Topic
We must engineer a return to that era's lower usage, says expert Vaclav Smil. Second in a series.
'Not a sacrifice' to live then. The Unisphere, symbol of New York 1964-65 World's Fair. Shutterstock.
ENERGY & EQUITY: There's power in people caring what their neighbours do.
"Everything has to get worse. We are behaving so badly."
Vaclav Smil, you should know, talks very fast in staccato bursts and doesn't own a cell phone.
The University of Manitoba professor, perhaps one of Canada's most precise energy analysts, also doesn't want to be the servant of a communication machine.
"Everyone wants a piece of me," he adds. Authorities from China, Japan, Russia and the United States pester him with speaking invitations and information requests all the time. Even Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates makes demands on him.
And that's because Smil actually knows something about energy in a world that has grown largely energy illiterate, thanks to a now threatened diet of cheap hydrocarbons.
For nearly 40 years now, Smil, a Czech émigré and polymath, has studied the world's energy systems. He grew up in the political darkness of the Soviet Empire and has matured in the moral emptiness of its American counterpart.
Although heralded around the world for his insights, he remains largely unknown in Canada. Yet the prolific academic has penned some 30 books and 400 articles on how the world recklessly spends both energy and valuable natural resources.
All of Smil's work is dense, number-filled, literate and chock full of intriguing history. Altogether, his energy writing delivers a sober two-pronged message: North Americans have grown fat and lazy by burning too many fossil fuels. Yet energy transitions are by their very nature protracted, difficult and unpredictable.
Wood to coal
Although oil shocks and boomtowns can unsettle economies in just years, real energy transitions in large global economies often unfold over decades if not generations, Smil observes.
Take one of the world's first major energy transitions from wood to coal as a source of heat, he says. At first aristocrats considered coal a foul and smoky substitute for wood. But a tree famine in northern Europe and England forced along the hydrocarbon's adoption by the 17th century.
It really took the invention and deployment of the steam engine to transform coal into an empire builder. Even so, coal didn't provide the world with nearly 90 per cent of its primary energy until 1930 before being partly replaced by oil.
So transitions take a long time. "The 19th century was a wood century and the 20th was a coal century." Oil didn't reach its peak as central energy source until the 1970s and still accounts for one-third of the world's energy needs. In fact, the global economy remains a full-blown fossil fuel civilization that mines coal, oil and natural gas to satisfy the majority of its energy diet.
Even the transition from horse to car took a long time, adds Smil. In 1885, Gottfried Daimler built one of the world's first combustion engines. "Thirty-three years later the number of horses in the world peaked and then the transition went very fast." But it took 50 years to remove the horse from urban streets and farms.
Energized all the time
Our overwhelming dependence on fossil fuels creates another problem. In 1850, the average European or North American used energy intermittently.
Vaclav Smil, one of the world's greatest energy analysts and thinkers, has long argued that the key to managing energy supplies is to consume less energy, not more. The pursuit of higher energy spending does not make us richer or wiser, says Smil.
Nor does high energy consumption improve security, happiness, equality or build stronger democracies, adds Smil.
In fact, Smil advocates a return to energy consumption levels prevalent during the 1960s. That means using one-third less energy than currently consumed by the average North American household. "We must break with the current expectation of unrestrained energy use in affluent societies," says Smil.
In Smil's Energy in Nature and Society, the scientist highlighted some uncomfortable truths associated with high energy spending.
High energy spending makes civilizations fragile.
"Expansion of empires may be seen as perfect examples of the striving for maximized power flows, but societies commanding prodigious energy flows, be it late imperial Rome or the early 21st century United States -- are limited by their very reach and complexity. They depend on energy and material imports, are vulnerable to internal malaise, and display social drift and the loss of direction that is incompatible with the resources at their command."
High energy spending fosters insecurity.
"The Soviet Union nearly doubled post Second World War per capita energy use but with a crippling share channeled into armaments. Enormous energy use could not prevent economic prostration, a fundamental reappraisal of the Soviet strategic posture and Mikhail Gorbachev's initiation of long overdue changes."
High energy spending weakens economic prosperity in agriculture.
"Increased energy subsidies may be used with very poor efficiency in irrigation and fertilization, may support unhealthy diets leading to obesity, or may be responsible for severe environmental degradation incompatible with permanent farming (high soil erosion, irrigation-induced salinization, pesticide residues)."
High energy spending encourages materialism but not cultural greatness.
"It is enough to juxtapose the Greek urban civilization of 450 BCE with today's Athens or Florence of the late 15th century with Los Angeles of the early 21st century. In both comparisons, there is a difference of one order of magnitude in per capita use of primary energy and an immeasurably large inverse disparity in terms of respective cultural legacies."
High energy spending does not bring happiness.
"Just the reverse is true: it tends to be accompanied by greater social disintegration, demoralization, and malaise. None of the social dysfunction -- the abuse of children and women, violent crime, widespread alcohol and drug use -- has ebbed in affluent societies, and many of them have only grown worse."
High energy spending diminishes human diversity.
"In natural ecosystems the link between useful energy throughputs and species diversity is clear. But it would be misleading to interpret an overwhelming choice of consumer goods and the expanding availability of services as signs of admirable diversity in modern high energy societies. Rather, with rampant (and often crass) materialism, increasing numbers of functionally illiterate and innumerate people and mass media that promote the lowest common denominator of taste, human intellectual diversity may be at an historically unrivalled low point."
High energy spending does not lead to greater energy savings or efficiencies.
"Efficiency gains in engines or electrical gadgets have not been invested wisely but applied to the overproduction of short-lived disposable junk and into dubious pleasures and thrills promoted by mindless advertising."
High energy spending does not improve quality of life.
"Higher energy flows actually erode quality of life first for populations that are immediately affected by extraction or conversion of energies, eventually for everyone through worrisome global environmental changes."
From: Energy in Nature and Society by Vaclav Smil (MIT Press).
You'd put the fire on in the morning, harness a horse or roll up some sails, says Smil. Energy use was organic and the night skies often fell dark.
