Singapore Peak Oil

Singapore's Inter-Ministerial Committee on Sustainable Development (IMCSD) has unveiled its blueprint for sustainable development. You can download it at: http://app.mewr.gov.sg/data/ImgCont/1292/sustainbleblueprint_forweb.pdf

My impressions? In short, it is inadequate and myopic. It is another step on the road to diminishing returns on investments in social complexity. (See also: New Scientist article)

In spite of the blueprint's laudable efforts and lofty goals to maintain sustainable growth (an oxymoron really) and to promote green living standards, one topic that is sorely missing is any discussion at all about the future availability of dense energy sources, namely fossil fuels, to implement the "four-pronged strategy".

Energy is required for water recycling, purification and desalination, for waste management and recycling, for public transportation, for the construction of green buildings, etc. The big question which is not answered in the blueprint: where will we get the energy to carry out these activities in the next 20 years?

Sure the blueprint talks alot about energy efficiency and technologies, but they should focus on total overall consumption instead. If total overall consumption keeps growing, a finite resource like oil or natural gas will eventually be depleted regardless of how efficiently it is consumed per capita. See charts below.

Sources: EMA, Singstat and E2Singapore

The blueprint states:

In the past 10 years, households in Singapore consumed 64% more electricity, 21% more water, and generated 21% more solid waste. (p.40)

Will technology save us? No, because firstly it will likely result in greater consumption of energy and resources according to "Jevons Paradox," named after the 19th century English economist who observed that the increased efficiency in consumption of a resource tends to increase overall consumption and demand. Secondly, technology runs on energy. All forms of alternative energy depend on energy inputs from shrinking reserves of fossil fuels during the manufacturing process, and due to reasons of complexities of scale, diminishing energy returns, low energy qualities and energy interchangeability challenges, alternative energy supplies can never fully replace fossil fuels. Minister Yaacob Ibrahim, co-chairman of the IMCSD, has acknowledged this fact in the Business Times (28 April 2009, p.32):

"If you ask us whether we can really change our economic structure and replace all the fossil fuels that we import with alternative energy - not possible."

Considering that surplus energy is required for growth and complex societies like ours to function smoothly, how shall we live after peak oil if alternative energies are not viable substitutes?

The Export Land Model developed by geologist Jeffrey Brown and others forecasts that the top five net oil exporting countries of the world (Saudi Arabia, Russia, Norway, Iran and the UAE), who presently account for half of the world's net oil exports, will cease to export any oil by 2030 because of rising domestic consumption in their own countries and declining field production. In other words, they will have ZERO oil surpluses for export by 2030; they keep whatever they have for themselves and the rest of the world gets nothing. Actually, we don't even have to wait till 2030 to experience the painful effects because the model projects that their oil exports will be halved by 2015. If you think about that for a minute, the implications are profound and far-reaching; we're talking about distressing adjustments to the way we live, eat, work and play for the next 10-20 years.

Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame, defines a city as "people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life." Singapore certainly fits that description. Because of our excessive reliance on transient supplies of fossil fuels for food and electricity, densely populated cities like Singapore are by nature unsustainable and abnormal in the history of civilisation. William Catton, author of Overshoot, characterises this aberration as a "phantom carrying capacity" - that portion of a population that cannot be permanently supported when temporarily available resources [fossil fuels] become unavailable.

I am a little amazed that our sustainability blueprint for the next 20 years would exclude any major discussions of future energy sources. Just like the Ministry of Trade and Industry's "Energy for Growth - National Energy Policy" report, the sustainable blueprint has been disappointing. IMCSD has failed to connect the dots between the economy and the ecosystem by erroneously believing "that growth and environmental sustainability are compatible and mutually reinforcing (p.78)" and by neglecting any studies on future energy availability.

Fellow Singaporeans, brace yourself for a tumultuous future.

The only viable long term solution? Stop growing. Relocalize and embrace a steady state economy.

The Inter-Ministerial Committee on Sustainable Development that was set up in February this year is asking for feedback on how Singapore can continue to be "lively, liveable and sustainable." I urge you to give your feedback to them here:

http://www.sustainablesingapore.gov.sg/

Here's my feedback to them:

Dear Singapore Government,

if you want a permanent long term solution to a sustainable Singapore, please consider the works of ecological economists such as Herman Daly, Brian Czech, and Robert Costanza. Please re-examine the questionable notions that relentless economic and population growth are always essential and favourable to our well-being.

According to some peak oil experts, we have probably reached the peak in global oil production. World net oil exports and production have plateaued since 2005 and according to some estimates will decline sharply from 2012. Peak oil imposes limits to growth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UjvxBqVmgE

I suggest the following:

1. Negative population growth. Please understand that our carrying capacity is limited by food availability. If global oil production declines from 2012 and natural gas after 2020, so will global food production. Considering that we import 90% of our food sources, what will we eat then? We can either choose to reduce our numbers in orderly fashion, or Nature will deal with it unsympathetically.

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/6069
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html


2. Intensify efforts to develop solar energy even if they are not currently economically feasible because it will be too late to mitigate the severe consequences if we wait for market price signals. The Hirsch Report states that we need a crash program at least 20 years before the peak to transition smoothly.

http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf


3. Implement sustainable organic urban farming by learning from the Cubans who successfully overcame their artificial peak oil crisis in the early 1990s after the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

http://globalpublicmedia.com/articles/657
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-66172489666918336&hl=en


4. A Steady State Economy: "An economy viewed as a subsystem in dynamic equilibrium with the parent ecosystem / biosphere that sustains it. Quantitative growth is replaced with qualitative development or improvement as the basic goal."

