David Montgomery‘s Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations reminded me a lot of When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce, except that instead of looking at how we have allocated our water resources globally, it focuses on the way humanity has husbanded (or not) its soil resources throughout history, through a vast array of case studies in what we got wrong. It also reminded me a little bit of Energy at the Crossroads, insofar as the last chapter or two, instead of being a concrete, level-headed outline of what we need to do if we actually want to solve the problem which has been presented, it devolves a little bit into a lament. You’ve convinced me there’s a problem. Clearly you have some idea of what the solution looks like. Please don’t be afraid to put that idea into words, even if you think the plausible solutions are so far removed from our current way of doing things that someone is going to think you’re crazy. I think a lot of the most credible solutions to our sustainability problems sound “crazy” to “normal” people these days… but that’s just the way it is. We still need to know what the available solutions look like, or at the very least, what characteristics one can sketch out which any available solution has to have.
Deborah Tannen is a sociolinguist at Georgetown University who studies “genderlects” — the speech and conversational patterns that exist both between women and men, and also within same-sex communications. She wrote You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation in 1990, and it explores an interesting way to interpret several types of common (often, explicitly stereotypical) misunderstandings that take place between men and women. Her idea is that generally in conversation women are trying (perhaps unconsciously) to facilitate intimacy, building relationships through social connectedness, whereas men are attempting (also perhaps unconsciously) to negotiate a social hierarchy.
Before I finished Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age in the Salt Lake City airport Monday, I found a book by Carl Sagan in the bookstore. “The Varieties of Scientific Experience”, based on his Gifford Lectures from 1985 (and published posthumously, in 2006 by Ann Druyan). I read half of it in the airport, and the other half last night. It went fast, because I’d heard it all before. The main piece of new information was that a decade and a half after the fact, Carl Sagan is truly dead to me. I’ve read most of his books, I’ve seen his television series Cosmos several times. I love his ideas; they’ve shaped me throughout my life, but I no longer hope to find anything new in them. So long as there were pieces of his mind that had been recorded, but that I hadn’t yet been exposed to, it was as if he wasn’t quite gone. He was still, from my point of view, a dynamic entity.
Smil’s take on the future of fossil fuels seems very similar to that of Steve Koonin (and thus BP), namely that there’s plenty of all of them in the ground for us to damn ourselves to a hothouse hell, if we should so desire. I’m not entirely sure whether this strikes me as an optimistic, or pessimistic statement, but I suspect it’s pessimistic. If we were forced to change our energy systems, I believe (unlike many Peak Oilers) that we would be up to the challenge, dramatically reducing demand without reducing our standard of living, increasing conversion efficiencies, and innovating our way out of the mess partly technologically, and partly socially. If, on the other hand, we have to choose to stop burning fossil fuels, I’m much less confident that we’ll do the right thing.
Where does our energy come from today, and how do we use it? How much does it take to live the Good Life, and what, really, should that energy be used on? Where might it plausibly come from in the future, and what does the Good Life consist of anyway? Energy at the Crossroads by Vaclav Smil at least attempts to get at this stuff, looking at humanity’s utilization of energy, in the past, present, and several possible futures. But the book is a such a dense mass of numbers and graphs that I think I’m going to have to do this in several posts.
The first two sections Long-term Trends and Achievementsand Energy Linkages, look at how energy use correlates with other variables of interest, how those correlations have changed through time, and how they vary globally today. If there’s an overarching message here, it’s that nothing about today’s global energy system is straightforward. You can’t make many useful comparisons by looking at only one dimension, such as the total primary energy supply (TPES) utilized or the energy intensity (EI) of a nation’s economy, or by simply looking at mean values without considering the distribution they come from. These variables are not normally distributed. Another clear message is that the 20th century was an anomaly. The explosive global growth in fossil fuel utilization that we have seen over the last hundred years will not be sustained, for a variety of reasons, any one of which would be convincing, but which in combination are downright scary. Either the way our civilization uses energy will be utterly transformed, or the sources of that energy will change dramatically. Or both.
