Category — Thoughts

Hey Guys,

My faculty sent out an invitation to the 2010 Clean Energy Conference, happening October 8th and 9th. The student rate is $100, which is major steep, but I think it would be great to attend. I’ve attached the file and it looks like there will be some really interesting discussions.

2010 Clean Energy Conference

Adam.

When considering the impacts of a wide-scale land disturbance, it’s important to weigh the political, economic, and social elements that are or will be affected. This article will attempt to further examine the long-term ecological and landscape impact of fossil fuel extraction by examining the reclamation standards determined by the Alberta provincial government. Using the Alberta oil sands as a case study, I will look at open pit mining rather than Steam Assisted Gravity Drained (SAGD) operations as this type of extraction involves the largest landscape impact of the development. I propose that due to the substantial environmental impact in this region, the current reclamation standards fail to encompass the grand scale of the oil sand development.

According to the Alberta Oilsands Vegetation Reclamation Committee, any user of public land whether it be a private timber licensee or a multinational energy corporation, must “achieve maintenance-free, self-sustaining ecosystems with capabilities equivalent to or better than pre-disturbance conditions” (OSVRC, 1998). For many industries such as forestry, this is a complex but very attainable task, and in many cases the outcome does actually benefit the ecosystem (such as salvage harvesting Mountain Pine Beetle stands). For other resource sectors following the governmental guidelines, the task is completely moot. The Alberta oil sand extraction, for example, is a large-scale development that involves ecosystem reconstruction at the scale of entire landscapes. “Given the large area of each mine (ca. 100 km2) eventually to be stripped and mined, this is not a restoration problem but the engineering of new ecosystems” (Johnson. 2008). For example, the largest tailings pond in the world “Mildred Lake”, resides in the Athabasca region which is owned and operated by Syncrude Canada Ltd. The Mildred Lake Settling Basin has a water surface area of 13 km², and holds more than 400 million m³ of tailings (Fedorak et al. 2002). Further, a major problem with using tailings ponds as a disposal method is the slow rate of sedimentation of the fine tailings, which could take 125–150 years (Eckert et al. 1996), which far surpasses the reclamation timeframe.

Because of the oil sands development of the landscape, the ground and surface hydrology is rerouted wherein whole wetlands and creeks disappear or move, the soil chemistry is changed to a point that native species won’t grow without annual fertilization, and whole boreal ecosystems are removed (OSVRC. 1998). The current remediation tactics use the same reclamation standards that the forestry industry uses, requiring “80% of the plots in a standard survey to be stocked with an acceptable tree(s) to a minimum height standard” (Alberta SRD. 2008). This standard is based on the assumption that the ecosystem occupying the site after the disturbance will be the same or similar to what it was prior; but because open pit mining alters the whole landscape, the silvicultural prescription will not necessarily equate to what remains after extraction. Regarding development in peatland areas, Mark Sherrington writes “peatlands are vegetation communities established on organic soils over several thousand years and cannot be reclaimed in the 80–100 year time period considered for reclamation in the Oil Sands region” (Sherrington. 2005). This means the peatlands removed for development will, at best, be returned to marches or swamps which don’t support the biodiversity or carbon storage that the peatlands previously did. The reclamation procedure also relies on salvaging peat deposits from the excavation sites, as well as harvesting organic soils and peat from offsite locations to mix with the replaced top soil, to create a suitable growth medium. While this method is “noteworthy because native seeds and root fragments transferred with the soil became established and grew rapidly on the reclamation sites” (OSVRC. 1998), it further expands the “footprint” of the operation and relies on fragile ecosystems to provide another resource to supplement the damages driven by fossil fuel consumption, which in turn releases more carbon previously stored in the frozen organics within the peatland permafrost. This is analogous to the consumption of a cleaner energy, natural gas, (or maybe even nuclear), to produce energy deemed by President Barack Obama as “dirty, dwindling, and dangerous.”

