As mentioned in the previous post, main stream media isn’t really much of a help. Here’s three movies I’d recommend to anyone interested in the topics of peak oil, climate change and population overshoot.

What a Way To Go
The End Of Suburbia
A Crude Awakening

Do you ever wonder how different news agencies decide what stories to cover, which ones to give priority to and even more important what ‘spin’ they put on the news?

A recent article on peak oil from the CBC’s web site has me thinking about this.

Peak oil has “the imperative of urgency,” according to Richard Gilbert, an urban-issues consultant based in Toronto.

“The likely outcome of not dealing with this issue is not an environmental catastrophe. It’s an economic and social catastrophe that may leave us unable to deal with the environmental catastrophe,” he said in an interview.

Later in the same article …

Well, 95 per cent of all motorized transportation is fueled by oil. Almost half of that is freight. And freight has shaped what our economies, and hence our societies, have become.

“The economies of the countries of the world in a sense float on a sea of oil,” Gilbert said. “They need that transportation to function in the way that they do now.”

Oil at $250 US a barrel would be “the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane hitting the entire North American continent at the same time,” said Perl. “There is no way for society to continue with these price increases without either an economic collapse or some kind of military crisis, or both.”

Even more chilling..

Oil-rich Western Canada would be a choice morsel to court or conquer.

The article goes on to outline the authors’ thoughts on how to best minimize the effects peak oil could potentially have on society and as a primer on the subject I’d highly encourage you to have a read.

The above quotes sound like pretty important topics to me, yet peak oil is certainly under-reported in mainstream media coverage. Here’s a little experiment you can verify for yourself. I visited several popular news web sites, CBC, BBC, PBS, CTV, CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC. CBC, BBC and PBS are publicly funded, the last four are private.

I did a search for “Peak Oil” on each of these sites. What I noticed is that to a varying degree, each of the three public sites (CBC, BBC and PBS) have published pieces on the subject. On the four private outlets, very little is available and what is available has a general ‘debunking’ theme to it.

Why such a dramatic difference between the degree to which the subject is reported and more so, how it is reported? In order to answer that, you have to think about the mandate of the different types of news sources.

Publicly funded organizations have (in theory at least) a mandate to provide information and interpretation that is in the public’s best interest. I’m sure it doesn’t always work this way, but this is the intent.

Many private news organizations are directly or indirectly owned by major multinational corporations and their mandate is to best serve their owners’ interests, not yours. Also, when you go to each of the news sites, take notice of how much advertising is on each site. Private news sites also have an obligation to their advertisers, upon whom they depend for revenue.

The differences can be summed up by saying that private news organizations have an obligation to make money. Public stations have an obligation to best inform the public.

Any chance of mitigating the effects of peak oil relies on drastically reduced public consumption of goods and energy. Reduced consumption is not in the best interest of private news organizations, their multinational owners or their corporate advertisers. So it is really any surprise that existing biases exist?

Try this little experiment out. Substitute “Peak Oil” for other topics and observer the differences. After doing this for myself, all I can say is “thank God for the CBC”.

Oceans today are 30% more acidic than before the Industrial Revolution.

If we continue to burn fossil fuels at today’s rates, within the next century we are likely to see a bottom-up collapse of the world’s marine ecosystems that will last hundreds of thousands of years.

Acidification of the ocean is a topic I know very little about. I’m looking forward to learning more when the film is release in August of this year. You can see the trailer for the film on the web site.

In the article, Mr. Salonius makes the point that part of the reason for lack of progress on many of our current ecological problems is a result of fragmentation within the scientific community, with each discipline focused on a small subset of the larger problem. Also, he argues that the time has come for scientists to become actively involved in the political process.

I’d add to these points that it is in the public’s benefit to become more aware of the larger set of problems and how they are related to and influence each other. Also, I think it is important for people to become engaged with the political process by doing more than just voting.

The danger of course is that by focusing on too broad of a spectrum of issues people become overwhelmed and too discouraged to take any action. Which would be extremely unfortunate as the actions of an individual or small group focused on a single problem can produce fantastic results.

Case in point, I have just finished reading David Suzuki’s “The Sacred Balance” (which I heartily recommend). In the final chapter Suzuki relates the story of Karl-Henrick Robert, a Swedish doctor specializing in cancer. Robert came to realize that many of the cancer patients he treated were sick because of environmental causes. Robert also seemed to realize that fragmentation in the environmentalist movement was counter-productive. In his own words…

up to now, much of the debate over the environment has had the character of monkey chatter amongst the withering leaves of a dying tree - the leaves representing specific isolated problems … very few of us have been paying attention to the environment’s trunk and branches. They are deteriorating as a result of processes about which there is little or no controversy; and the thousands of individual problems that are the subject of so much debate are, in fact, manifestations of systemic errors that are undermining the foundations of society.

