Mischievous Ramblings II

Choosing an Energy Source

(Visualization: Evan Robinson; Data Sources: Ecologist Magazine: The Future of Energy is Renewable,
Energy & the US Economy: A Biophysical Perspective, Renewables in Scotland: Carbon Dioxide)

I was reading The Transition Handbook in preparation for a workshop next weekend, and there's a couple of great charts showing the carbon intensity (grams of CO2 equivalent produced per kilowatt-hour) and EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) of various energy sources (although oil is prominent by its absence, I added some in later).  Those charts are online at The Ecologist magazine.  Although I found them interesting and useful, I thought they would be much more useful if they were combined.

The result is above: a scatter chart showing the relationship between EROEI and Carbon Intensity for various forms of energy.  Because a high EROEI is good, we would prefer to use energy sources far to the right.  Because low Carbon Intensity is good, we would prefer to use energy sources far down on the chart.

Several energy sources were "outliers" -- they didn't fit nicely on the chart as scaled, so they are marked by half cut-off blue dots at the very edge of the plot.  Their label includes the actual value, so although the "Tar Sands (465)" dot is at about 260 gCO2e/kwh, the actual value is 465 gCO2e/kwh as indicated by the (465).

For any given application, this chart provides a (roughly) optimal ordering of energy sources.  Wherever possible, Tidal Range power is the highest EROEI and the lowest (or very very close to the lowest) Carbon Intensity.  Next is a choice between Offshore Wind (if you prefer to reduce Carbon Intensity a bit more in exchange for a bit less EROEI) or Sewage / Landfill Gas.  And so on.

You'll notice that the included petroleum and petroleum like fuels (US oil, tar sands, Coal) are very dirty, except for possibly "Clean" Coal, which doesn't really exist yet.  And there are alternatives to each of them which have higher EROEIs.  But none of them have the physical energy density that these carbon based fuels like oil have.

A simple conclusion is obvious: carbon based fuels should not be used for electrical generation (that's what most of these energy sources are, with the exception of Solar Thermal and the generalized cogeneration of electrical power and heat intrinsic to Sewage / Landfill Gas, Concentrating Solar Power, Solid Biomass, and so on) if any of these other alternatives are available and can supply a significant fraction of the required power.

Fall Convocation 2008: Simon Fraser University

(Photo: Simon Fraser University)

Last month, I received my MBA from Simon Fraser University. My family persuaded me to attend convocation, although my previous experience (BACS, UC Santa Cruz, 1983) had left me disinclined to attend

I am so very grateful that I was persuaded. After gowning, lining up, precessing, and waiting (since there were no doctorates to be awarded, we MBAs were the first of about 400 students to reach our seats), we were sitting and listening to what I expected would be the traditional boring platitudes about how wonderful we were, how fantastic our experience at school had been, and how we would now proceed to change the world, preferably through good capitalist means.

I had forgotten that I was in Canada.

Dr. Michael Stevenson, President of the university, gave a fantastic speech:

The movement over the last quarter century to lessen the size and cost of the state, and to liberate the market from bureaucratic regulation and inefficiency, has been characterized by many contradictory trends. For example, the promise of less government has been undercut by the continued growth if redirection of government spending; the promise of the free market has been undercut by “irrational exuberance” of poorly regulated capital markets; the assurance of better services has been undercut by the health and safety threats in deregulated water, power and food systems or the increased visibility of homelessness and drug addiction following the deinstitutionalization of mental health care. Domestic “wars” on drugs or crime are as ineffective in achieving their announced objectives as the international War on Terror. And claims to political superiority grounded in the defense of human rights and civil liberties are devalued by arbitrary arrest and the abrogation of legal rights in defense of “homeland security,” and by the more general pressure to liberate executive power from judicial restraint.

For reasons like these, the events of the last few weeks underline the limits of American and North American domination, whether economic, military or political. The world is a much different place than it was even a decade ago, when we celebrated the advent of a new millennium.

As new university graduates you know the world is a more complicated and dangerous place. You know that this is not only a question of the rapid restructuring of economic and political power in the global market and international order. It is also a question of the life of the planet itself…of fundamental changes in climate and ecosystems, the intensified risks of natural disaster and reduced biodiversity, and the hugely complex issues of adaptation to and mitigation of environmental change.

Despite the magnitude of these challenges, and despite the rhetorical drum-beat of electioneering calls for change, the political response is so far not encouraging. Governing and opposition parties still vie for the embrace of lower taxes, knowing apparently that most of us will favour a marginal increase in private consumption over any collective investment in public infrastructure or social services. Courageous leadership on climate issues is the exception rather than the rule, and it is met with opportunistic opposition to carbon taxes, unless they be levied on someone other than ourselves. Public investment in the arts as a means to building the creative economy and improving the quality of life is opposed as a sop to cultural elites and a subsidy to work that affronts the sensibilities of ordinary men and women, as great art tends to do when first produced. And public investments in education, which are so urgently required in order to rethink the fundamentals of our ways of life and to redefine long term strategies for social change, are increasingly targeted to the short-term demands of the existing labour market and to the shortest possible return on investment through the commercialization of research.

Serious discussion of these and other issues is muted by the forces governing our electoral politics. In the age of mass communications simple plurality, first-past-the-post, electoral systems force convergence on issues and differentiation on image. Trash advertising and spin, segmentally targeted to different “demographics,” manipulate political sentiment and undermine rational discussion.

This is a different place.

Interesting Musing on Oil Prices

Via Marginal Revolution, Calculated Risk discusses a possible scenario concerning oil prices, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) country spending, and the US trade deficit:

The following graph is interesting. This reminds me of how the surge in California state government revenues in the late '90s (due to the tech stock bubble), led to a concurrent surge in government spending. When the tech bubble burst, the state budget went bust.

The same pattern has been repeated across the U.S. recently with surging government spending based on revenues from the housing bubble. Now, almost every week, we see a story about some state or local government laying off workers and cutting their budget as revenues from housing decline.

US Medical System Worst In 19 Industrialized Nations

Reuters reports on a study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, authored by Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee, published in Health Affairs, a peer reviewed journal:

France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday.

Allan Ginsberg, America

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?

Photographing While Arabic

From Australia, a show sends people out to videotape a bridge and a nuclear facility, dressed as a comic-book Arab or an American tourist, and times police response:

Not surprisingly, officials pay much more attention to someone dressed as a comic-book Arab than they did to the "American tourist." The takeaway? Terrorists should dress like Americans when casing targets!

Sulu v Hardaway

From The News Blog

Awesome!

Not Ready To Make Nice: Death Threats to Song of the Year

Dixie Chicks win 5 Grammies, including Country Album of the Year, for an album most country radio stations won't even play

Too sweet.

I'm just sorry Natalie Maines didn't get up and say "y'know, I am ashamed that the President of the US is from Texas" and/or "I'm still not ready to make nice."

She was gracious and said she was ready to make nice, though.

But the "hah, hah" Simpsons quote may have spoiled that.

Go Chicks!