matter and energy

Introduction: The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is seeking senate approval for an announced a $42 billion Nation Building and Jobs Plan to support jobs and invest in future long term economic growth. The 'plan' includes "five one-off cash bonuses (of $950) for eligible individuals". These are proposed for Australian workers whose taxable income was $100,000 or less in 2007-08. There is also a Single Income Family Bonus to support eligible families with one income earner; a Farmer's Hardship Bonus paid to drought affected farmers and farm dependent small business; owners receiving exceptional circumstances related income support; a Back to School Bonus of $950 per child from low- and middle-income families; $950 paid to eligible students and people returning study to help with the costs of education and training.

Other measures the Senate is being asked to support are: free ceiling insulation for around 2.7 million eligible Australian homes; building or upgrading a building in every one of Australia's 9,540 primary schools; building more than 20,000 new, low-income social housing dwellings and defence homes; a temporary business investment tax break for small and general businesses buying eligible assets; significantly increasing funding for local community infrastructure and local road projects.

Commentary:

While I appreciate the seeming urgency of the 42 billion dollar plan - I totally agree with the opposition and minor parties' demand that the scheme be at least given a senate review.

Yes we are in very difficult times, but what amounts to a knee-jerk response, while politically possibly advantageous, from a long term view is very foolish.

Schemes like this (even though they may have had a far longer gestation period than we tend to be told) are wonderful for the opportunist "white shoe' brigade - and I can fairly predict that at least 15% will be siphoned off, to nobody's benefit.

The only component of the scheme that I can wholeheartedly agree with is the roof insulation - but even then, it requires a far more coherent energy target - as 'roof insulation' can mean damn near anything. Are there any targets - R values, appropriate forms of insulation, what about roof space venting?? Different areas of Australia require different methods - up here in the tropics - simple sisalation (double sided aluminium foil sarking) does wonders - but not on the tablelands - where you need something more substantial, and even more substantial measures are required as you progress south. There is no indication that what we are seeing here is not a 'feel good' "one size fits all" approach - which is exceedingly foolish.

I'm not sure about the primary school improvements - after seeing the 'air-conditioner in every school' issue of last year - which raises the State's carbon footprint significally (especially as most country school buildings were never designed to accommodate A/C - being neither insulated or draft-proofed). Plus the need for A/C is restricted to only a few days a year. Maybe some schools could use some upgrades - but this seems to be a 'pork barrel' issue.

Given the rapidly approaching issue of "Peak Oil", road infrastructure would seem to be the least useful use of the money - and the use with the least useful benefits in the future. Sure - many road projects are "shovel ready" - but that doesn't make them appropriate - Facing the inevitability of a fuel constrained future (very soon) - we need to be putting the money in to the provision of public transport and light rail where appropriate.

Some obvious areas - that would have a huge carbon footprint impact - would be the fitting of solar HWS to as many homes as possible.

Another - creation of "forest regeneration corps" - to re-plant our millions of hectares of marginal land that was cleared - because clearing land was Government policy at the time. Associated with appropriate training - such a corps could be really important for the long-term "carbon -neutralisation' of Australia.

And that's just a start.

The Biosphere and the Lithosphere

Humans live in and from the biosphere. But in the first decade of the
21st Century, 85 percent of the primary energy consumed by the 6.7
billion humans comes from the lithosphere.

About 40 percent of this energy is oil. Another 40 percent comes from
natural gas and coal, and 6 percent more is from uranium.

This represents close to 10 billion tons of oil equivalent, extracted
every year from below ground.

The Technosphere

The technosphere, that recent human creation, transforms the
biosphere, with the extraction, transformation, and transport of
useful materials from the Earth crust at a rate of about 33 billion
tons per year. In addition, about 36 billion tons of the accompanying
ores and some 30 billion tons of earth crust cover are extracted. In
total, the 11 billion tons of equivalent oil of primary energy are
needed every year to extract, transform and transport about 100
billion tons of materials, including the energy materials themselves.
Without that energy, these movements will not be possible. With
decreasing energy supplies, the extraction of materials and the
related services will decrease accordingly.

