Peak Oil, e-Readers, and Electronic Documents

This is a cross-post of a similar posting in my Content Curmudgeon blog, since the post fits equally well in both blogs.

Peak Oil and e-Readers or Electronic Documents… Huh? Isn't this kind of like mixing oil and water? Not really.

For related reasons, having to do in part with resource constraints, the cost of print subscriptions continue to rise, even sometimes becoming prohibitive. After 40 years as a continuous Wall Street Journal print subscriber, I canceled my print subscription. It cost nearly $400/year, and I already have an online subscription that costs around $100. The WSJ is great, but not $400/year great, especially in this economy, when I also have the online edition. So I cut the cord and went completely on-line. With online access I can of course search, save articles, print them to Acrobat PDF, the way I used to clip print articles. My paper press archive goes back 30 years, but PDF lasts forever, right? Another advantage of online news: the news is always fresh. Besides I'm helping save the environment, or at least I hope so. I reduce the number of plastic bags (that you can't recycle); I eliminate the need to recycle the paper itself. There is even a potential business advantage to the right e-Reader: It can preserve into the indefinite future the opportunity to view important documents. What could be nicer?

Well, there are advantages to print. Print never crashes. You can read print even when broadband is down or out of reach. You can fall asleep in a chair, drop the newspaper, and not have to buy a new one. Can't do that with a laptop. Print is very easy to read, indoors or out in bright sunlight. And print graphically rich, uses color, and is still more familiar and comfortable. Spouse says "I miss the WSJ print edition." Oh Oh.

I tell her to wait, I'll find an e-Reader that is nearly as good or even better than print. It will meet my kind of Turing test for print: doesn't crash, very portable etc. but also preserves the benefits of online: Searching, always current. iPad is here; Plastic Logic's Que reader is coming. We'll find something (but haven't bought anything yet). Now the limitations begin to appear, both from others' reviews and my own discussions with vendors.

iPad is ever so cool, has Apple's trademark usability, color… what could be better? For one thing, it tries to be everything a netbook can be, way more than just an e-Reader. I don't care if it can run my iPhone apps because I don't have an iPhone. In fact, I don't want to be nickled and dimed (more like dollared) to buy lots of little apps to fill in iPad's gaps (like being able to print or use a USB). And iPad doesn't run Flash, which is commonly used on many web sites, including the online WSJ. This feels a little like the "microsofting" of Apple. You can run anything, but not without add-ons that may not play well together. So I can buy another iPad-custom WSJ subscription, right? And do I do that for every subscription? Oh well, at least iPad has a (downsized) browser, so I can get to the WSJ in some fashion if I decide to spring for an iPad. But what about the other constraints? Early reviews say that that beautiful 1 and one half pound product begins to feel very heavy after a while, even can make your wrists hurt. And what kind of netbook wannabe is only single-threaded?

So I've now talked with a marketing rep from Plastic Logic about Que, and expect to get an evaluation device as soon as they become available. Yes, I know it will not display color (hey, the WSJ didn't start using color until it became common in other print editions). And it is very light and also cool in its own way – even has a screen that is more book-like, roughly 8 ½ y 11 inches. It reads virtually every document format known to humankind, and has huge amounts of space for all my books. But wait: It doesn't do flash either, and apparently has no browser, not even a limited one.

Maybe I misunderstood. And maybe when I finally get my hands on Que, I'll discover other advantages that cancel out the negatives.

Or quite possibly there is no perfect e-Reader. I'm guessing that's the case, since this is the real world. And if that's the case, I have to figure out exactly what a document is, and what attributes are optional (like Flash). That is no easy decision, since it requires peering into the future and guessing exactly what I'll be willing to do without.

And that's where the similarity with Peak Oil comes in. Liquid fossil fuels provide 95% or so of the world's transportation fuel needs. Yet liquid fuels will eventually run out, and before they do, they will become erratically less available and more expensive. So we'll also have to figure out which transportation options are critical, which optional. I'm guessing SUVs are optional, and public transit is critical.

And this may even have some bearing on e-Readers: they depend on electricity and broadband. Those are critical resources too, right?

What's your guess, about which transportation choices are critical and which are optional?

What's your guess about what constitutes the essence of a document, so it can be preserved and read generations hence?


 

Energy "Thought of the Moment"

Brief thought about energy, expressed from time to time.