Today people use energy 24/7 and at fantastic levels. Every home plugs into an ever-increasing number of glowing gadgets, each promising more comfort and entertainment than the last one. "There are no peaks and valleys. It's not just the quality but the constancy of energy use that has changed," explains Smil every so quickly.
Now don't get Smil wrong. He thinks modern societies consume way too much energy (North Americans consume twice as much as Europeans and yet aren't twice as smart or happy, he adds sarcastically). Moreover, we lavishly waste much of it on the overproduction of cheap and unnecessary junk.
He believes a transition to "non-fossil future is an imperative process of self-preservation" as well as a moral necessity. Harnessing renewable energy flows, is both desirable and inevitable, he adds.
But the old-fashioned engineer and historian doesn't think the transition to cleaner forms of energy will be easy, quick, rational or smooth.
That's a lot of exajoules
One of the first obstacles is just the amount of quantifiable fossil-fueled power that must be replaced. Consider, says Smil, that North Americans gobbled up about six exajoules (EJ) of energy in the form of wood, animal power, coal and some oil in 1884. (The Japanese earthquake and tsunami released about two EJ of energy.)
Today North Americans happily burn our way through 100 EJ of which only 7 EJ come from renewables, such as hydroelectric dams. In other words, the U.S. would have to find 85 EJ from wind, geothermal or wind or "nearly 30 times the total of fossil fuels the country needed in the mid-188s to complete its shift from biomass to coal to hydrocarbons." That's a tall order requiring new infrastructure and massive re-engineering.
The second issue for Smil is capacity. Renewables such as wind and solar just don't have the same ability to make concentrated energy as fossil fuels. Capacity is the constancy of energy that an electrical power plant can actually deliver divided by what it could produce if it operated 24/7. No power plants, of course, work that way.
Nuclear plants, if they are not leaking or down for repairs, can operate 90 per cent of the time. Coal-fired plants can chug along 65 per cent of the time before they need to be cleaned and repaired. But a solar installation can only pump out juice 20 per cent of the time. A wind farm can muster power 25 to 30 per cent of the time or slightly more if perched offshore.
Next comes power density. It's the rate of flow of energy per unit of land area. A coal mine or oil field can deliver great power density. So, too, can a hydroelectric dam. But not renewables. Fossil fuels, despite their declining quality, still offer power densities two to three times greater by orders of magnitude than wind, biofuels or solar.
Smil then offers an uncomfortable calculation. In the early years of the 21st century, the fossil fuel industry (mining, processing and piping) occupied 30,000 square kilometres, or an area about the size of Belgium. The low power densities of renewables, just to replace one-third of the demand for fossil fuels, would require a land base of 12,500,000 km for turbines, solar arrays and transmission lines. That's a territory the size of the U.S. and India.
Renewable challenges
To Smil each renewable or alternative to fossil fuels offers a unique challenge. He thinks that solar, of all renewables, offers the greatest potential. It's the only alternative that currently delivers flows of energy that readily surpass the demand for fossil fuels.
But capturing and transporting those flows at the right commercial scale still proves elusive. "We don't yet have the storage capacity. Solar energy works only when the sun shines."
Nuclear, he says, is "as dead as it can be." It promised cheap energy but delivered the world's least economic source of power as well as persistent waste issues. Only Alberta wants to build nuclear reactors to manufacture more bitumen, a proposal he calls "madness incarnate."
Wind will require millions of turbines and massive land disturbance that may be "environmentally undesirable and technically problematic." It's also an intermittent source of power that requires extensive back-up, usually in the form of coal-fired stations. And in large parts of the world the wind simply does not blow regularly.
Biomass or growing modified trees, sugar-rich crops or algae to fuel inefficient vehicles poses another problem altogether. Civilization has already appropriated 40 per cent of all plant growing activity on Earth for food, fibre and feed. This appropriation has already modified, reduced and compromised ecosystems to "a worrisome degree." Devoting more the world's precious soils to produce something like ethanol, says Smil, is "stupid."
Refashioning a 'supersystem'
The engineer's bottom line is sobering, if not completely politically incorrect. Over the last 100 years the world has spent trillions of dollars building the most extensive energy network ever conceived. Millions of machines now essentially run on 14 trillion watts of coal, oil and natural gas. The quality of these fuels is declining, and keeping the whole show going is getting more and more expensive every day.
Refashioning what Smil calls the world's costliest "supersystem" into something cleaner and sustainable will be a gargantuan task that requires "generations of engineers."
"Yet everyone is broke. So how are we going to build hundreds of billions worth of solar and wind farms?"
To Smil the only moral response remains a "significant reduction in fossil fuel use." The scientist proposes going back to the future -- or the 1960s, to be precise.
"In the 1960s people didn't have three car garages, fly to Las Vegas to gamble or drive SUVs, but they lived comfortably," says Smil. More importantly, they consumed 40 per cent less energy than people today.
"We can return to 1964 with no problem. Living in 1964 is not a sacrifice."
Nor would getting there impose draconian challenges. Switching to 97 per cent energy efficient furnaces (that means they burn 97 per cent of the gas instead older varieties which send 55 per cent up venting stacks), mandating diesel-fueled vehicles and deploying high speed trains would all be part of the solution.
"Bombardier makes rapid trains in this country," declares Smil. "Yet there is not high speed train between Montreal and Toronto. Canada doesn't have a significant high speed link. It's incredible!"
'It will have to collapse'
Smil recognizes that reduced energy use is not yet seen as desirable or politically unacceptable but "replacing entrenched precepts," he adds, is never easy.
In the absence of "radical departures" from that status quo, Smil sees but one all-too human reality:
"Everything is going to have to get worse."
That seems to be the global course at the moment, as oil dependent jurisdictions such as Japan, North America and Europe pretend their "overdrawn accounts, faltering economies and aging populations" don't exist.
