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.

An email that I sent recently....

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Dear MND and MEWR,

As a concerned Singaporean, I am alarmed to read the following in a speech by Minister Mah Bow Tan:

Cities have to ensure that economic growth is not stunted by infrastructure bottlenecks and that growth does not come at the expense of clean air, clean water and a liveable environment. http://www.mnd.gov.sg/newsroom/Speeches/speeches_2009_M_24042009.htm

I urge the Minister to reconsider that statement because research done by the authors of the "Limits to Growth", ecological economists and scientists have proven that "there is a fundamental conflict between economic growth and environmental protection, including conservation of biodiversity, clean air and water, and atmospheric stability. This conflict is due to natural laws (thermodynamics and ecological structures) - it is simply a result of the way the world works. Mounting evidence of this conflict demonstrates the limits to growth."

A cursory reading of the daily news reports will tell us that we are loosing biodiversity, fresh water, top soil, and clean air at an unprecedented rate and all of this is due to human economic expansion.

I plead with you to read the following articles and re-examine the growth paradigm which has guided us for at least the last 50 years and come to an understanding that this cannot go on forever. At some point, probably now, we will clash with the earth's ecological limits to sustain itself and Nature always wins. This means that societal collapse and die-offs are inevitable unless we take steps now to descend the growth ladder in a controlled manner, or else massive social dislocation is likely to ensue in the years ahead.

A sustainable Singapore requires a new non-growth paradigm to guide us, not the current one that has left the earth devastated and poorer for future generations.

Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil
http://www.esf.edu/efb/hall/2009-05Hall0327.pdf

Economics in a Full World
http://www.publicpolicy.umd.edu/faculty/daly/sciam-Daly5%20copy%201.pdf

Prosperity Without Growth
http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications/downloads/prosperity_without_growth_report.pdf

Why our Economy is Killing the Planet
http://www.scribd.com/doc/13482709/Ecological-Economics-Beyond-Growth-Why-Our-Economy-is-Killing-the-Planet-New-Scientist-18-Oct-2008

Ecological Economics - Beyond Growth - Why Our Economy is Killing the Planet - New Scientist 18 Oct 2008

This is an excellent video which explains Hubbert's peak theory when applied to other natural resources besides oil - peak uranium, peak copper, peak coal, etc. Those who argue that peak oilers habour unfounded fears about the future because we have hundreds of years of coal and uranium deposits that we can rely on often overlook the principle of net energy (EROEI/EROI) and diminishing ore grades. Chris Martenson has done a superb job of explaining in his videos the current crises and connection between the economy, the environment and energy. I encourage everyone to visit his website at http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse and register (it's free) to view his videos in high resolution.

A hundred years ago, markets ruled: fortunes were made, workers abused, bubbles blown. The Austrian School of economists, led by Ludwig von Mises, said this was fine: despite temporary messiness, the market knows best. But the messiness of markets was unacceptable to socialists, some of whom led a revolution in Russia to establish the first state-controlled, planned economy.

The catastrophes of the Great War and The Great Depression led to the ascendancy of John Maynard Keynes, who argued that even capitalist economies need regulation to avert manias and subsequent implosions.

Keynesianism then reigned, as Britain, the US, and most other countries adopted regulations on banking, finance, and industry, in many cases nationalizing railways and other central features of the productive economy.

Meanwhile, rival economist Friedrich von Hayek quietly plotted the Austrian School’s revenge, the occasion for which was offered by stagflation and labour unrest in the 1970s. Von Hayek, who had toiled in obscurity, was now the man of the hour; his acolytes Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan promised to show the way back to prosperity: government was the problem and privatisation the solution!

The ensuing three decades have seen economists crowding back to the ‘Let Markets Rule’ side of the ship, as they giddily praised the wonders of globalisation and free trade.

Since the Collapse of 2008, economists are rushing to announce a new era of neo-Keynesianism: lack of regulation in the finance industry has led us to the brink and only massive government intervention can put us back on track.

