Butter

I am sitting at the end of a long farm table, looking at a scattering of condiments towards the other end. Among the salt shakers and bottles of hot sauce is a three inch yellow cube on a plate under plastic wrap.

I should tell you that this farm is on an island and has (among many other animals) one extremely free-range dairy cow. I forget her name, but she has one. I encountered her a number of times as we both wandered around the farm pursuing our respective agendas. Both involved renewable energy - photovoltaics and wind on my part, indigenous biomass on her part.

When I sat down to my first meal here the cook pointed out both the regular butter and the farm butter. At first I didn’t get it. The yellow cube she pointed to looked like a chunk of cheddar cheese. It didn’t register as butter to my eyes. Later I figured it out and tried some.

It was as different from store-bought butter as cream cheese is from aged cheddar. The farm butter was a brilliantly rich yellow, the real yellow that food processors try to put into supposedly buttery food with artificial color. It was almost tacky looking it was so…real. It had a creaminess and an uber-buttery flavor alien to the white stick of the grocery store. The texture was firmer than commercial butter at room temperature, but not as hard when chilled. I was thrilled and consumed a goodly portion of heavily buttered homemade bread.

Of course I asked to buy a pound to take home. The only problem is that it will run out and the farm is too far to visit just to get butter.

I mention this experience to point out part of what we have lost with industrialized agriculture. We have gained convenience, for sure. We have cheap food, or at least cheap calories. We have consistency. What we have less of is flavor, color, and texture. Read Michael Pollan and others on the subject and you’ll find that we have also lost nutritional value.

But forget about that for the moment. Let’s consider consistency, as in invariability, sameness. It is a culinary virtue only in terms of food safety. The aforementioned cook told me that the character of the butter changed with the seasons, according to the cow’s diet. The spring butter is the richest, when the cow is grazing on the new growth. It gets whiter and leaner in the winter when the cow can’t graze at all. How wonderful. I want my food to carry the sign of when it was created. It’s not just about some romantic vision of agriculture. It’s about knowing, truly understanding, what I’m putting into my body. I like being able to meet the person who produced my food. Or the cow, for that matter. That is real food safety.

Michael Pollan writes about the abstraction of food. Beef is beef is beef, wherever it came from. Eggs are eggs and butter is butter. In the past few years people have been challenging this abstraction by pointing out the real differences in taste and nutrition between industrially produced food and traditionally produced food. The difference is there, it is real, and it is dramatic. The contrast just smacked me between the eyes again.

Buttered toast for breakfast tomorrow.


Megatons to Megawatts – For the Moment

Because of the upcoming (possible) legislative debate over the fate of Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant (VY), I’d like to discuss the issue of nuclear fuel. I hear a lot of discussion about operational safety and waste disposal, both of which are vital issues. Nevertheless, before we get to either of these issues somebody has to make some fuel rods out of Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) and get the nuclear reaction going. It could be a problem in the near future.

The worldwide nuclear power industry uses roughly 65,000 tonnes (funny spelling = metric tons) of uranium oxide annually. The problem lies in the fact that not all of this uranium is actually dug out of the ground on a year-to-year basis. About 13% of it comes from recycled nuclear weapons.

Back in 1993 the United States and Russia agreed to take the leftover Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) from the downsizing of their nuclear arsenals and blend it down to LEU for use in nuclear power plants. The HEU, between 10% and 90% U-235, is mixed with depleted uranium or minimally enriched uranium to reach a concentration of 4-5%. The U.S. and Russia each contracted a reprocessing company to do the job and the uranium market was soon glutted with the stuff. Uranium prices were held below $20/lb till 2004.  New exploration for uranium came to a near halt.

Just for a sense of scale, the word from the World Nuclear Association is that “the blending down of 500 tonnes of Russian weapons HEU will result in about 15,000 tonnes of LEU over 20 years. This is equivalent to about 152,000 tonnes of natural U, or just over twice annual world demand.”

So, here we are approaching 2013, which happens to be the end date for that treaty. It raises several problems, including a possible interim shortfall due to a lag in resource development, a possible price spike, and issues with country of origin.

The first problem is the interregnum in the development of new mines and some glitches in the operation of existing ones. From 1985 to 2004, there was nearly zero mine development. Since the uranium price spike of 2007, nearly $140/lb., there has been more activity, but not sufficient to make up the loss of HEU-sourced fuel. Meanwhile, a flood in a major Canadian mine and a fire in an Australian mine have cut production and forced a larger drawdown of stockpiles.

