What united all these extralegal commodity flows [...] was the unsanctioned circulation of goods and services that either because of the way they are produced or because of the way they are consumed violate someone’s ethical sensibilities.

One of his main points is that the steepness of that moral or regulatory gradient translates pretty directly into profit margins.  Cocaine increases in value by 1400% when you bring it across the US border.  This creates incredible incentives to get around the rules, even at great risk.  This is why Prohibition rarely works as a policy.  Any attempt at eradication financially empowers those who are willing to continue taking the risks you’re able to impose.

He listed nine industries with dark twins: Tourism (sex tourism), Pharma (illicit drugs), Waste Disposal (toxic dumping), Military (arms dealers… hmm, actually, those are kind of the same), Commodities (illegally harvested, but otherwise legal natural goods), Healthcare (human organ trade), Software (malware and botnets), Immigration (human trafficking and illegal immigration), Finance (money laundering).  The scale of these industries, altogether, is of the order trillions of dollars, or of order 10% of the global GDP.  They are not marginal, informal activities.  They are a non-negligible component of globalization.  they are a couple of orders of magnitude larger than all foreign aid, and an order of magnitude larger than international remittances.  They are organized, and they do the same general kinds of business planning that you’d learn about if you got a Harvard MBA.  They are also, in a perhaps uncomfortable sense, “actually existing development programs“.  400,000 people are directly employed by the Mexican drug trade.  That’s more people than any other industry in Mexico except tourism and agriculture.  Deviant globalization is real globalization.  It’s real money.  It’s real jobs.  It’s a real way for people to get by, and whether we happen to like it becomes at some level immaterial.

In extreme cases, these organizations end up hollowing out the states or regions in which they operate.  The FARC in rural Colombia.  The pirates of Puntland.  The Kurds in northern Iraq.  We are not accustomed to dealing with places that aren’t part of some state or another, and businesses that aren’t subject to legal jurisdiction, but that’s just because we live now.  Five hundred years ago, this would not have been such an unusual situation to find yourself in.  There’s nothing magic or inevitable about the Westphalian state.  Historically, that kind of jurisdictional uncertainty and physical insecurity has created huge transaction costs, and inhibited commerce.  To trade, you needed your own private army.  However, today information and transportation technologies, as well as some remnant state based infrastructure and control, have enabled relatively easy flow of goods and services even where it’s not entirely clear who is in charge.  Who cares whether it’s legal or not: once the oil is in the tanker, we’re good to go.

Another key point is that these actors have little to no interest in actually replacing the states which they happen to be undermining.  They are not revolutionaries.  Providing social services like roads and electricity and education and healthcare isn’t generally part of the business plan.  It may in some cases be a good idea, in order to build political support for your organization among the local constituency… but it’s not the reason your organization exists.

It seems like at some level there’s a continuum being populated, from state-like businesses to business-like states.  What is the FARC really?  Is it actually a revolutionary army?  Or is it the domestic security division of a transnational biopharmaceutical company?  What is Blackwater Worldwide (aka “Xe Services LLC”)?  Is it part of the US military or is it part of e.g. Halliburton?

I like the framing of deviance as not corresponding directly to legality or illegality, because it’s actually not entirely clear who it is that’s making the laws in a lot of the world, including the US.  If drug cartels were involved in the legislative bodies deciding whether or not drugs were going to be illegal, and how illegal they were going to be, would you still think that legality was the right way to decide whether their activities were acceptable?  But oil and coal companies are intimately involved in the rule making processes which end up regulating them.  The finance industry appears to have little meaningful oversight at the international level because they’ve integrated themselves so completely with the regulatory framework.

It might seem strange, but almost any piece of the global economy, from somebody’s point of view, is deviant.  We think that Shell pumping oil out of the Niger delta is fine, because we get the oil.  MEND begs to differ.  Who gets to decide?  What about children working for less than a dollar an hour in southeast Asia, sewing shirts for Banana Republic?  Is that ethically questionable?  Some of us think so.  It just so happens we don’t care enough to change the laws.  Or help organize labor over there.  Or to avoid buying those shirts.  Or to blow up the stores, shipping containers, and factories.  It’s not so much whether or not anyone finds your segment of the global economy ethically objectionable, it’s how much and what kind of power those who find it objectionable wield.  If the US government, or equivalently, major transnational corporations domiciled in the US, think what you’re doing is “morally objectionable” (not in their interests), then you’re often screwed.  If a bunch of hippycrunch trustifarians think you should shut down your coal fired power plant, well, who gives a shit?  Nobody, until one of them breaks in and takes down 500MW of generating capacity.

Not incidentally, the “how much power” these folks wield is pretty directly correlated with whether or not they can find a business (or tax) model that thrives on the moral disequilibrium in question.  We like to think that the governments are the morally legitimate actors, and the others are the deviants.  Governments define the “rule of law” after all.  But when lawmakers are captured by corporate interests, the rule of law becomes suspect.  Its validity is diluted.  What’s right, what’s legal, and what you can get away with are entirely different things, and at some level it seems to me that there are those arguing from the point of view of what’s right, and those who are arguing from the point of view of what you can get away with, are both fighting for control of what will end up being legal, or whether “legality” continues to be a significant characteristic of any economic activity.  When the main economic actors are intimately involved in determining whether some economic activity is legal or not, the designation of economic activity as “black market” vs. legitimate becomes moot.

In other words, if corporations effectively make the laws, all markets become gray.  It is only by separating the rulemaking bodies and the economic actors that we can effectively decide what kinds of economic activity we would like to sanction, and what kinds we would like to discourage.  As Gilman points out, even if we do make that separation, there’s only so much we can do to influence the shape of trade, as the potential for arbitrage tends to scale with the effectiveness of enforcement.  So we are left with hard questions as to which kinds of (perhaps) objectionable activity we would like to put up with, and where.  There are other kinds of order besides the “rule of law”.  A lack of law does not necessarily mean a state of anarchy.

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.

The basic problem that Montgomery lays out is the combination of the plough, topography, and gravity.  Ploughing inevitably disturbs soil.  Disturbed soil on a slope goes downhill, especially in places where the rain isn’t gentle.  If the net flux of the soil going downhill is greater than the rate of soil production in situ in the long term, you’re fucked.  And the net flux of soil going downhill is greater than the rate of soil production, just about everywhere.  About a third of the Earth’s inventory of topsoil has been washed into the oceans as a direct result of human deforestation and agriculture.

The simplest description of soil breaks it into 3 layers or horizons.  Topsoil, or the A horizon, is the relatively organic rich layer containing most of the living matter in the soil.  The subsoil, or B horizon, is poor in organic material, somewhat weathered chemically, and made up of relatively small particles.  The C horizon, or parent rock, is largely unweathered boulders or bedrock.  Slowly over millennia water and oxygen and biological forces penetrate into the crust dissolving and fracturing the rock.  The rate of this penetration is roughly the rate of soil formation, and it’s of order millimeters to centimeters per century, whereas using industrial agriculture techniques on slopes can result in erosion rates of 10-100 cm per century.  Topsoil thickness in a particular place will eventually come to equilibrium under a given land use.  The problem is that with most agriculture today, that equilibrium thickness is zero.

Forests allow thick, rich soils to form even in sloping places by reducing the erosion rate significantly.  They soften the impact of rains, and their roots physically hold the soils in place.  Their roots also contribute to the mechanical weathering of the parent rock.  In the short term, clearing forests to open up new farmland seems like a good idea, but ultimately, it ends up being more like soil mining, as without the trees, the equilibrium thickness is significantly reduced, and the soils end up in the bottomlands (and may even temporarily improve farming down there… before getting washed out to sea).  Deforestation agriculture in the (flat) tropics generally fails for a somewhat different reason.  When temperatures are high, and rainfall is plentiful, all the soluble mineral nutrients that plants require get leached out of the soils, and the entire available inventory accumulates in the local biota, and increases only very slowly with time.  Remove that biota, and you’ve removed most of what made the area capable of being lush, and you’ll be forced to import all the nutrients your crops need if you want to keep them producing.  In contrast, irrigated agriculture in arid climates (net evaporation) destroys soil productivity in place by depositing mineral salts over time (cf. Mesopotamia, the Indus and the San Joaquin Valley).