Nature of this sphere

Being a sphere, the Planet is limited in size. It is obvious,but in
this world needs to be continuously emphasized, that the resources
contained in it are also limited. Geologists in general and the ASPO
community in particular, know very well that the extraction of
resources from the lithosphere is subject to a given pattern that
limits and shapes the extraction rates. It has, more or less, the
form of a bell shaped curve, shown in its logo. It is the Hubbert
curve. Even admitting that the shape of the curve may drift apart in
some cases, from the theoretical one, due to social causes, the
principle is out of question.

Resource peaks and energy flows

And some of us feel that we are reaching the oil peak in our ascent,
and other neighbouring peaks as well, even the present financial
storms and other geopolitical clouds may disguise that cordillera, as
exclusively a monetary problem.

Then, it is a question of flows, diminishing flows, rather than the
end of oil or gas. It is a physical and geological issue, rather than
an economic one. Pouring more paper money into the markets will not
help to realize where we are. Those present frentic movements very
much resemble the classic film scenes of thieves throwing and
dispersing the bank notes of the loot in the middle of a crowd, to
create a momentary convulsion and thus, trying to escape from the
police, while keeping a couple of rolls in the pockets.

Limits of human economics

As M. King Hubbert said: `There's no monetary mechanism in existence
that can find oil that God didn't put there and the price isn't going
to increase that amount of oil'. The same can be applied for all
other materials that humans demand today in increasing amounts.

And there is a clear evidence that global economic growth and global
energy consumption run parallel and are very directly related,
despite some anomalies in specific countries, which claim
improvements in efficiency, in the GPD/Unit of product or service
ratio, while diverting and outsourcing the burden to third countries
o regions. Technology improvements and higher financial investments
help to delay the peak or plateau of the bell curve or reshape it,
but can neither fight the reality of gradual depletion.

There are also clear indicators that greenhouse and other gas
emissions are also directly related to the fossil fuels, extracted
from the lithosphere and burnt to provide goods and ser-vices to
society.

However, classical economists still work, think and behave as if they
lived on a flat Earth with limitless resources to be made available
by Man's ingenuity and market forces.

Very serious issues are at stake caused by the growing gap between
the available fuel supply, which is subject to natural depletion and
the ever growing demand implied by classical economic theory.

Future survival

In the same way as a seed takes time to emerge from the ground and
form a plant, we will soon have to face the paradox and the dilemma
of returning to the biosphere and its resources for survival, and
rely more and more on renewable energy resources above ground.

The Sun projects onto the Earth some 8,500 times more primary energy
than we consume, but it is, again, rather than a question of volumes,
a matter of flows and feasible energy capture rates of this as
beautiful as dispersed energy.

We urgently need to determine the extent to which we can maintain the
present socio-political and technological environment with more of
the renewable energy resources from the biosphere and less from the
lithosphere, by using the human ingenuity and technology; or by
reshaping our way of living; or perhaps and better, a wise
combination of both.

Seventh ASPO International conference in Barcelona, 20-21 October 2008

We will be analyzing and discussing all these important questions in
detail in the 7th. ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas) International Conference at the World Trade Center in Barcelona, Spain, on October 20th and 21st.

See the Official program (pdf file) "From Below Ground to Above Ground"

Join us by registering here

For questions and contacts, please address to spain[at]telefonica.net>

For more information http://www.aspo-spain.org/aspo7

Welcome to Barcelona.

Article by Pedro from Madrid, subtitled by Sheila Newman for candobetter.org

Centro Properties Group owes banks nearly $4 billion - Ex-chairman didn't see 'debt bombshell' coming.
The Australian Financial Review (Thursday May 1st 2008) saw fit to feature the perilous circumstances of Centro on its front page, with a follow up on page 47, captioned, "Lolling like a beached whale in a receding tide" - the tide being financial investment and customers. How, you may wonder, could someone in charge of borrowing billions from banks, to deploy energy and resources for billion dollar developments, be apparently so energy and resources naive that they could fail to see the fossil-fuel related "debt bombshell coming"?

Yet, this is ex-Centro CEO, Brian Healey's explanation for beaching the Centro Shopping Centre Group colossus.

