Domestic Fuel

I have a question for you. Is the debate over global warming over? The next logical question is: Should it be over?

According to authors Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling Jr., human-induced climate change is indeed real, but this will not necessarily lead to an environmental apocalypse. This is the premise of their book, A Climate of Extremes. They write, “The data lead us to conclude that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is indeed real, but relatively modest. We’re not arguing against AGW, but rather against DAGW (dangerous anthropogenic global warming).”

A Climate of Extremes is about data – the data that proves (or disproves) the existence of global warming and the potential effects that it could have. The authors spend the majority of the book debunking the science that leads us to believe that the polar bears will go extinct, the icebergs are melting and those on the coasts will endure catastrophic damage, and that hurricanes, floods and fires are somehow tied to climate change. Well folks, there is no data to back up these far-fetched claims argue the authors.

The entire time I was reading the book, this famous quote kept running through my mind, lies, damned lies and statistics, a sentiment used to describe the power of numbers. The authors featured a lot of content that has been used by famous global warming advocates, such as Al Gore to prove the danger we face if we don’t curb greenhouse gas emissions, is taken out of context. In other words, the data is fiddled and faddled with to meet a person’s particular needs.

We all know this happens and it is good that people continue to “out” the bad science. However, the biggest irony I found in the book was when they discussed the pervasive bias inherent in global warming research. Shortly thereafter, they offer up why corn-ethanol will cause, rather than curb global warming, and they point to Timothy Searchinger’s original paper  – a paper which has not only been criticized by the scientific community but also new research has been presented. My point: maybe the authors should take some of their own advice.

While I am a proponent of offering up various scientific viewpoints, it should never be taken at face value and neither should the data presented in A Climate of Extremes. It is in everyone’s best interest to delve into the issue, farther than what is presented in a few books.

Since the biodiesel industry is in a struggle for the extension of its $1 per gallon tax credit, I thought I’d spend some time learning more about biodiesel. This week, I read “Biodiesel America,” by Josh Tickell, who also produced the award winning film, “FUEL.” While the book is a tad bit dated (it was published in 2006) the basic information is still good.

Many people perceive biodiesel as a niche fuel, but this is really not correct. Your clothes, food, electronics and toys were all brought to you through a transportation network that runs on diesel. Your children are taken to and from school on buses fueled by diesel. And diesel is highly toxic. According to Harvard University’s Alternative Fuel Vehicle Program, biodiesel emits no sulfur dioxide, 78 percent less life cyle carbon dioxide and as much as 50 percent fewer smog-producing compounds as compared to conventional diesel.

While Tickell notes that biodiesel cannot replace our country’s entire diesel market, and it does face a few challenges that must still be overcome (cold start problems, costs) he writes, “Biodiesel has a bright future as an alternative fuel, both as a fuel blend (B20) and on its own (B100)….While biodiesel does have drawbacks, its similarities to conventional diesel in terms of performance, low cost, and compatibility with our existing fuel infrastructure make it an ideal solution for meeting emerging federal emission requirements and improving air quality now.”

Biodiesel has a higher net energy value than diesel, the feedstocks used are grown or produced here in America, the fuel stays here in America, and it is more environmental friendly and sustainable (all aspects discussed in the book). So why are our legislators in Washington DC dragging their feet in support of this viable alternative fuel?
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I read in interesting book this week called “Future Scenarios, How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change,” by David Holmgren. The book focuses on the inevitable “energy descent” that the world is facing and outlines four likely scenarios that include the cultural, political, agricultural and economic implications of peak oil and climate change. Holmgren is best known as the co-creator of permaculture. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, it is “the integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man.”

The book begins with a discussion of four possible broad energy scenarios that are likely to occur over the next century: techno-explosion, techno-stability, energy decent, and collapse. These scenarios range from continued growth to doom and gloom, and Holmgren writes, “There is a desperate need to recast energy descent as a positive process that can free people from the strictures and dysfunctions of growth economics and consumer culture.” He continues, “This is now apparent to many people around the world and is far more fundamental than a public relations campaign to paint a black sky blue.”

There are other factors that will affect our future in addition to climate change and peak oil and these include critical materials depletion, water depletion, food supply, population pressures, financial instability, psychosocial limits to affluence, and species extinction. Holmgren notes that all of these issues combined need to be considered when predicting possible future scenarios.

So what are the scenarios?
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Yesterday I reviewed the book Crude World and today I watched the documentary Crude directed by Joe Berlinger. Ironically, Crude follows the multi-year struggle of 30,000 indigenous and colonial rainforest dwellers of Ecuador as they struggle to hold Chevron accountable for what many environmentalists are saying is the world’s worst case of oil contamination ever. This story was told in one chapter of Crude World, but you don’t really embrace the full effect of the devastation and human struggling until you witness it yourself.

