Oil and gas impossible to protect without totalitarianism

Bombs target oil pipeline in Iraq's Kirkuk, one killed | Reuters: "Four bombs went off on Saturday near a minor pipeline from an oilfield close to the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, security and oil industry sources said."

Why are world governments increasing totalitarianism? Oil and gas source areas and pipelines are impossible to protect.

Cheap oil has peaked. Every day it takes more joules to get a joule of energy. And what is left in the ground is already borrowed against. Massive debt defaults and recession are at stake.

There is a way to get out of this mess. Every day many gigajoules of energy are wasted on cars and other consumer products. By getting rid of cars, we could save energy, cut emissions, reduce heat, and create a simple, but comfortable life.

Fuel efficiency for cars estimated at 1%

theconversation : "If we assume that the average car weighs roughly 20 times more than its driver, we can estimate that for a single-occupant car journey, with no significant other cargo, the effective fuel efficiency drops to just 1% (adding a passenger only raises this to 2%). And that’s before we take into account the broader resource and infrastructure requirements, as mentioned above, for that journey to take place."

Expect to see more emergencies like Oroville Dam in a hotter world

skepticalscience : "Like many extreme events, the Oroville emergency is a combination of natural weather likely intensified by climate change. California regularly sees “atmospheric rivers” that deluge the state with rainfall, but in a hotter world, scientists anticipate that they’ll be amplified by an increase in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere."

Clean coal exposed as fraud, now we have clean cars

Soup-to-Nuts Review Finds CA Clean Cars Program Working | NRDC: "The California Air Resources Board (ARB) released a soup-to-nuts review of its Advanced Clean Car (ACC) program today. The 658-page report confirms that the popular program, which establishes smog-forming and carbon pollution limits for new cars and trucks, can be met on time, with known technologies, and at reasonable cost. Agency-experts recommend that the Board stay the course on the standards, pointing to a large body of evidence showing the auto industry is already exceeding standards and are on-track to meet 2025 targets.  "

It doesn't matter if cars burn water and exhaust perfume -- they are still wasteful consumer products that promote sprawl and growth. More cars means more buildings and homes spread out. Each one individually heated and cooled. Each with its own leaf blower, snow blower, riding mower, electronic entertainment center, web-connected refrigerator, hedge clipper, power tool set, ladder, ping pong table, etc. This is why the oceans are full of junk, rare earths running out, species going extinct, wetlands filled, etc.

The private auto enables the end of the biosphere. Why are so-called environmentalists trying to improve it and make it more effective for its task?

False debate on cost of #publictransit

The so-called "debate" about whether to invest in public transit is framed incorrectly. The failure to break away from the accounting-style framework to an economic framework is the result of many years of dominance by the profiteers of autosprawl.

Public transit funding is framed in budget terms. How much does it cost? What is the minimum we can invest and still function as a community.

If the actual costs of the autosprawl system were included in this discussion it would be easy to show that the reduction in car and sprawl costs would more than justify robust investment in public transit. Even fare-free public transit.

We have shown in our spreadsheet that if a city realized only very small reductions in the costs of the car system, it could easily afford fare-free public transit. 

No silver bullet?

There is one main problem in today's cities. It is the private auto. How did this happen. Was it just free market forces? No, by now you should know that free markets are a fairy tale believed only by honest libertarians... and good luck finding one of those!

Car dominance started in the US, with the premeditated destruction of the street car.

It would be nice to paint some lines on the road and suddenly go back to cycling, but that's not going to happen.

The car system, autosprawl, is much more that just cars. It is a massive infrastructure that cost trillions to build and costs trillions to maintain. It is heavily subsidized. People do not see the subsidy. They think cars came from the Garden of Eden and have always been the only way to get around.

When buses are fare-free, it will begin a snowball effect undermining the critical mass of autosprawl. The subsidy will be seen as a burden and cars will lose political power.

Bang.

Half of carbon emissions come from wealthy 10%

It's more than just climate change: ""However, these human impacts can only truly be understood within the context of economic inequality," pointed out political scientist and co-author Jorge Rivas of the Institute for Global Environment and Society. "The average per capita resource use in wealthy countries is 5 to 10 times higher than in developing countries, and the developed countries are responsible for over three quarters of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions from 1850 to 2000."