The only way to make sloping farmland work long term seems to be fairly labor intensive terracing… which is really just a way to make sloping farmland flat.  The relatively closed nutrient loop terraced rice paddy system that has developed in Bali seems to have been stable on a 1000 year timescale… which is pretty unusual.  Carefully managed floodplain agriculture in non-arid climates also seems to be workable potentially long term, but historically has proven unstable because of population growth, and expansion of the practicing civilizations into more marginal upland areas, with the associated deforestation.  Large scale loess deposits like are found in the periglacial plains of midwestern North America, northern China, and parts of the former Soviet Union also may be able to support long term agriculture, but only if they are protected from heavy rains and winds like those that created the Dustbowl, meaning that you can never till the soil and leave it bare, and must instead use continuous cover crops, and in all likelihood no-till agricultural methods.  As it turns out, these methods can also potentially sequester significant amounts of carbon in the soils, which would be a good thing.

In the end, the message seems to be that certainly using current methods, we are far beyond Earth’s sustainable food production.  Since in the US we currently throw away half of our food, and a lot of that is unnecessarily produced meat anyway, there’s a lot of slack to work with.  In places like India and China, I have to imagine there’s less food waste, and I know there’s far less meat consumption and waste, so this slack is not globally distributed.  There are more labor intensive (and less profitable) methods of agricultural production that get much more food per unit soil (and less per man hour), but as of yet, there seems to be limited interest in getting more people tending the land.  There are surely also approaches to this problem which would involve genetic engineering.  Not the proprietary and dishonest kind that (e.g.) Monsanto generally hocks, but the open and altruistic kind that (e.g.) Pamela Roland is advocating.  Is it without issues?  Of course not.  But neither are any of the other options on offer.

In the fullness of time, everything about our agricultural system will be detached from the mines.  We will not mine the soil, and send it to the sea.  We will not mine fossil fuels to fertilize, or bring in rock phosphate by the trainload.  We will not mine the vast post-glacial aquifers.  We will not do these things because they will not be options any more.  What we have to decide is whether we’d like to live at a modest level of agricultural consumption, investing more labor and intelligence and less materials and energy in the production of our food, or whether we would like to continue the historical agricultural boom-and-bust pattern, periodically dropping into famine and despair while the forests regrow, and the soils rebuild, as the sedimentary records indicate they did in pre-Roman Europe, and again after Rome fell, for centuries.  Choosing the former stable solution within any system resembling our current economy will require deciding that in matters of soil conservation, the right discount rate is zero.  This is true for many long term sustainability issues, and I just don’t see anybody working toward it in a generalized way within the finance world.  Hopefully I’m wrong.

Exactly the same statements and conversation fragments can be interpreted very differently using these two lenses, as Tannen illustrates by looking at a series of stereotypically failed interactions between men and women, either from real recorded conversations, or out of dialogue samples from books and films.  Her style of study is very descriptive and very narrative.  Ultimately, she’s telling a story about conversations, and choosing examples that bolster her case.  I don’t think I’d call it science, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting.  Certainly many, and possibly most, of her interpretations of the male conversational point of view (which I have to imagine is more alien to her personally) seemed to ring true with me.  I’d like to see what Michelle thinks about her interpretations of the female side of things.

Even if Tannen is wrong in some sense, even if this isn’t really what’s going on behind the different male and female ways of speaking, her framework can still be useful, because it gives men and women a relatively altruistic way to interpret what might otherwise seem hurtful.  It can serve as a kind of scaffold for optimism, especially if both people feel like it makes sense.  At the same time there’s some danger in enabling altruistic explanations: not everyone is altruistic all the time.  So even if you think you know what kind of interaction you’re having, if the motive of the other person isn’t to build intimacy, or if you fear that’s not the motive, then the whole system breaks down.  Tannen laments the stereotypes of women as manipulative and indirect gossips, and of men as hierarchical monkeys trying to get a leg up on the pile, but certainly in the enormous space of human interactions, there are people who know intuitively how these conversational styles can be abused selfishly, and the rest of the people must know they exist.  Somehow we have to bootstrap ourselves up to knowing each other well enough to believe we’re going to be altruistic in our interactions, and then be careful to stay in that domain.

There was a period last year during which I was on a very erratic sleep schedule, and often Michelle would go to bed before me, but I’d be at home working or reading or just trying to get sleepy enough to go to bed.  I don’t like to read in bed with someone else there because sometimes it ends up being hours before I want to stop reading and turn the light off, and I know it’s annoying to be trying to sleep with the light on next to you.  And I know Michelle thinks it’s annoying too, from the grumpy sleepy faces she makes when it happens… even if she doesn’t remember it in the morning.  So to me, going to bed means going to sleep.  But for Michelle, it’s not really the end of the day just quite yet, and so she wanted me to come in and say good night and tuck her in when she was finally ready to go to sleep.  For a while, she’d call me in, and I’d kiss and tuck, but eventually I started resenting the routine.  It started feeling more like a command, or a token imposition to demonstrate control.  Her power to distract me, and pull me away from whatever I was doing at a moment’s notice.  It started feeling like a chore, instead of an opportunity to be intimate.  But if I try looking at this interaction through Tannen’s female goggles, it makes the request seem not only harmless, but sweet, and my eventual resistance to it very mean.  It doesn’t matter if Tannen is right (though in this case she does seem right to me) if just having the framework allows both of us to interpret the same interaction in a more friendly loving way.  I’m curious what the view through the male goggles looks like to Michelle.

The book seemed more to focus on examples like the above, with incorrect male interpretations of female words, and the resulting loss of intimacy.  It’s not really billed as a “self help” or relationship book, so there wasn’t much in the way of explicit instructions for either or both parties, but I did get the sense that she was more trying to change men’s perceptions of interactions, and style of speech.  Maybe that’s just because the author is female, and I’m male.  But there were some interesting examples from the other side too, of patterns of generally inter-male intimacy building conversation patterns, which I definitely found familiar.  A kind of mutual challenge and response, in which the parties are trying to match, but without escalating the conflict too far.  Conspicuous backing off, or one person making themselves vulnerable, and the other refusing to take the bait.  Here’s my throat.  No, I won’t bite it.

Not pushing, and not getting pushed back, or maybe rather, reaching out and having the other person also reach out, is one way to be a peer, to be bonded without hierarchy.  But pushing, and having somebody else push back just as hard but no harder is another way.  It’s a refusal to be dominated, and also a refusal to dominate.  They’re different processes, and I think I like them both in different contexts, to different degrees with different people.

I think one of the things that made me so attracted to Michelle originally was the fact that she could have and enjoy the kind of pushing and pushing back more than most women.  More than anyone I’d been with before.  But it’s at least a little dangerous too, especially when you have both types of interactions with the same person.  Somehow, you have to be able to judge or negotiate which kind of conversation it is that you’re having; mismatches feel bad.  Even if you know you’re having a pushing conversation, you need to know how far is too far, and you need to know whether the other person feels like doing that right now.  If not, it’s good to have other people you can get it out of your system with.  Or if one person starts to expect a pushing interaction from the other, and stops being able to recognize when they’re putting out their hand instead, it feels bad.  And I think for me both kinds of interactions are necessary to feel really close to someone.

