Recently in Energy the nexus of everything Category

An interesting paper has recently been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled "Public perceptions of energy consumption and savings" (see http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/06/1001509107.shortb) by Attari et al. This paper provides insights into how people view the quantity of energy consumed for various tasks that are normal in an industrial society. The paper authors conclude that people generally overestimate the energy savings for changing habits related to saving low quantities of energy while underestimating energy savings associated with saving larger quantities of energy.

This research shows some of the difficulties in using surveys to assess perceptions and reality of how energy impacts our lives. Take for example the following in which the respondent is asked to select how strongly he/she agrees or disagrees with the statement:

"We are approaching the limit of the number of people the earth can support."

Today, human population is approximately 6.7 billion. If you believe that the earth can only support 2 billion people, then you could strongly disagree with the statement on the grounds that we are not approaching that limit, but that we have far surpassed the limit. However, if you believe the earth can support 12 billion people, then you might also strongly disagree with the statement because you think we are far from the earth's limits (i.e. we are not yet "approaching the limit"). So two completely different answers might prompt selecting the same response to the statement.

The results for the questions pertaining to values and behavioral questions (e.g. how hard do you think it is to change your energy consuming habits) are not presented in the PNAS paper by Attari, but these are important questions to ask. Many people believe that the vast majority of people will not willfully conserve energy without financial penalties (e.g. high prices or taxes) for consumption. I fall into that category myself. We find ourselves in an interesting time as for only the second time in the last 40 years we (in the US) have reached a point where over 10% of GDP was spent directly on primary and secondary energy.

The first time period was from the mid 1970s-mid 1980s and likely in 2008 as well (see figure). The first time over 10% of GDP was spent on energy was driven by political events - particularly the Arab Oil Embargos and the Iran-Iraq War. This most recent worldwide economic recession starting in 2008 was not driven by a particular political event, but has been a growing trend for almost a decade (at least with particular reference to the US).

The US broke out of the recessions cause by the oil shortages of the 1970s by investing in energy efficiency for vehicles (Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standards), only to find itself equally or more dependent upon oil for economic growth today as in 1970. Important questions are: Will the US meet its new CAFE goals (reaching 35.5 miles per gallon for vehicles sales; 39 mpg for cars and 30 mpg for trucks and sport-utility vehicles) by 2016? This targeted increase is approximately the same percentage increase in fuel efficiency as occurred from the 1970s to the late 1980s in meeting the original CAFE standards. If the US (and the world) is successful in reducing oil consumption per mile traveled by 2016 (or soon thereafter), will we only find ourselves in the same position 10-30 years down the road? In other words, will we just wait until we consume too much gasoline for it to take too much out of our wallets to again think about restructuring the way our economy functions and consumes energy?

There are reasons to think this time is different. This time we are well past peak oil production for the US. Perhaps we have reached peak crude oil production in the US and so far the statistics seem to point to that possibly being true (but it will take several more years to confirm the full truth). In reading the August 15, 2010 issue of Science which talks about scaling up of renewable energy, there are two articles about biofuels. One article in particular ("Challenges in Scaling up Biofuels Infrastructure" by Tom Richard) notes the logistical issues with making fuels out of biomass. Richard discusses much about how we are supposed to create a viable supply chain for the relatively low-density biomass materials to go from the farm to the biorefinery and finally to the consumer. The reason that this is such a hard problem is that the net energy of the biomass fuel is so low that it is not obvious that we can run our current economy as designed if using these fuels to any large degree. That is also a major difference now from the 1970s - we're actually really trying to grow an economy using biofuels instead of just making cars run on less fuel and importing more oil.

The current conundrum discussed in the news and the public is between (1) Western government spending to keep stimulating their economies after the decade-long period of overspending and (2) savings to prevent future collapse of governments under their own debt burden. Unfortunately, energy resource availability is rarely a part of the discussion, and pundits never point to it as a core driver. This is quite unfortunate.