For these reasons, it should be clear that the generic reclamation standards of the province are not sufficient when dealing with such a macro anthropogenic disturbance. Reclaiming this land involves more than a superficial cleanup with the assumption that nature will restore itself and it’s unrealistic to assume that the landscape after extraction would resemble anything close to “pre-disturbance conditions”. As filmmaker Shannon Walsh and writer Macdonald Stainsby point out: Alberta’s failed reclamation strategy is “an absurdist creation only possible at this point in market-utopian logics” (Walsh. 2010). To recreate viable whole landscapes, a strategy must be created with the end goals and design objectives clearly laid out, a bottom up approach; which would allow developers to incorporate final objectives into land-use planning. The Landscape Design Checklist proposal by the Cumulative Environmental Management Association does just this. The document recommends compiling the design objectives into a checklist for creation of landscapes, and then incorporate the checklist into the design process. “Although many of the items in the design checklist may already be incorporated into the design process by some mining operation staff and their consultants, not all items are routinely or optimally followed, and the process is seldom systematic” (CEMA. 2005). If a design such as this were integrated into the provincial reclamation policies and guidelines, it may encourage a forward-looking approach rather than one that prioritizes short-term issues for the largest profit, and would contractually obligate the companies to reclaim land to a standard that actually supports the re-establishment of healthy ecosystems and landscapes.

Nevertheless, if reclamation standards change to incorporate ecosystem reconstruction at the scale of whole landscapes and hold the oil companies to a greater environmental accountability, this will effectively increase the costs of reclamation and therefore the overall cost of production. This would drive the cost and consequently the price of each barrel of oil from the oil sands up, which would create even greater disdain for a resource that is already marginally accepted by North American societies; (although the reduced environmental pressure does stand to reduce social pressure). If Alberta continues to allow large scale landscape reconstruction and environmental modification without fully acknowledging the long-term consequences of these actions, then I propose that the term reclamation be changed to masturbation; because it may look and feel good right now but in the long-run their only screwing themselves.

Literature Cited:

Alberta Sustainable Resource Development. 2008. Alberta Regeneration Survey Manual. Alberta Sustainable Resource Development, Forest Management Branch. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Effective May 1, 2008.

CEMA-RWG Landscape Design Subgroup. 2005. Landscape Design Checklist, Revised RSDS Government Regulator Version, May 2005. Cumulative Environmental Management Association. Fort McMurray, AB. http://www.cemaonline.ca/  (accessed on October 22, 2010)

Eckert, W.F., Masliyah, J.H., Gray, M.R., and Fedorak, P.M. 1996. Prediction of sedimentation and consolidation of fine tails. AIChE J. 42: 960–972.

Fedorak, P.M., Coy, D.L., Salloum, M.J., Dudas, M.J. 2002. Methanogenic Potential of Tailings Samples from Oil Sands Extraction Plants. Department of Biological Sciences; Department of Renewable Resources, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. NRC Research Press.

Johnson, E.A., Miyanishi, K. 2008. Creating New Landscapes and Ecosystems: The Alberta Oil Sands. Department of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Department of Geography, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

Oil Sands Vegetation Reclamation Committee, 1998. Guidelines for Reclamation to Forest Vegetation in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region. Alberta Environmental Protection. Edmonton, AB.

Walsh. Shannon; Stainsby, Macdonald.  2010. Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution. AK Press, Chapter 28, Part 7. Pages 333-344.

Energy and wealth distribution are accomplished by a system of social relations and production called capitalism. However, the allocation of this wealth and energy supply has created problems; climate change, postcolonial unrest, and poverty should cause us to stop and think about the system that got us here. If we accept that all knowledge is political, that someone somewhere, created the institutions of capitalism for a purpose, we should not withhold scrutiny; especially at this critical juncture in human history where the future demands bonafide institutions which can meet the task of changing our energy system and restoring equity to our world.

I would like to discuss briefly the obstacles embedded within this capitalist system which may impede this transition.

Subtracting fossil fuel from the capitalist equation is one of these obstacles. Capitalism harnessed fossil energy during the eighteenth century to fuel its expansion. Fossil fuels enabled rapid expansion of trade and markets over the globe; augmented exponentially the amount of work human bodies can accomplish, and generated a great deal of wealth for capitalist nations and individuals.(1) Finding a substitute with these magical qualities is the first challenge we face if we want to continue with present rates of economic growth and increasing global consumption.