More than anything else, I think I wanted to hear from him what purpose he thought we ought to assign ourselves.  The closest he ever got, in his published work anyway, was Pale Blue Dot, but even this book is still mostly background and introduction.  It assumes at some level that you don’t know about Copernicus, Galileo, Percival Lowell or the Voyager spacecraft, and that you need to be convinced that choosing a purpose is both possible and appropriate.  I’m just not interested in that conversation any more.  I’ve been convinced for a long time.  It seems like a meta-conversation to me at this point — talking about talking about what we should be doing.  I’ve had this feeling with Joseph Campbell too.  It’s as if despite the fact that at some level they’re both decrying the nihilistic, relativist, post-modern take on the world, they cannot bring themselves to state the purposes which they would like us to aspire to.  Perhaps for fear of rejection or ridicule?  Or because they know they might be wrong?  Or because the business of convincing people of a value judgment or aesthetic choice is so different from what we usually do in science or even academe in general.  It is much more like art, or politics.

There’s also I think a sense from Sagan that we need to get everyone on board and working together, and that whatever we decide to do, it, and the decision process, should be egalitarian.  This would be preferable, certainly, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.  Those goals which are attainable are the ones which can be reached by only a small subset of humanity working together.  Lamentably, there will be times when subterfuge and propaganda are the tools of choice.  It might even be the case that in the service of our goals, some kind of violence is the lesser of the available evil options.  These are painful thoughts, but I think they’re true.

So I’ll risk it.  Here’s what I think our purpose is: joyful and persistent understanding.  This isn’t a polemic, it’s a value judgment.  It’s an aesthetic opinion, and unlike facts, everybody is entitled to their own opinion.

These three values: joy, persistence, and understanding, feed on each other.  The more persistently we are joyful, the more total joy there is.  The more we understand the universe, the deeper our enjoyment and appreciation of it is.  An endless and omniscient but miserable existence is nothing worth aspiring to.  The greater our understanding of the universe, the greater our potential for persistence is.  The longer we persist, the more we are able to understand.  Like most value systems, this is a tautology.  That’s okay!

In the service of these values, it is our duty to protect and foster life and intelligence where it exists, and to spread it as widely as possible throughout the Universe, for only those highly ordered systems are vehicles capable of understanding.  Our sworn and everlasting enemy is entropy.  So far as we can tell, it will one day win, but not yet.

Today, so far as we can tell for sure, humanity is the only vessel for deep intelligence, and the Earth is the only abode of life.  Maybe it will sound strange, but I think we have too much understanding at the moment.  I think understanding without joy — without compassion and wonder — is a threat to persistence.  Love without Truth lies.  Truth without Love kills.  Destruction is easier than creation.  If we do one day approach godliness, transcending our mortality and limited capacities for understanding and manipulation of the Universe, I think we should consider ourselves extraordinarily lucky.  I don’t think either success or failure are assured, but it does seem that one is much more likely than the other.

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.

Ironically, despite the fact that Smil took an entire chapter to decry forecasting, he suggests some predictions in this chapter (written in 2001) which have already proven spectacularly untrue, particularly regarding China’s coal usage.  Between 1995 and 2001, according to Smil, China’s coal production dropped by ~1/3.  He attributes this largely to decreasing energy intensity of China’s economy, more efficient use of fuels, and their shutting down of many small, rural, manual coal mines.  Incredibly, since 2001, China’s coal consumption has more than doubled (according to BP’s 2008 statistical review of world energy).  Obviously, comparing production to consumption isn’t quite fair, but I do wonder why he chose production instead of consumption.  And unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like China is taking Smil’s advice, to use the highest efficiency plants available on the market today, largely because they would require a lot of expensive imported equipment.  Though ultimately, the difference between a 25% and a 45% efficient coal fired power plant isn’t large enough to stop changing the atmosphere.  Even thermodynamically impossible 100% efficient plants wouldn’t do that.  As far as missed predictions go, it’s much easier to overlook his skepticism about the inevitability of higher future oil prices, in the face of the record oil (and natural gas) price spike of 2008.  Those prices have been volatile for a long time, and now that gas prices have settled back down to $2.50/gallon, the US generally seems willing to forget that $5 gas is possible, and not something we have a tremendous amount of control over.  Next time liquid fuel prices spike, I have to wonder if we will again act surprised.

He points out that the scale of non-traditional reserves is enormous, and that high fuel prices, especially if they are consistently high will (as we have recently seen) spur innovation in extraction technologies.  The Athabasca tar sands, oil shales, coal to liquids, seafloor methane hydrates, Venezuela’s extra-heavy Orinoco crude, and much improved reservoir recovery rates can, in combination, and with the right pricing, magnify our oil and gas reserves to at least several times what we have on the books today.  Actually using all that available fuel, in a burn-it-all future, is very possibly suicidal.  At the same time, most major energy sinks have significant room for efficiency improvements.  Slower, more aerodynamic, lighter-weight cars could fairly easily increase fuel economy tenfold.  Co-generation of electricity and useful heat can double a power plant’s efficiency from ~35% to ~70%.  Our homes and buildings can, in most places, be built so that they do not require any external energy inputs to maintain comfortable temperatures.  Replacing the mountains of our daily disposable plastic junk with a relatively few durable and repairable objects performing the same tasks would greatly reduce the energy footprint of our material goods.  We can also re-design our cities to be human-centric instead of car-centric, and shift our diets away from energy intensive meat and dairy.  Even these technologically straightforward options, available today, would greatly reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.  Were these fuels really to be scarce, and were that scarcity reflected in their prices consistently, I have little doubt that we would find a way to avoid using them.

The harder question is whether or not we can find the will to change our ways while leaving cheap, plentiful fuel in the ground.

Nonfossil Energies

Smil dedicates a chapter to looking at the possible non-fossil solar energies: hydro, biomass, wind, direct (PV or thermal), at our current (pitiful) energy storage technologies, and finally at nuclear energy.

He was much more positive about hydroelectric power than I am, and I think at least partly this is because he restricted his focus to energy alone.  Certainly, if all you care about is energy, then hydro is great, but if you care about water and soil too, it’s less straightforward.   The effects of large, low-elevation reservoirs in arid regions on water availability is significant because of evaporative losses, and this also concentrates salts, which are ultimately deposited in agricultural soils, and the lifetimes of reservoirs have turned out to be significantly shorter than we might have hoped, and their flood management capabilities are fundamentally at odds with their power generating ability (see When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce and Cadillac Desert for more…).  I had no idea that there were 20GW (10 times the size of the Hoover dam, 3 times as big as the Grand Coulee on the Columbia) power stations in the Himalayas.

To my surprise, it turns out that today biomass (burning wood and crop residues and dung, for the most part) still provides a significant portion of global primary energy, on par with hydro power, and far larger than all wind and direct solar combined.  The conversion efficiencies for traditional biomass are appallingly low, but not quite as bad as corn ethanol (which is negative, overall).  Even were we able to do direct cellulosic ethanol (or other indirect biofuels), it’s only reasonable if we’re desperate for liquid fuel.  Flying, for instance.

Among renewables, wind and solar are the largest, least diffuse, and most accessible energies, but they are still spread thinly enough to pose problems.  We need new transmission lines, running east-west so that we can synchronize peak demand and peak supply.  These lines need to be much more efficient than our current grid, and much more dynamic, because of the irregularity of wind and solar generation.  We need to dedicate vast tracts of land to direct solar capture.  Saul Griffith’s “Renewistan” would be about the same size as Australia.

Efficiency isn’t a source of energy per se, but we (especially in the US) waste a lot of energy without getting anything useful out of it.  Any demand management we can do will make satisfying our energy needs with renewables much easier.  I don’t think Smil buys Amory Lovins’ claim that we could live just as well on 90% less energy, but he clearly sees plenty of room for improvement, even without (horror) sacrifice.

Another thing that would make renewables much more practical is real energy storage: some way to take electricity, and save it for later.  Ideally, this could be in a chemical form, for later use with, e.g. a fuel cell.  Right now the biggest energy storage systems we have are pumped hydro.  Two reservoirs, connected by a big huge pipe.  During off hours, grid power is used to pump water up the hill, and during peak hours, it runs turbines on the way down.  Not very efficient.