Sadly, this time the tracks are gone. The great economic paradigms simply took too much for granted. They assumed that economies run on money and labour, but ignored the roles of energy and ecosystems. They assumed that because population, resource extraction, and available energy had grown throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, they would grow in perpetuity once the proper relations between money, market forces and government regulation were worked out. Almost no one stopped to think that limits to Earth’s atmospheric carbon sinks and supplies of fossil fuels, topsoil and water might impose ultimate limits on economic activity.

The fields of ecological economics and biophysical economics have sprung up to fill in this blind spot of conventional economic thinking, but both are currently marginalised.

In the months ahead we will see a titanic battle over who can restore the beatific condition of perpetual growth. Sadly, neither free marketers nor state controllers have the answer. Humanity has reached physical limits to growth - peak oil and climate change - that spell ruin to all economic philosophies that fail to take such limits into account.

How long will it take the theoreticians to figure this out? How much of our remaining wealth will they destroy in a futile attempt to prove their paradigms eternally true? How far will society unravel before someone in charge begins to question the received wisdom?

Best hopes for quick learning.

Richard Heinberg is a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and author of Peak Everything

Source: http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=2084

William Choong, senior writer for The Straits Times, wrote about the need to "re-embrace the atom" (28 Jan'09, ST). I sent him a short email which you can find in part below. Let's bear in mind that nuclear power is no substitute for oil when it comes to the production of petrochemicals, plastics and pesticides, etc. (I'm not saying that the writer is implying that going nuclear is the solution to all our problems). You can read his piece here: Straits Times or WildSingaporeNews.

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Hi William,

With reference to your article on nuclear energy in today's ST, the problems you neglected to mention and which I feel are important are Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROI or EROEI) and Peak Oil.

I assume you are familiar with these two concepts. If not please read

http://www.energybulletin.net/primer and http://www.eroei.com/articles/the-chain/what-is-eroei/

It takes energy to acquire energy. The entire nuclear cycle from the planning stages, to the building and construction phase, to the mining and enrichment of uranium and disposing of waste is highly dependent on fossil fuels, namely crude oil. So you can't say nuclear energy is in anyway "non-carbon" or free of "greenhouse gases". If ASPO is correct, we should see world oil production begin to decline within the next five years. It's currently on a plateau. When that happens, the energy returned (EROI) from nuclear power is expected to decline and it may no longer be feasible to run nuclear plants. [ Studies on the EROI for nuclear energy vary widely, see http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3877 ]

Why is EROI so important you ask?

Because the production of goods and services is a work process, economies with access to higher EROI fuel sources have greater potential for economic expansion and/or diversification. The history of the expansion of human civilization and its material standard of living is directly linked to, but not caused by, successive access to and development of fuel sources with increasingly greater EROI. The transitions from animate energy sources such as plant biomass, and draft animals, to wind and water power, to fossil fuels and electricity enabled increases in per capita output due to increases in the quantity of fuel available to produce non-energy goods. The transition to higher EROI fuels also enabled social and economic diversification as increasingly less available energy was used in the energy securing process, meaning more fuel was available to support non-extractive activities. Much of inter- and intra-society conflicts can in fact be traced to struggles for control over the disposition of energy surplus. LINK

Hubbert's Peak Oil theory can also be appled to uranium deposits. Some say that uranium supplies peaked in 1980, others say it will peak in 2035, and still others say it won't peak for many hundreds of years. If uranium does peak within 25 years, then we would certainly face difficulties sourcing for uranium to power nuclear plants.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium

Instead of thinking of ways to source for low-carbon energy to fuel our economic and population growth paradigms, we ought to ask ourselves if this is sustainable or possible in a finite world. Ecological/Biophysical economists are calling for a paradigm shift in the world of mainstream neoclassical economics. They have proposed a Steady State framework and I believe it provides answers to our future.

