The triple-digit oil price likely isn't an aberration related to Saudi hoarding or escalating violence in Libya. Peak oil should be considered a current and permanent feature of our collective predicament.
If the 2011 oil peak plays out like 2008, the high price of energy could push the global economy into another recession. The economic contraction related to high energy prices will bring the price of oil back down again, only to repeat the cycle.
The political, business and cultural opposition for active policies to better price energy and carbon, eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, and break from fossil-dependent transport is overwhelming in most jurisdictions in North America. Absent other solutions, fossil fuel consumption is kept down using the recession and austerity policies.
Canadian economist Jeff Rubin writes that "recessions have been the only sure fire way America has cut back on its fuel consumption and the need for oil imports". Economic contraction and restructuring is a destructive energy strategy but has become the default setting of many political and business elites. A result is that ongoing economic restructuring is incorporating energy decline with cruel social and economic justice implications.
Richard Gilbert writes that we're "we’re effectively using the blunt tool of economic recession to reduce oil consumption in the face of supply constraints". As one alternative, he proposes "oil-proofing" Canada's transit network.
We should be moving as quickly as possible into electric traction. The way to get the most for each dollar invested in this transition would be to convert diesel bus routes to electric trolley bus routes. Conversion of a two-way route costs about $5-million per kilometre, including overhead wires, substations, and vehicles. Thus, for the $8-billion that the Ontario government through Metrolinx is to spend to add a 25-kilometre streetcar line in Toronto, 1,600 kilometres of roadway used by buses could be electrified, about 80 per cent of the total length of such roadway.
If the busiest routes were converted, this would mean that almost 100 per cent of transit trips in Toronto would be electrified, instead of the present 50 per cent (the share carried by streetcars and subways). Toronto’s transit system would be effectively proofed against oil crises. Some bus electrification of this kind would be worthwhile in all of Canada’s communities with a population of 100,000 or more, and in many smaller ones. European experience suggests that bus electrification can pay for itself over time.
Bus electrification would be particularly important in Eastern Canada, which is especially vulnerable to convulsions in oil markets because more than 90 per cent of the oil consumed there comes from or via another country. Moreover, unlike almost every other part of the developed world, there is no access to a strategic petroleum reserve.
Public outcry, organizing, and the active and experimental deployment of alternatives can be used to ensure a short-term decline in the availablity of energy contributes to our collective well-being and dignity rather than worsening both. Public transit is an ideal place to get to work on this crisis.
Phase one is complete and includes an MIT-affiliated campus, pictured above. More pics here.
Phase one is complete and includes an MIT-affiliated campus, pictured above. More pics here.
A new neighbourhood energy utility on Burnaby Mountain will supply enough heat for the entire Simon Fraser University campus and future homes in the acclaimed UniverCity residential development.
SFU is partnering with SFU Community Trust, Corix Utilities, and BC Hydro on the community-based sustainable district energy system. The project involves a high-efficiency heating plant using biomass – recycled wood waste from construction sites – as the primary fuel source.[]
SFU Burnaby’s aging natural gas boilers, which are at the end of their useful life, were responsible for 85 per cent of the university’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2007. Under B.C.’s Bill 44, which imposes penalties for carbon emissions by public bodies, these GHG emissions cost the school approximately $1 million each year.
The estimated cost for the combined heat and power system is $39.1 million, with a $4.7 million contribution from the public sector. Expected completion is winter 2012. The project has a total capacity of 36 MW and should eliminate 11,000 tonnes of carbon emissions.
George Monbiot explains why the Fukushima disaster made him pro-nuclear:
A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation. []
But the energy source to which most economies will revert if they shut down their nuclear plants is not wood, water, wind or sun, but fossil fuel. On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power. Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast.
Simon Fraser University's Urban Students Department is presenting a Visiting Lecture by Noel Isherwood, a Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Urbanism at the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment.
The topic is London's Urban Morphology:
Urban Morphology is the study of the growth and change of the built form of settlements. It draws on insights from urban history and archaeology, but also from architecture, geography, history, sociology, urban design, spatial analysis, space syntax and town planning. In this lecture Noel Isherwood, a consultant with the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, explores the City of London from Iron Age to 21st century.
This May, Noel will be returning to Vancouver to co-teach a sustainabile community design workshop at SFU's UniverCITY project. More details to come.
I met Noel at the Traditional Building and Urbanism summer school I attended with the Prince's Foundation last summer and am excited to see him speak on this topic.
I'll be attending his upcoming lecture at SFU Harbour Centre on March 11, at 7 pm. You can also attend by RSVPing here.
In a new paper, John Morrissey identifies a military-strategic studies complex that constitutes a key academic support for US geopolitical and geoeconomic imperialism.
In the power–knowledge symmetry of the academic–military world, strategic studies discourses do vital geopolitical work: they prioritize, disguise, legitimize and characterize entire conflicts; they reduce political and cultural geographical knowledges of distant places; and they erase the signature of, and accountability for, “our” violence. In a world of euphemisms and neologisms, well paid mercenary soldiers become “contractors” or “security employees”; ungovernable spaces of abject violence and misery become areas currently experiencing “a slight uptick in violence”; and waterboarding becomes “simulated drowning”, not actual drowning interrupted or torture.
Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. climate secretariat, warned of the destabilizing effects created by growing water stress, declining crop yields and damage from extreme storms in some of the world's poorest countries, which could set off mass international migration and regional conflicts.
Figueres said the world's military budgets grew by 50 percent in the first nine years of this century. Rather than continue that growth in weaponry, she said, the generals should invest in preventative budgets to "avoid the climate chaos that would demand a defense response that makes even today's spending burden look light." []
Figueres said much of the funding that pays for the growth of armies today could help curb carbon emissions that fuel global warming. It also could help poor countries in the most vulnerable and unstable parts of the world to protect themselves from the most devastating effects of climate change.
A team of researchers have published a study that shows human greenhouse gas emissions significantly contributed to devestating floods in England and Wales in 2000. The floods damaged 10,000 properties and cost £1.3bn in insurance loses.
From the New Scientist:
Allen and his team found that human greenhouse gas emissions "significantly increased" the likelihood of the 2000 floods. They can say, with a 66 per cent confidence level, that emissions nearly doubled the risk of the 2000 floods.
Conversely, says Allen, there is only a 10 per cent chance that the increase in flood risk rose by just 20 per cent as a result of human contributions to climate.
Their methods seem very robust and combine a number of models to account for the difficulty of predicting rainfall and flooding events.
Their work also employed distributed citizen-science through Climateprediction.net, where idle computing time is donated by nearly 55,000 contributors and used run climate models.
The authors have launched a new project, called Weatherathome, that will use distributed computing to model weather -- rather than climate -- events.
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