Finally, we could choose to go for the nuclear option, on a scale far beyond anything we’ve done so far.  Smil rates this unlikely, for political reasons primarily, though he admits the economics are not great either (whereas Lovins thinks the economics of nuclear power is total disaster).

Possible Futures

I was expecting a few different specific scenarios in this section, but that’s not what I got.  It was almost a little bit desperate.  A familiar desperation though.  The beginning of the book was very dry, but describing the scale of the challenges that face us if we want to transition to present-day solar energy instead of photons captured deep in the geologic past, and the apparent lack of urgency we feel, as a civilization, about this task, Smil is clearly frustrated.  He has told this story before.  Some of the challenges are technical, most of them are political and economic and social.  We can probably solve the technical problems eventually, if we put our minds to it.  But it’s unclear we want to put our minds to it, or make the changes we need to in order to avoid remaking the world for the worse.

In the end he asks, were our lives really so miserable 50 or 60 years ago, before energy use in the developed world began skyrocketing?  What have we really gained by our more energy intensive lifestyles?  Is a 500 square meter house really so much more hospitable than a 100 square meter one?  Do we actually enjoy living 50 miles from our workplaces, and spending an hour or two in the car, in traffic, each day?  These questions don’t apply to a lot of the developing world, yet, but they do seem to be attempting to follow in our footsteps.

The last graph in the book makes very clear that this will not happen.  The exponential rise in power consumption over the last hundred years, from 0.5 TW in 1900 to 10 TW today, cannot continue.  We will not be using 200 TW of power in 2100.  The question is how we will manage the curve rolling over, and I don’t think anybody knows the answer.

The first two sections Long-term Trends and Achievements and 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.

Today global mean primary power consumption, per capita, is about 2kW.  Earlier this year Saul Griffith advocated this level of consumption as a a global goal in his Long Now seminar “Climate Change, Recalculated” i.e. that we should be trying to get those people who have less than this much power available to them up to that level, and those of us who are consuming more than 2kW should adjust our energy systems downward, by a variety of means, and thus, aggregate energy demand would only have to increase with population, over time (and then, one hopes, in the near future also decrease with population).  This plan, or something like it, sounds pretty good.  But without knowing how energy use is distributed now, and without knowing how much energy one actually needs to live what we consider a high quality life, it’s hard to assess whether 2kW is actually the right number.  Today’s mean value is, after all, totally arbitrary.

By coincidence, it turns out that even with today’s technology, you can live a pretty good life on 2 kW.  There are many examples of democratically governed, politically free countries having this level of energy usage, and also low infant mortality, long life expectancy, high literacy rates, and plenty of high quality food.  Those qualities go a long way toward defining the Good Life in my mind.  However, there are also some things you just can’t have today, if you want to live a 2 kW life.  You can’t drive or fly regularly; you can’t get very many of your food calories from animal products; you can’t own a lot of disposable things, and you can’t live in an energy-intensive dwelling like the ones that most people in the industrialized nations live in today.  To me none of these are show-stoppers, though I suspect many North Americans will probably disagree.  I’m convinced that they feel differently because the low-energy alternatives to their current lifestyles have not been effectively sold to them, not because a low-energy lifestyle is necessarily inferior.  In most of these QoL variables, there are no clear improvements beyond about 3.5 kW.  Just more disposable crap and conspicuous consumption.

Just for reference, here’s how global per capita energy consumption broke down by continent in the late 1990s:

1. North/Central America: 7.0 kW
2. Australia/NZ: 5.1 kW
   
3. Europe: 4.8 kW
   
4. South America: 1.1 kW
   
5. Asia: 0.96 kW
   
6. Africa: 0.48 kW
   

Three continents above the mean, and three below, but ~80% of humanity is on those three low energy continents, and just ten percent of the world’s population accounts for 50% of the world’s primary energy usage.  At the same time, nobody actually wants to live the near zero impact lifestyle practiced by the refugees in Chad.

One sobering example of the ways our energy use has changed in the last hundred years is agriculture.  Over the course of the 20th century, the harvested agricultural land area on Earth rose from 8.5 x 10⁶ km² to more than 15 x 10⁶ km², largely because of expanded irrigation and the introduction of synthetic fertilizers, both of which allow agriculture (at least temporarily) to be productive on marginal land.  This rise is significantly greater than one would expect from the increase in human population over the same span of time.  Globally, we now produce ~5000 food calories per person per day. In 1900, we were only producing ~2500 food calories per person per day, leaving a very small surplus, and precluding the consumption of much in the way of animal products (since producing a calorie of meat or milk uses up much more than a calories of grass or grain).  Today only about 5% of our primary energy consumption goes toward agriculture, but distressingly, a large, and rapidly growing, portion of the embodied energy in our food is derived from a non-solar (or more literally, paleo-solar) energy subsidy (synthetic fertilizers, tillage, etc).  In 1900, basically all agriculture was “organic”.  Today, globally, more than 1/3 of the energy in the world’s food comes from fossil fuels, and in the industrialized world, a much higher proportion of our food calories are heavily (energy) subsidized by fossil fuels.  Additionally, in the US around 2/3 of all the food calories produced end up being fed to livestock.  Globally, it’s around 40%.  Smil further backs up the numbers on outright food waste that Jeremy Siefert quoted in Dive!, namely that in the US we throw away about half the food we produce (never mind the fact that one might reasonably consider some large proportion of the calories that go into subsidized meat production wasted in the first place).  This is not a scalable system.  The developed nations can’t keep living that way for very long (even if we might want to), and the other 4-7 billion people on Earth in 2050 cannot expect to be able to live that way.  Every time I see statistics on the increasing rate of meat and dairy consumption in China, I cringe.  Another consequence of our fossil fueled synthetic agriculture is that today humanity fixes about as much nitrogen artificially as the rest of the biosphere combined.  Nitrogen is often a growth-limiting nutrient, and unfortunately, the majority of what we fix using the Haber-Bosch process today ends up being deposited in places where it has significant negative impacts on the biosphere, like the eutrophication of the Gulf waters where the Mississippi deposits agricultural runoff from America’s bread basket, or the vast shit-filled ponds strewn across Iowa’s hog farming country that contaminate local groundwater, or the fertilizer and pesticide salt-pan wasteland that occupies the now defunct Aral Sea basin.  Instead of re-fixing that nitrogen over and over again, and then dumping it like garbage, it should be put into a closed cycle, as was the norm on farms before they industrialized when individual farmers had both livestock and food crops.  Farmers like Joel Salatin have demonstrated that this is still feasible today, on a much larger scale, if we choose to end our massive meat subsidies.

Over the same span of time, we’ve also managed to enormously increase the efficiency with which we use almost all energy.  We use less than a third of the energy today per unit nitrogen fixed than we did during WWI, and we are now asymptotically approaching the stoichiometrically required energy.  The trend of both increased energy usage and increased efficiency exists across all the major energy domains.  The result is that today we residents of the industrialized world have access to hundreds of times more in the way of “energy services” than did our great-grandparents.

In a testament to the power of steadily increasing efficiency over the long haul, the real price of electricity has decreased by a staggering 98% since 1900 (most of that reduction was achieved by 1920).  At the same time, it’s interesting to note that the inflation adjusted prices of fossil fuels themselves — coal, oil, and natural gas — have remained essentially unchanged on average, despite significant short-term fluctuations.  Smil points out that this isn’t some kind of market magic.  Few global markets have been as consistently manipulated by governments and industry cartels as the energy markets (a point that Daniel Yergin’s book The Prize gets across very clearly in the case of oil… and Yergin is an industry cheerleader.)

