US Carbon Emissions

US Oil Rig Count and Oil Production

Brainstorming a Few Hypotheses About Prism

So executives at major tech companies are doubling down on the denials that they know anything about PRISM, including Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg.  My first assumption was that the denials were legally compelled by the very orders under which they provided the data.  However, after the Obama administration had confirmed the program's existence, there would be little incentive for CEOs to personally continue to dispute the facts.  So what's going on here?  I don't know, but here's all the hypotheses I can come up with:

• The tech executives do know about PRISM (in fact if not by name) but are continuing to deny it in the hopes of muddying the waters and limiting the damage to their company's brands internationally (this doesn't seem like it would be very smart given that more revelations seem likely, but it's at least a logical possibility).
• The tech companies have employees with clearances who have implemented PRISM at the behest of the government, and non-cleared executives, including CEOs, genuinely don't know what's occurring.  If so, they are going to be outraged, and with every right.
• The NSA has gained access to company's internal data via some third party (eg a telco provider to the tech companies, or a hardware or operating system vendor who has provided equipment with a backdoor).
• The NSA has used technical means to break into the tech companies and install monitoring systems without their knowledge or permission (much as China has been trying to do).
• The reporting by the Washington Post and the Guardian mischaracterized PRISM, and for some hard-to-imagine reason, the administration has decided to confirm it rather than correct it or deny it.

I have to say that any of these would be fairly breath-taking.  I await further revelations with great interest.  I have a feeling there are a lot more shoes still to drop here.

Oh, in an aside, the Guardian is reporting from a supposedly knowledgeable US intelligence source that "We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world"  If that's true, not very much of it's been brought to light by the commercial security industry, suggesting that there are some interesting techniques in need of discovery.

Sustaining a City in a Long-Term Power Outage

A few comments on this fascinating study from Pittsburgh (site of Carnegie Mellon, which is a center of excellence at studying critical infrastructure issues).  The key theme that emerges for me is the interaction of the liquid fuel system (particularly diesel) and the electricity system.  In a short outage, lots of critical infrastructure has diesel generator backup, and so the hospitals, 911-call centers, and so on can continue to operate.  However, they typically have limited fuel storage capacity (if for no other reason than that diesel doesn't keep indefinitely), and so in a long outage, the availability of diesel becomes critical to keeping everything together.

US Exports and PRISM

It appears to me that the new revelations about the PRISM program are likely to hurt US commerce over time.  If I'm a buyer at a non-US company and I'm contemplating putting my data on Amazon's cloud, using Google Docs, buying a Cisco router, even installing Microsoft Windows on my PCs, I now have to assume that the US company I want to do business with is in bed with the NSA.  I have to assume that my enterprise data, my employee's personal data, etc, may be compromised by this new equipment or software.  The company's denials clearly mean nothing (since the government has now confirmed PRISM, thereby making liars of them all).  For all foreigners, you have to assume that anything you share on Facebook, send in a Gmail, say on a Skype call, etc, could be inspected by US intelligence.

In the short term, this will likely have little effect, since people will have limited choice, and it will take a while for the culture to shift.  But in every internal debate about whether to use the American solution or some other homegrown option, this information is going to put a finger on the scale.  Foreign governments are now going to have excellent reasons to promote and protect their homegrown software and equipment industries, since they know they can trust them.  It will take years or even decades for this to play out, but "Made in America", or at least "Designed in California", just took a massive hit to the brand.

Hints of Climate Change Affecting the Electricity Grid

It's interesting reading the NERC 2013 Summer Reliability Assessment.  Although it's not a focus of the report, reading between the lines you can see that climate change is going to have complex effects on the grid, and all of them increase the stress on it:

1. Weather extremes, particular heat-waves, cause higher peak demands, and larger swings in power demand.  For example, p1 refers to challenges in the Texas interconnect (ERCOT) as follows: "The Anticipated Reserve Margin for ERCOT is 12.88 percent for summer 2013. This is below the 13.75 percent target for ERCOT. Sustained extreme weather could be a threat to supply adequacy this summer. ERCOT may need to declare Energy Emergency Alerts (EEA) if there are higher‐than‐normal forced generation outages or if record‐breaking weather conditions similar to the summer of 2011 lead to higher‐than‐expected peak demands."
2. Drought (expected to increase under climate change) can affect the operation of thermal generation plants (both nuclear and fossil-fuel powered).  Eg p4 says: "When water levels fall significantly, water intake structures may be exposed above the water surface, causing the plant to become nonoperational. Additionally, generators are less efficient as the temperature of cooling water increases and results in a reduction of the power capability of the plant. Along some bodies of water, regulatory limits are placed on the temperature of the cooling water system discharges, and power plants are not allowed to raise water temperatures above levels deemed safe for species of fish and other aquatic life. Again, no major system impacts are expected; however, in certain extreme cases, waivers may be needed to keep critical generation online."
3. Drought more obviously reduces available hydro-electric generation, eg in the midwest this year (p5): "For the upcoming summer season, the Missouri River main‐stem water levels are being monitored closely, as impacts to this water source may affect significant hydro generation. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers predicts that 2013 will be a drought year, and electric energy produced from the Missouri River will be approximately 80 percent of the historical average."
4. Major storms appear to be worsening, and these can cause unpredictable damage to the grid, or the fuel sources required to run the grid.  For example, hurricane Sandy caused substantial outages in the northeast last year, and hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico can cause loss of natural gas production required for electricity generation (p6).
5. Finally, the increase in solar and wind production (which is being undertaken to reduce the causes of climate change) itself is a grid-stressor as these sources are intermittent and mostly not under the control of the grid operators.  The larger the mix of these sources becomes, the more we will demand of the transmission grid.