There is no one consensus on the "economic growth" issue among mainstream economists as the proper choice, or series of choices, is quite unclear. There appears to be no good path, only a choice between bad paths. Ecological or biophysical economic arguments have historically been quickly dismissed as invalid, yet no other economic theories are based upon anything tangible. We hear of the need to "consumer confidence" as if that is a tangible and meaningful reason to invest. Irrational exuberance, or extreme confidence, is exactly what pushed us to two boom-bust cycles (dot-com and now housing) over the last two decades. Confidence only takes you so far, and at some point you need something tangible upon which to base economic theory. That tangible good is essentially natural resources, primarily energy, and the technologies that convert those resources to consumer products and services.

Because increasing consumption of natural and energy resources are the key driver of economic growth, if you do not increase their consumption, you do not grow. Yes, more efficient energy production and conversion systems (power plants, vehicles, mining, etc.) also induce economic growth, but the past only indicates the higher efficiency begets higher total consumption - due to Jevon's Paradox. However, when fossil resource availability does decline due to depletion, we'll be happy for higher efficiency services even when total consumption decreases.

Adding or switching to energy resources and technologies, where they exist, takes decades. Translation: this is longer than election cycles. Thus, a US president that implements energy efficiency or conservation policies will generally not reap the rewards or drawbacks of those policies. The next President, or perhaps a second one down the line, will be dealing with those problems. Since 2000, the United States has consumed roughly the same total amount of primary energy, about 100 quadrillion Btus per year. There has never been a time in US history at which total energy consumption was stagnant for this long. Much of the reason for the stagnation in energy consumption was offshoring of energy-intensive industries to developing countries, and thus there are less and less non-skilled jobs available after each economic downturn. The US economy restructured based upon increasing energy prices during the last decade, and companies traded cheap energy in the form of the muscle of Chinese, for more expensive energy, in the form of natural gas and petroleum.

Thus, major structural changes in the US economy have occurred over the last decade, and no policy can reverse these trends in less than another decade. The reason that economists, and even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernake are calling the economic future "unusually uncertain" is that the US has never encountered the situation at which we now reside. Energy consumption is flat. World oil production is at a plateau. We have shipped jobs to China and borrow their profits to feed our consumption habit. Unemployment is high.

Policy can't ship more jobs to China because hindering employment even further is a political death nail. Policy can promote offshore oil and renewable energy technologies, but those resources and technologies have lower energy return on energy invested (EROI) than the resources we have used in the past. Lower EROI means more of the economy must focus on energy production itself rather than producing other more discretionary economic goods. And a change in transportation mode (electric cars, electric and/or high speed trains) will take decades, and these changes can work, but they may never be as economically as productive as burning petroleum at $20/BBL to $60/BBL.

So the reason that economists see a "sluggish" or "low-growth" economy in the foreseeable future is due to energy. From 2000-2008, we pretended that high rates of GDP growth could occur without increasing energy consumption. Increasing prosperity of the developing world has strained energy resources to the point that we must adjust to a future with energy consumption that is both lower and from new resources and technologies. These technologies and resources, even without considering altering them to prevent greenhouse gas emissions, are less productive. So if you put these concepts together, you end up with the result that we must (1) invest in new energy technologies that (2) employ more people per output (kWh, liter of fuel, etc.) and produce (3) lower net energy than historical coal, natural gas, and oil (even future coal, oil, and natural gas are less productive) such that (4) the energy sector grows as a proportion of the economy and (5) by definition the rest of the economy must shrink. Either this reality we become true, or the scientists working on fusion will pull a rabbit out of hat. No tax policy of a President will do much to significantly alter this equation. Only energy consumers can wait to see if we do or do not pull off sufficient technology solutions, and adjust their habits accordingly.