University of Maryland geographer and co-author Klaus Hubacek added: "The disparity is even greater when inequality within countries is included. For example, about 50 percent of the world's people live on less than $3 per day, 75 percent on less than $8.50, and 90 percent on less than $23. One effect of this inequality is that the top 10 percent produce almost as much total carbon emissions as the bottom 90 percent combined.""

Cars are literally killing us every day

Dangerous by Design 2016 | Smart Growth America: "Between 2005 and 2014, a total of 46,149 people were struck and killed by cars while walking in the United States. In 2014, the most recent year for which data are available, 4,884 people were killed by a car while walking—105 people more than in 2013. On average, 13 people were struck and killed by a car while walking every day in 2014. And between 2005 and 2014, Americans were 7.2 times more likely to die as a pedestrian than from a natural disaster. Each one of those people was a child, parent, friend, classmate, or neighbor. And these tragedies are occurring across the country—in small towns and big cities, in communities on the coast and in the heartland."

Wrong solutions are wasting valuable time, energy

There are so many wrong solutions for energy and climate, we had to create another blog to try to address them. These are more than just mistakes, they are absorbing critical activist energy and wasting precious time. Before you back a solution, think it through. Check the math. Here is a link to a list of some of the problems with solutions that are being put forward.

Wrong Solutions for Energy, Climate

Capitalist failure brought Trump, which will bring more failure

insurge-intelligence: "As the London-based development charity ActionAid showed in a 2013 report, a more realistic poverty measure lies between $5 and $10 a day. World Bank data shows that since 1990, the number of people living under $10 a day has increased by 25 percent, and the number of people living under $5 a day has increased by 10 percent. Today, 4.3 billion people — nearly two-thirds of the global population — live on less than $5 a day.
So really, poverty has worsened in the Age of Progress. And now the unsustainability of this equation is coming home to roost even in the centres of global growth, where wealth is most concentrated."

Russia is just an oil company with an army

The Nearly Now: "People who are looking to understand what the Trump gang is up to would do well to consider his gang’s actions through the lens of the Carbon Bubble. Understand that the amounts of money at stake are vast, nearly inconceivable to most of us, and highly concentrated in the hands of the people in Trump’s cabinet and their close friends and business allies."

Americans want more buses, including 65% of Trump voters

Make public transit a big part of infrastructure investment: Guest commentary: "Nearly 70 percent of voters polled following the presidential election support investment to repair and improve public transportation. A large majority who voted for Trump — 65 percent — feels similarly."

The Cost of Auto Orientation

Strong Towns: "In the United States we've proceeded for sixty years with reconfiguring our public spaces to accommodate the automobile. The built in assumption of this approach, especially when it comes to commercial property, is that the more cars driving by the better. What we've overlooked in our haste to "modernize" is the lower return on investment we get from this approach, even under ideal conditions. Today we need the humility to acknowledge that our ancestors -- who built in the traditional style -- may have known what they were doing after all."

China leads the #climatechange fight

IMAGE: The Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau highway, with up to fifty lanes at some points pic.twitter.com/IH9g6cufPc

— The Int'l Spectator (@spectatorindex) February 4, 2017

World GWP is about $90Trillion, growing at 4%. At that rate in 2034 it will be $180Trillion. No matter what happens with emissions, how much heat will be generated to service this base of human installations and activity?

For example China oil use grew 2.5% last year. That means total oil use will double in 28 years. Since oil allows sprawl and growth. How much energy converts to heat to run all that stuff?

Unsafe at any price. Falling net energy and global debt guarantee collapse on current course

How global economic growth will drown in Trump’s oil glut after 2018 – INSURGE intelligence – Medium: "This has led to a number of devastating consequences. To maintain economic growth, we are using ingenious debt mechanisms to finance new economic activity. The expansion of global debt is now higher than 2007 pre-crash levels. We are escalating the risk of another financial crisis in coming years, because the tepid growth we’ve managed to squeeze out of the economy so far is based on borrowing from an energetically and environmentally unsustainable future.
And this is also why there has been an unmistakeable correlation between long-term global net energy decline, and a long-term decline in the rate of global economic growth."

#Renewables promote growth and therefore heat

The following tweet sums up what is wrong with renewables. They just promote growth.

Shouldn't every parking lot get a #solar upgrade? RT if you agree: https://t.co/5MDWmbxWtw #ActOnClimate #NoKXL #NoDAPL #go100re #renewables pic.twitter.com/r168595frp

— Mike Hudema (@MikeHudema) February 1, 2017