The lawsuit was filed against Texaco but when Chevron merged with Texaco in 2001 they inherited the suit. Originally filed in the United States, the suit was dropped and moved to Ecuador where against all odds, the courts proceeded with the case. The people are led by local lawyer Pablo Fajardo who is being assisted by American lawyer Steven Donzinger. The documentary covers three years of the case and follows the plaintiffs to three continents and begins with the judges orders to visit the contamination sites.

Eventually, the judge orders a third party to come in and test the various contamination sites (which Chevron has claimed to test and found no pollutants that exceed U.S. EPA regulations). When the 4,000 page report is released in 2008, it “recommends compensation for environmental remediation, excess cancer deaths, impacts on indigenous culture, and Texaco’s ‘unjust enrichment’ from its operations.” The monetary cost: $27 billion dollars. 
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Yesterday I declared this the Week of Oil. While the Obama administration is calling for more green jobs and support of the clean tech industry, it is also calling for more research on ‘clean coal’ and more off-shore drilling. It’s these last two items that really seem to fire people up so I decided it was high time I learned more about oil’s world and I began by reading “Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil,” by Peter Maass.

This book takes you on a journey around the world and throws you into the violence that surrounds nations’ quest for oil. It’s not pretty. To reiterate what most people already know, the majority of oil left in the world lies in volatile areas. And not just the Middle East, but areas of Africa and South America. Too many people believe that oil leads to wealth and the revival of a country. However, too often, it leads to corruption by government officials, increased poverty and unrest – not to mention the environmental devastation that occurs.

The sad thing is that despite knowing better (America is all for human rights, right?) our own corporations support these evil regimes. A case in point that Maass discusses is Equatorial Guinea and its corrupt dictatorial President Teodoro Obiang. His reported salary is $60,000 a year (US dollars) but it was recently discovered that he has bank accounts in access of $700 million. The bank accounts reside in the U.S.

So while he’s rolling in the dough, the people of his county are uneducated, underfed and lacking in basic amenities like clean water and electricity. Eventually, the Senate released a report detailing “money laundering and foreign corruption” after being tipped off by journalist Ken Silverstein, and in the report wrote that oil companies operating in the country “may have contributed to corrupt practices in the country.” Naturally, the oil companies denied paying bribes (which is illegal), a few hands were slapped and business as usual resumed. The only true losers were the citizens of Equatorial Guinea.
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How many people agree with the statement, “We should not leave the solution to our environmental issues to environmentalists.” Two proponents of this idea are Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenbeger with the Break Through Institute and author of a book by the same name, “Break Through: Why We Can’t Leave Solving the Planet to Environmentalists.”

They write, “In the end, it is the global ecological crisis themselves that have triggered the death of environmentalism. For us to make sense of them, the category of “the environment” – along with the ancient story of humankind’s fall from nature – is no longer useful. The challenge of climate change is so massive, so global, and so complex that it can be overcome only if we look beyond the issue categories of the past and embrace a grand new vision for the future.”

They continue by arguing that before a new vision can be realized we must first ask, “What kind of beings are we? and What can we become?” And this is what they set out to answer; however, along the journey, I lost interest and barely held out long enough to discover the answer to these questions.

Right now, many people who read the book are thinking (or will write me) you didn’t get it. No, I got it. In fact, the answers are philosophical, engaging, well thought out, and have extreme merit. But the truth is, I like to be entertained when I read, even if it’s a nonfiction or business book, and this book felt like I was back in philosophy class in college (and for me that was one and done). Yet the philosophical arguments they lay out adeptly get us thinking into a new thought paradigm. We should no longer think about how the world can work together to solve global warming in the traditional sense of’ ‘environmentalism,’ but we must realize that true results will come when we understand that the solution to the problem lies in the intersection between ecological concern and global prosperity.

This week we’re back to climate change, and the author James Hoggan, lays out the “crusade to deny global warming in “Climate Cover-Up.” For those of you familiar with the online green space, you may have come across the blog DeSmogBlog, which is co-founded by Hoggan. This site is dedicated to “out” those companies, experts and scientists who are (or were) trying to deny global climate change and manipulate the public. It also calls out the supporting characters to the deceit – the mainstream media.

Like companies who have been outed in their campaigns against ethanol, Hoggan outs companies like ExxonMobil who had campaigns against the existence of global climate change. Climate changed seemed to gain worldwide consensus in 2006/07 in part due to the success of Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth“. (For Gore fans, he just released his follow-up “Our Choice” last winter.)

