(Continued from Part 1)

“The laws of thermodynamics provide an immutable framework to all life on closed planetary systems such as ours. No advances in the science of energetics and no improvements in capital efficiency or in the productivity of labour, under any social system whatever, can prevent anthropogenic climate change as a result of human-made greenhouse gas emission. No substitute technologies such as nuclear, hydrogen or any other, can overcome the problem of planetary warming; even supposedly non-greenhouse technologies like nuclear power, if implemented on a wide enough scale to provide 9 billion humans with today’s US per capita energy consumption, would result in such significant ambient warming and the release of water vapour (a powerful greenhouse gas by itself) as to produce the same risks of rising oceans, climatic change and even runaway, ecosphere-destroying warming. Any responsible scientist is bound to concede that no amount of technical improvement, progress etc, can overcome the iron limitations imposed on us by unalterable constraints determined by the limited size of the planet and the laws of thermodynamics. Therefore it is clear that current US living standards are achieved at the peril of the ecosphere and of all life on earth, and by the theft of life-opportunities from billions of fellow-humans living today in the Global South–and also by the theft of life and opportunity from all future generations, including America’s.”

-Mark Jones

The current energy regime depends overwhelmingly on fossil hydrocarbons. Jones’ point that these sources of energy cannot be replaced on a calorie by calorie basis with alternative energy sources is absolutely correct. Not even close.

The Party’s Over

Many proponents of alternative energy center their discourse on achieving “sustainability.” To be sustainable, an energy source would have to be perpetual by its very nature (wind, solar, wave), replaceable through re-concentration (biomass), or rely on some nearly inexhaustible resource (theoretically hydrogen or fusion, but I will show later that these are chimera). Proponents often present empirical data–how many kilocalories a day of solar energy hit the earth, etc.–or simply present alternatives that can transform energy into useful energy, with no reference to ultimate capacity, density, portability, stability, safety, ease of extraction, etc.

Before reviewing so-called alternatives, it is important to review some energy basics (Thanks to Don Lancaster’s excellent “Some Energy Fundamentals”).

In physics, force is something that pushes against resistance. If resistance is overcome to any degree, that is, if something is moved, that is work.

Work, in the physics sense, is measured by an arbitrary but consistent standard. For example, if a force can lift a one pound weight one foot straight up (directly away from the center of the earth actually), we refer to the quantity of that force as one foot-pound. Physical work, on the other hand is a reference to something that is affected. In this case, the one pound weight. The work is performed on the weight. The force that holds a spring closed is a force, not work. Work has to move something.

Energy, on the other hand, is the capacity to do work. It can be latent (available, but not currently moving anything) or actual (moving something now). My fingers can access the energy to strike these keys. When I am thinking and not typing, that energy is latent. When I type, the energy is actual.

Energy comes in forms: thermal, chemical, electrical, etc. Those forms come packed in different sources: heat from sunlight, heat from wood, heat from coal, heat from animal metabolism.

Power is a combination of intensity and time. Power is the quantity of energy delivered for work over a specific time.

Different energy sources are measured in different ways. British Thermal Units (BTU) measure heat. One BTU equals the heat energy required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. One volt of electricity successfully overcoming one Ohm of resistance is a current of one Ampere. The heat generated and lost to the environment by that resistance is one Watt. The power of one Watt (quantity) for one second (time) is called a joule. The power of a Watt over one hour is… one Watt-hour.

An energy source contains energy. An energy carrier only moves it. A battery is an energy carrier. Hydrogen is an energy carrier. All energy carriers, with no exceptions in the physical universe, are energy sinks. Batteries are convenient for certain uses, but they are not cheap when you look at the power delivered. People with photovolactic-powered calculators are paying around $500 a kilowatt-hour for the power in them. Fortunately, they require very little power.

An energy sink is any process that uses up more “past” energy than it returns as “present and future” energy.

Energy density refers to how much energy is stored in how much volume or weight. These are not the same, and they are important. Volumetric energy density is how many watt-hours per liter, for example. Gravimetric energy density is how many watt-hours per kilogram. Gasoline has a volumetric value of 9,000 watt-hours per liter. 150 Bar gaseous hydrogen, on the other hand, contains 405 watt-hours per liter. A 15-gallon gas tank would have to be replaced by a 334-gallon gas tank to carry around the same energy.

