plumbing the depths

Richard Heinberg explains the recession from an ecologist's perspective in:

Temporary Recession or the End of Growth?

and looks at where we are in on the curve of oil production in:

Is the Global Oil Tank Half-full, Is It Half-Empty...Or Are We Running On Fumes?

sciam update: Does Economics Violate the Laws of Physics?

all biophysical economists see only very bleak prospects for the future of modern civilization, putting a whole new spin on the phrase "the dismal science.

the well-being of our economy depends on a healthy natural world. To my mind, economics is a subset ofecology, and we place ourselves (nevermind our progeny) at great peril as we use up the world's non-renewable resources. For more on this alternative view of our global economy, visit these pages from:

NY Times, the SUNY-ESF conference, Revisiting the Limits to Growth after peak oil.

malaise 30 years later

NPR interviewed today the author of the book "What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?". Jimmy Carter spoke to the nation on July 15, 1979, thusly:

What I have to say to you now about energy is simple and vitally important.

Point one: I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States. Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977 -- never. From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the 1980s, for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by one-half by the end of the next decade ...

Point two: To ensure that we meet these targets, I will use my presidential authority to set import quotas. I'm announcing tonight that for 1979 and 1980, I will forbid the entry into this country of one drop of foreign oil more than these goals allow. These quotas will ensure a reduction in imports even below the ambitious levels we set at the recent Tokyo summit.

Sorry kids, for not following through.

the big picture

See The New Republic's piece about Dr. Doom

"A financial crisis needs general thinking, and a team of specialists will have difficulty understanding the whole thing," he says. "Nouriel's approach has always been worldwide, which is not rewarded in academia. "

and

Roubini has traveled from the Jeremiah wilderness, ...

The peak oil thesis is simple and stark:

1. oil has unique qualities as a material and as an energy source
   
2. created eons ago, there's a finite supply of oil
   
3. modern civilization, the world economy and 6 billion people greatly depend on abundant oil
4. we're rapidly using up that oil (80 million barrels a day, including 20 million by the U.S.)
   
5. we're past the peak of what oil we are able to extract globally each year
6. we will not find a substitute for oil in time to avert an irreversible global economic decline
7. we may now be witnessing the start of that decline
8. the decline will be steep and chaotic
9. the decline will result in billions of deaths

Did I say anything about global warming in this? Answer - no, 'cause it's irrelevant.

We Can’t Get There From Here

Leave it to a layperson to bring the facts about energy to the public's attention, but who's listening?  Sharon Begley poses the question and presents the numbers, where the venerable Scientific American studiously avoids it(also here).

Oil prices a-twitter

Why are prices so low, if we're running low of oil?

MSNBC has an answer, as did Kurt Cobb a month ago.

Making energy

President Obama in his 2009 address to Congress:

But to truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy.  So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.  And to support that innovation, we will invest fifteen billion dollars a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power; advanced biofuels, clean coal, and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks built right here in America.

Freakonomics (pg 268): Peak Oil: Welcome to the Media's New Version of Shark Attacks

If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technical innovation.  The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand.

One oil ad recently speaks of 'making oil supply more available' in order to lower prices. 

But it take eons to make oil, and only a few years to extract it from the Earth.  That is the basic problem we face.

  

Kunstler on the transition

Here's part of Barack Obama's inaugural address:

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done.  The state of our economy calls for action, bold and swift.  And we will act, not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.  We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.  We'll restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost.  We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.  And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.  All this we can do.  All this we will do.

Bold is mine.  What if science and Dr. Chu, the new Energy head, say decline is inevitable?

J. H. Kunstler writes this, HOPE AND FEAR,  reminding me of an earlier blog entry of mine.

For me, the argument is simple and carefully ignored.  

1. Consumption, for the many (of the Earth, by China(and others), for America [shall not perish?]), has become the purpose and measure of our economy. 
2. The basis of consumption, Nature's physical bounty , is limited and is being rapidly depleted.  
   
3. The response by the pols and pundits is: do something quick, stimulate more consumption, government can't allow this or that industry or company (or individual) to fail, borrow now-pay back later.  Have faith.  Party like it's 1999.

But, as Abe Lincoln put it in his Second Inaugural:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which (we) may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

 

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