Jun 25, 2009 at 01:06 PM : More change! ...

More change!

Oops I have NO MORE change!

I have no more money at all to be taxed!

Bury me - it is the only sure thing I have left! At least it is already paid for!!

Jun 25, 2009 at 02:06 PM : No one several months...

No one several months ago thought a bill like this would ever make it out of committee. It did, and it made it out with a whole bunch of compromises that both sides worked out. This is a first step to getting the US in a position of moving the larger emerging industrial giants off the snide on pollution. China and India both can smugly say no to all pollution standards because they say, the US has none. Treaty time on Global Climate topics are coming up very soon. The US should set an example by acting in the interests of the planet, not be some dirty industrialist nation that ignores overwhelming science to allow a few major entrenched industrialists to make more money.

There are a lot of positives in this clean energy bill. This would be the very first time the US will actually cap and regulate emissions for carbon dioxide. Not many are behind the carbon offsets, or the paltry 17% carbon emissions cut by 2020. Big oil interests are, of course, opposed to every regulation under the sun and would prefer to be allowed to do what a cartel always does, and that is anything they damn well please with as little regulation as possible. No shock. This bill sets a direction. It is not a perfect product for either side, but many believe we need this direction desperately if global climate catastrophe is to be avoided.

If you would like to read reponses to the current Waxman-Markey bill here is a link to Yale Environment 360 article on the World Changing website.

Jun 25, 2009 at 05:06 PM : The...

The climate change bill is a bad idea, and an example of too little, way too late, and shows complete denial of the link between energy use and GNP.

Our standard of living, capital base, and GNP, are purely the result of exploiting abundant cheap energy supplies to amplify human labor. Most of this bounty is the result of the discovery of petroleum, and technology to exploit this miraculously concentrated energy form. Along side petroleum is the other carbon based energy source, coal.

The availability of this concentrated energy source,, and the original ease of production and use, radically changed society, and the human condition on the planet.

In modern western societies, this energy input represents a human labor amplification of over 100 to 1, and for some tasks more than 250 to 1.

To define the gain in a more familiar way, the average middle class American has the energy equivalent of 25 slaves working for free, every day of the year.

Take for example, the amount of human labor involved for your morning hot shower, if you had to gather 25 gallons of water from a nearby river. Using a two gallon bucket, that’s a dozen trips. Next, build a hot fire with wood to heat the water. The wood took a great deal of labor to cut and prepare with hand tools, and more labor to haul and stack it for use. Once the water is heated, more labor is required to place it in a container high enough to create a pressure flow through your shower head. And of course, once the shower is finished, you’ll need to get rid of the used water. At least one half day of hard manual labor equivalent to enjoy that 10 minute shower. No wonder the pioneers took one bath per week on Saturday nights, and the whole family shared the same tub.

Concentrated solar energy, represented by oil and coal, are the reason for our living standard. Our GNP, and the real capital created, are the result of this concentrated energy source.

Not too long ago, it bears remembering, most people on all sides of the peak oil debate – believers, skeptics, and everyone in between – assumed that the law of supply and demand would necessarily define the world’s response to the end of cheap oil. As existing reserves depleted, nearly everyone agreed, the intersection of decreasing supply and rising demand would drive prices up. Common or garden variety cornucopians insisted that this would lead to more drilling, more secondary extraction, and other measures that would produce more oil and bring the price back down; techno-cornucopians insisted that this would lead to the discovery of new energy resources, which would produce more energy and bring the price back down; green cornucopians insisted that this would finally make renewable energy cost-effective, and at least keep the price from rising further; and pessimists argued that none of these things would happen, and the price of oil would rise steadily on up into the stratosphere.

What has actually happened is extreme volatility of price, decreasing net supply, and disruption of business as usual.

Only a few economists realize that these perplexities point to weaknesses in the most basic assumptions of economics itself. E.F. Schumacher understood. He pointed out that for a modern industrial society, energy resources are not simply one set of commodities among many others. They are the Uber-commodities, the fundamental resources that make economic activity possible at all, and the rules that govern the behavior of other commodities cannot be applied to energy resources in a simplistic way.

The attempt to make sense of energy resources as ordinary commodities misses the crucial point that energy follows laws of its own that are distinct from the rules governing economic activities. Trying to predict the economics of energy without paying attention to the laws governing energy on its own terms – the laws of thermodynamics – yields high-grade nonsense.