I just finished David Bodansky’s 600+ page tome Nuclear Energy. It’s almost a textbook, but not quite. I don’t know who the intended audience is really. Other than me. Similar genre, broadly, as The High Cost of Free Parking. A comprehensive overview of a technical topic, for those with a long attention span and no fear of numbers. I decided to read the book because of the recent turn toward nuclear power that some environmentalists have taken. There are many publics that react strongly, and negatively, to the idea, but I don’t trust public sentiment to be rational any more than I can manipulate it. Bodansky did an admirable job of remaining neutral throughout the book, on a topic that almost universally devolves into something resembling a religious debate. As a result of this reading, I’m much more positive (or rather, less negative) about nuclear energy than I was before. I think that my position, which I hope can count as an informed one, now closely resembles that of Ralph Cavanagh, as articulated in this debate with Peter Schwartz hosted by the Long Now Foundation.
The main questions I had coming into the book were:
Can nuclear energy be done responsibly?
What would it take for it to scale up meaningfully?
How would it compare in costs and risks to renewable energy sources, if it were done at responsibly scale?
The answers I came away with were that yes, it probably can be done responsibly, and at the scale necessary for it to be meaninful as a long term source of primary power globally. However, if it were to scale up responsibly in the long term, it seems that the associated costs would likely end up being greater than for renewable energy sources. So I guess I’m supportive of having the so-called “nuclear option” on the table, in competition with any other carbon free power source, with the significant caveat that the cost of the nuclear power being considered correspond to a responsible, long term, large scale deployment. The scenario I foresee needing to be avoided is ending up with an unfair comparison, between short-term and/or irresponsible and/or non-scalable nuclear power, and renewables — especially renewables as priced before the solar power industry has obtained whatever economies of scale there are to be had in their niche. One might be able to make a persuasive argument that we need to use nuclear power as a bridge between fossil fuels and renewables at scale, but I haven’t heard that argument made yet.
I finished reading Taleb’s second book, The Black Swan. He openly admits that it’s not really a new book, but a re-writing of his first book, Fooled by Randomness, which I loved. He’s gotten really incredibly lucky with the timing of his book releases… just before 9/11 and just before the stock market laid a giant turd on the doorstep of all the happytalk from Wall Street. Especially lucky when you take into account the fact that The Black Swan was at least 15 months late!
Taleb really has just one big idea, and in his own obnoxious way, he’s humble enough to admit it. His idea is that the world is less predictable than we think. That “rare” events are both systematically more likely that we believe them to be, and that their consequences are disproportionately large. He rails against the use of Gaussian distributions where they should not be used — against the mindless shoehorning of all kinds of processes into that bell shaped box, where they do not belong, and can do great damage.
I think the main differences between this book and his prior one are that in this book, he provides a few short words on how he thinks we should live and plan, given that we live in an inherently, and increasingly, unpredictable world. That, and the fact that because of his prior book’s success, he was able to get away without having this book edited, apparently, at all (which I think may have been a mistake… but oh well). Anyway, his advice in a nutshell:
I’ve been doing some reading on Afghanistan. I am so glad I wasn’t born there. I’m going to read more, but ugh, I need a break.
The first book I read was A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaleed Hosseini, who also wrote The Kite Runner. It reminded me a little bit of One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s intergenerational, it’s about a community, and it’s discontinuous – there are large spaces in time between the salient events which are conveyed. The style is also a little bit like the magical realism of Garcia Marquez, except that all the events really happened, and what makes them seem magical is how surreal they are. How surreal and awful.
When the Rivers Run Dry is a kind of modern, global Cadillac Desert, looking at present and future water issues around the world. I think in the end it was too ambitious, looking at too many individual situations superficially, without going into the details on how they came to be the way they are (which Cadillac Desert was able to do, since it focused only on the American West), and also without drawing enough insightful generalizations from the many different cases the author studied. It ended up feeling mostly like a dreary litany of mistakes painstakingly repeated in nation after nation, decade after decade, apparently without any learning going on. Often these projects were funded by the World Bank and other international “aid” organizations, or by powerful central governments. In both cases, the motivations often turned out to be short sighted and political or financial and had little to do with good engineering, productive agriculture, fisheries, or long term stability.
I just finished reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. It’s his personal account of working as an economic forecaster for an international infrastructure engineering and consulting company called Chas. T. Main during the 1970s (it’s since been purchased by Pasadena’s very own Parsons). If I remember correctly, I got this book from Arjun.