Historic Blizzards in DC 2010-Peak Oil Thought Experiment

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard about the series of 4 winter storms that have hit the metropolitan DC area, starting with 19 Dec 2009 and continuing to this evening, 10 February 2010. DC's Reagan National's total snowfall to date exceeds historic records: 54.9" total compared with 54.4" set in 1898-1899. Not only that, in Northwest DC where I live, we always get 4-6" more than does National, which is right off the Potomac waters. Since there was no Reagan National in 1898, that total was probably more realistic than the 54.9" recorded at National – add 5" at least, or "normalizing" today's totals—making them apples to apples with 1898—the total is probably more like 60" compared with 54.4". Our electric utility, Pepco, shows huge numbers of power outages.See the little "hat" icons?

Those show where workers –already stressed to the bone—are trying to restore power.

We've had 4 snowstorms-cum-blizzards since the 19^th of December. Here are some photos during the 3^rd storm, after the neighborhood was somewhat cleared, and some from today, the February 10. Here's a second-story street view including my Corolla, during the 3^rd storm.

And here's my (beloved) screen house after the third storm – no time to take it down in November since it was always too cold, and the vinyl roof would crack.

And here's that same Corolla 6^th of February, before the fourth storm. I bravedthe roads to get the local Giant grocery store to buy some milk and a few other necessities (champagne off the list; liquor store was still closed). There were lots of empty shelves. I managed to buy milk, eggs, and some other things. The store was packed.

And the screen house after the 4^th storm – leaning precariously towards the gas grill. See how much snow there is on the grill, which I cleared between storms.

Last night there was a natural gas explosion (maybe not the right word) when the consistently 20 degree F or lower temperature caused a breakdown at a gas meter near Lafayette School, about a mile from my house. There was a loud thunderclap (no actual explosion), a strong rotten egg gas smell, and authorities considered evacuating houses in the area (to where?), until the gas company could get through the snow and shut off gas to the school.

Interesting times.

But what the heck does this have to do with a Peak Oil thought experiment?

The thought experiment is that we might see similarities in life after 4 blizzards-in-a-row and life after peak oil.

And what on earth does "Peak Oil" even mean? Well, for starters it doesn't mean that on a year certain the invisible oil spigot is shut off, and suddenly there is no oil. The definition is more subtle. And as you may know, oil not only provides gasoline, but plastics, diesel, many pharmaceuticals, electricity (for those power plants that burn diesel), and may other things that we take for granted. Shut off the oil and you shut off the other products. No, what global peak oil means is simply that world-wide, we've extracted the most petroleum that the world has ever seen, and year-by-year we will produce less.

Now we all know that everything runs out eventually. When will "Peak Oil" happen? 50 years hence? 2007? Opinions differ. "Peak oil" is usually considered along with the economics of extracting it. So the bubbly that flowed effortlessly from the ground in the "Beverly Hillbillies" comedy shows –not unlike the Quaker State oil in Pennsylvania— becomes very expensive to extract from $1 billion plus deep water rigs like Chevron's in the Gulf of Mexico. Clearly the easy bubbly stuff , which was so inexpensive to collect and refine, becomes much more expensive when Chevron has to drill 4 miles below the ocean and another 2 miles in the surface below that.

Add to the increasing extraction cost the fact that demand for fossil fuels is also increasing, everywhere from Saudi Arabia (yes) to India and China, and you can visualize a picture of gasoline and other fossil fuel-based products becoming increasingly expensive and scarce, as the US (and other countries) compete for the diminishing, ever more costly products. Think of a 7th grade graph with two lines, one sloping down (oil production) as another slopes up (demand).

So what will that world be like, whenever it begins? Perhaps it won't be a "tipping point" where suddenly everybody realizes it has occurred. Maybe it will be a series of unpleasant events where everything from gasoline to plastics and other petroleum-based products become intermittently available and more costly, on an upward trend of cost and a downward trend of availability.

A glimpse of that world might be like life during the blizzards. Store shelves –depending on just-in-time deliveries by semi's from distant locations, don't show up in time. Perhaps the rig owner-operators can't afford the expensive fill-ups, keep driving for cheaper diesel, and don't deliver on time. Perhaps utility deliveries of electricity to my house become intermittent – maybe they've installed wind or solar power which eventually became competitive with fossil-based fuels, but the wind died down and the sun didn't shine today.

What does that do to us in our homes? During these blizzards, I've grown accustomed to carrying around an LED flashlight in case the power goes out. I had a natural-gas fireplace installed several years ago as a heat backup. (Yes, natural gas is also fossil fuel, but it –like coal-- may run out after oil). I have thankfully been able to telecommute since I kept my power, heat, cell and land line phones, and broadband. I didn't miss the daily drive to Herndon, but I did miss the person-to-person interaction. Still, we collaborated successfully and got our work done. My son-in-law turned down my offer to drive to their house before the storm and deliver my WII console for the grand kids – he said they were learning to play games together and enjoying reading. "Good choice," I thought.

