Ford Motor Co. said Wednesday. "The way to get at is to make an economic decision just like in Europe where the fuel prices are seven or eight dollars a gallon," Ford chief executive officer Allan Mulally said. "Then our behavior would change dramatically."

The current policy of forcing automakers to maintain an average fuel economy level across their product lines is not sufficient to cut gasoline consumption and is harming the industry, Mulally said at an automotive conference in Traverse City, Michigan. "I've never seen a market distorting policy like CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy)," Mulally said. To keep average fuel economy standards in line, automakers have been forced to produce more smaller cars than there is demand for to be able to produce the larger models that customers really want, he said.

While automakers are committed to squeezing more fuel efficiency out of their vehicles every year, the technology does not exist to make the cuts legislators are asking for unless consumers stop demanding large, gasoline guzzling vehicles, he said. "The numbers that are being talked about are not possible -- you have to do it by the product mix," Mulally said.

While automakers have doubled the average fuel efficiency of vehicles on the road since CAFE was implemented in 1975, there are now three times as many vehicles on the road and they are driving four times as many miles, he said. And the US now imports 68 percent of its oil, up from 28 percent in 1975. "Energy independence is really important," he said. "But we've also got to do it in a rational way so we don't destroy a phenomenal manufacturing industry in the United States."

While I'm more than a little skeptical about peak oil industrial collapse scenarios, I can't resist throwing in some apocaphilia (or commentary thereon) from time to time, so here's the ArchDruid John Michael Greer pondering Cities in the deindustrial future. I might just repeat my "cities are the future" mantra here - what should happen is that cities will encrust themselves in cleantech and redesign themselves to become more and more efficient in their use of resources, and continue to be the engines of economic activity long into the future...

Some of the contemporary debates about the future of industrial society remind me forcefully of the opening scenes of John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress. The whole cast is present and accounted for.

The main character, Christian, is an ordinary guy who does some incautious reading and discovers that the city where he lives is slated for total destruction. The more he reads, the more worried he gets, but he has no idea what to do about it all. He has plenty of equivalents today, of course, and so do his family and friends, who consider the whole thing overblown and are convinced that Christian has basically gone nuts.

As Christian paces back and forth in the fields, crying out “What shall I do?” and making his family’s assessment look plausible, he meets a character named Evangelist – with Bunyan, you don’t need a program to tell you who’s who – who points out the direction Christian needs to run to escape the destruction to come. With that, he’s off, and the result is a thumping good read even if you don’t happen to share the religious beliefs that motivated Bunyan’s story. That’s where A Pilgrim’s Progress parts company with today’s less spiritually driven debates, though, because a contemporary pilgrim who hopes to flee the City of Destruction can count on a tolerably large mob of Evangelist wannabees pointing in every direction you care to name.

Since well before I launched The Archdruid Report I’ve fielded my share of emails from people in Christian’s position, convinced they ought to take action to face the arrival of the deindustrial age but wholly at a loss about what exactly they ought to do about it. Most of them seem to be convinced that the wicket gate through which they need to pass is located some fairly large geographical distance from wherever they’re currently living. That’s a common assumption, of course, and it’s not new to peak oil. One of the more amusing moments during the run-up to the Y2K noncrisis happened when two people preparing to relocate got into a conversation on an online forum; one of them lived in rural Alabama and had just decided to flee for safety to the Puget Sound area of Washington state, while the other lived in the Puget Sound area and had just decided to flee for safety to rural Alabama.

Go further back and you’ll find the same thing in every secular millennialist movement the United States has seen since the dawn of the 20th century. Whether the apocalypse du jour is nuclear war, pandemic disease, racial conflict, Communist takeover, fascist police state takeover, the imminent arrival of Antichrist, or what have you, the accepted way to deal with it is to flee to some isolated location in the mountains and wait for the rubble to stop bouncing. I’ve tried to challenge the kneejerk application of this same way of thinking to the consequences of peak oil in a number of previous posts, but there’s another side to the picture – the widespread notion that cities in the aftermath of peak oil will be deathtraps by definition.