Smil, for example, regards China's rise as an industrial and authoritarian superpower as a copycat of the worst excesses of the U.S. energy experience. To Smil, a long-time opponent of the Three Gorges Dam, the Chinese may well outdo Americans in gratuitous materialism.
"China will speed the day of reckoning and India is coming next," he says. He calls the new fossil fuel gobbling economies "riders of the apocalypse." Their energy ascent is physically not possible without an energy descent in the developed world, explains Smil.
"There is no shortage of delusionary people," adds Smil. "I'm a stupid, old fashioned 19th century engineer. Things move slowly."
In fact, no society has really begun any transition other than that of collective global economic stagnation and accelerating investments in fossil fuels.
"Americans are living beyond their means, wasting energy in their houses and cars and amassing energy-intensive throwaway products on credit," he recently wrote in Foreign Policy magazine.
Yet no U.S. politician has yet advocated a reduction in fossil fuel energy use by 40 per cent even though avoiding catastrophic climatic change now demands such behavioural changes.
"We will never act voluntarily. It will have to collapse. That's optimistic," he quips.
You know, he repeats, "Living in 1964 is not a sacrifice."
The conversation ends. Another investigator wants to pump Smil for more straight energy talk.
But perhaps his best advice still remains the concluding sentence of a 2011 article in American Scientist:
"None of us can foresee the eventual contours of new energy arrangements -- but could the world's richest countries go wrong by striving for moderation of their energy use?"
Next Wednesday in Andrew Nikiforuk's 'The Big Shift': What drove our last big shift, from horsepower to steam, and upheavals it caused. ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
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siamdave
11 weeks ago
biggie
Hmm - one expects more from Mr Nikiforuk. Instead of telling us all to cut back, why not get a bit more specific about who is doing what? You wanna even try to start to estimate the drop in oil usage worldwide if we stopped the US from bombing people all over the world, and driving around their aircraft carriers and the rest of the planes and ships to threaten everyone, and not to forget arming others in their bombings and shootings, and stirring up others to bombing and killing to further their geopolitical objectives?? And to complain 'we don't have money' for improvements is to embed yourself in the capitalist trap - we actually have all the money we want, if we organise our economy to benefit 'we the normal people' rather than the capitalist-elite overclass (details on that and some related things here - What Happened http://www.rudemacedon.ca/what-happened.html ). (even if we keep some defensive capability, that is a great deal less expensive, in oil or money, than the invasions and bombings, etc etc, we've been doing the last 20 years - yes, we might have some 'R2P', but that's another discussion, and really has nothing to do with the geopolitical-objectives-based regime changes the US has been up to the last couple of decades, all lying propaganda and demonising aside..)
Fiat lux
11 weeks ago
We can get back to rational
We can get back to rational energy use by quitting the "free trade" rackets and associated criminal ideological theories enriching the global 1% and enslaving the world with the free movement of imaginary capital.
Stop forced urbanization, globalization and return to locally based production, economic systems, genuine private, mixed enterprise .
But first, independently check out the garbage economic theories taught in our universities,licencig destruction and enslavement.
Ed Deak.
Hakuin
11 weeks ago
I'd say the Consumption Machine
Is driven by fear. The people are so indoctrinated into the idea that failure to run full speed, all the time is death that they create and condone most of the vanity that is our energy waste. What was the real daily pace in 64? Why weren't the people running in terror? What have we learned since then that convinced us we better get ours NOW or we will miss the boat?
Illahie
11 weeks ago
Our energy is running out
Yet the prices of natural gas are in the gutter because of oversupply.
The oversupply of bitumen has led to a 40 dollar per barrel discount.
The shale oil resources in the USA are staggeringly large.
Nuclear technology is progressing at a rapid pace. The USA has an enormous amount of Thorium.
The oil resources in the arctic seem to be huge.
Australia has just discovered a huge amount of hydrocarbons.
ModestyBlaise
11 weeks ago
Going Backwards? Unlikely.
HRDS Canada tells us that the workforce was quite different in the '60s. Notice how many women are now working outside the home. How many are commuting to workplaces that have been built much larger to accomodate both men and women. The commute and the larger workplaces all consume far more energy than 50 years ago. Is the good professor suggesting that women go back to a '60s lifestyle? Not a chance of that happening.
"For instance, in 1965, the work force was almost 70% male and only 30% female. By 2003, almost half of the work force was female (46%). During this period, the female labour participation rate doubled from 31% to 62%. In addition, many women in the work force today are mothers of young children; almost 71% of mothers with children under the age of six were in the labour force in 2001, compared to less than 25% in 1965."
bcwoodcarver
11 weeks ago
oil industry subsidies
Mr Nikiforuk
You often state in your articles about the subsidies the feds give the oil industry. I have researched this and cannot find any company that receives $$ directly from the Harper government.
Bailey
11 weeks ago
Money, outrage and the rule of law
None of this is in any way optional. It will happen because it must happen, this big shift. It will be difficult to motivate, but we can either do it voluntarily and together, or we can fight a war over it, and do it afterward. Those of us who remain.
To begin with, we should start by admitting that we have given so much money away to the wealthy and powerful that our currencies are wrecked, and redesign them. money must be based on labour rather than materials or on the good faith of bankers and corporations.
Then, the reason the previous transitions took so long is because, in principle, one has had to wait for those with vested interests in the status quo to die. This process takes generations we no longer have.
We should arrest them and try them in public with a lot of publicity. The crimes they have committed and the bribes they pay to get away with it will outrage and motivate at least 95% of the people to accept and participate in the shift.
Then the transition to renewals needs to be incorporated into every single thing we do. All new buildings must incorporate their own power production and storage systems, which will go a long way to providing the new space required.
Then as a major element we must look to the oceans to give us enormous amounts of predictable constant energy. The waves and tides and sea currents run all the time. It's a simple design problem that could quickly begin to give us a large and growing portion of the energy we need. Even industrial power, if the industries are located near the sea.
