Peak Energy

a factor of ten

2011-02-21T21:47:00.000-08:00

Broken Promises from Range Fuels

In the past week, an increasing numbers of stories have covered the Range Fuels affair. The Wall Street Journal’s take was the most high profile coverage:

The Range Fuels Fiasco

Vinod Khosla stepped in with his hand out. The political venture capitalist founded Range Fuels and in March 2007 it received a $76 million grant from the Department of Energy—one of six cellulosic projects the Bush Administration selected for $385 million in grants. Range said it would build the nation’s first commercial cellulosic plant, near Soperton, Georgia, using wood chips to produce 20 million gallons a year in 2008, with a goal of 100 million gallons. Estimated cost: $150 million.

In early 2010, the EPA said Range would finally produce some fuel in 2010—but only four million gallons, not 100 million, and of methanol, not cellulosic ethanol. So taxpayers have committed $162 million (along with at least that much in private financing) to produce four million gallons of a biofuel that others have been making in quantity for decades. This politically directed investment might have gone to far more useful purposes.

As some readers wrote to me and noted, the WSJ article reads as a condensed version of an article that I wrote a year earlier called Broken Promises from Range Fuels.

Robert Rapier has de-constructed something that was never really there. The Vinod Khosla energy investment portfolio. This outcome is not unexpected to me. A few years ago I cast a bushy eyebrow at this software asshole Khosla and his bad math, scribbling a few choice words about this well connected Pied Piper. Click on the saint below to learn more.

The thing about it is, Khosla may or may not have understood why he failed. Understand, software assholes make 200 million dollars on a big play and they think they've accomplished something. But software is ephemera. There is an existing base of platforms, growing on one end and shriveling on the other. These platforms run on energy. For a software maker, the difference between 10 units and 100 million units is negligible in terms of production. Really, getting the licensing figured out is probably more energy intensive these days than delivering the bits.

Of course, 100 million units of software X is what turns a humble software person into a software asshole. Word, friends. I imagine Khosla thought printing energy would be as easy as printing bits.

Nope.

And the next time one is glancing in awe at the balance sheet of one of the software "bigs," SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, whatever - remember that the amount of money sloshing around every year just for semi-refined petroleum ("crude") is on the order of 584 to 730 billion U.S. dollars.

yum, mea culpa

2011-02-09T01:33:00.000-08:00

Gulf Seafood Sales Get Boost From U.S. Military In Wake Of Oil Spill
Gulf seafood sales fell sharply after BP PLC's Gulf well blew out in April, spewing millions of gallons of oil into the sea. Consumers have long feared that fish, oysters and other products could be tainted by oil and chemicals used to fight the spill, even though extensive testing has indicated the food is safe. The perception has lingered – along with the poor sales.

It's all good. Feed the troops with healthy seafood! The hole is plugged, Matt Simmons was wrong about a second hole, and he isn't around to explain. Rest in peace Matt. You were right about most of the lies, wrong about a few. Me? What me worry? Let's bury this like a massive plume of oil sunk with corexit, a tar ball resting on an inch of sludge. Just another feather in the cap for the Goldman Sachs portfolio.

Oh, and the Corexit is still there, but that's cool. I don't live in the Gulf region, and if I did, I wouldn't be seeing oil any more - at least - not as much.

First Study of Dispersants in Gulf Spill Suggests a Prolonged Deepwater Fate
“We don’t know if the dispersant broke up the oil,” Kujawinski added. “We found that it didn’t go away, and that was somewhat surprising.” [...]
Kujawinski and her colleagues found one of the dispersant’s key components, called DOSS (dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate), was present in May and June—in parts-per-billion concentrations--in the plume from the spill more than 3,000 feet deep. [...]
Using a new, highly sensitive chromatographic technique that she and WHOI colleague Melissa C. Kido Soule developed, Kujawinski reports those concentrations of DOSS indicate that little or no biodegradation of the dispersant substance had occurred.

The lies have all been painted truthy, and as time passes, the victor rights history with a steady hand. Is the salt dome out in the Gulf cracked like a Pennsylvania frack? Of course not. That cap is tight.

Go to sleep. Stay inside. If you go outside and a bird falls out of the sky and hits you, that's natural. Scientists know all about it. They go outside lots.

Some people say they're getting sick, but they're probably stupid. If they're not stupid, they'll soon be dead, and either way, it kind of amounts to the same thing.

Arctic HO!

extraordinary claims

2010-06-19T03:30:00.000-07:00

Casting about for more information on some of the Gulf oil disaster analysis provided by Matt Simmons, I came across a recent thread on the Oil Drum, perhaps the best clearinghouse for information on the technical aspects of peak oil, or at least tied with the overall breadth of the Energy Bulletin.

This doesn't mean the Oil Drum, or the Energy Bulletin, are respected in the mainstream of thought. Far from it. A handful of savvy journalists use these sites as valuable sources of information. A source, not an oracle. Those of us who surf the margins would be well to remember this - and I think perhaps the good professors might chafe at this sea of marginality, leading to the following instruction to the class to be proper scientists,

Matt Simmons on Dylan Ratigan Today, Closing the Relief Ports, and Open Thread 2
"We would like to hear what you think--please avoid the conspiracy theory talk and assess the veracity of the claims that Simmons is making from a scientific point of view. We can find no other industry professional making the claims made in this interview, but we wanted to throw it open to the experts that lurk here to hear what the best and brightest thought about this instead of dancing around it--I'd rather have a thread, tear it apart, and put it to bed. So, if these claims need to be debunked, then let's tear them apart on the scientific merits for the record so that folks can be disabused of these ideas. So, is the situation MS describes possible/plausible? If so, how? If not, why not?"

Most of the people on The Oil Drum are smart enough, which lead to the forum mostly getting a passing grade. Dutifully, a majority of responses described Matt Simmons as a senile old fool. Grandstanding for unknown reasons, completely off the reservation and devilishly shorting BP all the while. (Him and everybody else, I guess.)

Now, I like the Oil Drum. I read the Oil Drum. I support the Oil Drum. I support everyone who signs up for the thankless task of tacking upwind against the risks and blind spots endemic to our carbon energy civilization. Perhaps I also appealed overmuch to authority in the previous post. I've got to remember why my blog is on hiatus anyways, repetitive bitter satire has the half life of Chinese take out. I should aspire to something a little higher.

Unfortunately there is a crux to this. It is an oil soaked ghost turtle. An explosive shrimp. It is surreal and real. A surface slick of light oil (refined by the Gulf) and visible from space. A rig the size of an aircraft carrier and framed in steel has melted and sunk. A claim or two has been made. But who is making the extraordinary claim?

There is limited basis for skepticism of Matt Simmons analysis. In fact, pseudo skepticism of same generates several extraordinary claims that fly in the face of the actual evidence we have at hand. The burden of proof is not just on Matt Simmons. He has made falsifiable claims. It is on those who think that machine gun pace of debunked lies, emitting from the government and Beyond Petroleum SPIN MONKEYS are anything but garbage. Perhaps we need a peer reviewed study just to make sure? Come now. Who is even allowed to visit the site of the spill, or fly over it, without threat of arrest? Scientific observations are quasi legal in the Gulf at this time.

So let's review Simmons claims.

Huge blowout. I don't think this part is controversial. Biggest ever, arguable.

Well Casing damaged or destroyed. This is a major concern. Nothing "conspiratorial" here. Many commentators have focused on this issue. Simmons suggests it is gone, because that is common in blowouts. Ancillary to this is his suggestion that a nuke is required to close the breach, a suggestion that pisses many people off, and certainly carries major risk in and of itself. This prediction is falsifiable.

The primary controversial claim made by Simmons relates to the volume of oil emitted in this disaster. He says 120,000 barrels a day. The official estimate is (for now) 30,000 barrels to 60,000 barrels a day. The original PUBLIC estimates were off by an order of magnitude, and Simmons says merely double that again. What a crazy person! This guy has either lost it, or we need to wait two more weeks for someone to pull their other thumb out. Simmons bases his claim on the vast amount of oil visibly spinning out around the gulf like a Catherine wheel and anonymous sources. This prediction is falsifiable.

As to the volume, and the potential for a massive slurry of tar and heavy oil slinking along the ocean floor, I suggest some of the analysts out there can try making stacks of fruit loops to test for plausibility. These difficult abstractions must be modeled scientifically, after all. I used cheerios. (They usually float, but not after I got through with them.)

This whole thing is just a tragedy. Now the methane is apparently going to kill the bacteria that were supposed to eat the oil. One can't cover up something that is visible from space. It is weird, and surreal. I wish it had never happened.

A postscript is that Matt Simmons apparently met with Stephen Chu a few days after his appearance on MSNBC. I can't help but wonder what he told him. Maybe he doubled down.

BP: Simmons Still Sees Bankruptcy; Massive Hole at the Well Bore? (Updated)
Yesterday, (Simmons) entertained Republican Senator Susan Collins and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu at the Institute. [...] Turning to the spill, Simmons reiterated the rather surprising conclusion that the current “top kill” effort by BP, as well as the planned relief wells, will not stop the Gulf spill. He says he talked over the weekend with scientists on board the Thomas Jefferson, a research boat used by the National Oceanographic Administration.
[...]
“The riser leak is a deception,” says Simmons. “The hole is in the well head — it’s the well bore.” [...] Simmons sees further ripple effects from what he considers the massive size of the leak.
“When they [the Thomas Jefferson] finally got the permission to circle the three-mile radius,” of the well, “once they got up wind [of the blast], within 20 minutes all the crew [of the boat] were nauseous, and several people are still in the hospital. There is benzene coming out of that stuff. If a hurricane finally blows up the Gulf, we could have millions of people die,” on the Gulf coast.

paint it black

2010-06-13T14:56:00.000-07:00

Alternate Link for below video here,

As people drive about in their cars, vroom vroom, they call into talk radio shows to complain about BP. Meanwhile what is leaking into the gulf is oil. BP is irrelevant. To that end, it is stomach churning to listen to Matt Simmons discuss the problem as he thinks it is, rather than as it is described by the White House or the public relations arm of Beyond/British Petroleum.

Simmons is one of the good guys in the indelibly marginal field of Peak Oil. Peak Oil is a reasonably accurate model of reality, so that doesn't explain it's marginality. It is marginal because it lies outside the boundary of how western culture conceives of itself. This is why cloning Dolly the sheep was a shock in the nineties for many - yet a reader of the marginal literature of science fiction yawned at the news. C'mon - cloning - a fifties idea. From the last century now.

Simmons has taken grief from the right of the political spectrum - from technocratic twits who believe money plus technology energizes the world. The lefties pick on him because OBVIOUSLY he is trying to run up oil prices to LINE HIS POCKETS with this peak oil scare-mongering.

But of all the commentators, Simmons was never a scare monger, and went towards the sensible path of suggesting conservation and wind power.

Yet here he is, talking at the end of this video about a massive pool of oil painting the gulf coast black. He a sensible guy. A rational player. He didn't trade in his bona-fides or shred his scientific integrity to work for MMS.

Random thoughts pop into my head - like Obama will lose his job over this, and no one will really care. BP might go bankrupt, and no one will really care.

The Gulf is dying and people care.

freestylin'

2010-06-06T03:09:00.000-07:00

One thing I've been thinking about lately is the zeitgeist of the United States.

At some point, shortly, people are going to realize that the system is failing, and the very myths of our technocratic culture will begin to break down. Such as, perpetual growth of concrete sprawl and attendant ballooning of property values. Etc. This doesn't work so well when the banks are failing, the fish disappear and the corn or rice is a genetically modified vector for poisonous pesticides.

How will the culture react when the pile of glittering rewards shrink? Detroit is where is starts. Every day that city shrinks, as does morale. Now one hears stories of 60% of homes in Las Vegas underwater (mortgage) because people have nothing left to gamble.

The termites are in the foundation.

who's that rappin?

2010-04-28T00:50:00.000-07:00

Oil spill: Gulf of Mexico disaster 'growing by the moment'

The explosion, the sinking, and now the spill from the Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil rig couldn't have come at a worse time for President Obama and other proponents of expanding deepwater oil exploration off the US.

Obama. Bush Light, half the calories, but sold by the same corporation for the same price.

The current incident demonstrates the risks and degree of difficulty of the global gambit to go ever further afield into the earth's deep crevasses to find oil. Trying to shut off a well 5,000 feet below the ocean surface has never been done.
...
Early reports were that BP workers using four remote-piloted subs had managed to jam the 5,000-foot "riser" from the well to the surface, These reports were wrong, with the Coast Guard saying Monday that the leak was not contained, but had, in fact, tripled in size in 24 hours.

No one said the Transocean Deepwater Horizon was the Titanic. No one said she was unbreakable. Floating like a butterfly, she stung the ocean floor like a bee and blew up. This is no little ethanol refinery. No energy laundering operation. A billion dollar play has crumpled, and the energy to payback the investment is floating towards the United States. The viscosity of karma may now be measured.

"If this doesn't give somebody pause, there's something wrong," Florida Gov. Charlie Crist tells the Miami Herald.

Some of us paused when the itch got scratched back in 2006: "A faulty natural-gas well was the cause of the Lusi mud volcano in Indonesia that began erupting in May 2006 and hasn't stopped yet, burbling up hundreds of gallons of mud each day and so far burying four towns and 25 factories"...

The past is for historians. I told you so is always too late. The military wants to know when their water powered jeeps will be ready.

Don't count on the "experts" managing this honking, pooping black swan. Experts are creatures of structure and status, shorthand for money. Yes, wade offshore for oil. Not as simple as Texas, is it? Peak oil is unfortunate in that like a small child who asks for world peace, remediation goes completely against the system of the world. Like a small child, it is largely ignored.

tending weeds and pressing roses

2010-02-02T01:22:00.000-08:00

A few changes, as I ponder uncorking a few new ideas in the near future. Yes, now I think about writing on peak energy rather than actually writing! It doesn't actually save me time of course - the ideas rattle around in my brain, instead of yours, where they belong.

Removed:

Real Climate,
With prejudice. My standards are low enough as it is. This doesn't mean I'm a burn it all guy, unconcerned about global warming. I am anti-structural by nature and I smell a structure.

Riverbend,
Long time no see. Makes one wonder.

Past Peak,
Blue skies.

Added:

Club Orlov,
I agree, a SKS is a good choice. Comes apart like a tinker toy. Now I just need a sailboat and a good book on maritime law. And a method to gut and clean a jellyfish, cause that's what we get. Eat lead, primordial suckers!

Peak Oil Debunked,
This dude makes me laugh. He's as conceited as me, MIGHT BE my nemesis. Something new on the methane front, as well. Bears investigation. In the time since this popsicle stand began, didja know that bushcheney allowed a new process domestically called hydraulic fracturing to be used to acquire natural gas? Let me tell you friend, supplies are BOOMING!

thinking backward

2009-02-26T23:58:00.000-08:00

It is said that as one ages the perception is that one is younger than is in fact the case. This is not really a surprising distortion. Much valuable science is performed around the obvious. By the same token, surely I am living about five years back in a self hallucinated past. By god, I'm enjoying it.

Today, scanning the articles at Energy Bulletin, one might think there is some risk in being that peak oil commentator who lives in the past. Not in terms of physical reality of the position, but in terms of cultural relevance.

Fundamentals are still valid. Oil is depleting. Natural gas is depleting. Fine, friend. The need for alternatives press in. So raise the alarm, bell the cat, and don't be scared. One shouldn't be scared. The cat is dead. There is no pressure at the top end for oil supplies, or need for greater production, at present. And as the economic collapse progresses, there is an outstanding possibility that while production declines literally, demand will drop, masking the shortfall.

The peak oil crisis: a turning point?
It does not take much excess supply to fill that 80 million barrels worth of floating storage that is bobbing around on the world's oceans right now. Less than three months during which oil exporters are pumping out a million b/d of excess supply will do it nicely. It has now been about five months since OPEC realized there was too much oil for the demand and began a series of production cuts now totaling 4.2 million b/d. [...] We know there was an oversupply of oil because of the price collapse, we just don't know how much. While the reporting agencies are circumspect as to the size of the drop, they seem to be suggesting 1 or 2 million b/d.

The slightly terrifying conclusion I draw is that it will be difficult for the reality based geology crowd to get anyone's attention for a while. Years.

Not just that, it will be hard for anyone to get a loan to invest in alternative energy, period. And I'm critical of about seventy-five percent of what passes for alternative energy, as a casual reading of this blog would reveal. The bad bets are giving the workable projects a bad name because the entire sector is seen as marginal.

"Urgency surrounds numerous clean tech companies, which saw a drying up of tax equity-structured financing in 2008," stalling solar, wind and biofuels programs and threatening some of the companies with bankruptcy, said the report obtained by The Associated Press.
Despite the overall growth in 2008, venture-backed investments in clean energy declined by 14 percent in the last three months of the year, reflecting the impact of tight credit markets, according to the report released Wednesday.

So I reckon some time around 2014, after the fiscal “swamps” have been drained, the globe will reformulate around a new system of bartering fresh water for oil, and discover that there is not much of either left.

It will never be 1939 again.

[Image sourced to http://www.philseed.com/]

such a winters day

2008-12-31T21:43:00.000-08:00

No, this isn't a post about California, any more than anywhere else. Just a pause for reflection, after four December's of posting on the topic of peak energy - something I understand and mean to be peak usable energy in an industrial sense.

In other words, something which is rooted in and provides context for our present living arrangement. Our civilization.

There is another leg sprouting from our culture, and that is capital. Interesting to notice is the uneasy relationship between capital and energy.

Oil pricing on the markets has seen violent, volatile shifts this year - whipsawed by a rising and falling dollar, the inertia gathering behind the global depression and yet this is all against a backdrop of almost unabated consumption of energy. A few percentage points change at the top.

Depletion of those easy reservoirs of energy - - coal, oil, natural gas, continues. A steady drumbeat.

Commentators who don't understand how investments in renewable energy are ultimately indexed to non-renewable energy, are weaving the usual myths about how investments in renewables will be stalled because the price point of oil is too low.

So-called alternative energy is now, as it has been for some time, a necessary investment if our culture wishes to tramp a bit further along the path known.

Investment in alternative energy might also make obvious that other paths are possible, and even desirable.

