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DrumBeat: February 24, 2007
Posted by Leanan on February 24, 2007 - 9:22am
Topic: Miscellaneous
A combination of a late dose of cold up north, a major refinery fire, the usual industry maintenance and the change from winter to summer gas blends is squeezing supplies."The problem is not crude oil supply," said Ben Brockwell, director of data and pricing with Oil Price Information Service in Lakewood, N.J. "There's not enough refining capacity."
Terrorists in Iraq are becoming proficient at blowing up oil refineries. Similar plants in a handful of American cities represent our greatest vulnerability. We could easily be making them less dangerous. But we’re not.
Rural Maine Scrambles in Midst of a Propane Shortage
Propane dealers are scrambling for supplies, with some driving to Detroit and Ontario to restock. Gov. John Baldacci has increased the hours to deliver propane and is urging conservation and priority shipments for hospitals and nursing homes.
Eni Confirms Fears about Kashagan Oil Field Problems
Italian oil and gas giant Eni SpA (E) confirmed investors' fears about delays and cost overruns at its mammoth Kashagan oil project in Kazakhstan, but insisted its strong position in the growing European gas market and its alliance with Russia's OAO Gazprom will power the company forward.
Tony Juniper: Peak oil, climate change and the role of local communities
It was very interesting to hear his take on peak oil and climate change, the dangers he identifies of linking the two refers more to what I call ‘old paradigm peak oilers’ such as Robert Hirsch with their plans for the tar sands and coal to liquids, than to those of us seeing peak oil and climate change as the Two Great Oversights of Our Times which signify a complete rethink of many aspects of our lives. It was also interesting to hear his vision for a world beyond oil…
Climate Change, Peak Oil And Nuclear War
Damocles had one life threatening sword hanging by a thread over his head. We have three...
After decades of resistance and delay in responding to the world’s most pressing twin challenges - peak oil and climate change - it’s hard to believe, but governments the world over, from federal to local, are finally starting to take serious action.
Venezuela offers to cure Nicaragua's oil ills
President Hugo Chavez met Friday with President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua to discuss an array of Venezuelan assistance programs, capping an unusually frenetic week for this country's efforts to enhance its political and economic influence in parts of Latin America.
PDVSA: 7B Barrels Certified in Orinico Belt
Some 7 billion barrels of crude oil have now been certified in Venezuela's Orinoco Petroliferos Strip, the state oil company Petioles de Venezuela (PDVSA) said Thursday.Another 235 billion barrels of heavy crude are expected to be certified across the strip, however, only 20 percent can be extracted due to technological limits, PDVSA vice president Luis Verma said.
While undoubtedly, the U.S. and its Ethiopian proxy conqured Somalia and “liberated” it from the clutches of Al-Qaeda primarily for geostrategic reasons (possible launching point to attack Iran, more friendly territory close to Arabic Sudan, more ports under their control, a possible regional base for the AFRICOM command post, potential launching points to protect the Strait of Hormuz [the primary shipping point of Middle Eastern oil], etc), Somalia is awash in unspoken oil and provides a tantalizing business opportunity.
Qatar launches $18bn gas project
Qatar yesterday launched a mega gas-to-liquids (GTL) project in partnership with Royal Dutch/Shell that will cost up to $18 billion, $10bn of which have already been earmarked.
ConocoPhillips: Corocoro Field Output May Start Mid-2007
ConocoPhillips (COP) said Friday that its Corocoro field in Venezuela could start producing oil in mid-2007, later than originally expected.
EPA: Hybrids Not As Fuel-Efficient As Thought
"I feel we got ripped off. I bought the truck and they said I would get 33 mpg -- I'm only getting 22.6," said Ray Terilli, who drives a hybrid."The engineering that created those statistics is joke. It is way outdated," said motorist Joe Cohen.
Solar World: China becomes a growing force
'Thin film will be the future,' solar energy markets expert J. Peter Lynch told United Press International, referring to an emerging type of solar technology that relies on much thinner solar panels than the traditional black panels on many rooftops today. 'As more and more Chinese (thin film) companies (go) public, they will drive prices down and shrink margins.'
PG&E eyes power grid plan to boost electric cars
California's biggest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., is considering a plan to charge fleets of battery-powered cars overnight with wind energy and let consumers sell back some of the stored electricity during the day.
