A most important graphic

Click to enlarge. Note that, of the roughly 98 quads of energy we start with, we only use about 43, with 55 going to entropic and distribution losses. Also note the tiny, almost microscopic scale of renewables next to polluting/depleting sources like coal (which also form nearly all the energy loss, since entropic losses are caused by high-temp energy transformations).

Spring FSELC Calendar

2008-09 Amateur Naturalist Series: Geology of the Columbia River Gorge

Thursday, April 16th, 7:00 p.m. (Optional field trip Sunday, April 19th)
Straub Environmental Learning Center, 1320 A Street, Salem
$5 per person; RSVP required (Call 503-391-4145 or email lisa@fselc.org)

2009 Sustainability Workshops: Green Investment

Tuesday, April 14th, 7:00 p.m.
Straub Environmental Learning Center, 1320 A Street, Salem
Coordinated and co-hosted by Willamette University. Free and open to the public.

10th Annual Earth Day Celebration at Oregon Garden

Saturday, April 18th, 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
The Oregon Garden Earth Day has become a focal point for the Mid-Willamette Valley . Families can enjoy kid's activities, plant and garden sales and educational demonstrations. Local Oregon musicians will be featured throughout the day along with 35 indoor exhibitors and food. Earth Day will continue to be a free event to encourage people to learn about stewardship of the Earth. For more information

Nature Kids: Youth Naturalist Classes

Tree Time! The Importance of Trees
Grades 4 and 5 – Wednesday, April 22nd, 4 – 5:30 p.m.
Straub Environmental Learning Center, 1320 A Street, Salem
Class is free, RSVP REQUIRED. Call or email Lisa at 503-391-4145 or lisa@fselc.org for more information.

2009 Sustainability Workshops
Green Landscape: Tuesday, April 21st, 7:00 p.m.
Green Cuisine: Tuesday, April 28th, 7:00 p.m.

Straub Environmental Learning Center, 1320 A Street, Salem
Coordinated and co-hosted by Willamette University. Free and open to the public.

2008-09 Amateur Naturalist Series: Wildflower Identification

Tuesday and Wednesday, April 21st and 22nd (Optional field trip April 25th)
Straub Environmental Learning Center, 1320 A Street, Salem
$5 per person; RSVP required (Call 503-391-4145 or email lisa@fselc.org)
**Please note: this is a two-night class. Payment is $5 for both sessions and payment is due on the first night.

JUNKride 2009: Spotlighting Environmental and Human Health Impact of Plastic Marine Debris

Wednesday, April 22nd, 7:00 p.m.
Kaneko Auditorium, Willamette University, 1300 Mill St. SE

Dr. Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins, who have brought world attention to the “plastic soup” fouling our oceans, are embarking on a 2,000-mile bicycle ride/speaking tour from Vancouver to Tijuana in a quest to end the age of disposable plastics. Join us for their stop in Salem! Sponsored by FSELC and Willamette University Center for Sustainability. Free and open to the public. Note: Parking is located west of Sparks Field on the North side of Bellvue Street – no permit needed at 7:00 p.m. There is a pedestrian sky bridge over 12th Street to reach Tokyo International University of America, where Kaneko Auditorium is located.

2008-09 FSELC Lecture Series: Martin LeBlanc
Working Together to “Leave No Child Inside”

Thursday, April 23rd, 7:00 p.m.
Loucks Auditorium, Salem Public Library, 585 Liberty Street SE, Salem
Free and open to the public

Lisa Olivares
Environmental Education Coordinator
Friends of Straub Environmental Learning Center
Mailing Address: 765 14th Street NE, Salem, OR 97301
Physical Address: 1320 A Street NE, Salem, OR 97301
Phone: (503) 391-4145
www.fselc.org

The future of freight in Salem

This OPB story reminds me of a great line someone came up with:

I have seen the future and it has pedals

The stages of grief

A comment on the prior post about the CBC video introduction to peak oil went:

"We read a story in Wired a while back about Peak Oil. My husband was so down that he didn't read another newspaper or newsmag for months!"

A lot of people go through the stages of grief (Kubler-Ross) when they first realize that the life that abundant cheap oil has given the rich countries cannot survive when oil is no longer cheap: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance.

On the other hand, peak oil doesn't mean we're running out of oil -- the exact opposite in fact. Peak Oil is the moment of maximum global oil availability. So if there's ever a moment when we ought to be able to afford to prepare for the transition, it's at the peak.