Still, after nearly a week housebound and even without postal mail, I've felt like I was more than housebound, almost under house arrest. But we coped and are getting to enjoy it after a fashion. I can't do anything about it, but I also wonder how the street people are faring. In this world of confinement to my close neighbors, the best I can do is check on Mary, the nearly 90 year old, feisty lady who insists she doesn't need anything, but accepted my freshly baked bread.

So is the fourth DC blizzard a metaphor for peak oil? Do you think the whole idea is hooey? Love to hear your comments (spammers need not apply).

Last Harvest - December Salad

In my earlier post, I lamented the meager harvest for all my organic urban gardening efforts and hoped for better times next year (don't we all, gardeners or not?). Weeds had overtaken everything; harvest was pitiful.

Well here's a little update. A month ago I harvested 15 pounds of sweet potatoes, just before the annual scourge of the leaves. Ordinarily I spend over two months raking, moving the piles to the front for DC leaf pickup, a total of leaves at least 5 feet high, 5 feet wide, and maybe 25 feet long. A huge mess. This year I found a way to make lemonade out of the leaf lemons. Instead of using a leaf blower to blow them, I raked them into easy small piles every few feet. I then used the "reverse switch" and a pouch on my blower and mulched the leaves. This divide-and-conqueor strategy was so much easier to deal with, and instead of piling them up for the city to truck away, i've made beautiful layers of mulch, a winter blanket over the perennials, raised beds, asparagas, and everything else.

And one immediate benefit: the salad you see above. I think this must be a DC gardener's record, harvesting a fresh organic salad on the 10th of December. I'd picked the last of my tomatoes a couple weeks ago and let it ripen on a sill. I'd planted the lettuce in August, but mulched it with the leaves and covered them whenever a frost was forecast.

Tonight I picked enough lettuce for two bowls, and have covered the plants back over with leaf mulch to see if they can survive the below 20 degree F predicted temperature this evening. (Where is global warming when you need it? Can't help asking that.)

So did I transform the leaf scourge to leaf blessing by living without oil? Not completely. Pepco burned something (or used Nuclear power) to generate the electricity. Still, the city trucks didn't have to cart my 600 or so cubic feet of leaves to who-knows-where. I'll bet my net energy use was less than the city would have spent carting them all away, and I've now got a great layer of mulch for next year's garden.

Urban Micro Gardening

Lifelong Gardener – New Challenges

If you consider life after easily accessible oil and products such as artificial fertilizer derived from petroleum products, the thought occurs: "How will people cope?" Especially in an urban setting, you cannot be self sufficient. Still, can we become a bit less attached to modern food systems and even pass along urban gardening knowledge to those who follow? As a life long gardener I thought this would be easy. It isn't. That's what this post is about.

I have gardened all my life, starting in my teens with a quarter acre of land in northern NH, then on a third acre house lot in central Massachusetts. I like growing almost everything: herbs, flowers, vegetables, fruits (I’ve even tried mushrooms). Now I am living in northern Washington DC literally 6 miles from the White House. To quote Jefferson “Though an old man, I am yet a young gardener.” This garden has no more than 1/10th of an acre growing space surrounded by oak trees and on a downslope. My gardening efforts have grown beyond mere hobby with two new directions: An experiment to see how much can be produced on this little patch of earth, and a living lesson to my grandkids and others what is involved in approaching sustainable gardening. I’ve learn just how hard it is to garden in an urban setting even with significant sustainability investments.

Apart from the small space, there are other challenges: animals and barely adequate sunshine. Yes, animals: I built a 6’ fence to keep out the deer, rabbits and foxes, but I still lose produce to birds, squirrels, raccoons and who knows what all else. The neighbors love (and DC protects) its trees; I compromised and cut down enough to get me perhaps 6 hours daily sunshine.

Garden Strategy

My gardening strategy has several elements, each with a sustainability theme. First, pack quite a bit into a small space without overcrowding, and plant many small things in small numbers. Secondly, favor heirloom varieties since they require less fertilizer and you can harvest their seeds. Third, although aesthetics are important, think creatively and landscape with edibles. Strawberries and sweet potatoes are a pretty ground cover; blueberries are beautiful shrubs. Finally, diversity is important, since you never know what will succeed from year to year. I plant perennials, annuals, and dwarf trees.

I’ve emphasized sustainability with 3 rain barrels (185 gallons total capacity), an upward migration worm farm, tumbling composter, raised beds, and electric tiller. In fact, I've given away all my gasoline-powered tools in favor of electric and battery-based alternatives. (How well they work is also another post for another day.) We recycle essentially all table scraps, garden waste, and even some newsprint; our goal is to throw away no more than one garbage bag of waste each week, continuously looking for ways to reduce waste further.

