http://www.postcarbon.org/blog-post/285555-five-lessons-from-a-month-in
Five Lessons from a Month in Hell
by Asher Miller
Post Carbon Institute (March 22 2011)
Leave it to the bombing campaign in Libya to remind us that the ongoing
horror in Japan isn't the only thing to lose sleep over. Japan and the
North Africa/Middle East region are each about five thousand miles away
from us here in the US, in opposite directions, but we've got one eye
glued on each these days. And with damned good reason.
On the surface, the nuclear crisis in Japan and the political crisis in
Libya (along with at least five other countries in the region) might seem
unrelated. But when it comes to our self interest here in the United
States, there's one thing that binds them together: our unquenchable need
for energy and the price we pay for that addiction. And there are a few
lessons I think would behoove us to learn from this month in hell:
1. Mother Nature and human nature can't be contained.
We've done such a remarkable job at reshaping the physical world to suit
our wants and needs that it takes disasters like that in Japan to
literally jolt us out of our complacent belief that we are masters of our
domain. As Post Carbon Institute Fellow, Bill McKibben states:
What the events reveal is the thinness of the margin on which
modernity lives. There's not a country in the world more modern and
civilised than Japan; its building codes and engineering prowess kept its
great buildings from collapsing when the much milder quake in Haiti last
year flattened everything. But clearly it's not enough. That thin edge on
which we live, and which at most moments we barely notice, provided
nowhere near enough buffer against the power of the natural world.
This is not just true for disasters that are merely nature's whims. When
we pump gigatons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or split an atom
in an effort to generate "clean" energy, we play with nature's balance.
Our power in this regard is remarkable. But, as we're discovering, it's
much easier to break something than put it back together again.
And mother nature is not the only nature at work. Across the Arab world,
the populace is rising up to demand some say in their own lives. It may
well be that hunger pangs drove people into the streets this year - after
decades of high unemployment, government corruption, and profound wealth
inequality - but what's helped fan the flames of uprising across borders
is something to which we all can relate: a hunger for self determination.
Once that hunger is fed, it's hard to contain.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is when that tart taste of hypocrisy should be
noticeable on our tongues. Because while we proclaim - and I think, for
the most part, genuinely feel - a calling to spread democracy around the
world, that's pretty much the last thing our oil-fueled economies need
right now. As geopolitical security expert Michael Klare recently wrote:
To put the matter baldly: The world economy requires an increasing
supply of affordable petroleum. The Middle East alone can provide that
supply. That's why Western governments have long supported "stable"
authoritarian regimes throughout the region, regularly supplying and
training their security forces. Now, this stultifying, petrified order,
whose greatest success was producing oil for the world economy, is
disintegrating. Don't count on any new order (or disorder) to deliver
enough cheap oil to preserve the Petroleum Age.
Sure, label me a cynic, but how many of you really believe that the
bombing campaign we're waging in Libya right now (launched on the eighth
anniversary of the bombing of Baghdad, no less) has nothing to do with the
1.3 million barrels per day of oil Libya produces? If we cared so much
about human rights, what are we doing about government violence in Yemen
or Bahrain, where Saudi Arabian forces have been called in to squelch
protests? The House of Saud fears protests spreading to Saudi Arabia and,
frankly, so should we. Because if Saudi Arabia's oil production goes
offline, or is even diminished, all bets are off for economic recovery
here at home.
2. We must prepare for business unusual.
Is it just me or have the last three years felt like a breathless series
of one crisis after the other? A global economic cliff drop ... massive
earthquakes in Haiti, New Zealand, and Japan ... record floods, droughts,
and fires in Asia, Russia, Australia, and the US ... oil price spikes in
2008 and again in 2011 ... government debt crises in Greece and
Ireland ... the worst oil spill in US history ... record high food
prices ... political regimes overthrown or threatened in Tunisia, Egypt,
Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain ...
For the most part, the public conversation has focused - with increasing
desperation - on "getting back to normal": robust economic growth,
profligate energy use, unbridled consumerism, et cetera. But what if all
this is the new normal?
3. Resilience is not just a quaint concept.
As someone working for an organization that promotes resilience, I've been
pleased to see a real growth in the use of the term resilience - to
describe everything from the wives of former Presidential candidates to
sports teams. But resilience is not just a quaint concept; its real world
application (or lack thereof) can have a profound impact.