The loss of the surplus military contribution to worldwide uranium supplies would undoubtedly cause another price spike. I wouldn’t presume to even ballpark the magnitude right now, what with the jumble of political and economic factors. I should note that fuel cost is only 9% of the cost of nuclear plant operation, but balance that with the fact that the price of uranium shot up by a factor of ten from 2003 to 2007. It has settled back to the $40-$55 range for the past couple of years.

So where does uranium come from? Right now, Canada and Australia each account for about a quarter of world production, with Kazakhstan coming third at about 15%. The U.S. share is about 3%. As stated above, 13% comes from the U.S./Russian weapns recycling. Canada’s production has been declining since 2001 and the U.S. peaked in 1980. Australia has restrictive laws on uranium mine development and may or may not decide to expand its largest mine in 2010. The real player in the longer term looks to be Kazakhstan. Do we really want to be dependent on Kazakhstan for our power prices? Kazakh President-for-life Nazarbayev would like that.

At the moment the U.S. uses just under 19,000 tonnes of uranium a year and produces 2,000 tonnes. We are the world’s biggest consumer of nuclear fuel. Of the next six top consumers (France, Japan, Russia, Germany, South Korea, and the U.K.) only Russia produces more than it consumes. The rest produce no uranium, or almost none in the case of Germany. In the international market, China and India are competing for long term contracts as they plan the expansion of their nuclear power industries. It’s looking to get messy when the military supply dries up. Even the World Nuclear Association, which one would assume to take an optimistic position, predicts a dropoff in world uranium production after 2015. The most optimistic rational scenario I have seen puts peak uranium in the year 2020.

This brings me back to Vermont Yankee. If the legislature approves a relicensing in 2012, how many years of operation would we get out of it before uranium prices make it uneconomical? Two? Three? Eight? Geology is inexorable. It just doesn’t care what we want, and it disappoints us more often than not. All safety considerations aside (and that’s a long distance aside) the fuel supply issue seems like a bad gamble.

Dissecting the Market

I have written about this before – the oxymoron “free market.” I keep hearing it and reading it, so I guess I’ll keep writing about it.

We all know what the “free” in “free market” means – unrestrained or unregulated. The term “market” has more moving parts. I have read many definitions of a market, and they could be summarized as “a set of rules governing a particular type of commercial transaction.” Sometimes the particular rules are as simple as a defined place and time, but they are always backed up by a host of general rules concerning buying and selling.

Markets can’t be unrestrained because they are made out of restraints. They are intrinsically not free.

The same goes for “free trade.” The trade in question is across national borders, which are, by their very nature, restraints. Part of the very definition of a nation state is the ability to restrict what goes across its border. True “free trade” would means a complete transfer of sovereignty from governments to international businesses. Visualize one world government by Wal-Mart and you get the idea.

“Free enterprise” goes down the drain on the same arguments as “free market.” In short, no rules, no trust. No trust, no transaction.

The thing that surprised me as much as coming to this conclusion was the fact that I hadn’t heard of this basic logical contradiction somewhere else. This is not a political argument, really. It is a matter of the accepted meanings of the words contradicting each other.

It makes me think that popular economics is in the same condition today that human anatomy was 467 years ago. That was just before the publication of De Humani Corporis Fabrica (The Structure of the Human Body) by Vesalius. He had performed many dissections of human bodies and published a seven volume illustrated treatise of his work. It angered a lot of anatomy professors.

Before Vesalius, the medical community relied on the works of Galen, a Roman physician who formulated the four humors theory of illness and wrote about human anatomy. Unfortunately for the clients of medieval physicians, both his four humors theory and his anatomical studies were wrong. Forbidden to dissect human bodies, Galen had dissected apes and pigs. The apes were somewhat close to humans, but pigs are quite different in their internal arrangements.

This resulted in ongoing absurdities in the medical schools of the Middle Ages. The students would sit in an operating theater, grouped around a body and a barber-surgeon. The surgeon would cut apart the body as a professor read from a book of Galen. The surgeon would lift up and display a human liver. The professor would describe a pig’s liver. The description would not correspond to reality, as it hadn’t in any of the past dissections, but the students would nod, take notes, and go on to slaughter another generation of patients. Galen, after all was an authority with 1400 years of tradition. The corpse must be defective, not the theory. (See my essay on triumph of doctrine.)

