US Crude Production

Global Temperature Records

Education and Jobs Through 2018

Global Oil Recovery Faltering?

Lithium and other Minerals in Afghanistan

Pretty interesting article in the NYT this evening:

WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

and

Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.

For the geologists who are now scouring some of the most remote stretches of Afghanistan to complete the technical studies necessary before the international bidding process is begun, there is a growing sense that they are in the midst of one of the great discoveries of their careers.

“On the ground, it’s very, very, promising,” Mr. Medlin said. “Actually, it’s pretty amazing.”

Of course, the administration is strongly invested in trying to justify the Afghan war, which isn't going very well, and no doubt this news should be seen as part of the P.R. campaign. Still, the Obama administration does not have a history of large lies, so I assume the basic facts here are true.

That lithium would come in pretty handy if we are going to try and run the planet on plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles.  Lithium is a key constraint in that scenario.  Whether anyone will ever get it out of Afghanistan is another question altogether though.

Radio Ecoshock Podcasts

Just a note that Alex Smith of Radio Ecoshock invited me on his radio show to talk about the heat stress posts I did.  I don't think I'm that great at radio, but if you'd like to check it out with appropriately modest expectations, Alex's blog post is here, the whole show is available as an mp3 (either CD quality 56MB, or 14MB low-fi version), and my 15 minute segment is here.

Debt Confidence Phase Transitions

Construction Wage Animation

1998

Housing Bubble Construction Frenzy Maps

Squatting in Buffalo

Not much from me this morning as I have discovered the BEA Table CA06, which has details on compensation by industry, for every county in the country and I am busy figuring out how to digest all the data.  In the meantime, there is a fascinating article in the New York Times on squatters in abandoned houses in Buffalo, NY.  This is the kind of thing I expect gradually more and more of as we go forward - as industrial society continues to need a smaller and smaller fraction of the population in order to function, people will find various ways to survive on the fringe of it.

Also, this link comes courtesy of Ran Prieur, who seems to be a thought leader amongst career drop-outs.  His manifesto is here.

Education and Income Maps

Peak Oil Stress Map

Gender and the Geography of Work

Where Men Don't Work

Abandoned Parts of the Country

Odd Distribution of Snow

Chicago and Michigan Neighborhood Demographics

San Francisco Bay Area Neighborhood Demographics

Bad Neighborhoods as a Unifying Theme

Planning for Moore's Law

It's important to realize that whereas originally Moore's law was an empirical description of the emerging behavior of the semiconductor industry, it has long since become a consciously planned effort.  The entire semiconductor industry co-ordinates its efforts to move to ever smaller and smaller "feature size" (the size of individual logic elements in a chip).  The coordination is accomplished via the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, which involves international teams and working groups that collaborate to lay out a fifteen year roadmap for the industry which gets revised or updated every year.

The most recent roadmap is the 2009 version, and I spent a little time with it this morning.  I would guess that most scientists or technologists from outside the semiconductor industry would have a reaction similar to mine: this thing is a product of some alien civilization that has figured out how to make central planning work.  The idea of all the major competing players in an industry collaborating to figure out all the R&D activities required to accomplish the next 15 years of progress is just extraordinary.  But there it is.  It's full of detailed schedules for when the industry will introduce different feature sizes and what challenges they have to overcome to do that.

Moore's Law vs The Flynn Effect

What we Spend our Economy On

Violin Playing Robot

Investment in Computers and Software

Global Growth Rates, 1000-2010

Singularity > Climate Change > Peak Oil > Financial Crisis

While lying awake late at night worrying about what kind of world my children will inherit, I find it helpful to come up with schemas for the most obvious and inevitable of the large societal problems.  It makes them seem slightly more manageable to place them in order of importance, or time.  Further, being clear on what are the biggest and most important problems is an essential prerequisite to thinking about solutions: these problems all interact, and solutions to the smaller of them may not be radical enough to address the larger of them.

In this post, I would like to argue for the above ordering of problems.  I mean the '>' symbol in two senses: "A > B" meaning both "The main impact of A will fall later in time than the main impact of B", and also "A is a more serious and fundamental threat to humanity than B".  While a full explication of the arguments would occupy a number of books, today you are going to have to make do with a single measly blog post, albeit longer than usual.

Female Employment-Population Ratio

Male Employment-Population Ratios Recovering

Latest Global Oil Production Statistics

Demographics of Heat Death

Are Throwaway Societies More Resilient?

When I was growing up in England, it was very common to hear my older relatives say "They don't make things like they used to".  They generally had a perception that in the past, things were better made, lasted longer, and were expected to last longer.  Bedsheets used to be thicker, buildings made of stone, bridges and machinery over-engineered with lots of extra metal, etc.  By contrast, nowadays we live in a throwaway society.

It would be interesting and useful to quantify that.  However, this morning, I'm just going to throw out a half-formed idea for the sake of seeing if anyone can give me useful feedback.  So I'm just going to assume that it's basically true that in modern society, the average lifetime of an object is lower - buildings, personal possessions, etc - compared to pre-industrial societies.  Things are designed accordingly, with planned obsolescence.