The latest Water Commission rulings have now come out on how to distribute water resources on the island of Maui, Hawaii. These rulings discuss how to distribute water from diversion ditches owned and operated by the last sugar-cane plantation of Hawaii Commercial and Sugar (HC&S) who is by far the largest water user on the island. The historical and future contexts of Maui are important in understanding why commercial and native Hawaiian interests have a very difficult time becoming aligned in any significant way.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s settlers to Hawaii established large plantations that over time grew sugar cane, pineapples and other crops. The best land for growing these crops generally lies on the leeward side of the islands that are relatively dry, sometimes almost desert-like. As a result of prevailing Northeasterly winds, the water is precipitated out of the Pacific clouds on the eastern sides of the islands before reaching the western portions of the islands. In order to provide the water required for large agricultural plantations, a series of diversions ditches over 100 miles long along takes water from the windward side of East Maui around to the central valley for the sugar-cane plantation.

However, over the last few decades, the plantations on all Hawaiian islands have been shutting down due to having difficulty competing economically on the global market. The HC&S plantation is the last of a dying breed in Hawaii, and many environmental and pro-native groups wouldn't be surprised if the plantation shut down tomorrow – and for the most part they'd prefer that ending. As plantations on the islands have shut down the question arises as to how to allocate the water that previously diverted for agriculture. The case of reallocating some water from the previously fully diverted Waiahole Stream on Oahu has potentially set a precedent for using water for the purposes of native rights and environmental services. The native rights are primarily concerned with growing taro. Because taro is normally grown in flooded fields and patches that reside adjacent to streams and divert water into the fields before returning most of the water. Some species of taro can be grown without flooded fields, but those varieties are less common.

However influential the ruling for the partial reallocation of diverted water in the Waiahole case, it concerned water becoming available from the closing of a sugar plantation, Oahu Sugar. The water essentially became up for grabs. The cases on Maui for the Ne Wai Eha (West Maui) and East Maui concern a sugar plantation that is still operating. Furthermore, the push for renewable fuels in the US have led to federal grants going to investigate the use of Maui lands for biofuel development. This added pressure from the federal government may overcome any economic and legal pressures to either shut down HC&S the sugar plantation or divert more water to other uses on the island. Other pushes for general energy independence, an abundance of sun and water (when considering the entire island of Maui) generally make Maui as attractive as any location in the US states.

Whatever happens, the allocations of water and land use on Maui are a microcosm of the pressures of industrialized countries trying to make money and renewable energy using large plantations/farms and higher wages than countries like Brazil that also have the requisite natural resources, but currently not the same wage and environmental management pressures.

In the continuing saga of the oil leak after the April 20 explosion and subsequent sinking of the Transocean's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, operated by BP, there has been no shortage of people quoted in the news media wondering why we can't just throw money at the problem and have the well plugged. We've heard "Why aren't BP and the government responding?" over and over. But they have been responding, only ineffectively until BP's "top kill" procedure that seems to be having success (as of this writing), but is not yet completed through the process of cementing the well. This thinking that we should easily be able to stop this leak stems from the fact that many people are uneducated about the principles of science and that all things new are viewed as equally innovative. If this fallacy persists it will undermine research and education in energy.

To give an example, I've heard prominent policy speakers on prominent talk shows say that if we'd simply hire Google employees tackle the problem of plugging the leaking oil well, then it would be completed within days. This mentality assumes that, when it comes to environmental remediation of an oil leak a mile below the sea surface, the people who invented the drilling technology itself are at some level less competent then those that make their revenue from linking advertisements to Web searches. Granted, both Google and BP are generally very good at what they do. But suggesting Google is best qualified to stop an oil leak is akin to suggesting that BP should be in charge of Google's strategy for operating its search engine in China. This suggestion also implies that the past research on energy alternatives has been performed by buffoons.

Just as in the past "The Marine Biologist" episode of the popular 1990s US sitcom Seinfeld, we might as well ask Kramer (the clumsy neighbor) to hit a golf ball into the ocean to plug up the well just as he plugged up a whale's blowhole with his "hole-in-one." Oh wait, I forgot, he actually did plug up the hole. In the case of the whale - not well - unplugging the passageway was needed. The call came out for a marine biologist, a relevant expertise for the task at hand. The fact that George (who often lied of his intellectual capabilities to get ahead) solved the problem because he pretended to be a marine biologist, and did so successfully, is relevant to my point. Society perceives that we don't need a foundation in science and engineering to solve energy problems that involve science and engineering.