This disconnect was vital to the medical schools of the time. If the discrepancy was acknowledged, the medical establishment would have had to admit that it didn’t know jack, and that paying to hear its members spout nonsense was a waste of time. Likewise paying for actual treatment. Bleeding and purging, anyone?

Today we have economists spouting self-evident nonsense every time they use the word “free” in conjunction with “market,” “trade,” and “enterprise.” They also write about leveling the playing field, as if a single set of economic rules could equally benefit T. Boone Pickens and a retail clerk. They theorize about an economic environment populated by fully informed, rational individuals making decisions with enlightened self interest.

The students nod, take notes, and go forth to change the rules, bend the rules, obscure the facts, and generally rig the game. After all the analysis they still play hunches. All the while they continue to spout about free markets and rational actors. Our economy goes to hell.

The economists have arguments about the greater or lesser role of governments in regulating markets. The free marketeers would have you believe that there is some possible ideal state where government doesn’t interfere with markets. This is impossible, because governments are the necessary makers and enforcers of laws that make markets possible. The New York Stock Exchange is the bastion of free market economics, right? Utterly wrong. The NYSE couldn’t exist without thousands of laws regulating the sale of stocks. In fact, the NYSE is, in essence, a huge set of laws regulating the sale of stocks. Those laws are enforced by the Securities and Exchange Commission. When the SEC fails to do its job of enforcement, and/or Congress fails in its lawmaking responsibilities, we have disasters such as the present economic collapse.

Proposing that government should stop meddling in markets is like proposing that bricklayers should stop meddling in the building of brick houses. The real question is one of architecture. What design will best serve our needs and protect us from the elements?

There are economists who are beginning to study the real, ill-informed, irrational behavior of human beings participating in markets. There are critics pointing out the imperial nudity of classical economics. We need to start listening to these scientific economists who recognize that economics isn’t an exact science. We need to pressure our government to stop playing a supposedly hands-off game with our economy that is actually hands-on in favor of big campaign donors.

We need to start calling bullshit on the use of the expression “free market” and its siblings. That would get us into the realm of modern economic medicine. We need to acknowledge that any system of economic rules has winners and losers, and that as a society we can and should decide that question.

An Imperial Presidency, Like It Or Not

“Empire,” “emperor,” and “imperial” all derive from the Latin word imperare, to command. Originally the term imperator was given by acclamation to a successful military commander. It later obtained its more political meaning.

With President Obama’s announcement of an escalation of troop numbers in Afghanistan, the word empire takes on a new meaning for me. It’s a question of who, or what, is commanding.

I can pile up many arguments as to why remaining in Afghanistan, much less increasing our presence, is a bad idea. I can point to history, with the stories of empire after empire breaking their teeth on the rock-strewn mountains of Central Asia. I can lay out the thesis of Jonathan Schell in his book The Unconquerable World, where he outlines the inevitable long-term failure of imperial occupations when opposed by determined indigenous forces. I can point to the mission creep of this invasion, which sought to eliminate an Al Qaeda presence that is no longer there. (The best estimate of the U.S. government is that there are perhaps 100 people associated with Al Qaeda hunkered down in Afghanistan. Not including Osama bin Laden.)

I can consider the unsavory lose-lose choice we face in Afghan government. Presently we support the second most corrupt government on the planet. Hamid Karzai’s warlord and crony-ridden kleptocracy, kept in place by U.S. cash and firepower, has near zero legitimacy after a clumsily rigged election. About 30 of the 238 members of the Afghan parliament are actually showing up to work. What is left of the hundreds of millions of dollars in aid money after Karzai’s friends and relatives have skimmed their share isn’t even being spent.

The alternative force is the Taliban, a group of medievalist religious fanatics. They gained control of Afghanistan originally because the Afghan people preferred legalistic religious zealotry to the indigenous mafiosi known as the Northern Alliance.

So, what shall it be, murderous thieves or murderous zealots? In some provinces, after experiencing extortion and rape at the hands of the Afghan National Police the locals are swinging towards the Taliban. I’ll predict that the Taliban will win this one. They are religious reactionaries, but only a century retrograde of most of the rural Afghan population. They offer people some level of personal security and rule of law. 14th century law, but law nevertheless.

But none of this really matters. What matters is the imperator, and Barack Obama does not hold that office.

