Compression Extended Footnotes by Robert W

Compression Extended Footnotes By Robert W. “Doc” Hall Introduction Although this set of footnotes is long, documenting every statement in the printed book proved impossible. A great deal of additional research is not in either the book or the extended footnotes. Original sources were preferred to secondary sources reporting about them, but some originals could not be found. One could only get as close to facts as possible. Many topics cited are fast moving, so some citations were obsolete as the book went to press. In addition, web page references are not fixed, but subject to revision, moving of servers, and deletion. URLs cite the location where a reference was last seen. To participate in ongoing “Compression Thinking,” see: http://www.compression.org Some footnotes covering a page or more are background commentary adding depth to topics in the printed text. Readers are invited to do their own digging, looking for original sources and data. Readers familiar with environmental sustainability will notice that the book does not rely on some familiar references or touchstones. I deliberately followed no well-worn trails researching that topic and most others. You are invited to do the same. Conclusions reached are certainly outside conventional business thought, and somewhat outside the patterns of thinking that seem to be jelling as conventional environmental thought. So please do your own thinking based on facts as best you can determine them. We need a lot of dialog on Compression. We do not need PR “stealth bomber” wars between web sites, articles, and books merely blowing opinion back and forth. Table of Contents for Extended Footnotes Pages Chap. 1: Understanding the Challenges of Compression, (114 footnotes) 2-29 Chap. 2: Lessons from Toyota, (35 footnotes) 30-34 Chap. 3: Learning to Learn, (69 footnotes) 35-45 Chap. 4: Dispelling Our Expansionary Habits, (107 footnotes) 46-66 Chap. 5: Creating Vigorous Learning Enterprises, (30 footnotes) 67-71 Chap. 6: Developing the Constitution for Vigorous Learning (44 footnotes) 72-81 1 Chapter 1: Understanding the Challenges of Compression 1 Thomas Malthus penned “An Essay on the Principle of Population” in 1798. He posited that since resource growth was linear, but population growth exponential, humans would periodically outgrow their resources, followed by collapse. Malthus did not foresee the industrial revolution letting resource use grow “exponentially” for a couple of hundred years. In 1968 Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb made specific short-term predictions of collapse that were discredited when they did not materialize. In 1972 the Club of Rome projection, The Limits to Growth, did not do that, but was accused of it. In 2008 Graham Turner, “A Comparison of The Limits to Growth with 30 years of Reality,” found that the Club of Rome projections were not far off track. Critics can’t bear to think of this. The most noted critic, the late Julian Simon, basically argued that since economic expansion had never stopped, it never would—linear projection taken to an extreme. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, a pioneer in “thermoeconomics,” did not make specific run-out or doomsday predictions, noting that specific projections using “crossover” models assume incorrectly that one can deterministically project the amount of recoverable resources, global carrying capacity, and resource consumption rates. However, no state is permanently stable; all nature, including human-influenced processes, is not deterministic, but can sometimes flip from one near-stable state to another. Timing of flips may be difficult to predict. Hence run-out predictions can only be roughly approximated. Georgescu-Roegen was criticized for stretching the applicability of the second law of thermodynamics postulating how human activities can tip the balance of natural processes in a direction unfavorable to survival of part of the human population. After all, both economic and climatic changes have always doomed a fraction of the global human population. Unfavorable shifts merely increase that doomed fraction, and if drastic, include all of it. (Readers can glimpse his work at: www.eoht.info/page/Nicholas+Georgescu- Roegen and read one of his papers at:http://dieoff.org/page148.htm) The definition of Compression in this book is operational. Therefore it’s arbitrary. However, without setting goals that we can fix in mind and work toward, we’ll dither with half-measures while debating resource limits and climate shift points that cannot be pinpointed. Plenty of carbon economics proposals have been floated; see for example the variety identified by Climate Changes at www.economicsclimatechange.com/ Nearly all of these concentrate on modifying current financial and economic systems to drive environmentally sustainable behavior. By contrast, this book proposes setting up physical state goals as drivers; then modifying business models to attain those goals. 2 According to the U.S. Geological Survey, global iron reserves are many times current production, but ores are becoming lower in grade. For U.S. iron ore reserves see: (http://minerals.er.