We as people are more prone to act in times of crises than when continual change is required. Former President George W. Bush' decision to go to war with Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein was based upon the highly uncertain belief that there were weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that needed confiscation before he chose to use them. As we all know today, there were no WMD in Iraq, but within a few years we at least knew the answer to the question.

We wait until financial crises occur such that we have to take drastic measures to bail out banks so that we can justify actions by saying we didn't have time to pursue other solutions. These justifications exist even though looking at the past data shows that total debt in the US, public and private, has been continuously increasing for all practical history, and is at near 350% of GDP. And now the US public debt is at 90% of GDP. With these trends, why do we need a crisis to act? In group planning exercises, simulated crises are often created to force people to make concrete decisions to explore the effectiveness of the decisions. For example, say that your region is experiencing drought, and the demand for water is 10% higher than the supply - for whom and how much to you reduce water access to meet the supply?

In the research community we should do a much better job at explaining the differences in making decisions under uncertainty. There are measureable decisions that produce short term feedback regarding effectiveness (e.g. acts of war, plugging an oil leak) that have highly uncertain outcomes, but that history has shown people pursuing out of choice or necessity. There are also decisions where the feedbacks occur over long times and succeed due to multiple coordinated actors due to their disperse nature (e.g. climate change mitigation, energy investments, land use management to preserve aquatic environments such as prevention of hypoxic zones). We're good at the former and bad at the latter. Because these latter decisions for environmental management require group coordination, regulation and government involvement is usually used, and those that are affected and unaware question the motives to the point of noncompliance. Only after convincing them that their personal actions make a difference as part of a coordinated effort do they believe they should change their actions.

With regard to energy investments, given the existing measures for economic growth that discount the future and keep environmental impacts external from the growth equation, oil still makes sense. As long as value is measured by the flow of goods instead of the stock goods, we will favor energy and fuel-consuming items and systems. The "innovative" energy efficient investments in web servers that lower the energy per bit have simply followed Jevons' paradox as we now process even more bits than were saved. We stream movies on YouTube and constantly check the web on our mobile phones.

We assume that solar electric generating technologies will someday be cheaper than coal, and we assume that putting a sufficient price on greenhouse gas emissions will drive innovation in energy systems that enable continuous living at high standards in the developed world while bringing the developing world up to par. Most of these assumptions of innovation of new technologies are based upon the study of gadgets that consume, rather than produce energy. There is a reason why solar power is not cheaper than coal power - it is hard to take a diffuse energy resource such as sunlight and make it as productive as energy dense resources like fossil fuels. There are real physical constraints that limit the power that can be produced. These physical constraints can't be removed by programming a search engine (Google) or a mimicking a sitcom (Seinfeld), or simply believing they will work.

We need to understand how well renewable energy systems can replace fossil fuels. This is not because the fossil fuel industry is necessarily evil, but because fossil resources will inevitably become uneconomical, no matter how we quantify that. And because today renewable energy technologies are manufactured by burning fossil fuels, they will also not be economical in the long run unless they are made with their own energy as an input.

One current climate and energy bill in the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources of the United States Senate is S. 1462, the American Clean Energy and Leadership Act of 2009. The stated purpose of this bill is to:

" ... promote the domestic development and deployment of clean energy technologies required for the 21st century through the improvement of existing programs and the establishment of a self-sustaining Clean Energy Deployment Administration that will provide for an attractive investment environment through partnership with and support of the private capital market in order to promote access to affordable financing for accelerated and widespread deployment of-- (1) clean energy technologies; (2) advanced or enabling energy infrastructure technologies; (3) energy efficiency technologies in residential, commercial, and industrial applications, including end-use efficiency in buildings; and (4) manufacturing technologies for any of the technologies or applications described in this section."