Look at the way that rules governing the availability of other resources go haywire when applied to energy. When North America’s deposits of high-grade iron ore were exhausted, for example, the iron industry switched over to progressively lower grades of ore; these contain less iron per ton than the high-grade ores but are much more abundant, and improved technology for extracting the iron makes up the difference. In theory, at least, the supply of iron ore can never run out, since industry can simply keep on retooling to use ever more abundant supplies of ever lower-grade ores, right down to iron salts dissolved in the sea.

Try to do the same thing with energy, by contrast, and two awkward facts emerge. First, the only reason the iron industry can use progressively lower grades of ore is by using increasingly large amounts of energy per ton of iron produced, and the same rule applies across the board; the lower the concentration of the resource in its natural form, the more energy has to be used to extract it and turn it into useful forms. Second, when you try to apply this principle to energy, you very quickly reach the point at which the energy needed to extract and process the resource is greater than the energy you get out the other end. Once this point arrives, the resource is no longer useful in energy terms; you might as well try to support yourself by buying $1 bills for $2 each.

At the beginning of the 20th century, petroleum was found and produced with an energy return on energy invested of almost 100 to 1. An amazing one time gift.

Today, we are below 15 to 1 world wide, when all extraction is averaged. Good reason why oil is no longer sold for less than $1 per barrel.

It’s the EROEI that built our prosperous society, but the era of easy cheap energy has ended.

Left behind is the refuse, carbon placed back in the environment far faster than it was removed over millions of years.

The EROEI of most Green Energy sources is below 3 to 1, and some are net energy losers once the petroleum derived energy subsidy is removed.

Is it a problem? YES! Can we fix the problem?

Well, yes and no.

All alternative energy sources can not hope to ever give a EROEI even close to the golden age of petroleum. To make it work, each of us has to give up most of our phantom slaves gifted to us by the short term EROEI of petroleum. This decline will happen regardless of social attitudes, but most would never do it voluntarily anyway.

Bottom line....

We have waited far too long, and made the wrong choices, to have any chance of mitigating the effects of the coming net energy draw down. There is not enough spare capital available in the entire world economy to rebuild, and scale up alternative energy supplies before the world economy shrinks dramatically as a result.

The climate change bill will do little long term to avoid carbon loading of the environment, nor will it accelerate the use of non carbon sources any faster than would happen over time as the result of net depletion of carbon based energy going forward, and it's ever increasing cost.

The next 20 years will be a time of chronic energy shortages, falling living standards, and hardships as a result of an economic model built on a never ending growth assumption, fueled by cheap energy.

The carbon tax won’t help, and will simply add to our collective misery.

Jun 25, 2009 at 06:06 PM : casooner90: ...

casooner90: It's just another version of the spending, the spending, the never-ending spending. And while the word "taxes" is almost a no-no in the democrat vocabulary, taxes are what will be exploding over the next several years with this cap and trade bill. Ms. Pelosi has been up in the clouds too long. This is not my version of "the sky is falling"; rather, the sky is falling.

Jun 25, 2009 at 09:06 PM : Donmason, I love your...

Donmason, I love your stuff. I would never dare to argue with you on a subject that you obviously have an exhaustive bank of understanding and knowledge of. That being said, and in refernce to my small post above, this is a direction bill not a fix everything we can, damn the costs bill. It is flawed by many of the compromises needed to get the actual document (more than 1,000 pages) out of committeee. We need to start somewhere. This is a point of departure bill to begin the process, which everyone hopes will allow enough time to move the public opinion needle to where it needs to be to achieve many of the real solutions that must happen down the road.

Oh, and thanks for the economics tutorial.

Jun 26, 2009 at 06:06 PM : casooner90: ...

casooner90: By now you know the bill passed the House. There were many democrat defectors, however, and that's a comforting thought.

Jun 28, 2009 at 09:06 PM : Alicen, this bill...

Alicen, this bill (which the Dems them selves didn't even read nor fully understand) is going to either put US corporations at a severe disadvantage or will further burden the consumers. Guess which one? You guessed it. The consumers will get the bill since the US corporations will continue to compete GLOBALLY.

This is another one of those 'change' without knowing all the specifics.