Another interesting point that comes up is the use of energy intensity (EI) as a metric of an economy’s efficiency.  EI is the amount of energy required for a given amount of GDP output.  Japan, for instance, does much better than most of the industrial world on this mark, but this is in part because they import  a lot of their energy intensive economic feedstocks, like aluminum, produced in British Columbia’s hydroelectrically powered smelters.  As with so many other economic metrics, it’s unclear exactly how relevant nation-scale statistics are when trade has been pretty effectively globalized.  Why should we care how clean and efficient our own economy is, if all we’ve done is shipped the pollution overseas?  Why should we care that Toyota is domiciled in Japan, when half their shares are held by people in the US?

The third chapter is entitled Against Forecasting, and chronicles the comedy of errors which has made up our attempts at forecasting energy use, prices, demand, sources, technology, and and all manner of other complex systems over the last century.  As with the nonsensical market noise that Bloomberg spews 24/7, when you actually go back and look at how well predictions have panned out in the past, it becomes impossible to give them any serious consideration today.  However, we are a storytelling species, and when we’re told a tale that agrees with our expectations, based on recent events, we tend to be suckers.

Instead of forecasting, Smil seems to favor back of the envelope, order of magnitude calculations, which can at least sketch out the extreme range of possibilities, and then also what he calls “normative scenarios”.  Instead of trying to say what will happen, as if we have little control over the course of events, a normative scenario describes what we think should happen, what we’d like to happen, and what kinds of very bad outcomes are nevertheless possible, in theory, without assigning any kind of likelihood to the different scenarios.  I think I like this unusually humble approach, and am curious how he will apply it to the fossil and non-fossil fuel options we have at hand.  At the same time, however, he pokes fun at Amory Lovins’ “Soft Energy” path (1976), which I understand to be exactly the kind of “no-regrets” scenario that he’s describing.  I think Lovins was more saying that, should we want to, we can live at a high standard of living on much less energy (and at much lower cost) than we tend to think.  Obviously with the quantity of coal, tar sands, oil shales, and more traditional hydrocarbons available to us globally, we will not be compelled to take the soft path any time soon, and so the fact that we’re using twice as much power today as Lovins predicted (or rather, suggested we might use if we wanted to go that way) isn’t necessarily, in my mind, a good example of a failed forecast.

The main questions I had coming into the book were:

1. Can nuclear energy be done responsibly?
2. What would it take for it to scale up meaningfully?
3. 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.

Great Power.  Great Responsibility?

The main objection to nuclear power that I had when I started the book had to do with whether or not it can actually be done safely and responsibly, by which I mean avoiding:

1. risk of Chernobyl type accidents resulting in long term damage on a large scale.
2. increasing the rate of nuclear weapons proliferation.
3. bequeathing a dangerous burden of nuclear waste to our anonymous descendants.

Bodansky effectively convinced me that the rate of weapons proliferation has so far been little influenced by the spread of nuclear power, in spite of Iran’s recent, well publicized, and almost certainly duplicitous attempts to set up their own domestic fuel cycle “for peaceful purposes”.  Virtually all the nuclear powers outside the permanent members of the UN Security Council obtained their weapons via so-called “research” reactors, or from the A.Q. Khan catalog.  This isn’t exactly comforting news of course.  While the world hasn’t shaped up quite the way Tom Lehrer envisioned it…

nuclear weapons have been slowly creeping from nation to nation for the last half century, and to date exactly zero nations have been convinced to give them up once obtained.  South Africa is often held up as an example in this respect, but in truth nobody in the outside world forced them to get rid of their six bombs.  They made that choice because it became clear that the internal politics of the country were likely to change dramatically, even as the external politics of the world were rearranging themselves.  In a similar vein, we are fortunate that the nations which precipitated out of the Soviet Union were able to so amicably reallocate their nuclear arsenals to Russia.  It didn’t have to be that way, and we should not draw any optimistic generalization about the stability of the world’s nuclear powers based on these two examples.  It’s relatively easy to put policies in place and manage them when one has a stable government.  The real test of any safeguards we come up with, for both waste and weapons, will be when nations and civilizations dissolve into anarchy, as they have from time to time throughout history, and as they are sure to do on occasion in the future.  What will we do when Pakistan descends into civil war, or when North Korea’s Dear Leader finally dies?  As a planet, we are faced with a never ending sequence of tests of our ability to avert a nuclear war.  What this book convinced me of is not that the danger of weapons proliferation is small, but rather that it is mostly uncorrelated with the spread of nuclear power.  Nuclear disarmament is not a solution to this issue.  The knowledge is out there, and we have to live with it to the end of our days.  I do not find the position which Thomas Barnett and others within the military establishment take, that nuclear weapons have ruled out the possibility of so-called Great Powers War, to be convincing.  Under normal circumstances yes, but under abnormal circumstances, which are more common than we like to imagine, no.

Compared to the prospect of weapons proliferation and the corresponding increase in the chances of a nuclear exchange as time goes on, the dangers of Chernobyl type accidents and the task of managing nuclear wastes seem almost frivolous, but they are not insignificant.  With reprocessing to remove the actinides for use as fuel and transmutation of Tc-99 (half-life 211,000 years) and other important long lived fission products, the remaining nuclides in the waste stream are manageable, with none having a half life longer than 90 years, and the important ones (Sr-90 and Cs-137) being closer to 30 years.  This  highly radioactive waste can be vitrified in borosilicate glass to immobilize it, and stored in a facility which need only be able to survive for a few centuries, not tens or hundreds of thousands of years.  As a species we’ve built things that last centuries.  We haven’t built anything that lasts more than 10,000 years.  The current project at Yucca Mountain is a fool’s errand for a variety of reasons, and a lot of people know it.  Even if it’s eventually approved, all the waste stored there will remain retrievable, perhaps for as long as a few hundred years, which is a very good hedge against the current US position that no reprocessing will be done.  I have been convinced that in principle, the problem of nuclear waste management, while very expensive and politically intractable, is in theory a technically solved problem, despite the fact that the US is going out of its way not to implement what seems to be the most responsible solution.

I am less confident that it is possible to design a truly idiot-proof reactor, which is what we need if we are going to avoid another Chernobyl.  The fleet of reactors which the world currently operates have too many parts, and too many different combinations of possible failure modes, which cannot really be meaningfully tested.  Bodansky and the nuclear industry quote small probabilities of failure, and try to make some estimation of how likely it is that a significant accident will happen in a given span of time, based on aggregations of probabilities for all the component parts, and past operating performance.  Again, this is a Black Swan problem.  The truth is that when probabilities and sample sizes are small, we really have no idea what’s going on, and such analyses implicitly ignore the possibility of malicious or downright bone-headed operators.  The Chernobyl accident happened because they turned all the safety mechanisms off, on purpose, for a demonstration of some failsafe (which, duh, failed!).  Several people were recently killed in a criticality accident at a Japanese reprocessing plant because they dumped a solution of enriched uranium into a precipitation tank filled with water, which moderated the neutrons and set off a chain reaction.  People do dumb stuff, even in nuclear power plants, and even when they aren’t under duress.  To be responsible, nuclear power needs to operate safely when manned by morons in the middle of a war zone.  Many of the reactors in the Generation IV program incorporate so-called “passive” safety features, usually involving negative thermal feedbacks (e.g. doppler broadening of the neutron absorption spectra), such that loss of coolant accidents result in the reactor shutting itself down, even if nobody does anything.  I’m not convinced that any of the designs under consideration meet the morons in a war zone standard, but it at least seems plausible that such a reactor could be designed and built.