Tbarnston
11 weeks ago
Smil: Feb 21 2013
http://www.american.com/archive/2013/february/memories-of-peak-oil
" Only one thing is abundantly clear to me: for the past 15 years I have been quite confident that there is no imminent danger of any sharp peak of global oil extraction followed by an inexorable production slide — and early in 2013 that confidence is greatly strengthened by new facts. Is it too much to hope that even some catastrophists and peak-oil cultists will find it impossible to ignore those numbers?"
Smil is hardly alarmist, but Nikiforuk sure is. Nikiforuk's technique of paraphrasing academics with inflamed rhetoric is getting old.
Bailey
11 weeks ago
Numbers
Dear Tbarnston;
One of the most insidious misinterpretations of this crisis is the argument that it has something to do with the "production" of fossil fuels. If we had seven times or seven hundred times as much hydrocarbons as we do, we would still be in crisis because there is just no way to live with the consequences of burning them in air we need to breathe, or discharging the wastes that result into water we need to live.
Bob the Postman
11 weeks ago
Pedant alert
Thanks for this valuable series. Some editorial suggestions:
"Even so, coal didn't provide the world with nearly 90 per cent of its primary energy until 1930 before being partly replaced by oil."
Does this confusing sentence mean, "Coal provided the world with 90% of its energy needs until 1930, at which time oil partially replaced it"?
"Daimler built one of the world's first combustion engines"
Daimler invented the INTERNAL combustion engine. Steam engines are also combustion engines.
"Nuclear plants, if they are not leaking or down for repairs, can operate 90 per cent of the time. Coal-fired plants can chug along 65 per cent of the time before they need to be cleaned and repaired."
I think these sentences mean that nuclear plants must be taken out of production for routine maintenance 10 days out of 100 whereas coal plants must be offline for routine maintenance 35 days out of 100—but they don't convey this meaning very clearly.
Fiat lux
11 weeks ago
One only has to look at the
One only has to look at the standards of life in 1964, compared with today's.
People were making decent wages, could afford to buy homes, farms, start businesses. The debt loads on people were minimal, there were no homeless to speak of, no need for foodbanks, the cancer rate was about 2% and no children in cancer ward.
Pollution was minimal, a gallon of gas was around .27 cents and executives were making 5-10 times the wages of their workers as opposed to 3-400 times today.
The list is endless and it is obvious that the present day destruction was, and is being caused by a fraudulent and criminal economic theory taught in our universities, forced on humanity by a criminal sector with the use of non existing, imaginary money as weapons of colonizations a destruction.
Ed Deak.
Jim Baird
11 weeks ago
Energy is not running out.
As much as 330 additional terawatts of power is accumulating in our oceans every year. This is causing thermal expansion, massive storms and the icecaps to melt. We simply don't have the wit to convert this heat to mechanical energy and all the energy we needs. Estimates are we could harvest at least 25 terawatts of this power, which is approaching twice the 16 terawatts the world currently consumes. The really sick part is BC technology that would make this possible is squelched, not only by Ottawa but Victoria as well.
Jeffrey J.
11 weeks ago
We Are Not Worthy
Thank you again (and again) to the Tyee and Andrew Nikiforuk. I almost feel unworthy to wake up each morning and be allowed to read these rich, well crafted scholarly essays.
Vaclav Smil should be a wakeup call for all Canadians! Are we not told to revere experts and scientists? Is not Prof. Smil an expert?
But suddenly,the obligation to listen to an expert will be countermanded by the Harper/Christy Clark/Gordon Campbell/etc ruling politicians. Why? Because it is only pro-oil experts that we should listen to.
This exposes the deep hypocrisy that exists within the corporate world. Principles are only used when it serves their self interest. Otherwise, not so much.
Excellent article!
Bailey
11 weeks ago
Mr. Deak
You obviously have a clear understanding of the workings of our currencies and economies, with a unique view of their historical antecedents.
How do you think a currency could be structured so as to be based on a flexible thing like labour?
I envision a financial system in which capital financing would be forthcoming based on a calculation of the amount of wages that could be projected to result from the project, together with a formula based on materials and land needed, then repaid by the taxes charged on those wages, and on the wages of those who produced and transported the materials.
I concede I am no expert or economist, But you are. What are your thoughts on what this would look like in practice?
gilbert marks
11 weeks ago
They gave Smyth tenure - the Big Oil chair?
You know Andrew, you get some Big Oil shill to quote nonsense that I've debunked for you already, but you don't have the courage or knowledge to get on this forum and defend your spew.
While I agree your work on fossil, and renewables is accurate, you get it that your entire conclusion is wrong when your antinuclear spew is shown to be horseshit, thereby making nonsense of your doom scenario - and subsequent book sales.
Your shill Smyth's statement, shows himself to be a liar right from the beginning with 2 GW of nukes for Darlington well into the planning stage, far ahead of the tar sands proposal. Many refurbs are planned in Ontario. And if we are going to sell tar who not make it the cleanest tar on earth using nuclear steam.
"Nuclear...dead as can be" Smyth is really too stupid to be quoted. Maybe something happened to him when the Soviet army blew up its weapons production facility at Chernobyl.
There over four hundreds nukes worldwide in the construction/engineering and planning stage.
"delivered the world's least economic source of power" They gave this guy tenure?
With Chinese advanced construction techniques costs there as in Russia and India are headed to 1 cent a kwh.
There are 5 nukes under construction without subsidy in the US under the oversight of the toughest regulator on the planet at a cost of 8 cents a kwh - 4 cents for the unit built by public power operator TVA.
Aside from the constant Big Oil paid antinuclear spew paid for by Big Oil in the media,the 100% corrupt political and professorial class, the only thing stopping massive nuke development is cheap gas originating with Big Oil dumping. With costs 3 times the current price that advantage as you show won't last.
In fact that Big Oil propaganda is not working all that well in the US with support hitting close to 80% in the South US where the plants are built and 65% elsewhere. Studies in Aus show that when voters are given access to a reasoned debate on nuclear opposition from all but vicious greenies disapears.
"persistent waste issues" English as second language?