What struck this writer is that Centro is in charge of moving enormous quantities of materials all round the world, in order to build its many massive shopping centres. Surely someone in this commercial colossus would have noticed the rising cost of making concrete and transporting rocks and wood and glass, and running the bulldozers and cranes and tools on construction sites?

How many people in charge of government, how many economists, CEO's and even engineers, are either incapable of applying energy-resources theory to reality or still believe fairy-tales about man's ingenuity excepting modern economies from thermodynamic limits?

It seems that an awful lot of people in the global society of the 'developed world' really believe that our economies have literally 'dematerialised', i.e. are relying on less and less fuel and materials. What must such ‘cornucopians’ make of some other features in the same edition of the Fin Review? A long article about food shortages feeding conflict, another about the incompetent assessment and management of Australia’s food basket, the Murray Darling Basin, and one about how all the signs point to ours being the era of petroleum depletion.

"For the record, supply constraints keep oil prices moving in one direction." This article (from the New York Times) cites Fatih Birol, the chief economist with the International Energy Agency, saying, "'According to normal economic theory, and the history of oil, rising prices have two major effects'. 'They reduce demand and they induce oil supplies. Not this time."

And the article goes on to explain what many people not distracted by consumerism and with normal powers of observation have been increasingly aware of for the past 15 years. Oil discoveries are diminishing in size and in quality or accessibility, whilst economic growth, based on population growth, is being encouraged in the third world and in the English speaking first world, by growth economics ideologues in government and big business. The Centro business, to such observers, is indicative, in its reliance on land-speculation and population growth, of a kind of blindness to reality and a faith in an economic illusion.

It is as mysterious as the recurrent drive of pods of whales to beach themselves.

The financial media is full of gruesome stories lately. Centro's predicament may well symbolise much of the investment and development world's predicament. Not just business, but governments and whole economies, may also find themselves high and dry like beached whales. Whales need water to swim in, humans need air and food to survive, and our modern economies need oil. The Fin Rev quotes CIBC World Markets analyst, Jeff Rubin: 'The outlook for oil supplies signals a period of unprecedented scarcity.'"

The day after payment was due, new CEO, Glenn Rufrano, was still trying to finalise an extension from the numerous banks involved in funding Centro’s debt, all of them dealing with companies in similar trouble, in a system of circular financing.

In a world where the US and other governments subsidise farmers to grow corn for biofuels with precious fossil-fuel based fertilisers, causing famines, and nations go to war for oil, and mortgages rise due to engineered population growth and land speculation by multinational developers, how could you just expect people to go on shopping?

Energy is often defined as ‘the ability to do work’ or ‘the ability to do something useful’. They are very misleading definitions that have contributed substantially to the dire situation that civilization is in today. ‘the ability of an object to do work on a vehicle’ or ‘the ability of an object to do something useful to a vehicle’ are more realistic definitions because they specify that energy is an attribute of an object and it can do something useful to a vehicle. Energy does not exist in isolation in our everyday world. The object may be a person or a horse or a stone or a machine or a fuel or a magnet. It makes no difference. If it has potential to do work, the object has potential energy. This describes the circumstances where work can be done on a vehicle. The object can only have potential energy if it has obtained it from our sole source, sunshine, by way of some process. A fuel has potential energy that was stored for eons in oil. My fingers have the potential to do work pressing keys because I got the energy from the food I ate. This potential energy invariably ends up as waste heat when used. A parcel of energy has a limited life. That is its invariable destiny so should realistically be incorporated in its definition. The object and vehicle invariably are natural material or made from natural materials (matter) and most also have limited lives. The waste material on their demise often degrades the ecosystem. Coal provides stored potential energy that can do useful electrical work. The life of the coal ends up as material wastes, including the carbon dioxide that is contributing to climate change. This is a simplified but realistic view of the operation of the ecosystem and its parasite, civilization. This view can contribute to elucidation of wiser means of using the limited remaining natural resources, including those that are the source of the energy that drives industrialized society which is built up from natural resources. Denis Frith Melbourne Australia denisaf2000|AT|yahoo.com.au ‘What went wrong’ http://users.bigpond.net.au/jaymz/download/Gaia_and_Us-Denis_Frith-jun07...