mandarine

When you google 'Airbus Boeing Peak Oil', the top result is this article that I wrote in the summer of 2006. Being a Cassandra proved right gives one all sorts of uneasy feelings, but I will carry on in that direction and offer a revised version of my prophecy, adorned with new details.

In a nutshell: people are talking a lot about the difficulties for airlines with $150-a-barrel oil. But we also have to understand that it is going to be much worse for aircraft manufacturers. They probably know it; but they cannot believe what they know, and they cannot say it either. This is not just another crisis for air transportation and aerospace construction: this is the last crisis until the end of the fossil fuel era.

Hard times for airlines

First an important premise: there are no serious alternatives to jet fuel for airliners. And even if there were, they could never be cheap in a world of expensive energy. The problem is not that oil is scarce: the production has never been this high — that's why we call it Peak Oil. The problem is that energy supply is not meeting global demand: until demand abates, any type of energy will end up costing the same, be it classical kerosene, gas-to-liquid synthetic jet fuel, or biodiesel. Regardless of the environmental footprint. Just know that if it was technologically feasible, filling an A380 tank with biofuel would use up 150 hectares of yearly yield,considering an optimistic figure of 2000 litres per hectare for Jatropha biodiesel. You'd need 150×2x365×150 = 16 million hectares — the arable land in France — to power the currently ordered A380 fleet.

Meanwhile the fuel efficiency improvements do not come anywhere close to compensating the price surge. Boeing claim that their new 787 will burn 20% less fuel than current jets of the same category (namely the 767 or A330). 20% is how much oil prices rose between the beginning of April and mid-May 2008: 30 years of technological improvement in aircraft and engine design will offset six weeks of price increase, and no technological Deus ex Machina will change that deal.

The obvious consequence is that cheap flights are gone for good. We are currently witnessing a fast concentration of the market, because the fierce competition prevents airlines from transferring the whole fuel bill to their passengers. As the weaker players exit the arena, ticket prices will rise until the few remaining airlines can break even financially. We will see a trend of de-democratization of air travel, and people will gradually change their travel habits, starting with the poorer and newer travelers.

There is a second key element that will drive air traffic down: as planemakers' market forecasts point out, air traffic growth is consistently correlated to world GDP growth. No need to be a psychic to imagine that GDP growth will seriously suffer from expensive energy. When people's purchasing power shrinks because of the energy bill, they will think twice before flying. Note that a major economic downturn could very well stop the rise in oil prices or even reduce them for a while. But it will not help air traffic - unemployed people do not fly all that much.

Meanwhile, environmental awareness is growing worldwide: the global warming theme is increasingly popular with the sort of middle class travelers who used to fill economy seats for exotic vacations. There will be less scuba-diving in the Maldives; less horseback-trekking in Mongolia; less leopard-spotting in Tanzania. Flying is losing political correctness points by the day. This is even beginning to reach the corporate world, although sometimes only for mere greenwashing concerns: more firms are asking their employees to fly less, to favor teleconferencing or to merge meetings. Business travel, the spine of airline profitability, is probably weaker than most hope.

I also see a final, more tricky contributor to airline misfortunes: many airlines have based their financial model upon the resell value of their aircraft. Planes are a huge investment, with a long lifetime — a bit like homes. Maybe you see what I am hinting at. Just as the housing crisis brought many people to bankruptcy, many airlines will lose their financial footing when the industry's obvious overcapacity and gloomy outlook pulls the market value of second-hand aircraft down. All this will contribute to reduce air traffic over the next decades, to the levels of the 1990s, then the 1980s, then the 1970s …

Harder still for aircraft manufacturers

The average natural decay of a fleet because of ageing is around 6% a year. When yearly traffic is constant from one year to the next, 6 planes for every 100 go into retirement, and are replaced by newer planes. This means that if airlines cut the world's capacity by a mere 6% each year, old retiring planes will not need to be replaced, and no new aircraft will be sold at all. A 6% capacity reduction is equivalent to just changing the Tuesday flight of the daily San Francisco to Tokyo service from a 747-400 to a 777-300ER. A reduction the economic press or the general public would hardly notice can make Airbus and Boeing assembly lines grind to a halt. US carriers will reduce capacity by 10% to 15% this third quarter of 2008 alone.