The perilous fantasy of energy independence
The paradox of today’s quest for energy independence is that pursuing it actually increases energy insecurity. However much politicians who call for energy independence might prefer it otherwise, the market has chosen oil as a staple energy source. So governments should ignore neither the valid interests of oil exporters, on whom consumers in their countries depend, nor exporters’ reaction to the rhetoric of energy independence or to steps taken to achieve it. Isolationist politicians may not care about other countries, but they should think twice lest they harm their own.
Regulatory adviser speaks about nuclear power, weapons
The world is heading toward another atomic age, a nuclear regulatory adviser for Argentina said Thursday.Abel Julio Gonzalez said countries have to develop nuclear power to deal with the global fossil fuel shortage.
Oil prices reach a new high for the year
Oil prices reached a new high for the year during a volatile session Friday, driven by tensions with oil-producing Iran and expectations of continued pressure on U.S. petroleum product supplies
California and colorless green ideas
Aside from a few dead-enders on the political right, climate change skeptics seem to be making a seamless transition from denial to fatalism. In the past, they rejected the science. Now, with the scientific evidence pretty much irrefutable, they insist that it doesn't matter because any serious attempt to curb greenhouse gas emissions is politically and economically impossible.
Give up chocolate or desserts for Lent? No, give up your car! Try auto-fasting. (In German only, alas.)
Saudi Arabia to Hike Gas Exploration on Demand Surge
Saudi Arabia is gearing up to meet surging domestic demand for natural gas that is key to sustaining its industrialization drive, experts say.Amid rapid industrial expansion, Saudi Arabia is seeing a record surge in gas demand. Between 2005 and 2030, consumption is forecast to rise threefold to 14.5 billion cubic feet a day, according to recent data from the country's Petroleum & Mineral Resources Ministry.
Shell delays decision on oil shale production
A decision by Royal Dutch Shell on whether to begin commercial oil shale development won’t happen by the end of this decade as planned because the permit process has taken longer than expected.
Oil worker shot dead in Nigeria
Unknown gunmen have killed a Lebanese construction worker on his way to work in Nigeria's oil-rich city of Port Harcourt, say security sources.
Electric cars get White House showcase
President Bush peered under the hood of an all-electric sport utility truck parked at the White House Friday and said his goal of reducing gasoline use by 20 percent over the next decade is realistic."I firmly believe that the goal I laid out — that Americans will use 20 percent less gasoline over the next 10 years — is going to be achieved, and here's living proof of how we're going to get there," Bush said on the South Lawn after examining the truck and a car that had a battery tucked in its trunk.
Where Bush would steer energy R&D
Overall federal spending on energy research in real dollars is only one-third what it was at its 1978 peak, according to a Harvard University analysis. Some also question the administration's emphasis on nuclear research, saying other promising technologies could be applied sooner to climate and energy-security issues.
Israel denies report that it is preparing for an attack on iran. interpretation : Israel is already prepared for an attack on iran
From the Telegraph today:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/Cartoon/OpinionCartoonFrag.jhtml?&Ran...
From Reuters
Having US military forces cross into Iran is a hostile act and a casus belli
Special Ops has been in an out of Iran for years. Is it a surprise they don't much like us?
I always enjoy reading articles by the folks over at Whiskey & Gunpowder.
Today Byron King, their Peak Oil guy, posted two articles about his attendance at a speech by Shell Oil's President John D. Hofmeister. Hofmeister is on a 50 stop tour through the US talking about energy.
Byron King's articles are always worth a read and these two are particularly worth a look.
The Shell Answer Man and Peak Oil (Part I)
The Shell Answer Man and Peak Oil (Part II)
I've set these links to start up in a new window so you don't lose your [new] tags.
That is a really good write-up. Thanks for posting the links. And I couldn't agree more with Byron's comment:
But then again, educating the public about the nation’s energy supply and answering peoples’ questions on the subject might just be more important over the long term than squinting at a few more spreadsheets full of obscure data or buttering up the stock analysts.
Yes, I just spoke to Byron by phone the other day. He knows his stuff. I recommend his articles for TOD readers.
Auto-fasting? I thought you were talking about Zimbabwe.
In spite of the horrifying situation in Zimbabwe, your post gave me the first (guilty) smile of the day.
Glad to oblige John, we're here for the audience, after all.
By the way, the auto-fasting craze seems to be gaining popularity closer to home as well:
Shouldn't be too much of a problem
Let's take a trip down memory lane.
etc. etc. etc.
One thing Arabs seem to have in common is a hatred of Israel. No wonder we are surging troops into Baghdad. This is going to cause riots. The current Shiite government is an Iranian ally.