http://www.steadystate.org/CASSEFAQs.html
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3941

I wrote about this some time ago to the ST Forum http://www.straitstimes.com/print/ST%2BForum/Story/STIStory_172145.html

Some people think that a sustainable economy should sustain the rate of growth of GDP. According to this view, the sustainable economy is equivalent to the growth economy, and the question of whether sustained growth is biophysically possible is begged. The political purpose of this stance is to use the buzzword “sustainable” for its soothing rhetorical effect without meaning anything by it. -- Herman Daly

Ecological Economics in a Full World by Herman Daly _SCIAM Sep 2005_ -

Irish Times
By John Gibbons

Growth and the pursuit of growth is the secular religion of the western world, and its dogma is infecting every society.

BRIAN COWEN and Enda Kenny suffer from this. So does Gordon Brown and at least nine in 10 other world leaders. All are labouring under the same crippling psychosis. This is their shared conviction that, whatever the problem, the solution lies in economic growth.

So deeply ingrained has the notion of relentless, limitless growth become that to suggest that it may be the cause of, rather than the solution to, our greatest challenges borders on heresy.

Growth and the pursuit of growth is the secular religion of the western world, and its dogma is gradually infecting every society on Earth via globalisation. Every cult needs its clergy, and the high priests of growth are our economists. Purporting to understand such magic as the "hidden hand of the marketplace", economists have been feted by presidents and parliaments as the new alchemists, with their dazzling theories suffused with the promise of technological transubstantiation that will somehow lift us beyond the mortal limits of our fragile blue planet.

These sorcerers have led politicians and populations alike to believe that they alone understood and could tame the raging marketplace, while extracting from it an infinity of goods to sate our ever-expanding appetites.

Perhaps their greatest sleight of hand has been in selling the notion of infinite growth within a finite - and sharply declining - ecosystem. Take Robert Solow, a Nobel Prize-winning US economist. "The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources," was his breathtakingly myopic analysis.

Ask an economist to value a forest, and he'll tell you how much timber sells by the tonne. The Amazon releases 20 billion tonnes of water into the atmosphere every day, free of charge. Forests control floods, purify water, protect biodiversity and keep the planet habitable, but what does this matter to a hedge fund manager? Another trick, called temporal discounting, allows economists to sell our children's future down the heavily polluted river in favour of short-term profit.

Yet this analytical vacuity is the norm, not the exception, among the economic elite. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, dressed up political ideology and passed it off as rational economics, while cheerfully choreographing the world's greatest financial crisis since the 1930s. None of this has dented the collective self-confidence of the ruling cabal of economists, nor cooled the media's love affair with them.

Tune in to RTÉ or Today FM any day of the week to hear the very economists who sold us the poison during the boom years; now they are peddling their repackaged "cures" in the form of the latest economic elixirs of growth. Heavy drinkers will be familiar with this logic: it's called the hair of the dog.

In nature, growth is a phase, leading to the equilibrium of maturity. An adult that continues growing can only do so by becoming obese. Within the body, cells that multiply exponentially in an otherwise stable organism are more commonly known as a cancerous growth or tumour. The World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Index has tracked the ecological health of the world since 1970. Its 2008 report found that total planetary resources have been permanently depleted by 30 per cent in well under four decades.

"The possibility of financial recession pales in comparison to the looming ecological crunch," said the fund. The report found that three in four people live in countries that have exceeded their own ecological limits. Ireland is well up the debtor list. We consume resources requiring three times the amount of land actually available globally per person. We are ecologically as well as economically in hock. You really wouldn't want to be around when this debt is called in.

For now, we continue propping up our house of cards by rapidly running down the ecological capital of other countries to maintain our astonishing bubble of affluence. In famine times, this was called eating the seed corn. When our political elite, guided by their hierarchy of economics believe they can cure the recession by "jump-starting" the consumption-driven economy and so plunge us deeper into ecological debt, you see just how the cancer cult of growth economics has metastasised throughout the body politic.

