The c-word

I heard a CNBC anchor speak in hushed-terms of the 'collapse of capitalism', showing some concern.  

For a frightening look at how societies collapse, see Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.   Here are two thought-provoking paragraphs from that book:

last tree and globalization

How much choice we have in the matter, I think, is debatable.  

NPR's latest

'Peak Oil Theory' Demands Energy Alternatives

So many folks lament about the dismal (even dire) state of the economy, but few suggest it has anything to do with peak oil.  

Physicist to head Energy Department

Fancy that, a physicist in charge of the Department of Energy.  Nobel prize winning physicist, Stephen Chu, is nominated as incoming Secretary of said department.  PBS re-airs its piece: Physicist Searches for Alternative Fuel Technologies.  Tad Patzek, also a professor at Berkeley, questions Mr. Chu's position.

A Gift from God

CBS' 60 Minutes presents an inside look at the Saudi oil infrastructure.

Resource Insights

See Kurt Cobb's  blog for the real fundamentals and deep analysis.  Perhaps explaining the drop in oil prices along with the global financial collapse, Cobb wryly observes:

That, of course, could lead to a lot of unpleasant demand destruction

Sachs on message

Back in April, I wrote to Jeffrey Sachs about his emphasis on climate change. He's come around to see the danger of peak oil, as per this latest Scientific American column of his:

The 15 billion barrels or so that is supposedly economically accessible in protected U.S. offshore sites would slake around 6 months of global demand (32 billion barrels per year, equal to 82 mbd times 365 days per year) in 2008, and of course a much smaller share by the time they reached the market in 10 to 15 years. 

double whammy

NPR: Slick Oil Ads Aim to Bolster Industry's Image

API: Ads, energytomorrow

See Kurt Cobb's blog entry on the deceptive ads. Trouble is: the facts are not substantiated.  Purpose: to lull us into complacency and deflect scrutiny.

in the MSM

The New York Times presents a series (free subscription req'd) of articles about energy, but I'm afraid the impending danger to our own lives is not appreciated. It's always: the environment, climate change and future generations.

In the Washington Post: This Time, It's Different : Global Pressures Have Converged to Forge a New Oil Reality. When the media says that

Mexican sales of crude oil to the United States have plunged

instead of just 'dipped', Houston, we have a problem. Gas prices continue to spike. And growth has slowed.

if only a steady state

Under the heading of connecting the dots, what role does equilibrium (and especially homeostasis) play in our economy? Here's what Fed chief Bernancke said in July '08 before the Senate Banking Committee:

"I do believe we're going to start to see a stabilization in the construction of homes somewhere later this year, the beginning of next year. House prices may continue to fall longer than that because of the large inventory of unsold homes that we still face. There is uncertainty about exactly what the equilibrium is that prices will reach. It is that uncertainty that is generating a lot of the stress we are seeing in financial markets."

The book by Herman Daly, Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics, has a chapter (14) called the Impossibility of Sustainable Growth. The book is one of my list of peak oil books. Daly is also author of the important Scientific American article, Economics in a Full World, refered to in other posts here.

après moi, le déluge (attributed to Louis XV or Madame de Pompadour) - NY Times - Dr. Doom

penciling it out

One almost has to be deaf and blind not to conclude that the writing is on the wall, dare I say it, that we're nearing the end of our civilization. Proving it to a faretheewell is a little harder, but not so if one makes one very plausible assumption, that technological breakthroughs won't save the day. The assumption is plausible because we humans are very clever to have gotten to where we are already. But remember also, as Kunstler puts it in The Long Emergency:

we tend to confuse and conflate energy and technology. They go hand in hand but they are not the same thing

In the same paragraph, Kunstler adds:

Much of our existing technology simply won't work without petroleum, and without the petroleum "platform" to work off, we may lack the tools to get beyond the current level of fossil-fuel based technology.

[even if, a big if, otherwise possible]

Another way of putting it is that we have an extremely narrow window of opportunity to make that happen.