The democrats need to get their act together and forbid Bush to foster aggression against Iran. You don't need to be a genius to know that Iran will respond against us. It is a back door into expanding the war.
I first heard about auto-fasting in an email:
Indeed "autofasten" has been promoted for a couple of years in Germany. But there is only a a neglible number of people, I think, who actually participate. Very much like the "carfree day" (22th of September) which has been held for a decade or so, meanwhile in entire Europe, and which is completely unheeded by 99,9 per cent of all motorists.
There were four really carfree november sundays in Germany during the 1973 oil crisis. I loved skating on the roads in that november. Lots of people went out in these foggy, cold days strolling on the car lanes.
I would like to see a carfree sunday once a month, europe-wide preferably. It would be great fun especially during the summer and it would save a lot of CO2.
Hi gang, I have been on vacation for a couple of weeks. I missed all the great posts on TOD. I got in late last night and this morning I tried to catch up on a few things I had missed. Glad I caught Nate Hagen’s great article: “Climate Change, Saber Toot Tigers and Devaluing the Future.” It was the best thing I have read on TOD in months. And I must say that I agree with Nate on every point he brought up. And I must take issue with some of those who disagreed with Nate. But I will limit myself to just one poster, Science Ed Guy. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2243/162793
This was a great post by Science Ed Guy, the kind I really enjoy reading, but Ed has simply been misinformed. Ed seems to believe that before the arrival of Columbus to the New World, Native Americans lived in perfect harmony in some kind of sustainable utopia. In fact, he seems to think that this was the case in most of the world.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Warfare, starvation and misery have always been the norm, not just on the islands but everywhere else in the world as well. In fact the very reason the very remote islands of the Pacific were occupied in the first place was because of warfare, starvation and misery. When the islands became so overpopulated that they could no longer support the population, a certain segment of the population were put on outrigger canoes to find a new place to live. And it is highly likely that only a tiny fraction were successful in find an Easter Island or a Hawaiian Island group. The vast majority of those putting out to sea probably perished at sea.
In the islands and on every mainland around the world, malnutrition was the norm. Here is George Huppert describing “Life After the Black Death” in a small French town called Sennely:
A great book pointing out that this was also the case for Native Americans as well as hunter-gatherer tribes everywhere in the world is “Constant Battles” by Steven LeBlanc. Starvation in complex societies was a way of controlling the population:
And from “Against the Grain” by Richard Manning:
But all this seems so foreign to modern day society. And because it is so horrific, many deny that it ever happened and certainly deny that it can ever happen again. But is because of this great abundance of energy, supplying in turn a great abundance of food, that the population has exploded. But it cannot possibly last. There are limits.
Ron Patterson
I really doubt this. If you get a chance, check out the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunter-Gatherers. It's a recent publication and contains the latest thinking.
Most of pre-Columbus North America was controlled by agrarian groups whose lives may indeed have been more miserable on average than hunter-gatherers or our own.
But, at least for hunter-gatherers, the notion of "primitive" life being "nasty, brutish, and short" has long been put to rest.
Asebius, please quote a few passages from this book that states that historically hunter-gatherers were not prone to warfare but lived in peaceful and sustainable groups. I don't think there is any historical evidence to support such a theory.
The book cover shows a modern day hunter-gatherer sorting berries on a woven blanket. The table of contents show this to be a book of essays by many authors on primarily modern day hunter-gatherers.
Modern day hunter-gatherers can usually be divided into two categories, those who have been influenced and changed by modern day innovations and those that have not been so influenced.
The former include the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, the Aboriginal Australians, the Inuit Eskimos and a few others. These people have been so greatly influenced by modern weapons and culture that they bear only a vague resemblance of their former tribes. The Inuit for instance, use rifles to hunt seals and have outboard motors on their boats. Studying these people today tells us almost nothing about how they lived in the past.
The latter group includes the Yanomama Indians of the Amazon and several tribes still at war with each other in New Guinea. The Yanomama often raid other tribes and kill even the children of that tribe. In New Guinea we find the same thing along with cannibalism.
In the past warfare was a way of life among the !Kung, the Australian Abroginals, the New Guinea tribesmen and all other hunter-gatherers around the world. The evidence supports this and I think the book you quoted will also support this. The book you refer to is called the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunter-Gatherers. Well, here is an article based upon the work of Cambridge Archaeological Journal and I would bet that they both agree. But since the book you reference is a book of essays by many authors, I am sure you can find one or two who still doubt the "Constant Battles" of the hunter-gatherer past. For instance some still maintain that all the evidence is symbolic. From the first URL below:
Such evidence is however found all over Australia as well as around the world.