Portability is another issue related to energy. Gasoline is relatively simple to contain and transport. Natural gas is far more difficult.

Taking all these factors into account, we can now look at energy reality.

The simple fact is that the world system as it is now constituted, in every facet, including technological development and population, has been fueled predominantly by fossil hydrocarbons, exclusively and irreplaceably in many sectors by oil. Any analysis that fails to confront this fact squarely is neglecting physics, specifically the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The reason this physical law — related to energy — is so important is that it is a law that cannot be broken. We cannot “make” energy, and when we use it up in work, it is gone for all practical purposes.

Second Law of Thermodynamics — This law states that heat can never pass spontaneously from a colder to a hotter body. As a result of this fact, natural processes that involve energy transfer must have one direction, and all natural processes are irreversible. This law also predicts that the entropy of an isolated system always increases with time.

The central question regarding “alternative” energy is whether and how it can replace fossil fuel — and I will concentrate here on two sectors, transportation and electricity, beginning with oil. The first premise we have to face is that neither wood, hydropower, solar, wind, wave, tides, fission, geothermal, batteries, nor gas hydrates are interchangeable with oil. These can produce electricity, but electric batteries that store it cannot replace oil.

Walter Youngquist, in “Alternative Energy Sources–Myths and Realities” (Electronic Green Journal, December, 1998) explains:

“How to use electricity to efficiently replace oil (gasoline, diesel, kerosene) in the more than 700 million vehicles worldwide has not yet been satisfactorily solved. There are severe limitations of the storage batteries involved. For example, a gallon of gasoline weighing about 8 pounds has the same energy as one ton of conventional lead-acid storage batteries. Fifteen gallons of gasoline in a car’s tank are the energy equal of 15 tons of storage batteries. Even if much improved storage batteries were devised, they cannot compete with gasoline or diesel fuel in energy density. Also, storage batteries become almost useless in very cold weather, storage capacity is limited, and batteries need to be replaced after a few years use at large cost. There is no battery pack which can effectively move heavy farm machinery over miles of farm fields, and no electric battery system seems even remotely able to propel a Boeing 747 14 hours nonstop at 600 miles an hour from New York to Cape Town (now the longest scheduled plane flight). Also, the considerable additional weight to any vehicle using batteries is a severe handicap in itself. In transport machines, electricity is not a good replacement for oil (Jensen and Sorensen, 1984). This is a limitation in the use of alternative sources have where electricity is the end product.”

Batteries are also energy carriers, and therefore energy sinks. More energy is put into their production than what is retrieved for work in their use. This is not a technological deficiency, though some batteries are less inefficient than others, though far more expensive. This is a reality inscribed by physical law. Batteries cannot replace gasoline for vehicles. Not now. Not ever. To think otherwise is not merely technological optimism; it is technological blind faith–the belief that somewhere, somehow, technology can solve any problem. This is quite simply not true, and sometimes the opposite of true.

This points us to the question of interchangeability. All BTUs are not equal, because of form. We not only will never use batteries to fly airplanes or run eighteen wheelers, we will never use coal, wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, or wave power to run these vehicles. Volumetric, gravimetric, and portability considerations remain paramount for specific energy applications. There are a handful of highly-expensive, science-project electrical cars, but in the world there are more than 600 million automobiles (75% of them are private cars). That number is rising precipitously (30% in ten years if trendlines hold). They consume approximately half of the world’s gasoline. They continue to be produced along with replacement parts, and will continue to be produced–barring some massive social cataclysm or transformation–until the petroleum is no longer economically available.

The petroleum is in fact about to go into an irreversible decline in production. C. J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrere, petroleum geologists working for Petroconsultants in Geneva, wrote in 1999 that world oil production would peak approximately this year (2004) then go into permanent decline. Youngquist and Duncan of the Petroleum Engineering Program at UCLA predicted 2006. That was net oil. World per capita production peaked in 1978.

