Vail Goes Green

Yes, indeed, the symbol of indulgence, the giant Vail ski resort, has set a goal to cut energy use by 10%. Actually, some of these measures are to cut purchased energy use, as in putting solar panels on the roof of one of the restaurants. That might not cut the total energy consumption, but it will cut Vail's energy bills from local utilities. Still, there are some notes in this article that caution against assuming that energy reductions are easy to achieve.

Housing Patterns and Oil Prices

I am in a constant struggle to keep up with my magazines. I read, and I read, but they keep coming in the front door faster than I can move them to the recycle basket. So, I just read, today, an article in the March 2008 issue of The Atlantic. The article was entitled "The Next Slum?" It was written by Christopher B. Leinberger who, according to the blurb at the end of the article, was "a visiting fellow at the Brooking Institution, a professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan, and a real-estate developer." There is a reference to Mr. Leinberger's latest book, The Option of Urbanism, published by Island Press in November 2007. If you like the article, you might want to think about getting the book.

The basic thesis of Mr. Leinberger's article is expressed in this paragraph: "For 60 years, American have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and '70s - slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay."

The article makes sense to me, in part because I have an example of the phenomenon Leinberger describes in my own family. One of my sisters recently moved to a condo in the downtown area of one of Seattle's suburbs. Leinberger may be exaggerating this trend, partly because he may be making some doubtful assumptions about how many people really like urban living. (He does have some survey data to support his contentions, though.) But I think he may be right about the general trend to slowing suburban growth, and renewed growth in urban centers. (I might also note that some of his statements are consistent with Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1962), which I recently read. Jacobs's book is a classic critique of urban planning. It's available in a Modern Library edition.)

This growth wouldn't necessarily be in the old urban centers. Leinberger mentions Reston, Virginia, White Plains, New York, and Lakewood, Colorado. A few years ago, Joel Garreau, who writes for the Washington Post, published a book called Edge Cities, about the growth of these suburban centers. What Leinberger is now adumbrating may be an extension, or an intensification, of the edge city phenomenon. Here's a link to Leinberger's article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime/2

Leinberger himself doesn't refer to energy costs as a motivator for the movement he describes, as he is focusing on the subprime lending crisis as an accelerator. I don't think it takes a lot of imagination, however, to see how "lifestyle centers" would be made more attractive by higher charges at the gas pump.

The Problem with the Energy Problem

In response to my recommendation of Crude Awakening, a friend raised a good point with a comment that the problem isn't that we're going to run out of fossil fuels, but that we aren't. He is, of course, thinking of the problem of global warming.

It is a good point, but it is also wrong. It's a good point because the causal chain of burning fossil fuels, increases in greenhouse gases, atmospheric warming, climate change, potentially catastrophic physical changes to the planet is well-established. The more fossil fuels we burn, the more input goes into that causal chain, and the greater the magnitude of the consequences.

Where this formulation of the problem goes wrong is in the statement that this is "the problem." A lot of experience and study have taught me that whenever someone says "the problem is ...," he's wrong. At the very least, she is about to give us a very partial picture of the situation, in which she will identify as "the problem" that issue which happens to be most salient to herself and her concerns. If there were only one problem tied to our use of fossil fuels, it wouldn't be nearly so hard to figure out a way to solve it. There are, however, several problems, and finding a course of action which will solve all of them is very, very difficult.

First, to acknowledge my friend's point, there's global warming. The solution to global warming is to burn a lot less fossil fuels, coal, natural gas, and oil.

Next, there's the evidence that the world oil supply is at or near its peak, if it has not already passed it, so that we are going to have steadily declining reserves. We may be seeing the beginning of steadily declining annual production. The solution to this problem is to burn a lot less oil.

Third, there is the Malthusian problem of a large and rising population, which is facing limits upon the resources necessary to sustain it. The solution to this problem is to limit population growth, and to increase the production of food and other basic necessities.

Now, it would seem that the first two problems have solutions which are mutually consistent, if not reinforcing. If we are burning less oil, are we not burning less fossil fuel? Well, no, because when we stopped (mostly) using oil for electric power generation after the oil shock of the 1970s, we turned to natural gas and coal. Coal is less energy dense than oil, I believe, so you have to burn more of it to get the same amount of heat, and, therefore, electricity, so you tend to put more carbon into the air. Moreover, at this time oil is the only stuff that's really good for transportation. Even those two-mile-long coal trains that run out of Wyoming to the East coast are powered by diesel fuel. Substituting other stuff for oil in transportation is complicated (because of the lack of infrastructure), expensive, and often self-defeating. It takes about as much oil to make a given quantity of ethanol (from corn) as the ethanol replaces. It takes, with current technology, more oil to make a given quantity of hydrogen than the hydrogen replaces. (Much more, like four or five times as much.)

And the example of ethanol brings us to the interaction of the third problem with the other two. The so-called Green Revolution, which radically increased food yields, and which allows us to sustain a population of over six billion people, was really a petroleum revolution. (Crude Awakening has a discussion of this point.) In addition to providing fuel to power tractors and other farm equipment, oil and natural gas are the feedstocks for the fertilizers that allow increased yields, and the pesticides which allow the bulk of those yields to be harvested. Trucks and trains and ships, all powered by oil, allow us to move food around the world, so that people almost anywhere can have a balanced diet at any time of year, and no matter how limited the locally-grown crops may be. Plastics also protect food from pests and decrease spoilage. According to some figures bruited about on Crude Awakening, if oil runs out (should I say, when oil runs out), the planet will only sustain a population of about 1.5 billion people. 1.5 billion is the population of just two countries - China and the United States - today. (Or India and the European Union. Or any number of other combinations, each of which contains only a small minority of the countries of the earth.)

Now, then, according to some guesses (and they are guesses), global warming may displace a few hundred million people from their current living areas. It will increase the difficulty of cropping some areas, but will increase production elsewhere. A lot of the effects of global warming we can deal with, as long as we have a plentiful supply of energy. But the end of the era of oil could mean the deaths of five billion human beings, as well as of huge numbers of the animals dependent upon them. So, which should get the priority?

Crude Awakening

I seldom recommend movies, but I think Crude Awakening, a 2006 documentary about the oil situation, is so compelling, so comprehensive, so depressing, that we all ought to be aware of it. These guys use numbers to show how hard it will be to replace oil as a fuel, partly because oil is still very, very cheap. Here's a nice figure from the film: one barrel of oil contains enough energy to equal 25,000 man-hours of labor. If anyone else has see this movie, I'd appreciate comments.