Capitalism, in the words of John Maynard Keynes, an economist now back in vogue having been deemed passé by the seeming triumph of right-wing political ideology, "is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the good of everybody".

Many people who live in man-made environments like cities may wonder what ecology has got to do with them. Put simply, our environment is to human survival and wellbeing what water is to a fish. If growth is toxic, what about the alternatives? In 1972, a group called the Club of Rome published its prescient book, The Limits to Growth .

Reaching what they call equilibrium would require hard choices. We would have to trade some freedoms, such as the right to have unlimited population growth and resource consumption, "for other freedoms, such as relief from pollution and crowding and the threat of collapse of the world system".

In the 36 years since its publication, Earth now bends under the burden of an additional 3.3 billion people. As we fret about declining property prices, philosopher Henry David Thoreau's observation was never truer: "What good is a house, if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"

An excellent summary by George Mobus of just what is wrong with our financial and economic systems. Go to his blog for more details and read the discussions on TheOilDrum. Now if only those imbecilic bankers and economists who advise our politicians and run our financial institutions would pay greater attention to such writings, our world would be a better place.

1) ALL economic activity is work in the physical sense.

2) ALL work requires the flow of energy from a high potential source, through the work process, to a low potential sink.

3) The guidance of energy flow through the work process requires knowledge (of the process and its control model) and information regarding the energy potential available.

4) In the economy money acts as an information token representing the availability of energy to do work at the micro level.

5) Monetary policies have been crafted to disconnect the meaning of money as energy available to do useful work; money is now a commodity a-la Friedman. Money no longer serves as a measure of available energy. Though its flow, counter to actual energy flow, still acts to guide presumptive energy flow.

6) Fractional reserve banking, loaning some portion of an account to a borrower on the idea that the borrower will use that money as if there were energy to do useful work (unconsciously of course) and produce some additional wealth worked as long as net energy (ERoEI) was increasing over time.

7) Until at least the 1970s net energy had been increasing over time, hence the credit system worked because the debt could, in theory, be paid back in a subsequent time period due to the net increase in wealth-production potential.

8) With the advent of production of harder to obtain (lower ERoEI) oil, net energy gain started to decline (creating the top deflection in the peak curve). As net energy gain started to decline it became increasingly difficult to have an increase in wealth-production capacity -- it became harder to repay loans.

9) Since money value had been decoupled from energy available to do work the signal that loans would be harder to pay back was lost.

10) Sometime between the end of the 70' and into the 80's we found it necessary to continue what amounts to a re-financing scheme, chasing more debt to cover previous debt (note: this is also tied to incomes as evidenced in the growing need for two or more wage earners per household and a lot of corporate merger activities, etc.).

11) In order to generate caches of money to appear as if wealth was being created, market manipulations and speculation took on its own life. 'Sophisticated' schemes (slights of hand) have been invented to keep the illusion that wealth is being created -- now defined in monetary terms rather than hard assets with fixed values. But the wealth is just marks on paper (or registers in a computer memory). Real wealth has been in decline, e.g. the infrastructure decay.

12) With the peak of oil production (or plateau) the total net energy available to do work is starting its downward slide. All borrowing against a future when there would be more, not less, energy is futile. There is no PHYSICAL way that those loans can be paid back. All financial schemes that are based on debt being repaid are doomed to failure. The First Law of Thermodynamics is rather clear on this account. You cannot create energy out of nothing.

We humans are a smug bunch. We actually think that money is some social construct that has meaning beyond a physical reality. We've operated on that assumption and now the piper will be paid.

None of the financial geniuses that currently spout their theories are able to explain what is happening. They cannot predict what will come next. They talk about a "bottom" for this or that market. But there is no bottom as long as net energy is in decline. When total energy really starts to decline (post-peak oil) the s**t will really hit the fan.