That said, it was interesting to read a level headed discussion of just how bad Chernobyl was: pretty bad, as far as conceivable nuclear accidents go.  But at the same time, today the radiation levels in most of the evacuated region are comparable to the extra cosmic ray dosage you get from living in Denver above a mile of the atmosphere’s natural shielding, and less than the doses that flight attendants and airline pilots get in the course of their professional duties at 10,000 meters.  However, that kind of constant ambient dose isn’t how most people living near Chernobyl would end up getting irradiated.  The radionuclides would be chemically concentrated in agricultural produce and livestock, and then consumed at a level much higher than the background.  In the grand scheme of things though, one Chernobyl per century, while awful on paper, would probably not have a large impact on humanity, when compared with other things we routinely ignore as a species, like the salinization of our soils through dry land irrigation, or the instability of our climate, or genocide, or malaria, or synthetic biology, or our rotten food system, or the contamination of our drinking water with fracturing fluids from oil and natural gas drilling.  Not that we should be ignoring those things, but adding one more thing we don’t care about to the long list is less compelling than holding it up as some kind of uniquely horrible disaster to be avoided.  People are for some reason more risk-averse in the context of radiological hazards than other hazards, technological and otherwise.  Bodansky concienciously avoided making the argument that this disparity in our risk assessments implies that nuclear power is safe, as many atomic cheer leaders have done.  I suspect this is because there is another logically consistent conclusion: that all of those other things are in reality awful enough that we should avoiding them too.  That’s certainly my conclusion.

Issues of Scale

Any meaningful long term source of energy for humanity, even with massive improvements in energy efficiency within the OECD (especially the US), has to scale up to at least tens of terawatts of primary (i.e. thermal) power, and be able to maintain that power output almost indefinitely.  In the fullness of time, so far as we understand the universe today, only nuclear energy is capable of this.  The question we have to answer is whether we want to manage our own nuclear reactions here on Earth, or whether we want to collect the energy liberated by the nuclear reactions which take place in the Sun.

The average US citizen has a lifestyle which requires about 10 kW of primary power.  The average H. sapiens on Earth today uses about 1/5 that much (see Saul Griffith’s excellent talk from this January, or his Watts On presentation here in PDF form).  If we can comfortably get ourselves down to 2 kW (and based on my own energy usage, I think we can) and simultaneously bring everyone in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America up to 2 kW, we’re still going to need something like 20 terawatts of power by mid-century, and substantially more if we don’t pursue energy efficiency and and attack profligate use hammer and tongs from now until doomsday.  That amount of power is equivalent to roughly 20,000 nuclear power plants, or 50 times the current worldwide nuclear capacity.  If nuclear power plants can be designed to operate for 100 years, that means with 20,000 of them, at steady state, we’d be both retiring and constructing roughly 200 nuclear power plants annually, indefinitely.  That’s more than one every other day.  This is what I mean by “at scale”.  If you don’t believe that our power is going to eventually be either solar or (local) nuclear, I recommend watching this talk by Nate Lewis.  The other options just don’t scale.

Of course there are other options, but here I am restricting myself to the scenarios which I think we would collectively consider to be successes.  Alternatively, humanity globally could assume a very low energy lifestyle, and live everywhere as they do in sub-Saharan Africa and rural Asia today, and as all humans did only a few centuries ago.  I think this is unlikely to be regarded as a success by most people, including those in sub-Saharan Africa and rural Asia, who have an intimate knowledge of what that lifestyle looks like, and some idea of what our lifestyle looks like, and seem intent on transitioning to something more like ours.  We could also blithely continue burning the coal, oil, and natural gas (as seems to be the “plan” at the moment), but even ignoring climate change we will one day run out of fossil fuels, and be forced to find another energy source.  Why not do it now rather than later if we can?  Another option — the most attractive and responsible one in my mind — would be a drastic and voluntary reduction of the human population, to something under 1 billion, instead of the peak of 10 billion we’re supposedly headed for.  With a pre-industrial human population, I think there would be plenty of room for us and the rest of the earthlings to live in relative comfort and affluence.  But that does not appear to be the course we are on.  Even if we do manage to peak population this century, and then decline rapidly, we’re still going to have a significant window of time, barring catastrophe, during which we need to provide energy on the tens of terawatts scale.  It’s not inconceivable that we could find some new transformative technologies — controlled fusion, or energy efficiency on a currently unimaginable scale — but we should not be taking that as a given in our planning.  We must hope for the best, but plan for the worst.

Being able to run our energy systems at this scale for centuries if not millennia is another kind of scalability: temporal scalability.  As mentioned above, this is a kind of scalability which our current fossil fuel based energy systems lack.  The Sun has another couple of billion years under warranty, so solar power scales through time if we can find a way to effectively take advantage of it.  Fission here on Earth is more limited.  The US currently sends its nuclear fuel through the reactors once, and only once.  Only about 1/3 of the fissile U-235  is consumed that way, before the fission products which are neutron absorbers (aka “neutron poisons”) accumulate to high enough concentrations to shut down the chain reaction.  France (which gets about 75% of its power from fission) and many other nuclear power users re-process their fuel, chemically separating out the highly radioactive fission products, and re-forming the actinides (U-235 and U-238, newly formed Pu-239, etc.) into new reactor fuel.  This has several consequences:

1. You get three times as much power out of a given unit of fuel.
2. It greatly reduces the mass and volume of the radioactive waste which has to be disposed of.
3. It can dramatically reduce the time which that waste has to be stored, if you store only the short lived fission products, and separate out the troublesome long lived ones for transmutation into something less difficult to deal with.
4. It removes a potentially large future incentive for someone in the distant future to go digging around in the waste repository: once the dangerous fission products have decayed away, the remaining fissile actinides potentially become available for weaponization, that is, the waste repository becomes a so-called “plutonium mine”.

So there are a variety of good reasons to reprocess spent fuel.  The arguments against doing it are the cost, because it involves a lot of remote-handling facilities to deal with the extremely radioactive material, and the danger of present-day weapons proliferation as separating out the usable fuel necessarily means separating out plutonium, which depending on how the reactor is run, and how long the fuel has been in it, may be weaponized by those with sufficient technical skill.  If you believe that the cost and potential weapons proliferation dangers of re-processing are prohibitive, then nuclear power is not really on the table as a serious option for solving our energy problems in the long term.

Re-processing helps with waste disposal issues, and increases the fuel economy by a factor of three, but for nuclear power to really endure, we would need much more than that.  We would need breeder reactors like France’s beleaguered Superphénix, which transmute naturally occurring, relatively abundant nuclides (Th-232 and U-238) into fissile fuels (U-233 and Pu-239) by exposing them to intense neutron bombardment from an operational nuclear reactor.  Breeding fissile material would result in a truly millennial energy supply.

The Price of Power

So maybe responsible, scalable, long-term nuclear power is possible, and if so it represents a real long term energy option, but it will not be cheap, and it will not be without technical challenges.  Renewable power also represents a real long term energy option, if we can figure out how to store intermittently generated electricity or heat efficiently, or how to effectively manage a portfolio of different forecastable, intermittent power sources with minimal storage.  That might also turn out not to be cheap, but the scope for cost reduction in renewable energy is potentially large, in part because it is a nascent industry, and in part because there are many different ways of harvesting sunlight.  Thus, any fair long-term comparison between renewable and nuclear energy must consider the costs and dangers of reprocessing, the technical challenges of building extraordinarily robust breeder reactors, and the consequences of the accidents, sabotage, and failures which will occur on a timescale of centuries or millennia.

In general, my impression is that the risks associated with nuclear power are more like Black Swans than the risks associated with renewable power, which is a big strike against nuclear.  If we’re going to have failures, I’d much rather they were gaussian.  I think it’s potentially telling that the person who effectively hamstrung the nuclear industry in the US was Jimmy Carter.  He did this by distributing the nuclear regulatory powers among the Dept. of Energy (which he created), the EPA, and the NRC, and giving these disparate bureaucracies different fundamental motivations.  They haven’t been able to agree on much since.  This is potentially telling because Carter was a nuclear engineer, who worked directly under Hyman Rickover, the father of essentially all production nuclear reactors in existence today (since for better or for worse, our commercial power generating reactors are today still largely based on the ultra-compact submarine reactors Rickover initially designed for the US Navy).  I do not doubt that Carter deeply understood the issues surrounding nuclear power and the nuclear industry.

