Democrito2000’s Weblog

By Daniel Ruiz Sandoval

Last year, during the peak of Hurricane Katrina, I was horrified to see that, for a short period of time, there was no gas at the pumps in the Florenceville – Hartland – Bath area. Is this the beginning of the end I asked myself? Now, one year after Katrina and with the hurricane season still ahead, I wonder what our life would be like without oil.

According to authorized sources, oil production has been exceeding discoveries since 1983. While demand for oil continues to rise steadily, production is expected to decline in the near future pushing prices to unimaginable heights. Some specialists, such as Richard Duncan, see in these developments the beginning of the “post industrial stone age”, characterized by farming villages, kinship tribes and rogue bands; with the surviving population “’achieving’ permanent sustainability at the subsistence level”. Some, like Georgescu Roegen, even foresee a real “danger of extinction” for the human race.
But why not take a more optimistic stand? When I think about the future, I see a world of small energy-efficient rural communities connected on a watershed basis, exchanging organic produce in strong local markets. However utopian this outlook may seem, it is not the product of wishful thinking but of historical necessity.

In those parts of the world not directly affected by the current and future oil wars, fuel scarcity will force the population to resort to traditional methods of production and transportation. Agriculture will turn organic because oil-based fertilizers and pesticides will be too costly to make as well as to transport or, even better, not available at all. Agricultural machinery will sit idle due to lack of fuel. Oil scarcity heralds the return of the horse as a means of transport; the railway would make a come back too, although in its steam-technology version. While oil will be utterly scarce, coal will remain relatively abundant and boilers could run on firewood too. Although switching back to coal may seem like a step backwards on climate change mitigation, overall emissions could decrease as a result of the collapse of the oil-based economy.

Long distance trade would be radically transformed as well. Sail ships would reappear in navigable lakes and rivers, while steam ships would be used to try to keep international trade alive. The end of oil does not mean the demise of the global economy at all. World-wide trade had been around for a long time before oil became the primary transportation energy source. Higher transportation costs and longer delivery times however, will make local manufacturing profitable again, nurturing strong and diversified regional economies.

The question is, will our civilization will be able to make the transition in such a short time span? Since approximately 10 calories of fossil fuels are required to produce 1 calorie of food consumed in the U.S., famine will surely follow if the agro-industrial sector falls apart too suddenly, and prolonged blackouts –as we are already seeing in some North American cities- would surely undermine the very basis of our current way of life. But oil is not vanishing all at once. Prices would prompt decision makers to allocate it to the most essential uses, although that does not necessarily imply that the most vulnerable social groups would be protected. The oil wars have already begun, and as we know from past experience, societies at war tend to restrict civil liberties and labor rights. The dwindling oil stock that is left would be used for defense purposes and it is very likely governments would tend to ration some products. Food would be one of them, since it does not look like the current world population could be fed without oil-based agricultural inputs. But those communities better prepared to make the transition would surely suffer less. Ironically, the people least affected by the oil crisis would be those practicing subsistence agriculture in the poorest regions of the world.

By Daniel Ruiz Sandoval

In 1990 nuclear power was the fastest growing source of energy in the world, by 2005 it was the second slowest. This shift may be related to several factors. According to an MIT study the nuclear industry faces four critical problems. One of them is cost, as most reactors end up costing much more than the initial estimate and take longer to build than originally planned. As for the cost of the electricity produced, nuclear energy is becoming more competitive due to oil and gas skyrocketing prices, and the allocation of carbon credits to this industry within the climate change mitigation framework could sharpen this edge. Another factor is the public perception that nuclear energy is not safe in spite of the fact that modern reactors can achieve a very low risk of serious accidents. However, the knowledge about the safety of the overall fuel cycle is limited at best. Waste is the third factor that stands in the way of nuclear energy expansion as it is not clear whether the industry can compensate for the costs of long term confinement. Finally, the notion that nuclear power actually fosters proliferation of nuclear weapons finds support on the new reprocessing systems that involve the separation and recycling of plutonium, a key component of an atomic bomb.

Nevertheless nuclear power currently provides 15% of the world’s electricity and offers an opportunity to further reduce the use of fossil fuels at least in the power generation sector. In France, for instance, over 75% of the electricity comes from nuclear power, although it is argued that the industry is heavily subsidized by the taxpayer.

But probably the greatest hurdle facing the nuclear energy industry is the availability of uranium, the fuel that nuclear reactors use to generate electricity. A recent report from the Energy Watch Group indicates that discovered reserves are not sufficient to guarantee uranium supply for more than thirty years. With eleven countries that have already exhausted their uranium reserves, Canada is the only country left at present having uranium deposits with high quality ore grade. In this context Canada is well positioned to develop nuclear energy since it not only has the fuel but also the technology in Atomic Energy Canada Limited (AECL). Being a Canadian state-owned company, it would not be surprising that a number of reactors will be commissioned to AECL in order to move forward along the learning curve and reduce average costs in the same way the aerospace industry has developed, making it competitive at the international level. A flourishing nuclear industry would no doubt bring revenues in the form of contracts to build reactors overseas, but also from electric power and uranium exports. But the question remains of what will happen when the fuel to run the plants runs out just as is happening with oil now, or who is going to dismantle the reactors once they exhaust their average forty year operational life? But maybe more important is who is going to look after the radioactive waste confinements at least for a few centuries and mitigate the harmful effects of uranium mining. In this perspective nuclear energy might be able to function as a bridge between our current fossil fuel based economy and a more sustainable society by ameliorating the worst impacts of the oil crunch in the short run. So it looks like nuclear energy will only serve as a means to prolong our high energy consumption patterns for thirty or fifty years at the most. Adding to that, the risk remains that once the nuclear option is over, we will be left with a number of mining sites to restore, waste deposits to manage for a very long time, and non-operational reactors to take care of. So after everything has been said and done maybe that community-based wind power option is not a bad idea after all.