The World Values Survey is available at: www.worldvaluessurvey.org www.happyplanetindex.org

Download the reports
Download the Happy Planet report (2006, pdf)
Download the European Happy Planet report (2007, pdf)

See the Global HPI map:  http://www.happyplanetindex.org/map.htm

From:    jeh1 at columbia.edu
Subject: Complete Trip Report.                                                                                                                                    Date: August 4, 2008

- July 3, 2008: Dear Prime Minister Fukuda: A letter to the leader of Japan before the G8 meeting
 http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2…

- July 2008: *Climate Threat to the Planet: Implications for Energy Policy*
Slides for presentation given July 4 at United Nations University in Tokyo, available in PDF and Powerpoint.
 http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/Tokyo…
 http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/Tokyo…

Above is a summary of the State of the Science and a hint to the State of the Politics.

The links are here and we will post this also in our data base.

From:    jeh1 at columbia.edu
Subject: Dear Prime Minister Fukuda
Letter sent to Prime Minister Fukuda before the G8 meeting is at http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2…

makes some very interesting points about relative parts of coal, oil, and gas in 2007 emissions and their historic part in the present composition of the air, and the various sources of these emissions.

He makes suggestions and asks for Fukuda’s leadership. Please open the above link in order to read Jim Hansen’s intervention to the G8.

The US is single market for Venezuela, Mexico, and Canada, but also a market for every other oil exporter.
Will the US now try to monopolize also the Brazilian future exports?

With World Vegetarian Week here, Bruce Friedrich, Posted May 19, 2008, on AlterNet, his Top Ten Reasons To Go Vegetarian.

1. Helping Animals Also Helps the Global Poor While there is ample and justified moral indignation about the diversion of 100 million tons of grain for biofuels, more than seven times as much (760 million tons) is fed to farmed animals so that people can eat meat. Is the diversion of crops to our cars a moral issue? Yes, but it’s about one-eighth the issue that meat-eating is. Care about global poverty? Try vegetarianism.

2. Eating Meat Supports Cruelty to Animals. The green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes of years past are now distant memories. On today’s factory farms, animals are crammed by the thousands into filthy windowless sheds, wire cages, gestation crates, and other confinement systems. These animals will never raise families, root in the soil, build nests, or do anything else that is natural and important to them. They won’t even get to feel the warmth of the sun on their backs or breathe fresh air until the day they are loaded onto trucks bound for slaughter.

3. Eating Meat Is Bad for the Environment A recent United Nations report entitled Livestock’s Long Shadow concludes that eating meat is “one of the … most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” In just one example, eating meat causes almost 40 percent more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, and planes in the world combined. The report concludes that the meat industry “should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.“

4. Avoid Bird Flu - The World Health Organization says that if the avian flu virus mutates, it could be caught simply by eating undercooked chicken flesh or eggs, eating food prepared on the same cutting board as infected meat or eggs, or even touching eggshells contaminated with the disease. Other problems with factory farming — from foot-and-mouth to SARS — can be avoided with a general shift to a vegetarian diet.

5. If You Wouldn’t Eat a Dog, You Shouldn’t Eat a Chicken Several recent studies have shown that chickens are bright animals who are able to solve complex problems, demonstrate self-control, and worry about the future. Chickens are smarter than cats and dogs and even do some things that have not yet been seen in mammals other than primates. Dr. Chris Evans, who studies animal behavior and communication at Macquarie University in Australia, says, “As a trick at conferences, I sometimes list these attributes, without mentioning chickens and people think I’m talking about monkeys.”

6. Heart Disease - Our Number One Killer Healthy vegetarian diets support a lifetime of good health and provide protection against numerous diseases, including the United States’ three biggest killers: heart disease, cancer, and strokes. Drs. Dean Ornish and Caldwell Esselstyn — two doctors with 100 percent success in preventing and reversing heart disease — have used a vegan diet to accomplish it, as chronicled most recently in Dr. Esselstyn’s Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, which documents his 100 percent success rate for unclogging people’s arteries and reversing heart disease.

7. Cancer - Our Number Two Killer Dr. T. Colin Campbell is one of the world’s foremost epidemiological scientists and the director of what The New York Times called “the most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease.” Dr. Campbell’s best-selling book, The China Study, is a must-read for anyone who is concerned about cancer. To summarize it, Dr. Campbell states, “No chemical carcinogen is nearly so important in causing human cancer as animal protein.”

