This is an excellent (and very short!) TED talk by Edward Burtynsky, who has spent a decade travelling the world and taking high quality pictures of how the landscape and society have been impacted by oil….
There are more pictures available on his website, and they are well worth a look.
http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/
Currently, hydropower provides 6% of the USA’s electrical power, and solar, biomass, wind and geothermal combined provide 3%.
Dismantled nuclear weapons currently provide 10%. Quite literally, swords to plowshares – an oddly reassuring discovery.
As we rapidly approach peak oil, is it possible that predictions of possible resource wars culminating in a nuclear exchange will not happen, because if it got to the stage where any country was prepared to use nukes to secure their energy supplies, it would simply make more sense to dismantle them and use them as fuel?
The fissile material from Russia’s ex-weapons currently provides about 45% of the fuel in US nuclear reactors, and former American weapons provide 5%. This programme was instituted in the 1990s as a means to secure the weapons no longer needed with the fall of the USSR. It has meant a cheap and plentiful supply of fissile material, and also massive financial savings from not having to maintain the warheads themselves, along with the missiles and other delivery systems they used to be part of.
Nuclear disarmament appears to make extremely good sense from an economic point of view, and it is also a cheap and plentiful source of energy. It is a win-win strategy for the increasingly resource constrained world we seem to find ourselves moving into.
The current supplies of fissile material, from the previous rounds of disarmament, are scheduled to run out in 2013. Interestingly, the US and Russia are currently negotiating a treaty to further reduce their stockpile of weapons.
To quote the New York Times, which has an excellent article on this:
“Treaties at the end of the cold war led to the decommissioning of thousands of warheads. Their energy-rich cores are converted into civilian reactor fuel.
In the United States, the agreements are portrayed as nonproliferation treaties — intended to prevent loose nukes in Russia.
In Russia, where the government argues that fissile materials are impenetrably secure already, the arms agreements are portrayed as a way to make it harder for the United States to reverse disarmament.
The program for dismantling and diluting the fuel cores of decommissioned Russian warheads — known informally as Megatons to Megawatts — is set to expire in 2013, just as the industry is trying to sell it forcefully as an alternative to coal-powered energy plants, which emit greenhouse gases…
…In the United States, domestic weapons recycling programs are smaller in scale and would be no replacement for Megatons for Megawatts. The Nuclear Fuel Services, in Erwin, Tenn., in 2005 began diluting uranium from the 217 tons the government declared surplus; so far 125 tons have been processed. It is used at the Tennessee Valley Authority plant.
The American plutonium recycling program is also well under way at a factory being built at the Energy Department’s Savannah River site in South Carolina to dismantle warheads from the American arsenal; a type of plutonium fuel, called mixed-oxide fuel, will come on the market in 2017.
In total, the 34 tons to be recycled there are expected to generate enough electricity for a million American homes for 50 years.”
There is a great review of the new film about Peak Oil, ‘Collapse’, in the New York Times. This documentary consists of a long interview with Mike Ruppert, interspersed with archive footage. He has also been interviewed about it recently in The Wall Street Journal.
As someone who has being reading Ruppert’s work for years to see him gain mainstream acceptance (of any sort!) is reassuring and unnerving in roughly equal measures. Unnerving, because if we realise what is coming down the tracks with peak oil & resource depletion it impossible not to be, and reassuring, because realising this means there is some hope of doing something about it. Ruppert has been talking about the connection between oil, the money system and geopolitics for years. To quote Variety:
‘Less wake-up call than four-alarm fire, “Collapse” forces its audience to witness the testimony of Michael Ruppert, an independent writer and researcher who believes that everything — industrial civilization, at least — is falling apart, soon to vanish completely. In other words, it makes countless other political documentaries look like episodes of “Teletubbies.” Unnervingly persuasive much of the time, and merely riveting when it’s not, Ruppert’s talking-head analysis gets the Errol Morris treatment from director Chris Smith (“American Movie”), whose intellectual horror film ranks as another essential work, one well deserving of play in major cities — provided they’re still around’
The trailer is below, and you can read his blog here.
Another excellent Guardian article here where it’s economics editor seems to have realised that Peak Oil is here, and it is going to impact dramatically on everything we do:
“It is 30 years since the film Mad Max was made, launching the career of Mel Gibson. The film made a big splash at the time for its terrifying view of a world without oil, where gangs of grisly looking people roam deserts in a post-apocalyptic world, killing each other to get their hands on the few drops of petrol that some have managed to produce in makeshift refineries. Social order has completely broken down.
Great film if you like that sort of thing but complete fiction, of course. Or is it? Three decades later, and I wonder if the film was, in fact, years ahead of its time.
Just think back to summer last year when oil prices spiked to $150 a barrel – 10 times the level of a decade earlier. In petrol stations in some European countries, people started to drive off without paying and drivers had to be banned from filling cars before they had paid up. In Britain, people stole heating oil out of the tanks that sit outside many houses in the country.
Imagine what would happen if prices rose, say, to $300 a barrel. Or higher. Not only would it become too expensive to drive unless absolutely necessary, but food would become prohibitively expensive to transport, goods from China would be too expensive to ship, and plastics, which come from oil, would be unaffordable. The cold turkey after more than a century of cheap oil would be painful indeed. For developing countries it would be fatal – many could not afford energy at those prices”.
Dimitri Orlov is a Russian, living in America. He writes a lot about peak oil, and its implications. As a Russian, he has more experience than most of how societies behave when they collapse, and the strategies that may be of help.
The talk here was given at Feasta’s The New Emergency conference which was held in Dublin this summer. Its just under an hour, and well worth a look.
You can also get the text and slides to his ‘Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation’ talk here.
Story here about Flint, Michigan. In an effort to manage decline the city is razing entire districts and returning them to nature. This reduces the cost of maintaining infrastructure and services for what is left of the city. This story reminded me of the old quote from Vietnam – ‘we may have to destroy the village in order to save it’.
Flint is just north of Detroit, and the original home of General Motors. It may be familiar to you if you have seen Michael Moore’s ‘Roger and Me‘ which shows the massive impact the downsizing of GM’s factories had on the community there in the late eighties. The city hasn’t recovered since. Unemployment is currently running at approximately 20% and the population has halved from its peak.
The idea now is to actively manage the decline, and it came from a guy called Dan Kildee, the treasurer of Genesee county where Flint is located. As he says “The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we’re all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way… Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity.”
It is an idea that seems to be catching on – Kildee has been asked by the US government and a group of charities about applying these strategies elsewhere, and is currently looking at 50 cities in the US. Plans are also afoot to split up Detroit into a small collection of urban islands, surrounded by farmland.
There have been some brilliant photo essays I’ve come across recently, chronicling the decay of Motor Town, USA – Detroit. The scale of it is quite simply shocking. With the information about the possible speed of decline in our energy supplies here scenes like this may become far too common.
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1864272,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089,00.html