All the world's nuke waste would fit on a football field compared to the tens of cubic miles of toxic forever solar waste heading to our landfills to leach into our water supplies. There are no engineering issues in the way of reuse or safe disposal - just Big Oil corrupted media and politicians. Nuke waste burning Gen IV nuke plants are going into service on the grid this year in Russia and India.
How does Smyth look in the mirror in morning knowing that 3 million folks die every year from air pollution that nuclear could resolve within 10 years.
in 20 years the West's world third ghg spewing economy will be running on 40 cents a kwh wind and 90 cents a kwh solar but getting all its energy from 17 cents a kwh gas, while the BRIC countries zero GHG economies will be laughing at our dumb asses while running their prosperous countries on penny a kwh Gen IV nuclear.
gilbert marks
11 weeks ago
smil not smyth
No editing at the Tyee.
freewilly
11 weeks ago
It frustrates
It frustrates the heck out me, there are practical solutions and technology to deal with the rampant creation of junk, but as unlikely than returning to the lifestyle of the 60s.
How many varieties of phones do we really need? Packaging is often more costly than the crap inside. Our food comes places that look more like refineries than bakeries or kitchens.
Back in the 60's 'made in Canada' or 'American made', meant quality, long lasting not cheap crap. We used to spend good money a pen that actually worked and paper was made out of wood pulp. Daddy would help little Bobby build a treehouse, not buy it at Home Despot.
Pastic was used to make Tupperware and reuse it. Tires were made of rubber not complex polymers. A program was like a plan or agenda. Ordinary People could create them.
Employees were never refered to as 'associates'. People went to work and came home to eat dinner, not go to another job. Eating at Mcdonalds meant you were going to your neighbours who came from the old country, and you couldn't understand a word they said.
Booker
11 weeks ago
pollution
Just a small quibble, Ed. Pollution in 1964 was far worse than today and reaching a crisis point. The Great Lakes and most rivers were dead, the air in the cities unbreathable. The Cayahoga River was so polluted that it was soon to catch fire, inspiring Randy Newman's song, Burn On
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPmjTG8NLuw
Rachel Carson had recently published Silent Spring and sparked the modern environmental movement.
Some things are actually better than in 1964 but your other points are right on.
annie57
11 weeks ago
Fortunately There Are Some Doers
Bailey,
"None of this is in any way optional. It will happen because it must happen, this big shift. It will be difficult to motivate, but we can either do it voluntarily and together, or we can fight a war over it, and do it afterward. Those of us who remain."
I agree, and it is heartening to see people doing it voluntarily and together.
"Feldheim is one of the first 100 percent renewable energy communities in Germany."
http://vimeo.com/55071914
Bailey
11 weeks ago
Dear Mr Marks
Leaving aside leakage and meltdowns, which is to say not to mention Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, what do you reckon is the cost, assuming we could figure a way to talk that would be understandable so far into the unseeable future, of storing wastes toxic enough to kill continents for, oh say forty or fifty thousand years that would prevent accident, earthquake or military malice from ever releasing it?
Amortize that cost over the life of a breeder reactor please.
Really, if you're going to insist on ignoring costs to make your argument, you might at least try to find a nuclear technique with lower costs to promote.
I understand there's a thorium reactor possible with much shorter and less problematic storage and leakage risks.
Fiat lux
11 weeks ago
Bailey....I'm no expert
Bailey....I'm no expert economist, just an old tradesman hick in the sticks. The difference is that I've had first hand experience with all ideological theories, including war and starvation, that makes me question what is going on, because I have seen it all before and then have spent a lifetime researching the reasons for history's tragedies.
A lot of highly educated people are now beginning to realize the damage being done by the presently ruling, criminal ideological and not real science based theory.
My scientist friends tell me that there are some who are working on monetary systems that would represent physical realities, instead pseudo religious theories, designed and forced on humanity by a criminal sector under the guise of ideologies.
The first thing to remember is a simple, unbreakable physical law and reality, and what I keep repeating all the time:
"Wealth can not be created, only taken from others, the environment and future generations".
Once we realize this simple fact, we can start examining how the "taking" is being done, how ideologies and economic theories are being used for licencing the takings, and what crimes are committed with its enforced practice?
Developing a monetary system that represents realities, instead of licencing theft and destruction, will have to be done by people far better educated than I am. It also has to be a cooperative effort involving all disciplines, and then be accepted by an ideologically brainwashed and misled humanity, controlled by fraud.
Not to mention the sector and politicians who now derive their powers from the present fraudulent monetary system, designed to distort realities and enslave people with promises and theories.
Ed Deak.
rlbolin
11 weeks ago
nuclear power
I would be most interested in Mr. Smil's opinion on the use of thorium reactors as opposed to those currently in use. It appears to me that this technology is much more amenable to peaceful use and is a lot less dangerous? Am I missing something?
Jim Baird
11 weeks ago
Ditto Jeffrey J.
Andrew's articles have terrific.
ireckon
11 weeks ago
Gilbert Marks
Your portrayal of fission power would lead one to believe that you have a stake in the industry. Perhaps we might develope safe nuclear power in the future but I judge the industry on its performance to date. Our existing plants are an unacceptable liability and are all subsidised. Long term nuclear storage is paid for by the taxpayer; the tremendous risk of nuclear accidents are also ultimately borne by the taxpayer.
TEPCO’s Fukushima number 4 may be off the radar but it remains a disaster in progress. In simple terms what we have there is a bathtub full of unstable fissionable materials standing 100 feet in the air on wobbly stilts. The plan to remove that material to a secure location has been too dangerous to accomplish and will likely take years. In the meantime another earthquake could cause the structure to fail and the meltdown to begin. The Fukushima plant is a North American design and we see the same vulnerabilities in nuclear plants throughout the US, furthermore plants over here are not designed to withstand a large earthquake.