8. Fitting Into That Itty-Bitty Bikini Vegetarianism is also the ultimate weight-loss diet, since vegetarians are one-third as likely to be obese as meat-eaters are, and vegans are about one-tenth as likely to be obese. Of course, there are overweight vegans, just as there are skinny meat-eaters. But on average, vegans are 10 to 20 percent lighter than meat-eaters. A vegetarian diet is the only diet that has passed peer review and taken weight off and kept it off.

9. Global Peace - Leo Tolstoy claimed that “vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism.” His point? For people who wish to sow the seeds of peace, we should be eating as peaceful a diet as possible. Eating meat supports killing animals, for no reason other than humans’ acquired taste for animals’ flesh. Great humanitarians from Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi to Thich Nhat Hanh have argued that a vegetarian diet is the only diet for people who want to make the world a kinder place.

10. The Joy of Veggies - As the growing range of vegetarian cookbooks and restaurants shows, vegetarian foods rock. People report that when they adopt a vegetarian diet, their range of foods explodes from a center-of-the-plate meat item to a range of grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables that they didn’t even know existed.

Sir Paul McCartney sums it all up, “If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you could do. It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty.”

So are you ready to give it a try?

Check out VegCooking.com for recipes and meal plans and to take the World Vegetarian Week 7-Day Pledge.

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11. We just saw an article about the KOBE CLUB Restaurant at 68 W. 58th St., New York City.

When you dine under the 2,000 dangling Samurai swords, you might as well indulge in the signature meat (the Kobe Steak - we assume it is the original imported from Japan - unless they found it more economical to produce it somewhere in Kansas) “that will make all other steak dinners look like McDonald’s mystery meat.”

You can order the EMPEROR’S FLIGHT OF ALL-JAPANESE WAGYU BEEF for $395. -

The Flight is of 4-ounce fillet, 4-ounce sirloin and 10-ounce rib eye, cut from the highest grade Wagyu with a fat marble of 8 or higher. so for 18 ounce of highly fat meat - let’s say one pound when the fat comes out - you pay $395.

This is clearly a further good reason to become vegetarian.

[OPINION by Charlie Hall About His: Charlie Hall’s Balloon Graph -
19 December 19, 2007.

Energy researcher Charlie Hall’s balloon graph challenges the notion that alternative energy sources will provide a smooth transition to a post-fossil fuel society. Scale and energy return remain huge obstacles.

Charlie Hall is one the best-known energy researchers you’ve never heard of. That’s because he puts his effort into understanding whole energy systems such as human civilization rather than perfecting headline-grabbing energy panaceas such as corn ethanol. From the early 1980s onward Hall and his colleagues–some of them former students–have been warning that a society hooked on fossil fuels would find itself up against limits not easily breached–probably sooner rather than later.

With the current boom in biofuels, wind, and solar, and even a revival in nuclear power, many people believe that a smooth transition to a post-fossil fuel economy is already a foregone conclusion. But a careful look at Charlie Hall’s balloon graph tells a different and much more disconcerting story (1). (To view a larger version of the graph, click here.)

First, let’s look at the components of the chart. On the vertical axis we have energy return on investment (EROI) expressed as the ratio of energy output versus energy input for each energy source. (Hall, an ecologist by training, appears to have coined the term by adapting “yield per effort” concepts from fisheries.) It is not always obvious to modern industrial people that it takes energy to get energy. The more energy we spend on finding, extracting, refining, and transporting energy resources, the less we have for all the other activities of society. The horizontal axis of the graph represents quads or more precisely, quadrillion BTUs (British Thermal Units). The graph depicts energy use in the United States. But the principles it demonstrates apply to the world as a whole.

The various colors put focus on the annual production totals and energy return of oil at different times. The sizes for all the balloons represent a very rough guide to the uncertainties in calculating EROI ranges. (As we shall see, even with these uncertainties there is a very large discernible gap between what we currently get from fossil fuels and what we can expect to get from alternatives.)

Oil, which makes up the largest percentage of U.S. energy consumption today (40%), has shown a substantial increase in its total output even as its EROI has fallen. To see this on the graph look at the blue balloon labeled “Domestic Oil 1930,” the purple balloons labeled “Imported Oil 1970″ and “Domestic Oil 1970″ and the red balloons labeled “Domestic Oil Today” and “Imported Oil Today.” That same move to a lower EROI is also being seen for natural gas and coal though the balloon graph does not depict these trends.