An empire has its own momentum. The arc of its story line is stronger than the people who serve it. An empire has its own reasons. Like a shark, it has to keep moving or die.
We still have over 750 military bases around the globe. Like the British Empire of the 19th century, the sun never sets upon us. We are, however, a waning empire. Our client states are leaving us. We have overspent. The corporate virus that infects our body politic has restructured our economy from a manufacturing powerhouse into an unsustainable paper chase. And yet our president can’t look at an obvious disaster in the making, perhaps our final disaster, and turn in a different direction.

I am reminded of a couple of parasitic organisms that modify the host’s behavior. The lancet fluke has a life cycle that includes the cow, the snail, and the ant. When it infects an ant it takes over the ant’s motor nerve system and makes it climb to the top of a grass stem and wait. This makes it more likely to be eaten by a grazing cow and continue the cycle. Likewise, the Toxoplasma gondii parasite, which cycles between the guts of cats and mice, makes mice less fearful of the smell of cats. Biologists have found many other instances where parasites have modified the behavior of their hosts to their own benefit and the host’s peril.

So it is with the U.S. We, the people, have been sold a narrative of the necessity of military force. Evidence that it isn’t working is marginalized in our public discourse. I should be more precise – it isn’t working for the average Afghan or for the average American. For the average Fortune 500 military contractor it is working fine. Hundreds of billions of dollars have churned into the accounts of Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), Lockheed Martin, Blackwater, and hundreds of other corporate beneficiaries. They, in turn, finance the campaigns of like-minded legislators. KBR even blackmailed generals in the field into approving suspicious invoices with threats of non-performance of vital support services. The Department of Justice is underfunded and understaffed so it can’t adequately pursue these corporate criminals. The military-industrial complex is taking us down from within.

Obama’s call for more troops was inevitable. He could no more back out of Afghanistan than the CEO of Exxon Mobil could transform that company into an environmental non-profit. He was swept along by a legacy of imperial narrative, a corrupt Congress, the demands of thoroughly integrated corporate parasites, and the advice of generals focused on “kinetic operations” (shooting things). I shouldn’t under-emphasize the power of the imperial narrative. We keep telling ourselves a story of our exceptional nature as a nation, the inevitability of our eventual triumph, our essential goodness, our destiny as a world leader, and the justice of our military exploits. Obama couldn’t deny any of that. Political suicide is a mild term for that kind of truth telling.

The imperator is not a man in an oval office. It is the structure of our empire itself. That structure, parisitized to the crumbling point, will lurch forward till it can’t sustain itself any longer. The long, torturous, bloody, losing proposition of occupying Afghanistan is on that path.

Solar Surge

Contrary to appearances, your Minor Heretic has neither fallen down a hole, nor lapsed into a coma. My recent post-vacation-post silence is the result of a full schedule. That schedule includes two concurrent solar installations, finishing the curriculum for a two-day solar workshop for electricians, delivering said curriculum, plus creating and presenting two other renewable energy workshops for homeowners. Plus life in general.

The renewable energy business seems to be the only one holding its own in this recession. Solar and wind power aren’t experiencing the same geometric increase that they were a couple of years ago, but things are still moving along.

The sign-up for the photovoltaic portion of the Act 45 queue here in Vermont filled the same day it opened on October 19th. To refresh, Act 45 will allow providers of renewable energy to contract with utilities at a fixed rate for 20 years, that rate being sufficient to make as good a return as any existing generator. The limit on the entire program is 50 megawatts, and no single technology is allowed more than 25% of that, meaning 12.5 megawatts. There was a subscription of 176 megawatts of PV on the opening day, meaning that there had to be a lottery to see who would get a piece of that 12.5 MW.  Nothing like a 14:1 over-subscription to show the level of interest.

Even outside of Act 45 things are doing well. One of our local utilities, Green Mountain Power (GMP), had a sudden flash of brilliance about spot market power prices. Many states have a net metering program, where a homeowner or business can install a photovoltaic system and feed excess electricity back into the utility grid, racking up credits against future electric bills. GMP has gone one better, offering an extra 6 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for solar production.  Are they insane?

Crazy like a fox. During summer peak demand GMP might have to buy power on the New England spot market for as high as a buck a kWh. Of course, it is during the middle of those long, hot, sunny summer days when photovoltaic systems are pumping out the most power. Nineteen cents per kWh looks cheap during those times. GMP did the math and offers a price that encourages solar but still let’s them come out ahead. Why the other utilities aren’t doing the same, I don’t know.