“Seeds of warfare precede agriculture - war among hunter-gatherers”
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_n1_v147/ai_16415819
The above is a fantastic and very short article. And here is an even better article describing the almost constant warfare among the hunter-gathers of New Guinea.
http://www.climatechange.umaine.edu/Research/projects/NewGuinea.html
Ron Patterson
The current view is definitely *not* that hunter-gatherers were warfare-free or non-violent. But, at the same time, the current view is that warfare and misery were by no means constant or even present in many areas.
Darwinian wrote:
The Yanomama are agrarians in many ways and the warlike Papua New Guinea tribes are very agrarian.
I'm very partial to the thesis that the introduction of agriculture in any form greatly increases the likelihood of endemic warfare and misery. For instance: high population densities (sustainable only by agriculture) and warfare go hand in hand for much of human history.
The current view? And just who, or what group of people hold the authentic "current view?" Of course no tribe or group of people are constantly at war. That would be impossible. War is something that happened only when circumstances dictated. And it was dictated whenever the population of an area overrun its resources.
Warfare, in both our agrarian past and our hunter-gatherer past was, in the vast majority of cases, brought on by food scarcity. If there were never a scarcity of food or resources, it is highly likely that there would never be warfare. But since it is our nature to multiply to the very limit of our existance, we have warfare. But the evidence suggest that warfare, in the past, has been far more frequent than you suspect Asebius:
Ron Patterson
Ron,
Here's a link to the intro to The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers.
http://assets.cambridge.org/97805215/71098/sample/9780521571098ws.pdf
They don't really quarrel with your prevalence of warfare thesis. (Ember and Dival which Pinker refers to in your quote, are cited) They do quarrel with the idea that hunter-gatherers generally lived constantly on the edge of survival, experienced their lives as miserable, and found food hard to get.
See page 10 of the pdf (the first page of the intro) and see also page 14, the section entitled "Divergences".
If all this seems like a contradiction, the answer may lie in the form of warfare practiced. i.e. How sport-like was it? How often did casualties occur?
The authors of the encyclopedia intro also talk about how warfare seems to have been sparked and intensified by the stresses of colonial presence.
Asebius, thanks for the reference. I found it very interesting. Of course no one claims that hunter-gatherers lived in a constant state of misery and starvation. Prehistoric Homo sapiens suffered from the same “feast to famine” cycle that has plagued all other species since life evolved.
The intro to “The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers” was a great read but I recognized it as basically Boasina in nature. I don’t know if you are aware of it but Franz Boas, and his disciples which include Ruth Benedict, A.L. Kroeber, Leslie White, Robert Lowie, Margaret Mead and at least half a dozen other noted anthropologists of the early twentieth century, have been largely discredited except in a few anthropological circles that still hold tight to the tabula rasa theory. But even in most anthropological circles Boas disciples are becoming scarce. Steven Pinker laid waste to the theory in “The Blank Slate”.
The Boasian school of anthropology states that culture is everything and genes are nothing. War is culturally driven; the environment can be sustained or destroyed depending upon the culture of the tribe living in it and so on. Sociobiologists or those better known as Evolutionary Psychologists, hold a different view.
Basically it is a human universal that when people get hungry, very hungry, there is little they will not do to obtain the food necessary for their survival and the survival of their offspring. And this includes going to war with their neighboring tribe if this is what it takes. And because of the nature of nature, there have always been times of famine. Which means, that in virtually every hunter-gatherer group, there have been times of warfare.
Ron Patterson
Ron,
I'm aware of that debate and have read Pinker's Blank Slate. Own it in fact. I don't dispute the existence of universals among human collectives.
However, the universals that you are suggesting in this thread go way beyond his position. (ex "it is our nature to multiply to the very limit of our existance"). You won't find them in his book. That is Malthus, not Pinker.
Time doesn't permit me to get into this now. We'll pick it up later.
A quotation from page 1 of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers:
on page 5, however, the issue of violence is discussed and the authors talk about the need...
Emphasis in the original for both quotes.
I am reminded of the Mongols under Genghis Khan. Not agrarian, not starving.
Alan
100% agreed. Not just increased population density, but the increased investment in the land. That makes it a lot harder to walk away from conflict.