Of course, none of these things need be fatal to the reliable production of electricity.  But it's clear that it's going to take significant additional investment to keep the grid working reliably in the face of climate change.  Given human inertia, one might imagine that we will be slow to make all the necessary investments and be prone to run the grid in a stressed and vulnerable manner.

Extreme Weather Possibly Increasing Power Outages?

OECD Oil Consumption

US Wind Power Statistics

The Source for Keystone: Tar Sands Production

Initial Conference Impressions

A few quick hits from the conference.

• I went to the opening plenary last night.  I estimate there were about 250 people in the room.  I thought this was seriously impressive for a local conference organized in two counties (Tompkins and Cortland) with about 150000 population between them.  The conference is perhaps drawing from the larger region to some degree, but still, this is not a state-level conference in Albany or a national conference in Manhattan.
• My impression is the high level of interest is driven by two things: a) we have had some very extreme and variable weather here in recent years and it's really got people's attention, and b) the big fight about fracking has led quite a few people to a larger interest in energy/climate issues (if you start insisting that you don't want your region to be a fossil-fuel supplier, your conscience is apt to start nagging you that maybe you shouldn't be using too much fossil fuel either). 
• The keynote speaker was Mark Hertsgaard, author of Hot: Living through the next Fifty Years on Earth.  I liked his speech, it was inspiring.
• I couldn't help noticing that the parking lot outside the conference venue had a mix of vehicles that looked very typical of the region.  Wall-to-wall Priuses and bicycles it was definitely not.  I have a half a mind to do an actual sample tomorrow to get a sense of where we are at; have people who care enough about climate to attend a conference cared enough to make any detectable changes in their own lifestyle?
• The definitive word on climate change and New York State is NYSERDA's Climaid (600 pages but you can get it one chapter at a time).
• This morning I was in Cortland all morning for the section on adapting agriculture to climate change.  The audience was smaller (it being a weekday), but the speakers were excellent - in the main session we heard from scientists and then at lunch we heard from actual growers.  The basic message was the same from everyone:
• New York State has warmed noticeably, particularly in the winter.  The growing season is longer.  One big dairy operator mentioned that in 1973 he was planting 80 day corn on his hills and 90 day on his river bottom land, whereas today he is planting 95 day corn on the hills and 110 day corn on the bottomland.
• The weather is also noticeably more extreme.  There are more droughts, more floods, more risk of frosts during the longer growing season, more occasions when they can't get machinery into the fields because the weather is too wet, and more big snowfalls.  This showed up both in the scientist's statistics and also the grower's anecdotes.  The scientists all pinned this on more moisture in the warmer atmosphere and changes in the circulation due to a warmer Arctic.
• Here are corn yields in New York State since 1945.  There is the same linear pattern that yields often show nationally and globally.  Although the climate is certainly affecting agriculture here in both positive and negative ways, apparently it all nets out to maintain roughly the existing trend:

• I got to ask a lot of questions.  The most intriguing answers came in response to me observing that climate scientists seem to have been repeatedly blind-sided in the last decade, and did the scientist speakers have confidence in mainstream climate science projections or did they think there was a material risk of non-linear poorly understood processes causing significantly more radical change.  None of them sounded reassuring.  Dave Eichorn said that he agreed the situation was poorly understood and he wasn't confident that the changed weather patterns we are currently observing will still be the same in 20 years, or something else altogether might be occurring.  Larry Klotz said that scientists are inherently conservative because they don't want to publish something that won't hold up in twenty years, so they shy away from making strong claims without being very confident of their ground, which contributes to the impression that they underplay the issues.  He personally is speaking out more in part because he has a new grandchild.  David Wolfe said that he, like a lot of his colleagues, tends to stick to mainstream projections to avoid losing credibility and/or sowing panic with less likely but possible scenarios.  However, privately, climate scientists discuss amongst themselves the possibility of much more extreme scenarios and they cannot be ruled out.

US House Price Map

Why Did Saudi Arabia Reduce Oil Production?

Some Solar Power Considerations

US Crude Oil Production 1920-2012

US vs European GDP

Update on US Oil Rig Count

OECD Oil Consumption

Employment/Population Ratios

Distribution of Katrina refugees