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.