To achieve the goal of the deployment of clean technologies, not research, a Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA) is proposed to be established in the Department of Energy. The agency will be an independent administration within the DOE with a Technology Advisory Council to advise on the technical aspects of new technologies. CEDA is to provide different types of credit such as loans, loan guarantees, other credit enhancements as well as secondary market support such as clean energy-backed bonds that are aimed at allowing less expensive lending in the private sector.

The mission of CEDA is to help deploy (not research) technologies that are perceived as too risky by commercial lenders. Thus, the agency aims to promote riskier technologies but with high potential to solve climate and energy security needs. At the same time, a portfolio approach is supposed to mitigate risk and enable CEDA to become economically self-sustaining over time after getting initial seed capital allocated by Congress (possibly up to $16 billion from existing funds reallocated to CEDA).

If other private investors are also pursuing balanced portfolios of risky and safe energy investments, what exactly might be the difference between the government CEDA and a private equity energy investor? Would it be that CEDA has a mandate to only invest in energy and climate technologies whereas a private fund can invest mostly in energy technologies or even change it energy-related portion of its portfolio over time? No doubt many would be skeptical that the government, even with private advice via the Technology Advisory Council, could make a profitable investment fund for clean energy, much less specifically having to invest in technologies that are too risky for the private market. It is also not clear how far $16 billion can go in this endeavor. For instance, for a wind turbines (not a risky clean energy technology) at a cost of $2000/kW, $16 billion could purchase 8 GW of installed capacity. Riskier and unproven technologies would be much more expensive such that the CEDA fund could invest no more than the order of 10s to maybe 100s of MW of installed effective capacity (via energy conservation or generation technologies) or less. If a new technology were deployed and operated successfully for a year or two at a scale of 0.1 - 1 MW, then it would begin to get established as less risky from an investment standpoint, and more business model and upscaling issues could take over in importance with CEDA divesting and hopefully handing the reigns to private capital. Thus, possibly up to a few dozens of technologies could get funding from CEDA to expedite their deployment.

It is not clear what the returns to CEDA will be in what will surely be rare cases of success. CEDA is meant to be more creative and flexible than existing government programs that have loan guarantees as the only funding and assistance mechanism. On the grand scale of problems and budgets, $10-$20 billion on CEDA may be a worthwhile bet. After all, that's only about a dozen stealth bombers!

For a 30-minute interview with myself and two others on the energy-water nexus topic, with particular focus upon renewable energy, visit Renewable Energy World.

A few weeks ago on This Week (ABC, http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/exclusive-sen-alexander-9969974) US Senator Lamar Alexander (R) of the said the United States is now too complex for there to be very large sweeping bills to pass that will be good for the country. The reasoning is that the bills are now so long that there are too many unintended consequences and surprises embedded in them. He thus pushed for more incremental bills to make continuous progress. On the other hand, President Obama says the health care system is so complex that you can't overhaul it in a piecemeal fashion. So which is it?

What does these conflicting statements from the US elected officials say about the state of governing the United States, or perhaps generally the industrialized world, regarding the reaching a point of diminished marginal returns on the complexity of how we are organized? And in the reasoning of Joseph Tainter (http://www.cnr.usu.edu/htm/facstaff/memberID=837) are energy resources, or the lack of the abundance per capita of the past, have something to do with our inability to solve new problems? I'll quote from an article in Slate's website (http://www.slate.com/id/2225820/):

"Over the last several decades, the number of bills passed by Congress has declined: In 1948, Congress passed 906 bills. In 2006, it passed only 482. At the same time, the total number of pages of legislation has gone up from slightly more than 2,000 pages in 1948 to more than 7,000 pages in 2006. (The average bill length increased over the same period from 2.5 pages to 15.2 pages.)