However even if we were to discover a new source of abundant energy to replace fossil fuels there are contradictions and political motives within capitalism which must be addressed before we speak of the mechanics of a new energy system, or social order.

The first contradiction is between production by capitalists and consumption by labour. Capitalists want to maximize profits which means paying the lowest wages possible. However, these wages must be carefully measured to ensure an adequate level of consumption by labour; because when there is not enough people, and money, to buy all the stuff we have a crisis of overproduction and underconsumption. Then, a crisis, people lose their jobs, as we saw during the Great Depression in the 1920s and the US mortgage crisis in 2009.

The second contradiction in capitalism is, the tendency of firms to shift the costs of pollution onto the health of labour and the environment; these costs are then born by individuals and the state as pollution cleanup and health care bills. However, this crafty maneuver catches up with capitalists because in the long run pollution hinders the productivity of labour and land which lowers the profit rate, not to mention making people quite irate!(1) These two contradictions will cripple solutions to our energy and poverty crisis if left untouched.

Another obstacle is the possibility that the present capitalist system requires an uneven geography of energy use and wealth.  If this is true, than any future attempt to level out the use of energy and wealth will necessarily fail unless this systemic flaw is corrected. The present arrangement of global capitalism is enabled by ample cheap labour; two billion souls living outside the formal economy are feeding the industrial cities of the global south with cheap and plentiful labour for free, i.e. it does not require wages paid by capitalists to reproduce itself; instead, renewable energy from biomass, like dung and wood, is used to nourish this population instead of money wages. Their day-to-day existence is provided by the toils of their labour and that of their animals.(2) For many reasons these people living hand to mouth leave their rural subsistence lifestyles for the promising light of the city and the wages available there which are needed to survive in a global cash economy. Herein lies the problem; if this population of two billion peasants are brought in to the formal economy and their standard of living raised, as we are told will happen as the “rising tide” of economic growth “floats all boats”(4), who will form the army of cheap labour necessary to achieve a ‘sustainable’ profit rate?(3) We have seen rapid deindustrialization in the developed industrial nations over the last 40 years as firms moved production away from organized and high cost labour towards these cheap labour supplies to boost profit rates. However high profit rates depend on keeping wages low and keeping the commodities used to sustain the labour force cheap. Without cheap labour, profit rates fall, and commodities rise in price forcing up wages even more.

The implication of a necessary underclass of flexible, cheap labour is that it is opposed to the goal of transitioning to renewable energy and human development. Constructing a new energy system and reducing poverty and inequality under the current capitalist system means increasing wages and transitioning to renewable energy sources. If wages rise too much in these traditionally poor industrial areas, profit rates fall. Renewable energy must provide energy at the same price as fossil fuels to maintain profit rates. If renewable energy is more expensive, this too will strangle profits.

So challenges exist beyond the technical task of rewiring our society with windmills and solar panels. First, fossil fuels are the darling of capitalism. They enable the explosive nature of capitalist development fueling innovation, transportation and production at breakneck speed. Breaking this habit will be tough given the good times it has provided. In addition, the contradictions inherent in capitalism are being constantly managed with each consecutive crisis. Capital is always seeking the cheapest labour and the lowest wages while simultaneously seeking to raise consumption levels. This only works when there is wide range of income levels. When everyone gets paid what they are worth there is no margin left for profits. The other contradiction is that cheap goods and services depend on offloading the costs of producing these goods onto some peripheral environment and population. If everyone starts speaking up there will be no backyards left to dump the refuse of production. The final problem is more specifically political and stems from these contradiction: Our species of capitalism rests on inequality; inequality which allows fabulous wealth to be created at reckless speed but only for the lucky few. What to do? Well, that’s up to me and you.

Notes

(1) Huber, T. “Energizing historical materialism: Fossil fuels, space and the capitalist mode of production.” Geoforum 40, (2008): 105-115.

(2) Abramsky Koyla. “Chapter 5: Energy, Work, and social reproduction in the world-economy” in Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution. Edited by Koyla Abramsky, AK Press, Oakland, CA, 2010. pp. 98-99.

(3) O’Connor, James. “Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible?” in Natural Causes. Guilford Press: New York, NY, 1998.