Two hoped-for breakthroughs are nuclear fusion and cellulosic ethanol. Physicists have been trying to harness fusion for decades without much success. Richard Heinberg talks about the difficulty in his book, The party's over: oil, war and the fate of industrial societies.

To sustain our wonderful American lifestyle, we use up a lot of oil, about 25 barrels* per American per year. We burn most of that up for energy and most of that as liquids in transportation. (Let us also not forget how dependent we are on plastics.) Remember that the energy-dense oil we extract from the earth is solar energy concentrated over vast amounts of time. Is it reasonable to expect that we can harness the diffuse solar energy that impinges on the U.S. in sufficient quantities to replace that which has accumulated in the earth over eons? What kind of infrastructure, with how much in the way of energy inputs, would be required? It's questionable even whether corn kernel ethanol, with its massive government subsidies, has a positive EROEI. There seem to be biophysical limits to cellosic ethanol which make it more problematic than from sugar-based ethanols. Further, there are reports about problems with the mono-cultured sugarcane-based ethanols from tropical Brazil.

We need a substantial permanent harness-able energy source, along with the technology to store and transport that energy. Even if those were theoretically available, we need the energy, will and time to get to such a place, all in short supply.

* - 25 barrels per American per year doesn't sound like a lot, but when you consider that we Americans use 25% of the world supply, that amounts to 1000 barrels per second extraction worldwide.

Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait
For some basic energy numbers, see this PDF from the University of Washington, School of Oceanography.

gas and wind

T. Boone Pickens' plan gets examined on CBS and on Cnet. T. Boone refers to his plan as a bridge to the future. Here's one media critique from the Houston Chronicle: Pickens' plan is bold. Neither natural gas nor even coal are as abundant as is assumed.

Pickens original commercials said: 'this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of'. His website and later commercials lack that verbiage, perhaps so as not to contrast with the party (Republican) with which he has been associated in the past. Within the past few months, in Congressional testimony, he asserts his earlier view. It should be noted again that the Republican candidate in the current presidential race, John McCain, selectively uses some of Pickens' data, but emphasizes drilling. The MSNBC piece, Fresh energy problems for new president, and Newsweek's The Truth about Tire Pressure shows the two candidates as having been all over the map. The New Republic offers this view:

Democrats will have to argue that the only true path to "energy independence" is independence from oil itself. That is, however much we may rely on our own oil sources, the market for oil is global, not national, and the growing thirst for oil from places like China and India won't be diminishing any time soon. So drilling may provide a few more U.S. barrels of oil, but this increase in supply will be minuscule compared to the cresting demand.

the arithmetic of drilling

Per segment on CBSNews tonight Offshore Drilling debated

21 million barrels a day consumed in States
18 billion barrels offshore total would take 2.5 years to consume in States
if approved today, it would have no effect on the price of oil in 5 to 10 years

Just a red herring?

NPR: Offshore Drilling May Have Little Effect on Oil Prices

Here's Slate's take.
Problem is the obstinately (how about impossible?) cellulosic ethanol and the non-science background of the Shell chief.

TNR has this to say in Drilling Deeper:

This past Wednesday, President Bush called for ending a federal ban on offshore oil drilling, two days after John McCain flip-flopped to take the same position. The idea may or may not have merit in the long run, but what it won't do is lower gas prices in the short term: The Department of Energy estimates that it would take more than 20 years for either production levels or prices to be affected by a repeal of the ban on offshore drilling. Because the amount of oil at stake is so tiny (about 19 billion barrels, equivalent to around seven months of global consumption), it won't do much at all to ease jitters or help deflate a bubble in oil markets.

One element that appears in many of these discussions is time, or the lack thereof.


TruTV has a series about oil drilling and drillers.

mainstream ineluctable

Charlie Rose featured a half-hour panel yesterday on oil. The lead member was one Charles Maxwell who introduced Hubbard and peak oil, which of course flew over the heads of everyone else at the table.