And we better do it, because we will have to invest lots of energy now in the things we will want to rely on later, when oil (and thus all forms of energy) is much less abundant. Even a 2% per year decline in oil flows means that it only takes 36 years to put the world on half-rations for oil. And 2% decline rate is about the lowest that anyone suggests we'll see -- Cantarell in Mexico, the world's second largest field, is plunging at 15% a year or more. Sometimes all the glorious technology people think will save us is only making things worse, faster.

If you or your husband are ready to think about preparing for the coming transition to a post-oil world, you can check out the Salem Transition Initiative for Relocalization (STIR), a group that is just starting to organize around building the social resiliency we'll need to meet the challenge of a future that is likely to look so different from the immediate past.

Interesting video intro to peak oil

The CBC does a nice job with "Preparing for the Worst,"an introduction to peak oil, despite the media's need to constantly portray people preparing for the obviously inevitable as 'extreme' and 'doomers.'

Funny, you never hear firefighters called "doomers" because they think there is a need to be ready to fight fires. The only people who get the disparaging term "doomer" applied to them are the ones who keep insisting that resources are finite on a finite planet. Strange that.

10,000 word pictures -- think carefully on these

(h/t to Soot and Ashes for the pix/nice juxtaposition)

Peak Oil, transit options and community health

Excerpt:

The presence of mass transit, whether local or long haul, simply makes towns and cities livable. That is going to become increasingly important, as we're in a time where a recent prophecy is going to come to pass.

I don't speak of any supernatural explanation of world events, but rather petroleum geologist Marion King Hubbert's 1956 pronouncement than U.S. oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970, with "the global peak coming about half a century from now". Hubbert was a tad optimistic [pessimistic, actually] about his predictions; the U.S. peak was in the spring of 1971 and the apparent global peak in May of 2005 might have been eclipsed by production in the winter of 2008.

Even if we did dodge the peak oil bullet for a full three years the fate of the world's five largest supergiant oil fields is certain. Ghawar, Saudi Arabia's four million barrel a day cash cow, is over 90% consumed and seawater forms an ever increasing percentage of the output as the field nears the time when it will "water out".

The nitrogen pressurized field of Cantarell in the Bay of Campeche has declined from its 2.2 million barrel a day peak to perhaps a third of that and the Mexican government will soon begin capping depleted wells. The Kuwaitis have responsibly managed Burgan and information is spotty on China's Da Qing, but these two fields, at million barrels a day each are geological resources rather than fossil fuel cornucopias and their life spans are not infinite. The [X] field of northern Iraq is largely untouched but due to above ground concerns there it may never be exploited. The condition of these five, once responsible 10% of the global total production, are a good proxy for what is happening with the rest.

This peak oil business is going to be as wrenching a change for us as the industrial revolution was for our ancestors three centuries ago. Many careers from the 20th century are going to fall by the wayside. Rising heating costs will make larger homes less desirable and that goes double for the distant, poorly constructed suburbs that sprang up everywhere during the last decade's bubble. . . .

There are a few bright spots out there and engineer, accountant, New Orleans resident, Katrina survivor, and rail electrification activist Alan Drake is the keeper of a happier vision of our future.

The United States has about 180,000 miles of rail and 36,000 of those miles are good candidates for double or triple tracking coupled with rail electrification. If we undertake this technologically simple duplication of systems already in use in Europe we'll cut our oil consumption by 10%, put millions back to work in new, peak oil proof
careers, and amazingly enough our economy ought to grow 25% during the process.

Word

Well said:

On the transportation side, I look at our history of investing in infrastructure.

We spent (and are spending) billions and billions of dollars creating the interstate-highway system, and increasing the size of our airports and ports.

There is this default assumption that we are going to keep growing those things bigger and bigger, off into whatever kind of future we imagine. I protest that sort of assumption—that everything we are doing is about getting bigger and bigger.

Ultimately, sustainability means coming to terms with natural biophysical limits.

So we have to get past this idea of planning around extrapolation of past trends.

That the future may be different than the past is the first thing that we need to come to terms with. This is where the idea of peak roads comes in: If we can say to ourselves, “We have as much road capacity today as we will ever need,” then we can start to ask what that means in terms of how we should actually start designing our cities.

This shouldn’t be thought of as a default “anti-roads” statement. But our numerical models show that we simply may not have enough fuel (and biofuel, and electric cars) to use more road capacity than what we have today.