If, points out Dr. H. E. Puthoff of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, “it appeared that the development of alternative energy [were economically feasible, it] would be welcomed for the simple reason that if the burden of major energy use were to be removed from the oil industry, then their rapidly dwindling resource could be conserved for a longer period of time, and they could concentrate on the development of pharmaceuticals, plastics, synthetic fibers, etc., for which the profit margins are significantly greater.” Puthoff goes on to explain that “what remains to be proven [with regard to alternative energy sources] is whether the fundamental processes involved can be brought from proof-of-principle to engineering maturity so as to constitute market-viable energy resources.” For 600 million automobiles aimed at becoming 800 million automobiles, there is no alternative to diminishing fossil fuel. That is precisely why energy companies have not invested in the research and development of these alternatives.

Ethanol is touted by some who fail to understand two things. Industrially grown corn is its basis, and it is severely destructive of soil and water. Even more importantly, perhaps, ethanol is an energy sink. Ethanol requires more energy inputs than what we get back from it. It is, in fact, a vote-buying scheme that subsidizes agri-business for growing corn that neither the environment nor the economy needs. According to Pimentel, ethanol takes 71% more calories to make than it produces. This is disputed by alternative energy buffs who claim that sugar beets can yield an energy positive in the production of alcohol, but even though this may be theoretically true, it fails to account for the ecological downsides of intensive industrial agriculture on the scale necessary to replace oil, which would be, again, massive soil salinization and depletion, and additional strain on depleting aquifers.

For producing electricity, the alternatives most often considered are nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, waves, and hydrogen.

Nuclear not only creates extremely dangerous material that will remain dangerous longer than any civilization yet recorded, it is not greenhouse gas free, as advertised. Nuclear fuel is made with uranium, an ore that has to be mined, milled, refined, and shipped, each step requiring energy inputs, and the rarer any extracted material becomes, the more energy intensive the extraction process becomes along with it. Studies conducted in Europe showed that nuclear electricity has a greenhouse “footprint” similar to combined-fuel generators, and as uranium become rarer, that footprint will become deeper.

“Uranium, the fuel base of nuclear power, must be mined, milled, converted, enriched, packaged, sent to reactors and split to produce the heat and steam that generate electricity. The uranium enrichment process in particular, in which the radioactive material is made more radioactive, generates greenhouse gases galore. “It requires a tremendous amount of electricity,” explains Elizabeth Stuckle, a spokeswoman at the US Enrichment Corporation, the company in charge of altering the uranium for the reactors. To get that electricity, she says, ‘we are having to rely on fossil fuels.’”

- Mark Francis Cohen, Nuking the Atmosphere

Even the libertarian-capitalist Cato Institute notes that nuclear energy is also heavily subsidized and could not survive in a free market (neither could any of the other commercial energies! The free market is now and always has been a pernicious ahistorical myth.). Nuclear is not safe, it is not clean, and it is not cheap. It is the most expensive energy on the grid, except to the subsidized corporations who sell it. And a spent fuel fire or a reactor meltdown could have unbelievably catastrophic consequences. To power the whole world with nuclear electricity would require more than 500 reactors that would age and deteriorate in ultimately unpredictable social, economic, and political circumstances.

At this juncture, partly for thermodynamic reasons and partly for economic ones, solar (photovoltaic) panels–on aggregate, over time, worldwide–have not produced a single watt-hour of electricity. For the time being, photovoltaics are a net energy sink. Photovoltaics can be improved, and theoretically they can be developed and used in a manner that gains energy, but this will require many more years and millions of dollars in research and development to begin gaining energy from photovoltaics. Right now, there is more energy expended in aggregate production of the panels than those panels ever produce. Moreover, their power delivery is extremely limited and they cannot complete with conventional electricity. And while photovoltaics may be made more efficient over time, they still have one other material constraint, and that is the increasing scarcity of silicon. Finally, geography and climate constrain the universality of a solar solution. Sixty square miles of solid solar cells would theoretically be required to power Oregon. If it rains, everyone suddenly has cold showers as their food rots.