All told, the industry will cut capacity by 9% in 2008, according to James Higgins, analyst for Soleil-Solebury Research. (quote from CNNmoney.com)

In short: airlines make money in proportion to air traffic; aircraft manufacturers make money in proportion to air traffic growth. In a world with negative air traffic growth, the former float, the latter drown. Therefore, although we will probably not see the end of air traffic any time soon, this extremely nasty leverage effect will make aircraft manufacturers suffer considerably.

One might argue that in a world of expensive oil, airlines should scrap all old, gas-guzzling planes and buy new, soberer ones instead. That would be easy if they were making a lot of profit or could promise a bright future. But when the industry is consistently in the red zone, and getting redder, bankers do not follow. Few airlines have sufficient cash to sign billion-dollar contracts without external investment. Therefore airlines will be like people in poor countries: they will be running old vehicles which use up tons of gas because they cannot afford the newer models which make twice the miles per gallon.

Admittedly, a handful of airlines will be in a position to buy the new planes. When all the world's money ends up in oil exporters' hands, they have to buy things from us to avoid drowning under the heap of green bills. Aircraft are a great choice, as they are both hard-currency-intensive and fossil-fuel intensive, which oil producers have a lot of, as per design. Consequently, aircraft sales may in fact undergo an increase because of high oil prices. This I call the "Aboulafia effect". I conjecture that such an increase is inherently short-lived. Middle-East carriers will probably become prominent players, and gradually snatch the bulk of the market from the traditional airlines. But air traffic will shrink nonetheless, and all they will need to do is buy back the recent planes from their victims, scrap the old ones, and make the most of a declining market — something they are becoming good at.

As if matters could be any worse, there will finally be a mean backlash effect: thanks to cheap liquidity seeking asylum, the years 2003-2007 were absolutely euphoric in terms of aircraft orders. Manufacturers had to invest massively in infrastructures and people in order to ramp up production and honor those orders. But these planes will not materialize into deliveries before a couple of years. There is plenty of time for many airlines to go bankrupt or otherwise hit financial turbulence. This will mean massive delivery deferrals, then cancellations, so that assembly lines cannot even hold onto their current backlog. Who knows, we may witness the very curious artefact of a negative net yearly order-book. In the real world, that's called jumping off a cliff with a lot of momentum.

The combined value of the orders for Airbus and Boeing planes exceeds $500 billion at list prices, so large-scale cancellations and deferrals could easily amount to tens of billions of dollars and affect suppliers of engines and other parts in addition to the jet makers. (from the Wall Street Journal)

What next?

When that happens, it will be catastrophic for all the people, organisations, or communities, which now contribute to the aircraft manufacturing adventure. This could send Seattle or Toulouse the way British textile, or French foundries went not so long ago. And do not get influenced by prejudice. Aerospace does not have an intrinsically higher value than those industries we have come to regard as lowly. Today's ghost slums were full of very busy and extremely proud people at the peak of their flourishing trade.

I do not know what the smartest move for aircraft manufacturers is, and I am glad I am not in Tom Enders' or Scott Carson's shoes. Publicly acknowledging that the air travel industry is on the brink of inevitable decline would discourage investors and hasten the fall. And yet, the earlier they can start downshifting, the smoother the forced landing. They should be cancelling the B787 (a little too late for that one) or A350 developments, and simply offer to fit new generation engines on good old 767s and A330s. That would already be at least half the fuel economy, for a much smaller cost, while not forcing new capacity on the market place. Or silently work on a totally new kind of bird, absolutely optimized for fuel efficiency, even if it changes the rules of the game: a Mach 0.62, 20,000ft, turboprop, middle-range, high-capacity, DC-4-comfort machine that would be the soberest flying camel to get people where trains can't go for the next half century.

Or maybe steer away from this dwindling trade altogether and find a new frontier. How about giant wind turbines? If those do not sell, nothing will anyway, so that may be worth a try.