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/iron_ore/feoremcs04.pdf) Global copper: (http://minerals.er.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/copper/240303.pdf) Platinum group: (http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/platinum/550300.pdf). That is, reserves exist for older common commodity metals, but they are harder to mine. Reserves of materials like tantalum exist, but their location and conditions under which they are taken incur protest, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Back page” news articles on this are not hard to find if you Google the subject. Interestingly, statistics on uranium ore sources do not appear to be publicly available from USGS, at least not from the open list at http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity. However, the Earth Policy Institute claims that global uranium ores have decreased in concentration from 0.28% to 0.09%, which may be a bit low; old mining lore is that the acceptable concentration is 2 Chapter 1: Understanding the Challenges of Compression 0.7%. Uranium often concentrates in nodules, so a few nodules may be rich in U3O8, but an entire site is not. Quaterra Resources claims to have hit several holes (Braccia pipes) on an 85 square mile property near the Grand Canyon with U3O8 concentrations ranging from 0.34% to 0.63%. The site is near old uranium mines that were well worked in the 1950s. Some were on the tribal grounds of the Navaho Nation, which has banned further uranium mining on Navaho territory, described as the “Saudi Arabia of uranium,” although bigger deposits are in Australia. The reasons: Many Navaho miners died in the early days of mining from inhaling dust, and now tailings from many abandoned mines present a continuing risk to the Navaho Nation (see Tom Zoellner, Uranium, Viking, New York, 2009, pp. 170-172; much of the book is on the sorry history of uranium mining). Since Quaterra’s new finds are near the Grand Canyon, their proposal to mine there met great opposition from environmental groups and naturalists concerned about further upsetting the ecology (and beauty) of the Grand Canyon National Park. According to the Associated Press, the Obama administration was preparing to “segregate” Federal lands to block the development of all mining claims in the area (“Interior to Halt Uranium Mining,” July 20, 2009). Technology and energy required to exploiting remaining reserves of uranium and other minerals is only part of the problem of recovery. For example, according to Paul VanDevelder, “What Do We Owe the Indians?” American History, June 2009; 65% of the United States’ known uranium reserves are on Indian land. So are 40% of its coal reserves, 20% of its sources of fresh water, and rich deposits of copper, zinc, and petroleum. Indians will resist tearing up more of their land obtaining these things. Bill Yellowtail is quoted as saying, “The battle of the 21st century will be to save this planet, and there is no doubt in my mind that this battle will be fought by native people. For us it is a spiritual duty.” Mining and refining metals uses a lot of energy. Obtaining them from less and less concentrated sources takes more energy (and cost). Avoiding or restoring ecological damage takes even more energy. People want commodities if they do not live near locations where the stuff is mined or smelted. An example is the uproar in West Virginia about “mountaintop surface mining” of coal. Normally, the most concentrated ores are found and worked first, while the industry seeks more efficient technology to mine and refine lower-grade ores. However, at some point the physics of gathering energy from more dispersed sources requires a lot of energy using any technology, and potentially leaves more environmental damage. In addition, mining and extraction often entail ugly chemistry with the potential for long term effects from emissions and effluents. Now and then, media snippets suggest that mining can be made environmentally friendly by methods like using bacteria to concentrate metals. Bacteria are now used to promote oxidation of gold or copper ores, which concentrates gold before further processing, but a process merely made less damaging is still far from environmentally benign. For example, lactobacillus bacteria are proposed to concentrate uranium from ores, tailings, or even seawater (Takehiko Tsuruta, “Removal and Recovery of Uranium using Microorganisms from Japanese Uranium Deposits,” J. of Nuclear Science and Technology, No. 8, 2006, pp 896-902). 3 “Hubbert’s Peak” is named after the late petroleum geologist, M. King Hubbert, who first projected the peak of American oil production in 1949. He presented a formal paper in 1956 estimating that oil production would peak in the early 1970s. The actual peak occurred in 1970. (I first heard of Hubbert from Jim Donnelly, a technological forecaster at Socony-Mobil Oil Company in 1964, but never thought more about him for decades.

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