A succinct criticism of modern economics by Clive Ponting in A New Green History of the World, pp. 132-135. I heartily recommend this book which I borrowed from the Singapore National Library. It is a stimulating, concise overview of civilizations' impact on the environment.

There is a fundamental flaw in classical economics and all the modern systems derived from it -- Marxist, welfare, Keynesian and modern ultra-liberal economics. They all deal only with the secondary problem of the distribution of scarce resources between competing ends and how the optimal allocation of resources can be achieved. The resources of the earth are treated as capital - a set of assets to be turned into a source of profit. Trees, wildlife, minerals, water and soil are simply commodities to be sold or developed. More important, their price is simply the cost of extracting them and turning them into marketable commodities. Yet this view ignores the basic fact that the resources of the earth are not just scarce, they are finite. Economics is unable to incorporate this fact into its analysis and so the economic systems based upon it encourage both the producer and the consumer to use up resources at whatever rate current market conditions dictate. Economics assumes, in defiance of all logic, that resources, in terms of land, materials and energy, are inexhaustible and that growth in the overall level of the economy can continue for ever. It also assumes that as one material or source of energy becomes scarce its price will rise and this will encourage the development of substitutes. In the short term this is certainly possible but the process cannot be continued indefinitely into the future. There is no way in economics that current prices can take account of the problems that will have to be faced in the future. (Since there is in theory an almost infinite future ahead of human societies current prices would have to be infinite in order to conserve them for that future.) Instead, economics argues that since the most rational action for individuals and hence societies is to pursue immediate self-interest then there is no need to take account of posterity.

Another problem for economics is that markets and therefore prices do not reflect true costs. Some commodities such as air never enter a market mechanism and are therefore treated as free goods available to all. However, as early industrial societies found out, if commodities such as air and water are treated as free then levels of pollution will rise rapidly because firms do not have to pay a price for the smoke and gases they put into the air or for the waste products and effluent that they tip into rivers. The rest of society does, however, bear the cost of such activities - water not fit for drinking, air not fit to breathe or even simple problems such as people's washing becoming dirty through air pollution. These 'externalities' can only be controlled through government regulation.

Many of these problems are also reflected in the failure of GDP to measure the real state of society and the economy. GDP does not measure some sorts of activity and economic contributions, for example housework if it is done without wages being involved, subsistence agriculture and voluntary community work. The 'black economy' (which is very large in some countries) is by definition not measured. There are also problems with what GDP does measure. It includes many items that are not benefits to society as a whole. For example, the shorter the life of cars and the more frequently they break down, the greater will be the amount of activity in an economy and the level of GDP will rise. This ignores the fact that individuals (unless employed in a car factory of a garage) would be better off if they had more reliable, longer-lasting cars. GDP also takes no account of some of the effects of using cars - higher levels of pollution and greater traffic congestion and delays. Other social problems such as poor housing and health care are also not included. On the other hand some social problems actually lead to a rise in GDP. In the United States as levels of crime continue to rise one of the major growth industries has been in crime prevention and security. This is not worth $65 billion a year and makes its contribution to GDP but its doubtful whether this measures and overall benefit to society. Similarly over-eating, obesity and an obsession with weight have created a diet industry worth $32 billion a year and the stresses of modern life have resulted in sales of Prozac worth $1.2 billion a year, both of which increase GDP. The growing doubts about the failure of GDP to reflect social costs and problems have led in the last couple of decades to attempts to create better measures of the real increase in the standard of living, taking account of factors such as pollution, traffic congestion, crime, health care and access to education. One of these measures is the Genuine Progress Indicator or GPI and it reflects a very different picture from the GDP. In the second half of the twentieth century the GDP per head in the United States rose from $12,000 to $35,000, suggesting a near tripling in the standard of living. However, the GPI would suggest that the standard of living taking account of wider social problems increased by only 8 per cent.

