It might be relatively easy to dismiss mockery of President George W. Bush, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and their ilk for episodes of apparent “airborne fact finding” (or aff as I prefer to call it) as simply taking these events out of context for either political or comedy fodder. (The archetypes of making an aff of oneself are Bush’s flyover of New Orleans, and Rumsfeld’s August 2006 take on the Iraq security situation). I can’t help but wonder, however, whether there is more to this than isolated incidents, or even broader evidence of a flyover presidency. Rather, I am beginning to suspect that there is a wholesale willful ignorance afoot here, mixed with a dim recognition that the common experience of aircraft vistas can serve as a useful means to transmit hollow messages brimming with naught but ideology. Exhibit B is Linda Chavez’ stunningly moronic AFF-based analysis of population statistics on Weekend America in December 2007.
A more recent example that seems to me to be consistent with aff analysis is advanced by Michael Anissimov and bolstered by Tsteel. Basically these arguments, arguments that I have seen in nearly limitless and infuriating permutations, are little more than, “whoa, look out the window of my plane, all that empty land, all that sunlight. Dude, it’s all cool!” Tsteels agreement with Anissimov’s claim that concern about overpopulation is a selection effect based on people living in crowded cities, is patently and quantitatively unsupported by his aff argument. Showing that there are regions of this country where population density is higher and regions where it is lower, imagining that somehow all the population might be spread out so that both yellow and blue regions turn green, and from that sunnily concluding that there are enough resources on this finite planet to support six billion, rushing headlong to ten billion, people is sophomoric at best.
Randomly selected from among a vast list of issues this conclusion ignores are the additional resource impacts of those formerly yellow regions turned green (shouldn’t our experience with the suburbanization and exurbanization of America have at least a bit of a role in considering how this might work out?), studies showing that dense urban areas can be more resource efficient in many ways than less dense communities, and a quantitative and scientifically/technologically grounded consideration of the many, many parameters beyond map colors that determine the population carrying capacity of the earth and the quality of life of its inhabitants.
Technology, ah yes technology. It has been a wonder at, for instance, delivering porn to your desktop, engineering Segway scooters to search for a problem, developing Humvees that can lay siege to nearly any landscape, and distributing obscenely large high definition television screens to homes across our great nation. At reducing the consumption of finite resources, um, not so much. In my own view, this is only partly due to the market failures that many other commenters have identified. It is also due in large part to the second law of thermodynamics – an inviolable principle that so many of the technology pollyannas have chosen to ignore, the brick wall to end all brick walls, dead in the path of all those schemes that propose to replace, joule-for-joule, the extraordinarily low entropy and high energy density, and efficient and easy to transport energy source of fossil fuel with high entropy and low energy density, low efficiency and difficult to transport energy alternatives. It’s all so reminiscent of that long ago watershed, when a president came before a nation in crisis and asked, not for sacrifice, but shopping. Our resource pollyannas tell us that we’ll be able to shop ourselves out of this one as well, that we can plan on consuming in the same gluttonous way we have for the past century, that by buying more we’re saving more, that we live in a Wal-Mart biosphere whose shelves will be miraculously stocked and pennies knocked off the price while we sleep, a more absurd and fundamentally flawed prospect than President Bush’s own prescription.
The elephant in the room as the Hubbert peak passes, as ocean fish stocks collapse, as fresh water becomes a battleground, as media and corporate interests design, spread and buttress a culture of consumption even for the impoverished, as ugly anitbiotic resistant strains of microrganisms multiply, as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations relentlessly exponentiate, as the global arms market continues to boom, as extinctions accelerate, as the economics of global food supplies continue to undermine the meager foundation that has kept many millions just this side of starvation (not to mention the many millions it has abandoned to that horrific fate) really IS becoming how many people is too many? As the most extraordinarily successful large life form that has ever existed on the planet, we had better start asking the very painful question whether it is possible to be too successful. I still remember what I learned over the course of a few days from a little jar of nematodes and pablum with a tight fitting lid, a failed science project from many years ago: the problem with biological systems and finite resources is that they always ask that question about success – and then answer it - if someone else doesn’t ask it first.
