Either China's screwed, or everybody is.

[GliderGuider]

China is currently burning half the world's coal, which supplies 68% of their primary energy consumption. If China were to keep increasing their coal consumption at the same rate as the past decade for the next 18 years, in 2030 they would be burning all the coal produced in the world today. China cannot keep up their current expansion of energy use based on coal because a) there isn't enough production and shipping capacity in the world to support it; b) the CO2 emissions would be insupportable.

They don't have enough other energy resources (gas, renewables or hydro) to replace coal use over the next two decades.

The implication is that the Chinese coal consumption is probably going to peak quite soon, perhaps within the next 5-10 years. The effect that will have on the Chinese economy could easily be catastrophic, and the knock-on effects for the world economy will be only somewhat less serious.

If the Chinese economy does crash, we could be within a decade of seeing global CO2 emissions stop rising, but at the cost of a significant slowdown or decline in the world economy - even when taking energy efficiency improvements into account.

Either that or China keeps increasing their coal use, their economy continues to boom, but the world loses its last vestige of hope for avoiding a climate calamity.

[DetlefK]

1. Unsustainable energy-base is just one of many destabilizing factors in China.

- Massivley centralized government turns local governors into corrupt tyrants above the law.
- Massive environmental pollution (soil, water and air).
- Middle-Class increasing, but not fast enough to get China's economy away from cheap labor and export-driven industry.
- Every middle-class-guy wants a car, but China cannot afford that in terms of gas and air-pollution.
- Growing income-gap.
- The economic growth created a permanent underclass of impoverished workers that moved to the cities because there's no work on the countryside.

[GliderGuider]

6. China can't reprise the European industrial revolution.

There is neither the energy nor the environment left for them to play with. The factors you mention will all help bring the gravy train to an early halt through social breakdown.

[kristopher]

2. "They don't have enough other energy resources..."

What do you base that statement on? Have you got a link to a resource assessment that no one else knows about?

Even though they've officially changed their energy policy to one that limits coal, it is possible they may choose to follow the path your graph shows. But it would be a choice, not a dictate caused by lack of resources for alternative energy options.

[GliderGuider]

4. Economies require energy.

China's current low-carbon energy sources supply only 9% of their energy needs. A continued build-out of hydro and renewable sources along current trends could result in them supplying 18% within 20 years. Any reduction in the use of coal, oil and gas would have to be offset by a comparable increase in renewables (allowing for the differences in Carnot efficiency of electricity and combustion fuels).

I don't think they can do it and keep their economy intact. If it comes down to a trade-off I suspect they will choose to keep the economy and jettison the environment. It's how humans are wired psychologically.

[kristopher]

7. You said they don't have the resources.

Pointing to the 9% that you say they've tapped tells us absolutely nothing about their resource base and the maximum extent to which those resources can be tapped.

This is just another of your fiction based scaremongering attempts, isn't it?

Perhaps you should focus on your own back yard.


Canada ranks worst in developed world on climate policy: European report
http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/canada-ranks-worst-in-developed-world-on-climate-policy-european-report-1.1548262

[GliderGuider]

9. I know Canada is doing badly. I'm not talking about Canada.

Was Cassandra trying to scare the Trojans or warn them? There are a lot of Cassandras out here, but again no one's listening. It's Troy all over again.

[kristopher]

11. Maybe you SHOULD be talking about Canada.

Pluck the mote from your own eye and all that stuff...

[GliderGuider]

12. Why, so I'll stop talking about really uncomfortable things?

[kristopher]

13. I was thinking you might be motivated ...

...to actually get your facts straight for once.

Being disgusted with your lack of accuracy and eager willingness to make things up as you go along is as far from being made uncomfortable by the writing of difficult truths as it is possible to get.

[GliderGuider]

16. I yam what I yam, kristopher.

[Demeter]

3. China has a lot of solar potential

Furthermore, it has the manufacturing facilities for solar gathering equipment.

I'm not in the least worried about China. The government can set a plan and execute it, or execute those who sabotage it.

[FBaggins]

5. What's the source for your extrapolation?

It doesn't look like any current projection for renewables or nuclear power.

[GliderGuider]

10. The data is from the BP Statistical Review.

The projections for nuclear and renewables are on there - renewable is the green line, nuclear is the flat black line right at the bottom.

[FBaggins]

14. Sorry... once again?

Are you saying that the future curves are also from another source? Or are they just curve fits to prior data?