But it is kind of moot, as capital shrivels, the bizarre effect may be that energy for change lies latent, or more likely misused for war and rumors of same. Just another night in Gaza. At the end of the day it is about trust.

The year ahead could illuminate our potential. Be hopeful that it will not show a gully carved down to hell.

We all know our vices too well. The untouched heights are what we seek.

Happy New Year,
jon / 2008

the day after - part three

2008-10-14T10:42:00.000-07:00

The United States annual 700 hundred billion dollar Military budget has long been a cipher and a certainty. The U.S. manages to fund a space program on 2 percent of that. The dollars are real, and they are glazed over North America proper as evenly as possible to ensure every voter, in every district, has a stake in the continuation of this boon.

It is likely that in the coming years this budget will be cut back out of bankrupt necessity. One wonders if there is time to shift the focus of national defense in the short term. It is now apparent, as highlighted by both Obama and McCain, that energy independence is a national security issue.

Consider a shift in manufacturing from missiles to wind turbines. At roughly 1000 dollars per Kilowatt, what would we get for 100 billion of national security investment in wind? Approximately one hundred million kilowatt hours of electricity. This is just napkin math, change the numbers and change the outcome. Certainly, these same dollars could be directed to build ten nuclear plants. But if this national security wind manufacturing was sustained year by year, at the level noted above, eventually the entire 2.3 trillion kilowatts of North American electricity production could be replaced – in this case over twenty years.

Had we started 8 years ago, we’d be half way to clean energy and energy independence.

This is really a thought experiment, but it is a major concern that as liquidity has been sucked out of the market, the possibility for new ideas and new directions is heavily constrained, making it vastly easier to “predict” the future. Less scenarios to account for. The scenario being run – where taxpayers bail out banks – is one of real cash vanishing from the economy.

The return (it is hoped) are dribbles of credit. Well, hooray. Peak oil is unfolding, folks, and the U.S. (one of many countries now with a similar plan) just spent 700 billion + 250 billion so that banks can continue to extend credit.

Current United States investment in alternative energy is the period at the end of this sentence, and investment in the military is everything else on this page.

So Americans, call your senator, congress critter, and presidential candidate of choice and let them know that energy independence is a national security issue and we have the technology.

the day after - part two

2008-10-09T22:08:00.000-07:00

Surveying the wreckage, with martini in hand, or better yet, a slice of apple pie, one might be inclined to flip out.

A fair response, but it is time to change ones mind. Turn it, twist it, and then re-program. This might involve hitting a television in the face with a sledgehammer. Many of the constrained energy scenarios – and responses to same – are the identical response needed for a depression. This upcoming depression will segue directly into a constrained energy environment.

The crisis demands an industry to engage in on a national scale, a hoover dam, something to turn the focus of the age from money to people. More on this – much more – tomorrow.

For now, food for thought.

Where will one get your consumables, if there is limited supply at the grocery store at the grocery store, or the bread line?
Grow as much of your own as possible, and chicken eggs are an excellent source of protein.

Where will one live if jobless?
Planning now might keep you out of a tent. Pooling resources with other humans is always a good bet.

If the whole world is going bankrupt, why not me?
Take this idea with a grain of salt: The common refrain one sees on the media to “pay down your credit card” is absolutely correct in normal times. These are not normal times and paying banks with interest might not be the best use of your cash RIGHT NOW. Let's watch how the emergency develops.

Neighbors never moved in, the pool next door is fetid – can one grow food over there?
Move out of Arizona and California exurbia while it is still possible. Get to water.

the day after - part one

2008-10-08T23:00:00.000-07:00

The financial conflagration gathers strength – touched off by the mortgage crisis as a dynamite primer, but exploding on account of unsupportable shady investment practices. Lacking steady dribbles of cash to cover the heavily leveraged, endless trillions of speculative credit/money, the game ends. Various billion dollar bailouts are a drop in the bucket – not even addressing mortgages that have already failed. Much less all the tea in Iceland.

The big tent of speculation is in greater part hot air, and removing a few supports of real cash here and there has started the whole bit of tatty cloth fluttering towards the ground. The carnival is defunct.

This crisis follows fast on the heels of record high oil prices, which have then been hammered back down by the economic conditions. This has long been predicted by peak oil analysts, although usually as a progression of high oil prices directly causing the economic downturn. While oil prices are a contributor to the recessionary economy, the financial crisis is not directly rooted in oil prices, but the effect will be the same.

Tom Whipple and Steve Andrews comment:
In recent months US and world oil consumption have been dropping due to high prices and the worsening economic funk. Whereas in recent years worldwide demand for oil increased by about 1.5 million b/d every year, that number will shrink to a few hundred thousand b/d annual increase for 2008. If the economic situation gets much worse, demand for oil probably will go into actual decline.
If, as seems likely, the omnibus financial bailout does little good and the world goes into a prolonged recession, then we probably are on the peak/plateau of world oil production right now. Demand will drop, production will be slowed, and new multi-billion dollar oil projects that are not already well underway will be delayed or cancelled due to lack of demand or capital to pay for them.

The stock market had been resonating on the border of non linear for a while now, swinging back and forth with a marked lack of rhythm or reason, preparing for the now apparent state shift. But the market is just a sick canary, and there is no reason to expect the financial system will be stitched back together barring perhaps one possible "fix" – global, concerted inflation to spread the capital shortfall around and get things moving for the big boys. Of course, this "fix" would turn the middle class standard of living into a Zimbabwean delight.

Tomorrow, how to change your life.

victory garden of the week - July 14

2008-07-19T22:33:00.000-07:00

making my little piece of the world just a little greener (post gazette)
(T)his year, something inside went "click." All those articles about decreasing one's carbon footprint by using locally grown food finally sank in. And what could be more local than the plot of crabgrass right outside the door, which thus far has existed for the sole purpose of being mowed? Couldn't it be put to better use?
...
Now I find myself coming home from work each night and marveling at how fast the stalks and leaves have shot up and proliferated with basically no effort on our part. Mother Nature helped too, providing so much rain in the early weeks that we didn't have to water.

The banks will never foreclose on your fresh tomatoes. Watch for slugs.

Las Vegas in winter

2008-07-10T23:51:00.000-07:00

Down and out in Las Vegas The Independent
With Americans cutting back on luxuries, and the price of transport rocketing, the so-called "Vegas vacation" is facing the axe. This week, as the nation celebrated Independence Day, major hotels were taking stock of a fall in all-important room occupancy rates from their usually impressive 95 per cent levels to nearer 80 per cent.
...
Local bankruptcies have quadrupled. The property market, which rode the wave of a boom for most of the past decade is now below its peak by anything from a quarter to a third (depending on whose figures you believe), while Nevada now boasts, if that is the right word, the nation's highest foreclosure rate. The number of empty homes has caused a health scare after it emerged that mosquitoes – possibly carrying the killer West Nile virus – are breeding in abandoned swimming pools.

Even as the air wheezes out of the bag, one wonders how mindful Americans are of the permanently changing landscape. High gas prices, recessions, and even depressions are not new to North America. Everyone wants this whole mess to turn the corner - sweep out out the rats, bring on the new President, a new day, and perhaps falling gasoline prices after the coast is drilled for sweet black gold. Smart cars will be docked into Hummers instead of replacing them.

America is a population that is among the least equipped in history to handle a systemic collapse. People died slowly on live TV during the Katrina disaster. Americans love their media, not their neighbors. Those who are planning their next gambling run down in the casinos just as soon as ticket prices come down and the card gets paid off have no idea at present that this day will likely never come.

The primary hubris of the energized civilization is the power switch. It is such a casual weakness. Nothing happens without it. We're not built to do without it, and most of us don't even know how it works.

It is a strange feeling of unease as an individual, to finally face these weaknesses in our culture for real. The real news is still ignored, while many are ready to start dreaming of the housing collapse turning around, or what have you.

Imagining a herd of robot consumer narcissists when they begin to feel peckish is a nightmare scenario. We've all built our cocoons, our personal worlds, each of us a perverse cockroach in our own right, ready to come boiling out into the streets as soon as the system changes.

Perhaps I should grow a really long beard.

victory garden(s) of the week - July 8

2008-07-08T00:28:00.000-07:00

Growing front-yard food can rile neighbors (ap/cnn)
Some of the neighbors are less than thrilled. Some municipal codes limit the percentage of a yard that can be planted with anything other than trees and grass.
"Especially in the first three years, I got a lot of code violations," said Bob Waldrop of Oklahoma City. He planted his corner lot almost entirely with fruit trees, berry bushes and vegetables.
...
An anonymous complaint about Karen Baumann's front-yard garden in Sacramento, California led to a fight by local gardeners against the city's landscaping code, which stated that gardens could take up no more than 30 percent of the front yard.
After a public hearing where Baumann's 11-year-old twin sons testified, dressed as a carrot and a tomato, the city changed the law.

When the neighbors complain about front yard vegetables, defacing their John McCain for President lawn signs (as inedible as the chem grown grass they extrude from) probably won't help change any opinions.

And the sqawking of pigs and chickens may not win over hearts and minds in the short term. I do find it interesting that in my burb this summer, a cock crows a-morn, apparently a new arrival from last year, although I haven't located his habitat nor harem yet.

Have patience with ignorant grass-centric neighbors. Before long, they'll be seeking guidance.

a cult of finitism and other futures

2008-07-07T00:21:00.000-07:00

Back when this blog began, I knew things. I knew them confidently. As time went on, the more I learned, the less I knew. Yet there is a value in knowing something confidently.

You've got something jingling in your pocket right now. The petro dollar. Right now you can literally use it to buy things of lasting value. This icon won't hold value forever. A penny saved is a penny burned. Buy real things. Swords and plows. Seed corn.
Oil itself is not part of the living Earth. Buying a cell phone or a new TV is like planting a dollar bill in the ground. It will not grow, it will not bear fruit.

- - -

So, how long can it go on? Hold up one hand and count some fingers. There you go. That is a good estimate, in years, for how long we have before peak oil hits.

Part of my detachment from this space is peak ennui. Things haven’t changed much in the last few years. Yes, the supposedly predictive became reality, the peak is effectively in. Yet rank and file North American are content to debate pepsi coke and “opening up” coastal areas to drilling. And the throttle has stuck on the dollar printing machine. Quick, what is that word, the one that describes a person who feels gravity does not apply to them?

Ok.

This a transitional age. Our energized civilization is in a liminal state. From here on, the strange unknowns rule, Britney Spears is in a haired / hairless state until observed. Everyone at General Motors scratches their heads and wonders how small next years Hummer might be made, and if it perhaps may qualify for a carbon credit if the dashboard is carved out of California charcoal. Call it the Hummer: Gore Edition and hedge some bets.

So out of all this uncertainty, there are yet things I know confidently. Much of it refernced elsewhere, notably the Energy Bulletin.

Oil – the top isn’t in.
Production hovers like a flying saucer between 80 and 90 million barrels a day. There is will stay, until it breaks south forever, probably around 2010 all else being equal. So c’mon – a little relief at the pump? I mean, sixty dollars to fill twelve gallons, that isn’t the way Eisenhower drew it up!
Go ahead, waste air and blame investor speculation. All the countries with dollar reserves and large economies are content to bid up the price of oil, knowing it is one of the few ways to get value out of the increasingly pathetic petro dollar. Then they turn around and subsidize domestic supplies. China does this. And why not. What else can they use their dollars for, other than cleaning algae out of their pond for the Olympics?
The interesting thing here is that the losers are ostensibly Americans, because no one in America has any dollar reserves. (Never mind Zimbabweans.) Less trips! Shorter distances! This is not my beautiful non-negotiable lifestyle.
As the economy deteriorates, demand destruction will NOT take place immediately. There are too many dollars sloshing about. Look for oil to settle between $175 and $200 a barrel by the end of the year as a best case.

Will the last person out of town turn off the lights.
Even as the Department of Homeland Security spends billions on police state gadgets to “secure” the airlines, the airlines are teetering. This is not a surprise to anyone who thinks about energy. But what happens the day half the airlines go out of business, and the remaining airlines index prices right to fuel costs instead of trying to undercut each other?

On that day, with a glut of serviceable planes grounded by fuel prices, all pending orders to Boeing and Airbus will be canceled for the next ten years. Boeing, within spitting distance of where I live, is no small part of the local economy in Washington State. In fact, this will be devastating to the local economy, and will probably be the signal of real demand destruction. Skilled union members will be left to poach rabbits down by the freeway and cultivate taters. (Where are these people going to go – Arizona? Water falls out of the sky in Washington State.)

The sad subtext to this story is Boeing is developing a fuel efficient plane known as the “Dreamliner”, supposedly in part because some manager at Boeing read Deffeyes “Hubbert’s Peak”, yet this plane has not yet been delivered and looks to miss the sweet part of the market, the one where planes are acquired new.

Beef – it is what was for dinner
When deciding where to lay our corn bets, one must figure on heavily subsidized bio-fuel distilleries surviving to produce a welfare fuel which provides 15 percent less energy by volume than gasoline. (I wish I could get a piece of that action, but I have no ties to organized crime.) Meanwhile, unable to afford feed, ranchers will continue to thin down their herds of steak racks, keeping prices low today, and raising the price of meat through the roof next year after the full weight of the Midwest floods ripples through the commodities market.

original chart

victory garden of the week - July 1

2008-07-01T14:20:00.000-07:00

opec signals heavy sour

2008-05-20T00:47:00.000-07:00

OPEC signals reluctance to lift oil output (Bloomberg, Reuters)
The Qatar oil minister Abdullah al-Attiyah said there was no need to raise oil supplies to global markets. "The market doesn't need more oil," he said, pointing to a cut in forecast oil demand growth by the International Energy Agency.
"There is more oil in the market than consumers want," said the Iraqi oil minister Hussain al-Shahristani.

Not everyone has gotten the point yet, so below is a reprint of a satirical piece done in 2006. No guesses will be provided today about 2010, or even October of this year. Always in motion is the future - difficult to see.

Oil stuck below $159, traders question OPEC resolve

SINGAPORE (Reuteres) Oil deepened losses below $159 a barrel on Tuesday as traders waited for evidence that other OPEC members would follow Saudi Arabia's lead in cutting output.

U.S. light, sweet crude dipped 12 cents to $158.69 a barrel by 0148 GMT, extending a 52-cent fall on Monday . Prices hit a 2008 low of $156.55 a barrel last week and stand 25 percent below a record-high traded in July. London Brent fell 26 cents to $158.95 a barrel.

Top global exporter Saudi Arabia told its customers at the weekend that it would give them less crude in November, making good on its part in an OPEC deal last week to cut production by 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd) to try to stem falling prices.

The kingdom told Asian refiners that it would cut their sales by up to 8 percent versus October's levels and told oil majors that it would deepen earlier curbs by another 5 percent, but most others members have yet to show evidence of reducing output.

With oil prices still high by historical measures, analysts have questioned whether the full cuts OPEC agreed to will be implemented, and oil traders appear to be waiting for the proof.

"Until another third world country starves to death following the cut on stockpile levels we don’t expect a response" from prices, said Blonkles Gurb, a commodities analyst at National Paraguay Bank. "It may be a few weeks before anything happens (to stocks)."

Some OPEC ministers said another 500,000 bpd reduction could follow when the group meets in Abuja in December as they fear a supply glut could develop in the second quarter if peak winter demand fails to draw down toppy stockpiles.

Meanwhile, in the face of oil production cuts, construction of the huge asphalt pyramid commemorating the American-Iran conflict continues unabated in Saudi Arabia.

“It is a stupid and useless war to, thus it is fitting that we celebrate it with our excess stupid and unrefinable heavy crude,” stated Abdullahi Jones, a spokesperson for the United States of Arabia.

another skeletor type

2008-04-24T00:00:00.000-07:00

Attorney General says mobsters pose new global threat
Also alarming is growing evidence of what Mukasey described as mobsters infiltrating and corrupting global gas and energy markets — potentially destabilizing parts of the U.S. economy. He cited cases of organized criminals increasingly smuggling immigrants and contraband — such as counterfeit money and drugs — into the United States.

Here we have in Mukasey another skeletor type, yet freshly presented. Untainted in the public mind by the scorch marks and glub glub of Abu Graib.

The storyline is new, even though the package is shopworn propaganda. Misdirection, fear, perfect to be sopped up by the media.

The storyline du jour externalizes oil prices on somebody - anybody - except those who are running the United States into the ground.

Filling your hummer got you down? Blame mobsters.
Cost of milk making you cringe? International rings of criminals.
Natural Gas bill more than you can afford? Viktor Bout! Rockets and AK-47s!

Can't blame Osama - need him for weekly radio addresses.
Can't blame Saddam - hung by the neck until dead.
Can't blame ourselves -

buttered regrets

2008-04-23T00:11:00.000-07:00

Japan's hunger becomes a dire warning for other nations
Japan's acute butter shortage, which has confounded bakeries, restaurants and now families across the country, is the latest unforeseen result of the global agricultural commodities crisis.
…
While soaring food prices have triggered rioting among the starving millions of the third world, in wealthy Japan they have forced a pampered population to contemplate the shocking possibility of a long-term — perhaps permanent — reduction in the quality and quantity of its food.

Those pampered Japanese. Not that the rest of the western world is any different. There exists everywhere a lust for buttered goods. Why buy a cow? When the milk isn’t cheap. I’m no prognosticator, but I sense trouble on the horizon.

Short on butter, but not guns, the Japanese might choose to go to war to secure a supply. Recent history tells us this isn’t totally out of the question. And, butter is a vital part of any future fuel - - green wash the biodiesel, use food renewably squirted from a land whale and add a fatty richness to ones exhaust.

Anyone driving in the wake of such exhaust will become envious and hungry.

First, the Japanese hordes will come marching off their shores for the butter, then clotted cream. This will be followed by a quest for pure maple syrup, on account of the high sugar content which makes for a great ethanol blend. And you guessed it - - a pleasing aroma.

If one were a Japanese warm-monger in this thought experiment, one might really brighten the day of someone in Haiti, just by driving past them.

“What’s that delightful smell?” A Haitian child will ask, wiping the dirt off her lips as a Japanese convoy drives up.

Not comprehending the language, but graciously understanding, a Japanese soldier then gestures towards the back of his vehicle.