(4) This is the status quo strategy to improve the well being of the global poor. As economic growth increases global production of goods and services, and thus global prosperity, so too will the poor prosper by induction into the formal capitalist economy.

I thought this was an interesting article about how the Alberta tar sands are shaping landscapes far beyond spaces of extraction. It is interesting because it is a debate centred around the issues of space and movement –– using a small Idaho highway to move large equipment destined for the tar sands.

Some excerpts:

… international oil companies see this meandering, backcountry route as a road to riches. They are angling to use U.S. 12 to ship gargantuan loads of equipment from Vancouver, Wash., to Montana and the tar sands of Alberta in Canada. The companies say the route would save time and money and provide a vital economic boost to Montana and Idaho.

AND

The proposed route could shave thousands of miles of transportation costs for such shipments, which might otherwise be forced to travel through the Panama Canal to overland routes accessed through Houston or New Orleans. Interstates and other wide highways are typically not an option, in part because overpasses are too low.

I help produce the twice-weekly newshour at CiTR 101.9 FM – the UBC radio station. We did a show on Monday focusing on oil tanker traffic in BC’s coastal waters and food security in Vancouver. Both issues, obviously, relate to energy, specifically oil. I have the complete audio from the panel discussion on food security, if you would like me to post it. The panel discussion was part of the Food and Beers series, hosted by The Tyee editor David Beers, at the Museum of Vancouver. The series continues for a few more weeks.

Have a listen if you get a chance – I’d love to hear your feedback. Or let me know if you have any story ideas.

Here is the link to the MP3:
CiTR News for Monday, October 18

Also, if you really want to support independent, community-based, volunteer-driven media (When I make it sound that good, how can you resist?), you can subscribe to the podcast here and join the Facebook page here.

I came across this Chevron ad on a website and thought you all should check it out. I think it’s interesting how they’re trying to brand themselves as a corporation fully supporting, caring about, part of the communities they operate in. Also, their tagline is interesting: “Chevron. Human Energy.”

What are your thoughts?

Are the tar sands a source of Canada’s geopolitical power? Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff thinks so – and he’s not alone (1). Industry and neoliberal politicians argue Canada has increased its geopolitical power because of Alberta’s tar sands. In the process, they have ingeniously tapped into a powerful form of patriotism – petro-patriotism. While extraction equals power and profit, the real power is not centred in Fort McMurray and the region –- for the most part, not even in Alberta. These spaces of extraction in northern Alberta are not spaces of empowerment for local peoples. To the contrary, power is centred in executive boardrooms of multinational corporations, generally lacking deep ties to communities and spaces of extraction. Although industry and petro-politicans speak of Alberta, and more generally, Canada, as holding key geopolitical power, the paltry royalties collected by government, the foreign investment, and deep North American integration have eliminated the possibility for any real geopolitical power. These issues merit an in-depth discussion, but the aim of this response is to briefly connect these three issues within the context of geopolitics in an age of neoliberalism.

Commentators, academics, activists, and some politicians warn of the diminishing control Canada has over its own energy resources, specifically in tar sands. Hugh McCullum of The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives characterizes Canada as an “energy satellite” of the United States, while others describe Canada as an “energy colony” (2,3). The provincial government has squandered an incredible opportunity to establish a rainy day fund to prepare for the inevitable post-petroleum future. For every $100 barrel of oil, Alberta only receives $26, while even Alaska receives $42 (4). Alberta makes less on its oil than Norway, Alaska, New Mexico or Louisiana (5). Oil companies are seeing huge profits. And yes, thousands are employed in northern Alberta, but the province nor the country are valuing this finite resource at a level consistent with the social and ecological costs associated with tar sands development.

The province’s inadequate royalty scheme has partly fuelled the incredible foreign investment. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative’s 2006 report, Fuelling Fortress America, noted that “American investment controls 40% to 50% of Alberta’s oil” (6). While the United States views the tar sands as an answer to its energy insecurity, China, too, is investing. In 2009, PetroChina announced its plans to buy a 60% stake in the privately-owned Athabasca Oil Sands Corporation. PetroChina now has a large stake in a company whose assets include five-billion barrels of bitumen (7). To put it bluntly, Alberta’s tar sands are up for sale, yet the provincial and federal governments have raised few concerns. Even more worrisome, many argue, is the division which no longer exists between industry and government. Both are quietly working towards deep North American energy and military integration.