Hoggan writes, “…no one seemed to be confused about climate change in 1988. The great scientific bodies of the world were concerned, and the foremost political leaders were engaged. So what happened then and now?” Well, that’s exactly what Hoggan lays out for the reader:  a big fat smear campaign against the earth.
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I have a new hero and his name is William Kamkwamba – “The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind.” William begins his story by writing, “A windmill means more than just power, it means freedom.” William was born in Malawi and like many in his country, his family struggled to survive in a country defined by drought and hunger. Unable to pay for school, William, gifted in the sciences, began spending his time in the library where he discovered how to bring electricity to his home with a windmill in the outdated American textbook, Using Energy.

What happened after he found that book is absolutely amazing – William spent months collecting the pieces that he would use to fashion a windmill out of junk. Fueled by ridicule and passion along with the support of his family and two best friends, William succeeded in creating a windmill that brought electricity to his home. Word spread and people began coming from miles and miles away to see “The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind.”

William understood what most take for granted – that electricity would help the family survive. It would replace the expensive kerosene that his family had to travel nearly seven kilometers to purchase. It would bring light to the darkness and it would allow them to pump water and irrigate the land, not only improving the bushel per acres of their crops, but allow them to plant and harvest two crops a year, helping to eliminate the months of hunger suffered year after year.

But the completion and success of his windmill didn’t fix his families problems right away.
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I thought it would be apropos to tie this week’s book review into a common New Year’s resolution -weight loss. Enter “The End of Energy Obesity,” by Peter Tertzakian. While this book has the same theme as most energy books these days, breaking America’s energy addiction, it varied from the most common used parallels and likened our country’s energy addiction to our country’s food addiction. It is an effective analogy.

Tertzakian writes, “Over the last decade, specifically in North America, our energy appetite has soared to such an extent that we are now energy obese.”

Throughout the book, Tertzakian outlines how America became energy obese as well as the way our country can curb its energy appetite as this will need to be done, in part, through a new energy diet that is compelling. He explains that energy sources, both renewable and nonrenewable will need to meet nine energy attributes. The higher the score, the better chance the energy source has of being successfully incorporated into our energy diet. The nine attributes include: versatility, scalability, storability and transportability, deliverability, energy density, power density, constancy, environmental sensitivity, and energy security.  Ultimately, Tertzakian feels that renewable energy has limited potential and his winning solution is increasing the use of natural gas.

For the most part, he stays the course with his metapor through the first two parts but he begins to wander off topic in part three as he delves into conservation, dissolving distance and the development of communication technologies. I also disagree with him in the sense that relying on an increase in natural gas is not the best way to go. Natural gas is a limited resource that fluctuates heavily in terms of pricing. An increase in the use of this energy source could cause our energy prices to become even more volitale. Yes, energy prices will increase as we ramp up the integration of alternative energy sources but over the long-term, prices will become more stable than they are now.

Ultimately the book presents some interesting ideas to mull over but if you’re short of time, just focus on the first half of the book. To read this book or any book I review, click here.

My eyes are still a bit fuzzy from all the reading I did last week so last night in honor of all of those snowed in in the Midwest, I watched a documentary – Gas Hole. As the title indicates, this movie is about America’s dependence on oil. Beginning in the 1970s during the first oil crisis to now, it details our country’s attempts to unsuccessfully shed itself of its addiction to foreign oil.

It baffles my mind, as I’m sure it does your mind, that with all our alternatives and technology, we can’t seem to make any headway towards a country not dependent on fossil fuel based energy. “We do not have a national energy policy that fits the 21st century,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-California.

The movie is ripe with conspiracy theories as told by politicians, celebrities, alternative energy enthusiasts and witnesses. One of the main threads of the film is the invention of the “Oglemobile,” a car that could achieve nearly 100 miles per gallon (mpg) on vapor. The inventor was a man by the name of Tom Ogle who lived in El Paso, Texas. This feat was achieved in 1977. Ultimately he sold the patent, was told he could never produce another vehicle using the technology, and then died shortly thereafter under mysterious circumstances.

According to the movie, Shell was behind another of the conspiracies to keep fuel economy technology out of the marketplace. A former shell researcher noted that fuel economy testing began in 1939 with a car that could achieve 40-50 mpg and by 1977 and broken the 1,000 mpg barrier. The narration asks, “What have we been doing while scientists have been getting 1,000 miles per gallon?”

That is a good question. Although this movie is a little slow-moving, for those people who want to know the answer to the posed question, this is a film to be reckoned with.

I’ll leave you with the words of Eshoo, “It’s not enough to say something. We have to do something.”