That picture of a rain barrel? That's one of three that I own. Beautiful, functional, and if you're lucky lots of free unchlorinated water easily dripped into your garden. What could go wrong? Lots of things... but that's a post for another day.


What’s growing in this small space? I have a dozen asparagus plants, six rhubarb plants, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, horseradish, two super-dwarf peach trees, a fig tree, a dwarf pear tree (picked since it doesn’t require another for cross-pollination). I grow herbs in pots and in the ground. We are experimenting with both culinary and medicinal uses for the 20 or so varieties.

I have tilled a circular area roughly 15’ in diameter for flowers, and another 100 square feet to see if I can grow sweet potatoes (these have become a groundcover extension of the flower garden). I have five plastic “Earthboxes,” essentially sealed containers of potting mix that require very little watering, fertilizing, and no weeding. Each can grow two tomato plants or 6 peppers, for example. These also are on wheels so I can move them to the brightest areas of the yard depending on the season. Lastly, I have two raised beds, each 8’ x 20’.

I run drip hoses from each rain barrel to different gardens. Worm compost and tea go into the gardens, as does the regular compost (supplemented with numerous pages from the Washington Post).

What have I achieved?

A more important question though, is “what are you harvesting from all these plantings?” Simple answer: Do you remember the book titled “The $64 Tomato”? I’d be happy if mine were that cheap. Perhaps it’s the difficulty of the Urban Garden paradigm, but this garden has been the most disappointing and difficult of any I’ve had through the decades. And I’ve spent in the 5 digits to set it up and make it work. If I were the quitting kind, I’d quit.

Some things like the peach, pear and fig trees may eventually bear fruit. Trees take time. But so far is not so good, primarily because of the extraordinarily low yields generally.


Lessons Learned

Urban gardening constraints are far less forgiving than growing in larger rural gardens. Oddly, the problem with animals is MORE severe in the city than in the country. For example, I suspect the deer in northern NH have learned that people eat venison, while they’ve also learned they have no natural predators in D.C.

Larger gardens provide more room for experimenting and more produce even when yields per plant are lower. This forces urban gardeners to react quickly to problems, measure everything, and document ongoing “lessons learned” to apply with each new season.

There are many advantages to growing heritage varieties. They provide a hedge against varying climate conditions (since they’ve learned to adapt). You can re-use the seeds. The produce is generally tastier (even if less pretty). They also require less fertilizer, perhaps growing with just compost and worm dirt. However, heritage varieties do yield a lot less than hybrids and often require longer growing seasons. It’s probably a good idea to grow both heritage and hybrid varieties. The little fertilizer needed for the hybrids is a better use of scarce resources than many other uses we can all name (think SUVs).

Be flexible, very flexible. If something doesn’t work out, and the reasons are beyond your control, then forget how much time, money and effort you put into it, and do something different. Find fast growing or shade-tolerant things to grow where there is the least sun. Decide which is more important for the best areas: mint or rhubarb, for example. I’m digging up the mint (it seems to grow nicely anywhere) and putting in more rhubarb where the original plants did very well.

Test your gardening area for moisture, sun, PH, and nutrients. Use an all-in-one tester (which unfortunately does not measure Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potash separately) or test individually.

And remember, there’s always next year.

Taleb, Noonan, and a Supermarket Conversation

In her WSJ editorial dated March 13, 2009, There's no Pill For This Kind of Depression, Peggy Noonan described a phenomenon that I noticed recently in a supermarket checkout line. We all seem, pretty much simultaneously, to have come to believe that the world is not only worse off than anybody would have said a year ago, but that it will be bad for a long time.

Noonan credits this to the idea that

“The writer and philosopher Laurens van der Post, in his memoir of his friendship with Carl Jung, said, 'We live not only our own lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time.'"

“Of our time,” meaning that we have come to a concurrent conclusion that we are all witnessing a Black Swan event. The concept of such a thing was popularized by Nassim Taleb in his book of that name: Once in a while something totally unforeseen happens. Taleb elaborates on that idea on his website, Fooled by Randomness. Taleb asserts that there are some kinds of events (Black Swan events) that you essentially cannot foresee, even when the warnings are there.

Noonan says that we have a collective unintended common belief shaped by our time (that Black Swan event). Today, the event is the serious near-Depression and the common belief is that it won’t get better very soon at all. Noonan describes a “wall street titan” she interviewed five weeks ago, asking him what people should do next. He said: “Everyone should try to own a house, he said, no matter how big or small, but it has to have some land, on which you should learn how to grow things.”

