These mini articles are not meant to be perfect, or correct - merely to stimulate thought!
WHAT ARE THE SMART OPTIONS?
In the first place, use less energy to minimise your costs. House insulation, low energy bulbs, lower heating temperatures, efficient boilers, efficient cars, travelling less. Consider generating your own energy through solar or PV (electricity generating) panels. They seem expensive with a long payback - but that is only at today's prices. If energy prices double, then they become much more viable. And they are set to rise 66% shortly. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2043872/Household-energy-bills-%27to-top-and1631%2C500%27.html )
Then (controversially) - switch to electricity from gas and oil for heating, and to electric cars. Electricity will have many source materials for generation, and many renewable sources. It must be cheaper than oil and gas in the long run.
Work from home, if at all possible. Grow your own vegetables. Eat less expensive meat and more cheap vegetables. Enjoy holidays nearer home rather than airtravel to far flung places.
Use cars to the minimum and public transport, bicycles and feet to the maximum.
Shop locally, enjoy your local community and facilities. Help neighbours and receive help in return.
Not really! See the investigative article in the Oct 2008 issue of the highly respected Ecologist journal. Some people have been stating that it takes 10 calories of energy in feed to make 1 calorie of meat – or that plant food yields 10 times as much protein per acre as meat does ( Peter Singer et.al). This ratio of 10:1 is only ever true for cattle fed indoors on grains. For cattle fed outdoors on grass this simply is not true. A genuine ratio is more like 3:1. Even this ratio hides the true facts. There are millions of acres of grass where food (other than potatoes in some areas) cannot be grown. Examples are the British uplands, virtually the whole of Norway etc. Food cannot be grown in these high altitude areas, only grass. We can’t eat grass – cows and sheep can!
Then there are residues from vegetable oil, sugar beet, grain milling, distilling, citrus fruits, almonds, cotton. According to the University of California these 7 residues provide a third of all the nutrients provided by livestock – and cannot be eaten by humans. If we add in dry straw etc., then ‘residue’ materials could provide the feed for 75% of all meat and dairy production.
Of course ruminants produce methane – a deadly climate change gas accounting for 4% of global greenhouse gasses. The FAO (a UN body)quotes 18% by including Amazon deforestation to produce soya – but 99% of livestock production is not fed from Amazon deforestation – and none should be.
New Zealand experiments show that using different feed methods drastically reduces methane gas output from sheep and cattle. Modifying the feed for dairy cattle, and grazing sheep and cattle on uplands and savannah, would mean that the earth’s land would be maximised for protein production. Methane produced by ruminants is still a problem, science has yet to find a total answer.
Swedish studies on the total energy going into food (including fertiliser, transport etc) named the worst three as – shelled shrimps, fresh tropical fruits and fresh cod! ‘Bad’ foods are not that obvious to spot.
The best advice at present is to eat meat and dairy in strict moderation, feed ruminants on residues or on uplands and continue research into reduction of methane from ruminants. Vegetarians usually have a high dairy consumption, meaning their eco footprint is not much less than omnivores. Vegans who eat no meat or dairy certainly have a lower eco footprint, but only if they avoid a large amount of foods transported in from outside the UK or produced using large quantities of fertiliser (i.e soya).
The poor in many countries only survive by using milk and meat derived from animals fed on wastes, residues and unwanted biomass. They could not, at present, survive on vegetarian or vegan diets.
WILL OIL GO OVER $200?
First of all the question of whether oil will hit $150 Most experts think that it will. There are many speculators and hedge funds betting on this, but that in itself will not drive up the price. They are betting on what they see as a near certainty - oil going above $150 so they make a big profit. There is not enough production capacity to keep oil below $150 in the long term.
In addition several of the main oil producing countries need an oil price of at least $100 just to balance their budgets. To show any growth (and keeptheir populations happy) they need around $120. Saudi Arabia has already seen a drop in the standard of living of its ordinary citizens.
Will it reach $150, or drop well below? No one knows. If oil stays above $100 then there is a high chance of recession in the West. This will lower demand for oil in the West - and reduce demand from the West for cheap goods from the East. This indicates a resultant temporary drop in oil prices - which we are seeing at present following oil hitting $140. If the world goes into recession then oil may stay below $100 until the recession lifts.
However - the Eastern economies are not just dependent on exporting to the West. They have high aspirations. 1 in 20 Chinese now own a car and this is expected top double in a few years. In addition Russia and Africa are rich in raw materials that the new Eastern emerging economies need. The powerhouses of the Eastern economies will start to provide the money to raise African economies from poverty to emergent state - driving up the demand for oil again.
So, the hedge fund managers may be right. Oil will probably eventually go to $150 and remain above that level for the foreseeable future. However the rise will not be a straight line - oil prices will rise and fall - but it will continue to trend upwards over the next few years.
BIOFUELS
Friends of the Earth have issued a letter to their members about biofuels (March 2008). They want to call biofuels "agrofuels", which makes sense. Some of the points they make (and we have no reason to think they are wrong!):
- The amount of grain needed to make the agrofuel to fill a 4x4 just once could feed a poor person for a year.
- EU proposed legislation on using more agrofuels means that as there is not enough EU farmland, rainforest, peat beds and pastureland will have to be turned over to agrofuel production to meet the propose target of 10% of fuel being agrofuel..
- The use of peatbogs and rain forest for agrofuel production means that agrofuels could be 70% more damaging to the climate than petrol!
- The use of rainforests involves forcing whole communities off the land that has belonged to them for hundreds of years.
To which we might add that agrofuel production has been instrumental in a 50% increase in the world price for grain. The UN's World Food Programme recently held an emergency meeting after a sudden 25 per cent jump in the price of wheat in a single day. The WFP warned that the planet's poorest people were facing a drastic food crisis.
