Across the Great Divide

"Natural Climate Change" is Cold Comfort.

Memory is unreliable and historical records provide an incomplete picture, so it's possible the valley I grew up in was not all that warmer than the one I walked through today. I know I didn't own a proper winter coat then, but I was also tougher, perhaps, and went more places in a car.

Still, there's no question the air quality in this high desert town is worse and the inversion phenomenon that traps bitter cold for weeks at a time seems to have worsened, too.

And we know why.

The particular shape of the valley combines with snow cover and weather systems to trap frigid air. Pollutants don't rise, forming a cloud that blocks sun from melting the snow and warming the earth.

Since Jan. 18, air quality in low-lying areas of Grand Junction has been worse than Denver’s, a metropolitan center of 2.6 million people. For that matter, the amount of fine particulates — a mix of acids like nitrates and sulfates, organic chemicals, metals, soil and dust particles — trapped above the valley are more concentrated here than in any other city in Colorado.

...

[T]he pollution measuring less than 2.5 micrometers — which creates the health risks — is caused by any number of combustion sources. Smoke from wood-burning stoves and vehicle exhaust make up most of it. Other factors include the use of hot water heaters, industrial pollution, the effects of drilling and dust from dirt roads.

To climate change deniers, the cold provides an occasion to make gleeful comments about global warming. Others, whose denial has begun to be penetrated by science, have shifted to "yeah, but climate always changes. It's not my fault!"

And since climate changes, we have the earth's permission to go on doing what we've been doing. We press on with "reducing our dependence on foreign oil" without really addressing the dependence part. Another way to say it is, we're committed to using up our domestic energy supplies sooner rather than later.

No one can live in this valley and deny the massive changes that have taken place on earth or fail to see the relatively little say any puny creatures have had in the matter. But neither can they bundle up in an extra layer, watch their heating bill climb, and breathe lousy air, while believing mankind's fate is out of their hands.

High Cost of Local Government? Look at Your Car Habit.

Conrad deFibre's story about the troubles Westbrook, MN, faces in maintaining its streets illustrates a point I've made before.

Motor vehicle users don't pay for the full cost of the streets they use most.

[Cities throughout Minnesota] maintain nearly 45,000 lane-miles of streets, on which vehicles travel 8.9 billion miles a year. But little of the money needed for the job comes from motorists' user fees such as fuel and registration taxes. Instead, regressive property taxes and special assessments pay the lion's share.

The car culture often points to light rail lines and bike lanes as not being self-funding, but:

The latest numbers indicate that user fees will pay barely two-fifths of the $4.7 billion in projected construction needs until 2030 for the busiest streets in Minnesota's biggest 144 cities. And that's only if apportionments don't continue to decline.

Cutting state aid for roads is just another facet of the present trend of balancing state budgets by shifting more costs to cities. Maintenance and construction get deferred when cities face shortfalls, pushing those costs into the future — when repairs will be even more costly.

And while small government advocates like to claim city operations are full of waste, looking at the budget through the windshield can be instructive. Our cars cost us a lot. And street repairs, like education costs, may be another can we kick down the road in our denial.

In my suburb of Golden Valley, street maintenance is the fourth largest operating cost category, just slightly behind administrative services and fire and inspections. (Police is by far the largest category, at $4.56 million versus $1.37 million.)

But street maintenance is only one auto-related operating cost. Police devote a lot of resources to traffic and accidents; engineering (general engineering plus traffic signals, street lights, concrete repair) and public works (responsible for the city's infrastructure).

Then there are the capital costs. In Golden Valley, the city's pavement management program to improve city streets is budgeted to be much larger than the police budget through 2014. 

Like it or not folks, our car dependence has a lot to do with our tax bill, whether we pay it now or pass it on to our kids.

Palin, the Regulator.

Sara Palin explains how you can't trust those oil companies she was crying to unleash just a bit ago. But you can trust the Norwegians and the Dutch and some company in Maine trying to sell its clean up products.

Palin cites Dutch expertise with dikes, perhaps overlooking that the country's real oil spill expertise may come from Royal Dutch Shell, another one of those suddenly evil oil companies.

