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802b999
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a company's engineers develop new equipment that can pump out more petroleum at a lower cost, the effective size of the reservoir increases. Not the actual size--its physical dimensions--but the effective size, the amount of oil and gas that can be extracted in the foreseeable future.
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Charles C. Mann |
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44ce72a
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Stories like that of Kern River have occurred all over the world for decades. After hearing them over and over again from geologists, I realized Hubbert and Limits were going about matters the wrong way. An oil reservoir in the earth is a stock. If it becomes too costly or difficult to extract, people will either find new reservoirs, new techniques to extract more from old reservoirs, or new methods to use less to accomplish the same goal. ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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7f5beaa
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It is commonly asked, when will the world's supply of oil be exhausted?" wrote the MIT economist Morris Adelman. "The best one-word answer: never." On its face, this seems ridiculous--how could a finite stock be inexhaustible, when a constantly renewed flow can run out? But more than a century of experience has shown it to be true. As a practical matter, we know only that there is more than enough for the foreseeable future. That is, fossil..
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Charles C. Mann |
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ba9398f
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Rapid urbanization is a hallmark of our age. In 1950 fewer than one out of three of the world's people lived in cities. By 2050, according to United Nations projections, the figure will be almost two out of three. Meanwhile the world's population will have more than tripled. In 1950, 750 million people lived in urban areas; by 2050, demographers project, 6.3 billion will--more than eight times as many. For the most part, farmers have kept u..
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Charles C. Mann |
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16199c7
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cost and technical difficulty are not the primary reason so many modern cities have been unable to provide water to their inhabitants. Again and again, the biggest obstacle has been what social scientists call governmentality and what everybody else calls corruption, inefficiency, incompetence, and indifference. French cities lose a fifth of their water supply to leaks; Pennsylvania's cities lose almost a quarter; cities in KwaZulu-Natal, t..
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Charles C. Mann |
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c7301e3
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About 3.5 percent of the weight of seawater consists of dissolved salts, most of it table salt. The most common way of removing the salt is known as "reverse osmosis."
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Charles C. Mann |
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0424e85
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In 1966 Israel invited a California scientist, Sidney Loeb, to spend a year at Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva (the new Hebrew name for Beersheba). Loeb had worked for industry after taking an undergraduate degree in engineering in 1941. Feeling restless, he quit his job at the age of forty and went to graduate school at the University of California at Los Angeles. Like the researchers in Israel, scientists at UCLA had been seeking prac..
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Charles C. Mann |
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e23f973
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The drumbeat of negative forecasts had its effect: the United States and the European powers rushed to control every drop of oil in the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. In light of the last eighty years of history in these regions, it is hard to view these moves as enduring successes.
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Charles C. Mann |
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9c80d0b
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Could the doomsayers have been correct, but rung the alarm a little too early? After all, Earth is finite, so the amount of energy it contains must also be finite. Isn't it wholly rational to expect fossil fuels to run out?
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Charles C. Mann |
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78dcc88
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Hubbert, one of the nation's most important petroleum scientists, built much of the intellectual framework for the environmental movement. He was a Wizard who became a Prophet.
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Charles C. Mann |
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cd7cad9
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Augustin Mouchot was far from the first to realize that the sun's energy could be tapped. For more than two thousand years Chinese architects had been aligning windows and doors with the southern sky to let sunlight flood into rooms during winter, heating cold interiors. Thousands of miles away, Greek savants expounded the same architectural principles to their disciples. So, later, did the Romans, according to the solar-energy chronicler J..
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Charles C. Mann |
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0c920aa
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But Mouchot was learning the limitations of solar power. Sunlight is plentiful and free, but it comes as an intermittent flow, not a reliable stock. Mouchot's engines were useless at night or on cloudy days--and French skies were often cloudy. Even when the sun shone, the mirrors were costly. One skeptical engineer noted in a review of Mouchot's work that running a typical one-horsepower steam engine required "about two kilograms [4.4 pound..
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Charles C. Mann |
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b4b5636
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Historians estimate that in 1800 all of the steam engines in Britain could generate perhaps 50,000 horsepower. By 1870 the figure had soared to more than 1.3 million horsepower, a twenty-six-fold increase. Nobody was going to wait for solar enthusiasts to fiddle with mirrors that didn't work on rainy days. Mouchot was trying to persuade society to switch from a stable stock of coal to an inconstant flow of sunlight. And society was not terr..
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Charles C. Mann |
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9750cc6
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Hubbert laid this out in the Technocracy Study Course: Should the fruit flies continue to multiply at their initial compound interest rate, it can be shown by computation that in a relatively few weeks the number would be considerably greater than the capacity of the bottle. This being so, it is a very simple matter to see why there is a definite limit to the number of fruit flies that can live in the bottle. Once the number is reached, the..