Showing posts with label second law of thermodynamics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label second law of thermodynamics. Show all posts
Friday, November 28, 2008
Friday, July 4, 2008
Oil: A Bleak Vision
The critiques of my position on the current oil crisis at pandagon - positing that we have trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure dedicated to an oil-fueled civilization and so imagining essentially immediate and drastic change in our oil consumption patterns is both imprudent and unthinkable - while possibly correct, a point I would love to be able to concede (I desperately want my daughter to grow up in a world that is not a nightmare of privation and desperation), depend significantly on a basic assumption. I find that assumption inconsistent with a detailed understanding of the fundamental principles governing the systems we are discussing. First, I'll give you my punch line and then make the argument, so that if you decide you'd rather go get rickrolled on another website you don't have to continue reading this:
The mathematics of exponential functions are ruthless.
The assumption that the critiques make is that there are some capacities in our system that will allow us to undergo a slow transformation (slow being one or two generations) from the unsustainable oil-fueled culture we have built. For example, some of the capacities that have been referred to include rapid spin-up of alternative oil equivalent fuel sources, corporate self interest that controls oil supplies in a prudent fashion, and what I would characterize as moderate conservation efforts. And perhaps the more important point is that these capacities are very likely an inescapable requirement for a slow transformation. Evidence strongly suggests that the situation we are currently encountering is consistent with the peak oil model - the infamous Hubbert's peak. In this analysis an exponentially increasing demand for a limited resource produces an exponential decay - a crash - in the availability of the resource. Notably, this crash depends simply on an interaction between supply and demand - it doesn't for instance take into account potentially disastrous external events, for instance, conventional - or, God forbid - nuclear military conflagration in the Middle East. The only way to cushion the ruthless mathematics of such a crash is through capacities external to the resource such as those identified above.
Since slow transformation may ultimately depend on the external capacities, these should be critically examined.
1. There are currently no obvious technologies that can be used to produce alternative oil equivalent fuel sources. The unforgiving and unassailable principles of physics strongly suggest that developing them at a level sufficient for a slow transformation is unlikely, at best. We have a long history of imagining that pressing problems will yield to relatively quick technological fixes, only to be repeatedly disappointed: unmetered electrical power from nuclear plants? fusion? corn ethanol? Energy principles are extraordinarily well understood in the scientific and engineering communities and there just isn't a lot of low hanging fruit waiting to be picked.
2. Imagining that corporate self interest will play a significant role ignores that corporations are probably singularly incapable of addressing issues such as these. Our free-market model rewards corporations based on criteria that almost without exception do not include thoughtful long-term stewardship of resources. Is there any more evidence necessary than the fuel-efficiency obstructionist history of U.S. domestic automakers, now facing bankruptcy? The sub-prime mortgage debacle? Corporations are at least as likely as individuals to act in fundamentally irrational ways that prove their own destruction.
3. Conservation. Aye, that's the rub. Assuming my analyses above are correct (obviously, debatable), can conservation play a key role in a slow transformation? That becomes simply a question of whether the conservation rate is sufficient to offset the exponential crash associated with Hubbert's peak, and that is the heart of my argument. From what I understand about the mathematics of these principles the rate of conservation suggested by slow transformation (people being more careful about when and how they use their cars, people replacing 25 mpg vehicles with 50 mpg vehicles over the next decade, redesigning and rebuilding a less oil-dependent infrastructure) is insufficient to offset the rate of collapse predicted by Hubbert's peak.
The critics of my argument point out that because of deep infrastructure investments we cannot expect a drastic and immediate change from our current oil-dependence, that we need to approach this in a gentle and orderly fashion . The problem with this critique is that those prehistoric forests that produced the oil fields we are currently sucking dry just don't care that you live in a suburb 50 miles from your workplace, that your food supplies need to travel an average of 1500 miles to reach your plate. The solar constant of 1340 W/m^2 just doesn't care that our agriculture, our food supply, depends on climate conditions in the mid-west grain belt and the Asian rice belt, that much of agriculture depends on fresh water supplied by a slowly melting summer snow-pack. The second law of thermodynamics just doesn't care that you have to pay 5 dollars for a gallon of gas or 10 dollars, or 100 dollars, that you are wishing or praying as hard as you can for a miraculous new source of energy. And guess what? Those players win by default: they are inescapable principles and they JUST DON'T CARE.