Explaining Long Tail Climate Risk

Heat Stress and Climate Change in India

Cool Vests

Stock Market Today

Little bit of uncertainty roiling the collective consciousness today...

Odds of Cooking the Grandkids

Thinking about Government Debt

US Debt Projections

Consequences of Government Debt Default

Five Centuries of Inflation

Debts and Defaults in History

Nantucket Sound Wind Project Approved

Interior Dept press release:

BOSTON, Mass – Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today approved the Cape Wind renewable energy project on federal submerged lands in Nantucket Sound, but will require the developer of the $1 billion wind farm to agree to additional binding measures to minimize the potential adverse impacts of construction and operation of the facility.

“After careful consideration of all the concerns expressed during the lengthy review and consultation process and thorough analyses of the many factors involved, I find that the public benefits weigh in favor of approving the Cape Wind project at the Horseshoe Shoal location,” Salazar said in an announcement at the State House in Boston. “With this decision we are beginning a new direction in our Nation’s energy future, ushering in America’s first offshore wind energy facility and opening a new chapter in the history of this region.”

The Cape Wind project would be the first wind farm on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, generating enough power to meet 75 percent of the electricity demand for Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket Island combined. The project would create several hundred construction jobs and be one of the largest greenhouse gas reduction initiatives in the nation, cutting carbon dioxide emissions from conventional power plants by 700,000 tons annually. That is equivalent to removing 175,000 cars from the road for a year.

A number of similar projects have been proposed for other northeast coastal states, positioning the region to tap 1 million megawatts of offshore Atlantic wind energy potential, which could create thousands of manufacturing, construction and operations jobs and displace older, inefficient fossil-fueled generating plants, helping significantly to combat climate change.

Global Forest Losses

Planned Rumaila Output

Averaging US East Coast Wind

Crude + Condensate Trends

When Does Surplus = Resilience?

If 2005-2007 Wasn't Peak Oil, What Was It?

Latest Global Oil Production Statistics

European Aviation and the Icelandic Volcano

More on Icelandic Volcano

Heading Out is a must read on this subject tonight, with some very helpful background.

In an aside, I was on the phone to my Dad in the U.K. this morning, and I was asking if any real economic consequences have surfaced yet.  It's a pretty interesting natural experiment in how dependent modern economies are on air travel - Europe has now effectively had air transport altogether withdrawn for several days with no warning.

He said so far the only visible consequence for the person in the street was that the supermarkets had run out of lettuce.  I forgot to ask if there had been panic buying of lettuce :-)  Of course, the airlines are losing $200m/day, and I wonder if a couple will go under if this goes on for a long time, since they weren't in great shape even before this.

Update:  Wow. Guardian says 30% of UK exports travel by air, with pharmaceuticals particularly reliant.  That sounds like it would start to bite pretty fast.

What is Waxman-Markey Really Doing?

Correlation is Not Causation

Icelandic Volcano Blows Again

Carbon Prices are a Very Blunt Tool

Deep Energy Retrofits

It Can't Possibly Be That Easy

Over the weekend, I read Paul Krugman's big essay on climate economics, Building a Green Economy.  In it, he makes the following claim:

Just as there is a rough consensus among climate modelers about the likely trajectory of temperatures if we do not act to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases, there is a rough consensus among economic modelers about the costs of action. That general opinion may be summed up as follows: Restricting emissions would slow economic growth — but not by much. The Congressional Budget Office, relying on a survey of models, has concluded that Waxman-Markey “would reduce the projected average annual rate of growth of gross domestic product between 2010 and 2050 by 0.03 to 0.09 percentage points.” That is, it would trim average annual growth to 2.31 percent, at worst, from 2.4 percent. Over all, the Budget Office concludes, strong climate-change policy would leave the American economy between 1.1 percent and 3.4 percent smaller in 2050 than it would be otherwise.

And what about the world economy? In general, modelers tend to find that climate-change policies would lower global output by a somewhat smaller percentage than the comparable figures for the United States. The main reason is that emerging economies like China currently use energy fairly inefficiently, partly as a result of national policies that have kept the prices of fossil fuels very low, and could thus achieve large energy savings at a modest cost. One recent review of the available estimates put the costs of a very strong climate policy — substantially more aggressive than contemplated in current legislative proposals — at between 1 and 3 percent of gross world product.

Such figures typically come from a model that combines all sorts of engineering and marketplace estimates. These will include, for instance, engineers’ best calculations of how much it costs to generate electricity in various ways, from coal, gas and nuclear and solar power at given resource prices. Then estimates will be made, based on historical experience, of how much consumers would cut back their electricity consumption if its price rises. The same process is followed for other kinds of energy, like motor fuel. And the model assumes that everyone makes the best choice given the economic environment — that power generators choose the least expensive means of producing electricity, while consumers conserve energy as long as the money saved by buying less electricity exceeds the cost of using less power in the form either of other spending or loss of convenience. After all this analysis, it’s possible to predict how producers and consumers of energy will react to policies that put a price on emissions and how much those reactions will end up costing the economy as a whole.