In Japan we can clearly see the risks of nuclear power; increased health problems, contaminated ground water, contaminated seawater, and contaminated crops. We also find elevated levels of radioactive materials in seafood harvested on North America’s West Coast. The resulting increase in health disorder and declining life spans will not be compensated by industry nor can they. In short, you’re sellin and I aint buyin.
Tbarnston
11 weeks ago
@Bailey
I agree with you 100%. I just find Nikiforuk's current approach very tiresome and inflammatory.
As a reader I want solid facts and ideas that help me find and develop strategies so that I can adapt my family's lifestyle and set a good example for my children and community.
I think people are scared to make change because the messaging is that we need a major crash before change will be forced upon us. I fundamentally disagree with this philosophy because we have just as much agency in solving the problem as we do in creating the problem.
Smil's perspective actually shows that we have time to make significant incremental changes today without sacrificing much in quality of living. Nikiforuk takes this good news and turns it on its head to paint a bleak and scary view of the future where we careen off the energy cliff and back into the dark ages.
It need not be that way, and I don't believe it will turn out that way because the solutions to these problems lie right in front of us, if we choose to take them.
alive
11 weeks ago
free condoms, please
As per usual my comment is about the more obvious problems, in this case that is: overpopulation!
Our main enemy is the religious idiots who push for more kids and are agains prevention and abortions!
We help starving kids so they can grow up and breed -- does that make sense?
Human life is not all that valuable in the scheme of things --- any war will prove that!
Bailey
11 weeks ago
alive's idea
Wow. What a handle to use to deliver a message like that. I kind of suspect that you might believe as I do, deep down you know, that war and stuff actually proves the opposite: that human life is so valuable that we will take such drastic measures as we do just to prove it.
It's death that is so cheap, not life at all. I've known and talked to religious idiots throughout my life and travels, and I early on came to the conclusion that their central error is when they think that God, or really any conceivable god could possibly care a whit whether any particular creature is alive or not at any particular point in time. All evidence points to quite the opposite conclusion.
The trick, I think, is not to oppose the complexities of the world, or the behaviour of others so much as to propose life affirming alternatives to the poor choices that seem always to be the easiest to choose.
We don't help starving kids so they can grow up and breed, though we do know they certainly will. We help them so we can be people who will help starving kids. If we can't be at least that, then maybe we will find our deaths truly meaningless and empty. Instead of full and even sometimes a little bit noble parts of our lives, as we can see they often are.
Fiat lux
11 weeks ago
Bailey... Don't forget that
Bailey... Don't forget that to help starving kids is left wing socialistic and not competitive at all........as all good "conservatives" can tell you.
Ed Deak.
bfearn
11 weeks ago
Hummmm??
"just to replace one-third of the demand for fossil fuels, would require a land base of 12,500,000 km for turbines, solar arrays and transmission lines. That's a territory the size of the U.S. and India."
Look at -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_land_area.png
Feverish
11 weeks ago
freewilly
"Employees were never refered to as 'associates'. People went to work and came home to eat dinner, not go to another job. Eating at Mcdonalds meant you were going to your neighbours who came from the old country, and you couldn't understand a word they said."
Thank you!!!
Feverish
11 weeks ago
1964 was the good old days
And one year before I arrived on the west coast scene to experience the age of aquarius & the culmination of gen X. I doubt things were all that rosy - ignorance is said to be blissful after all.
Certainly we used less energy in BC. Other than your fridge, stove, spinner washer, lights and radio, what was there to plug in? Record players I s'pose.
We could easily live on a third less energy, individual/ familial, but who wants to give up their comforts?
The lessening of eco-footprints is really a good way to prepare for a crash, live a moral life, save money, whatever, but until the military industrial light fantastic is ground to a halt, our core problems will continue unabated.
The depth of human caring about life, in big, general terms, will be what determines our shift or break the earth's capacity to support homo sapiens.
DW67
11 weeks ago
@Ed Deak
Helping starving kids benefits multi-national corporations too. As nations like China and India develop, the expectations of the workers rise to the point where it's no longer economic to have them produce base goods. Instead their masses must move to higher value manufacturing jobs and the low skill, labour intensive jobs must move to a poorer economy. If the people of the poorer economies keep dying before they can reproduce there won't be anyone to do the low skill jobs. It's essential to feed starving children so they can grow up and make clothing for Walmart.
Look at all the ads for aid organizations and the people behind them. There is a disproportionally high fraction from the religious right of the spectrum, the people who vote Republican/Conservative even though it's against their own economic best interest.
The 1% really does have it easy right now. Their use of ideology has convinced the middle class to support institutionalized gambling. We are forced to pay into a system where the players take no personal risks, gamble with our money and get to keep most of the winnings. Should they lose, the government takes more money from us to cover the losses. The player's only risk is losing his job should he lose too often. The people who caused the latest recession were paid big bonuses for having done so.
Feverish
11 weeks ago
Rewrite
"...will determine whether we shift or break the earth's capacity to support homo sapiens."
RickW
11 weeks ago
TBarnston
Possibly because that is what gets the average reader's attention. Straight statistics do not work, and never have. If they did, inflammatory political ads would not exist.
Fiat lux
11 weeks ago
DW.... Sooner or later some
DW.... Sooner or later some bright academics will figure out the obvious that it is not cheaper, but far more expensive to send resources to Asia and then bring back the products of their slave labour factories.
I'm working on this with the PhD section of a world class professor friend in sustainable development.
Interesting to see how even those highly educated people are shocked, at first, when I dare to question imaginary monetary values destroying the Earth, but then wake up and can see the brutal reality of facts.
The result of generations of pseudo religious brainwash that has always been used by history's 1% to colonize and enslave.
Ed Deak.
Cynic
11 weeks ago
Good comment from siamdave.
Good comment from siamdave. Smil's analyses don't factor in the consequences of money creation being controlled by private banks. Thinking within the capitalist box will get us nowhere and being unaware of the basic financial corruption makes for futile debate. Smil and Nikiforuk could and should be better informed. Comments like "Yet everyone is broke. So how are we going to build hundreds of billions worth of solar and wind farms?" are lame and ignorant. And tiresome.