Robert took it upon himself to draft a document to be reviewed by 50 of Sweden’s top scientists. After 21 iterations of this document, he finally had a consensus. The document outlines Robert’s “Natural Step” ideas and has been endorsed by the king of Sweden, is taught in all Swedish schools, has been adopted as policy by more than 50 corporations and has spread around the world to other countries including Canada, The United States, Britain and Australia. Robert’s Natural step consists of 4 key ideas:

1. Nature cannot withstand a systematic buildup of dispersed matter mined from the Earth’s crust (minerals, oil, etc).
2. Nature cannot withstand a systematic buildup of persistent compounds made by humans (pcb’s etc).
3. Nature cannot withstand a systematic deterioration of its capacity for renewal (harvesting fish faster than they can be replenished, converting fertile land to desert).
4. Therefore, if we want to continue, we must (a) be efficient in our use of resources and (b) promote justice - because ignoring poverty will lead the poor, for short-term survival, to destroy resources (e.g., the rain forests) that we all need for long-term survival.

A broad view helps get to the root of the problem so that not only are symptoms addressed, but the fundamental causes of the problems can also be understood and dealt with.

I think Robert’s Natural Step is an outstanding example of a wide vision without becoming overwhelmingly complex.

For those who find themselves confused about what exactly these terms mean and how they might work, this is a great introduction to the topic.

If you have the opportunity, I highly recommend this film.

Basically, that’s peak oil. It doesn’t mean that we run out of oil, but rather that we can no longer pump it out of the ground at a rate which satisfies demand as oil reserves start to decline. At that time new oil will become increasingly harder and harder to find and existing reserves will become increasingly more expensive to operate. It’s not a question of if we will experience the peak oil phenomenon, but rather when. Some analysts predict this to happen in the next couple of decades. Some say we are starting to experience it now.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard prediction of astronomical prices caused by natural resource depletion. In the early 70’s the Club of Rome published “The Limits To Growth” which predicted similar increases in commodity prices due to the depletion of natural resources. But in fact the opposite happened, prices actually dropped. One thing the Club of Rome overlooked was the power of the free market and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” to reallocate resources and find alternative resources to use. The same argument can still be considered valid in the context of peak oil. But the problem is, oil is embedded into every aspect of our lives. Finding alternatives won’t be easy and it won’t happen overnight. Given the dependency we have on oil, can market forces adjust quickly enough to avoid an economic and social collapse?

Consider the life of a loaf of bread. The ground the wheat was grown on was broken and conditioned by machinery that runs on petroleum. The ground was then fertilized using petroleum based fertilizer. The seeds were then planted using machinery. Petroleum based insecticides were then likely applied to keep it from being eaten by pests. It was then harvested using more machinery. Then using diesel trucks, the wheat is then transfered to a processing plant which is either powered directly from fossil fuels or by electricity generated by fossil fuels. The processed wheat (now flour) may be turned into bread there or transfered to yet another facility. After the bread is made it is packaged into a plastic bag and then put on a truck, ship or plane to eventually end up in your grocery store. When you need bread, you’ll hop in your car and drive to the store. All of the workers involved along the process will also drive to and from work in their cars and trucks.

This is a very superficial illustration of how oil impacts every aspect of our food production. What do you think will happen to the price of this loaf of bread as oil prices start their climb?

Given the nature of the oil business, and the way different countries report their reserves predicting a precise time when peak oil will occur is quite difficult. However you would expect there to be some signals if oil were peaking. Perhaps you would read almost daily about record oil prices. Perhaps you would begin to see countries fighting for control over existing oil reserves. Perhaps you would begin to see previously unfeasible extraction methods begin to become common. I wonder if we’re now extracting oil from the tar sands because the high price of crude makes it economically feasible, or if the opposite is the case: the price of crude is high because we’ve had to resort to trying to extract if from the tar sands.

From the office building I work in there is a good 360 degree view of the city of Saint John, New Brunswick. Looking out the east side of the building you can see the Irving Oil Refinery. In front of the refinery you can see the Irving Paper plant. To the right you see the three red and white stacks of the Courtenay Bay oil fired 109MW generating station owned by NB Power.

Looking out the west side of the building you can see the Irving pulp mill at Reversing Falls and the nearby Irving Tissue plant. To the far left, in the distance (not in picture) you would find the stacks from the Coleson Cover generating station, a 978MW oil fired facility also owned by NB Power. If you could see a little further west you would see the nuclear power plant at Point Lepreau. I think it’s reasonable to say that Saint John has its fair share of industrialization.

Living in Saint John, New Brunswick, it’s hard to find a vantage point where you can’t see something Irving related. Besides the 3 operations mentioned above there’s the dry docks (now shut down), gas stations and convenience stores, office buildings, hardware stores and on and on. Irving is also in the midst of building a mammoth LNG terminal on the Bay of Fundy. You get the idea. If all of the Irving related industry in town suddenly vanished many, many people would be out of work.

From the refinery’s web site

The Irving refinery in Saint John is Canada’s largest, producing over 300,000 barrels of quality finished energy products per day. From that daily production, we export approximately 175,000 barrels of petroleum products to the US Northeast, including 100,000 barrels of reformulated gasoline (RFG)—that’s about 42% of all Canadian petroleum exports and about 45.5% of US RFG imports.