What I’d like to see, ideally, is a leveling of the playing field between renewable energy and nuclear, which will unfortunately mean subsidies for any non-nuclear, carbon free power source which is capable of scaling up to terawatts, in order to overcome the enormous historical subsidies which the nuclear industry has recieved.  In the interim, I think it’s an open question whether we should be sympathetic to nuclear power as a temporary bridge as we wean ourselves off coal and oil, scale up solar and wind, and develop economical energy storage technologies.  “Temporary” in this context probably means 50-100 years, since that’s how long we might expect a well designed nuclear power plant to last.  Enhanced geothermal power (or “heat mining”) is another possible temporary non-renewable emissions free power source we might consider to close the gap.  The MIT faculty has made extensive reports recommending the development of both of these power sources, focusing on the next 50 years.  In that timeframe I agree that they can both make sense, and that reprocessing is not a necessity, but neither of these power sources as described can be pitched honestly as the same kind of long term solution that renewable energy will be if we can solve the energy storage problem.

Whatever decision we ultimately make about where the nuclear reactions enabling our civilization take place, here’s hoping we make the choice with our eyes wide open.

But there it stumbles.  While what it says is true, it is not enough.  The truth alone is no longer sufficient.  The film is blind, or nearly so, to the future that we need to see.  It’s too easy, given the truth we have inherited, to envision a dark future.  Vague assertions that the solutions are at hand are not enough.  He exclaims, and rightly so, that “We don’t want to believe what we know.”  For some reason, we are afraid to envision a bright future.  Maybe it’s because throughout the 20th century, the bright futures we envisioned often turned dark.  Social progress became World Wars and gulags.  Technological progress became mustard gas, ICBMs and DDT.  Economic progress became the Depression and the disingenuous promise of perpetual growth through the liquidation of our natural capital.  I agree that we don’t have time to be pessimists, but fodder for pessimism seems to be almost the only content out there in the environmental sphere.  And it’s getting old.

CC by babypinkgrl2003

What we are in desperate need of, is the story of Earth 2100, and The Age of Stupid, and Home, told backwards from the future, and with the much hoped-for ending as the starting point.  We have the solutions, but they have not been woven into a compelling narrative, while the Apocalypse narrative is one we are all intimately familiar with, and so it takes up residence in the front of our minds.  The End has always been nigh in someone’s mind, and that doesn’t mean it isn’t right around the corner now, but because it’s a story we’ve told ourselves so well for so long, in one context or another, we are trained to it.  We hear it without having it spoken.

This future history has to be believable, while at the same time not incorporating any wild technological leaps that we can’t necessarily count on, which isn’t to say that wild technological leaps won’t happen — they almost certainly will — but the space of possible technologies is so large, that depending on or waiting for any given one is foolish.  This future history needs to be something to strive for, a destination we want to get to.  It can be many threaded and non-deterministic; it can have multiple outcomes and decision points, but whatever form it takes, it needs to be compelling.  The future needs to be a place we would want to live, with people that we loved. Here’s how I think it goes.

O wonder!  How many goodly creatures are there here!  How beauteous mankind is!  O brave new world!  That has such people in’t!

CC by alopecosa

Humans moved to the cities.  That’s where we lived.  And the cities became as nations unto themselves, some jealous and some free.  Coal was banned.  Banned!  Death trains no more.  But still we had to block the sun for a while, and so we changed the sky again.  In place of coal we harnessed the Atom and the Sun.  Then we learned to keep the light and hold it in chemical bonds, like plants, but far better.  There was an accident, and a city died, and with our newly stored sunlight we decided that nuclear reactions were best left far away.  But still the seas did rise, and there was war and plague.  Things stopped moving.  Freight trains and container ships were stilled.  From this fearful chaos we built cyclical economies, with materials running in circles.  Rebuilt and decomposed again and again, biologically.  An economy no longer a strong function of location.  Labor prices largely equalized worldwide, for a given set of skills.  Education the key to wealth, and available wherever you might be.  Then one day freely moving energy, freely flowing information, but materials left in place.  Landfills finally mined.

CC by Zevotron

Why go anywhere?  We go for people.  For culture.  Different cities, with different laws and different peoples.  Cities built for people.  Green and quiet but dense.  The freedom to move between them as you wish.  Distributed economic organizations.  Live with people here, work with people anywhere (even here).  Our human numbers shrank and our lifespans lengthened.  Between the cities the forests could re-grow, with help, there were no longer mines.  The wilds returned.  We tinkered with our crops at home, for better or for worse.  We lost many of our irrigated lands to salt, but with a little tinkering, we took some of them back again.  A few people tended the cities of the plants, vast greenhouse worlds, intricate engineered ecosystems under compostable glass, collecting and meting out the rains, drop by drop, cycling nutrients with the help of domesticated bacteria and integrated livestock.

CC by Jonasweb

The wilds return.  They encroach.  We can easily hold them at bay, but know that destroying them means destroying ourselves.  We have Enough.  Slowly and by parts, the lost menagerie is found or mourned.  The European lion and the American camel.  The blue whale and the bluefin tuna.  The moa and the mastodon.  From bits and bytes we sought out or hid away.  And if you so choose, you can eat a bit of that ancient meat, hunted on the slowly regrown plains or in the darkening forests, or fished from the reborn seas and emancipated rivers.  But only if you take it as an animal, as a member of the wilderness, under your own power, and by your own wiles.  Only if you know that you too, are meat.

I thought one of the most interesting aspects he discussed was the ongoing and chaotic transition from a planned economy to a market economy.  The communists nationalized everything, meaning that at the beginning of the transition, the state had trillions, or tens of trillions, of dollars worth of assets.  Moving toward a market based economy to us means getting those assets into private hands.  Russia did this, and it was a disaster.  Former black marketeers and some of the Red Directors ended up owning huge portions of the formerly state controlled capital, and they got the goods at deep discounts in exchange for political support.  This cheated the state out of its wealth (which of course it had in turn cheated the original owners out of in the early 20th century, but then those “original owners” were at the time cheating the impoverished Russian underclasses in an almost feudal state…) and set up very concentrated economic (and thus potentially political) powers amongst the oligarchs.  Both of these things helped to create conditions where someone like Putin had a large incentive to try and wrest control back to the state (popular support for righting the economic wrong wrought by the oligarchs, and a political incentive to remove those concentrations of power and potential opposition).  Anyway, giant mess all around.  If it hadn’t been for the spikes in oil and natural gas prices, who knows what Russia’s economy would look like now.

It seems like China may have learned something from that experience — at least, something about how not to privatize a few trillion dollars worth of state property.  Instead of going whole hog all at once, and getting the economics tangled intimately with high level politics, China is privatizing piecemeal.  Schell couched it in terms of corruption, which I’m sure it is, but it’s not entirely clear that that’s all it is.  Different economic resources are controlled by different arms of the government, and operated by them for profit… for funding, almost in lieu of tax revenue and centralized budgetary processes.  It’s as if, he analogized, the EPA happened to own a nationwide chain of golf courses, which it ran on the side, in addition to its regulatory and governance duties, and with which it partially funded itself.  Poorly paid local and regional bureaucrats ultimately end up in control of state-owned resource flows, and in collusion with banks (some legal, others illegal), are more than happy to get in on the economic action.  Now, it’s easy to rail against this as corruption, and I’m sure it doesn’t help with any governance issues, but at the same time, the level of decentralization and the compartmentalization of economic interests within the government actually sets up approximately the right incentives to think of these public-private “partnerships” as quasi-privatizations.  Privatization done in parts, without centralized control, without (necessarily) creating the kind of concentrated loci of power that the Russian privatizations did.  It’s much more a continuum.  Schell’s talk was given and recorded in 2006, prior to our own economic debacle, which actually makes it all the better today, because in retrospect, it is obvious that our own economy shares all of the negative qualities that he brings up in regard to China to some degree — in fact to a much greater degree than anyone would have been willing to admit in 2006.  With the US government set to take up to a 70% stake in GM over the weekend, and the apparently abject subservience of our regulatory machinery to the banking industry, the differences between our two arrangements begins to get more than a little bit fuzzy.

