klingons/cylons

Taking the Next Steps on an Education of Limits

sastyk — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 07:03:24 +0000

Taking the Next Steps on an Education of Limits

Well, the astrophysicist and I finally managed to write something together. More than a year and a half ago when I moved to Scienceblogs I promised that Eric would be my sometime- collaborator. I promise I did not realize was a total lie. You see, the way we've managed over the years to raise four kids, run a farm and work several jobs is that we trade off responsibilities - when I'm working in front of the computer, he's with the kids or working the farm. When he's at work teaching, I'm home doing the same. Yes, we do have evenings together after the kids go to bed, but what we found is that if we're not too tired to do anything but sit and read, well, we can think of more fun things to do than write blog posts together.

We finally did manage to write something together, though - a Peak Oil Review Commentary - about the challenges of teaching the issues raised by material limits, peak oil and resource depletion. This is a subject near and dear to both our hearts,
and one that I've been working with ASPO-USA to start bringing to the forefront.

Both of us find that students (and indeed nearly everyone) also have radically inflated assumptions about the merits of renewable energies, and no implicit grasp of EROEI, either as a concept or of its mathematics. This cannot be chalked up only to poor mathematical education (although it would only be helpful to have a population where everyone understands calculus, if we can't express our ideas without higher mathematics, the movement to address Peak Oil is doomed) - it is the very concept of energy return over investment that most students have not had presented to them. Once students "get" EROEI, they are often excited and astonished that no one ever proposed this to them before.

Again, EROEI concepts are not only the territory of physicists, mathematicians and geologists. The idea that a society with a declining resource base needs to think hard about returns applies across the board. This is a natural concept for business students, and I know more than one historian analyzing collapsed societies through the lens of the return they got from their investments in complexity. Seen through an EROEI-educated lens, the arts, in which human creativity transcends the base materials in which they work, whether the athletic human body (dance, theater), paper and pen (writing), the plastic arts, etc...begin to look awfully good again. Agricultural education is obviously a natural setting as well to begin see the possibilities for wealth of the biological kind that can emerge from an EROEI-educated society.

The value of these and other basic concepts does not begin at the college level. Both simplified EROEI calculations and the conceptual framework that a lower energy life does not mean certain doom are things that could be taught to students at much earlier ages than the college level - once these ideas are intuitive to a critical mass of the population, it becomes much easier to convey them. Indeed, we know many teachers who are attempting to bring these issues up to high school, middle school and even elementary aged students. As homeschoolers to three of our boys, ranging in age from nine to five, we have found that the basic intellectual grounding of these concepts is accessible as soon as you master single digit arithmetic, in the case of EROEI, or as soon as you can begin logic exercise like "Well, you could eat the cookie or give it to your friend if you only have one cookie...but what's a third choice? What else could you do?"

The biggest difficulty for most of us who teach these issues - and we know many others working in many fields and across disciplines and with students of all ages - is that so many of us are operating in isolation, attempting to invent something that does not wholly exist yet. That so many people are doing so admirable a job is remarkable - but it also doesn't have to be this way.

At this point, there simply is no resource for teachers working on these issues to share experiences. ASPO is going to step up and take a lead here, helping those of us birthing a nascent discipline to come together and organized our work. If you teach or study these issues and would like to participate in a discussion list, and perhaps eventually in the first-ever Peak Oil Student and Teacher Conference this year in Washington DC, please email us at education@aspousa.org. We look forward to having you join the discussion!

Sharon

sastyk Tue, 08/02/2011 - 03:03

Categories

Social Sciences

there's no chance I have time to get more involved; but- there is a parallel area of investigation in the overlapping disciplines of ecology and animal behavior; in "foraging strategy" and "optimization" research. There's a substantial literature, and a fair amount of math if you dig in.

The thing is, some of the animal models might make the entire concept more readily comprehensible to students. How big does a seed have to be; and how much energy must it contain, before it is worth while for a bird to search and pick it up? Energy gained must be more than energy spent- or you have a dead bird.