Bills are getting longer because they're getting harder to pass. Increased partisanship over the years has meant that the minority party is willing to do anything it can to block legislation--adding amendments, filibustering, or otherwise stalling the lawmaking process. As a result, the majority party feels the need to pack as much meat into a bill as it can--otherwise, the provisions might never get through. ... And as new legislation is introduced, past laws need to be updated. The result: more pages."

So governing the country is becoming more and more difficult to increasing size and complexity. Theoretically, this requires more and more money and energy to operate the government and distribute services among the citizens. Given that US energy consumption has been effectively flat at between 99 and 101 quadrillion (1 quad = 1 x 10^15) BTUs since 2004, perhaps this has finally caught up to us in the form of the mortgage and financial crisis causing the current recession. The economists are stating that they don't see jobs recovering much at all this year even if the overall economy does grow by any percentage.

It is disappointing to hear, or rather not hear, more of a discussion among politicians of how energy resource quality (measured by energy return on energy invested (EROI), net energy, etc.) is not brought more into the general discussion as an indicator of the future path of our society. I hosted a panel session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting on "The Consequences of Changes on Energy Return on Energy Invested" (see: http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2010/webprogram/Session1710.html). During this session we discussed how the quality of energy resources (being primarily fossil fuels) as measured by EROI are getting lower. Thus, the same amount of energy production (in total Btus/yr) at a low EROI is not able to sustain the same level of complexity and growth as when that same quantity of energy has a higher EROI. More fuel and parts of the economy are literally needed to support the functioning of society, and society must rearrange itself. Many people believe this rearrangement is happening by switching to alternative energy resources such as renewables for liquid fuels and electricity, but these resources are inherently inferior (when thinking only from an EROI standpoint) that the fossil fuels we have used in the past and are still consuming today. Thus, energy systems must inherently get simpler not more complex. It is not clear whether the "smart grid" is more simple or more complex. In some instances, it allows decisions to be made more locally and that sounds simpler. On the other hand, there are more decision-making nodes or locations, and that sounds more complex. I'm inclined at the moment to think that the smart grid is an increase in complexity, but this is a ripe area for future research.

I send out a call to the energy community to call for a more integrated approach to thinking about how critical energy quality is to economic production and societal organization. Instead of blaming the current politician in office for running up the budget or spending too many tax dollars, we need to show that our future options for private and public services are fundamentally limited by the quantity and quality of the energy resources we consume. Thus, we should not be surprised when our politicians are having extreme difficulty in solving the current challenges. The lesser amount of excess energy floating in the economy simply demands that actions be performed much more precisely with less and less room for error. When there is excess energy available, you can simply more easily afford to mess up, and for that matter, clean up your mess.

I just attended the conference Understanding, Measuring, and Managing Water Scarcity Risks and Footprints in the Supply Chain this past week. This conference was primarily attended by sustainability managers of corporations along with a few academics and non-governmental organizations. There was much discussion of how to measure water impacts of industry as well as how to act on measured or calculated information. Many of the speakers and attendees were familiar with several methods for measuring water "usage" such as the Water Footprint (www.waterfootprint.org) and the Global Water Tool of the World Business Council on Sustainable Development (www.wbcsd.org/web/watertool.htm). The former presents information on the green water (soil moisture for the most part provided by precipitation) and blue water (stored water in rivers, lakes, and aquifers) consumed in the supply chain of a product. The latter is a mapping program that allows businesses to understand if they have operations in regions of the globe that have water scarcity.

There was general agreement within the community that the Water Footprint is not properly used as Jason Morrison of the Pacific Institute summarized by saying "different interests use the term 'water' footprint' to mean different things" for their own purposes. Technically speaking, the water footprint is in units of water volume per time. By multiplying by the time per product manufactured, one can obtain the water footprint in units of water per product. This last term is the one most commonly presented in such examples as the quantity of water needed for a pair of jeans or a cup of coffee. This water volume per product is a handy unit of measure that consumers and business people can easily grasp. The problem is that it doesn't seem to be helping either water resource management practitioners or sustainability managers at companies.