“Corn – Butter – Maple Syrup – Sugar Cane – French fry Grease – Grass. Why, we’ve got a little slice of God's green earth in our fuel tanks! Now which way are the Blue Mountains – we must secure a supply of coffee to keep our cows producing...”

the economist

2008-04-10T23:52:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I've got to borrow a story from Big Gav because it is so grand. I've got a few essays of my own chillin' on ice, and there they will stay for a few more days while I attempt to intersect time and effort.

"The strategy the economists used was as simple as it was absurd—they substituted economic variables for physical ones. Utility (a measure of economic well-being) took the place of energy; the sum of utility and expenditure replaced potential and kinetic energy. A number of well-known mathematicians and physicists told the economists that there was absolutely no basis for making these substitutions. But the economists ignored such criticisms and proceeded to claim that they had transformed their field of study into a rigorously mathematical scientific discipline.
...
The external resources of nature are largely inexhaustible, and those that are not can be replaced by other resources or by technologies that minimize the use of the exhaustible resources or that rely on other resources [...] If the environmental crisis did not exist, the fact that neoclassical economic theory provides a coherent basis for managing economic activities in market systems could be viewed as sufficient justification for its widespread applications.

This model of economists, that is, the one where their model sucks, resonates. The biggest, most painful lie that western civilization has been living with, the BIG LIE, is the lie wherein the world systems are boundless. Delivered to your door as a Pop Tart forever.

A cornucopia of uranium, diamonds, bananas for ethanol, forests for wood or rubber, and mucho third world types to exploit. An ocean-all to flush our plastic, carbonic acid and phosphorus. Forever and ever, a perpetual motion economy, with the cash flying out of your town into someone's grey pocketss, yessss...

But now the trash has piled up so high we can smell it everywhere. And money can't buy as many grits of rice or corn - - much less happiness.

It figures.

Stupidityness is the only human endeavor that can be effectively modeled as a closed system.

Stupidityness is the only human endeavor that can be effectively modeled as a closed system. -monkeygrinder

a horse and some pepper would be nice

2008-03-23T01:49:00.000-07:00

James Kunstler’s new novel “World Made By Hand” is an excellent, brisk read which I recommend. This novel, along with the nonfiction “… Geography of Nowhere” are two essential works by the author. The novel certainly may be safely passed along to a reader who normally lacks interest in the topics which define it.

Many people hear the word oil as “blah blah blah.” Times are changing, though.

The narrative speed accompanied with the first person perspective of the “World Made By Hand“ seem quite by design, reflective of an era in which there is no survival value in morose reflection, navel gazing or irony. Strong emotions and shock are expressed to the reader as a series of thunder shakes and tornados on an already stormy day.

Injecting a bit of commentary, which I intend to approach delicately to avoid giving away the plot, relates to the supposed “science fiction” elements of the novel. In fact I presumed this myself last year, a reaction of humor because here is someone in Kunstler who “reads next to zero science fiction” writing a novel with some of the standard trappings of a work in the same genre.

A particular section of the novel seems intended as magical realism. It certainly describes magical thinking and creation of a local legend, right at ground level. Tracking this idea throughout the entire work, I have the opinion the Kunstler is expressing a view that science and hyper-technology will no longer be an organizing principle for humans in his imagined future, and the paranormal experience of the protoganist symbolize this, rather than being some some sort of sci-fi sprinkle. Unfortunately, the intended effect is apt to be confusing for those who have actually read widely in the genre.

Kunstler implies that a regression to a prior pattern of living will turn out to be ultimately more successful than our techno-blip century in oil. The trickster will trump science and tribalism will trump secular humanism.

It is quite directly anti-science fiction, but is a bold enough statement to be ambiguously shelved next to “Lucifer’s Hammer” without raising any eyebrows. If it were science fiction, it would be of a sort written in the fifties, a brand orphaned by Ellison and everything after. Thus the author seems to inhabit the same bubble that his protagonist lives in, where all the news from the outside, larger world is second hand.

And for all that, the town described in the novel, upstate New York twenty years in the future, is perfectly plausible. It is just one little place that may come into existence, in a world of many small places.

I imagine a raggedy view of the future, and certainly this possibility is not precluded in Kunstler’s novel. One where existing technology fails to pop like a soap bubble a few seconds after the oil and gas deliveries stop. And that time could be soon. Certainly it will be a big world after all, and the steady hum of hydroelectric in the Pacific Northwest won’t help millions of people walk out of the desert Southwest if there is no gas at the gas stations one fine day. Terroir. The shape of possible outcomes is defined by essence of territory, region by region, river to valley.

The novel “World Made By Hand” allows a reader the chance to internalize these possibilities for themselves, a valuable service. One cannot read the book without looking around their neighborhood. Bravo.

I think our future perception of all this will be as a kind of reverse science fiction - - in the sense that (science fiction) has until now always been presumed to take place in the future.

tell yourself what to do

2008-03-18T23:18:00.001-07:00

coming soon, a bit more words

2008-03-17T02:05:00.000-07:00

I haven't had much to say lately, haven't felt like it was necessary. The sources of information on peak energy are varied and broad.

But listen, the globe has been in an age of cheap energy abundance for a century or so, and this is clearly coming to a close. We are left with an infrastructure which can't even produce electricity without fouling the nest, and limited time and capital left to address the situation. For now, all the available latent energy techniques (wind, heat, photons, crust, wave) require massive capital to achieve parity with current production via potable energy. Oil, gas, coal. Awaiting a breakthrough. Waiting. Waiting.

If anyone imagines that I have a taste for blogging much about the idiot scenario that is running now, they would surely be mistaken. I am not that morbid. It isn't as funny anymore. A few years ago I was joking about the salmon going away and now they are almost gone from the warmer southern oceans of North America.

However, I have a few things left to discuss. A few loose ends.

After that, to survive, this blog would certainly need to be recast as a device to conceptually project outward and beyond the troubled times that have sickened the world. Because this new era of chaos is not where the action is, no matter how much the adrenaline is pumping, no matter what the pace of change.

Sound and fury.

heyoka

2007-12-29T13:38:00.000-08:00

Heyoka are thought of as being backwards-forwards, upside-down, or contrarian in nature. This spirit is often manifest by doing things backwards or unconventionally--riding a horse backwards, wearing clothes inside-out, or speaking in a backwards language. For example, if food were scarce, a Heyoka would sit around and complain about how full he was; during a baking hot heat wave a Heyoka will shiver with cold and put on gloves and cover himself with a thick blanket. Similarly, when it is 40 degrees below freezing he will wander around naked for hours complaining that it is too hot. A unique example is the famous Heyoka sacred clown called "the Straighten-Outer":
“ He was always running around with a hammer trying to flatten round and curvy things (soup bowls, eggs, wagon wheels, etc.), thus making them straight ”

Dribbles of potable energy have lately been produced increasingly from food. The effects are startling to most. Food prices of staples have shot up as a result of this wickedness, while fuel prices have done the opposite of decline. Then entanglement begins.

Food prices are up, because people have grown in quantity and a predictable change in the weather has reduced surface area of current producing farmland. Ethanol laundered back into this system does nothing except increase the dead zone where the river joins the ocean. This is a pulse of scarcity, the first of many, like a series of standing waves rising up behind the first gentle one splashing at our feet.

The peak oil crisis: storm of the century
Other peak situations cut both ways and may have unforeseen and unintended consequences. Food grain-based biofuels (peak oil vs. peak food) should in theory help to mitigate the peak oil situation but is contributing significantly to peak food and higher food prices. The amount of corn-based ethanol being produced today is making a minimal contribution to keeping down oil prices while resulting in much higher food prices. Increases in fuel and food prices are starting to result in significant inflation which in turn is complicating efforts to deal with peak money.

As sources of ready made potable energy decline, such as oil, a change in patterns of energy consumption is called for. This change, in many respects will likely incur an up front cost of more energy, such as the energy needed to fabricate windmills or crustal heat exchanges or wave mills. This is electricity and it is fair to say that there is an infinite ability to generate electricity at a profit.

Unfortunately, much of our globe is more than ten steps away from efficiently making do with electricity. Goods and most importantly food rely on this concentrated energy source, what I call potable energy or liquid fuel. All transformations of electricity into liquid fuel result in a net loss of usable energy, so if one plans on doing this one might be advised to start from a massive surplus of electricity. There is no surplus. Presently most electricity is produced from potable energy. The tail cannot wag the dog unless there is another, bigger, dog at the other end.

So the entanglement begins. What real liquidity is left in the world, what capital is not currently tied up in foolish, bullet ridden projects, must be applied to survival. But we are in the midst of a liquidity crisis, one which is constraining scenarios.

Prudence might dictate, a sour lipped muse, that our civilization triangulate towards a specific sustainability. This sustainability is shortly defined. The leavings of this generation shall not choke the next one into oblivion.

Naturally, we might be fitting our ocean going ships with sails. Ideally, we might rebuild the Appalachian mountains, burying the diamonds of energy stored within for a million years. Of course, we may scrap and recycle all automobiles in favor of go-carts which get 150 miles to the gallon. Every child might be taught to maintain a garden before ever being permitted to visit a supermarket.

This is not close to happening except in the farthest margins of our civilization. A self selecting few kookily unhook from the control rods of the Western economy. In contrast, of course, to the kooky bankers who are capitalized 10 to 1 trillion on mortgages alone. Premised on energy growth that will result in economic growth for the next sixty years. The parameters of the model have changed, but the economic structure is rigidly crystallized in the real word, and fixed in the minds of her inhabitants.

That damn losing bet is an entangling bet for everyone in the world. There is nowhere to run. Remember that. Don’t expect any help from the top when the aisles of your supermarket are bare. Positive outcomes are constrained, and wishful thinking will constrain them again.

For the time being, peak oil types are clowns, if not quite sacred. What is changing is that people are beginning to see us.

Accurately identifying the problem is the first step. Make sure your remedies are sensible and local, even if it means leaving your desert home to the lizards or your city to the ocean twenty years before the ocean comes to you.

In a moment, our backwards thinking, contrarian ideas about energy will become apparent to all. At that moment, don’t lead the people on. Don’t parody sincerity by being what you mock.

I’m talking to you, corn whiskey.

I was content to let is drop, but G then said. "You know, you've been predicting all these catastrophes for years now, but we're still here, the cars are all rolling down Broadway out there, and life is going on. You're beginning to sound like a crazy person." It didn't bother me especially that G thought my my ideas were outlandish so much as being comprehensively written off by an old friend as a crazy person, someone who... I dunno... rummages through dumpsters and talks to himself on the street without any sign of a cell phone in hand. I didn't hasten to defend myself. G obviously needed to feel that the world would continue functioning like a well-oiled machine now that he was responsible for an operation that employed a hundred other people. We parted agreeing to acknowledge a difference in our view of things.

burning man with oil

2007-09-25T20:38:00.000-07:00

Every year, I don't go to burning man, which is sad, because the year I did go I had a blast, rednecks in helicopters aside.

It could be compared to summer vacation as experienced by a child. Every day, wake up and do whatever, all day. Anyways, I saw a link on Big Gav's site and so of course I pass it on.

If I don't make it back to burning man in the next few years, I expect Phoenix will be a year round stand in for burning man by 2015 or so, and might even have real mutants.

the high cost of fuel is change

2007-09-24T00:15:00.000-07:00

Democracy Icon Aung San Suu Kyi Greets Myanmar Monks
As the rain poured down, Aung San Suu Kyi walked out with two other women and cried as she paid her respects to the monks, the witnesses said.
...
The witnesses said Aung San Suu Kyi did not appear to speak to the monks, who have been leading an escalating show of strength that has left the junta facing its most prolonged challenge in nearly two decades.
The monks — who are deeply respected in devoutly Buddhist Myanmar — have become the effective standard-bearers for a protest movement that broke out a month ago after a huge hike in fuel prices and has since gone nationwide.

Prices of fuel sky rocket, and the military is afraid of the people, instead of vice versa.

A trend to watch.

coming to a store near you

2007-09-18T00:08:00.000-07:00

noodles of yesteryear

2007-09-17T22:52:00.000-07:00

Italians set to boycott pasta as the price of wheat reaches record highs
Italy's leading flour maker, Grandi Molini Italiani, and pasta and poultry producers are planning further price increases, shocking Italians, said to choose pasta over sex. [...] The green trend for bio-fuels is also blamed for boosting demand for grain. The US Department of Agriculture, meanwhile, reports world wheat stocks are falling to a 26-year low of less than 115 million tonnes.
But the trigger for this week's price rises was hot winds sweeping across western Australia, causing severe damage to the already struggling wheat crop.
...
Australia's weather trouble "compounds what is already a fairly desperate problem", said Simon Ingle, head of milling wheat for Britain's largest farmer-run grain co-operative, Grainfarmers.
"This is extremely serious. Importing nations such as Egypt, India and Morocco have to pay at least twice as much for wheat as they did last year," he added.

Catchy headlines aside, Italians will not be boycotting pasta. They might be buying less of it, yes. And while one cannot say with surety whether there are hedonic replacements for staple foods such as pasta, we're to find out shortly. Grubs, anyone?

Food boycotts will really be about belt tightening and have the flavor of a motor vehicle driver foregoing petrol on alternate weekdays to "send a message" to the big corporations.

Meanwhile, grain surpluses plummet in the face of permanent rummy weather. It is not a valid comparison to highlight the tonnage of available wheat 26 years ago without highlighting the difference in population - - which has seen a swell of 2 billion since 1980. This means presumably back in those sepia toned days a starving Italian could heap their plate with 30% more noodles.

Furthering the point note that along with an overall swell in population, the First World has also seen a swell in buttocks:

...(S)ome data from the Centre for Disease Control in the USA. It is estimated that the average American consumed approximately 1497 pounds of food per person per year in 1970 and this rose to a whopping 1775 pounds of food per person per year in the year 2000. That is a 278 pound increase per person per year – which translates into a lot of extra food.
Researchers report that portion size changes are part of the “supersizing” phenomenon seen at fast food establishments and at restaurants.

So as the losers start to lose with finality, the strange North American boat of temporary abundance that I live on chugs on. The passengers on this journey continue to gorge themselves, curious man sized experiments in the craft of foie gras.

Doing more with less, an opportunity that will come your way. Get ready.

People who go broke in a big way never miss any meals. It is the poor jerk who is shy a half slug who must tighten his belt.

the surge

2007-09-13T00:04:00.001-07:00

Oil breaks 80 dollars on supply, storm fears
Crude oil prices burst into record territory Wednesday as New York futures topped 80 dollars a barrel, with traders fretting over a big drop in US reserves and a new tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico.
The contract for light, sweet crude for October delivery closed at 79.91 dollars, a jump of 1.68 dollars, after peaking at 80.18 dollars.

Fundamentals.

Back in August of 2005, there existed a moment of freako excitement as oil prices crested $65. The dollar index at that time hovered around 88. Fast forward two years and a month, and the dollar index is is swirling around 80 and oil (surprise) has galloped upwards to a non-coincidental price of 80 dollars a barrel.

Non-coincidental simply because as the dollar falls, oil will rise. This moment was inevitable, and both indexes will continue their journey in opposite directions. Supply is not necessarily relevant, with the dollar so perilously weak.

Then again, on the supply side, in an effort to smooth the jittery nerves of investors around the globe, OPEC has over-promised an additional 500,000 barrels of crude a day to be pumped helter skelter beginning November 1st.

Sounds to me like the refineries best prepare for more of that slurried stinking sludge that passes for a production increase in these latter days of the oil patch.

All oil isn't born Brent North Sea crude, you know.

summertime

2007-08-02T00:08:00.000-07:00

I need to take a week or two off
- as if I hadn't been already -
and recharge.

Image Sourced Chaotic Soul

China

2007-07-26T00:40:00.000-07:00

Texas

2007-07-25T00:22:00.000-07:00

United Kingdom

2007-07-23T22:17:00.000-07:00

The Rubber Clown Suit of Positivity

2007-07-18T00:04:00.000-07:00

I call that depression and anger the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity. It's suffocating, and that rubber stinks. But once you start meditating and diving within, the clown suit starts to dissolve. You finally realize how putrid was the stink when it starts to go. Then, when it dissolves, you have freedom.

Ice-cream makers frozen out as corn price rises
What’s the connection between ethanol, the biofuel produced from corn, and a cherry vanilla ice-cream? Answer: the first is responsible for pushing up the price of the other.
This month, the price of milk in the United States surged to a near-record in part because of the increasing costs of feeding a dairy herd. The corn feed used to feed cattle has almost doubled in price in a year as demand has grown for the grain to produce ethanol.

There is something disquieting about watching ethanol fail in realtime after a few years of predicting same. I saw Pimental on CNN the other day. This is quite different than the usual wide eyed optimism presented. Usually the mainstream media trots out techno-optimists girded for battle with their Rubber Clown Suits of Positivity (apologies to David Lynch).

The effect is much like watching the Iraq war, another slow motion disaster which never, ever stops, even in the face of obvious failure.

Only the scale differs, the war wasting trillions instead of ethanol’s billions.

Yet, in a non-trivial development, the ethanol industry hasn’t just stolen tortillas from poor Mexican peasants. With such a voracious cornhole, there has been evident inflation on food – first they come for the cows, then they come for the cherry ice cream.

The waste is conspicuous, as we prep for the spin cycle on our slender energy plateau.

Add actual energy depletion, and simmer.

Biodiesel For The Revolution

2007-07-12T01:45:00.000-07:00

I came out here to be alone

2007-06-26T22:46:00.000-07:00

An ugly battle over clean power

(Sandy) Sandall says he doesn't oppose wind power. He gets his electricity from solar panels and from his own relatively tiny wind turbine mounted on a 50-foot pole. But rows of white massive white poles, topped with blinking lights and propeller blades that make a "whoosh" audible from several hundred yards away — that's another thing. Sandall remains unconvinced by assurances that the sound won't be noticeable from farther off, and that it won't hurt property values.
"I'm 72 years old. I came out here to be alone," said Sandall, who is part of a citizen group, Residents Opposed to Kittitas Turbines. "I have no objection to alternative energy. This is just not the place."

My American generation – “Gen X” and the following, will surely exceed the Baby Boomers in narcissism and selfishness, and blind destruction of the globe, given the chance. Yet the likelihood of this scenario fades as energy depletion fundamentals lock in and feed back.