I was thinking about that a lot when I discovered my guinea fowl will spend a lot of time stripping dandelion seeds out of puffed up heads. And it gets more complicated; is it worth while for the bird to search for dandelion heads? Or is it only worth while if the head is tripped over? And exactly how much available oil, protein, and carbs are in a dandelion seed, anyway?

Incidentally, there is a very nasty witch hunt going on right now, where EROI is the basis of the question.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/second-guessing-polar-bear-re…

Dead polar bears- are relevant. Their investment in swimming out to floating ice where they have better access to seals- is no longer paying off.

Is the discussion open to those outside of acedemia, such as those who teach through Transition Towns or other adult peer-to-peer situations?

Ran into this one just now! and it's spectacular:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/14388541

These bustards invest a huge amount of energy in "conspicuous consumption" - there's a fantastic video. Just about the silliest looking display I've ever seen- from the HUMAN perspective.

To the bird- the investment is again, life or death; to the point that the showier birds die sooner.

Boy; that investment HAS to be paying off in increased offspring- or the "showier" types would disappear from the gene pool quickly. But- apparently; it pays, enough to be worth shortening their life for.

To me; a spectacular illustration of how important the concept of EROI truly is. And universal.

ok and hilarious, in this case; always useful in teaching.

Hi Colleen - Absolutely - that's why we mentioned things like homeschoolers, church study groups, etc...

Sharon

This is a great idea! Perhaps in time, ASPO-USA can be a resource for peak oil eduction in a similar way as the SPLC is a resource for teaching about racism and prejudice (through their "Teaching Tolerance" program: http://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/teaching-tolerance ).

What do we do?
Use machines to create jobs...
I believe the EROEI for solar is around 10. If we "put aside" 3 parts of that toward exponential growth of automated solar factories, ALL the problems would be solved.
Advanced machine automation could create about 600,000 square miles of installation jobs, globally! That's assuming solar power alone is used to power 10 billion people at the western standard (including not having to waste energy on spinning generators and end use efficiencies such as electric cars, more insulation, led lights, etc).
Obviously, people would charge too much to make enough arrays to cover 1% of Earth's landspace, but they wouldn't charge too much to install them!
I did some basic and simple math (which is about all I know) and came to the conclusion that "normal" solar panels would require 2% of Earth's land space AND would cause negative albedo... it emits more infrared than the land it covers. I realize that we could power 100 times the people on clean energy... if it did not waste (or emit) heat in the process.
Nuclear, if done with a molten fuel (and without dangerous high pressures) could really blow away solar... in EROEI But machine made GaAs concentrating solar dishes and freznel arrays are the ticket for exponentiating jobs. Such "better and safer nuclear" still would waste about 55% of the energy as heat (and generate waste heat from the decay of nasty stuff for some 300 years).

Gallium arsenide solar dishes concentrates such high temps that the laws of physics states that it (the unused 70% of sunlight) can re-emit in the visible, and less infrared, which can be reflected back toward the sun unimpeded by the infrared absorbing (and re-emitting) CO2 and other GHG's.

I demand this solution!

It takes care of unemployment, global warming and excess heat (which is about 1% of fossil fueled forcings). These 2 axis solar dishes need no thermodynamics, produces no GHG's (except at first stage during manufacture) and even reflects some of the excess heat byproduct. This means that global population could, convievably grow well beyond what is presently imagined, to many tens of billions, living off of machine (and home made) hydrophonics and "grown meat".

There should be no reason to not be able to build automated battery factories, as well as for all the parts of the solar dish.

oh wow, ummm,

Thank you for answering in-depth the question I asked elsewhere yesterday. I sincerely appreciate it --even though I'm always unnerved when this happens.

Have a lovely weekend!

Efficiency, Substitution and Innovation isn't All It is Cracked Up to Be

sastyk — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 06:52:14 +0000

Efficiency, Substitution and Innovation isn't All It is Cracked Up to Be

About a month ago I had the privilege of spending an hour talking (on stage, in front of an audience) to my congressman, Paul Tonko, about energy issues and preparedness. What emerged from this discussion was that *EVEN THOUGH* Tonko is one of the best congresspeople out there on energy and environmental issues, even though he's a tremendously smart guy, even though he actually has had some real education on peak oil issues, the two of us were talking past each other in many ways. It was fascinating - I know that Tonko grasps the basic idea, but the narrative in which efficiency, substitution and innovation always come and save the day had such a powerful grip on him that the actual mathematics were secondary.