Everyone knows that at some point fossil fuel supplies, which are finite, will begin to decline. To replace them we currently have biofuels such as biodiesel; other renewables such as wind, photovoltaic, and hydroelectric; and nuclear power. Oil from tar sands is also shown in the lower left-hand corner, but you have to look hard. And, that’s just the point. You have to look pretty hard to see these alternatives on the graph. There are two reasons for this. First, some of these new sources are not very far along in their deployment. As they are more widely deployed, they will supply more total power and move to the right on the graph. Second, the EROI for biofuels such as biodiesel and for unconventional oil such as that extracted from tar sands is extremely low. Given current technology, these alternatives are not likely to move upward very much on the graph anytime soon.

Hall believes we have two problems illustrated by his balloon chart. First, in order for these alternative sources to move rightward on the graph–that is, produce much larger quantities of energy for society–they will have to be deployed on a vast scale which few people contemplate or understand. Two examples come to mind. The worldwide installed capacity of solar photovoltaic cells is 10.9 gigawatts. With the total worldwide installed electrical generating base at 3,872 gigawatts, it would take more than 2,000 years at the current rate of installation (1.74 gigawatts/year) to reach today’s capacity. And that’s without even considering future growth in electricity demand. If we include the installed base of wind (74.3 gigawatts) and the current rate of wind installations (14.9 gigawatts/year), we can bring the figure all the way down to about 230 years, again without considering growth in demand. Of course, the rates of installation will grow, and there are other renewable and nonrenewable energy sources available. But the challenge of scale remains huge.

When it comes to biofuels, the scale problem gets no better. Biofuels researcher Tad Patzek uses corn ethanol as an example. To fuel the American vehicle fleet using corn ethanol:
[o]ne would have to grow corn on 1.8 billion acres, year-after-year, for decades. There are about 400 million acres of arable land now in cultivation in the U.S. Therefore, one would have to use the land area equal to 4.5 times the current arable land area….
If we want to continue living in the kind of energy-drenched civilization we now enjoy, we will have to move simultaneously rightward and upward on the balloon graph. Hall estimates that if society were to average less than a 5 to 1 ratio of EROI, anything resembling our modern civilization would probably not function. The balloon graph suggests a minimum EROI for the United States of around 40 to 1 for 100 quads of energy generated. Therefore, without major breakthroughs in the efficiency of alternative energy sources, no combination of those sources has the prospect of giving us both the high energy returns and the large total production we are accustomed to from our current energy sources.

(It’s important to note that nearly all the good sites for hydro power in the world have already been taken. And, turning to firewood for fuel would simply result in the leveling of the world’s remaining forests, leaving us with nothing for the future and destroying the habitability of the planet in the bargain. The upshot: Neither of these alternatives is going to move much to the right on the graph.)

Many are saying peak world oil production will soon be upon us with peak natural gas and coal following close behind. To live anything like we now live, we are going to have to see some astounding technical breakthroughs in alternative energy sources soon. And those breakthroughs will have to be followed by dramatic and costly efforts to deploy alternatives rapidly and ubiquitously. For now we appear to be on a course that will require drastic changes in the way we live.

Perhaps we will somehow muddle through. But when you look at Charlie Hall’s balloon graph, it’s easy to conclude that even muddling through might end up being a very unpleasant affair.

Notes:

(1) Hall, C.A.S., R. Powers and W. Schoenberg. (in press). Peak oil, EROI, investments and the economy in an uncertain future. Pp. xxx-xxx in Pimentel, David. (ed). Renewable Energy Systems: Environmental and Energetic Issues.

——————————————

We Posted the above without being in full agreement with what it says - not because what it says - but rather because what it does not say.

What it does not say is the fact that nobody in his right state of mind will imply that one switches from oil into a different source of energy without first reducing needs for energy inputs to more manageable needs. First deal with conservation and avoid waste - that is the rule of the thumb!