Notes

Many thanks to Richard Heinberg and Julian Darley of the Post Carbon Institute for accepting publication at Global Public Media.

Requests for reproduction or translation should be sent to the Post Carbon Institute.

Remember that I recently recommended reading George Monbiot? Well, he’s just agreed to my translating his recent article Small is Bountiful, in defense of smallholdings, on my garden blog. Not that you need a French translation anyway, but I thought I’d let you know.

Mowing is more fun when it allows for some creativity.

Remember how I said people should read much more than they write? Well, I am doing just that at the moment. That and write post upon post for my gardening blog. This leaves me no huge motivation to post here, all the more so that I am under the impression I would be boring people with the same themes all over again.

For those dear readers who would protest they would not be bored, I offer two solutions:

1. I will be recycling old posts - I know I like to read them again. Maybe you will.
2. I strongly recommend you to read George Monbiot’s articles. He writes the things I would like to write. Only he does it much better. And he knows what he is writing about.

[…] why are we still prospecting for fossil fuels when we already have more than we can safely [global warming] burn? The reason is that governments are pursuing two completely different policies. One is to encourage the production of fossil fuels; the other is to discourage their consumption. Until this conflict has resolved our carbon cutting programs will fail. No company extracts fossil fuels as a hobby. Once removed from the ground, they will be burnt whatever demand side policies say. May I propose a new kind of carbon capture and storage, which is geologically stable and guaranteed to work? Leave the damn stuff in the ground.

George Monbiot, as podium speaker in the Nature podcast

Have you ever noticed how we laugh at other people’s supestitions, while we think we are not superstitious ourselves? Some of us find Feng Shue a stupid hassle that comes in the way of home and garden design; some of us eat pork with delight (sometimes with our left hand); most of us skip mass; we can say ‘rabbit’ onboard a boat. And we dismiss any claims that this will bring bad luck, bad spirits, or even hell our way.

And yet we rich westerners fall victim to a very dangerous superstition. A supestition which is destroying the planet, destroying other people’s livelihoods, destroying the livelihood of future generations. We believe that we cannot be happy with less stuff, less comfort, less energy. We sure believe we cannot be happy without a well-paying full-time job, however morally or environmentally or economically questionable said job might be.

All those who have stopped shopping, who have downshifted to a smaller house, who have sold their car will tell you readily: happiness and affluence are totally unrelated. And yet we cling to our stuff and our comfort like barnacles and limpets, and we feel helpless when we find out that our planet is dying, because there’s really nothing we can do about it.

Changing all the lightbulbs or buying a Prius or setting up photovoltaic arrays is OK, because it is about buying new stuff -this fits with our mental frame. But letting go of stuff and habits altogether is something we absolutely dread, unconsciously.

Emily’s challenge is about learning to let go, one finger at a time, so that we can discover not only that it does not cause misery, but it can even bring some feeling of pride (I am prone to this kind of feeling) and achievement. And in any case, it brings exactly the same kind of relief as when one unpacks after a long flight and finds out one had forgotten the anti-crash amulet home: we are still alive and well, regardless of what TV commercials want us to believe.

Emily’s ecojustice challenge is good for you. Everybody else does it. You’ll feel bad if you don’t. Do it now.

Warning: I could not resist a little doom and gloom.

When we are burning fossil fuels, we only see the environmental impact. There is supposed to be a Kyoto quota, and when we consume more, we feel some sort of hypothetical environmental guilt regarding global warming. The concept of future generations is very abstract, and very uncertain, and it does not make for easy arbitrations in everyday’s life.

Digression on market, non-renewables and future generations

As a side-note, just note that market price is fixed just with today’s supply-demand balance. Future generations cannot stake claims on today’s market, while today’s sales will deprive them of their share. Imagine a group of ten friends camping together in the wilderness, with so much tea for breakfast. Four early-risers sit down for breakfast at sunrise, and drink as much tea as they wish. Four others wake up later, find that there is only tea left for three. Two of them agree to drink just half a mug each in exchange of cookies from the other two. The two late-risers get nothing. Had we placed all ten together with the global tea and cookie problem, the share would have been quite different.

