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

Betting the farm

President Bush had more to say about energy in SOTU 2007 compared to last but without the catch phrase, America is addicted to oil.

Extending hope and opportunity depends on a stable supply of energy that keeps America's economy running and America's environment clean. For too long our nation has been dependent on foreign oil. And this dependence leaves us more vulnerable to hostile regimes, and to terrorists -- who could cause huge disruptions of oil shipments, and raise the price of oil, and do great harm to our economy.

It's in our vital interest to diversify America's energy supply -- the way forward is through technology. We must continue changing the way America generates electric power, by even greater use of clean coal technology, solar and wind energy, and clean, safe nuclear power. (Applause.) We need to press on with battery research for plug-in and hybrid vehicles, and expand the use of clean diesel vehicles and biodiesel fuel. (Applause.) We must continue investing in new methods of producing ethanol -- (applause) -- using everything from wood chips to grasses, to agricultural wastes.

We made a lot of progress, thanks to good policies here in Washington and the strong response of the market. And now even more dramatic advances are within reach. Tonight, I ask Congress to join me in pursuing a great goal. 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. (Applause.) When we do that we will have cut our total imports by the equivalent of three-quarters of all the oil we now import from the Middle East.

To reach this goal, we must increase the supply of alternative fuels, by setting a mandatory fuels standard to require 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017 -- and that is nearly five times the current target. (Applause.) At the same time, we need to reform and modernize fuel economy standards for cars the way we did for light trucks -- and conserve up to 8.5 billion more gallons of gasoline by 2017.

Achieving these ambitious goals will dramatically reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but it's not going to eliminate it. And so as we continue to diversify our fuel supply, we must step up domestic oil production in environmentally sensitive ways. (Applause.) And to further protect America against severe disruptions to our oil supply, I ask Congress to double the current capacity of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. (Applause.)

America is on the verge of technological breakthroughs that will enable us to live our lives less dependent on oil. And these technologies will help us be better stewards of the environment, and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change. (Applause.)

The White House expands on this theme with this web site.

We need a Manhattan project. What we're getting is smoke and mirrors.



An MSNBC editor John Schoen, whose articles I've reviewed before, comments on Mr. Bush's speech and its implications. He speaks of subsidies to the ethanol industry, as well as the following two items:

Higher prices for the natural gas — needed to generate heat to brew ethanol — has also gone up.

and

The administration is relying on another “safety value” — a technology to produce ethanol from the cellulose in corn stalks and other plants like switchgrass that can be produced more cheaply than corn. So far, this so-called “cellulosic” process is much more expensive than corn-based ethanol. Major research breakthroughs will be required to make it economically competitive.

The first point hints that much in the way of fossil fuels is needed for ethanol production. Heat for fermentation is only one of the energy inputs. See my earlier posts about EROEI, energy returned on energy invested.

The second point reflects a contradiction between claim and fact. Remember, Mr Bush claimed:

America is on the verge of technological breakthroughs

but Mr. Schoen points out that a process (from switchgrass cellulose) that is supposed to be cheaper (read: requiring fewer energy inputs) than corn, turns out to be "much more expensive".

An MSNBC blogger, Alan Boyle, explores the SOTU energy implications here from a more scientific viewpoint.

Worthy of note is the new Congress' 100 hours legislation on energy:

We will energize America by achieving energy independence, and we will begin by rolling back the multi-billion dollar subsidies for Big Oil.
H.R. 6, "Creating Long-Term Energy Alternatives for the Nation Act." passed 264-163, Jan. 18th, 2007

What if

Here's a terrifying dramatization (just shown again) on Discovery Science, What If: The Oil Runs Out.

Slowly a consensus has emerged. Oil, the lifeblood of modern societies, is going to peak then decline irreversibly. Oil will be used for decades to come, but the era of surplus, conventional oil is ending, and we are not prepared.

Mathew Simmons' first words are:

If we have a shortage, it's a lights out event.

Also narrating are: Paul Domjan , Neil McMahon, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein, and Andrew Curry of the Henley Centre Consultancy. Get the bittorent here.

Blending drama and documentary, the IF series returns with a film investigating a scenario many experts fear will come true.

When the cheap oil we depend on starts to run out, we may not be able to take anything for granted any more.

Drama
It is 2016 and the world is in crisis.

Global supplies of oil cannot keep up with soaring demand and the price of petrol is going through the roof.