Going forward, it seems hard to resist bigness, but more than ever I feel like bigness is the problem.  Big government, big industry, all concentrations of decision making power.  We need lots of small actors with the freedom to try lots of different things, and incentives to think as long term as possible.  Autonomous entrepreneurial city states that are willing and able to learn from each others trials and errors.  I have no idea how to get there from here.

Michael Pollan gave a recent talk, unsurprisingly to a full house (it’s SF after all), entitled “Deep Agriculture“, which was largely, but I think not entirely, a synthesis of his previous books.  The first point he made was that America’s healthcare costs, our industrialized agricultural system, climate change and the ultimately limited supply of fossil fuels are really all part of the same system of issues.

We spend roughly twice as much per capita on healthcare as do the twenty nations which have longer life expectancies than we do.  A significant portion of that excess spending is on chronic “diseases of the rich” which are intimately linked to diet: obesity, heart disease, diabetes, etc.  At the same time, we spend a smaller proportion of our incomes on food than any other nation in the world, and probably any other nation in history.  If our cheap diet is generating high healthcare costs, then it isn’t really all that cheap.

It’s become an often quoted statistic that for each calorie we ingest, on the order of 10 calories worth of fossil fuels were burned.  Pollan makes the point that actually, all these calories are solar.  All these chemical bonds from which we extract our heterotrophic living were ultimately been formed by photosynthesis.  The only difference is when that sunlight fell to Earth: was it this year, or was it in the Carboniferous?  In the fullness of time, our diet will come to depend on this year’s sun.  No matter how much we (or others) might like and profit from the current system, it will end, because we’re using up our long-stored sunlight.  Maybe this change will be forced in 50 years or maybe 500, but it will have to change someday (barring the creation of some kind of electrochemical synthesis process allowing us to take massive amounts of nuclear power and use it to directly build food molecules… but that just doesn’t sound like a good idea to me).  There are a variety of reasons why, given the inevitability of this problem, we might choose to deal with it sooner rather than later.  The forced transition probably wouldn’t be particularly enjoyable, and on top of that, there’s the fact that we’re currently altering the composition of our atmosphere by combusting these fuels, and polluting our soils, rivers and oceans with the resulting fertilizer and pesticide effluents and salts.

He thinks that it is entirely possible to do things differently, and suggests several changes.  First, getting animals and plants back together on the farm.  Instead of having CAFOs that create vast unmanageable cesspools filled with high concentrations of nitrogen, phosphorus, and other “pollutants” separate from our industrial monocultural factory farms, onto which we pour vast quantities of “fertilizers” having high concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus and other “nutrients”… why not make it a closed loop?  Okay okay, now, I know this doesn’t sound like any kind of amazing, groundbreaking idea.  Actually it seems pretty obvious, but we’re not doing it.  In most cases, we’re not even really making much of an effort to try.  Ultimately there isn’t really any possibility of “running out” of these nutrients, if we keep them cycling.  We’re not capable of creating or destroying nitrogen or phosphorus, or potassium, or calcium or iron or any of the other most basic nutrients that our crops need, but if we want to re-use them, we do need to stop throwing them in the ocean as agricultural runoff or the effluent from our sewage treatment plants (for entropic reasons, it’s hard to get them out of the ocean once they’re there).

He also thinks that it’s likely part of the solution will be either making farming more labor intensive than it is today, or making our mechanization much smarter and more adaptive (e.g. What would a mechanized harvester for a Mayan beans+corn+squash planting look like?)  Either of these options probably involves food becoming more expensive.  Thankfully he’s not just looking backward at some kind of romantic Tuscan pastoral existence.  Whatever strategies we come up with for making our agricultural systems sustainable need to be able to scale massively, and feed billions of people (at least in the short run… I do still hope we can get the population down to much less precarious numbers over the next couple of centuries without a catastrophe).  They need to do the same kinds of things (water management, nutrient cycling, soil preservation, resilience against pests and diseases) that our ancestors were largely forced to do by virtue of their level of technological power level and depth of scientific understanding, and which we’ve been able to temporarily get away without doing, but there’s no reason to think that doing those things well necessarily means doing them the way they have been done.  We understand plants and animals and soils and chemistry much better today than anybody 500 years ago could have imagined possible, even if we still have only a very tentative understanding of how these complex things work together as a system.  We can do sustainable agriculture more intelligently and more productively today than anyone ever has, if only we put our minds to it.  Therein lies the problem.

There are several ways we might go about “putting our minds to it” today, alone or in combination, and none of them have yet really been brought to bear on the problem, because it is not seen as imperative.  As with climate change and water, it is a problem of the Long Now and not the next election cycle or the next quarterly report.  Currently neither our capitalistic nor our political systems are constructed in such a way as to be able to deal well with this kind of problem.  We need agricultural entrepreneurs: venture funding and startup companies, running thousands of novel farming experiments, finding out what works, and what doesn’t, and what the real potential of closed-loop agriculture is.  For instance, what are the economics of growing produce in greenhouses in the northeast, heated, watered, and carbon-dioxified by the waste heat, emissions, and coolant water from a natural gas fired power plant?  What combination of water, carbon, and transportation costs would be required to make that a viable business model?  How does that compare with current costs?  How does it compare with the real (unsubsidized) costs of water in, and transportation from the Imperial Valley?  The closest things we have today are people like Joel Salatin on the Polyface farm in rural Virginia, and Will Allen at Growing Power in urban Milwaukee, but agriculture is very capital intensive, meaning that generally if a farmer runs an experiment one year, and it doesn’t work (and anybody in science will tell you, generally, experiments don’t work.  Trial and error is mostly error — and that’s okay), they run the risk of being wiped out, with insufficient revenue to turn over into next year’s production.  There are good reasons to be conservative as a farmer.

Additionally, we’ve actively structured our ag policy so as to discourage many kinds of experimentation.  As Salatin recounts at length in his book, Everything I Want to do is Illegal, deviation from the expectations of the agricultural regulators is not taken to kindly.  Long ago California’s congressional delegation successfully lobbied for provisions in the farm subsidy laws which prohibit any land which has received agricultural subsidies from being re-allocated to growing fruits and vegetables.  This is interstate protectionism.

And then there are the incumbents within agribusiness, who are already turning a fine profit with it the way it is, thank you very much.  As with the incubent energy interests and scientific publishing, those whose busineses grew up in the immediate past are always in a better position to influence both the market and the relevant government policies than the new upstart, irrespective of whether the new business model might be a little better today, were the two options able to compete on even footing.  Eventually in some cases the new business model takes over because the differential becomes too large to maintain, regardless of the market or political power the incumbents wield, but in capital intensive industries, this kind of ouster is especially difficult, and often only comes when the innovation being proposed involves a massive reduction of capital intensivity… like the elimination of printing and distribution costs for newspapers.

Add to these difficulties the fact that many of the current initiatives in sustainable agriculture are focused on processes rather than products, on knowledge or information, instead of material goods.  A mountain of ammonium nitrate is a completely rivalrous good.  If I’m using it to fertilize my field, then you aren’t.  Industrial capitalism thrives on this property of material goods.  You can’t “pirate” pesticides, because the bulk of their worth is bound up in their material existence.  You certainly could pirate Joel Salatin’s farming practices, and I suspect he would encourage it, but it predictably makes industry wary of getting into the “process” business.  If there’s no way to ensure exclusive ownership, the potential for profits as a result of coming up with a better process is dubious.  This is both a blessing and a curse: improved processes can scale quickly and without limit, but the potential for piracy discourages investment.  This is separate from the question of IP and GMOs, which Pollan also touched on briefly.  He isn’t categorically opposed to genetic engineering, but thinks that so far industry has primarily used it as a tool for market manipulation, and ultimately control, which is not productive in the context of this discussion.

I’ll be interested to see what else Pollan has to write about food.