Now to my supermarket checkout line conversation. A middle-aged woman ahead of me was buying a bunch of pussy willows, and we got to talking. She said that once she’d stuck a branch in the grown and it rooted, almost damaging her plumbing with its growth. I mentioned I’d done something similar by cutting some tomato branches last October before the first frost – I’d put them in water, they’d rooted, and I expect to plant these now 2’ tall tomato plants in a few weeks.

She responded that she didn’t have much land in the back of her house, but was seriously thinking of digging up the front lawn to grow some vegetables. In Northwest D.C. you just don’t do that. It hurts property values, and neighbors complain. (Unless you are a wealthy heir of a food company, then you dig up all you want and plant sunflowers and potatoes out front… I’ve
seen that too.)

Taleb and Noonan are both right. The Black Swan event happened, and we were all caught by surprise. Noonan was right that we are all gripped with the same kind of pandemic fear, sharing the life of our time.

Maybe good will come of this. We’ll all get down to our roots, back to basics, and that will be part of our shared recovery. And we’ll collectively stop our blind consumption of resources of all kinds, including fossil fuels, buying some time to figure out sustainable alternatives.

I hope so.

Peak Lithium? Why Should You Care?

What the heck is lithium and why should you care? First things first; what is lithium?
My first encounter with lithium was as a surreptitious high school participant in a science experiment. My teen buddies and I got a small piece of lithium and dropped it into a toilet to let it fizz.

That was exciting. But beyond the plop-fizz thing, what else should you know about lithium?

Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia:
“According to theory, lithium was one of the very few elements synthesized in the Big Bang, although its quantity has vastly decreased since that time. The reasons for its disappearance, and the processes by which new lithium is created, continue to be active matters of study in astronomy. Though very light, lithium is nevertheless less common in the universe than any of the first 20 elements.”
To learn more, go to Wikipedia.

All this is mildly interesting, but it doesn’t answer the question “why should I care?”

Here’s why.

President Obama’s and others’ hoped for transformation of our transportation systems –including your car—from petroleum based to electric, depends on rechargeable batteries. The best chemical bet at this time seems to be lithium batteries. Lithium ion batteries are the majority choice, although lithium phosphate batteries are less apt to catch on fire – but they too depend on stable and abundant supplies of lithium. Click here for more on lithium phosphate alternative rechargeable batteries.

The common thread is easy to see: Lithium. Note this phrase in the above Wikipedia quote: …less common in the universe than any of the first 20 elements. And that leads to the next point.

Where in the world do you find lithium? Not at Home Depot. Here is a quote from Peak Oil Review from its February 9 2009 newsletter (ask me how to receive this if you’re interested).
In the rush to build the next generation of hybrid or electric cars, a sobering fact confronts both automakers and governments seeking to lower their reliance on foreign oil: almost half of the world’s lithium, the mineral needed to power the vehicles, is found in Bolivia — a country that may not be willing to allow much access to the mineral. (Peak Oil Review, 09 Feb 2009).
Recently Simon Romero wrote about this in the NY Times. Here is a quote:

“We know that Bolivia can become the Saudi Arabia of lithium,” said Francisco Quisbert, 64, the leader of Frutcas, a group of salt gatherers and quinoa farmers on the edge of Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat. “We are poor, but we are not stupid peasants. The lithium may be Bolivia’s, but it is also our property.”

How much lithium is in Bolivia and elsewhere? The article goes on to say that “The United States Geological Survey says 5.4 million tons of lithium could potentially be extracted in Bolivia, compared with 3 million in Chile, 1.1 million in China and just 410,000 in the United States. And beyond the current use of lithium in cell phones and laptops, what will be the impact of plug-in hybrid automobiles on the supply of lithium? Here’s what Mitsubishi spokesman said on the BBC News, November 9, 2008: “Mitsubishi, which plans to release its own electric car soon, estimates that the demand for lithium will outstrip supply in less than 10 years unless new sources are found.”

Now technology optimists will always say, and sometimes be right in saying, that we can always find alternatives. Still, the time is short for alternatives; GM is pinning its hopes for survival on the Volt, to be available in 2010. Not sure
Google “peak lithium” and you’ll find this WSJ blog. http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/02/03/peak-lithium-will-supply-fears-drive-alternative-batteries/
This blog describes alternatives such as zinc-air batteries. However, one very large obstacle: they aren’t rechargable and have a short lifespan. That’s akin to saying “except for that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”

So are plug-in hybrid automobiles truly a climate-friendly, peak-oil mitigating alternative to the internal combustion engine?