She also claims about 75 percent of her time on the job was spent dealing with the oil business and related matters. There had to be some reason she was seldom seen around Juneau.

An amazing demonstration of fast talk and emphatic but empty assertions that makes it tough for even Bill O'Reilly to get a word in edgewise.

Oil Prices Aren't Only Hurdle for Oil Shale.

Shell Oil, one of the major players in developing western Colorado's oil shale into actual oil, announced this week that it is dropping a contested application for conditional water rights on the Yampa River near the Piceance Creek Basin, where much of the fable trillion barrels of American oil remains locked up in rock.

The company said in its statement, “The exact scale and timing for development will depend on a number of factors, including progress on our technology development, the outcome of regulatory processes, market conditions, project economics and consultations with key stakeholders.

That's what companies have been saying about oil shale since before my mother was born. (A local newspaper editorialist makes that point, punctuating a talking-head video with a 1920 oil shale news story.)

I remember as child my father pointing out street signs falling down in a patch of desert, where developers promised oil shale was going to bring a monorail and a burgeoning new community. Ten years later, I was working on drilling rigs that were sampling the Piceance Creek shale deposits, and fiften years later, a big oil shale project collapsed with oil prices, nearly taking the entire western slope economy with it.

It's not much of an overstatement to say that experience made many locals here feel about oil shale after Black Sunday the way 9/11 made Americans feel about terrorists.

Regardless of what happens to prices in world oil markets, one irreducible fact remains. Most oil shale reserves are in the arid west, where water is a very precious commodity — with competing demand from agriculture, growing cities and power generation. Extraction technologies that work in pilot programs still must be able to scale. With water shortages all over the west now, that's a big hurdle to overcome.

Oil Companies Follow Through on Their Promise.

Via Grist with a h/t to Rep. Jeremy Kalin.

Biking to the Apocalypse: How Far Off are Oil Forecasts?

Steven Colbert did a riff last night on America's rolling shortage of ammunition — observing that ammo scarcity was being caused by hoarding gun owners who feared ammo scarcity — and proposing that the new U.S. currency be lead-based.

Good yucks.

But even a good supply of bullets won't be much help if we don't get serious about world (ahem, U.S.) energy consumption. It takes oil to maintain control over other nation's oil supplies.

Via Jim Thill, who used to write about this top a lot, the Guardian reports that a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency is underestimating the world oil supply.

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency [IEA] who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

Okay, a lefty British paper quotes anonymous whistleblower saying U.S. is plotting to suppress the truth.

But look at the production forecast the IEA has just released.

The dark blue is crude oil from currently producing fields. The precipitous decline of those fields is, um, past.

Now it's true that a field not yet developed becomes a currently producing field at some point, so the light blue becomes dark blue the moment it's tapped. 

But before Obama could finish a second term, the world supply will be moving from "fields that cost more to produce" to "fields that will cost even more, if we can find them" just to keep production levels flat.

And you know what China and the rest of the developing world thinks about that.

Above the flat line, we're looking at "even more expensive and environmentally harmful," "soybeans and french fry oil," and liquid natural gas, with that soothing green upward slope.

One little problem. 62.5% of the world's proved natural gas reserves are in Russia, Iran (45.3% together) or elsewhere in the Middle East [PDF].

Jim Thill offered some bicycle hoarding tips with his post. In addition, you may want to save a bullet for yourself.

Split Estate: Meet the New Neighbors.

Ranchers and other generally libertarian types may favor drilling on public lands like ANWR and Colorado's Roan Plateau. Some locals love the oil and gas jobs exploration brings. But as pressure to explore all domestic reserves increases, resistance starts to erupt in the land of the Sagebrush Rebellion.

In more contemporary terms, "split estate" is where Drill, Baby, Drill meets Leave Us Alone.

Split estate lands are located throughout the Rocky Mountain region.

[A] split-estate property is defined as a parcel of property consisting of two separate legal estates: the “surface estate” and the “mineral estate.”[2] In the states of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Utah this translates to roughly 51 million acres of surface estate properties being owned and managed by private parties such as ranchers, farmers, homeowners, and retirees and the subsurface mineral estate being owned, leased and managed by the federal government.[3]

The only thing missing from this definition is the oil and gas companies who buy up the leases and move in next door to claim the wealth under the land.