North American economic union became clear through the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Specifically in terms of energy, this agreement “guarantees an increasing export of a finite resource,” even though Canada has not reserved any energy for itself (8). NAFTA paved the way for the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), which the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, the federal Conservative government, and the US federal government eagerly advocated, although Parliament never voted on it. The SPP allows for deeper military and energy integration. A “streamlined regulatory process,” deregulation of cross-border oil pipelines, and the privatization of energy industries are central to this backroom agreement, which has generated little attention in the mainstream press (9). The Civil Assistance Plan, signed by both countries, allows US and Canadian soldiers to enter either country to curb civil unrest or defend oil facilities (10). Recently US Senator Lindsey Graham said he did not believe Alberta crude to be “foreign” oil, appearing to suggest that Canada’s resources are merely an extension of the United States (11). Senator Graham is not alone in this view. Any geopolitical power Canada did have is rapidly disappearing.

We can no longer see today’s neoliberal politicians and oil corporations distinct from each other. We are witnessing the emergence of corporatist states, where sovereignty is increasingly irrelevant as decision-making is conducted with government and industry in the same room –- or government simply consisting of industry. Petro-politics and petro-politicians have ensured disproportionate returns for industry, while those in regions of extraction pay the environmental and social costs. Foreign investment and deep security and energy integration, advocated by industry, are further centralizing power in the hands of a small elite. Geopolitical power cannot exist when government forfeits total control of resource development to multinational corporations and fails to properly regulate. Is geopolitical power even relevant in this age of global corporate dominance?

Notes

1. Andrew Chung, “Ignatieff touts Alberta tar sands,” The Toronto Star, January 22, 2009, http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/575269.

2. Hugh McCullum, “Fuelling Fortress America: A Report on the Athabasca Tar Sands and US Demands for Canada’s Energy” (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2006), 23.

3. Shannon Walsh and Macdonald Stainsby, “The Smell of Money,” in Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution, ed. Kolya Abramsky, 341 (Oakland: AK Press, 2010).

4. Andrew Nikiforuk, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2008), 149.

5. Nikiforuk, Tar Sands, 140.

6. McCullum, “Fuelling Fortress America,” 23.

7. Nathan Vanderklippe, “PetroChina buys 60% stake in oil sands project,” The Globe and Mail, August 31, 2009, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/petrochina-buys-60-stake-in-oil-sands-project/article1270720/.

8. Walsh and Stainsby, “The Smell of Money,” 340.

9. Walsh and Stainsby, “The Smell of Money,” 341.

10. Nikiforuk, 164.

11. Jane Taber, “US Senator sold on the oil sands,” The Globe and Mail, September 17, 2010, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/us-senator-sold-on-the-oil-sands/article1712877/.

Long-term German politician and renewable energy advocate, Hermann Scheer, passed away last Thursday. He was one of the primary voices featured in the movie Energy Autonomy, and indeed, wrote a book by the same name, envisioning a transition to distributed, decentralized energy production.

Some of the main ideas I took away from the movie:

There has been a worldwide decoupling of energy production from energy consumption. The idea of energy autonomy is to re-localize energy production with networked systems of wind, solar, and bio-gas. This can be a strong poverty-reduction strategy in rural areas, and developing countries as a whole, especially when the costs of importing energy into a country is proportionately high to its overall GDP.

From Hermann Scheer’s perspective, the transition to renewable energy cannot be delegated to the traditional energy sector, whose main priority is maintaining the status quo of their previously built infrastructure. For Scheer, Carbon-Capture and Storage (CCS) is a “bad investment” and is characteristic of the clinging, death grip that the traditional energy sector has on fossil fuels. The energy transition must instead be advanced by a mass movement of people who start integrating renewables and smart design into the way they use transit, build their homes, and power their appliances.

A few criticisms of the movie:

Overwhelming emphasis on technological innovations and entrepreneurs, with little to no mention at all of capitalism (its need for growth/mass consumption)

There was no hint of “overshoot”, or our collective footprint exceeding the carrying capacity of the earth, and thus, the requirement of reducing consumption and material throughput.

