Heat

It’s been too hot to blog. The high temperatures and humidity make your Minor Heretic’s brain whimper and try to shrink back into its reptilian bottom third. We just had a top-5 heat wave here in Vermont, five days in the 90s, setting records. Ok, nothing to you folks in Arizona, but a lot of us haven’t invested in air conditioning.

This June, according to NASA, was the hottest since modern record keeping began in 1880. It followed the hottest January to June in recorded history, despite the sun being at the bottom of its cycle. 2009 was essentially tied with 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007 as the second hottest year in recorded history. 2005 took the gold, if one can call it that, contributing to the first decade of this century being the warmest on record. According to the NOAA, this June caps 304 consecutive months that are as above the 20^th century average as the kids of Lake Wobegon. Oh, and the Arctic sea ice is at its lowest area for June (42%) since anybody has been keeping track.

I was thinking about ice the other day, and not just because it was disappearing from my drink so quickly. I went down to the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum and attended the opening of the new Hazlitt Small Boat Exhibit. The museum has built a place to display their collection of historic small water craft. At the center of the building is a fully rigged ice boat. It’s basically a big timber with a couple of outriggers on skates, with a mast and sail. Ice boats can easily exceed 60 mph with a stiff wind and smooth ice. If there is ice. While visiting the exhibit I listened to some people talking about their iceboating experiences. They used to sail out on the broad lake almost every winter. Now they mostly sail in the shallower bays. The broad lake doesn’t “close” with the consistency it used to. I looked up the National Weather Service records of Lake Champlain freezing over. It only missed two years in the 19^th century. It failed to ice over four times in the first half of the 20^th century and twenty-five times in the second half. Seventeen of those ice free winters occurred in the last 25 years.

As I noted a couple of years ago, the mythical Northwest Passage, pursued for centuries by unfortunate explorers, is no longer a myth. You can now take a summer boat ride from the Atlantic to the Pacific north of Canada.

I’ve been thinking about global warming of late, wondering how many record setting heat waves we’ll be enduring over the next decade. I’ve also been thinking about resistance to the concept of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). I suppose some people are just born skeptical, but it seems to be more than that.

Of course, employees of coal, oil, natural gas, power, and car companies have a vested interest in disbelief. As Sinclair Lewis once wrote, “It’s hard to convince a man of something if his salary depends on not being convinced of that thing.” Beyond sheer economic self-interest or profit motivated mendacity, there is a political divide. Global warming is “liberal.” I’d contend that geophysics is beyond politics, even though individual scientists have political beliefs. The whole structure of science is bent on correcting factual error and refining our understanding of the natural world. Nevertheless, it’s those lefty environmentalists who are yammering about it, so it must be wrong.

Some observers have noted that climate change has another political facet – the negation of conservative theories about the balance of the individual and the community. Dealing with climate change requires cooperative action and strong government intervention. The corporate fossil-fuel promoters won’t give up revenue voluntarily.

It’s frightening, too. It promises extreme weather, crop failures, submerged coastlines…cue the four horsemen.

There’s a deeper resistance, though, and it involves guilt and responsibility. If I accept the concept that human activity is causing a dangerous change in the climate, then I bear guilt. Every time I put the key in the ignition or hit the thermostat I am committing a little crime. Every day I do my bit part in the grand terracide of modern fossil-fueled life. When I get on an airplane, hell, it’s a gun to some island kid’s head. Who wants to think of themselves that way? Sure, in a way we are bounded by our infrastructure and the expectations of society. But still, we have some options. This is the responsibility part, because with knowledge comes responsibility. If you know you are culpable then basic ethics requires you to act. In this case, acting means going against the current of our society, dealing with change and inconvenience, and creating a new lifestyle. Dissonance and inconvenience are not hot tickets in our culture. Personal change, although celebrated in a thousand books, is more popular in print than in fact.

The biggest obstacle to people dealing with AGW is their desire to feel good about themselves and just get on with life. Especially as getting on with life has become more difficult of late. I get the feeling that a lot of people realize that the oil companies are bullshitting us about it, for obvious reasons. There’s still that emotional hurdle, though.

As always with humans, it’s a marketing problem. Make the economic opportunity pitch? Make it a sport? People love the human drama of athletic competition*, so why not carbon competition? There are a thousand ideas, but downplaying the guilt and the looming disaster is a start. It seems counterintuitive, but that’s us.

*Name that TV show



On Dealing With Uncertainty, and a Threshold

My crystal ball is out being repaired. It’s been in the shop for most of my life – starter problems, I think, or maybe the bearings. I share this problem with most of the people who analyze the fossil fuel industry. There are so many factors, so many hands on the steering wheel, that it is essentially impossible to predict price and supply except in long term generalities. Nobody can time the market.

We have been on an undulating production plateau for oil since roughly 2005. World production for all oil-like liquids has been hovering around 84 million barrels a day. Price volatility has stalled the development of new oil fields, resulting in what some commentators refer to as the “practical peak” in oil production. What they mean is that while the world economy wallows in depression, the production of our aging oil fields will continue to decline. This won’t affect prices because of lowered demand, so the new, more expensive to develop oil fields won’t get tapped. When the world economy starts to crawl out of its present collapse, oil demand will increase, bumping up against declining supply. Steeply increasing oil prices will kill the recovery, oil demand, and oil development. Repeat until Amish.