The oil companies are in a desperate race to find any remaining oil reserves but what happens if there is no more out there?

Combining expert interviews with a fictional story line, the drama-documentary examines how our lives will change as the price of fuel starts to spiral out of control.

The film interweaves the story of Jess, an exploration geologist working for an international oil company, with the impact of the fuel crisis on her parents back home in Minneapolis.

Instability in the Middle East has caused an "oil shock" and the price of crude is rising day by day.

At the start of the film it is around $85 (£45) a barrel - in spring 2006 it is about $65 (£34) - but by the end of the drama the price has climbed to $160 (£85).

As the story unfolds, expert interviewees - including Paul Domjan, Former Energy Security Adviser at the US Dept of Defence, oil analyst Matt Simmons and the legendary former Saudi Arabian Minister of Oil, Sheikh Yamani - explain how the crisis will have an effect on every part of our lives.

We will not just be paying a lot more - £2.35 per litre or $5.88 per US gallon - to fill up our cars, we will be charged much higher prices for food, heating and light.

Long distance travel will become increasingly expensive and we will even think carefully before using the car for what we used to regard as routine trips to the shops.

Recession

As the economy goes into recession, Jess's parents find their world collapsing around them.

Also on Discovery, Clean Fuels.

From Newsweek: The New Coal Car. The article makes the claim:

With the world's largest coal reserves, the United States has enough coal to power the country for another century at least.

However, such claims are based on current usage levels, not the ones that would be required for complete replacement of oil usage.

grasping at straws

Over $100 million has been spent on Proposition 87 on California's ballot, a large sum. Bill Clinton and Al Gore have been featured in ads favoring the cause. One such ad states:

Imagine if we can stop being dependent on foreign oil. Brazil did it.
They made a simple change to their cars. Switched to ethanol, grown from their own crops.
If Brazil could do it, so could California.

Mr. Clinton promulgates similar themes with his Global Initiative, a recent meeting of which was critiqued thusly in TNR.

How true are the above claims? I've looked at them before, in Brazil and ethanol and ethanol, the panacea. Recently, Robert Rapier, at The Oil Drum, points out:

Brazil’s energy independence miracle was 10% ethanol and 90% domestic crude oil production.

This is astonishing and at such great odds with the basic pro-87 premise, especially when one considers that:

• Brazilian ethanol is also subsidized by government
• Enriching the well-connected
  
• Sugar cane grown in a tropical clime captures much more solar energy than anything in California and
  
• The environmental destruction is great
  

Tad Patzek of U.C. Berkeley also seriously doubts the pro-87 hype. Mr. Patzek took part in an ezine discussion about ethanol about which he comments:

My 1-hour working meeting with Mr. Khosla was *not* a debate. We both tried to establish points of mutual agreement and disagreement. While certainly there was agreement on several key issues, there was also significant, one might say fundamental, disagreement on biofuels. I find the biofuel focus of Proposition 87 to be inconsistent with the very survival of life diversity and key ecosystems on the Earth and, consequently, I do not favor Proposition 87.

Scientific American this year devotes its September special focus issue, as with part of last, to Energy's Future - Beyond Carbon. Again the emphasis is on global warming rather than fossil fuel depletion. Daniel M. Kammen (a Berkeley professor like Mr. Patzek) is author of the article, The Rise of Renewable Energy, in which he writes:

When all the inputs and outputs were correctly factored in, we found that ethanol has a positive net energy...

Mr. Patzek would strongly dispute that contention and others by Mr. Kammen.

Update (06-11-09): California Proposition 87 was defeated 55% to 45%. Also, from an analyst local to my area, Ethanol experiment goes off track.

Update (07-1-2): Scientific American publishes article Is Ethanol for the Long Haul?
summarized thus. The author, Matthew L. Wald, is a reporter for the N.Y. Times; puzzlingly, his scientific credentials are not listed in Sciam. Here's another article of his on the subject.

media

Tv
CBS: Greener Horizons
BBC: Fueling the Future, Education
PBS: EXTREME OIL

Press
NY Times: The Energy Challenge
Chicago Tribune: Oil:A Travelogue of Addiction

Radio
NPR: Paying at the Pump

Videos, etc
See my earlier post, Materials on energy

what elephant?

Banksy's L.A. living room

myopia writ large

One month does not a civilization make. What part of the word 'finite' do the pundits not understand? Here's more cornucopia from Newsweek. Mr. Maugeri writes:

Suddenly the alarmists who foresaw an imminent era of oil scarcity are silent

Not me.