Problematic endorsement of electric (sport)cars.

And lastly, the idea of autonomy could have been taken a bit further as there was no connections made to the political possibilities of a world where citizens have direct control of their energy supplies.

Otherwise, an uplifting movie, perhaps one of the first about energy to paint an optimistic vision of the future! (that is, if you aren’t counting this:

How was the film?  I was too tired to make it. I just stumbled across an interesting article by Lester Brown.

http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/book_files/pb4book.pdf

I’m writing this essay  partly in response to lectures by Stewart Brand and the Green Party. I’d like to speak about these lectures in relation to what we have read so far about capitalism, oil sands, arctic energy exploration and the implications for our future energy supply under a capitalist system.

Stewart Brand – Technology!

If I could summarize Stewart Brand’s lecture it would be like this: Climate change is serious and we have very little time to transition into a carbon neutral economy. The best path forward is to encourage more and faster urbanization, education and reproductive rights for women, accelerated genetic engineering of crops, bioengineering, nuclear power expansion right now with potential for fusion power to come online in the next few decades and geo engineering if necessary. In short, we need to accelerate advances in technology, economic growth and our energy infrastructure. I’ll refer back to these ideas later in reference to our readings.(1)

Green Party – Stop!

The Green Party suggested about the exact opposite stressing the Limits to Growth.(7) Their argument is that economic and population growth are the essential problems because each year our economy grows at the exponential rate of about 3% and consumes a comparative increase in material inputs like oil, water and topsoil. This consumption is an overburden to the ecosystems which support us through services like the hydrological, nutrient and carbon cycles. The only solution is to shrink our economies and population which will effect a decline in material consumption to reduce the burden on our the ecosystems.

Figure 1: Global GDP Growth 1960 - 2008 (2)

This Limits to Growth argument rests on the premise that human activity exceeds the carrying capacity of our planet. Humans are not different than any other species which surpasses its environmental limits; If they surpass the natural limits their population will eventually crash. This should cause us concern for if our material throughput (i.e. stuff we take from the earth) and economic growth continues. In figure 1 one we see a steady exponential increase in gross domestic product (GDP),  i.e. the final monetary value of combined goods and services produced, which serves as standard measure of economic growth. The graph shows a rough increase of an average of 3% increase in GDP per year. At this rate our economy will grow 3.3 times bigger over the next 40 years. In Figure 1 we see our economy was recently (2008) sitting at 61 trillion dollars. If we extrapolate that number at 3% to 2050 our economy will producing over 200 trillion dollars. The logic goes that we will also be consuming proportionally more resources, which we can’t afford to do because we already surpassed our carrying capacity decades ago. Technology is not a solution because all this new energy technology will only perpetuate business as usual economic growth,  material consumption and carbon emissions. Increasing efficacy provided by technology will only decrease the intensity of material usage but not change the fact that we will still use more resources each year albeit at perhaps at a rate below 3%.  The point is that it doesn’t matter how efficient our economy is if it requires more resources per unit output of GDP each year. According to this view is,the solution to stopping environmental degradation and ensuring human survival is, we don’t have a choice, we have to shrink our economies and our population by halting growth.

Mirage

My sinking feeling after hearing these lectures is that business as usual, i.e. the current formation of capitalism, and technological advance proposed by Stewart Brand is a flawed solution. It will not provide us with a solution to climate change soon enough. Not because we don’t have the technology to produce fancy new power plants, and grains, but because it will take too long and too much fossil energy to reconstruct our infrastructure for everything. New cities, buildings, vehicles, power grids and power plants will have to be rebuilt using fossil energy to transform our economy into a CO2 neutral/negative economy. Below in Figure 2 and 3 are graphs from a 2010 International Energy Agency report which shows our past and future energy supply. These graphs show that fossil fuels, oil, coal and gas have risen in use historically. Figure 3 below shows a steady increase of fossil fuel use up to 2030 with renewables making up less than half our power source at best. While certainly not set in stone, we could be emitting more carbon in the future than we are today if economic growth continues, and we have already emitted too much.