The United States has spent one trillion dollars, those are energy bucks, on the Iraq war instead of plowing one trillion energy bucks into investments renewables like wind, solar, and active conservation technology.

Imagine the standing of the United States in the world if the latter project had been embarked upon. Instead, the following artifacts have been left in the wake of the Iraq war - spent shell casings, pollution, and dirty pictures. Kind of like the Moon shot but without the Teflon frying pans.

That is the spirit in which I bemusedly maintain a casual intolerance for the opinions of people like Sandy Sandall, aging boomers who happily exist in the world they believe in, ignoring the reasons why Big Wind is important to the survival our species.

We all made it for years, ignoring the blood soaked oil from Nigeria, the incestuous cronyism that marks the relationship of the United States with Saudi Arabia and their medieval kingdom, (another example of the depredations which seemingly unlimited oil wealth can prop up).

We all made it for years, thinking we could dump soot and carbon into our air without limits.

Now a need exists to tap the steady wind of the Columbia River Gorge, and regions like it around the world.

Naturally a few local crybabies refuse to acknowledge their complicity in the created world and the created problems therein. They blubber about the view, and property values. A final spastic episode of Nimbyism played out by actors who believe they still have selfish options in a small and shriveled world.

Being alone – “I came out here to be alone” – is a luxury, not a birthright. So this becomes then a nursery tale, a child’s fable. Piss on the world all ones life, consume resources and carbon fuel from six continents, and the world will have her revenge.

Welcome to Gold Rush territory, Sandy. You are not alone.

Paper Thin Walls
Modest Mouse

These walls are paper thin
And everyone hears every little sound
Everyone's a voyeur, their watching me
Watch them, watch me right now
They're shakin' hands, they're shakin' in their shoes
Oh Lord, don't shake me down
Everyone wants two themselves
And half of everyone else who's around
Its been agreed, the whole world stinks
So no ones taking showers anymore
LAUGH HARD IT'S A LONG WAY TO THE BANK

free as a bucket of gas

2007-06-12T00:32:00.000-07:00

energy porn

2007-06-02T20:23:00.000-07:00

a whole world out of view

2007-05-17T23:52:00.000-07:00

Deforestation: The Hidden Cause of Global Warming
The rampant slashing and burning of tropical forests is second only to the energy sector as a source of greenhouses gases according to report published today by the Oxford-based Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of leading rainforest scientists.
Figures from the GCP, summarising the latest findings from the United Nations, and building on estimates contained in the Stern Report, show deforestation accounts for up to 25 per cent of global emissions of heat-trapping gases, while transport and industry account for 14 per cent each; and aviation makes up only 3 per cent of the total.
“Tropical forests are the elephant in the living room of climate change,” said Andrew Mitchell, the head of the GCP.

Eco-system consumption is a fragile, ephermeal way to exist. If the Earth were an egg, she would be ready to hatch soon, the protein is almost gone, but in fact the Earth is not an egg.

Sitting in the room where I type this out, I cannot sense these changes directly. My lamps still glow, pencils, pens, papers and books are strewn about, just as they were last year. The air supply, if it is thinner, is thinner in a way I cannot detect. Things are just so in my created environment, my personal space.

Yet I have developed a internal model, which reflects my belief that this world is bounded not just by surface area, but by growing dead zones. I reflect it to you, the reader, and sometimes it is reflected back to me and I learn.

Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, (Charles) Moore had altered Alguita’s course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. For one thing, it was becalmed. “The doldrums,” sailors called it, and they steered clear. [...]
As Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the “Eastern Garbage Patch,” Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.

Despite my concerns about the world at large,

it seems to me in this moment that I am not affected by the sand thickening through Beijing every Springtime. Mud tack in Brazil, stomped by grazing cattle is not a problem to worry about when a quality burger, fries and milkshake can be had for ten dollars keep the change. Certainly the lack of frogs and lizards croaking merrily in my neighborhood could be replaced with high quality recordings of happy frogs from some earlier era, perhaps back in the twentieth century.

Yes, for me, times seem as good as always, because no one has bothered to take the billboards down yet, which would surely reveal the missing chunks of our world. I can still go to the ballpark and smell fresh cellulosic ethanol feedstock while I enjoy a petro-dog. The good life.

For many Americans, that is what it is.

"Oh, gas prices are up, citizen, but I'm scared of the darkies, gas prices are nothing to worry about, they'll go down, they always do."

Thinking about the world unseen takes effort. Once the necessary effort has been expended, the destruction is obvious. Realization cannot be unrealized.

An interesting question for the average American to consider is why is a world that is slowly dying so hard to find represented in the media. All is well is the message desired.

Rip down the billboards of distraction and gaze into the slums that lie beyond.

kansas

2007-05-16T00:42:00.000-07:00

florida

2007-05-13T02:04:00.000-07:00

- and he built a carbon house -

2007-05-07T23:52:00.000-07:00

Considering trees as feedstock for liquid fuel is an excellent thought clarifier. Many people who would happily burn a stalk of corn to or two in order to roll their monkey wagon a few centimeters down the road are not so sanguine when trees are considered for the same purpose. I mean, it is worth a pause for most of us. A wooden chair is one thing, a heap of ash another.

And yet, outside today, trees are serving as feedstock for global warming. Weakened by years of drought, gnawed at by beetles and other infestious critters of nature, they finally burn and burn. A funeral pyre stacked high, flame chewing the corpse of centuries.

Some experts worry that the widespread damage may be part of a vast ecological shift in response to warming temperatures. "As the climate is changing, these ecosystems are rearranging themselves," said Dr. Craig Allen, a research ecologist with the United States Geological Survey in New Mexico. "Massive forest die-back is one way these systems will reassemble."
…
On the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, where climate warming has been especially dramatic, nearly four million contiguous acres of white spruce trees have been killed by spruce bark beetles. In British Columbia, the beetle has killed more than 10 million acres of trees, doubling in each of the last four years.

In such soon to be temperate northern climates, one can imagine and predict that southern trees will migrate north, looking for work, singing their Okie songs. Seedlings will spring up in the decaying trunks of their stately, yet obsolete, cousins.

More ominously - - in the hotter climes of China, the United States or Australia - - Dust Bowl country will rule. The trees, houses and roads will be heaped with sand, in some places simply freed from long rest under a crust of turf. Desertification.

And what should be done with the hapless carbon stalks in those parts? Burn it or let burn?

Neither.

Dead wood from a dying ecosystem is more valuable to the globe stacked high as timber than burned for fuel. It is more valuable carefully interred in solid form than if it is left to rot and decay in place.

It should be taken as some evidence of a twisted pathology on a global scale that “we” as a human race are cutting down forests we do actually need, whilst letting broken down old forests simply twist and burn in the summer wind.

Something brilliant should be done in the face of our in-progress long emergency. The chainsaws must be called out of Brazil and Indonesia to come take down the wood which is in the kill zone of ongoing drought, not for fuel, but as a precious store of non-atmospheric carbon.

It’s not enough by itself, by any stretch, but I’m getting tired of sipping tea as I write my diatribes, all the while watching the global climate engine tilt into the red. Yeah, I’m really freaking glad we’re all ”talking honestly” about global warming now, and I’m touched that peak oil is “on the radar”, but the consequences of studied inaction are Katrina-real, an F-5 to the puss, five dollah gasoline by the fourth of july (there is my provincialism again) and so it goes.

At the end of this century, if our grandchildren can build a wooden house, a carbon construct, out of thoughtfully harvested and stored Pinion pine, well and good. Perhaps even chic. On the obverse, a house built from sugar cane stalks seems like a dumb idea, but weeds and drowned coastlines may be all that is left if the outer bands of stupidity continue to be heavily traveled.

carbon trading is weak medicine

2007-04-30T00:10:00.000-07:00

trees, not just for firewood anymore

2007-04-18T23:01:00.000-07:00

Project looks at trees for biofuel
Forest-product companies have gotten pretty good over the years at squeezing as much lumber, paper pulp and chemicals out of their trees as they can. Now they're hoping to squeeze one more useful product out of the trees and the lands they're grown on -- transportation fuel.
Federal Way-based Weyerhaeuser Co. said Thursday that it has signed an agreement with petroleum giant Chevron Corp. to study commercial production of biofuels from cellulose-based sources, including trees and other crops that might be grown on Weyerhaeuser lands.

I'm getting tired of making this point, but if trees become a feedstock for liquid fuel, it won't be long before our "reserves" are thinned considerably. Look what the jackasses said about corn ethanol. Wouldn't affect the price of food. Now Mexico is running out of corn tortillas - - but that's ok, right? Even funny?

So yeah, take down the trees. This is not a green solution, this is a chainsaw response to OPEC directed at our own forests. (Oh sure, first they come for the managed tree farms...)

burning turkey feces (reprint)

2007-04-15T21:28:00.000-07:00

A while back I covered Changing World Technologies - wherein I idly speculated that claims on their web page may have been overstated a squidge.

Well, the plot has thickened, and now smells.

Innovative turkey-to-oil plant eats money, spits out fowl odor
(A) revolutionary plant is turning 270 tons of poultry waste into 300 barrels of crude oil every day. That would be cause for wild celebration in many circles if not for two not-so-minor problems. First, the plant is losing buckets of money, and second, some residents of the town that once welcomed it now pretty much hate it.
It turns out that process of cooking turkey guts, feathers, feces and other waste gives off a horrible stench.

The stench - well, that kind of punishes the early adopters. What really hurts is when you are losing "buckets of money" you don't have positive EROEI.

Solution?

Instead, he is considering a deal to build a plant in Ireland, where costs would be considerably less, and where a recent news article predicted a plant should be operating by next year.

Yes - move somewhere far, far away where your fame does not preceed you.

Thanks to Clark Williams-Derry of Cascadia Scorecard for the link.

- - -

(Article originated April 15 2005) RR posting analysis on "what went wrong" here.

get out while the getting is good

2007-04-11T23:18:00.000-07:00

"The bad news is that the Martians have landed in New York City, and are staying at the Waldorf. The good news is that they only eat homeless men, women and children of all colors, and they pee gasoline."

Kurt Vonnegut

more is better

2007-04-10T23:54:00.000-07:00

The Shock Model: A Review (Part I)
WebHubbleTelescope, a long time TOD poster, has been one of the most active in the blogosphere in the area of oil production modeling. He has advocated a more physically based approach instead of a heuristic curve fitting approach such as the Hubbert Linearization. He proposed an original method, the so called Shock Model, that has a clear physical interpretation and that is making use of both the production profile and the discovery data. I think that a review of the Shock Model is long overdue.

Just noticed this post by TOD contributor Khebab, and I am glad to see more perspectives on production modeling brought into the foreground at a site which for all intents and purposes is the hub of peak oil blogs and discussion forums. Deffeyes linearization has a certain home spun charm but I think we all own a protractor.

The issues around peak oil are interesting and important. I do what I do with the expectation that everyone engaged in this topic do the best they can, in the manner they are accustomed, be they scientist or artist to acknowledge and integrate this crisis in a positive way into our daily lives.

The work is noticed. And the notice of the work gets noticed, as when one A.M. Samsam Bakhtiari presents a paper where he states:

“Having seen the results of Prof. Guseo's GBM model, it became clear that the modeling phase of 'Peak Oil' had come to an abrupt close and that henceforward 'Peak Modeling'
should be shelved once and for all. Some experts still seem unconvinced as they continue to compare and weigh results generated by all types of available models --- as, for example, 'The Oil Drum' [3] and 'TrendLines' [4] websites.”

I’ll bet Prof. Guseo is a swell guy but just because the globe appears to have edged beyond the production peak doesn’t mean critical analysis stops.

So cheers to work completed, cheers for more to come, and cheers for open and transparent disagreements. The water level in the pool rises and everyone smartens up. Even us so-called doomer types.

give peace a chance

2007-04-05T23:59:00.000-07:00

monsanto brand ethanol

2007-03-29T01:21:00.000-07:00

Why Monsanto loves ethanol - Salon - wait for ad
For some time, How the World Works has been convinced that the rush to biofuels will significantly boost the ongoing rollout of genetically modified organisms. There's just too much money at stake in the energy business for it to be otherwise. The popularity of the latest biotech crops is a perfect illustration of this. These seeds aren't cheap -- they are top-of-the-line products. But for well-financed farmers and industrial-scale agribusinesses aiming to cash in on ethanol demand, seed costs are not a significant barrier. It seems reasonable to expect, in the not-too-distant future, quadruple- and quintuple- and sextuple-stacked hybrids that do all kinds of fancy things such as incorporate herbicide resistance, targeted pesticides, and modifications that make the corn cheaper and easier to industrially transform into ethanol.

Another reason to kill subsidies for ethanol. Amber waves of intellectual property set to line the pockets of Monsanto.

I guess, in sum, it is a fine thing that humans won't be eating this stuff. Especially since it can only be a matter of time before a sprinkling of human DNA ends up in the corn along with the rest of the genetic melange.

Ear of corn, ear of man, who is counting.

the tip of his brain is visible above water

2007-03-28T00:57:00.000-07:00

out, filthy baboon!

2007-03-27T00:21:00.000-07:00

Baboon Behavior Behind Wind Projects
On a visit to the Kruger National Park in South Africa in 1980, a band of these monkeys (sic, ed) proceeded to attack our vehicle as it drove down a public road. The experience was most threatening since the rabid behavior of these primates attempted to intimidate any human they came across.
...
Much like what is in store for towns that invite in industrial wind developers, the monkey's paw brings with it a terrible outcome. Allowing baboons to enter our communities has already developed a depressed existence for everyone who cares about a balance in the natural order. Taming the monkeys means shipping them out of our neighborhoods. The freak show that the wind developers peddle has Enron written all over it. The promise of local benefits at the price of living with industrial machines is too high for any sensible person to covet. Accepting the allure of the siren's call brings the noise of turbine tyranny. It is analogous to making a bargain with the devil. - - "Sartre"

Though I may wish it, there is nothing I may do to parody this nutball collection of mismatched paragraphs and ideas:

baboons
vicious and bloodthirsty
wind power
terror!!!
wind developers
monkey's paw
the devil (also, enron)
sartre!!!

Aghast, having thought I already soaked the humor from this particular bunch, (read here) I can only add that if you are a humble citizen of Cohocton, and you run across this "Sartre" character while gadding about,

- please assume he is armed, dangerous, and mad as a hatter. Packing sweaty, hairy palms.

I do understand the hesitation of some to allow wind turbines to be plopped down in pastoral farm settings which have existed for centuries. There is a contrast to the West side of the continent, as opposed to New York, in which endless miles of empty space which stand to be substantially prettified with wind turbines. In some cases, they might well be built around the bones of derelict stripper wells and natural gas piping.

Oh, how the aesthetes must have moaned, when the first paved roads were put in. And maybe they were right. Change is nonetheless rushing in like maglev train, and this is in large part due to the culture of energy dependance which we in the western world have constructed. The blight we have for so long deferred and channeled along the interstate has now landed, finally, in our own back yards.

If these wind turbines truely are a blight, they are just deserts. We could - and have - done worse.

"They think I'm crazy, but I know better. It is not I who am crazy, it is I who am MAD! Can't you hear them? Can't you see the crowds? Oh, my beloved ice cream bar. How I love to lick your creamy center! And your oh-so-nutty chocolate covering! You're not like the others, you like the same things I do! Wax paper, boiled football leather- DOG BREATH! We're not hitch-hiking anymore! We're riding!... Oh no! I know what you want! You've coveted my ice cream bar! No you don't! You can't take it from me now! I've had it ever since I was a child. Everywhere I go, people always try to take it from me! Why won't they leave.. me.. ALOOONNNNNE!!!"

he came as a rat

2007-03-21T21:30:00.000-07:00

What drives biofuel Bush?
Brazilian President Lula da Silva, the former metalworker, posing as a world leader in front of the powerful Sao Paulo industrial/agribusiness bourgeoisie - delighted that they may soon become the new sheikhs of a Green Saudi Arabia - as he struck a biofuel agreement with US President George "Social Justice" Bush.
…
It will be a long and winding road. Brazil produces 17.5 billion liters of ethanol a year. It plans to step up to 30 billion liters by 2012. But the US will need 132 billion liters a year to reach the goal of 20% reduction in its consumption of gasoline. For the moment, 90% of Brazil's ethanol is for the internal market. And the hefty, protectionist 54-US-cent tariff on every gallon (3.785 liters) of Brazilian ethanol imported to the US won't be renegotiated before 2009.

This must be why the Bush Administration is out to cut research for an actual renewable resource, geothermal energy. Can only stretch the dollar so far, and a decision has been made. Sugar and Corn Syrup, with a bullet.

So Americans, instead of being oil crazy, are to become flexaholics. Glug Glug. I think Bruce Sterling recently put it like this:

“We’re gonna glam, spend and consume our way into planetary survival.”

Now, I am with Mr Sterling in many respects. I wholeheartedly believe we should not constrain our future based on any anti-technology, anti design ideology. That said, biofuels of any stripe are already failed ideology, so be careful what you consume, all ye glamour pigs.

Yes, with biofuels, the threads are already unraveling from the greenwashed sweater, whether one looks to Iowa or Brazil. Sugarcane based ethanol, wherein the leavings are burned for energy during the manufacturing process, may in time prove to be as efficient as the unproven yet modestly promising cellulosic ethanol.

Modest net energy gains in the near term do not describe the damage to the globe in the long term. The basic problem is once a technology is developed, it is exploited to meet supposed crisis’s. In this case moving monkeys from point A to point B.

Brazil's Ethanol Slaves
Palmares Paulista is both a burgeoning agricultural town and a social catastrophe. "They arrive here with nothing," said Valeria Gardiano, who heads the social service department in Palmares, a town of 9,000 whose population swells each year with the influx of between 4,000 and 5,000 migrant workers.
"They have the clothes on their bodies and nothing else. They bring their children with malnutrition, their ill mothers-in-law. We try to reduce the problem. But there is no way we can fix it 100%. It is total exploitation," she said.
…
"They come here because they are forced from their homes by the lack of work," said Francisco Alves, a professor from nearby Sao Carlos University who has spent more than 20 years studying Sao Paulo's migrant workforce. "They will do anything to get by."

Marvelous. No need to read between the lines. Net energy gains are born on the backs of the displaced. That wouldn't be french fries we smell coming out of the back of your Bio-Car anymore.