One of the things that I noticed was the biggest barrier to our talking to each other, rathe than past, was the tendency to assume that technological innovations that are not yet ready for prime time, and may never be, are just around the corner. So, for example, during a lively debate about the impact of biofuels, Tonko spoke of Cellulosic Ethanol as though it were here, and an inevitable high EROEI response. The same was true of Carbon capture and storage - and yet, at this point neither of those technologies is really fully available to us. Yet the habit of assuming that all technological shifts will "play out" and come out with net Energy returns was an underlying assumption.

Another difference, one that I think is equally common is to focus on scientific achievement and innovation as though they are sole base on which things stand, while rendering invisible the heavy natural resource base that is at least as fundamental. If you erase the history of how abundant cheap energy has made possible scientific innovation and technological progress, and think that these are purely academic and intellectual accomplishments, springing from the head of Zeus without any inconvenient dirty contact with the oil, gas and coal below, then it is easy to believe that in an era of declining resources progress will move as swiftly as before. If you choose to see the resource base below it, however, that changes that view.

I'm not attacking Tonko - as I've written before our society is so profoundly invested in narratives of technological progress that in many ways, the only alternative seems to be apocalypticism. I've written many times about what I call the "Klingons/Cylons Dilemma" in which the only choices we are permitted to imagine are the perfect, sanitized and processed world of Star Trek, in which all problems except Klingons are solved (ie, all problems that come from within us are resolved, the only problems come from the unenlightened outside) or the Apocalyptic world where our technologies destroy us utterly and only a small plucky band of survivors makes its way across the blasted landscape. These two narratives have a hold of us so powerfully, that it makes it almost impossible to even speak of other narratives - to find the middle ground that most of us are actually facing.

That's why I'm glad Richard Heinberg is doing the hard work of fully articulating why all this just doesn't happen magically. In his latest book, he's setting down the arguments (again, he's made them before in _The Party's Over_ and _Powerdown_) in a way that help reach as many people as possible. Most of the people who read this blog already grasp this, and there's a temptation to write mostly to the people who have already gotten the basics down. My hour with Tonko was a great reminder for me just how important it is to recite the basics again...and again...and again, because it takes a long time for people to be able to hear them. I'm so glad Heinberg, who has been doing it longer and better, is doing it now:

The near-religious belief that economic growth depends not on energy and resources, but solely on increasing innovation, efficiency, trade, and division of labor, can sometimes lead economists to say silly things.

Some of the silliest and most extreme statements along these lines are to be found in the writings of the late Julian Simon, a longtime business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. In his 1981 book The Ultimate Resource, Simon declared that natural resources are effectively infinite and that the process of resource substitution can go on forever. There can never be overpopulation, he declared, because having more people just means having more problem-solvers.

How can resources be infinite on a small planet such as ours? Easy, said Simon. Just as there are infinitely many points on a one-inch line segment, so too there are infinitely many lines of division separating copper from non-copper, or oil from non-oil, or coal from non-coal in the Earth. Therefore, we cannot reliably quantify how much copper, oil, coal, or neodymium or gold there really is in the world. If we can't measure how much we have of these materials, that means the amounts are not finite--thus they are infinite.[1]

It's a logical fallacy so blindingly obvious that you'd think not a single vaguely intelligent reader would have let him get away with it. Clearly, an infinite number of dividing lines between copper and non-copper is not the same as an infinite quantity of copper. While a few critics pointed this out (notably Herman Daly), Simon's book was widely praised nevertheless.[2] Why? Because Simon was saying something that many people wanted to believe.

Simon himself is gone, but his way of thinking is alive and well in the works of Bjorn Lomborg, author of the bestselling book The Skeptical Environmentalist and star of the recent documentary film Cool It.[3] Lomborg insists that the free market is making the environment ever healthier, and will solve all our problems if we just stop scaring ourselves needlessly about running out of resources.

sastyk Tue, 04/26/2011 - 02:52