As this bleak scenario gained acceptance, it became easy to assume that the price of oil would defy the laws of gravity and break the barrier of $100 per barrel.

Appealing to the laws of physics, now that's a first.

But a bit farther out, between roughly 2010 and 2012, there is a good chance that supply trends will overtake demand, raising spare production capacity to a range between 7 to 10 percent of demand.

Methinks we've heard that before. Higher prices lead to more investment lead to more oil, nevermind geology. Mr. Maugeri concludes with more gobbledygook:

..., contrary to all the scare scenarios, ... China's oil-consumption growth has the potential to ease substantially, while in most industrial countries consumption growth is approaching zero and may start to drop.

and

One thing is certain: if prices should drop significantly before the investments now underway reach the point of no return, they could come to a screeching halt, precipitating another price spike.

Newsweek also presents an article on Big Oil's malaise, two factors being:

the maturing of old reserves and more and more risky exploration projects

Left unspecified are which reserves have matured and how significant a role they play in the global oil picture. Could those include the venerable Saudi fields?

a tank of gas, a world of trouble

See the Chicago Tribune's investigative report, Oil: a Travelogue of Addiction .

on Discovery Channel

aired this weekend: Addicted To Oil: Thomas L. Friedman Reporting
Mr. Friedman points out that cars use up most of the oil we import. He emphasizes foreign oil dependency as the immediate problem, as it fosters tyrannies, especially those who would do us harm.

He interviews Amory Lovins, who argues that further efficiencies can help us wean ourselves from dependency, while ethanol from switchgrass can do the rest. Another person argues that wind energy can provide us with one-half of the electricity we use. These arguments are highly questionable.

See also Thomas Friedman on Charlie Rose and the Year earlier discussion with Thomas Friedman on subject


coming up July 16 on the Discovery Channel:
Global Warming: What You Need to Know, with Tom Brokaw

More doomsaying

Under the title, Fly Now - Stay Later, the quarterly glossy magazine 111, printed in Palm Springs, California, includes this reprinted interview with 'doomsaying' author James Howard Kunstler. See an excerpt from his book, The Long Emergency.
Also from that Environment Advocacy Ezine, Grist, is an article on biofuels, The Scheme of the Crop.

Running Out, a Myth?

from John Stossel's web page:

MYTH: We are running out of oil
TRUTH: Not so fast!
"It's going to be a catastrophe!"
When they're not complaining about the price of gas, doomsayers would have us believe that we are burning oil at an "unsustainable" rate.

How can anyone honestly argue otherwise? In this video interview with Peter Huber, co-author of The Bottomless Well, Mr. Stossel asks the right questions such as: Isn't oil finite? Somehow, the answers are unconvincing.

Mr. Stossel goes on to argue:

If the price of a barrel of oil stays high, lots of entrepreneurs will scramble for ways to supply cheaper energy. They'll come up with alternative energy sources or better ways to suck oil out of the ground. At fifty dollars a barrel, it's even profitable to recover oil that's stuck in the tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Peter Huber and Mark Mills point out in their book The Bottomless Well that those tar sands alone contain enough oil to meet our needs for a hundred years.

But the media don't pay much attention to that. Not running out of oil is not a very interesting story.

As usual, everyone gets sidetracked by the present (cheap fuel) dollar cost to extract oil, but doesn't figure the actual energy cost to capture further energy, whether tar sands, ethanol or solar.

In another 20/20 piece, Mr. Stossel counts down to two more of his myths related to oil:
MYTH #2-- Urban Sprawl Is Ruining America and
MYTH #1-- Sharing Would Make the World a Better Place.
In that last, he alludes to The Tragedy of the Commons. See my blog entry on this.

Here's how one reviewer characterizes Mr. Stossel's Myths book:

From Publishers Weekly
ABC News correspondent Stossel mines his 20/20 segments for often engaging, frequently tendentious challenges to conventional wisdom, presenting a series of "myths" and then deploying an investigative journalism shovel to unearth "truth." This results in snappy debunkings of alarmism, ...The author's complacent glosses on overpopulation and global warming ("we can build dykes and move back from the coasts") are especially glib and one-sided.

ethanol, the panacea?

on a TV near you
NBC: Dateline NBC but see this MSNBC piece .
CBS 60 minutes but see other CBS piece
ABC: World News Tonight and this
CNN: Presents segment on ethanol in We Were Warned (for more info)

But see the Wikipedia piece on fuel ethanol, and its external links, such as the 2004 scholarly article by Tad Patzek and Pimentel's research. Patzek writes:

In this paper, I will describe in some detail the unfavorable thermodynamics of the industrial production of ethanol from one particular food crop, corn. I will use the Second Law of thermodynamics to track what is happening to us as mere years pass, and the precious resources the sun and the earth have been making and storing for millions of years are being squandered in front of our eyes.