The refinery uses as an input a huge amount of a finite natural resource. It imports this resource from far away places by ship. Diesel burning ships. Then using a massive amount of input energy, it creates as an output 300 000 barrels of products which, when consumed, will contribute significantly even more to the green house gas problem. And….we’d like to build another refinery here, just as big as the one we already have. The projected cost will be in the 5 - 7 billion dollar range.

We’re pretty damned excited about it too. Why? Because the construction project will result in about 5000 temporary jobs and 1000 permanent jobs. And we expect that our property values will increase. Of course in order to reap the benefit of our increased property value we’d have to sell our houses and move to someplace where the property value hasn’t gone up. We usually don’t talk about that part.

Of course there will be an environmental impact assessment performed to make sure that there won’t be any negative impact on the local environment. Sort of. The federal government will be doing an EIA for the proposed new wharf. The province is responsible for the rest. However, that may put the province in a bit of a conflict of interest. Given the amount of people Irving employ, and the contribution they make to the province’s economy they yield, shall we say, a certain political influence in the province. I’m not sure how objective a provincial EIA could be.

In an interesting development, the Conservation Council of New Brunswick and The Friends of the Earth are challenging this in court. See the full press release on the CCNB web site.

Launched by Ecojustice (formerly Sierra Legal Defence Fund) on behalf of the Conservation Council and Friends of the Earth Canada, the lawsuit challenges the federal government’s decision to dramatically restrict its assessment of the environmental impact of the proposed Irving refinery to the facility’s wharf structure – ignoring obvious local and transboundary air pollution, impacts on endangered Atlantic salmon and Right whales, and the global warming impacts of the refinery.“Minister Baird’s decision to evaluate the wharf and turn a blind eye to the refinery itself is not only illegal, it is plainly absurd,” said Ecojustice lawyer Justin Duncan. “The law is clear; the federal government must conduct an assessment of the entire project in order to evaluate the impact this refinery will have on the health of the region’s residents and the environment. ”

An interesting example of why the CCNB et al don’t have faith in the province to properly execute the EIA:

If not overturned by the federal court, John Baird’s decision to study only the wharf would leave the assessment of the refinery’s environmental impacts to the province whose environmental assessment process failed to protect the environment from the massive upgrade of the existing Irving refinery. For example, the existing refinery’s emissions of carcinogenic benzene have increased by a factor of ten since the refinery upgrade, increasing the levels of benzene in Saint John’s air by 60 percent. The provincial environmental assessment process found there would be no change in emissions of this carcinogenic air pollutant.

Now to me, that’s a significant piece of information for a couple of reasons. One is that it clearly illustrates the the EIA for the expansion of the existing refinery missed predicting a serious environmental concern. Second, is the very fact that benzene output has increased by a factor of ten and benzene levels in the air have increased 60 percent! It seems we’ve been paying some hidden costs for the economic prosperity the refinery expansion has brought us. I’m guessing the hidden costs of a whole new refinery may be even higher.

Initial reports in the local newspaper about the law suit didn’t mention the benzene issue. That was strange I thought. Oh wait….Irving owns all the local newspapers too. Actually they own nearly all the newspapers in the province. That’s handy.

Eventually the paper did cover the benzene issue. Irving says the readings are wrong. Benzene levels didn’t rise that much. But funny that never came up in the paper until Irving had a statement on the matter.

So will anything be uncovered in an EIA that will prevent a new refinery from being built? No, not likely. If Irving wants to build one, ultimately they will. I doubt finding an underground colony of magical unicorns or a school of mermaids living in the Bay of Fundy would prevent it. The best we can probably hope for is that the CCNB is successful in their bid to have a Federal EIA executed and the findings ensure that the refinery is built and operated in the most environmentally friendly manner. An environmentally friendly oil refinery…..

As a footnote, it seems that the Federal Environment minister is not favoring the Irvings by waiving the EIA. This seems to be the status quo for the department.

Other recently announced wind projects a 64.5 Megawatt wind farm at Aulac and a 49.5 MW farm at Lameque.

This is part of the provincial government’s commitment to bring 400MW of power into the grid by 2010. All of these projects are being built by private companies which will sell the power to NB Power.

Now this is good news, especially since NB has been noticeably lagging behind the rest of the provinces in renewable energy generation. To put some context around this, NB Power has a total capacity of 3324 MW, which should rise to approximately 3724 MW after all the wind projects are brought online. At that time, energy from a renewables will represent about 11% of the total energy production potential in the province.

That’s not bad. But considering that the other 89% of our power will still come from hydro, nuclear and fossil fuel plants, it’s only a start. Hopefully, these wind projects represent a real move towards clean energy and are not just a political maneuver to distract from the fact that the same government is poised to dump 1.4 billion dollars into refurbishing the nuclear reactor at Point Lepreau or that Environment Canada has recently released a report indicating that arsenic levels in the water near the Grand Lake coal-fired power plant are between 6 and 20 times acceptable levels.

Realistically, the real goal should be to reduce energy consumption. It is completely unreasonable to ever expect renewable energy generation to allow us to continue along at our current level of energy consumption. Until we drastically change our lifestyle and attitudes in this regard, we will be bound to energy that is created using environmentally damaging methods.

So kudos to the provincial government for the recent wind initiatives, but don’t stop there. There’s so much more that can be done.