After you do this - only then - you figure what energy source is best suited to a particular need - and you go for it. What this will do - is simple - it will eliminate the anti biofuels arguments that were put forward by Professor David Pimentel already over 30 years ago. The world has changed since, but not Professor Pimentel’s ideas. In those days he went all out to lead the US Department of Energy away from the logical solution of using ethanol for the purpose of increasing octane value of gasoline when switching to unleaded gasoline. Those days Professor Pimentel was plainly trying to prop up the Mobil Oil Company’s opposition to a mandatory use of ethanol - a product that they were not in the business of making it available to the US economy. It was then Senator McGovern who got the scoop on Professor Pimentel - it is all in Congressional records. Pity that Charlie Hall is relying on the Pimentel input to something that otherwise could be viewed as a tool for policy analysis. His blog - http://scitizen.com/screens/blogPage/vie… has in it, at this time, also 15 reactions/comments to his posting. We hope that someday he might indeed converge his analysis with material available from other general policy analysts. We also would like to hope that Tad Patzek mentioned by Charlie can also enlarge the scope of his analysis.

THE OIL POSTER: A Brilliant Tool for Examining the Geologic Realities and Social Ramifications of the Modern World’s Most Prized Resource.

“If a picture is worth one thousand words, then The Oil Age Poster is worth one million words because people can not only see the oil production Hubbert’s peaks in many countries and regions, but also read the facts proving that global peak oil is both inevitable and quite probably imminent.”

- U.S. Congressman R. Bartlett
Maryland (Republican)

Colorful and authoritative, this poster traces the history of the Oil Age from its beginnings in the hills of western Pennsylvania in 1859 to its rise as the engine of global industrial economies. The poster’s main chart features a year-by-year rendering of worldwide oil production from 1859 to 2050 with projections of future production based on Colin Campbell’s Oil Depletion Model. Historical annotations as well as detailed data on production, trade and reserves make this poster a versatile tool for presenting the realities and implications of global oil production and its impending peak. (Size: 36″ wide by 24″ tall; Retail Price: $12.50)  Buy a Poster  from  http://www.oilposter.org

Sponsor Your City or State

Make a sponsorship donation and we’ll send posters to schools, libraries, and policy makers in your city, region, or state. You can specify the type of recipients and even send to specific people.

A donation of…
… $50 sends 10 posters
… $125 sends 25 posters
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(Available only in U.S.)

Increasing Awareness - The primary goal of The Oil Age poster is to increase awareness of the critical role of oil in modern industrial society and to call attention to the impending worldwide peak in oil production.

Benefiting Schools - Sales will help fund the no-cost distribution of The Oil Age poster to high schools, colleges and non-profit institutions. Proceeds will also support the development of teaching guides and other educational tools to be used in conjunction with the poster in classrooms. (View the list of teachers and schools who have been sent posters.)

Benefiting Global Public Media - A portion of each sale will be donated to the non-profit Meta Foundation for the support of its projects and subsidiary non-profit organizations, including Global Public Media and the Post Carbon Institute.

What the Experts Are Saying:

“As this poster makes abundantly clear, we’ve already consumed about half of the world’s total endowment of regular conventional oil,” said Dr. Campbell. “This has provided most supply to-date and will dominate all supply far into the future. Now entering the second half of the Oil Age, we face the relentless decline of production, imposed by nature.”

- Dr. Colin Campbell
Leading authority on oil depletion issues
and co-founder of the Association for the
Study of Peak Oil (ASPO)

“This poster conveys a wealth of carefully researched information about oil depletion in a graphic format that anyone can quickly grasp. It is a map of our recent petroleum past and a glimpse into our post-peak future. No library, office or home should be without it!”

- Richard Heinberg
Energy expert and author of
Powerdown: Options and Actions
for a Post-Carbon World

“The primary goal of The Oil Age poster is to increase awareness of the critical role of oil in modern industrial society, and to call attention to the impending worldwide peak in oil production.”
- Julian Darley
Author of “High Noon for Natural Gas” and
Director of Global Public Media

China’s Fuel Efficiency Kicks America’s Butt - writes Dr. Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, March 25, 2008.

The Toronto Star reported an alarming factoid earlier this month: No gasoline-powered car assembled in North America would meet China’s current fuel-efficiency standard.

That’s mainly because:

Oh, and by 2010, China will be the world leader in wind turbine manufacturing and solar photovoltaics manufacturing.

No worries, though, our TV and movie sales overseas still kick butt. For now.

Tagged as: fuel efficiency, cafe, global warming, china, climate change