Forty-eight percent of Wyoming’s private land is split estate.

A documentary shot in my homeland (and former drilling land) called Split Estate premieres on Planet Green on October 17, 2009 at 8pm ET. It will re-air on Planet Green on October 18 at 12pm ET, October 22 at 11pm ET, and October 23 at 3pm ET.

Parking: Where Some Quarters are Better Than Others.

I'd planned to cycle around to all the metro Park(ing) Day locations on Friday, but lunch and a few distractions intervened. Paul Schmelzer hit the same block I visited and shot the same locations, so I'll let him tell it.

His post attracted a revealing comment:

I suppose then the harried good people trying to find a parking space are allowed to go park on the green at Lake Harriet?

What a dose of pointless idiocy and youthful self-righteousness this is. And if looking at a bunch of self-absorbed, underemployed hipsters is to be seen as injecting wonder into the urban landscape, well, I think I’d be better off in Mumbai.

(Mumbai has about 500,000 cars, with common parking for about 8,000. The city has almost twice the average vehicular density.)

Where Mr. Anonymous detects self-righteousness and self-absorption, I found a friendly invitation to sit and talk with strangers — not what would anyone expect to encounter at a street parking space, in a ramp, or glaring through the tinted power window of an Escalade.

The "wonder" being injected was not that urban spaces could use more greenery and hipsters — or even to show how easily a small piece of asphalt could be transformed to a community space. It was to make us question why we tolerate the barren monoclines created because of our autodependence. 

Mr. Anonymous saw those paved spaces as the exclusive domain of harried good people in cars, which of course is the prevailing view of these public spaces. Pedestrians and cyclists should stay off the streets and keep their quarters in their pockets.

Had he looked, Mr. Anonymous would have found more parking in the Monte Carlo lot right next to the temporary parks, and he would have seen more self-righteousness and self-absorption in his mirror.

The End of Easy Oil.

Anyone who thinks U.S. energy requirements are going to be satisfied at the nexus of the oil sands, oil shale and the free market ought to read this National Geographic piece on The Canadian Oil Boom.

"Oil sands represent a decision point for North America and the world," says Simon Dyer of the Pembina Institute, a moderate and widely respected Canadian environmental group. "Are we going to get serious about alternative energy, or are we going to go down the unconventional-oil track? The fact that we're willing to move four tons of earth for a single barrel really shows that the world is running out of easy oil."

With the boom, Vegas-like housing developments and mobile home parks fan out from Ft. MacMurray, Alberta, where the average single-family house costs about $540,000 and roads are choked with traffic. Fake falcons sit atop monitoring devices to keep birds from killing themselves in the sludge of unreclaimed holding ponds.

"It's my belief that when government attempts to manipulate the free market, bad things happen," Premier Stelmach told a gathering of oil industry executives that year. "The free-market system will solve this."

But the free market does not consider the effects of the mines on the river or the forest, or on the people who live there, unless it is forced to. Nor, left to itself, will it consider the effects of the oil sands on climate. Jim Boucher has collaborated with the oil sands industry in order to build a new economy for his people, to replace the one they lost, to provide a new future for kids who no longer hunt ptarmigan in the moonlight. But he is aware of the trade-offs. "It's a struggle to balance the needs of today and tomorrow when you look at the environment we're going to live in," he says. In northern Alberta the question of how to strike that balance has been left to the free market, and its answer has been to forget about tomorrow. Tomorrow is not its job. 

The Check is in the Mail.

Fortune Magazine just listed its Global 500, an annual ranking of the world's largest corporations.

Want to know how hosed the world is?

Of the top 10, seven are oil companies and one is an auto manufacturer.

Rounding out the list are Wal-Mart and ING Group, one of those do-everything financial services companies.

Autos and energy dominated the top 25, but the most intriguing entry was at number 11 — Japan Post Holdings. It's the early stage of the Japanese Government's move to privatize its postal service.

So far, it's looking good. Japan's postal service made about as much money as its world-leading car company lost in 2008.

h/t World Carfree Network