Only a small minority of economists have tried to deal with these deeper questions and raised doubts about the ability of conventional economics to deal with environmental questions. E. F. Schumacher in his book Small is Beautiful, published in the early 1970s, argued for an approach to economics 'as if people mattered'. He never created a coherent economic theory but argued that efforts should be concentrated on questions about the appropriate size and scale for activities and technology and identifying the real needs of people rather than assuming they would be met by ever increasing levels of production and consumption. He characterized this approach as "Buddhist Economics" and although his writings became international bestsellers his ideas have had little impact on policy makers or mainstream economics. Another trenchant analysis of the shortcomings of traditional economics was made by Hazel Henderson in her book Creating Alternative Futures published in 1978. Like Schumacher she criticized the fragmentation of economic thought, its failure to take into account humanity's dependence on the natural world and its even greater failure to recognize the values and unspoken assumptions that lie deeply embedded within it. The result, according to Henderson, is that:

Economics has enthroned some of our most unattractive predispositions: material acquisitiveness, competition, gluttony, pride, selfishness, shortsightedness, and just plain greed.

Excerpts from:

http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2008/07/could-we-start-industrial-society-from.html

Thomas Homer-Dixon gets at this issue of resilience in his recent book, "The Upside of Down." His number one recommendation is to build more resilience into every system we rely on including food production, transportation, education, manufacturing and governance. But the momentum in the global economy is toward further specialization at the behest of the world's policymaking elites which are dominated by neoclassical economists. Their solution to the problems of modern civilization is more complexity and more specialization.

That is what one expects from complex civilizations, according to Joseph Tainter, author of "The Collapse of Complex Societies." Such societies have been successful precisely because they have adopted complex strategies for taming the natural world and repelling their human enemies. These societies are designed for complexity. More than that they believe in complexity because new layers of complexity have helped to solve problems again and again in the past.

And yet, Tainter notes, there comes a time when returns on complexity begin to diminish and then actually decline. This idea seems alien to us. But, our belief in technological progress is really a belief in the effectiveness of added layers of complexity in solving our problems. Yet, even those who trumpet a future sustainable industrial paradise rarely speak of the downside of increased complexity. Its primary downside is a lack of resilience. Severe shocks--war, plague, resource depletion, climate change--become ever more difficult to respond to effectively.

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.

This video was created by Jay Hanson - creator of www.dieoff.org and www.warsocialism.com. He explains how and why economic growth is limited by declining energy returns (EROEI).

Under a one-for-one scenario, even if the price of oil reaches $5,000 a barrel, it won't make energy-sense to look for oil in the lower 48 because that would consume as much energy as it would recover.

Even if one paid a ton of gold per barrel, one still could not get net energy out of a well that consumes as much as it produces!

The high resolution version can be found here:

http://www.warsocialism.com/limitsToGrowth.htm

YouTube Version

The term "lower 48" in the video refers to the 48 states of the USA in the North American continent - excluding Alaska and Hawaii.

As you watch this video, ask yourself: do our political and business leaders have any inkling of our limits to growth? A casual reading of the newspapers will provide you with some insight to the current zeitgeist - the cultural and intellectual spirit of the times - that growth is imperative and it must not and cannot be stopped. These "growthists" are going to fall flat when they confront declining global oil production and exhaustion of our natural resources.

Darwinian:

I sat down with a friend who works in Saudi Arabia last night and had a long conversation. For obvious reason I cannot revel his name. Also his job does not give him access to production numbers, and certainly not decline rates, so he can only tell me what he has observed in his many years in Saudi.

He says there have been dramatic changes in Saudi in the last few years. He says there has been a massive influx of new employees in ARAMCO. Many of them, he says, are from Venezuela, anti-Chavezites who were fired by Chavez during the strike...

...And here is my assessment, my educated guess, at what is happening in Saudi. I think Saudi is at least 60% depleted and only heroic efforts are keeping them from a steep decline. They have found that they can keep production up by greatly increasing the injection water and poking more holes in their fields. Their new wells are horizontal and therefore suck only from the very top of the reservoir. I believe that Saudi is only a year or two away from hitting a decline wall. Reviving old mothballed fields like Khurais will hold the decline off for awhile but when it hits it will hit with a thud.