Similar problems afflict natural gas production. Coal energy production has been flat since 2001.

There is a similar problem with global heating due to the combustion of these same fossil fuels. The scientific consensus is that it is upon us and that it is dangerous, but nobody can say with absolute certainty how soon or how abruptly it will happen. Will it be a slow evolution or will it hit a threshold and accelerate wildly? Experts differ.

I have been pondering these dual and balancing uncertainties, fossil fuel depletion and global heating, and I’d like to advocate for immediate, accelerated action.

I like skydiving as an analogy. It has both the elements of risk and inevitability. Imagine that you are a careless skydiver. You jump out of a plane at some undetermined altitude, right into a bank of clouds. You have neglected to wear your altimeter, so you have no way of knowing your distance to the ground. You haven’t checked the weather, so you don’t know how close to the ground the cloud cover goes. There you are, falling blindly through the gray mist. You know the ground is down there, and that you will inevitably be making contact with it at some speed at some time. When do you pull your ripcord? You can’t wait till you break out of the clouds and see the ground. The clouds might be too low, and your chute wouldn’t have time to open. When faced with utter uncertainty and when delay may result in death, the only answer is immediate action. You may spend some time inconveniently floating down through the clouds, but no matter.

Some, especially those who work for fossil fuel companies, advocate a go-slow approach on energy and climate issues. Further study is needed before we act, they say. When you are falling and have no idea when you might go splat, that is no time to convene a committee to study the issue. It is time to pull the ripcord.

There is one strand of that ripcord I’d like to discuss. As a renewable energy consultant and installer, I am always doing calculations, including calculations about the economics of renewable energy installations. This morning I was working up a price quote for a potential customer. I subtracted the Vermont incentive and the federal tax credit, did an idle mental rule of thumb calculation, and had a sudden start.

Due to the economic slump and increased production there is a worldwide glut of photovoltaic (solar electric) modules. The price has dropped by about two dollars per watt over the past couple of years. $8.50 per installed watt used to be the off-the-cuff number for a residential scale solar. Now it is down to around $6.50 per installed watt. Subtract the Vermont incentive of $1.75/watt and the 30% federal tax credit and it comes to $3.33/watt. Now, consider that in Vermont this watt of solar will generate about 1.2 kilowatt-hours per year, or about 30 kilowatt-hours in its module’s 25 year warranted life span. $3.33 divided by 30 equals a levelized cost of 11 cents per kilowatt-hour, almost exactly what I would pay today. (What I would pay, but I don’t, because my solar array feeds more back to the utility than I use.) The economics are more complicated than that, but as of now, in Vermont, residential solar electricity is roughly at parity with the electrons we buy at retail. We have reached a long sought threshold.

25 years may seem like a long payback, but that is a 4% return, rising with the cost of electricity, guaranteed as long as the sun rises, and covered under your homeowners insurance. It is a half a percent better for business owners, who can depreciate their solar assets.

H.446, now called Act 45, offers even more with a feed-in tariff that will probably land between 25 and 30 cents per kilowatt-hour. The Public Service Board, the utility lawyers, and the renewable energy and consumer advocates are still making the sausage on how that will play out. Still, the absolute baseline cost for net-metered customers is viable. It can only get better as retail electricity costs go up.

Solar hot water offers a better return than solar electricity, and energy efficiency better than that. Interest rates are low. So what are you waiting for? Pull the fossil fuel ripcord.

Northwest Passage

“Through cruel hardships they vainly strove
Their ships on mountains of ice were drove”

(From “Lady Franklin’s Lament,” a traditional British folk song)

The Northwest Passage has been pursued like the Holy Grail by mariners for centuries. Cabot, Hudson, Vancouver, Franklin, and others all tried and failed to find a water passage north of the American continent. The reason for failure was simple. Much of the water north of Canada is covered in ice year round. The reason for pursuing it was also simple. Prior to the Panama Canal the only way to get a boat around the continent was via the far southern tip of South America. Even with the Canal, freight from the northeastern U.S. or Canada had a long haul down into the Gulf of Mexico.

Note that I wrote, “had a long haul.”

Back in 1969 a specially equipped tanker rammed through the ice at an optimal time of the year, but that was a one-time experiment. Just this September an ordinary cargo vessel made the trip from Montreal out the St. Lawrence, north around Newfoundland, and west across the top of the continent to several towns in Nunavut. It wasn’t a government-sponsored experiment, but a scheduled commercial cargo delivery. There was an icebreaker standing by, but according to the captain they didn’t see “one cube of ice.”

This is novel and ominous. The water north of Canada has been impassable for eons and the Northwest Passage merely wishful thinking since Europeans first explored the Americas. The ice thwarted, trapped, and killed hundreds of sailors led by hopeful navigators. Now it’s just a boat ride.

Can we stop screwing around now and get serious about global warming?