Similar problems are obviously associated with wind, waves, waterfalls, and geothermal. They are all geographically fixed and cannot produce more than a small fraction of the energy currently in use and inextricably bound up with the economic viability of the existing socio-political system.

That brings us to hydrogen.

The caustic Don Lancaster says, “It is reasonable to expect that hydrogen is probably going to play a big role in future transportation and energy developments. Hydrogen can make a great student paper or a nice research topic. And eventually might lead to a technical buck or two… At the same time, there is sure a lot of hogwash and misinformation out there. Especially on the web. So, the more you know about real hydrogen resources, the more intelligently you can dismiss all the rest of them.”

Hydrogen is not really a fuel, but an energy carrier and therefore an energy sink. Most commercial hydrogen is produced by reforming methane, not through electrolysis, as many hydrogen-acolytes want to do for the “hydrogen car.” The process of either reforming methane or producing hydrogen through electrolysis is both expensive and energy-intensive. In fact, pre-existing energy is required… more energy than can then be produced by the combustion of the hydrogen. Lancaster compares it to trading a US dollar for one Mexican peso. That is actually about right.

Hydrogen cannot be produced by any means on earth that “does not consume more energy than it delivers.” And while the immensely expensive and energy inefficient hydrogen has around 39,000 watt-hours of (carried) energy per kilogram, compared to gasoline’s 13,000, the hydrogen can only deliver 3.5 watts per hour per liter. Hydrogen, if inefficiently burned, actually produces nitrogen oxides. It also embrittles metals and diffuses through all non-metals.

The fact of the matter is, contrary to all the utopian fantasies that are being propagated by charlatans and consumed by people who don’t understand the science, there is not now nor will there ever be a “hydrogen economy.” It is the modern equivalent of alchemy. The Bush administration is pushing this right now, with the hidden agenda of producing it, using hydrolysis… with nuclear electricity; a rather backhanded way to push their agenda on behalf of their nuclear utility clients.

The unpalatable truth, which must be faced squarely if we are to be the least bit serious about energy, is that (1) there is no alternative to fossil fuel, and (2) it will take many years more dependency on fossil fuel to effectively transform our energy paradigm into anything that approaches sustainable. Youngquist and others estimate that full exploitation of all alternatives, even after extensive research and development to which there has been no meaningful political commitment, could not replace more than 30% of fossil fuels, and that is a net figure that does not take into account diversity of use, geographic constraints, or the fossil inputs that will be required to retool and restructure the whole world for an new energy regime.

This is about as pleasant to say and hear as, “That leg is gangrenous, and if we don’t cut it off, you will die.” It is also just as true and important.

Even so-called alternatives would require substantial fossil fuel inputs — not to mention a political will not yet on the horizon — to develop.

We are stuck with hydrocarbons, and they will be running out sooner than later. Our option is to stay with the train as it plunges off the cliff, or throw off the engineer and begin to apply the brakes until we can get off. This exceedingly bad news does not win huge numbers of devotees, it doesn’t make for a great grant proposal, and it doesn’t sell anyone’s political newsletters. No one wants to hear that the party is almost over.

Our system is a world system, and there is no way to realistically assess energy issues in any other context. Since we are examining energy use worldwide, we have to pay particular attention to the most populous nation on the planet, China.

As this is written, China has been for several years now the fastest growing economy in the world. This is not solely a function of population. China is developing its industrial base, to include its research and development capacity at an unprecedented rate. Its domestic oil production peaked in the mid-1990s and is now in permanent decline, even as energy needs increase with its phenomenal growth. In 1995, China’s energy consumption was 16,662 barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) per day. By 2005, it is projected to be 32,776, and by 2015, on that same trendline, it will be 64,475. This is just one example of the emerging conflict over finite global energy supplies.

It is in the examination of the global conjuncture that we have to more fully amalgamate the question of energy with that of geopolitics, because it is here where we can see how energy as a long-term secular trend figures into a massively destabilized world system that has been left since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The USSR was a “developmental state,” just as present-day India and China are. That is, the single central priority of the state (aside from self-defense) was economic development. But the USSR was distinct from China and India inasmuch as it had an overwhelmingly determinative role in the global system, while China and India today are merely articulated within a system in which the United States plays the singular and determinative role. In many respects, the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States defined the 20th Century. Many historians speculate that had it not been for the USSR, there would have been three, four, or more world wars between the industrialized capitalist metropoles, but the US-USSR standoff, renegotiated during WWII for reasons this article will not dwell on, created a bipolar world that served as the impetus for the development of “free-world multilateralism.”