The issue stems from culminating into one term the water consumed over a supply chain that occurs in time and in space. If your supply chain for a product occurs in more than one location and/or at more than one time, then by definition you cannot capture all of that information into a single number. Mathematically this is like taking the derivative of a number. Each time you take the derivative, you lose one degree of freedom or information. For example, the volume of a sphere is described as V = 4/3*pi*r^3 and is in units of cubic meters (m^3) to describes a three-dimensional space. Taking the derivative of volume with respect to its radius results in the surface area of the sphere at A = 4*pi*r^2 in units of square meters (m^2) to describe a two-dimensional space. Hence we went from three dimensions to two dimensions. If I show only the final value for the surface area of the sphere, say 1 m^3, I do not know that a sphere is being described. However, if tell you the equation for the sphere's surface area and tell you it is equal to 1 m^2, then you know how to calculate the volume (or radius) because I have just provided more information that told you about the third dimension.

What does this have to do with water footprinting? Well, similarly to needing to know more than one piece of information about the surface area being described (need two of either equation, radius, and surface area) to know it is for a sphere, you need more than a single value for the water footprint of a product to understand the environmental impact caused by its production. For example, if a shirt requires water during farming of cotton and dyeing of the fibers, then one could present the information in two numbers on a bar chart (among many other means for presenting information). Part of the bar chart would represent the cotton farming, and the other part would represent the dyeing step. By telling people where you source your cotton and where you perform your dyeing, you have now presented more information – information again that cannot be understood using a single value. I have just described four pieces of information: water for cotton, water for dyeing, location for cotton, and location for dyeing. A map with the water consumption value in each location the water is consumed could present all four pieces of this information. I could go on for temporal components. The World Water Tool exists to take the information described in this paragraph to relate to water scarcity around the globe. They of course use a map for this.

This thought exercise is meant to show that people understand that describing environmental impacts is somewhat complex. In describing water flows for human appropriated needs, from a basic standpoint we should focus on avoiding the word "use" to describe water flows. Instead, use "consumption" to describe water that enters the system as a liquid and exits as water vapor or in another chemical form. Use "withdrawal" to describe water entering and exiting the system in a liquid form, and note that consumption is a subset of withdrawal. The water footprint is a consumptive descriptor that for the most part includes evapotranspiration (green water) on top of what the term consumption (the blue water component) takes into account. If we stick to some of these basic rules, we can better understand how human and ecosystem services are subjected risks in water availability.

According to Japanese researcher Taikan Oki and Shinjiro Kanae, approximately 500,000 cubic km of water per yr are evaporated over the ocean (437,000 cubic km) and land (66,000 cubic km).¹ With water at a density of 1000 kg per cubic meter, this is 5x10^17 kg of water evaporated per year. Using a latent heat of vaporization for water of 2,270 kJ/kg, this means that a minimum approximately 1,135,000 exajoules per year (1 exajoule, or EJ, = 10^18 J) of solar energy are used to evaporate the world's water and drive the much of the hydrologic cycle of the planet.

Given that humans consume approximately 500 EJ/yr in primary energy, this means that the Earth's water consumes at least 2,000 times more solar energy each year when evaporating water that we consume in primary energy resources. Eighty-seven percent of this water is desalinated by evaporating from the oceans. So when we talk about desalinating water, or recycling water, just remember that it means that we are inherently deciding that 2,000 times our direct consumption of primary energy resources for the creation of fresh water is not enough!

So when we think if using desalination, but matching it up with carbon-free sources or technologies that are more efficient than a couple of decades ago, what we are really saying is that our original use of solar energy for water desalination is no longer sufficient for our purposes. With that mindset, should we rearrange our priorities in terms of the uses of water and locating people to where the solar resource combines with precipitation patterns and the Earth's contours to deliver water to us renewably? Or should we continue to bet that energy will be cheap such that we become more dependent upon it for delivering fresh water? These kinds of questions are mainly for rich countries, as we can only be so lucky to have these options.