In Iowa, slaves are not favored, rather tractors and government subsidies to prop up the illusion of a competitive fuel. However, because the subsidy is actually a energy subsidy, the final price of corn ethanol will always be indexed to the current price of oil, awl, texas tea, whatnot. TANSTAAFL.

In Brazil, in addition to the human misery which feeds the callow and pointless appetites of the bourgeoisie-consumptive wannebes, the sugarcane plantations can be seen from space and “Some of the cane plantations are the size of European states…”

All this so Brazil may produce in a year:

The equivalent of 2.5 percent of the gasoline by volume that the United States consumes in a year. Adjust for ethanol energy content, and it is less than that.

I’m dumb, not stupid, but I’d have to say that we’re going to run out of Brazil before we feed the fuelish appetites of the United States of America with sugarcane bio-fuel. The Middle East was once a forest. Humans are presently changing the rest of the world along similar lines.

So what did Bush achieve in Brazil?

He added a bullet point to burnish republican geo-green street cred in a changing world.

Not a real thing. Which is like anything that comes out of Washington these days.

a million bees cry out in horror

2007-03-20T23:13:00.000-07:00

The theme of the day is “million”. Not as a blind stab at numerology, rather an organizing expression of the surreal ways in which our dying world acts out as Earth Services fall apart.

Below are recent news stories on Bees, Rivers, Fishies, and Camels. Ordered by importance. Frogs would be on the list but they are gone. How often does one hear a croaking frog in Suburbia, citizen? Green weaklings get their DNA unzipped. Two legs good four legs bad.

Would not it be weird if come this fall a selection of the tastiest and most nutritious crops available in the grocery stores had shrunk by a factor of one-third or two-thirds? That is to say, those formerly pollinated by North American bees.

Weird indeed, like flipping on a light switch when the power is off. We’ve come to expect more of our Dominion over the wee critters of nature.

Breathing through the air supply in the box. Need to snap out of global hypnosis.

Drumbeat. Ramming speed.

Bees - Biological Geiger Counters (Coal, Petrochemicals, GMO -ed.)
The New York Times and other major media sources have recently published scary articles about a catastrophe in the making, about a disaster that will soon have a direct impact on our collective stomachs. In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers are getting the shock of their lives seeing hundreds of millions of their bees literally disappearing. Beekeepers go out to open their hives and find them empty. Bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply not returning to their homes, they vanish without a trace. Researchers say the bees are dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold. Researchers have labeled this affliction “colony collapse disorder.”
…
Scientists have already studied mercury levels in the head, abdomen and thorax of bees (Apis mellifera) from 20 bee populations coming from industrially contaminated areas with a dominant load of mercury (10 populations) as well as from uncontaminated areas. The following mercury levels were found in bees from the contaminated area: heads 0.029-0.385 mg/kg, thorax 0.028-0.595 mg/kg and abdomen 0.083-2.255 mg/kg. Mercury levels in samples from uncontaminated areas ranged from 0.004 to 0.024 mg/kg in the heads, from 0.004 to 0.008 mg/kg in the thorax and from 0.008 to 0.020 mg/kg in the abdomen. In honey samples from the contaminated and uncontaminated areas mercury levels ranged from 0.050 to 0.212 mg/kg and from 0.001 to 0.003 mg/kg, respectively.[iii] Researchers have also demonstrated heavy metal accumulation in honey suggested that honey may be useful for assessing the presence of environmental contaminants.[iv]

Many Major Rivers are in Danger of Dying: WWF (Coal, Oil, Natural Gas -ed.)
NEW DELHI - Climate change, pollution, over extraction of water and development are killing some of the world's most famous rivers including China's Yangtze, India's Ganges and Africa's Nile, conservation group WWF said on Tuesday.
At the global launch of its report "World's Top 10 Rivers at Risk", the Geneva-based group said many rivers could dry out, affecting hundreds of millions of people and killing unique aquatic life.
"If these rivers die, millions will lose their livelihoods, biodiversity will be destroyed on a massive scale, there will be less fresh water and agriculture, resulting in less food security," said Ravi Singh, secretary-general of WWF-India.

Up to one million fish found dead in Thai river (Global Warming, Petrochemicals -ed.)
Officials said they were still trying to determine what had caused the deaths of up to one million caged tubtim fish, a type of tilapia, at different locations along the river about 100 kilometres (60 miles) north of Bangkok. Jaranthada Karnsasuta, director general of the fisheries department, said a sudden lack of oxygen in the water killed the fish.

Enduring Problem
Barnum, a federal scientist, called state Fish and Game workers and warned them: 'Be prepared for a fish kill; it's going to happen.'
In fact, it was already happening. By the next day the sea's north shore was clogged with the corpses of more than 1 million tilapia, according to Fish and Game estimates. The fish had died of a lack of oxygen after high winds churned up the lake, causing a chemical reaction that sucked the oxygen out of the water and tinged it green.

Million Fish Die In Colorado At Once - 'A Lack Of Oxygen'?
I was having a cup of tea in the kitchen when I heard a 'brief' blurb on the news telling of a million fish that had died in the Colorado River (covering an area of 7 miles). The reason given was 'lack of oxygen'. I waited to hear more on evening broadcasts (pictures) and there was NOTHING ¬ just that 30 second announcement. When I went searching I found that this was not an aberration pertaining just to the Colorado, but was happening in all parts of the country (rivers & lakes)and to put the people, who blame farmer's fertilizer at ease, many of these areas had no farms anywhere near them. Tens of thousands of fish have been found in California, Oregon, Washington State, Pennsylvania, and the Potomac etc.

Thirsty Wild Camels Rampage in Aboriginal Community (Global Warming, human stupidity -ed.)
Camels "mad with thirst" recently rampaged through the Western Desert Aboriginal community of Warakurna, damaging toilets, taps and air conditioners to find water.
…
"An estimated one million feral camels, whose numbers double every eight years, compete with native animals and livestock, threaten native plants, wreck fences, bores and tanks, and invade Aboriginal sites," said Glenn Edwards, from the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre.

we've been robbed

2007-03-15T00:43:00.000-07:00

What's It All About, Nancy?
“Officials said Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of the leadership had decided to strip from a major military spending bill a requirement for Bush to gain approval from Congress before moving against Iran.” - Associated Press
Once again members of Congress, this time led by the Dems, have betrayed the safety of the United States to protect their political hides.

Yeah. I want my vote back. I want to vote for Nader. Let's stop the war in Iraq and start a new one in Indisrealraqranistan.

Ill tidings. March is a month for bad news.

angry grumbles and HL

2007-03-13T01:44:00.000-07:00

Predicting the Past: The Hubbert Linearization Robert Rapier
...
It is invalid to use three decades of hindsight for refining the Texas forecast, because we clearly don't have the same option with Saudi Arabia. Yet some argue that the Saudi peak can be forecast with confidence using the knowledge obtained from the case of Texas – a region in which the uncertainty of the method spanned almost 3 decades.
So, the HL has shown that it is good at forecasting the past, but can be very unreliable for predicting the future. In Part II, we will examine the evolution of the Saudi HL over time.

This is a line of reasoning that Mobjectivist has been tracing for years, although unfortunately Robert Rapier, posting on The Oil Drum, did not see fit to reference his work.

Already in a bit of a twist, I then read a few insufferable responses from Stuart Staniford. Below is my response, cross-posted to the Oil Drum article referenced.

Per claim in the Stuart quote, Rapier is NOT the discoverer of the inadequacy of Stuart's favored model.

Reading this thread, I also note that Robert Rapier fails to acknowledge the modeling contributions and similar objections of Mobjectivist (Web Hubble Telescope), a materials scientist who has been visible, active and rational in the small but growing peak oil community since May of 2004.

I'm more than scornful and less than impressed.

I've watched these threads before, as Stuart slavishly and continuously posts on a flawed technique, (One which big oil apologist Michael Lynch accurately describes as "curve fitting").

The atmosphere is so chilly towards Mobjectivist when he flatly debunks the linearization model, as he has done for well over a year, that some posters on these threads have grown confused and attacked him as if he were in opposition to the central thesis of peak oil - that is, individual reservoirs predictably deplete.

Sorry, no.

Rapier says, "Testing the model is called “validation”, or sometimes “back-casting.”"

Mobjectivist does this all the time, with multiple models. He has posted source code and equations over at his blog.

Robert Rapier, your references are incomplete if you do not acknowledge the ongoing work that Mobjectivist has done in this space.

Peak oil is something everyone has an opinion about, but at the core exists solid, empirical science. Science does not exclude ideas that are transparent and reproducible. Hubbert might agree, but it is time to stop appealing to his authority, for he is long dead.

I expect more rigor and honesty out of the subset of people in the peak oil community who have degrees which include the words "science" on them.

What are we, a cargo cult science? Hope not.

(Stuart Staniford) "I just want to add my support to Robert's great post. I agree that the key to understanding any prediction methodology is it's out-of-sample performance (...)
At any rate, I propose that we christen this phenomenon "Rapier Tail Creep" in honor of its discoverer :-)"

the gas must flow

2007-03-09T23:49:00.000-08:00

To attempt an understanding of Bushua'Dib without understanding his mortal enemies, the Al-Qaeda, is to attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing Darkness. It cannot be.
-from "Manual of Bushua'Dib" by the Princess Jenna

1995 + 10, stated calmly in 1976

2007-03-08T23:10:00.001-08:00

money floats on oil, part two

2007-03-06T23:16:00.000-08:00

The Big Green Fuel Lie
Ethanol is nothing new in Brazil. It has been used as fuel since 1925. But the real boom came after the oil crisis of 1973 spurred the military dictatorship to lessen the country's reliance on foreign imports of fossil fuels.
...
But there is a darker side to this green revolution, which argues for a cautious assessment of how big a role ethanol can play in filling the developed world's fuel tank. The prospect of a sudden surge in demand for ethanol is causing serious concerns even in Brazil. The ethanol industry has been linked with air and water pollution on an epic scale, along with deforestation in both the Amazon and Atlantic rainforests, as well as the wholesale destruction of Brazil's unique savannah land.
Fabio Feldman, a leading Brazilian environmentalist (...) believes that Brazil's trailblazing switch has had serious side effects. "Some of the cane plantations are the size of European states, these vast monocultures have replaced important eco-systems," he said. "If you see the size of the plantations in the state of Sao Paolo they are oceans of sugar cane. In order to harvest you must burn the plantations which creates a serious air pollution problem in the city."

Another post card from our dark green future. One million "flex" cars a sold in Brazil in 2005, against 300k in 2005, and the results can be seen from space.

Sugar cane is the best natural bio-fuel crop, bar none. Best EROEI. And the best disaster.

Where, exactly, are these psuedo-green cars driving?

It seems important. Got to cross 15 miles, or 15 city blocks. It is hip to drive. Brazil is a big country, USA big. Gotta go - somewhere. Time to go.

Fops and technocrats point to Brazil as some kind of great green energy success.

I think not.

No one will understand what all those cars were doing, when they look back at our civilization from one hundred years hence. New fields of mathematics will be devised to uncover the truth. Mad fools will suspect an endless quest for cheese poofs and sex, and will propose unsolvable conjectures.

Negative trends in the world culture are not being reversed now that "Global Warming" is recieved wisdom. Earth services are being consumed with finality. Like the Middle East before, only faster. Desertification is the new black. The national bird of Brazil is a chainsaw.

Maybe this is the final solution. Maybe it is working.

money floats on oil

2007-03-05T01:08:00.000-08:00

Biofuels growth hit by soaring price of grain
High grain prices are threatening the nascent biofuels industry, raising input costs and making the fuel less economic compared with oil. Agricultural commodity prices have reached long-term highs in recent days, based on forecasts of hot and dry weather conditions this year in the US which could result in lower grain yields. This comes after oil prices have fallen by a quarter from their record peaks last year.
Corn prices reached another 10-year high for the second successive day when it touched $4.31 a bushel, up five cents on the day. But the doubling of corn, a main feedstock for US ethanol producers, over the past year at a time when oil prices are at the same level they were 12 months ago has raised questions over the viability of the biofuels industry without heavy government support.

Take warning, right?

"“If you’re on the right side of the issue, just keep driving until you hear breaking glass. Don’t quit.”" - T. Boone Pickens.

Bio-Fuels are viable when recycling previously processed fuel stock, like fryer grease or methane decomposing from garbage heaps.

Other than that, and in particular, when using corn as a feedstock, Bio-Fuels are completely bonkers and doomed to fail, like every other half-witted perpetual motion machine that has come down the pike.

And now, the evidence is coming in to support the arithmetic, on account of all the fools who ignored the arithmetic. The dead metaphor being, this stuff ain't rocket science. Go ahead. Pour what is left of the midwestern topsoil into a six cylinder energy sink. Jerk.

Also re-iterated here is the fact that money is irrelevant when energy runs to depletion. Energy defines money, not the other way around. The capacity existing to achieve industrial goals, like laundering useful energy into corn, and then back out again, is dependant not on government "subsidies" but rather government "energy".

For now, you can still buy gasoline for 3 dollars a gallon or less in the U.S., but watch the markets this week. The shift underway might well be seismic. China just threw down on our t-bills.

And finally, one house-keeping note - Sorry for my extended absence. I had the flu, and it really sucked. But guess what - - it turns out not to have been bird flu, and thus I'm back on the horse. Not dead yet! Thus, I am not a bee.

too cheap to meter

2007-02-21T22:39:00.000-08:00

US Nuclear Plants' Power Output 2nd Highest Ever
The industry group said 103 nuclear plants nationwide generated 787.6 billion kilowatt hours of electricity last year, just off the 788.5 billion kwh record set in 2004.
At the same time, production costs sank to a record 1.66 cents per kilowatt hour in 2006, despite three years of price increases for uranium, the fuel used in nuclear generation. These are preliminary figures, the institute said, and final numbers are expected in two months.

Unprecedented efficiencies in power generation. Well, of course, plant operations can be expected to streamline over time. Even as their internals relentlessly corrode. Still, one can only marvel at how these outputs are achieved.

Maybe we should check some recent headlines.

Safety Lapse Feeds Debate on New Jersey A-Plant
Water Level Drops at Indian Point Nuclear Plant in Upstate New York
Safety Alarms Raised at Nuclear Weapons Plant
Unit 2 to be back in operation by Friday after outage

So, by and by, in addition to replacing oil and gas, we will need to replace every reactor running today. It doesn't matter if their operating leases get extended. These things wear out.

back in the saddle

2007-02-16T23:40:00.000-08:00

fresh rotten eggs scent

2007-02-07T00:07:00.000-08:00

Origin of pingo-like features on the Beaufort Sea shelf and their possible relationship to decomposing methane gas hydrates
...
Abstract

The Arctic shelf is currently undergoing dramatic thermal changes caused by the continued warming associated with Holocene sea level rise. During this transgression, comparatively warm waters have flooded over cold permafrost areas of the Arctic Shelf. A thermal pulse of more than 10°C is still propagating down into the submerged sediment and may be decomposing gas hydrate as well as permafrost. A search for gas venting on the Arctic seafloor focused on pingo-like-features (PLFs) on the Beaufort Sea Shelf because they may be a direct consequence of gas hydrate decomposition at depth. Vibracores collected from eight PLFs had systematically elevated methane concentrations. ROV observations revealed streams of methane-rich gas bubbles coming from the crests of PLFs. We offer a scenario of how PLFs may be growing offshore as a result of gas pressure associated with gas hydrate decomposition.

The above abstract is an interesting data point. Earlier this year I referenced an intriguing rumor which was unsubstantiated, yet suggestive:

Fuel tankers reporting increased methane venting from sea beds.
According to U.S. maritime industry sources, tanker captains are reporting an increase in onboard alarms from hazard sensors designed to detect hydrocarbon gas leaks and, specifically, methane leaks. However, the leaks are not emanating from cargo holds or pump rooms but from continental shelves venting increasing amounts of trapped methane into the atmosphere.

Oceanic methane can get powerful warm when unfrozen, trapping atmospheric heat left and right. The cows will be proud. However, do not become unduly alarmed.

If we stand on the cusp of a new thermal maximum, a pesky die-off, be assured that there is hope. Look to the humble Lystrosaurus, a hard charging reptile which survived where many others failed:

Lystrosaurus is notable for dominating land during the Early Triassic, found on every continent, for millions of years. This genus survived the end-Permian mass extinction and went on to thrive, becoming the most common group of terrestrial vertebrates during the Early Triassic. It is the only time a single species of animal dominated the Earth to such a degree. Why Lystrosaurus survived the Permian-Triassic extinction event may possibly be due to blind chance, however, adaptations to surviving on more resiliant plant material may have contributed to this genus' survival.

Blind chance? You be the judge.

It isn't just the handsome tusks, suitable for ripping carrion flesh from the backs of Exxon executives and their mercenary army of paid deniers / elephant gropers.

Look where the nose of the Lystrosaurus is pointed. Inches from the ground.

That is where the breathable oxygen will be if we fail.

Take a good look.

War is a Calamity, News at Eleven!

2007-02-03T23:12:00.000-08:00

Some may wonder why so much ink is spilled hereabouts on the possibility of a war with Iran, or the war in Iraq.

It is certainly more than just oil being a strategic resource. That isn't the only angle. One cannot be certain that Cheney started World War Three simply for oil. Reasons don't really matter. Perhaps Cheney is so callow a man that burnishing his Halliburton Stock options shall at last be his measure.

Causality is irrelevant. This war must be blotted out.

The world is tiny now. It is smaller than my cramped office. If I set out in a canoe desperately seeking a better life at risk of slumbering with the jellyfish (china or bust) it is unquestionable that I would meet a woebegone soul paddling from the other direction. The sense of frontier and mystery is fleeing this globe as the mother dough expands to fill the pan.

Two crisis loom, one acute - - Peak Oil and energy, and one chronic - - that being Violent Climate Change.

In both cases, time is not unlimited to address the problems head on, squarely.

Yet the stupidly expanding conflict in the Middle East threatens our ability as a race to fix the problems we need to fix. This may seem overly dramatic, to the average American, who have suffered no more than price inflation at the supermarket as the war in the Iraq region has drained millions of barrels of oil monthly from our finite resource base into a hazy blue sky.

The incalculable hatred we have bred in the hearts of one hundred generations of Iraqis pales when compared to the possible outcome of a full spectrum bombing run on Iran.