When that system collapsed with the USSR in 1991, the raison d’etre of multilateralism collapsed with it, and the suddenness of that shift — the equivalent of a Richter-8 geopolitical earthquake — caught the whole world unawares, including the former adversaries of the Soviet Union, like the United States.

The factor of the Soviet Union in the international equation had given credence to an illusion of autarkic national-industrial development that impacted even on the thought processes of US-aligned states like Japan and Germany. I will leave the detailing of this immense post-Soviet disequilibrium to historians and political scientists. Suffice it to say the repositioning scramble was on.

The unchallenged financial and military dominance of the world system dropped into the lap of the United States, just as it was becoming clear even to the most obtuse among the powerful that the earth’s very resource base was drying up. They know that there is grave danger to both the bioshpere and the world energy system, and that “growth” uses up these resources. In response, using the International Monetary Fund combined with selective applications of military power, crisis-stricken economies in the global South have been plunged into deeper and deeper misery. They cannot be permitted continue on the path of growth, because, as Hornborg shows, it is a zero-sum game.

Review any of the documents produced by the think tanks from whence the current administration has drawn most of its cabinet, and they are extremely frank and explicit about their goals. The conquest and control of Southwest Asia is their absolute highest priority, and has been for almost a decade, precisely because over 50% of the world remaining easily extractible oil is there. When John Kerry said he supported the war, even though he had the admission dragged out of him by Republican ridicule, he was telling the truth. John Kerry was not trying to abandon imperialism, he was being sent by his rich pals George Soros and Warren Buffett to save it from those fractious bad boys around the Idiot Prince.

Aggregate world oil production is peaking now. Gulf States production, with Saudi Arabia being the greatest producer, will peak around 8-10 years later, around 2010-2012 (though recent news suggest it may actually be peaking NOW). Which if you do the math, it means that everyone except the Gulf States is already peaked or in decline. Best predictions for the end of recoverable oil are between 50 and 100 years, with the most neutral folk predicting 2070 or so. (Industry paid liars make idiotic claims about hundreds of years, for which my mama would slap the shit out of them.) But as it runs out, which according to Hubbert Curve analysis begins almost immediately, there are a series of crises that will occur. This makes it more than a resource, and the drive to control what’s left is more than an economic competition. When we run out of a commodity like shirts, we can make more shirts. Oil is not a mere commodity. When you run out of oil, you’re out. You’ve got to die and come back in 2 billion years to get it back. This is the diminishing lifeblood of the global economy. That is why there is an attempt afoot to resolve this situation in favor of US economic interests by military means.

Military action against many groups across the globe, which is what the administration was telling us quite openly they were planning to do before Iraq turned into a military tar baby, has put a lot of backs against the wall.

Terror attacks are already multiplying in the region, and regimes that are perceived to be in the US camp are facing the not totally unjustified perception that they are Quislings of the US. As standards of living in those nations fall, given the passing of Arab nationalism, the appeal of political Islam to large masses of people has increased.

The war in Iraq is first and foremost an energy war, which could evolve into a new kind of world war, a war where non-state actors redefine armed conflict in dramatically new ways. In fact, it is likely that this is happening right now.