Could the EU's proposed policy for 10% of fuel to be agrofuel, lead to starvation in poorer countries? Wouldn't it be better for the EU to legislate for lower fuel usage overall, than to legislate that 10% of fuel must be agrofuel?
FAIR TRADE
Should we shun FairTrade foods and products? From the point of view of Climate Change, FairTrade items come from far away – often by air. The Fairtrade Sytem raises people out of poverty to make them consumers and carbon producers. If FairTrade works well, carbon emissions could increase.
On the other hand, as an excellent article in the Observer 23/3/2008 points out, FairTrade producers do not usually use tractors or petrochemicals. Everything is produced by hand with natural fertilisers. Flying in beans from Kenya may mean less carbon than producing beans at home using tractors, petrochemicals and energy for processing. Buying local apples in July means they have been stored in chill for 10 months – probably producing more carbon than those transported from New Zealand.
Experiments will shortly be run by Tesco and some manufacturers where products will bear a calculation of total carbon produced in getting the product manufactured/harvested and transported.
It seems that on balance FairTrade is at least as ‘ethical’ as locally produced.
NUCLEAR POWER
Nuclear power is often proposed as the answer to peak oil. As oil production ramps down, nuclear power is ramped up to fill the gap. Of course it takes many years to build a nuclear power plant so there would be a gap of at least 10 years before extra nuclear power stations could replace oil and coal fired ones.
The main problem with nuclear plants is disposal of nuclear waste. In the United States alone, the Department of Energy states that there are "millions of gallons of radioactive waste" as well as "thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel and material" and also " huge qualntities of contaminated soil and water"
Current proposals include
· Fusing into glass and placing in steel containers that last many hundreds of years (as at Sellafield). These can be stored underground.
· Disposal in sealed containers in undersea subduction zones, where the containers will slowly descend to the earth’s mantle.
· Re processing in fusion reactors (when these exist) where the waste would provide new energy and no radioactive waste.
Nuclear power could certainly help keep energy costs down, and technological advances in batteries mean that cars could run off electricity, or electricity could be used to produce hydrogen for use instead of normal fuel. But what about the waste? Would we be condemning future generations to a contaminated country? The UK Government has, as yet, no disposal policy.
A possible solution is a fusion reactor which does not produce radioactive waste – although the plant itself would be radioactive when decommissioned. However this type of radioactivity would be harmless after around 250 years. So far fusion reactors have been made that have produced power for a few seconds in a laboratory. No one is yet building a commercial plant.
The latest from CERN indicates that it may be possible to bombard nuclear waste to remove the radioactivity. If this is indeed possible then we can look on nuclear power in a completely different light - no radioactive waste.
MARINE FUEL
Marine fuel changes are set to hike oil prices even higher. At present ship emissions account for around 4- 5% of global CO2 as opposed to around 2% for aviation (UN report). A new generation of giant container ships will each use 350 tonnes of bunker fuel a day emitting 300,000 tonnes of CO2 a year – as much as a small power station. The first (Emma Maersk)is already working supplying goods from China to Europe. 3,000 of these ships are due to be built over the next three years. In the future these new ships will probably not use marine bunker fuel – but will use marine diesel. This is part of a worldwide protocol for emissions reduction – bunker fuel contains many harmful chemicals when burnt in an engine.
Global shipping consumes around 200 million tonnes of fuel per year. Bunker fuel is a by-product of oil refineries. No oil is pumped for bunker fuel conversion – it is there already as a byproduct when petrol and diesel are produced. If marine diesel is used, then oil will have to be pumped for this, and oil reserves will be depleted more quickly. This is bound to put up the price of oil – some estimates suggest that this could push oil towards $150 a barrel from current levels around $100.
The problem of shipping has been constantly underestimated in climate change calculations, ship emissions need to be included alongside aviation emissions in future targets.
WILL WE RUN OUT OF ENERGY?
Not for a long time! We will find oil supplies very difficult and prices will soar - however natural gas supplies seem good for at least the next 20 years. Gas fired power stations should be viable for a long time - especially as natural gas can be created in poor coal seams through injection of steam. The real danger is that as oil prices and energy prices rise, more countries (especially China and the US) will turn to coal fired power stations risking high increases in C02 and global warming. As energy prices rise, poor quality abandoned coal seams become economic.
Power stations can extract the CO2 from exhaust gases, and the CO2 can be 'frozen underground or in the sea - very safely. However this costs money, so pressure must be brought on governments to do this.
Renewable energy sources such as hydroelectric, wind sun and sea will slowly grow - but at present will find it difficult to compete with natural gas prices.
Nuclear power can produce cheap electricity in the short term (only because disposal of waste is not costed in) - but uranium sources are finite, and will run out.
So - petrol/diesel prices will soar but gas prices for electricity generation will not rise as fast. Energy prices will rise sharply - but electricity generating materials and nautral gas will not run out for a long time.
OIL and War
We are getting our energy more and more from unstable or unfriendly regimes. Iraq, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Lybia, Nigeria etc.
The Americans are importing more and more oil (currently over 56%) from unstable or unfriendly regimes - assuming that Saudi Arabia is in reality unstable. The wealth of the average Saudi citizen has more than halved in the last five years leading to a widening gap between rich and poor, and ensuring a steady flow of Al Quaeda recruits.
The Chinese are busy round the world trying to secure all the available oil and gas reserves to feed their expanding economy.
Eventually the depletion of oil reserves and reduced production will mean a struggle between the US and others to secure oil and gas.
If you believe the invasion of Iraq was really to secure oil - then the future looks bleak.