Figure 2: World Energy Supply 1971 - 2008 (6)

Figure 3: Outlook for Energy Supply 1990 - 2030 (6)

Capitalism Loves Oil

While I  love the whiz bang! gadgets produced by capitalism’s wonderful capacity for innovation I feel it is not the best solution in its present form. Capitalism relies on technological change and  competitive advantages in production and marketing which to date has only increasing our use on fossil energy at the very time we need to start shutting down every last fossil fuel power plant and internal combustion engine (Again see figures 2 and 3). Huber’s argument in “Energizing Historical Materialism” makes a strong case that fossil fuels are internal to the metabolism of capitalism. According to Huber, fossil energy is internal to contemporary capitalism for these reasons:

1) Fossil energy replaces human energy which decreases demand for labour and increases supply. This decreases the control of labour over the production process because there are proportionally less workers employed by each firm and by increasing the labour supply there is steady leverage against resistance because there are many more labourers to replace the resistors.

2) The ease of transportation allows concentration into cities where they can be consumed by industry and consumers.

3) Energy density and abundance have allowed increased velocities of production and time to market which in turn increases profit rates.

The problem then for any future energy source is that it will have to replicate these characteristics without a pause to sustain continued economic growth. This is then a major obstacle to stopping CO2 emissions and reducing our material consumption.

Oil Ho!

Present enthusiasm to exploit Canada’s Tar Sands and Arctic oil reserves seems natural given capitalism’s love of oil.

If we were serious about stopping CO2 emissions we would be limiting our exploitation of the Tar Sands. Yet I see no sign of a decrease in exploitation. For example Tar Sands development is a central policy of the Security and Prosperity Partnership signed by North America governments (SPP). (4) Alberta’s oil fields are the world’s largest remaining oil reserves and have attracted almost 60% of global oil investment.(4) Moreover neither Canada nor Alberta have indicated any intention to stop the total exhaustion of this resource.(4)

Similar to the Tar Sands, the Arctic is seeing vigorous investment by energy companies and energy states such as Russia. The Russians are betting on Arctic energy to fuel their future economic growth and imperial ambitions. They planted a flag beneath the North Pole on the sea bed hoping to prove that the sea floor is an extension of the Russian landmass so they can explore fossil energy deposits.(5) The Russian state owned enterprise (SOE), Gazprom, is the largest gas extractor in the world. Russia now ranks third behind Iran and Saudi Arabia for the oil and gas reserves. This would support the evidence offered by the IEA energy forecast that fossil energy is not going away anytime soon.(5)

Sounds kind of grim really. I think realistically the solutions to reduce human impacts on the earth lies somewhere in between Stewart Brand’s and ‘Limits to Growth’ arguments; We need some technological innovation and we need to seriously consider halting economic growth, at least in the developed world.  Of course things may turn out quite differently than any of us can imagine. However, I don’t think that mainstream political and business leaders or society for that matter are being intellectually honest or listening to the predictions of the consequences of a business as usual future. I know there is debate over how many people the earth can support, but it would be prudent to guess on the conservative side. It’s easier to grow later than be forced to shrink after it’s too late. The friction to change our behavior is only natural because any serious reduction in energy consumption of the system is likely to the power of elites and sacrifice the high quality of life we in the developed world feel entitled to. However things may turn out, it remains to be seen how tolerant the earth’s biosphere and atmosphere are to the endless growth ideology that is capitalism and its insatiable appetite for fossil fuel.

Bibliography

(1) The ideas of Stewart Brand can be found in his new book: Whole Earth Discipline: an ecopragmatist manifesto (London: Atlantic Books, 2010)

(2) www.google.com, “global gdp”.

(3) Huber, T. “Energizing historical materialism: Fossil fuels, space and the capitalist mode of production.” Geoforum 40, (2008): 105-115

(4) Nikiforuk, Andrew. Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent (2008). p. 2

(5) Sheppard, Lola and White, Mason. “Meltdown: Thawing Geographies in the Arctic”. pp. 133-134

(6) International Energy Agency, “Key World Energy Statistics 2010”. http://www.iea.org/.

(7) Meadows, Donella. The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books, 1972.