World oil consumption right now is around 77 million barrels a day. By 2010, that is expected to increase to 100 million barrels a day. This oil is produced by two major groups, let’s say, for the purpose of analysis. OPEC and non-OPEC (NOPEC). OPEC is largely concentrated in the Gulf region. NOPEC is the North Atlantic, North America, Mexico, China, Nigeria, and so forth. That doesn’t tell the whole story, though. Gulf States’ oil does not peak in production until 2010, and half the world’s remaining accessible oil is there. World production is peaking right now, but world production is an average. NOPEC peaked several years ago, now being in permanent decline. So, OPEC is getting stronger, and NOPEC is getting weaker. Saudi Arabia–an OPEC nation–is the biggest pool, with Iraq second. The US has for years been trying to ensure domination of OPEC, and they have accomplished that to some degree, by ensuring the corrupt Saudis and others invest heavily in US financial instruments. Given that OPEC production is still rising, and NOPEC is in a permanent free fall, OPEC is inevitably regaining dominance over the overall oil market. Iraq is the best potential swing producer outside of Saudi Arabia, and therefore the best potential stalking horse within a newly reconfigured OPEC. Now the US is beginning the process of psychological preparation of the US citizenry for some kind of action against Iran!

Since world oil production begins to decline on average almost immediately, the US as the biggest end user needs to figure out how to compensate for the losses being sustained in NOPEC production. Their solution, now in its first stage with the occupation of Iraq, is to gain political control over the region. But the most optimistic scenarios are that all regional producers combined, with massive investment (over $1.5 trillion, a number that is daily rising with Iraqi armed resistance) in new infrastructure, might put out an additional 15 million barrels a day. Given that our extrapolated appetite will go up 25 million barrels a day within nine years, the US remains in a dilemma.

Lat week, with oil prices threatening Greenspan with a “soft patch,” the heat was turned upon OPEC to raise production. Implicit in this demand is that Saudi Arabia open the faucet. The president of OPEC came back with a sheepish admission… they can’t. They are pumping full-bore right now.

In fact, the US has been trying to structure this post-WWII space for quite some time, and the bare fact is, it’s an over-reach. It can’t do it, and it can’t NOT try. The only option now, from the point of view of the Bush administration, is to wage the “infinite war,” a war of extermination against 100 million Islamic people in the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa. John Kerry fully intended to continue on the same course, while he pissed on our collective leg with “green-capitalism” and “energy independence.”

“It is a war fought not to grab a huge new untapped and undefended asset, but a declining one. The soon-to-be-decaying oil fields of the Middle East embedded in a sullen ocean of mass anger are no great prize upon which to build the next wave of capitalist accumulation.”

-Mark Jones

The people who are now in possession of half the world’s remaining oil reserves are being unpredictably destabilized, and the US loss of access to critical energy supplies is now at least within the realm of possibility. Pakistan has been destabilized even as it continues to be in a nuclear standoff with its neighbor, India. Russia grows more hostile to US foreign policy by the day. Turkey is feeling under attack from the US-allied Kurds. The fake Iraqi government is fracturing as this is written during the second general Shia uprising. Ex-CIA asset Osama bin Laden is closer to his goal of overthrowing the House of Saud than he has ever been. And Anti-American sentiment around the world is the strongest in living memory.

Between 1945 and 1990, the US intervened militarily on 52 occasions. Between 1990 and 2000, it intervened 60 times. As we progressed through that decade, the US has begun to more and more organize these adventures without UN approval or oversight. Our government has refused to ratify the land mine convention, and is now abrogated the Test Ban Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Accord. This drive to achieve independence of military action has now culminated with the grant of the broadest and most ill-defined war powers of any president in history to George W. Bush, with which he has managed to establish a situation that is, paradoxically, degrading the very institution upon which he most desperately depends to see his agenda through: the military.

How did John Kerry propose to change this when he was in fantasy-office? He didn’t. He was going to create 100,000 more defense industry jobs, raise the troop levels in Southwest Asia, and probably re-institute the draft (as Bush may still do). But Kerry supported green-capitalism, so he was better than Bush… right? His delusion would have taken three years longer to finish fucking up the biosphere than the Bush delusion, but it would have given the people four more years of false hope and denial and further forestall what really needs to be done.

If we want to know what the energy crisis looks like, look around. This is it.

If we want to know the logically simple but socially very difficult solution, it is conservation. Conservation is not conservative, but something that can only be accomplished through a revolutionary change in society. Whether we can accomplish the social transformation necessary is one issue, but the fact is that an energy soft-landing will require us to dramatically conserve dwindling fossil fuel stocks, by as much as 75%, and begin to think seriously about how to de-link from the growth economy… forever.

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