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Charles C. Mann |
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8832ac1
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Politicians and economists who argued for perpetual economic growth were deluded, Hubbert said. The population of the United States would hit a maximum "of probably not more than 135,000,000 people" in the 1950s, and after that the nation simply would not contain enough new consumers to need more consumer products. Hoodwinked by the fantasy of continuing growth, the ruling class had lost sight of these basic scientific realities. They were ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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fc1e600
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Hubbert visited a friend who was attending a big natural-resource conference sponsored by the new United Nations. At the conference Hubbert was startled to hear a prominent geologist assert that the world still had 1.5 trillion barrels of obtainable oil, enough to last centuries. "I nearly fell out of my seat," Hubbert recalled later. "I was up here, relaxed, visiting with my friend--and good God Almighty! And nobody said boo." A trillion-a..
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Charles C. Mann |
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d1e8f72
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These ideas might have been expected to draw fire from Hubbert's employer--he had become second-in-command at a big Shell Oil research center in Houston. But they attracted little notice until 1956,
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Charles C. Mann |
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0b3047a
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Because energy is critical to modern life, these utilities, as we now call them, became so politically important that many governments seized them as essential tools of the state; other nations contented themselves with heavy regulation. Either way, utilities have become a prominent feature of the contemporary landscape. Economically speaking, the advantages of Wizard-style, hard-path centralization and scale were so overwhelming that until..
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Charles C. Mann |
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1b7aecd
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Solar research had been the product of anxiety about fossil fuels. When the anxiety faded, so did the interest.
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Charles C. Mann |
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c2252fe
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President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 invited all forty-six U.S. governors to the White House to decry the "imminent exhaustion" of fossil fuels and other natural resources--"the weightiest problem now before the nation." Afterward Roosevelt asked the U.S. Geological Survey to assay domestic oil reserves, the first such analysis ever undertaken. Its conclusions, released in 1909, were emphatic: if the nation continued "the present rate of in..
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Charles C. Mann |
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b2c302f
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becomes as hot as the sun? Earth, he knew, reflects some heat back into space. But why isn't all of it reflected? What keeps our planet cozily warm, Goldilocks-style, and not too hot or too cold?
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Charles C. Mann |
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27131f8
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of bacteria, algae, and other truly important creatures. The third was that species, like sullen teenagers, don't pick up after themselves. Cyanobacteria sprayed their oxygen garbage all over Earth without concern for the consequences--littering on an epic scale. People were doing the same with carbon dioxide.
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Charles C. Mann |
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69fa7a9
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To Margulis, the Great Oxidation Event had lessons for today. The first was that people who thought that living creatures couldn't affect the climate had no idea of the power of life. The second was that the onset of climate change meant that Homo sapiens was getting into the biological big leagues--we were tiptoeing into the
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Charles C. Mann |
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02ed57e
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Wizard-style renewable advocates like the venture-capital-backed firm that built Crescent Dunes scoff at these ideas. Even in the best of circumstances, the process of replacing the present coal-and-gas grid with a new, renewable-energy grid--all the while keeping the old grid running--would be long, expensive, and risky even if it weren't being sabotaged by the people who are supposed to support it. Insisting on using small-scale component..
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Charles C. Mann |
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cc7bb5b
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Prophets see the mile-long stands of photovoltaic cells in projects like Charanka as inherently destructive to communities, natural and human.
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Charles C. Mann |
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e1ae55e
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Strikingly, Crescent Dunes has been fought by Prophets. As a rule, renewable-energy leaders see their goal as building giant, centralized facilities like Crescent Dunes--they are Borlaugians through and through, hard-path advocates in solar guise. But many or most renewable-energy supporters are Prophets who view Big Solar and Big Wind with almost as much distaste as the Big Coal and Big Oil they seek to replace. From its inception, Crescen..
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Charles C. Mann |
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f389924
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Germany, richer than India, has about seventy energy-storage projects, about a third of which collect the output from wind and solar plants into banks of batteries. The price of batteries, like the price of photovoltaics, has been falling. Renewable-energy enthusiasts imagine great warehouses full of batteries, soaking up excess sun power by day, releasing it by night, keeping the lights on in the dark. But no matter how cheap the batteries..
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Charles C. Mann |
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31db630
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Energy from the sun today is responsible for about 1 percent of India's electricity; even in Gujarat, it amounts to just 5 percent. Optimistic scenarios show its share rising to 10 percent by 2022.
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Charles C. Mann |
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df790c1
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Modi shifted gears, refashioning himself as a nattily dressed, tech-friendly progressive who lured major companies, foreign and Indian alike, to invest in Gujarat.
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Charles C. Mann |
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94b0693
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Realizing that solar had become essential to oil production, petroleum firms set up their own photovoltaic subsidiaries. Exxon became, in 1973, the first commercial manufacturer of solar panels; the second, a year later, was a joint venture with the oil giant Mobil. (Exxon and Mobil merged in 1999.) The Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), another oil colossus, ran the world's biggest solar company until it was acquired by Royal Dutch Shell, ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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2182e54
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Sun power's image as the province of baling-wire hippies was at odds with reality. Today's multibillion-dollar photovoltaic industry owes its existence mainly to the Pentagon and Big Oil. The first wide-scale use of solar panels had come in the 1960s: powering military satellites, which couldn't use fossil fuels (too bulky to lift into space) or batteries (impossible to recharge in orbit). By the 1970s photovoltaics were cheaper, but the in..