If we can start to grapple with the fact that we can actually get better instead of getting bigger, then we have started on the path towards sustainability. And I think until we can really wrap our heads around that we are fighting an uphill battle.

Meanwhile, bad ideas continue to percolate in background

The sales job to justify the already made (but, thankfully, far from funded) decision to destroy great chunks of minority-dominated housing areas of Northeast Salem and a big piece of West Salem for the convenience of motorized, nearly all-white commuters in Polk County with a third bridge over the Willamette in Salem proceeds apace.

"EIS" -- for those of you who don't speak the weird dialect of proto-English called Transjargon -- means "environmental impact statement." Originally intended to force governments to consider the environmental costs of proposed actions, they have become a cottage industry for consultants and a way to obscure the actual effects in a blizzard of mind-numbing jargon and hopeful assumptions totally unjustified by experience in other settings. Rather than being open-minded assessments, they are typically run as psuedo-studies where the inputs are carefully controlled to obtain the desired output decision. Here's some very telling language from a memo from the team working on this one:

First, the Draft EIS will assume that the future demand (year 2031) for vehicle trips across the river is 8% less than otherwise forecast. Basing the project design on a reduced traffic volume anticipates a high degree of success in increasing non-auto travel across the river and also helps prevent the project from being overbuilt.

So, note -- the selection of an entirely arbitrary figure for reduced vehicle trips that fails to account for the universal worldwide experience that paving drives driving -- that when you build more capacity, driving increases.

In short, taking this approach will enable us to (1) demonstrate fairly and conservatively the independent need for highway improvements even assuming a significant increase in the use of non-auto modes in the peak hours of operation;

In other words, we know we need a third bridge because we decided that a long time ago --- all that remains is jiggering the assumptions as needed to show "the independent need for highway improvements."

Note the one thing that none of the models used in these studies include: The price of gasoline and the global carbon dioxide concentration (which will, as it increases, necessititate ever more difficult measures to ameliorate all the prior investments in "business as usual" by the Highway Department").

And that's the key here, and the reason that this project will likely be derailed by a lawsuit if it keeps going down the path it's on now: the project team has refused to consider the effect of this spectactular and wasteful greenhouse generating project on the state's climate emission reduction goals.

Since the federal government is tiptoeing up to the unpleasant realization that CO2 is actually a pollutant that puts the environment at risk, one of these auto-bridge projects (the Columbia River Crossing megabridge or this one in Salem) is likely to serve as a perfect test case to force the State Highway Department to stop ignoring the rapidly mounting evidence that emissions have to come down radically.

So, as you're enjoying your $5 million budget cuts in Salem in 2009/10, take a moment to appreciate the high-priced consulting you're helping buy, to design a project that can never be built.

Dear Task Force and Oversight Team:

As we continue to work on the Salem River Crossing Draft EIS, we want to keep you apprised of recent developments and schedule highlights.

1. The Draft EIS is currently in the impacts analysis phase, which will result in a series of detailed technical reports. Over the summer and into the fall, we will write the Draft EIS itself, with agency review taking place during the remainder of the year. We are hoping to publish the Draft EIS in January next year (2010).

2. We expect to have at least one meeting each with the Task Force and Oversight Team in late summer or early fall to give you a summary of the technical reports and a preview of the Draft EIS. In the mean time, please watch for periodic email updates on the progress of the Draft EIS. (These will go to the general public too.)

3. We have finalized the approach to transit/TSM/TDM in the Draft EIS and would like to share that with you. Please see the attached memo from Dan Fricke and Julie Warncke, as well as the two background memos with further details.

4. We have made some minor updates to the project web site (including updating the information on schedule and the transit/TSM/TDM approach). We are currently making some minor adjustments to the graphics of the alternatives and will post those within the next month.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments. Thank you.

A distorted view of population declines

Prof. Bob Park of the U. of Maryland and former president of the professional physicists' group, the American Physical Society, makes a good point about the hysteria that growth-is-good advocates are trying to whip up about population stabilization and (horrors!) declines:

4. POPULATION: ARE THEY SURE THEY HAVE THE THEORY RIGHT?
Demographic experts warn that population decline in Russia could have serious economic consequences. It’s the same growth-is-good bullshit that always comes from the Chamber of Commerce. Russia's neighbors, Norway, Finland and Sweden, have the highest standards of living in the world and small populations. Afghanistan, on the other hand, which is not exactly a tourist Mecca, has a fertility rate above 7, the highest in the world.