Herman Daly:

'Sustainable development' therefore makes sense for the economy, but only if it is understood as 'development without growth'—i.e., qualitative improvement of a physical economic base that is maintained in a steady state by a throughput of matter-energy that is within the regenerative and assimilative capacities of the ecosystem. Currently the term 'sustainable development' is used as a synonym for the oxymoronic 'sustainable growth.' It must be saved from this perdition.

http://www.steadystate.org/CASSEFAQs.html
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3941
http://dieoff.org/page88.htm
http://www.npg.org/forum_series/steadystate.html
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-economist-has-no-clothes


5. Segregated cycle facilities or bicycle lanes on the roads. Petrol prices and car ownership will become prohibitively expensive in the coming years and getting around on a bicycle is one way to beat the transportation blues besides having to squeeze into our already packed buses and trains during rush hour. It's also a good way to keep fit and to reduce air pollution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bike_path

6. Adopt the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) as a metric of progress and well-being. The GDP as the public policy think tank, Redefining Progress, puts it:

[GDP] is merely a gross tally of products and services bought and sold, with no distinctions between transactions that add to well-being, and those that diminish it. Instead of separating costs from benefits, and productive activities from destructive ones, the GDP assumes that every monetary transaction adds to well-being, by definition

The GPI takes into account more than twenty aspects of our economic lives that the GDP ignores. It includes estimates of the economic contribution of numerous social and environmental factors which the GDP dismisses with an implicit and arbitrary value of zero. It also differentiates between economic transactions that add to well-being and those which diminish it. The GPI then integrates these factors into a composite measure so that the benefits of economic activity can be weighed against the costs.

The GPI is intended to provide citizens and policy-makers with a more accurate barometer of the overall health of the economy, and of how our national condition is changing over time.

http://dieoff.org/page11.htm
http://www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indicator.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genuine_Progress_Indicator


A truly sustainable Singapore calls for a paradigm shift in our position towards growth. If we don't carry out the necessary steps as suggested above by some scientists and ecological economists, the outcome of our present policies in the years ahead will be calamitous for us as a nation. Stop thinking economically only and start thinking ecologically too.

Excerpts from a speech by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at the World Cities Summit, 24 June 2008:

The first element of sustainable living is to conserve resources. It is especially important to conserve energy, in the form of electricity and fuel. This is both to minimise wastage, and also because usually energy derives from fossil fuel, and saving energy also reduces carbon emissions.

The idea is there, but it does not convey the urgency and gravity of the sustainability problems that we are facing due to resource depletion. It would have been better, albeit tactless and undiplomatic, to have said bluntly: "The first element of sustainable living is to understand that any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will collapse. (Tainter's Axiom)"

To have the greatest effect, energy efficiency should be factored into the way the whole city is designed, including its urban layout, buildings, transport system and industrial facilities...Such cities can still improve their energy efficiency, for example by encouraging use of public transport instead of cars, and not over-cooling or over-heating buildings. But substantial improvements will take time.

Energy efficiency is, of course, desirable. What the Singapore government often overlooks is total consumption. There are, after all, finite amounts of fossil fuels and no measure of efficiency is going to stop us from exhausting what's left in the ground if the total quantity of energy we extract increases every year. Instead of focusing purely on per capita consumption, it's more important and logical to be mindful of total energy consumption.

Look at the charts below and compare how even though we have improved our energy efficiency, total electricity consumption has risen relentlessly.

Sources: EMA, Singstat and E2Singapore

One more thing about efficiency that we need to be mindful of - Jevon's Paradox

In economics, the Jevons Paradox is an observation made by William Stanley Jevons, that as technological improvements increase the efficiency with which a resource is used, total consumption of that resource tends to increase, rather than decrease. It is historically called the Jevons Paradox as it ran counter to popular intuition. However, the situation is well understood in modern economics. In addition to reducing the amount needed for a given output, improved efficiency lowers the relative cost of using a resource – which increases demand. Overall resource use increases or decreases depending on which effect predominates. --- WIKI

Ideally energy should be priced not just at today’s market levels, but also taking into account the likelihood of a future carbon-constrained world, be it due to scarcer supplies of fossil fuels or a post-Kyoto regime to restrain carbon emissions.

"Scarcer supplies of fossil fuels" - Peak oil, Peak Natural Gas.

Another strategy is to shift towards clean and renewable energy, like wind and solar power, with a smaller carbon footprint. These should be part of the solution, but realistically they lack the scale to replace more than a small proportion of fossil fuel use.

Good. He realises that alternative energies are not a direct convenient replacement for oil.

There have been breakthroughs in water technologies, more so than in clean energy. In the last two decades, advances in reverse osmosis and membrane technologies have made desalination, water reuse and other water purification techniques significantly cheaper, and enabled them to be deployed on a large scale. This has transformed the problem from an absolute resource constraint to a question of economics. More water is available, at the right price.

I disagree. The question is not entirely one of money but more importantly energy. Water treatment plants require huge energy inputs to operate. How are we going to produce affordable potable water if the price of energy continues to ascend? How can we maintain or increase our current treated water output levels if there is a shortfall of energy? Like the Minister Mentor, he is holding on to a fundamental error held by mainstream economists by believing that money will solve our resource problems:

Error: Economic activity as a function of infinite "money creation", rather than a function of finite "energy stocks" and finite "energy flows". In fact, the economy is 100% dependent on available energy -- it always has been, and it always will be. LINK

The full text of the PM's speech can be found here.