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, ...

Peak Everything

Richard Heinberg's new book.

Telling it like it is, almost

Chevron's ad campaign, The Power of Human Energy.

a closer look at biofuels

The National Geographic October 2007 article, Green Dreams, takes an in-depth look at biofuels, especially ethanol.

ignoring the obvious

In his memoir, or at least from this Newsweek excerpt, Alan Greenspan projects into the future, with no mention of peak oil. Similarly with the upcoming CNN series, Planet in Peril. (CNN did at least once reprise its documentary, We Were Warned, now with added label Out of Gas; see transcription and classroom guide.) Can no one see the forest for the trees?

energy players

Fareed Zakaria continues his series of interviews. Here's one with Chris Somerville. Zakaria asks:

Are biofuels going to get us out of the energy trap?

What trap, Mr. Zakaria doesn't explain.

Earlier Mr. Zakaria interviewed Lovins on efficiency, Raymond on oil and Hefner on natural gas. Of Raymond, Zakaria asks:

Do you think the world is running out of oil?

Raymond's answer:

As the study says, the world is not running out of the resource. The problem we're getting into is the question, can we develop it in a timely way, given the constraints we have on the political front, the economic front, and just the time it takes to get things done?

Mr. Zakaria in an earlier piece wonders:

I don't know if the world is running out of oil, a subject of heated debate.

See my earlier posts on Raymond and on Lovins, here and here.

The World without Us

Alan Weisman's book is reviewed in July's Scientific American as well as in Newsweek . The latter refers to a Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, established 1996. Slate comments on the subject here.

Regarding how we might get there, in the Newsweek 7/30/07 issue, Jonathan Alter writes thusly about Norman Borlaug:

In only a few years, his ideas—which go far beyond seed varieties—had spread around the world and disproved Malthusian doomsday scenarios like Paul Ehrlich's 1968 best seller "The Population Bomb."

One Curtis Palmer comments on Alter's piece:

Dr. Borlaug labored to provide a food supply for the supply of people. He has to his credit an amazing achievement. The problem however, has never been the supply of food, it is the supply of people, and that remains to be addressed. If we don't adddress it in the near term it will correct itself, but that will likely be brutal. Even Dr. Borlaug believes that with little land left available to be put into food production that mass starvation will not be prevented through his work, just delayed (and magnified due to population increase). Inceases in crop yield may still be possible to compensate for further population growth but eventually we will reach the end of this particular Malthusian rope.

The Malthusian catastrophe looms large. See Albert Bartlett's letter to Physics Today and the DieOff site.

The History Channel has produced an extensive series based Weisman's book, Life After People.

local considerations

in the California desert. Per the Riverside County Press Enterprise, green efforts. See also the work of Berkeley professor Tad Patzek on ethanol and energy.

Black (oil) Humour

from down under
and satire from the not-so-frozen north (belongs in Ripley's)

Chevron Human Energy TV Campaign

Now showing on a tv near you and on Chevron's website, from the manhole commercial:

Some say that by 2020 we’ll have used up half the world’s oil. Some say we already have. Making the other half last longer will take innovation, conservation…and collaboration. Will you join us?

When exactly is (or was) the peak? Does it much matter? Chevron says "it's clear, the era of cheap oil is over." What exactly happens when oil demand outstrips supply? Do we understand what we all face with shortages?

Earth Day 2007

Sundance Channel aired the documentary, A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash. A wider audience may have thus been introduced to this frightening subject, but as one narrator commented, I'm paraphrasing, we are somehow unable to come to terms with it. It's available on Netflix (and as of July 08, on Netflix Instant & Roku).

Update: The film was released theatrically in the UK on November 9, 2007; BBC referred to that release in its coverage of record oil prices. Also from the UK, in Masterpiece Theater's, The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, one theme is global warming and the Kyoto Protocol.

Leading up to Earth Day, Newsweek covered the environment in this April issue but, as usual for the general media, conflates peak oil with global warming, and skirts the implications for both.

Even simpler and less convenient

From this British site:

Everyday in the news, we hear of the threat of climate change. There are international conferences, television documentaries, books galore.

(and an Academy Award and a possible Nobel Peace Prize)

But there is a danger whose consequences will be far more destructive and which will hit us much sooner. It is a danger that will effect everybody, rich or poor, wherever they live in the world. It will require enormous financial and scientific strides to defeat, strides which the world’s governments show few signs of taking. It is a danger which, quite feasibly, could lead to the end of our industrial civilisation. It is the danger of peak oil.

From another British site, here's an overview of the subject.

Oil on the Brain

NPR : Lisa Margonelli, Concerned with 'Oil on the Brain'

See also NPR's collection, Paying at the Pump.

Verboten

In this Newsweek column, George Will contends with Mr. Bush's global warming comment in his SOTU speech . All well and good, except for these paragraphs:

It could cost tens of trillions (in expenditures and foregone economic growth, here and in less-favored parts of the planet) to try to fine-tune the planet's temperature. We cannot know if these trillions would purchase benefits commensurate with the benefits that would have come from social wealth that was not produced.

and

Another reason (for his fascination with new fuels), he says, is U.S. imports of oil from unstable nations.

One of our greatest pundits, Mr. Will, by focusing on the 'foreign' aspect, doesn't recognize the essential role oil itself plays in our economy. He fails to ask the question: what happens when demand exceeds the supply? Can the economy (and social well-being) be sustained, nevermind expand?

Mr. Will correctly questions the assumptions regarding ethanol. He's generous when he says:

Ethanol produces just slightly more energy than it takes to manufacture it

Back to the SOTU, Mr. Bush suggests:

Let us build on the work we've done and reduce gasoline usage in the United States by 20 percent in the next 10 years.

Is there the option not to, willy-nilly.
Peak Oil Cassandra I