And you are correct: the Yanomamo are not hunter-gatherers. They are a horticultural society.
Two books come to mind. One is 1491 by Charles Mann, the second "Mayflower" by Nathaniel Philbrick. Both of these books document the mistaken assumptions of the early permanent european settlers in the Americas in the 1600's. They did arrive on a continent with more than enough to go around. They assumed it was a land of plenty and this helped them initially to justify their presence in someone else's land. There was more than enough to support the indians as well as the europeans, or so it seemed. THis phenomenon was not the norm before 1491, however. The indian population along the east coast had been decreased by 50 to 90% due to measles, influenza and small pox in the generation before the arrival of the pilgrims and others whose writings became the history of america. Massasoit had bailed out the pilgrims over and over again only bc/ he needed their help against other tribes after losing 90% of his men in the few years before the pilgrims arrived. The pilgrims were aware that a large percentage of the native population had just died, but they were blissfully unaware of europe's role in the pandemic deaths, and also failed to connect the dots as to why the land seemed so plentiful.
Science Ed Guy surmised that pre-columbus native americans were peaceful and enlightened because some iriquois cheifs claimed to make decisions based on the effects to the 7th generation distant. Thus, an example of a society not discounting future consequences.
He goes on then:
"Can you imagine anyone considering the impact of their decisions on the seventh generation? This idea seemed impossible to me when I first thought about it. But then I considered what the discourse might be like in that society, and I realized that if everyone talked that way regularly, then they might have gotten pretty good at seven-generations-later considerations."
As rare as that would be today even with our enlightenment and full bellies, I could easily imagine that it was much rarer in pre-historic societies, hunter gatherer or agrarian.
Science Ed Guy concludes:
"....I don't want to blame it on human nature. I instead want to blame it on our culture that was already pathological a century or two or three ago when white men were wiping out the indigenous peoples who had so much wisdom."
I would argue that our society, the society of hunter gatherers, and indeed most societies through antiquity, outside of perhaps some buddhist monks have been pathological BECAUSE of human nature.
The pathology of both the europeans and native americans at first contact is well documented by the Cabeza De Vaca narrative.
http://www.library.txstate.edu/swwc/cdv/
In response to Ron's mentioning of the Inuit Eskimos, there is a fantastic documentation of their life circa 1922 in the DVD Nanook of the North.
I believe that one of the more definitive compilations of the hunter-gatherer adaptation is provided in Lee and DeVore's (1968) "Man the Hunter." One of the main conclusions of the book is that hunter-gatherers to not live near the edge of starvation, exhibit greater health, and enjoy more leisure time than agricultural societies.
Hunting and gathering societies cover a wide range of adaptations and environments, both prehistorically and those known from European contact, and it is probably unwise to generalize from isolated examples. Because archaeologists have focused much research on the great transitions, the record is probably biased in favor of hunter-gatherers under stress, such as toward the end of the last ice age. Or, among hunting and gathering societies pressed into marginal habitats, such as following the expansion of early Neolithic cultures into western Europe.
So, one might ask in general, if hunter-gatherers are able to maintain population numbers which are generally stable, or with extremely low growth measured over immense periods of time, how is this possible? Even including a variety of documented biological processes, the practice of infanticide may have been prevalent throughout time.
As a further note, the great anthropologist Marvin Harris has a particularly engaging view of the sweep of human history in his book, "Cannibals and Kings" (1977). It's interesting that he cites the work of Hubbert in his last chapter and is pessimistic, to say the least, about the transition away from fossil fuels. If nothing else, it is a great read.
Probably, but also keep in mind that the practice of long breastfeeding (up to the age of five) and constant exercise (from walking all day) depressed the birth rate. Births were likely naturally spaced 3-5 years apart, rather than every year as among sedentary peoples. Women could not carry more than one child at a time, and there were no strollers back then, so spacing childbirth so that the older child was walking before the next one came along was important.
And birth control was not necessarily infanticide back then. There are other methods - including (gasp!) abstinence. It's inconceivable to the average American, but there were many cultures where men were expected to observe post-partum sex taboos. They may go four or five years without sex after a baby is born. Commonly, the reason given is for the health of the mother. IIRC, the Dani of New Guinea are one example. Anthropologists simply could not believe that they really did that, and staked out the huts at night, expecting to find a lot of sneaking around. There wasn't any.
Parts of this documentary were staged and are not accurate reflections of Inuit way of life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanook_of_the_North