Fiat lux
11 weeks ago
Good points on money
Good points on money creation, brought up by Cynic.
My definition for today's money, for a number of years, including here on the Tyee, has been:
"Money is a licence to control energy, issued by a special interest sector for its own benefit,"
The vast majority of today's money exists only as imaginary computer figures, but, at the same time, our paper money indicates that it is still a national and not private property.
It is a federal crime to destroy paper or metal money , which means that although governments have given away the right of money creation to private interests, it is still public property by law.
Just about the most idiotic situation anybody could imagine,and yet governments are selling their souls and the ground from under the public's feet to satisfy the monetary demands of special interests and borrow back the money the public legally owns.
The vast majority of today's imaginary money is used for the collectivization of economies into the hands and under the control of special interests by the legalization of theft, colonization and enslavement.
This means that if the public ever has the guts and courage to repossess and strictly control the creation of money, it already owns by law, it can then be used for the benefit and not the enslavement of humanity and the destruction of the ecology.
Which should be the sole purpose of money creation to begin with and not the legalization of theft and destruction for the benefit of special interests.
Ed Deak.
Bailey
11 weeks ago
Amen
There we go! Mr Deak, you are right on the mark.
The one thing I hear almost everybody saying in whatever way they individually express themselves, is that they feel robbed and betrayed by the very people they hired to protect them and their country for the benefit of all and for the future.
Instead, we elect these people who promise faithfully, even take an oath of duty, to protect our society, then lie to us and sell our valuable assets to people who pay them.
Hell, Harper even renamed the Government of Canada after himself, and has acted ever since completely against our best interests for the benefit of people whose interests are not ours. He has acted as though our property belongs to him, because his position gives him the power to control it.
Now the provincial government, for the umpteenth time, proposes to sell off all our assets in land for peanuts, saying it's not the government's business to own land.
Get a grip! The government owns nothing. Not land, not resources. Nothing. They have a fiduciary duty to shepherd and regulate those things for the public good.
I think they really hope we will have forgotten these facts, and are buying their philosophy of ownership of the commons by a landed aristocratic elite, who are already controlling our elected employees.
Money must be seen as a key common possession. It's creation and regulation must absolutely be done in accordance with democratic principles, and it's misappropriation by private interests should be punished by law.
gilbert marks
11 weeks ago
usual antinuke hogwash.
@bailey
Like all no nukers you can't read and likely flunked grade 3 science. I explained in my comment what we will do with nuke waste.
All the worlds nuke waste would fit on a football field. What kind of a ghoul would rather destroy civilization than worst case sacrifice a football field?
Candu nuke waste after 300 years is no higher level, than high grade uranium once found in the same worked out mines we can store it in.
Waste storage costs are assessed by the NRC at .1 cents a kwh.
Chernobyl was a nuke weapons plant same as a similar unit at Hanford, and in both TMI and FUKU all damage was confined to the plant itself, with area radiation levels at background level with a few hotspots with levels under that you'd get on an Indian beach vacation. I laugh at the ignorance that sends out the continuous spew on FUKU radiation but has no words for the tens of thousands of tons of deadly forever toxic chemical waste from destroyed Big Oil facilities that is now covering the area with a deadly oily sheen.
The leakage for normally operating nuke plants worldwide is an infinitesimal fraction of the continual radioactive spew from coals and gas plants worldwide - less than the content of a glow in the dark road sign.
@rlbolin
Google "David LeBlanc DMSR" and get a glimse at a Canadian penny a kwh thorium reactor that needs a $B in investment but can't get it because Harper spends $10's of billion of worthless carbon capture and biofuel projects.
@irecton
There are no subsidies on nuke power plants - name one. Nuclear is the safest power on earth never killing a soul - a perfect record unlike wind and solar that kill thousands annually with the air pollution from there required gas backup and in future from their deadly toxic forever end of life waste leaching into landfills.
The US NRC assesses a .1 cent a kwh fee to store nuke waste.
You are simple spewing nonsense on FUKU 4's spend fuel area. It has been reinforced beyond all standard for this type of facility.
Plants here are all designed to handle any imaginable earthquake and no nuke plant worldwide has ever been damaged by one. The FUKU plant was vulnerable only to a Tsunami. None here are.
All FUKU damage is confined to the plant site and radioactive levels in food from the accident are well under what you'd get eating a banana.
Fiat lux
11 weeks ago
Governor estimates: 1,000
Governor estimates: 1,000 gallon yearly leak of nuclear waste at Hanford. No technology to stop it
http://enenews.com/governor-nuclear-waste-is-leaking-an-estimated-1000-gallons-a-year-no-available-technology-to-plug-the-leaks-at-hanford
ireckon
11 weeks ago
Irecton ! Thats a good handle!
Gibly your jus tooo funny! Whatever your smokin I could use some dude. Have a nice trip,when you come down do some readin. Don't worry about the silly stuff you posted here, none of us would know you on the street anyways. Boogy on Bro!
Bailey
11 weeks ago
Fool, dupe or willful liar?
Dear gilbert marks;
Let me respond to your arguments in order.
1. POOP! yer mudder eats army boots an so's yer old man!
2. Where do you plan to keep this football field?
3. Should be some 300 years. Why do we think other people think it would be more like 30,000 years?
4. You're right of course, Chernobyl is a spa. The pride of Belarus.
Here are some happy snaps of the merrymakers there.
http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/chernobyl
gilbert marks
11 weeks ago
dumb and dumber
Er lets put the football field in an old high grade uranium mine. DUH!!
Because those idiots ar from Greenpeace you fool. They are deliberately unaware that the annual dose levels where danger occurs is now over 100 mSV, no future person is likely to spending much time in a uranium mine, Candu nuke waste is a much lower level than PWR waste, and we have deadly forever mine tailing ponds with cubic miles of toxic arsenic waste leaching into water tables all over the country.