[GliderGuider]

15. Those are my curve fits to the BP data. nt

[FBaggins]

17. Surely you know that you can't do that?

Sure... looking at the past and assuming that nothing changes into the future (until everything falls apart of course) is standard M.O. for a malthusian... but that doesn't make it legitimate.

The impact of already-implemented (and incredibly significant) policy decisions regarding hydro/nuclear/renewables wouldn't show up at all with such a curve fitting. So we already know that those lines are wrong... and that impacts the coal line.


Also - an underlying assumption that does not match reality continues the cause/effect error we discussed last time in assuming that energy drives economic activity (rather than the other way around). Much of China's massive population has been shifting out of 3rd-world status over the last couple decades... and thus their GDP growth has been astronomical (even in "recession" years). That growth rate wouldn't continue for that long even if they had all the energy they wanted. Thus it doesn't make sense to draw lines based on the assumption that energy demand will continue to grow at the rate of the last decade over the next two.

[GliderGuider]

18. So both the pro- and anti-nuke camps think this is bad juju.

Spin it any way you want, we're at Peak Civilization, and downhill from here in everydirection is a wasteland of fuckitude. You hopium dealers are doing nothing but keeping the sheeple asleep.

[FBaggins]

19. Which should tell you something

Any time Kris and I agree... it's best to get out of the way. The weight of history is not on your side.

Spin it any way you want, we're at Peak Civilization

Declaring it to be so does not justify concocted illustrations that are just graphical translations of the same unjustified declaration. Particularly when the graphs are de-facto offered as evidence for the declarations.

You hopium dealers

Have been right so far at every turn for hundreds of years. Precisely the opposite record as the malthusians.

As I've said before... the fact that the wolf eventually shows up does not mean that the town should have listened to the boy all the other times he declared that there was a wolf.

[GliderGuider]

20. Actually,

Last edited Tue Nov 19, 2013, 04:41 PM - Edit history (2)

It tells me that you and kristopher are both hopium salesmen, just with different brands.

If you're going to stick to your bleat about "the past doesn't define the future", then that should automatically invalidate your criticism of Malthusians. Shouldn't it? But it won't, because the reality of tipping points, irreversibility and the determinism of human behavior in the presence of large flows of Gibbs free energy aren't what you and kristopher are building your prophetic foundations on.

[FBaggins]

21. Nope.

If you're going to stick to your bleat about "the past doesn't define the future"

Actually... what I said was that you couldn't extrapolate from the past (particularly such a small window of it) while ignoring already-known facts that prove the extrapolation to be erroneous. You can graph 30 years of growth in a long-term bond fund and extrapolate out for the next 30 years if you want to... but I'll still tell you that long term rates can't go below zero and long-term bond funds fall as rates increase.

then that should automatically invalidate your criticism of Malthusians. Shouldn't it?

Not at all (even if that's what I said... which it isn't). Because I didn't say that the wolf never comes - just that there was no reason for anyone to believe the boy. I've told you before that peak oil/gas/coal/whatever is a reality. You can't take a finite resource and support infinite growth. But nothing in that reality implies that "the end" is tomorrow afternoon vs thousands of years from now.

"I know we've been wrong every single time we've predicted this for the last couple centuries... but this time we're right!" will some day be true - perhaps tomorrow - but that doesn't tell us anything or make Malthus anything more than a stuck clock.

[GliderGuider]

23. Here's how I see it.

Your behaviour and kristopher's are quite understandable. Think of the three of us as competing prophets in the agora. The more people who buy my vision, the fewer there are to buy yours. So it becomes a three-way fight for followers, in which each of you have to discredit two competing visions - the other's brand of hopium, and my brand of Doom.

You're both objecting that I don't worship your god by following your rules and spouting the "right" numbers (saying the correct prayers). From where I stand, the issue is more fundamental. We have utterly different views of how the world works and the forces that are at work in it. This isn't a technical dispute, as much as it might look like one on the surface, and as much as you two would like to re-frame it into one. It's a philosophical and psychological divergence.

Speaking now as a prophet of doom, it's too bad you guys are wrong, but two more lost souls in a world of 7 billion aren't going to make me lose much sleep.

[NNadir]

27. Well, no matter what one is "selling," be it a vision of disaster or something else, curve...

...fitting, especially by extrapolation, is often just nonsense.

