The Oil Drum: Canada

The authors of this study are: Rainer Zah, Empa; Heinz Böni, Empa; Marcel Gauch, Empa; Roland Hischier, Empa; Martin Lehmann, Empa; Patrick Wäger, Empa

Empa, Swiss Federal Institute for Materials Science and Technology, Technology and Society Lab, Lerchenfeldstrasse 5, CH-9014 St. Gallen, Switzerland, www.empa.ch/tsl

Executive Summary

In connection with the worsening scarcity of fossil fuels and climate change the idea of using renewable energy is attracting interest both in the Swiss public eye and in industry. Fuels made from biomass - so-called biofuels - are currently the most important form of renewable energy in road transportation and could at least over the short to medium term take on a role in reducing greenhouse gases and our dependency on fossil fuels.

In Switzerland therefore important political decisions have to be made against a background of giving a tax break for renewable fuels as opposed to diesel and petrol.

Although biofuels from renewable resources exist, a wider range of environmental impacts may result from their cultivation and processing than those from fossil fuels. These range from excessive fertilizer use and acidification of soil to a loss of biodiversity caused by clear cutting rainforest. Besides that, one should not forget that expanding agricultural energy production may lead to land use conflicts with other land uses such as food production or the conservation of natural areas. Therefore energetic efficiency and the attainable reduction in greenhouse gases should not be taken as the sole criteria for a holistic environmental evaluation of these alternative fuels.

The objective of this study is to evaluate the environmental impacts in the whole life cycle of biofuels used in Switzerland. Firstly an action-oriented analysis of the environmental impacts of renewable energy carriers was to be developed. Secondly the objective was to draw up a "comprehensive environmental analysis" of the various biofuels, which could serve as a basis for enforcing the exemption of renewable fuels from the excise duty on diesel and petrol. In addition, the effects of using the fuel were to be compared with other ways to use bioenergy, such as heat and power generation.

Editorial note: there is a comprehensive glossary at the end of the piece, as are the references denoted [X] throughout.

The situation in the credit markets continues to worsen as a sudden attack of risk aversion rapidly dries up liquidity. And this is before the resetting of adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) begins in earnest - to the tune of $50 billion - in October. Watch this space.

On the Canadian energy scene, Shell pumps $27 billion into the oil sands, even as oil patch profitability falls. Abu Dhabi wants to invest in Canadian power plants, and there are plans for BC to host an LNG terminal. Wind power grows rapidly in Ontario and Quebec, making a few enemies along the way. In BC they ask: should public transit be free?

On the climate front, water is the issue - too little and too much. Finally, in the tug-of-war between efficiency and resilience, efficiency has the upper hand, but what price will we pay for allowing our life support system to become brittle?

Going With The Flow?

You may remember that our definition of household cash is as broad as can be. We include all household "banking products", per se, but also include all household holdings of bonds, inclusive of Treasuries, Agencies, corporates, muni's and mortgage backed paper. Implicitly, we are assuming bond holdings could be converted to cash at a moments notice. So what follows is simply total household cash less total household liabilities over the last six decades.

I thought it was time to step far enough away from the myopia induced by current oil prices and, in so doing, provide sufficient space to review the the sustainability of the way we live. The title is taken from Jeffrey Dukes' 2003 paper Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption of Ancient Solar Energy (pdf). Before moving on to Dukes' results, here is a summary of the findings of Mathis Wackernagel, et. al. Tracking the ecological overshoot of the human economy (pdf).

Figure 1

Sustainability requires living within the regenerative capacity of the biosphere. In an attempt to measure the extent to which humanity satisfies this requirement, we use existing data to translate human demand on the environment into the area required for the production of food and other goods, together with the absorption of wastes. Our accounts indicate that human demand may well have exceeded the biosphere's regenerative capacity since the 1980s. According to this preliminary and exploratory assessment, humanity's load corresponded to 70% of the capacity of the global biosphere in 1961, and grew to 120% in 1999.