Chernobyl was a Soviet nuclear weapons plant just like the one at Hanford, nothing to do with nuke power. But since you ask it is one of the most prolific wild animal parks in all of Europe.
Bailey
11 weeks ago
So the kid born with his brain outside his head
in that gallery I sent you would be what? A wild animal in a preserve?
And the other children so defective are obviously just trying to give a false impression. They clearly need to be told the good news, that there is no danger there. You should go there and tell them, they and their mothers will be so happy to hear it.
There is a special place in hell for deniers of crimes so horrible as to defy description. The Allied armies moving through Europe in 1944 and 45 found many Nazi bureaucrats and townsmen who were even then still denying that the death camps existed. They too claimed the places were parks of a sort. I've seen film of them, forced to pile the bodies in mass graves for burial. The expression on their faces was not remorse, or even horror. It was truculent resentment at having to face the realities some of them still deny to this day.
The most interesting thing about you is the absolute refusal to face evidence that your premise is just wrong. That is fascinating to watch. I would really appreciate your opinion as to the answer to my question.
Fool, dupe or willful liar?
Fiat lux
11 weeks ago
There's no point in arguing
There's no point in arguing with the faithful.
I grew up in an arch conservative, fascist family, in an arch conservative fascist country, so I know the mentality of the system, have been sentenced to death by the nazis as an 18 year old soldier, to the gulags by the communists at 19, neither carried out, stolen blind of the results of 22 years of 7 day workweeks by the capitalists right here in BC, so I've seen them all.
According to the faithful nothing bad has happened in history, it was all done to hundreds of millions, now billions, for the sake of "economic efficiency" .
I still have some old mechanics magazines from the postwar years, predicting nuclear power stations in every house, nuclear cars and planes, and even radioactive golf balls that can be found in the grass with Geiger counters. No health problems at all.
Enough for the faithful to drool and dream over the wonderful nuclear world, as others are dreaming of tar oil benefits with pipelines into every house and factory.
The first demands of faith have always been blinkers and no questions, because the answers may interfere with artificially induced beliefs.
Ed Deak
Fiat lux
11 weeks ago
Published on Thursday,
Published on Thursday, February 28, 2013 by Common Dreams
Despite Warning for Women, WHO Report on Fukushima Slammed as 'PR Spin'
Greenpeace says report 'shockingly downplays' increased cancer risk for thousands of Japanese
- Jon Queally, staff writer
A new study released by the World Health Organization says that women, and especially female infants, exposed to radiation released following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan are at a significant risk of developing cancer later in life.
https://www.commondreams.org/sites/commondreams.org/files/imageA child is screened for radiation contamination before entering an evacuation center in Fukushima, Japan, Friday 1 April 2011. (Photograph: Wally Santana/AP) Despite those announcements by the WHO, critics of the new report say that overall the organization has done a great disservice by downplaying the overall dangers posed by the leaked radiation and accused the report of hiding "crucial information" about the ongoing dangers faced by those living in and beyond the Fukushima Prefecture.
“The WHO report shamelessly downplays the impact of early radioactive releases from the Fukushima disaster on people inside the 20 km evacuation zone who were not able to leave the area quickly,” said Dr. Rianne Teule, Greenpeace International nuclear radiation expert.
“The WHO should have estimated the radiation exposure of these people to give a more accurate picture of the potential long-term impacts of Fukushima. The WHO report is clearly a political statement to protect the nuclear industry and not a scientific one with people’s health in mind.”
gilbert marks
11 weeks ago
Ghouls
Well I would suggest Bailey that the problem lies with ghouls that are responsible for the murder of over 3 million people annually every year they can defer a fossil to nuclear conversation. I imagine there are likely thousands of more deformities caused by annual Big Oil water and air toxic forever chemical pollution than Chernobyl. Kinda makes your 1930's pals seem like nice guys now don't it.
And Luxy shame. If there was ever a zealot on this site tis you. You need to look in a mirror more often.
And stop with the junk science. If you need to quote Greenpeace over the WHO you seriously need to return to grade school science class.
If all the money spent on wind and solar had been spent on nuclear all the world's coal electricity production could have been already phased out saving more than a million lives annually and the global warming precipice would have been moved 30 years into the future.
Common Dreams is a another Big Oil favorite pushing their all renewable all the time junk science bullshit. Unlike Luxy I try to keep to real science peer reviewed in reputable journal not junk science downloaded from the alternet.
One of their most common posers is a character named Wasserman who like Luxy refuses to apologize to the families of the hundred million people that died when he and his low information cronies joined with Big Coal and replaced nuclear with coal.
Without Wasserman and his cronies, AGW would be an unknown concept.
Fiat lux
11 weeks ago
gilly..... If you would try
gilly..... If you would try to read , instead of believing, you might have noticed, that what I'm advocating is the reduction of energy use with rational and logical economic systems and not the advocacy of any more poisoning and destruction with either form.
Talking about "zealots", the most fanatic kind we see on this list are the nuke and similar ideological proponents.
I haven't looked into my old magazines for a long time, but still have some where nuke proponents predicted 50 years ago that nuke powered electricity will be so cheap that it won't be worth to read the meters.
Neither will we ever know the details of the damage caused by the 3 Mile Island accident,in human and animal life, right up to Canada, because the powers are keeping it a secret, not to alarm the faithful.
Ed Deak.
alive
11 weeks ago
Too obvious, eh?
OK, so shoot the messenger, the world is still overpopulated!
No matter how anyone plans to save on energy or conserve land, we are already past the mark where our main problem is too many people!
Put too many rats in one cage and observe -- or just keep reproducing humans and wait!
gilbert marks
11 weeks ago
Ed's too cheap to meter
Look Ed if anybody on this site is zealot its you. Get off that tack.
You make yourself look like an idiot when you do the too cheap to meter schtick. That was a quote about nuclear fusion from some speech in the early fifties at a science writers conference - UFO's, flying cars, death rays.
Even the DMSR above at a potential less than a penny a kwh, ain't too cheep to meter with all them smart meters around keeping the grid solid and radiated.