I understand my vision is a very bleak one. I hope against hope that it is deeply flawed. But it is insufficient to argue against it simply because it would prove problematic for those who are now ensconced in an oil-dependent infrastructure. The models and principles underlying the vision are orthogonal to those considerations. The black plague that killed perhaps 75 million people simply didn't care that the civilizations of the 14th century were built on an infrastructure that fed the devastation, and oil simply doesn't care that our civilization is built on an infrastructure that has some potential to surpass that horrific history. The mathematics of exponential functions are ruthless.
The mathematics of exponential functions are ruthless.
The assumption that the critiques make is that there are some capacities in our system that will allow us to undergo a slow transformation (slow being one or two generations) from the unsustainable oil-fueled culture we have built. For example, some of the capacities that have been referred to include rapid spin-up of alternative oil equivalent fuel sources, corporate self interest that controls oil supplies in a prudent fashion, and what I would characterize as moderate conservation efforts. And perhaps the more important point is that these capacities are very likely an inescapable requirement for a slow transformation. Evidence strongly suggests that the situation we are currently encountering is consistent with the peak oil model - the infamous Hubbert's peak. In this analysis an exponentially increasing demand for a limited resource produces an exponential decay - a crash - in the availability of the resource. Notably, this crash depends simply on an interaction between supply and demand - it doesn't for instance take into account potentially disastrous external events, for instance, conventional - or, God forbid - nuclear military conflagration in the Middle East. The only way to cushion the ruthless mathematics of such a crash is through capacities external to the resource such as those identified above.
Since slow transformation may ultimately depend on the external capacities, these should be critically examined.
1. There are currently no obvious technologies that can be used to produce alternative oil equivalent fuel sources. The unforgiving and unassailable principles of physics strongly suggest that developing them at a level sufficient for a slow transformation is unlikely, at best. We have a long history of imagining that pressing problems will yield to relatively quick technological fixes, only to be repeatedly disappointed: unmetered electrical power from nuclear plants? fusion? corn ethanol? Energy principles are extraordinarily well understood in the scientific and engineering communities and there just isn't a lot of low hanging fruit waiting to be picked.
2. Imagining that corporate self interest will play a significant role ignores that corporations are probably singularly incapable of addressing issues such as these. Our free-market model rewards corporations based on criteria that almost without exception do not include thoughtful long-term stewardship of resources. Is there any more evidence necessary than the fuel-efficiency obstructionist history of U.S. domestic automakers, now facing bankruptcy? The sub-prime mortgage debacle? Corporations are at least as likely as individuals to act in fundamentally irrational ways that prove their own destruction.
3. Conservation. Aye, that's the rub. Assuming my analyses above are correct (obviously, debatable), can conservation play a key role in a slow transformation? That becomes simply a question of whether the conservation rate is sufficient to offset the exponential crash associated with Hubbert's peak, and that is the heart of my argument. From what I understand about the mathematics of these principles the rate of conservation suggested by slow transformation (people being more careful about when and how they use their cars, people replacing 25 mpg vehicles with 50 mpg vehicles over the next decade, redesigning and rebuilding a less oil-dependent infrastructure) is insufficient to offset the rate of collapse predicted by Hubbert's peak.
The critics of my argument point out that because of deep infrastructure investments we cannot expect a drastic and immediate change from our current oil-dependence, that we need to approach this in a gentle and orderly fashion . The problem with this critique is that those prehistoric forests that produced the oil fields we are currently sucking dry just don't care that you live in a suburb 50 miles from your workplace, that your food supplies need to travel an average of 1500 miles to reach your plate. The solar constant of 1340 W/m^2 just doesn't care that our agriculture, our food supply, depends on climate conditions in the mid-west grain belt and the Asian rice belt, that much of agriculture depends on fresh water supplied by a slowly melting summer snow-pack. The second law of thermodynamics just doesn't care that you have to pay 5 dollars for a gallon of gas or 10 dollars, or 100 dollars, that you are wishing or praying as hard as you can for a miraculous new source of energy. And guess what? Those players win by default: they are inescapable principles and they JUST DON'T CARE.
I understand my vision is a very bleak one. I hope against hope that it is deeply flawed. But it is insufficient to argue against it simply because it would prove problematic for those who are now ensconced in an oil-dependent infrastructure. The models and principles underlying the vision are orthogonal to those considerations. The black plague that killed perhaps 75 million people simply didn't care that the civilizations of the 14th century were built on an infrastructure that fed the devastation, and oil simply doesn't care that our civilization is built on an infrastructure that has some potential to surpass that horrific history. The mathematics of exponential functions are ruthless.
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