For non-renewables, day-to-day supply-demand market rules are a total nonsense.

An unfair negotiation

But let’s not consider future generations. Let’s just focus on today’s market. What does the price of fuel reflect? It reflects the market and the law of supply and demand of today. The more people want fuel now, the higher the price will get.

I want fuel. Fuel price rises. I can afford it. I pay my fuel. Why should I feel guilty of burning it? Because a sky-high price is just a way of saying that somebody else forsook their expected share of today’s fuel supply. It would be OK if it were my retired neighbor in the same affluent neighborhood who said: “OK, you need to drive to work, I will stay at home instead of going fishing, so you can have my share of today’s gas”. But it is not like this. The negotiation power on a market is money, not importance. Therefore, the final share will not reflect an arbitration in terms of what’s more important to humans considered equals (e.g. trading comfort uses for vital ones), and the rich will always get more of the share, however futile their intentions.

Economic theory says that the rich will pay more, therefore get poorer, while the poor save money by not buying the stuff, therefore things even-out in the end. This is only true if the rich do not get richer with what they get to do with the stuff. And if the poor do not starve before that. Because in the meantime, rising gas prices are also pushing food prices upwards.

In a world of scarce resources in which the power scales are already all the way to our side, something has to break somewhere if we want more for us. Whenever I drive my car for a week-end excursion, whenever I turn heating on, whenever I eat a juicy steak, I can only do this because someone else forsook their share of today’s driving to work, their share of today’s stove, their share of today’s food.

My macabre illustration

Imagine yourself and a small child fighting over a blanket while camping out in a blizzard. The colder it gets, the harder you have to pull to keep warm and cosy. You have more strength, therefore you get more of the blanket, although you do not need it as much as the kid does. At some point, the child is too weak and lets go of the blanket altogether. This is called price elasticity in an unfair market.

Two weeks after moving in, our hens (at least one of them) have started laying. So far, we’ve had six eggs in one week. It would be enough if the eggs were standard calibre. But it takes two of our bantam eggs to make one ‘normal’ egg.

In any case, they tasted delicious.

The context

I have been doing a lot of slate-sorting in preparation of roof works on my third roof. Traditional slates around here are fish-scale-shaped shale (schist?) slabs one inch thick and eight inches to three feet long. The long ones are used near the gutter, and the size decreases as we get nearer the top. This means they have to be sorted according to size.

I have a three planks with small cells of gradual sizes, which I use as a riddle. And one by one, I pick slates from the heap, find the smallest cell in which it fits, and make tidy stacks of matching sizes. This is extremely tedious. The ideal job for listening to audiobooks.

The first audiobook I had been listening to when I started the sorting in January was Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. The second book was Mark Twain’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, again a solo work from LibriVox.

The audiobook

The recording was quite unusual, as the voice was particularly monotone and slow, as close to machine-read as a human can imitate. The tone was gramatically perfect, but there was hardly any warmth and emotion anywhere. This was disturbing at first, but then I discovered that I got used to it very easily.

In fact, I found out that this kind of neutral, unobtrusive tone was what came nearest to actually reading the book with my own eyes: what I was hearing was the equivalent of printed text, and I got to put the warmth and the emotion in there myself. This confirmed what I had suspected: for all I know, an audiobook could be read by a machine (if the tone is gramatically correct) or chanted like monks used to read from the Bible, and I would not be put off. This kind of neutral reading is not ‘being read to’: it is reading with one’s ears. The closest image of this process is me reading a book with my ear to the pages.

However, whenever there was dialogue, then the narrator turned from a machine to an actor. The voices, the southern accent, the inimitable negro expressions were so vivid that it proved without a doubt that the narrator’s dull tone for the rest of the text was absolutely intentional.

The story

The story is built around a ‘Prince and Pauper’ frame, with the son of rich Missouri townspeople being switched in his infancy with the snow-white slave son of their snow-white negro servant Roxy. To save her kid from the doom of ‘being sold down the river’, Roxy switches the clothes, and nobody notices the switch. Valet de Chambers (the name of the slave son) becomes Thomas Driscoll and vice-versa. The problem is that the newly promoted Thomas grows to be a complete brat.