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Charles C. Mann |
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661a695
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When Chapin tested these novel photovoltaics, they converted about five times more solar energy to electricity than the older selenium panels. But they were still terribly inefficient. Chapin estimated the cost of silicon panels that could supply electricity for a typical middle-class home at $1.43 million (about $13 million in today's dollars). It would be cheaper to cover the entire roof in gold leaf. Daunted by the economics, most resear..
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Charles C. Mann |
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f3bb484
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Fuller and Pearson placed a thin layer of the first type of doped silicon (extra electrons) atop a layer of the second type (extra holes). The two Bell researchers attached the little assembly to a circuit--a loop of wire, in effect--and an ammeter, a device that measures electric currents. When they turned on a desk light, the ammeter showed the two-layer silicon suddenly generating an electric current. The same thing happened with sunligh..
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Charles C. Mann |
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f8a4efb
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Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921 for explaining the photoelectric effect. But Fritts's invention remained a laboratory curiosity.
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Charles C. Mann |
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6fc1239
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As schoolchildren learn, the sun washes Earth with every imaginable type of light wave--X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared radiation, microwaves, radio waves, you name it. About a third of the total is reflected from clouds. Another sixth is taken in by airborne water vapor. That leaves roughly half of the incoming light--most of which is visible light, as it happens--to pass through the atmosphere. Almost all of that half i..
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Charles C. Mann |
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dccb78d
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Brand cites the example of France, which constructed "fifty-six reactors providing nearly all of the nation's electricity in just twelve years." Nuclear power provides about 77 percent of French electricity, a far greater proportion than in any other nation. Today, according to World Bank figures, France emits 5.2 tons of carbon dioxide per capita. The corresponding figure for the United States is 17. France shut down its last coal-fired po..
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Charles C. Mann |
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aa66869
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Two years after winning the divisive 1968 election, President Richard Nixon, a Republican, declared that "the environment," "the great question of the '70s," was a "cause beyond party and beyond factions." The Clean Air Act of that year, which set up U.S. emissions regulations, was one of the world's first general air-quality laws, more stringent and comprehensive than any of its predecessors. Congress passed it overwhelmingly: 73-0 in the ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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ef6fe84
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Katrina was a relatively modest storm that overwhelmed inadequate dikes and levees. Many climate scientists believe that in days to come governments will need to get better at shoreline defense. The world has 136 big, low-lying coastal cities with a total population of about 550 million people. All are threatened by the rising seas associated with climate change.
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Charles C. Mann |
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f5a9392
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In the past few decades, China has lifted more than half a billion people out of destitution--an astonishing accomplishment. That advance was driven by industrialization, and that industrialization was driven almost entirely by coal. More than three-quarters of China's electricity comes from coal. More coal goes to heating millions of homes, smelting steel (China produces nearly half the world's steel), and baking limestone to make cement (..
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Charles C. Mann |
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77b73de
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Coastal flooding could wipe out up to 9.3 percent of the world's annual output by 2100 (a Swedish-French-British team in 2015). It could create losses of up to $2.9 trillion in that year (a German-British-Dutch-Belgian team in 2014). It could put as many as a billion people at risk by 2050 (a Dutch team in 2012). Test cases occurred in 2017, when storms inundated Houston, Puerto Rico, and the Florida Keys.
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Charles C. Mann |
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5b80ec0
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Much the same is occurring in India. Already the world's fastest-growing economy, India will become the world's most populous nation (probably by 2022) and its biggest economy (possibly by 2048). It, too, runs on coal--with similar consequences. New Delhi, ringed by coal plants, is said to have the world's most polluted air, worse than anything in China. India's outdoor air pollution causes 645,000 premature deaths a year, according to a 20..
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Charles C. Mann |
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d9e13d7
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Shanghai, with an average altitude of thirteen feet, is among the many Asian cities vulnerable to rising waters.
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Charles C. Mann |
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54b1a3b
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About 85 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions come from fossil fuels, and about 80 percent of those come from just two sources: coal (46 percent) in its various forms, including anthracite and lignite; and petroleum (33 percent) in its various forms, including oil, gasoline, and propane. Coal and petroleum are used differently. Most petroleum is consumed by individuals and small businesses as they heat their homes and offices and..
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Charles C. Mann |
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477cd7b
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Oil and gasoline use is diffuse, scattered in the global crowd. The world has 1.3 billion vehicles and perhaps 1.5 billion households. Cutting emissions from these cars and homes means changing the daily lives of billions of people, a mind-boggling thought. Reducing global coal emissions, by contrast, means dealing with 3,300 big coal-fired power plants and several thousand big coal-driven steel and cement factories.*10 The task is huge, bu..
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Charles C. Mann |