The focus of Patzek's article is corn, but he does briefly compare the net energy of corn to switchgrasses and sugarcane. For more on sugarcane, see this other Wikipedia article.

As heard on NPR

Today, Morning Edition presented a piece with Matthew Simmons* and Daniel Yergin, pessimist vs. optimist. On listening to it, who do you think is the realist? This piece is part of NPR's series, The Future of Fuel.

See the earlier series on Boston NPR, pre State of the Union 2006, Addicted to Oil. Thomas L. Friedman is featured in the first of the 4 shows. He mentions a project with Discovery Channel. [His film premiered at Silverdocs Film Festival and broadcast on Discovery Channel on June 24, 2006.]

*Simmons who was featured on CNN Presents, We Were Warned, suggests here that global oil consumption is analogous to a car running out of gas.

drip drip drip

by Christo Komarnitski, Sofia, Bulgaria
Cartoons from the Bulgarian newspaper "Sega" -- Visit Christo's site
as seen on Cagle's Cartoons

Mainlining

In her Newsweek column this week, The Price of Our Addiction, Jane Bryant Quinn speaks bluntly about the downslope (of peak oil). The column begins:

For years to come, we'll be paying for our oil in both treasure and blood, as we fight and parley to keep ever-tighter supplies flowing our way.
The U.S. lives in an energy trap. We fell into it gladly, dug it deeper and sit fat and happy, with blinders on. We're fed daily meals of imported oil, from countries we pay in IOUs and think we can push around.

and concludes:

Unfortunately, we're investing in war, not in crash projects to develop new energy sources. Maybe there's time to spare. But some events, like true civil war and collapse in Iraq, could change everything in a day. We're running a faith-based energy policy—still addicted to oil. If something goes wrong, it will go wrong big.

This comes from a writer known for her careful and sober counsel. See also her later piece, What We Need Is Policy.

CBS News continues to ask the hard questions about ethanol . CNN reprises its Frank Sesno report, We Were Warned.

Brazil and ethanol

N.Y. Times article (reg. req'd) With Big Boost From Sugar Cane, Brazil Is Satisfying Its Fuel Needs includes the perhaps self-serving:

For each unit of energy expended to turn cane into ethanol, 8.3 times as much energy is created, compared with a maximum of 1.3 times for corn, according to scientists at the Center for Sugarcane Technology here and other Brazilian research institutes.

As I stated before regarding another article, the N.Y. Times claims that Brazil is oil-independent because of its development of ethanol; that begs the question of how much energy was needed to produce the ethanol and other concerns. Further as another article points out:

Gasoline with or without MTBE can be shipped in large quantities through an extensive network of pipelines. But ethanol, which tends to corrode pipelines, must be transported on trucks, trains and barges in relatively small batches to storage terminals where it is then blended with gasoline.

The oil is going, the oil is going!

That's the apropos title for this Salon article on peak oil.

The author, Katharine Mieszkowski, is thorough in her assessment with dozens of links to the Peak Oil canon. She tries to end the piece optimistically, but it sounds like delusion in place of denial.

I have two pet peeves with politicians (or even pundits) mouthing off about energy, as in this article. One is the use of the word 'spike', suggesting a temporary rise in real energy prices. The other is the reference to a dependence on 'foreign' oil; it's oil, period.

Another question that warrants investigation is: how do Peak Oil alarmists (of whom admittedly I'm one) view the Global Warming alarmists? I would say scoffingly. Though related as I've pointed out before, the one threat is much greater than the other.

On the subject of global warming, C-span's BookTV presented a panel of authors on the subject from the March 25-26 Virginia Festival of the Book, including:

Tim Flannery, "The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth"

Elizabeth Kolbert, "Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change"

William Ruddiman, "Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate"

At the end of the Q&A, a lady asked how would peak oil (and depletion) affect global warming. The answer was to the point, but cut short. Hello? Can't you see that Sword of Damocles?