I believe that Saudi reserves, as well as well as all other OPEC reserves are grossly exaggerated and that is the bombshell that will rock the world when that fact is finally realized by the mainstream media. (Full Thread)

The problem with the Singapore Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) is that they rely too heavily on figures from EIA, CERA and BP without questioning their accuracy. All these sources have proven to be overly optimistic in their oil demand and supply projections and they cite grossly exaggerated oil reserve numbers from OPEC. These dubious sources have been consistently wrong on so many occasions it is surprising they are still quoted on major news networks and regarded as authoritative by government bodies. MTI should be consulting the works and publications of ASPO and TheOilDrum.

CERA's Peak Oil Score Card

Related Link: Energy for [Unsustainable] Growth

Speech by Mr S Iswaran

October 18, 2006

What will the global energy landscape look like in the long term? For one, fossil fuels, such as oil, natural gas and coal will remain the world’s main energy source for the foreseeable future. The US Energy Information Administration, or EIA, estimated that in 2003, 87% of world energy consumption came from oil, natural gas and coal. The EIA projects that in 2030, these three fuels will retain a prominent 86% share of global energy supply. Estimated reserves of fossil fuels are expected to be adequate well beyond 2030. The EIA estimates that oil production will not peak before 2030. World reserves-to-production ratio for natural gas is 67 years, and 180 years for coal. Rising energy prices will also spur more oil and gas exploration and increasingly render unconventional oil, such as tar sands, economically viable. In essence, actual physical reserves of fossil fuels do not appear to be the limiting factor in meeting increasing energy demand in the next few decades. FULL SPEECH

Dr. Larry Haverkamp writes a weekly financial column, AskDrMoney, in the Singapore tabloid The New Paper.

He seems to be aware of peak oil and our limits to growth. It's not often that one finds articles like these in the Singapore papers and even less so in a tabloid. Signs of the times?

May 27, 2008

The problem is demand from developing nations is real while the supply of resources may be more limited than we had thought. For example, there is no way to know if producing countries have all the oil reserves they claim. No Opec nation has ever permitted an independent audit of its oil fields.

Combine increasing demand with decreasing supplies and what do you get?

Disaster. Expect continuously rising prices, not just for oil but other natural resources as well.

What's worse is that higher prices are merely a reflection of resource shortages.

The world's economies need food, fuel and minerals to operate. Even the most clever technology cannot produce output without inputs.

If resources eventually decline to zero in a few generations, output will also fall to zero.

Then, we will revert to subsistence living, like sophisticated cavemen. Call us the Cro-Magnon smarties. Full Article

July 01, 2008

We saw something like this in 1973 and again in 1982. The US was hit with an oil shortfall, which resulted in both recession and inflation, called stagflation. It spread to Singapore and around the world.

In hindsight, it seems overblown, since everything turned out okay. Prices shot up, then they came down. Growth slowed, then it picked up.

Prosperity returned, as it always does. If it didn't, you would have a permanent recession. The notion is so absurd that no economist in their right mind would even consider it. So I will.

In a worse-case scenario, permanent recession hits and each generation becomes poorer than the last. Gross domestic product (GDP) declines continuously. It eventually hits zero and we return to subsistence living, like our cavemen ancestors.

We may be seeing the beginning of that now.

Demand is out-pacing the world's limited supplies, pushing prices higher. Full Article

Dr. Bartlett on "political correctness":

In their writings the scientists identify the cause of the problems (climate change and peak oil) as being growing populations. But their recommendations for solving the problems caused by population growth almost never include the recommendation that we advocate stopping population growth. Political Correctness dictates that we do not address the current problem of overpopulation in the U.S. and the world.