Also, in the past week, I overheard a pundit use the term 'apocalypse' in connection with the current 'spike'.

MSNBC: Unlike 70s, there is no more supply to quench growing appetite for crude

The Ethics of Peak Oil

The cover article of the June '08 Scientific American is entitled The Ethics of Climate Change. The article has two basic flaws, as far as I can see. It ignores 'peak oil', which is the much more pressing danger, and (2) it ignores the thesis of an earlier Sciam article about ecological economics, Economics in a Full World. This is not the first time a Sciam author has ignored highly relevant earlier Sciam articles. See these posts of mine.

I also wonder who, if anyone, edits these articles. Here are two sentences from an article inset, Measuring Catastrophe, missing from the online version:

• A population collapse will cause the premature death of billions of people.
• If humanity becomes extinct or the human population collapses, vast numbers of people who would otherwise have existed will not in fact exist.

and elsewhere:

Is their nonexistence a bad thing?

up, up and away

I began this blog in 2005 with a reference to a National Geographic article on peak oil. Here's a new article on peak oil from the current issue of that magazine.

CNN just re-visited a piece it premiered 2 years ago and was shown several times since, We Were Warned. It is now subtitled, Out of Gas, while earlier that was, Tomorrow's Oil Crisis. It appears that tomorrow has become today.

President Bush on peak oil

Here's a clip from the President's 4/29/08 press conference:

Wendell.

Q Mr. President, you just said there's not a lot of excess supply out there. Some energy experts think we may have already passed or be within a couple of years of passing the maximum oil-pumping capability. In other words, we may be close to tapping all we've got. Do you think that's the case? And if you do, why haven't you put more resources into renewable energy research, sir?

THE PRESIDENT: Wendell, we've put a lot into ethanol. As a matter of fact, the solution to the issue of corn-fed ethanol is cellulosic ethanol, which is a fancy word for saying we're going to make ethanol out of switchgrasses, or wood chips. And we're spending a lot of money along those lines.

But energy policy needs to be comprehensive. And we got to understand we're in a transition period. The problem is there's been a lot of focus by the Congress in the intermediate steps and in the long-term steps -- the long-term steps being hydrogen; the intermediate steps being biofuels, for example, and researching the biofuels, and battery technology -- but not enough emphasis on the here and now.

And so you ask -- you say that people think we can't -- there's not any more reserves to be found. Well, there are reserves to be found in ANWR; that's a given. I just told you that there's about 27 million gallons of diesel and gasoline that could be -- from domestically produced crude oil that's not being utilized. And not only that, we can explore in environmentally friendly ways. New technologies enables for -- to be able to drill like we've never been able to do so before -- slant hole technologies and the capacity to use a drill site, a single drill site, to be able to explore a field in a way that doesn't damage the environment. And yet this is a litmus test issue for many in Congress. Somehow if you mention ANWR it means you don't care about the environment. Well, I'm hoping now people, when they say "ANWR," means you don't care about the gasoline prices that people are paying.

Yes, sir. Rog. ...

Q Fourteen senators, including your own Senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison from Texas, are calling on you to stop filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. You've been asked that several times over the past few years. I know what your answer has been. But do you think now, with the rising prices, the record high oil prices, it's time to change course?

THE PRESIDENT: In this case, I have analyzed the issue, and I don't think it would affect price, for this reason: We're buying, at the moment, about 67,000 to 68,000 barrels of oil per day, fulfilling statutory obligations to fill up the SPR. World demand is 85 million barrels a day. So the purchases for SPR account for one-tenth of one percent of global demand. And I don't think that's going to affect price when you affect one-tenth of one percent, and I do believe it is in our national interests to get the SPR filled in case there's a major disruption of crude oil around the world.