What happens if Iran blockades the Persian Gulf with their missiles? Answer. A shockwave is generated that leads directly to food rationing and economic collapse in such first world countries as the US of A.

China will shortly decide that the time to hold Dollar reserves is at an end, and with three carrier groups tied halfway across the world, Tawian is a beckoning prize of opportunity.

Russia shuts off her methane taps again, driving home the jui-jutsu lesson of twenty-first century warfare.

Nigeria might then explode as all the foreign hornets fly the nest to protect the queen.

You're telling me that this shit is occuring and we're interring carbon at the same time? We're funding Amory B. Lovins to re-write building codes for the world? We're teaching former Squalid-Mart employees to become organic farmers? While people are rioting in the streets and being hosed down with microwaves?

No. The answer is no.

Stop the war or lose the world. Time is not unlimited.

Peak oil is visible in the rear-view mirror and ethanol is still a fucking joke. This is no rant, "this is reality."

War a Calamity, Ex-Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski Tells US Congress

by Barry Schweid for AP

WASHINGTON -- Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser, told Congress the war in Iraq is a calamity and likely to lead to "a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large."

Testifying before the Senate foreign relations committee Thursday, Brzezinski skewered U.S. administration policy as driven by "imperial hubris" and a disaster on historic, strategic and moral grounds.

While other former U.S. officials and ex-generals have criticized administration policy in committee hearings, none savaged it to the degree Brzezinski did.

"If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, and I emphasize what I am about to say, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large," said the security adviser in the Democratic administration of former president Jimmy Carter.

He set out as a plausible scenario for military collision: Iraq failing to meet benchmarks set by the administration, followed by accusations Iran is responsible for the failure, then a terrorist act or some provocation blamed on Iran, culminating in so-called defensive U.S. military action against Iran.

That, Brzezinski said, would plunge the United States into a spreading quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Proposing a massive shift in policy, Brzezinski, who holds a senior position at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the United States should announce unambiguously its determination to leave Iraq "in a reasonably short period of time."

Second, he said, the United States should announce it is undertaking talks with Iraqi leaders to jointly set with them a date by which U.S. military disengagement should be completed.

Instead, he said, the administration is developing a mythical, historical narrative to justify the case for a protracted and potential expanding war.

Initially based on false claims Iraq had secret arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, Brzezinski said "the war is now being redefined as the decisive ideological struggle of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism."

terraforming for dummies

2007-01-30T00:46:00.000-08:00

[Bush] cures are another form of denial via energy bulletin
Another proposal, from a scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado, suggests spraying billions of tonnes of sea-water into the air. Regrettably, the production of small salt particles, while generating obscuring mists, could cause droughts in the countries downwind. Another scheme would inject sulphate particles into the stratosphere. It is perhaps less dangerous than the others, but still carries a risk of causing changes in rainfall patterns. As for flipping a giant mirror into orbit, the necessary technologies are probably a century away. All these fixes appear more expensive than cutting the amount of energy we consume. None reduces the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which threatens to acidify the oceans, with grave consequences for the food chain.
The demand that money and research be diverted into these quixotic solutions is another indication that Bush's avowed conversion to the cause of cutting emissions is illusory...

In the first case, these hypothetical techniques proposed to address global warming are all extremely energy intensive (as are proposed techniques for excess carbon to be interred during production of energy.) If one is constantly spending energy to make up for the fact that one is constantly spending energy, there is bound to be less energy on hand for things like stir fried goat tacos for the super bowl party on the plasma telly.

Let's be frank. These ideas are desperate proposals for ad-hoc experimentation on our last planet. Asinine techno-fixes from folks who can't or won't cross their respective peer groups but don't mind torching the globe, if only they can maintain their professional dignity until they die.

The most reliable way to generate a linear outcome for the climate is to head back for familiar territory. Climate models are tuned for the stuff that has been observed, not the outlying edge cases which have a whiff of extreme non-linearity - along with the sulphur. Obviously, it is past time to give up carbon energy in measured chunks, replacing it with conservation and systems which can use ambient energy.

The thoughtful approach isn't yet in the cards. As Jesus observed, (sic,) it is easier for a (carbon rich) human to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for them to enter the Kingdom of (Earth). Because plastic is forever.

I'm getting concerned that Peak Oil, when it breaks through the plateau, could be a barrier to a planned energy descent to prevent runaway global warming. Yes, we'll be burning less - the question is will it be enough less.

just wanted to warm up my pizza

2007-01-26T22:38:00.000-08:00

a year of oil via the oil drum

2007-01-22T01:17:00.000-08:00

I can't help but swipe and reprint this image from The Oil Drum because as is often noted, a picture is worth one thousand barrels of oil. Note the Eiffel Tower for scale.

Another way to conceptualize this picture is that in last ten years, 10 of those dirigables have been released into the atmosphere, whereby they may float about and melt glaciers, stir up the tundra and bubble into the oceans.

Terraforming. What is good for the Venus is good for the Earth.

uranium: I feel pretty

2007-01-21T00:55:00.000-08:00

It was horrifying, horrifying! Richard Daughty, 321gold
So how big is the market for uranium, you ask. Well, now that you mention it, I would like to know, too! And, in sheer coincidence, here is the Money and Markets newsletter to say "In 2005, about 16% of the world's electricity came from 440 nuclear reactors. That required about 77,000 metric tonnes of uranium." That works out to, if I calculated it correctly, 175 tonnes per reactor.
But "mines only supplied about 48,000 tonnes", he says. The rest "came mostly from reprocessed Russian nuclear weapons - a program that's slated to end. Meanwhile, there are 28 reactors under construction around the world and another 62 are being planned. All told, scientists estimate that the world will need about 900 more nuclear power plants by 2050". Twice as many as now! Wow! And how! Maybe these guys are really on to something big with that uranium thing!

Near term investment opportunities aside, it is a big boggle for me consider that the unicorns and rainbows crowd thinks that 900 new nuclear reactors can be stoked with atomic coal.

We aren't doing it now, we're burning through prior (weapons) production, just as we are burning through long past discovered oil reservoirs for our liquid fuel. More damn energy laundering.

How will we dig endless amounts of uranium out of the ground? How will we distill it from the oceans?

Ethanol, I bet.

Weather today calls for periods of cloudiness, followed by a shower of diamonds from the blue sky. This is my personal plan to remove excess carbon in our turgid atmosphere - - yet I find myself blocked by a conspiratorial cabal of diamond merchants, naturally.

Reality has nothing to do with it.

Perpetual motion refers to a condition in which an object continues to move indefinitely without being driven by an external source of energy. In effect by its very definition, Perpetual Motion is a system wherein the item in question consumes and outputs at least 100% of its energy constantly, sustaining no net loss as a result of the laws of thermodynamics. Using modern terminology, any machine that purports to produce more energy than it uses is a "perpetual motion machine", although somewhat oddly named as they may not include any moving parts.

you are with us or against us

2007-01-17T00:50:00.000-08:00

What's In It For Bush?
Suddenly the media is full of Bush (administration) propagandistic assertions designed to make the American public believe that Iran is the enemy that is fighting against our troops in Iraq.
...
A former member of the National Security Council gave me a possible answer. Bush can bury his defeat in Iraq with a “victory” in Iran.
Here is the victory scenario: Bush and Cheney will claim that their air attack on Iran succeeded in destroying Iran’s (non-existent) nuclear weapons program. The victory claimed by the Bush Regime and the propagandistic US media will “make America safe from nuclear attack.” This will restore Bush’s popularity and move the US back to a 50-50 political split in time for Karl Rove to steal the 2008 election with the fraudulent electronic voting machines built and programmed by Republican operatives.
The former national security official believes that Bush will be able to claim victory over Iran, because Iran will avoid responding militarily. Iran will not use its Russian missiles to sink our aircraft carriers, to shut down oil facilities throughout the Middle East, or to destroy US headquarters in the “green zone” in Baghdad. Instead, Iran will adopt the posture of another Muslim victim of US/Israeli aggression and let the anger seep throughout the Muslim world until no pro-US government is safe in the Middle East.

Following the news on Iran is sickening. The USS John C. Stennis carrier group left Bremerton yesterday to "project" power in the Gulf.

Only Congress has the power to stop the Bush administration. It is a question of politics.

Politics as usual will not win the day. The scenario outlined above is a best case scenario which results in total strategic failure some years AFTER Bush has left office. Congress must step up.

There are worse scenarios latent. And perhaps more likely ones.

Ocean man, take me by the hand, lead me to the land that you understand
Ocean man, the voyage to the corner of the globe is a real trip
Ocean man, the crust of a tan man embibed by the sand
Soaking up the thirst of the land

Ocean man, can you see through the wonder of amazement at the oberman
Ocean man, the crust is elusive when it casts forth to the childlike man
Ocean man, the sequence of a life form braised in the sand,
Soaking up the thirst of the land

Ocean man, ocean man
Ocean man

ween

foiled by Comet McNaught

2007-01-13T13:49:00.000-08:00

Just a side note from the usual energy fare locally.

Last night I took a course home from work which would put me in prime viewing position of the Mighty Comet as the sun set in the SouthWest.

Of course, naturally, after 3 days of clear and cold, the clouds had rolled in to obscure the view.

Today, I see this at SpaceWeather.Com - The sucker is visible in broad daylight.

Great. Thirty degrees and snowing in Seattle today. Marvelous. Comet is flying to Australia to get some surfing in, meanwhile.

Argh.

DAYTIME COMET: Comet McNaught is now visible in broad daylight. "It's fantastic," reports Wayne Winch of Bishop, California. "I put the sun behind a neighbor's house to block the glare and the comet popped right into view. You can even see the tail!"

Just hours ago, Mark Vornhusen took this picture of the comet between clouds over Gais, Switzerland:

frosty law

2007-01-11T01:42:00.000-08:00

Federal Way schools restrict Gore film
"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. ... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn't in the DVD."

Condoms don’t belong in schools. Condoms can break. Sex education classes should be hands on oral sex labs, good for a biology credit, and possibly photography. On this, Frosty and I agree - - and we agree on nothing else.

However, I should point out that, had Señor Frosty actually WATCHED the nazi-produced propaganda film starring Albert Gore he might have noticed that Albert and “the Frosty” both agree that in the end times, everything will burn up.

Really, really, burn up. Don’t be confused by the rising oceans, my dear, the bushes are burning just off the beach.

"Somebody could say you're killing free speech, and my retort to them would be we're encouraging free speech," said (school board member) Larson, a lawyer. "The beauty of our society is we allow debate."
School Board members adopted a three-point policy that says teachers who want to show the movie must ensure that a "credible, legitimate opposing view will be presented," that they must get the OK of the principal and the superintendent, and that any teachers who have shown the film must now present an "opposing view."

Well, that could get tricky. Remember why MSNBC fired Phil Donahue a few years back. Producers would scramble for three repuglo-fascist shills to counter-screech about nukes in Iraq, yet they still measured up as inconsequential pip-squeaks to the great white eminence Phil of Don-a-Hue.

For “opposing” viewpoints to global warming, we’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel these days. One might imagine Frosty has a mean powerpoint presentation exposing all the mendacity.

“The glaciers aren’t really melting,” he might begin. “They are being raptured early, on account of being so heavy.” click click.

Students should hear the perspective of global-warming skeptics and then make up their minds, (board President Ed Barney) said. After they do, "if they think driving around in cars is going to kill us all, that's fine, that's their choice."
Asked whether an alternative explanation for evolution should be presented by teachers, Barney said it would be appropriate to tell students that other beliefs exist. "It's only a theory," he said.

Oh dear, I think Edward is not a schoolteacher, and therefore does not belong in school - - but that is only my theory:

In common usage, people often use the word theory to signify a conjecture, an opinion, or a speculation. [...]

In science, a theory is a proposed description, explanation, or model of the manner of interaction of a set of natural phenomena, capable of predicting future occurrences or observations of the same kind, and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise falsified through empirical observation. It follows from this that for scientists "theory" and "fact" do not necessarily stand in opposition. For example, it is a fact that an apple dropped on earth has been observed to fall towards the center of the planet, and the theory which explains why the apple behaves so is the current theory of gravitation.

"From what I've seen (of the movie) and what my husband has expressed to me, if (the movie) is going to take the approach of 'bad America, bad America,' I don't think it should be shown at all," Gayle Hardison said. "If you're going to come in and just say America is creating the rotten ruin of the world, I don't think the video should be shown."

Bad America! Bad America! Go clean your room! (And don't lie, Gayle, you haven't seen anything of the movie. What would Jesus say.)

I hope Frosty never expresses anything to me in person. I would hate to fall sway to his magnetic gaze, although it is an open question whether he would be able to maintain his hypnotic hold on the Federal Way School board and a monkey at the same time.

Joan Patrick, Kenna's mother, thought it would be a good idea for students to see the movie. They are the ones who will be dealing with the effects of a warmer planet.

"It's their job," she said. "They're the next generation."

synthesis

2007-01-10T00:12:00.000-08:00

Bridging Peak Oil and Climate Change Activism via energy bulletin
By now a disturbing trend becomes clear: the two problems of Climate Change and Peak Oil together are worse than either by itself. Strategies that might help to keep lights burning and trucks moving while reducing emissions are questionable from a depletionist point of view, while most strategies to keep the economy energized as oil and gas disappear imply increasing greenhouse gas emissions. As we will see, the closer we look, the worse it gets.
As noted above, both groups need to design a survivable energy transition strategy in order to “sell” their message to policy makers. Carbon emissions come from burning depleting fossil fuels, the primary energy sources for modern societies. Thus both problems boil down to energy problems—and energy is essential to the maintenance of agriculture, transportation, communication, and just about everything else that makes up the modern global economy.

This is one of the best articles I've read regarding peak energy and climate change in the last year. In fact, had Heinberg posted it a few days earlier, surely it would be in contention for an Oscar.

The barriers to solving our problem are many, but primarily it is a mis-identification of the solution(s) coupled with cultural inertia. It has been the pattern of the twentieth century in the sciences to consider disciplines separately, and minor fiefdoms then rise forth, tone deaf to information from other disciplines which may instruct local models du jour.

This is what Heinberg is describing, and in proposing a joint solution to two problem domains which takes in to account the range of observable and relevant variables he has created a strong synthesis of the two fields. The framework now describes one problem domain, with some strong first order suggestions shaping a strategy. Much more cohesive then my own first stabs at considering peak energy activism as a subset of the global warming response.

This is state of the art thinking, wherein the negative outcomes are molded into the solution. In a way, the movement is growing up - - less mind share is spent in the musty, darkened halls of the "quasi-survivalist" peak oil fear sites, and more in forging a path.

I'm there. Fight until you can't fight no more. There will be plenty of time for nihilistic hedonism if human coastal cities turn into foam licked playthings of a hungry ocean while bands of merry chimps huddle just above sea level as a carbon soaked sky presses down.

beady eyed shards of a happy new year

2007-01-09T02:05:00.000-08:00

Greetings. I’ve been on an irrational vacation. An irrational vacation is where one tries to take some time away to relax, and ends up more stressed than when working. So I’m back on the stick.

Here is some stuff that has been bugging me.

Misplacing the apocalypse via Energy Bulletin
To accept the "doomer" framework, is to assert that there is no way out from the present crisis – and that is to go beyond what the evidence as a whole supports. The evidence is clear that there is a major problem, but to assert that, eg, civilisation will come to an abrupt end is to move from the realm of demonstrable fact (imminent absence of resources on which we presently rely) to a contestable conjecture (there is nothing that we can do to mitigate the situation). At root, then, the "doomer" perspective is a denial of hope, and a denial of the possibility of redemption. It is a theological perspective, not a scientific one.

I enjoyed this essay, but I’ve been at this gig for a while now. The broken metaphor of the apocalypse is played out. As long as religion is on the button, I venture peak oil presents a civilization with the promise and hope of being Born Again – suffering a “little death” as the grand global ponzi economy built around efficiency and mind control crumbles in lockstep with the disintegrating highways and byways. Hallelujah.

If one wants a real apocalypse, than the poison of choice is a change in the weather.

Global Markets Face `Severe Correction,' Faber Says
``In the next few months, we could get a severe correction in all asset markets,'' Faber said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in New York. ``In a selling panic you should buy, but in the buying mania that we have now the wisest course of action is to liquidate.''
Faber, founder and managing director of Hong Kong-based Marc Faber Ltd., advised investors to buy gold in 2001, which has since more than doubled. His company manages about $300 million in assets.
``Everyday the world is burning more oil than new reserves are added,'' Faber said. ``You wont see $12 dollars again'' for every barrel of oil. ``The trend is likely more to be upside because demand in Asia is going to double over time.''

Just to be clear here, Faber is calling out a global depression, and I concur. The full enchilada, only 179.99 at Taco Bell. Double or nothing every day. The pressure is building, eventually China will reach a point where she cannot be the last one out the door with her dollar reserves and thus will emphatically act first. I don’t care if this seems inscrutable, if there were ever a time for a little auto-didactics-ism this is it. Become the skeptical expert. Why do people ignore physics? What are they teaching in schools these days anyways? Ugh.

South Korea builds world's largest garbage-fuelled power plant
SEOUL (AFP) - South Korea has opened the world's largest garbage-fuelled power plant and expects to reduce its imports of heavy oil by 500,000 barrels a year as a result.
The 50-megawatt plant, designed to provide power to more than 180,000 households, began operating on Tuesday. It sits on a mammoth garbage dump in the city of Incheon west of Seoul, the ministry said in a statement.

Ah yes, the power plants built on fetid heaps of stacked up trash, hectares by silos. This is the final, sublime form of industrial civilization, quietly munching recently excreted turds of garbage as the lights dim. Sustainable at last.

Climate Change is Killing the Oceans' Microscopic 'Lungs'
The fear is that as sea temperatures continue to rise as a result of global warming, the loss of phytoplankton will lead to a positive-feedback cycle, where increases in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere leads to warmer oceans, and warmer oceans lead to increasing carbon dioxide concentrations.

Fear these days is actually reality just over the horizon, waiting to be observed. The dead, weed ridden oceans are mocking us from the soon to be, waiting to crown the king of the chimps with a crown of bleached coral and garland of shark fins.