Case in point: The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant to which the
world's eyes are currently glued. The plant consists of six nuclear
reactors in close proximity to the Pacific ocean and one another, in a
region prone to earthquakes.
Core components of resilient systems are redundancy and distribution.
Particularly in the realm of energy production, distributed systems are
often viewed as inefficient and therefore unwise. But how wise was it to
place six nuclear reactors close together? Four of the six Fukushima
Daiichi reactors are in one state of emergency or the other.
I'm sure the designers were convinced that they had created redundant
electricity systems, when maintaining electricity to cool the reactors is
high on the list of safety requirements. Not only did they have backup
diesel generators but they also had emergency batteries. Perhaps they
thought this was enough. It wasn't. The earthquake knocked out the
electricity; the tsunami flooded the emergency generators. Wholly
unexpected right? A real Black Swan? But Tokyo Electric Power, operators
of the Fukushima plant, had numerous warnings, including a report by the
US Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1990, which "identified
earthquake-induced diesel generator failure and power outage leading to
failure of cooling systems as one of the most likely causes of nuclear
accidents from an external event".
And if you think this lack of proper safety protocols is limited to these
reactors, or even the whole of Japan, think again. In the US, here are
just a few examples of resilience in (in)action:
* The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, which lies less than a mile from a
fault line, isn't required to include earthquakes in its emergency plans.
* The Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan has been storing nuclear
waste in outdoor concrete bunkers 100 yards away from the shores of Lake
Michigan (source of water for forty million Americans) since 1993, against
safety regulations.
* In 2006 inspectors discovered that the emergency generators at the Fermi
Two plant in Michigan (same design as Fukushima Daiichi Unit One) had been
inoperable for Twenty Years.
4. It's a small world after all.
An obvious point perhaps, but worth repeating: localized events can have
global implications. Radiation from the east coast of Japan has already
reached the west coast of the US and will eventually make its way around
the globe. There are concerns about contamination of food and water, ocean
fish stocks, and more. Global trade and travel, not to mention natural
forces like the gulf stream, make it virtually impossible to contain - or
even track - the effects. We're talking about trace elements of Cesium-137
here. But consider for a moment the much broader impacts of greenhouse gas
emissions, not only spatially but temporally. As I've said before: The
road trips my grandmother used to take to Vegas in the 1950s are now
raising sea levels in Bangladesh while the coal being burned in China
today is going to make my grand kids' August weather very different than
my own.
And what is true for Earth's atmosphere is also true for the political
atmosphere around the world. With world oil production on a plateau for
several years now, and demand growth in places like China, protests in
Egypt and Libya can send gas prices at your local gas station soaring.
5. An addiction is an addiction is an addiction.
Which gets me to the biggest lesson of all, in my mind. If nothing else,
this hellish month should remind us that there's no such thing as "free"
or "cheap" or "clean" or "safe" energy.
The debate over the safety of nuclear power is being waged with many of
the same arguments made by the same people we saw after Chernobyl and
Three Mile Island. But while much of the argument is the same, the
response on the part of the US government may well be different. After
Three Mile Island, no new nuclear reactors were built in the United
States. This time, even in the midst of international panic over the
spread of radiation, Energy Secretary Steven Chu restated the government's
commitment to nuclear power, to which it's pledged $36 billion in loan
guarantees.
Bets are also being placed for what the nuclear crisis will mean for other
energy investments. Some see the disaster in Japan as a boon for renewable
energy; others worry that it will reduce commitments to clean energy. The
natural gas industry has rolled out commercials across cable news outlets
and some believe that natural gas will be the big "winner" out of this
nightmare.
And yet what's distinctly missing from the public conversation is any real
acknowledgment that we're a-d-d-i-c-t-e-d to energy, and lots of it. And
that addiction comes with a huge cost, the price at the pump being the
least of it. We're not going to end this addiction anytime soon, nor
should we. Human progress has been achieved on the back of abundant
energy, and elements of that progress (education, human rights, time) is
not something any of us wants to see in the rear view mirror. Which is why
it might be useful - as it becomes increasingly clear that the Age of Easy
Energy is over - that we have an adult conversation about the best (read:
safest, most productive, and most aligned with our values) uses for the
energy we do have. The Number One thing we can do to provide us the time
and freedom to have that conversation is to use less of it. While that's
still voluntary.
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