The most famous example of this comes from the history of quantum mechanics, where the Rayleigh-Jeans Law predicted an "ultraviolet catastrophe." The difference between that case and this case is that the people reviewing the Rayleigh-Jeans law recognized that the problem was with the theory, and not with the result.

If one could believe in curve fitting, it would follow that many of the soothsaying exercises of the past would prove to have been accurate.

The only prediction that can be safely made is that predictions will prove to be wrong.

I note, with some amusement, that you included the statement, "but the world loses its last vestige of hope for avoiding a climate calamity."

I may have this wrong, as I've stayed away from this place for a while to avoid the risk of hearing too much pablum, but "hope" is a word that doesn't appear often in your commentary.

One hopes you're feeling well, and haven't become sick with some existentially derived illness.

Now, I happen to believe that the world is in dire straits myself, but I don't believe that any outcome is inevitable, and I think it's silly to insist on curve fitting approaches to anything.

As for China, I will say this: China is the only nation on earth right now that has any hope of phasing out dangerous fossil fuels, adding that the per capita CO2 production of the Chinese is a small fraction of other nations, including nations where people sit on their butts doing less for the climate.

China may do better than everyone else over the long term - whether 'better than everyone else" is enough is another question - possibly, I suspect, that there is no Chinese equivalent for the name "Kristopher" or "Romm" or "Lovins" or any other anti-nuke fools who insist on burning dangerous fossil fuels until the grand renewable nirvana springs from the head of Zeus, or Jesus, or any of the other Gods who predict things that somehow never come true.

[GliderGuider]

29. I've banished two words from my vocabulary: "should" and "hope"

And no, there's no existential illness, thanks for your concern.

I've been mulling over this new analogy of competing prophets a bit more. It's very fruitful.

I see people like FBaggins and kristopher as street-corner prophets for different Gods, each promising salvation in return for worship.

The Prophet of the Sun God and God of the North Wind thunders, "If you follow me and worship my True God, the path to Salvation shall lie open before us. Worship at the Altar of the Wind, Sun and Water, and mankind shall have Eternal Life. Turn aside from this One True Path and ye shall burn forever in the Lake of Nuclear Fire."

The Prophet of the Atom (praise be unto Einstein!) says something oddly similar. "If you follow me and worship my True God, the path to Salvation shall lie before you. Worship at the Altar of the Atom and we shall all enjoy Eternal Life. Turn aside from this One True Path and ye shall have condemned all mankind to eternal torment in the Climate Apocalypse."

Each of them reviles the other. They develop clever techniques to twist each others' words, invalidate each others' numbers, and deny each others' Gods. Each portrays the other as either Antichrist or Fool.

In this little psychodrama I see myself as a bit like a street-corner atheist - maybe with a touch of Richard Dawkins' bellicosity. I'm the guy who stands nearby and tells the people who come up to listen, "You know, there is actually no God. There is no Salvation. We are all mortal, made of flesh and bone. When we die, that's it. Nobody lives happily ever after in real life. These guys are trying to sell you something they don't own. Go home and hug your children."

People like listening to the prophets. The conflict is fun, and no matter which one you choose to believe you get an in-group to belong to and an out-group to hate. Their messages are full of the fluffy bunny-ears of hope and the fangs of contempt - there's something there for everyone.

People generally don't like listening to me or anyone who sounds like me. I don't offer Salvation, I don't even offer Hope. I don't tell anyone what they should or shouldn't do. I've stopped blaming anybody. I don't see our predicament as a moral failure. I tell people that we have to accept who and what we are, and offer an unusual interpretation of what that is:

We are dissipative structures whose DNA has been formed in the context of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, whose behavior is best described by evolutionary psychology. As a result, our collective behavior is strongly constrained by the flow of free energy through our societies - the more energy, the more we are constrained. We are herd animals easily entrained into lockstep by group norms. If there is enough free energy flow around us, our evolutionary history inclines us to behave like the "Takers" in Daniel Quinn's novel "Ishmael". Some of us long to be more like the "Leavers" instead, and are angry and blameful that humanity can't seem to make that shift. Those dreamers don't understand the power of our evolved, unconscious neural circuits - or how strongly those circuits respond to conditions of excess with exactly the sort of "immoral" behavior we so love to disparage.