Fuel tankers reporting increased methane venting from sea beds.
According to U.S. maritime industry sources, tanker captains are reporting an increase in onboard alarms from hazard sensors designed to detect hydrocarbon gas leaks and, specifically, methane leaks. However, the leaks are not emanating from cargo holds or pump rooms but from continental shelves venting increasing amounts of trapped methane into the atmosphere. With rising ocean temperatures, methane is increasingly escaping from deep ocean floors. Methane is also 21 more times capable of trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
In fact, one of the major sources for increased methane venting is the Hudson Submarine Canyon, which extends into the Atlantic 400 miles from the New York-New Jersey harbor. Another location experiencing increased venting is the Santa Barbara Channel on the California coast.

I promised apocalypse.

This is one of those WTF stories. A little corroboration is needed, to take this out of the realm of the tin-foil. Yet venting methane in warming oceans is the opposite of unexpected. It is expected. Just seems a little… early. This could ruin our whole century.

Say,
Has anyone asked the boy king about his plans to address global warming?

rocket's red glare

2007-01-01T01:22:00.000-08:00

back to merry olde england

2006-12-27T23:45:00.000-08:00

Wood Boilers Cut Heating Bills
Their owners proudly proclaim that they reduce dependence on foreign oil — and save thousands of dollars on heating bills each year. Neighbors say that they create smoke so thick that children cannot play outside, and that it seeps into homes, irritating eyes and throats and leaving a foul stench.

This is progress, of course, burning trees being almost as trendy as cellulosic ethanol (and almost the same thing). Wait till the people chopping down the trees realize they can instead sell rights for the carbon credits. A tree in the ground, worth two in the boiler! (or is that yet to be...)

At least the standard is not yet being approached in America - - China is trying to corner the market.

London had been identifiable as 'the smoke' for centuries. Successive monarchs had tried to ban the burning of low quality 'sea-coal' because of the choking smoke it produced. In 1661, John Evelyn wrote his Fumifugium in protest at the

Hellish and dismall Cloud of SEA COAL…which is…so universally mixed with the otherwise wholsome and excellent Aer, that her Inhabitants breathe nothing but an impure and thick Mist accompanied with a fuliginous and filthy vapour, which renders them obnoxious to a thousand inconveniences, corrupting the Lungs, and disordring the entire habits of their Bodies; so that Catharrs, Phthisicks, Coughs and Consumptions rage more in this one City than in the whole Earth besides.

Little had changed 60 years later, when Jane Barker wrote that she 'us'd frequently to walk to take the Air, or rather the Smoke; for Air, abstracted from Smoke, is not to be had within Five Miles of London' (Barker 1723, 67). William Frend recorded in 1819 that 'The Smoke of London, first view'd from a distance, affords a sight which strikes a foreigner with astonishment'. Emerson wrote in his English Traits that the way in which London 'aggregates the distempers of the sky' justified the popular characterisation of the English climate as 'in a fine day, looking up a chimney; in a foul day, looking down one'.

from solstice to a new year

2006-12-26T23:14:00.000-08:00

Kind of a fragile moment -- the winter "season" has exploded, and lies just behind, ghastly and spent in a flourish of clicking lights and torn wrapping paper. The new year lies just ahead, but is not yet extant.

I found this bit of words from Rubedo to be worthy of meditation as we hurtle forward in the now. (Thanks for the tip.)

De Natura Rerum
I was thinking about Anne Ancelin Schützenberger and her work with ‘the ancestor syndrome’, how in families there are often correlated dates on which people die in each generation (or get married or become ill or whatever); she uncovers traumas extant in the contemporary French and stems these wounds directly from the 1789 Revolution and subsequent Terror. Makes Tony Blair’s (old piano-grin himself) recent whispered not-quite-sorry about slavery tinkle the ivories of lip service more clearly, doesn’t it? The basic naked principle here, as Freud taught us, is the return of the repressed, or perhaps, dressed in velvet, the return of the unremembered – it matters not. As Adler points out we’re into the ice-sheet of lies, now melting in the frosty mandala of eco-collapse – and remember, the environment doesn’t begin where your skin meets the atmosphere, it interpenetrates your bios, your genus, your history and memory too – inside and out are of one taste.

weather snaggles

2006-12-21T00:18:00.000-08:00

The Northwest region of the United States experienced a slight flutter this past week, with no small effect on this blog - more content coming in the next few days, and sorry I had no available energy, my turbines being on the blink.

two years of peak energy (usa)

2006-12-14T22:44:00.000-08:00

seen at bouphonia

2006-12-11T23:31:00.000-08:00

you tube

2006-12-08T00:45:00.000-08:00

sharp as a whipple

2006-12-07T23:59:00.000-08:00

The peak oil crisis: the Saudi op-ed
...The Saudis could, however, bring pressure without doing anything so provocative as a major production cut. Simply ratcheting down production in an unobtrusive manner should be enough to scare Washington into reconsidering leaving Riyadh, as the leader of the world's Sunnis to deal with the mess on its own.
Just before President Bush met with the Iraqi Prime Minister in Jordan last week, Vice President Cheney was summoned to Riyadh to receive the whole Saudi message. It may be many years before we learn exactly what that message was, but already President Bush is back to talking about "staying the course."

Tom Whipple brilliantly ties together the peak oil situation as it relates to Saudi Ariaba with the strategic position of the United States.

There isn't much else to say. The region is in a fix. The world is in a fix. The United States imperial efforts to control one country completely, and use it as a wedge in the Middle East have failed. Israel, pal and friend to the U.S., has yet to figure this out.

The turd rainbow must now be unweaved.

Given the situation that exists now, I personally favor a federal system, partitioning Iraq into three states, taking tough measures to prevent genocide. Whatever course is taken, sensitive yet robust leadership is required, though not forthcoming. I find Robert Fisk's back-handed suggestion that US citizenship be granted to all Iraqi's as worthy of consideration. The U.S. can call it a reservation, name the natives "indians" and let them sell fireworks to the crackers in the Green Zone.

old forests do it better

2006-12-05T01:09:00.000-08:00

Old forest sucks up greenhouse gas, study says
Researchers have found soils in an old-growth forest in southern China are storing carbon at a rapid rate. If common to the soils of other old-growth forests, the finding could add combating global warming to the reasons for preserving them from logging, some scientists say.
The finding from soils in southern China goes against the generally accepted idea that old-growth forests are in balance, giving up as much carbon through decomposition as they take in from falling leaves and dying roots.

It may not be wise for anyone to follow up on this study. After all, the oldest wood makes for the best furniture. Nothing is more poignant than a monkey sitting on a chair hewn from an eight hundred year old tree.

And it is safe to say everyone enjoys the rich smell of roasting timber, as interred carbon is freed from captivity.

Technology lurks helpfully in the background. There is no reason to avoid commoditizing all the old growth forest into bite sized chunks. Quick as a flash, the forests may be replaced with endless regimented columns of nanotechology based carbon interral units. They'll be about the size of trees.

Or the huge mirror in space, everybody's favorite - - excepting a few politically correct ninnies. Humanity shouldn't just bet on her continued ingenuity in the face of failure - humanity should double down and enjoy the ride!

take up the reins

2006-12-03T01:40:00.000-08:00

Back in March of 2005, I wrote:

If Geo-Green ideas are unchallenged, we will watch tragedy unfold as unsustainable proposals continue to be written as energy policy in Washington D.C., with billions spent on blind industry wish fulfillment. Subsidies for nuclear and ethanol. Grants tossed down the rat hole to study oil shale and methane hydrates. Problems will be created faster than they are solved, right up to the point where oil depletion kicks our global economy like a mule.

The Geo-Green paradigm must be unmasked and reframed. It is not green, nor is it globally sustainable. [...] Allowing callow utopians frame their dead end policies as “green” will kneecap the credibility of true sustainable green movements when depletion begins.

On that note, I caught sight of an unnerving article on Robert Rapier's R-Squared Blog. As I read it a roaring sound filled my ears - - that of the Midwest water table being flushed into a Hummer.

Ethanol skeptic sees painful realities ahead
(Douglas Carper) sees more of the same for much of the agricultural economy that supports ethanol.
“I’m not posturing. I have no agenda,” Carper said in a Tuesday interview in his office. “I see trouble looming here in the American heartland and a lot of good, well-intentioned people facing some terrible and ruinous losses.”
His sense of trepidation may seem completely at odds with recent reality. Expansion in the ethanol industry in Nebraska is proceeding at an unprecedented pace. Corn prices are rising. Congress seems poised to expand its mandate of renewable fuels. But circumstances that lead others to conclude there’s money to be made by aggressive investment have Carper thumping his desk so hard pens leap in the air.
“For what constructive purpose are we disrupting agriculture in this manner?” he asked. “For what constructive purpose have we embarked on this dangerous public policy initiative?”

There is an urgency to addressing energy issues in 2006, and addressing them in the right way. Really, Vindod Khosla and his ilk are on the road to hell, paving as they go. Most of the farmers gadding about on their John Deere's understand the economics of ethanol better then the technocrats living on the coast. At the same time, these farmers can also smell a government grant at one thousand paces.

Politicians are predictable. Pay a farmer extra grow something, but not if the plan is to sell it as food. Then, they may market to their constituents a beneficiant role in solving global warming, and supporting a "green" alternative to buying foreign oil.

Green, like the dead zone on the Gulf Coast, run off from the artificially fertilized farmland of middles America.

Replacing our a problem with bigger problem sucks. Write your congress person. Time is not unlimited.

we have the technology

2006-12-01T01:48:00.000-08:00

Steve Austin, astronaut. A man barely alive.
Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man.
Better than he was before.
Better, stronger, faster.

Engineer Poet's recent proposal for more efficient use of our energy endowment (can be read as conservation) and reliance on closed systems where possible reminds us of an essential fact.

The tools to solve our problems exist. The barriers are not technology. We have the techology. In my country, the USA, we have a pluralistic society where ideas are meant compete and vie for dominance in the marketplace, although this is not what happens.

There is no "marketplace". Our western economy is as artificial and materialistic as the modern mega-farm, where genetically addled corn springs forth from puddles of carbon fuel. The barriers to solving our big problems are the shimmering dreams of vested interests, written into the grooves of our monkey brains.

There is no propaganda on TV to say,

"Hey, we need five million americans to learn how to farm organically, and distribute their product locally. Grants, education and housing will be provided for those undertaking this vital service. Meanwhile, we are cutting off all welfare to Archer Daniels Midland."

or,

"Please turn in your car for a brown bicycle. Smart cars will become available after we have recycled your hummer, but speed limits will 20 miles an hour for the majority of roads which will be dual use for human powered transport."

or

"Your local Walmart has been flattened. Your exurbs are slated to be turned into farmland. Relocation assistance will be provided."

Funny stuff. Rather than being exposed to such like outrageous and fascist ideas, degrading vanities are drilled into the sleepwalking populace - -

- zap -

- - Christmas is coming, so we must do our part to keep the economy afloat by charging up a choad boat of gifts on our credit cards, while praying for peace on Earth.

not to worry

2006-11-29T00:33:00.000-08:00

Stocks gain as Exxon's rise drowns out Bernanke
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks rose modestly on Tuesday as energy shares advanced on higher oil prices and overshadowed a warning on inflation from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Shares of Exxon Mobil Corp., the biggest publicly traded oil company, rose 2.3 percent, or $1.69, to $74.16 as the price of U.S. crude oil advanced 1.1 percent on forecasts of colder weather in the United States.

Whew! What an unexpected boon...

Never mind encroaching inflation, because, er, energy profits are bullish!

And here I thought monetary inflation and increased profits for Big Energy were views of the same donkey from different ends.

now wait a doggone second!

2006-11-27T00:43:00.000-08:00

James Kunstler, May 2005:

question What advice would you give to parents -- should they be teaching their kids survival skills aside from how to cooperate and live in a small-scale community?

answer Teach them how to be polite and fair, and teach them how to play a musical instrument -- we're going to have to keep our spirits up. Make yourself a part of a cohesive community. Be prepared to carry your weight and deal with a hands-on vocation. There will be far fewer public-relations executives and far more milkmaids.

question This sounds a bit like science fiction for back-to-the-landers. Are you a sci-fi junkie?

answer I read next to zero science fiction. And I don't write it.\\

More recently:

DM: What are you currently working on? Your blog is amazingly busy, so I gather that takes up a lot of time. Are you writing, or planning to write, another book?

JHK: I am in the middle of a post-oil novel -- since that is a world that can only be imagined, not reported upon directly. I think people will be interested to receive a detailed, imagined picture of this future. The job of fiction is to create a plausible world. My blog connects me to my readership, but it, too, has diminishing returns. My email load as become a tremendous burden and an obstacle to getting things done. For the moment, I have accepted these consequences, but I can imagine a time ahead when I just "go tune my fiddle".

This post is not meant to poke fun at James Kunstler. I just can't help but notice that he is seemingly writing science fiction, even though he likely does not wish his futuristic novel framed as such.

Should be a good read. The gift of science fiction is that while it often gets the future exactly wrong, it maintains the power to prefigure events in unpredictable ways.

Like Blowups Happen, Heinlein's 1940 short story of hair-trigger tensions amongst the staff of a nuclear power plant. Things didn't turn out that way exactly -- yet an echo of this imagined tension manifested in the psychotic nuclear weapons period of the cold war and exists to this day. An itch that has never been scratched, nuclear war.

And they call peak oil types apocalyptic.

seen at mobjectivist

2006-11-26T21:03:00.000-08:00

new gold dream

2006-11-23T21:44:00.000-08:00

Rising Costs Crimp New Energy Projects
HOUSTON (Dow Jones) -- Even as their coffers swell with cash, oil companies are warning that rising costs could crimp spending on major projects needed to meet the world's ever-growing demand for energy.
…
Labor and manufacturing costs have escalated so sharply this past year that projects' price tags are nearly doubling from when they were announced. Where the industry once thought it could complete a project at $10,000 per barrel of oil, actual costs are closer to $18,000 to $20,000, said Doug Terreson, managing director at Morgan Stanley, at a conference in Houston last week.

A shallow lie of the oily set is that higher energy prices open up a world of possibilities. Complicated projects which don’t pencil out at 30 dollars a barrel are supposedly feasible at 80 dollars a barrel.

I’ve got your undulating plateau right here.

The first thing one learns when investigating energy in an industrial economy is that money drives nothing. Potable energy is the go-juice. The day oil hits 150 dollars a barrel is the day thousands of retard projects all across the globe will be shuttered forever. For want of energy!

That hour has not yet struck. But meanwhile, here in our mundane day to day, when the price of energy doubles, there is a lag,

- and then the price of everything doubles.

A gallon of milk, a deep sea oil rig, all the same. Pay attention.

burning money

2006-11-20T00:11:00.000-08:00

BLM Drops ExxonMobil from Oil Shale RDD Project Bidding
Another major concern was the amount of energy required to power the OSTS development. Commentors requested that the PEIS address the sources of power for each project and the numbers and locations of required new power plants.

Little advertised in our mainstream culture wherein motive power is measured in dollars rather than industrial quantities of energy is that the favored shale oil production scheme in Colorado involves multi-megawatt power plant(s). Huge heating coils and a space laser are also involved but never mind that for now. It is an open question as to what will power said power plant(s). Certainly not energy; not much of that lying about anymore.

Technology must be employed instead.

Noting the furious pace at which the Fed has been printing money, doubling the amount of greenbacks in circulation since 2001, might I modestly propose cellulosic ethanol as the fuel source?

First, pound a billion dollars worth of paper money into a slurry. Ferment and Distill. Master craftsmen will sample the bitter brew of benjamin’s, delivering results to power plant(s) when the product is perfectly aged. Perverts will drink it for pleasure.

Yes, burning money will help us get a handle on our inflation problem and produce a homegrown supply of sweet, light crude at the same time.

Terrorist free, for what ails ye.

Does it hurt when the presidential medal of freedom gets pinned achest?

mission accomplished, CERA

2006-11-17T00:03:00.000-08:00

Pulitzer Prize winner suggests world still has plenty of oil
WASHINGTON - Far from being a nearly exhausted resource, the world's oil reserves are three times as large as some popular estimates state, and peak global oil production is still about a quarter-century away, according to a new study by Pulitzer Prize-winning oil historian Daniel Yergin.
The remaining oil resource base is about 3.74 trillion barrels, according to a report released Tuesday by Cambridge Energy Research Associates, which Yergin runs. That is more than three times the 1.2 trillion barrels that "peak-oil" theorists suggest.
...
The report, titled "Why the Peak Oil Theory Falls Down," challenges an increasingly popular view that the world is about to run out of oil. The Yergin report debunks the so-called Hubbert Peak Oil Theory.

Thanks to tireless editors at the Energy Bulletin for covering the vocal and pointed criticism of the CERA report.

However, Daniel Yergin and company win. Not on points. See the above rendering of the CERA report by a journalist who knows nothing about energy short yet clearly pines for something akin to Yergin's Pulitzer. For those new to the topic, every item highlighted in bold in the above article is factually inaccurate. Most laughably so.

CERA has set up camp in the blighted media landscape right next to the global warming deniers, (lately long of tooth and coughing up blood.) They staked their position. A left-right, a liberal media-fox news, a yin-yang.

Every time Peak Oil shows up now in the mainstream press, we'll get a quote from "Investment Banker" Simmons and "Pulitzer Winner" Yergin.

Fair and Balanced.

Mission accomplished, CERA.

Meanwhile it is an open question whether our polygot civilization has less time to deal with global warming, or the effects of energy depletion. I expect a photo finish.

the black death and peak oil genocide

2006-11-14T01:59:00.000-08:00

Attitude adjustment: Facing our ecological predicament
After a talk I gave last year on food and energy, one audience member remarked that it seemed to him that we face challenges so daunting that little can be done to stop a worldwide collapse of civilization. "What is the point in trying?" he seemed to be asking. As I prepare for guest lectures on peak oil and the consequences of overshoot at a local college this week, I'm asking myself: Is that person's attitude really all that unreasonable?

Respected peak oil philosopher Kurt Cobb directs his essay from this point to survey a few of the conventional scenarios, finally pointing out correctly:

And, yet the approach which is hardest to sell seems like the safest. It relies on the concrete, concerted actions of people everywhere doing things that require no miracles of technology, no rosy assumptions about the future availability of critical resources, and only limited faith in the marketplace(…)

The original rhetorical question, “What is the point of trying?” may be answered in a different way.