Let’s look at two prominent examples of this political correctness. The book, “An Inconvenient Truth” (1) was published to accompany Al Gore’s wonderful film by the same name. On page 216 Gore writes; “The fundamental relationship between our civilization and the ecological system of the Earth has been utterly and radically transformed by the powerful convergence of three factors. The first is the population explosion…”

It’s clear that Gore understands the role of overpopulation in the genesis of global climate change. The last chapter in the book has the title, “So here’s what you personally can do to help solve the climate crisis.” The list of 36 things starts with “Choose energy-efficient lighting” and runs through an inventory of all of the usual suspects without ever calling for us to address overpopulation! Full Article

It's the same over here in Singapore. Except for the lone voices of Dr. Geh Min, former president of the Singapore Nature Society, and Dr. Linda Lim, professor at Michigan University, I do not recall hearing or reading anything from Singapore scientists, academics or politicians about restraining population growth from an ecological perspective. Why are they not speaking up? Are they being "politically correct"?

With our per-capita energy consumption already among the world's highest, policies such as targeting a further 50 per cent increase in our population and resource-wasting practices like the high turnover of buildings - through collective sales, for example - need to be re-thought. Full Article

Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of oil extraction is reached.

Peak water? Just substitute "freshwater" for "oil" above.

The Ogallala Aquifer in the United States is one of the largest reservoirs of fossil water in the world. This is water that has been accumulated and trapped underground for thousands and perhaps even millions of years. Part of the aquifer lies beneath the Grain Belt of the United States. Unfortunately, it is being rapidly depleted. The importance of this aquifer to agriculture can hardly be exaggerated.

America is the world's largest exporter of soybeans, corn and wheat. Water shortages in the Grain Belt due to excessive water mining of aquifers can only mean disaster for global food supplies.

U.S. faces era of water scarcity

July 9, 2008

While agriculture in the Colorado Basin faces shortages, farmers to the east in the high plains — tapping the Ogallala Aquifer — have progressively seen their wells dry up. The aquifer is the largest in the United States and sees a depletion rate of some 12 billion cubic meters a year, a quantity equivalent to 18 times the annual flow of the Colorado River. Since pumping started in the 1940s, Ogallala water levels have dropped by more than 100 feet (30 meters) in some areas. Full Report

Global population growth is looming as a bigger threat to the world's food production and water supplies than climate change, a leading scientist says.

Speaking at a CSIRO public lecture in Canberra yesterday, UNESCO's chief of sustainable water resources development, Professor Shahbaz Khan, said overpopulation's impacts were potentially more economically, socially and environmentally destructive than those of climate change.

''Climate change is one of a number of stresses we're facing, but it's overshadowed by global population growth and the amount of water, land and energy needed to grow food to meet the projected increase in population. We are facing a world population crisis.'' REPORT

Encouraging to hear this. Now, if only more high-level civil servants in the Singapore government would echo his message and pay greater attention to the overpopulation problem.

Juxtapose these two statements.

Lee Kuan Yew:

Mr Lee told his 800-strong audience of industry players and economists that he was convinced that Singapore was heading into its most promising decade yet.

"We're going to move into a new plateau, new platform. You can see it visibly before your eyes. In 5 years, it will be good. In 10 years, wonderful," he said. LINK

Energy Watch Group:

The major result from this analysis is that world oil production has peaked in 2006. Production will start to decline at a rate of several percent per year. By 2020, and even more by 2030, global oil supply will be dramatically lower. This will create a supply gap which can hardly be closed by growing contributions from other fossil, nuclear or alternative energy sources in this time frame.

The world is at the beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This change will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence almost all aspects of our daily life.

...The now beginning transition period probably has its own rules which are valid only during this phase. Things might happen which we never experienced before and which we may never experience again once this transition period has ended. Our way of dealing with energy issues probably will have to change fundamentally. LINK

I'm laughing and crying at the same time; laughing because both statements are diametrically opposed and crying because the minister appears to be detached from the physical world that we live in.