There’s an added benefit for the utilities from solar. I take anything Amory Lovins says with a grain of salt, but he did a very interesting set of calculations about the life span of transformers. You have probably seen a utility substation – a fenced-in array of huge gray objects with cooling fins and ribbed insulators, power lines converging on them. The transformers drop the high voltage of transmission lines down to the medium voltage of your local distribution lines. The key thing to understand about the life span of these transformers is that they do 90% of their aging during 5% of their operating life. That 5% is when they are running at high temperature during peak load times in the summer. That is exactly when solar arrays are pumping out the most power and reducing the amount of power that needs to go through those substation transformers. The more power generated downstream of the transformers, the less they heat up and the longer they last. Lovins calculated that even at the prices of five years ago utilities could save money by installing solar downstream of their substations and delaying the replacement of their transformers. Considering that the price of solar modules has dropped by half since then, I’d say it’s a viable option for a forward thinking utility.

I was talking with my elected representative today and he said that the important factor in shutting down the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in 2012 is replacing the 600 jobs and the tax revenue. I offered that renewable energy was the only business actually expanding in this economy, and that energy efficiency work is labor intensive and pays back better than 5:1 on the initial investment. The renewable energy and efficiency path offers lower risk and higher local job creation per dollar invested than the dinosaur energy sources.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: We are heading towards a geologically inevitable end state. That is a time when the fuels we get out of the ground are so scarce and difficult to extract that they are impractical and too expensive to use. The earth stopped making oil and natural gas millions of years ago and coal hundreds of millions of years ago. It had some amount of uranium when it formed, and that was that. There is less of all these every day, and over time new discoveries get smaller, lower quality, and more difficult to extract. Someday this state, this nation, this planet will run on renewable energy. We can argue about the timing, but geology won’t change to meet our desires.

Given the inevitability of this, and especially given the unpredictability of the timing, we should be gearing up for renewable energy as fast as we can. I have used the analogy of a skydiver free-falling through clouds. If you don’t know how far away the ground is, and you don’t know how far from the ground you will find out, your best bet is to pull the ripcord now. Otherwise you may be rewarded with just enough time to say “Oh sh-“ after the clouds part.

The good news is that we can do it. The New Rules Project, a program of the Institute for Local Self Reliance, just updated a study on local renewable power production. Their research indicates that many states could produce most of their power locally. Some, such as Maine, could produce far more than their local needs, mostly through a combination of wind power and energy efficiency. Maine could produce six times its need with commercially viable onshore wind power. North Dakota tops the wind potential list at 140 times demand.

Let’s look at just their numbers for Vermont. The percentage of demand that could be met by various renewables and efficiency is as follows:

Onshore Wind: 111%

Rooftop PV: 18%

Percentage of land area required for 100% PV: 0.16%

Untapped Combined Heat and Power: 8%

Untapped Small and Micro-Hydro: 15%

Matching California’s Energy Efficiency: 38%

Combined Renewables: 152%

If we pursued California-style energy efficiency it would give us plenty of leeway in rejecting renewable energy projects that were unsuitable for our communities.

One of their startling conclusions is that maximizing renewable energy use in Vermont would cost something on the order of 5.7 cents per kWh at a wholesale level. That beats Vermont Yankee by a mile.

Of course, that’s just electricity. We still have to heat our houses and get to work. We waste a huge amount of energy in those sectors, basically because we can.

It is not impossible to cut the heating load of an average house in half with serious weatherization. A friend of mine in the weatherization business says, “I talk to people about energy efficiency and they say that they have done all they can. Then we work on their house and cut their energy use by another 30%.” Likewise, there is a lot of waste in our transportation system. We still drive huge, inefficient vehicles, alone, a lot. The solution to that problem is a combination of zoning, gas mileage standards, public transportation, and, sadly, really expensive gasoline. Some people won’t do jack until they can’t afford to drive.

Let’s remember the geological imperative – the problem will solve itself, but not in a nice way. The alternative is for us to start the transition away from non-renewable fuels now, before we have an emergency. Is that possible with our political structure and our present mindset? No. Which is why we need to focus on our educational system and the way we elect our local and national representatives . The ground is down there, through the clouds somewhere, and it isn’t getting farther away.