¹Oki, Taikan and Kanae, Shinjiro (2006). Global Hydrological Cycles and World Water Resources. Science, 25 August 2006, Vol. 313. no. 5790, pp1068–1072, DOI: 10.1126/science.1128845.

The economic struggles since mid-2008 are bringing out factions that highlight both the uncertainty of the future together with ignorance of how the past has led us to where we are today. In the US, we have the conservative "Tea Party" movement of the right that is complaining about excessive government spending and the liberal "anti-banking" faction on the left that is fed up with the fat cats on Wall Street skimming too much off the top. Both sides are correct in coming to grips with the fact that large organizations and bureaucracies (e.g. government and banks) are having a harder time coping with the current economic and social problems of today.

What has unfortunately been quite absent from most of the political discussions about how to get the economy "back on track" is the true role of energy resources and technologies. With all of the talk in the United States about the need to "connect the dots" for the "War on Terrorism", what we really need to do is accept the way the energy and economic dots are connected in our modern industrial society.

By taking the following factors into account and enhancing our knowledge of how we can and cannot affect these indicators, we will "connect the dots" on our future as well as possible:

• (1) Jevon's Paradox states that increased efficiency in the use of resources (in this case energy resources) through the use of technology and structural change increases total resource consumption.
• (a) Policy point: if we target increasing efficiency, we can expect to only delay environmental problems.
• (2) The energy return on energy invested (EROI) for the combination of energy resources, renewable and fossil, together with technology that converts those resources into services dictates the level of complexity attainable by society.
• (a) Policy point: society seems to have reached a level of complexity in the last 1–3 decades such that:
• (3) The EROI of energy services has been extremely high with the use of fossil fuels, and EROI will eventually come to a value such that it is equal for fossil and renewable resources. That time of EROI equality will mark a turning point in human civilization.
• (4) The human species has now grown in size that it is capable of affecting the environment on a global scale as opposed to only very localized impacts before the industrial revolution.

The connecting of the dots goes as follows:

• (1) Humans organized into agrarian societies, and this was beneficial because it raised the EROI from farming, where the energy produced in this case was that energy embodied in food, not primary energy for operating machinery. The invention of tools and use of beasts of burden (horses, oxen, etc.) also enhanced human EROI (i.e. the amount of human energy required to grow food for human consumption).
• (2) The discovery of fossil fuels and subsequent technological change to enable further exploitation of fossil fuels led to the industrial revolution and the capabilities of production and economy in our present industrialized society.
• (3) Resource constraints via any combination of technical, physical, economic, and political factors act as a driver to increase efficiency in the use of energy resources, but there are thermodynamic limits.
• (a) For example, the Arab oil embargoes of the 1970s drove up the price of oil which in turn drove the US and Europe to increase fuel efficiency of vehicles to get the same service (move passenger and cargo from point A to point B) with less fuel, or energy. Subsequently, energy efficiency increased since the 1970s but the rate of consumption of energy changed from exponential growth to linear growth, and economic growth also slowed compared to the previous post World War II rates for the US.
• (4) Today the rate of technological change in terms of increased energy efficiency and high EROI has not increased at the same rate as needed to enable economic growth equal to the pre-2000 years and subsequently the top of the economic food chain has decided to hoard recent profits at the expense of distributing those profits to the middle and lower classes. This is evidenced by the increased income gap between the top and the bottom.
• (5) The inherently lower EROI of renewable resources will not enable the same level of economic production and societal complexity as provided by higher EROI fossil fuels. This is because renewable technologies are based upon current flows of energy (e.g. sunlight, wind, waves), as compared to fossil fuels which are based upon stocks of energy stored over hundreds of millions of years.

To contemplate the final point above, consider that Earth stored the renewable energy of the Sun (in the form of biomass) on the order of 100 million years, and now we are consuming this energy on the order of hundreds of years. What humans learn and choose to practice during this century will dictate the type of societies that are even possible after peak fossil-fuel production.