That’s a belief just as deeply rooted in Western cultural history as its counterpart, the dream of fleeing to the wilderness for sanctuary on the eve of destruction. Those with a penchant for the history of ideas can trace it back to the Book of Genesis, where Lot flees from Sodom into the wilderness of Zoar just before the fire and brimstone hits, and to other passages in the Old Testament that reflect the lasting distrust of urban life the ancient Hebrews absorbed in their nomad years. Bunyan’s vision of the City of Destruction has archaic roots, and it played early and often into an enduring social schism in America’s collective life between the genteel urban society of the east coast, with its gaze fixed on Europe as the source of culture and manners, and the impoverished rural society of the hinterlands further west where a culture independent of white America’s European roots found its seedbed. Generations of circuit riders and revivalists riffed off the contrast between urban vices and rural virtues, simultaneously flattering their listeners, undercutting competition from older denominations with east coast roots, and feeding on popular bigotries against Catholics and Jews at a time when most American members of both these faiths lived in large east coast cities.

With the coming of the twentieth century, the same way of thinking helped drive the conviction that the best way to deal with the problems of urban America was to load up the moving van and leave the city behind, in exchange for the sanctuary of some comfortably middle-class suburb out of sight and reach of the poor. Thus it’s not surprising that the same tune gets replayed in a different key in today’s American secular apocalyptic, which draws its audience mostly from the white middle class. Too often the lifeboat communities imagined by today’s peak oil writers are simply suburban bedroom communities on steroids, postapocalyptic Levittowns that, like their 1950s equivalents, are meant to allow their residents to maintain a privileged way of life while the rest of society goes to hell in a handbasket at a comfortable distance.

Step outside the potent complex of cultural factors that make a flight to rural isolation seem like the obvious response to peak oil, and things take on a very different shape. Now it’s true, of course, that some cities are much too big and much too badly sited to survive the end of the age of cheap abundant energy. Los Angeles is probably the poster child for these abandoned ruins of the not too distant future, though most of the large cities of the Southwest could give it a run for its money – it’s easy to imagine tourists of the future wandering among the fallen skyscrapers of Phoenix or Santa Fe the way today’s tourists visit Teotihuacan or Chaco Canyon. Equally, it’s hard to imagine that Manhattan or inner city Chicago will become anything in the future but vast salvage yards for metals and other resources. Yet it’s crucial to note that the vast majority of America’s cities do not fall into these categories....

Dave Roberts at Grist has a note on Iraq and electricity again.

This post from Tom Grant at his excellent blog Arms & Influence reinforces the point I (channeling Amory Lovins) made in this post, namely:

The centralized power grid in Iraq is intrinsically vulnerable to terrorist attack, thereby crippling our efforts to create some measure of security and civil society. Our determination to rebuild it, rather than assisting the development of a decentralized micropower grid, is driven by corporatism rather than clear-eyed strategy.

Grant also makes another favorite point of mine, which is that the centralized grid serves as a mechanism of political control. That's why Saddam built it that way. Conversely, a decentralized grid serves to decentralize political power as well. That's part of why political powers fear it.

Links :

* IHT - Seoul to invest billions to compete with China, India for energy resources
* AllAfrica.com - Nigeria: Solar Energy And Competitive Advantage
* WorldChanging - Four Freedoms, Four Changes and the Earth Charter
* The Age - Eaton puts hybrid system into production
* TreeHugger - Province Of Ontario Canada Plans To Close All Coal-Fired Plants
* TreeHugger - How To Make Sustainable Housing Happen
* Past Peak - Extreme Weather World-Wide
* WSJ Energy Roundup - Will Dust Keep Hurricane Season Tame?
* The Guardian - Top Ten Green Websites
* The Market Oracle - The “Plunge Protection Team” Working Overtime to Save US Stock Market. Is the PPT real or imaginary ? You decide. I think its quite handy to have such a thing exist just as a rumour - if its existance was confirmed then there would be too much moral hazard involved in investing - but there are benefits to having people believe it exists during times of panic.
* ZDNet - Police agencies push for drone sky patrols
* SMH - Shredding Australia's Constitution. Ours was a lot weaker than the US one but they are both in tatters now. Our freedoms sacrificed to the god of big oil.

Word of the Day: Amishization - redesigning a product with simplicity in mind (well - thats what Kim Stanley Robinson reckons it means - I'm not sure what this guy is using the term for).