The story has many other characters, among which is “Pudd’nhead” Wilson, a passionate collector of fingerprints (guess who’s going to find out about the switched boys?), with a law career completely thwarted by an unfortunate joke he made on the day he arrived in town. Apparently, XIXth-century Missouri townspeople have this sort of zeroth-degree humour that we French and British credit all Americans with (no offense meant). The funny thing about Wilson is that his actual part in the story is almost completely accessory, but Twain managed to make his presence ubiquitous by starting all chapters with a quote from Wilson’s ‘calendar’, a collection of witty aphorisms and such like:

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.

The true Southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be mentioned with commoner things. It is chief of this world’s luxuries,
king by the grace of God over all the fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat. It was not a
Southern watermelon that Eve took: we know it because she repented.

It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

The story also has a pair of enigmatic Italian twins, which I could not quite ‘locate’. In fact, I understood in Twain’s afterword that they formed part of an initial plot, and were later refactored into secondary characters when the author understood there was not room enough for two stories. This afterword is very interesting: it feels just like a DVD’s ‘deleted scenes’ bonus section. Mark Twain explains his struggles with the manuscript, the story, the characters, and how he untangled the mess by severing the story of the twins off the main story. A great lesson for aspiring writers, I guess.

The author

After Huck Finn, this was my second encounter with Mark Twain, and I must admit I am in total awe. The story is good enough, but the language and the witty criticism of society is so sharp that I cannot help comparing him with Voltaire (and acknowledging Twain’s superiority in the comparison).

I’ll go download some more from LibriVox, to keep me company for the rest of the sorting.

Now is the time for my farmer self to say good-bye and move to roomier premises. The Mandarine half here will presently revert to literary mutterings, amateur photography, dilettante philosophy and leftist social criticism.

For those interested in my experience (and my errors) as a gardener, you can visit my new website, l’arpent nourricier, which I declare open as of now. If you read French, good for you. If not, you can still look at the pictures

My primary objective is to write about this wager of mine that I’ll be able to farm a garden big enough to feed a family while still working full-time (80% full-time) as an engineer. My secondary objective is much more pretentious: I want to transfer to the French-speaking internet all the experience and resources I can from the very vast corpus of resources and techniques for new, small-scale, organic farming from the English-speaking internet. My ultimate goal (apart from the obvious selfless contribution to the good of that part of humanity which happens to read French and among whom I happen to live) is that there is a chance that like-minded people might get to know me, and offer me to participate in projects involving local, small-scale, organic farming.

The name “l’arpent nourricier” translates to “the nurturing acre”. It is too bad that the term “nourricier” in French only conveys the “food” idea, and not the “care” idea that “nurturing” implies. It would have been an even better name.

PS: do not worry about the theme, I will be changing it as soon as I can.

Let me introduce you to our new tenants in the garden: Mr Orpington, Mrs Orpington, Mrs Orpington and Mrs Orpington, a family of bantams proudly acquired this morning from an almost-neighbour (20 km drive, with the poor things in cardboard boxes).

I had been considering the possibility of having hens in the garden for a long time, and now is the great leap forward for me and them. I count on them for many things:

• eat, peck, scratch, so that after a month, the patch of prairie under their chicken tractor is devoid of any weeds and pests, and I only have to fluff the soil up a little with a broad fork and then plant my seedlings.
• dispose of kitchen scraps, saving me 90% of the work with composting
• lay eggs
• brood some of the eggs and raise the chicks so that we can eat one of our tenants now and then
• entertain us and the kids with their chickenness

In return, they count on me for:

• moving the pen now and then
• replenishing the water bowl and grain plate
• leaving them alone when I can help it

Let us hope this very unequal partnership will give us full satisfaction. After all, they can’t complain. Industrial layers generally have to live on 2/3 of an A4 sheet of paper of real estate. My hens have twenty times that.

I feel as generous as a western executive building a brand-new factory in a Kuala-Lumpur suburb.