There are, of course, a number of ways this kind of modeling could be wrong. Many of the underlying estimates are necessarily somewhat speculative; nobody really knows, for instance, what solar power will cost once it finally becomes a large-scale proposition. There is also reason to doubt the assumption that people actually make the right choices: many studies have found that consumers fail to take measures to conserve energy, like improving insulation, even when they could save money by doing so.

But while it’s unlikely that these models get everything right, it’s a good bet that they overstate rather than understate the economic costs of climate-change action. That is what the experience from the cap-and-trade program for acid rain suggests: costs came in well below initial predictions. And in general, what the models do not and cannot take into account is creativity; surely, faced with an economy in which there are big monetary payoffs for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, the private sector will come up with ways to limit emissions that are not yet in any model.

Now, it's important to note that the goal of the Waxman Markey bill is to reduce US carbon emissions by 83% by 2050 (from 2005 levels, so even more than that from 2010 levels). So essentially, the CBO is saying, and Krugman is endorsing, that this level of emissions reduction will have so small an effect on economic growth that it's going to be indistinguishable from noise. I don't dispute that environmental economists think this, but I find it to be a completely facially implausible conclusion. I want to lay out two arguments for why these economists cannot possibly be right. The first is a common-sense argument about what actually has to happen at the level of the lives of individual citizens to bring about such a large reduction in carbon emissions. The second argument is based on looking at what was required to cause significant changes in energy efficiency in past episodes.

Robots vs Relocalists

One of the great things about the Archdruid is that even when I believe he's wrong, he's rarely wrong in a dull, predictable way.  Instead, if he's going to be in error, it's often in an interesting and thought-provoking way.  So it is with this week's essay, The Twilight of the Machine. In it, he argues that, well, let's have him say it in his own words:

The end of the age of cheap abundant energy, as last week’s Archdruid Report argued, brings with it an unavoidable reshaping of our most basic ideas about economics and, in particular, economic development. For the last three centuries or so, the effective meaning of this phrase has centered on the replacement of human labor by machines. All the other measures of development – and of course plenty of them have been offered down through the years – either reflect or presuppose that basic economic shift.

The replacement of labor with mechanical energy has even come to play a potent role in the popular imagination. From the machine-assisted living of The Jetsons to the darker image of reality itself as a machine-created illusion in The Matrix, the future has come to be defined as a place where people do even less work with their own muscles than they do today. All this is the product of what an earlier post called the logic of abundance: the notion, rooted right down in the core of the contemporary worldview of industrial society, that there will always be enough resources to let people have whatever it is that they think they want.

Abandon that comfortable but unjustifiable assumption, and the future takes on a very different shape. In a world where everything but human beings will be in short supply, it makes no sense whatever to deploy increasingly scarce resources to build, maintain, and power machines to do jobs that human labor can do equally well. An example may be useful here, so let’s take Rosie the Riveter, the iconic woman factory worker of Second World War fame, and match her up against one of the computer-guided assembly line robots that have replaced so many workers in production lines in the industrial world; we might as well pit icon against icon and call the robot HAL 9000.

He goes on to make a variety of non-quantitative arguments for why Rosy will win this contest. I won't rehearse them here. Instead, this affords me an opportunity to present a simple hypothetical calculation that has been at the back of my mind for a year or two, the conclusion of which bothers me a lot:

Latest Sea Level Rise Projections

Icelandic Volcanoes

Just a short note that Heading Out at Bit Tooth Energy is tracking the situation with the Icelandic volcano (here and here). Although I don't completely buy all of his analysis (in particular, he's an evil climate change denier and that keeps creeping into his writing :-), I do think he's right that there is some level of risk of a globally significant event here and it's worth keeping an eye on.

Ubaid Proto-Civilization

Exceeding the 2008 Peak of Oil Production

Implications of Unmeasurable Capital

I was very struck by a piece by Steve Randy Waldmann at Interfluidity yesterday, entitled Capital Can't be Measured.  He is basically arguing that modern financial institutions are sufficiently complex that the concept of their "capital" is subject to measurement errors of the same order of magnitude as the capital itself.  This rang true to me, and put into words something that had nagged at me in reading about financial reforms, but had not come clearly to the surface of mind.

Sure, “hard” capital and solvency constraints for big banks are better than mealy-mouthed technocratic flexibility. But absent much deeper reforms, totemic leverage restrictions will not meaningfully constrain bank behavior. Bank capital cannot be measured. Think about that until you really get it. “Large complex financial institutions” report leverage ratios and “tier one” capital and all kinds of aromatic stuff. But those numbers are meaningless. For any large complex financial institution levered at the House-proposed limit of 15×, a reasonable confidence interval surrounding its estimate of bank capital would be greater than 100% of the reported value. In English, we cannot distinguish “well capitalized” from insolvent banks, even in good times, and regardless of their formal statements.