There is certainly a point in trying to solve our ecological problems. Whether we humans do, or do not succeed, is hardly “the” point.

If humanity has already FUBAR'd so badly that despite our best efforts, our current global culture is screwed, it is still reasonable that a small population of humans will exist through the crisis point and beyond. Culture and perhaps morphology thus vectored away from the current path of cheeto enriched decadence.

This is known as the “die off” scenario. A bit of a hubbub and to-do has arisen over this eventuality actualizing in the short term. A handful of witless commentators have in the past blamed peak oil types for pointing out the negative scenario in the first place.

If a doctor tells one to cut out smoking or face the likelihood of delitorious health issues, it isn’t the doctor’s fault when cancer develops. It might be their fault if they didn’t provide an adequate prescription to address a very real physical addiction. Sadists don’t make good doctors, and those among us who might revel in the bloody possibilities of the coming years are obviously on a dead end track.

Be that as it may, people are mortal, and historically, civilizations are too. Fetishizing our current state of affairs as permanent is ridiculous, and hardly desirable at that. If the vaunted tar sands of Canada are to double in output, a river must disappear completely into Hades.

Frankly, there is something to be said for the Glum Olde Plague Years, at least in the eyes of our successors. Consider the results of the Black Death. Traumatic for a culture to have so many die before their time, although people dying early is not at all unheard of, only the increased incidence of same. The Renaissance flowered in the wake of the death and suffering, an echo of the fabled phoenix. The medieval period had ended.

We exist today in a state of technocratic medievalism. Short term fixes are plastered onto our pollution riddled populations to achieve festering goals. Bigger cars. Pharma for all, strictly meted out by government. Bigger boats, with bigger nets, for fewer fish.

More population, to increase the share of the pie of those who laid in their claims early, by virtue of having been born first, into a society that worships property values.

Blast property values, and exponentially increasing populations too.

It is time for a Renaissance. Spaceship Earth, Gaia, the Ecosphere, the Commons - - in trouble by any name. Is a dreadful, festering death afflicting billions the only thing that can spur a Renaissance? Hardly, yet with or without it we are all fated to suffer our mortality in due course.

Face up to your monkey butt. Face up to the patterns of witless consumption that are choking and subdividing this planet. With a little more work, the third rock out from Sol could become as interesting as the surface of Luna. The opinions of a few mangy peakniks count for little in the grand scheme of things. The actions of the many are enacting a final vote, a tyranny of the energy-rich majority.

If the die off comes, so be it. I guarantee a flower will grow out of the turd.

Evolution happens.

So Long, and Thanks for all the Fishsticks

2006-11-05T02:22:00.000-08:00

Scientists Fret over Starving and Missing Whales
Finding one 30-ton grey whale [image] in the vast North Pacific might be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but finding 17,000 shouldn't be. But that's the situation researchers faced while searching for the creatures in their traditional summer feeding grounds last season—and the whales' absence has them concerned.
"We've just come off a second summer in Canada in which we've had next to no whales show up," said William Megill of Bath University in the UK. "Not only in our little area, but apparently throughout the traditional feeding areas from Washington on up north. We have no idea where the whales all went this year."

Fresh on the heels of the tarter sauce catastrophe - - stocks of “all” protein laden autonomous algae munchers are on track to collapse within fifty years - - comes the news that “some” of our mammalian kin apparently are struggling now. The cold wind of irony blows.

Perhaps they’ve gone to hell, beating our generation out the door. Perhaps a starship captain has transported them back to the future to prevent our solar system from being destroyed by glitter. One can well imagine a small population of grey whales bleating their last bleats as a Japanese whaler runs them down.

It hurts when 17,000 whales go missing, but at this stage it is merely the tip of a rapidly melting iceberg.

Globally the news is all troubling, unsettling. No gloom and doom here – this is just what honest reporting tastes like in ought-six. The short list would include: energy shortages linked to food shortages, overpopulation, denuded soil, water tables draining, ecological collapse of the oceans, and yes, global warming. (A survivable affair as long as the methane hydrates don’t cut loose. We’re all bored with the current coastlines, which have been carefully stained with human feces and PCBs.)

Our human problems should be considered solvable, if addressed. Can anyone honestly say that the problems are being addressed in a systematic and courageous way? Are we in the West sacrificing any aspect of our polymer coated lifestyle to lay the groundwork for a richer, fuller, more humane culture for our successors? Hell no.

At best, each of the interlocked problems mentioned above compete for attention separately, and desperation programs are embarked on to pseudo-address certain of them while a jet setting existence is maintained. An excellent example of this is the imaginary money being spent on imaginary liquid fuel. Now is a great time to get in on this ponzi scheme, as unicorns and rainbows dance in the eyes of technocrats. I’m convinced that publicly traded ethanol producers will see their paper stocks soar to the moon, POW, at the first major burp in the traditional oil markets.

These global problems cannot be effectively addressed separately. Solving problems must then become our industry, the artifact we produce as a human race. One hundred years of directed attention ought to do the trick. The consumerist, globalist myths of our age need be beaten into gravel and dust, pronto, before humans become the creation myth of cockroaches.

When tallying up what must be saved, fish are the top of my list. That’s our brain food, right there. One can readily imagine that some time after we run out of Omega Three, names like “Og” and “Biff” will shortly come into common usage again.

Polysyllabic words are for nerds and stinky fish eaters.

In that area, Crawford and Marsh were ahead of their time in proposing that human encephalisation (evolutionary brain growth) could not have happened in environments which were poor in brain specific nutrients, such as on the African savannah. Their thesis was, from the beginning, that this remarkable phenomenon could only have feasible happened on coasts, or at least in waterside habitats rich in essential fatty acids like DHA.

More recently, Crawford (has) been part of a group of nutritional biochemists, including Stephen Cunnane and Leigh Broadhurst which has published a number of papers promoting a link between human encephalisation (the evolutionary trend to larger brains) and proposed increase in the use of coastal food chain.

the pattern

2006-10-24T00:15:00.000-07:00

where it’s at

2006-10-23T22:07:00.000-07:00

Heat
For the first time, he demonstrates that we can achieve the necessary cut – a 90% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 – without bringing civilisation to an end. Combining his unique knowledge of campaigning and environmental science, he shows how we can transform our houses, our power and our transport systems. But he also shows that this can happen only with a massive programme of action which no government has yet been prepared to take.

We’re obviously living with the energy production plateau now. Pretty sure we’ll get the opportunity to experience blue skies in 2030, by which time global hoarding will have kicked in, barring massive and racially suicidal exploitation of the oceanic methane hydrates. Ninety percent reduction in carbon emissions is a reasonable outcome of ongoing depletion of accessible reservoirs. Apologies to those expecting a linear outcome on the downslope, that is an unlikely scenario.

The question is, will a humane, sustainable and humble civilization be in place by that date?

It is said that an octopus will sometimes gain in intelligence right before it dies. Carbon human is almost dead, with one chance to wise up before kicking the bucket. Everything that is valuable, everything we care about, must be decoupled from carbon fuel sources, or it won’t be coming with us.

Peak oil is a backdrop, a true natural limit, begging a response. Yet there is no ethical or moral response to peak energy as such, it being simply a kick in the pants.

Here is our bloody energy. We will spend it. How?

George Monbiot has some ideas. Get onboard. Pick nits on the way.

not so pretty

2006-10-21T02:21:00.000-07:00

The Lancet Study...
We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years. Abductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, mysterious weapons – with so many different ways to die, is the number so far fetched?

Saddam Hussein was not a pretty flower, but he was our little flower, and all the events that Riverbend describe have taken place since we clipped Saddam and placed him in a vase.

Let's pretend the 600,000+ number is all wrong and that the minimum is the correct number: nearly 400,000. Is that better? Prior to the war, the Bush administration kept claiming that Saddam killed 300,000 Iraqis over 24 years. After this latest report published in The Lancet, 300,000 is looking quite modest and tame. Congratulations Bush et al.

This is not what democracy looks like. It looks and smells like something else.

At least 618,000 Americans died in the Civil War, and some experts say the toll reached 700,000. The number that is most often quoted is 620,000. At any rate, these casualties exceed the nation's loss in all its other wars, from the Revolution through Vietnam.

Peak Oil and Global Warming - Guest Editorial

2006-10-14T11:20:00.000-07:00

Reader pekadillo posted a thoughtful comment on a recent post -- with his permission I am sharing it with everyone.

Blackall Range Relocalisation
I've come to similar conclusions (...) I've recently been attempting to hitch the concepts of Peak Oil and Climage Change together into a big flashing arrow pointing towards what I consider to be the most reasonable solution: relocalisation.

Here's what's I've got so far. Feel free to do what you want with it.

Twin Forces

The twin forces of Climate Change and Peak Oil are pushing humanity to change our way of life.

In one ear, Climate Change tells us to stop burning fossil fuels or suffer the upheaval of environmental collapse.

In the other ear, Peak Oil reminds us that we have only a little time left to use our currently abundant oil and gas to effect change.

Two Complementary Problems

Peak Oil and Climate Change are huge problems in their own right. However, they are connected in many ways.
For example, if we attempt to enter the age of expensive oil without attempting to curb our demand, we will be forced to turn to dirty fuels such as coal and shale oil as oil and gas supplies decline, exacerbating global warming.

If we attempt to ignore global warming, our ability to address global problems such as oil decline will be diminished as we struggle to deal with environmental collapse, reduced agricultural output, refugees, economic recession, and other severe issues arising from climate change.

Thus we must solve both problems at once.

One Ultimatum

Both problems make the same ultimatum: we can make changes in an orderly manner soon, or change will come only a little later, in the form of a disorderly collapse of our existing way of life.

There are two major potential strategies before us.
1. Techno-fix
2. Re-localisation

Technofix strategies
"Fixing the fix for the fix"

This approach aims to allow us to continue more or less the way we are now, by applying technology to the problem. Our electricity is supplied by solar, wind, nuclear, and 'clean coal'. Our transport is powered by biofuels, hydrogen, fuel cells or batteries.

Technofix solutions are problematic for several reasons, including the following:

* They rely on cheap, abundant energy and a strong economy to implement and scale up
* They require expensive, large-scale infrastructure modifications that take a long time to complete
* They ignore other problems which also arise from unsustainable resource use, eg habitat loss, pollution, resource depletion, etc
* They add new levels of complexity to an already complex network of factors, inviting unexpected consequences
* They don't take into account energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) and actually do more harm than good

Re-localisation strategies
"Transportation systems are a symptom of being in the wrong place"

In this approach, we change our systems to use less energy and resources. Relocalisation aims to make local regions more self-sufficient, and less dependant on cheap transport and other external inputs. Food, energy and other products would be produced as locally as possible.

This solution has a number of advantages:

* It reduces demand on resources and reduces the need for transport
* It can be implemented even during an economic recession
* It builds community
* It encourages responsible economic development
* It can be begun NOW without having to wait for scientific breakthroughs
* It is compatible with long term sustainability
* It has the potential to reintroduce skills lost in the recent past
* Relocalised communities eat healthier food and get more exercise

In short, a strategy based upon relocalisation not only addresses both global warming and peak oil by withdrawing their root causes, it also brings with it number of positive effects for our society.

tunnel vision

2006-10-09T21:44:00.000-07:00

To further the discussion I started a few days ago advocating that Peak Oil types latch on to the Global Warming bandwagon, I’d like to make my position clear, and then devolve into some lazy ruminations.

Put the puzzle together. Everything that is happening in our world – resource depletion, over-consumption, depletion, global warming, global inflation, global wars– these ARE ALL THE SAME SICKNESS. Peak Oil, Peak methane, Peak coal, Peak agriculture, etc, these are each a demonstration of the human condition writ on the world, evolution tossed out of balance -- for perhaps only an instant -- by technology exercised without thought to limits.

In terms of Global Warming, and Peak Oil, this I believe:

Humans will burn EVERY SCRAP of accessible carbon fuel left on the globe, and quickly too. Sorry if this strikes some of cynical, I’d love to know how one is supposed to respond to the examples of the last century. It is HAPPENING and most carbon sequestration schemes are energy inefficient until proven otherwise.

Procrastination is the order of the day. In America, should Bush make it through the rest of his term without being impeached, he’ll spend the rest of his tenure paying lip service to global warming, and doing nothing.

Damn lucky, then, that energy depletion will proceed so rapidly. The opinion of some is that the ride down the energy ladder will be smooth. I disagree, I think it is bad analysis to say you can simply apply nanotechnology (yeast) and continue to brew beer without sugar, but I don’t care. Everyone has a cherished scenario. Some faithfully believe Jesus will return to divide up the corn amongst the baby boomers until there is enough ethanol for all. Others are capable of doing arithmetic.

We’re on the oil production plateau NOW. Use of carbon fuel is GOING DOWN. Get it? Humanity is going to strike the runaway Global Warming tipping point, or dodge it. My guess is dodge by a hair.

My guess is as good as yours, friend, and hopeful to boot.

In the meantime, there is a global warming bandwagon, and everybody is lining up. The good and the bad together. So how about Peak Oil types as well? What are we going to do, run on a platform of water injection or bust? A basket of crude grades? EROEIWTF?

This is not a stab at the necessary work all of us in the Peak Oil community are doing. I’m an energy geek certified, licensed and bonded. I’m fascinated by the world revealed. I’m pleased to get an orthogonal perspective on the arcane priestcraft of economics. Thanks, Ken Deffeyes! None of us, myself included, are going to de-focus from this topic.

Just saying. When advocating solutions, one may advocate something that will be largely misunderstood, or one can hitch a walkable community to global warming. An“eat local” movement to global warming. Wind turbines. Wee little smart cars. Bicycle lanes.

And people might listen. We’ll need this stuff, soon.

Together, we might recycle suburbia.

Tears For Fears
Mad World

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere
And their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tommorow, no tommorow
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had

64 squares and a grain of sand

2006-10-05T00:09:00.000-07:00

The century of drought
Drought threatening the lives of millions will spread across half the land surface of the Earth in the coming century because of global warming, according to new predictions from Britain's leading climate scientists.
Extreme drought, in which agriculture is in effect impossible, will affect about a third of the planet, according to the study from the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research.
…
"We're talking about 30 per cent of the world's land surface becoming essentially uninhabitable in terms of agricultural production in the space of a few decades," Mark Lynas, the author of High Tide, the first major account of the visible effects of global warming around the world, said.

30 percent decrease in global agricultural potential? Let’s see, where are we going to grow our ethanol perennial crops to prop up our stunted clown car civilization? If we scrape all the people off of India, or South America, we might have a shot to keep the “flex fuel” hummers of the future afloat. They’ll be equipped with off-board motors in the future, see, ‘cause the oceans are going to rise.

Sick jokes aside, one theme I plan on developing – with full comprehension of rapidly enveloping energy constraints, or “peak oil”, is the need to hitch our wagon to a concept that everybody gets. Peak oil is too wonky, too nerdy, and frankly too depressing for the majority of people to entertain honestly and openly, at least in the short term. I can debunk Daniel Yergin any day of the week, but gosh, he has a Pulitzer. It is an uphill battle – to get people to pay attention.

The concept to connect with is Global Warming, of course. It has brand name recognition, and it is well-nigh undeniable, except by sophists and a few crusty scientists who get carted out by Exxon-Mobil once year to shout “I’m not dead yet!”

The real changes we must make to “solve” climate change dovetail nicely with reasonable responses for Peak Oil. Increased use of renewables. Living arrangements which don’t intrinsically waste energy. I expect it won’t be long before the Chinese government orders the bicycles back in Beijing, by dictate.

Imagine how pleasant ones commute would be if one could bicycle on smooth pavement for 15 miles instead of driving in stop and go traffic for the same distance.

As it stands, the car is the penis of the American dream. You don’t chop off your penis at the drop of the hat. Just listen to Kunstler, talking about North America: “We are a profoundly unserious nation, for all our pretensions.” Certainly not serious enough to chop off a piece of our national psyche. Vinod, and perhaps some Swedish doctors, will rescue us.

More to come. It will take more than solving transportation to Solve global warming and prevent dire peak oil scenarios from coming to pass.

Comments welcome.

the wizard of oil

2006-09-28T23:17:00.000-07:00

The Pied Piper of Ethanol

2006-09-28T01:35:00.000-07:00

Critics of peak oil often sidestep dealing with issues of geology and production, and dive straight in with attacks on the resulting scenarios, as if that might falsify the science and the observations of a century.

A favored rubric used in the critique of “gloomy” scenarios is to pseudo-falsify them by associating them with religion. In other words, should one claim people around the world are going to starve, and worse that overfed Americans might hit their ideal weight, one will be tarred with the brush of the Christian Apocalypse. In this way, many rationalists are lumped in with those who take the book of Revelation literally.

Thus categorized, they are humiliated and forgettable -- in the minds of critics.

This is instructive, because it allows the stray cornucopian thinker who might be reading this blog an insight into how I conceive of Vinod Khosla in my pitifully illogical and bad chemical soaked brain.

I think Vinod Kosla sincerely appeals to as broad an audience as possibly on basically religious grounds, with a shamanistic frosting of reason and science around his gooey, globalist new- age vision.

He shepards a flock of boomers who need the salve and balm of forgiveness for consuming the world - - but not actual change. Oh no.

Charlie Rose interview of Vinod Khosla and Richard Branson [video]
Khosla:
I'm not a big believer in asking people to change their behavior
…
This problem, if it is going to be solved, (...) is going to be solved by lots of money from Wall Street
…
It is very visible to me that within 25 years we can replace all the gasoline in (the U.S.) with ethanol.

While I have perhaps unfairly arranged his quotes, I believe this is an accurate portrait of his message. Ignored here are the questionable assumptions and erroneous statements regarding ethanol which he litters his presentation with. Others have done a fine job highlighting the technical problems.

Vinod Khosla has been struck by a powerful vision of America powering her pathetically inefficient transportation system on grass, and doesn’t realize that he has hitched his wagon to a perpetual motion machine.

His passion is that of a saint,

A holy fool,

And he might succeed in dragging your friends and neighbors with him.

People love it when you tell them they needn't change, that a thirty dollar upgrade on their car will save the world.

Forgive me, world, for I have sinned. Pennies in the hat.