And one of the -- for example, one of the things the -- al Qaeda would like to do is blow up oil facilities, understanding we're in a global market, a attack on an oil facility in a major oil-exporting country would affect the economies of their enemy -- that would be us, and other people who can't stand what al Qaeda stands for. And therefore, the SPR is necessary, if that's the case, to be able to deal with that kind of contingency. And if I thought it would affect the price of oil positively, I'd seriously consider it. But when you're talking about one-tenth of one percent of global demand, I think the -- if you -- on a cost-benefit analysis, I don't think you get any benefits from making the decision. I do think it costs you oil in the case of a national security risk.

About ANWR, here's what the geologist Kenneth Deffeyes has to say in his book Beyond Oil:

World oil consumption is roughly 25 billion barrels per year; 5 billion barrels [eventual total] from ANWR would postpone the world decline for two or three months.

The Prez rightly concludes that the Petroleum Reserve has only the most minimal effect on the world market. He obfuscates the similar place ANWR has in that market, our lifeblood.

Sachs on Charlie Rose

Jeffrey Sachs was interviewed on Charlie Rose last week. Sachs is a Harvard-educated economist. Despite his credentials, he has a blind spot. When Rose asks about energy use, Sachs responds about climate change. The two problems are different. I just sent Mr. Sachs an email about his Rose interview; here's what I wrote:

I’m of the belief that peak oil [not climate change] is THE main problem our world faces in the next year or two, not 10 or 20 years hence.
Aren’t there economic models that conclude the worst? In your book and interviews, have you considered the work and [SciAm] article by Herman Daly, Economics in a Full World?
Since you use the word common in the title of your new book, I wonder if you’ve considered Garret Hardin’s essay, The Tragedy of the Commons, in your work.

Regarding impermanence

I'm not a Buddhist, but some of its assertions come close to those of modern science. In an earlier post, I remarked about its view about the rarity of human life. Another Buddhist tradition, this one from the Tibetans, is the sand mandala. After days of painstaking creation, the work is destroyed in an instant. One panel in the mandala video below is empty; is that a recognition of our imperfection?

Zakaria and others

Newsweek: why we can't quit oil

from an analyst local to my area: Energy Bill II could reap a bitter harvest

teachin

featuring Ted Patzek and David Pimentel
teach-in

Cataclysm

Along the same lines as the film, A Crude Awakening (see Earth Day 2007), is a segment of Mega Disasters on the History Channel, Oil Apocalypse:

The oil that runs our world won't last forever. The gap between supply and demand is ever-growing. Even without increasing our current rate of consumption we will empty the Earth's large but finite reservoirs in a relatively short time. Will alternative energy save us or is it already too late? What would happen to the world as we know it when our oil dependent industries come to a grinding halt? A worldwide depression is a certainty but a power struggle for the basic necessities of life would be complete chaos.

Are we looking down the barrel of an OIL APOCALYPSE?

Some of the peak oil experts interviewed in this piece are: Richard Heinberg (The Party is Over), Fadel Gheit (Oppenheimer & Co.), David Goodstein (Out of Gas), Ken Deffeyes (Beyond Oil), Matthew Simmons (Twilight in the Desert) and Michael Economides (The Color of Oil). Update: The segment showed on March 10, '08, and will likely show again this season.

The segment is also available on ITunes and as a bittorent.


Also from the History Channel production is Crude; its study guide states:

It is a substance that touches nearly every aspect of our lives, and yet most of us know virtually nothing about it. From our food to our cars to our clothing, crude oil contributes in some way to the overwhelming majority of the products and vehicles that we rely on each day. It is an energy source unrivaled in its efficiency and power – and is the driving force behind modern industries and economies. Yet some of the most knowledgeable experts predict that we have already passed peak production of this vital natural resource. And while the world is growing increasingly dependent on oil and its byproducts, the supply is becoming more limited each day.

It's a 2 hour program, and the narration is often moronic. Here's another critique of it.

And following up on the book, The World without Us, History Channel presents Life After People and National Geographic presents Aftermath: Population Zero.

ask for whom the bell tolls

Woes mount for Mexico's state oil titan

Output is declining rapidly, ...