This debate is not really about whose numbers are correct, but about what vision of the world can confer status upon its holder. The one thing the prophets here can agree on, it seems, is that somebody's numbers must be right. Well, I don't think this debate is actually about numbers at all, no matter how much effort we put in convincing ourselves that it is. It's about different visions of reality. It's not even so much about the future (which we all agree is pretty unpredictable), as it is about the nature of humanity - right here, right now.

The intent of my curve fitting is not to demonstrate some possible energy future. It is to demonstrate the ridiculousness of the notion that there is a God of Energy Salvation. The Prophets of Power are selling something they don't own. Go home and hug your kids.

[Nihil]

31. Whilst not as pessimistic as you, I thought that was a good post - thanks.

Some of the petty bickering across so many threads recently really *does* match
your description of the meeting of opposing evangelists but you get a bonus kick
for this line:

> Their messages are full of the fluffy bunny-ears of hope and the fangs of contempt



So true, so accurate and so resented by the prophets!

[GliderGuider]

32. Glad you liked it!

[pscot]

8. 100 million tons of coal for China

will pass through Washington state each year if the proposed coal ports at Cherry Point and Longview are allowed to happen. Burning that coal will add another 286 million tons of CO2 to the atmosphere every year.

[CRH]

22. 100 million tons of coal will produce 286 million tons of CO2 byproduct ???

I think you might want to check those figures, or the word 'that' in the last sentence.

[hatrack]

24. It's EIA, though output will vary a bit - grade of coal, efficiency of combustion, etc.

http://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/co2_article/co2.html

[GliderGuider]

25. He's not that wrong.

http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/co2-emission-fuels-d_1085.html

A kilogram of bituminous coal produces about 2.3 kilograms of CO2. So 100 MT coal would produce perhaps 230 MT of CO2. The amount varies depending on the carbon content of the coal. A kilogram of pure carbon would generate 3.7 kg of CO2.

[kristopher]

26. "1 short ton (2,000 pounds) of this coal will generate about 5,720 pounds (2.86 short tons)"

The amount of heat emitted during coal combustion depends largely on the amounts of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen present in the coal and, to a lesser extent, on the sulfur content. Hence, the ratio of carbon to heat content depends on these heat-producing components of coal, and these components vary by coal rank.

Carbon, by far the major component of coal, is the principal source of heat, generating about 14,500 British thermal units (Btu) per pound. The typical carbon content for coal (dry basis) ranges from more than 60 percent for lignite to more than 80 percent for anthracite. Although hydrogen generates about 62,000 Btu per pound, it accounts for only 5 percent or less of coal and not all of this is available for heat because part of the hydrogen combines with oxygen to form water vapor. The higher the oxygen content of coal, the lower its heating value.(3) This inverse relationship occurs because oxygen in the coal is bound to the carbon and has, therefore, already partially oxidized the carbon, decreasing its ability to generate heat. The amount of heat contributed by the combustion of sulfur in coal is relatively small, because the heating value of sulfur is only about 4,000 Btu per pound, and the sulfur content of coal generally averages 1 to 2 percent by weight.(4) Consequently, variations in the ratios of carbon to heat content of coal are due primarily to variations in the hydrogen content.

The carbon dioxide emission factors in this article are expressed in terms of the energy content of coal as pounds of carbon dioxide per million Btu. Carbon dioxide (CO2) forms during coal combustion when one atom of carbon (C) unites with two atoms of oxygen (O) from the air. Because the atomic weight of carbon is 12 and that of oxygen is 16, the atomic weight of carbon dioxide is 44. Based on that ratio, and assuming complete combustion, 1 pound of carbon combines with 2.667 pounds of oxygen to produce 3.667 pounds of carbon dioxide. For example, coal with a carbon content of 78 percent and a heating value of 14,000 Btu per pound emits about 204.3 pounds of carbon dioxide per million Btu when completely burned.(5) Complete combustion of 1 short ton (2,000 pounds) of this coal will generate about 5,720 pounds (2.86 short tons) of carbon dioxide.

http://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/co2_article/co2.html

[FBaggins]

28. Basic chemistry

Remember the "O2" in CO2.

Those two Oygen molecules aren't in the coal that's burned... they're taken out of the atmosphere as part of the combustion reaction and combined with the carbon atom.

[GliderGuider]

30. Something else to note:

The prophets of both renewable and nuclear power are squabbling about lines at the very bottom of that graph...

As in all politics, "The smaller the stakes, the fiercer the fight".