It was widely criticized when it came out as being the rantings of a conspiracy theorist, and I think that by the end of the book, it definitely takes on that tone. This is unfortunate, because a lot of the problems that Perkins points out really do exist, and it actually doesn’t matter much whether they’re the result of a shadowy global conspiracy, or a structural problem with our international economic and development system. But most good conspiracy theories contain a grain of truth, and at the very least they can provide a useful lens into how the same situation and facts can be interpreted differently by people in different positions, with different experiences, and different incentives. In that light, the book is asking the reader to consider what debt-based foreign development aid looks like from the point of view of the poor people living in the countries receiving the aid. This is actually a really interesting thing to think about right now, because our current financial and economic crisis has been described by some as similar in many ways to the kinds of crises which the IMF and World Bank have historically been called on to deal with in “developing” economies.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — Juvenal, Satires IV, after Plato
Incoming Memes
Twitterfeed
I think it's time to get out into that dusty, dusty Bat Country... 5 days ago
Just about packed... gonna nap until grocery and hardware stores open, or thereabouts. 5 days ago
Right. So I'm supposed to be all packed up and ready to go in 24 hours. Uh huh. We'll just have to see about that! 1 week ago
Thank goodness for coffee, waffles, dynamos and LEDs. Headed out to inspect 18km worth of bike lanes for @bouldergobldr on @burningman time. 1 week ago
Indulging in a little camouflage and para-aramid fiber lust, fashion bedamned! 1 week ago
How could I be anything but happy to have inspired someone else to go on a bicycle date? 1 week ago
Helping Kerry put up onions and tomatoes and other garden fruits for the long harsh winter. 1 week ago
Way up north it's the perfect temperature for moonbathing and stargazing with the crickets, cicadas, and toads. 1 week ago
Anybody up for another playa "training ride" tonight? Would it be absurd to try and ride to New Belgium and back by moonlight? 1 week ago
Biked on Boulder's paths all night with a mischievous girl in the moonlight and a waffle iron in my panniers. 1 week ago
Russia in color, a century ago2010/08/20 Incredible full color photos from all over the hinterlands of the Russian empire, around the year my grandmother was born. Just before it all disintegrated into chaos.
Profile: Viktor Bout2010/08/20 Viktor Bout, one of the arms dealers that served as a model for the protagonist in Lord of War, is set to be extradited from Thailand to the US. Russia is not pleased.
Poligraft | The Sunlight Foundation2010/08/18 Poligraft is an awesome tool from Sunlight for looking at the political influence and connections of people and organizations mentioned in news stories and press releases. A kind of digital political x-ray machine.
Federal R&D Agency Funding Profiles | Proposal Exponent2010/08/13 Good overview of where federal research dollars are spent. No surprise that it's dominated by DoD (more than half). And about half of the non-DoD funding goes to the NIH. The rest of us bicker over less than a quarter of it. Climate change? Renewable energy and efficiency measures? All in that quarter. Along with all geologic hazard research, the search for Earth crossing asteroids, habitable planets, life, and intelligence elsewhere in the Universe. All space exploration. All efforts to understand how ocean circulation works. All basic research into producing salt and drought tolerant crops, as well as soil and water conservation techniques. All archival sequencing of the world's extant species. All in that quarter. Eventually DoD will realize these things are security threats. Maybe they already have.
Cartoneros del Primer Mundo - lanacion.com2010/08/11 Box people of the first world? La Nacion, an Argentinian newspaper, wanted to use one of my dumpster diving pictures. Strange days.
Zoom into your Roof: Checking the Thermal Performance of Homes2010/08/11 Some cities in Belgium pooled resources to create a thermographic map of the buildings within their boundaries, for use as a resource to homeowners and building managers interested in doing attic insulation and infiltration retrofits. Awesome
With My Own Two Wheels2010/08/08 A documentary in progress, following various pedal powered projects around the world. With all the energy and technology we have access to in the US, it's easy to forget that for billions of people, access to this wonderfully simple 19th century contraption is still a bit step in the right direction. And actually... in many cases it would be for us too.
Deconstructing the groovy Bicilicuadora2010/08/08 Blender hooked up to a bike with a makeshift sidewall dynamo. Direct mechanical drive, and beautiful photos by Cass.
Clean Energy Action2010/08/03 Boulder may be deciding where its energy will come from for the next 20 years tomorrow... here's hoping we have the guts to do the right thing in a Long Now context. Rally at the Municipal Building 1777 Broadway, 5pm Tuesday 8/3!
