Michael Zenker, a global gas analyst with Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said natural gas reserves around the world and in America would be the only energy resource that could fill the gap between supply and consumer demand anytime soon.

He warned that not tapping world supplies in places like Indonesia, Yemen, Qatar, Algeria and Russia, or building infrastructure like coastal liquefied natural gas terminals, could prove disastrous for the American economy.

"We were lucky this winter," Zenker said. If it was colder around the country, "we would not have had enough gas supply to meet industrial demand."

...Chris McGill, an analyst for the American Gas Association representing petroleum distributors at the meeting, said an increase in the supply of natural gas is probably not coming anytime soon, and that no other resource is in a position to make up the difference.

"LNG is plan A," McGill said. "There is no plan B."

But my idea for a poll is this? What is your view of the net result of Peak Oil. 5 categories ranging from no effect to stone age by 2025. Then what time frame do you envision the net result happening. 5 categories of time frames for that. Then make a nice little matrix of the two.

I just think it would be interesting to see where everyone falls out in the matrix. What's everyone think?

He said:

Yet raise your eyes from the day-to-day chatter, and the market is more stable than it has been for a long time. The price won't collapse, and it won't soar either. There is nothing trickier than calling the top of a bull market. For oil, however, this looks like it.

For Immediate Release

Date of Release:  Feb. 14, 2006

From:  Willits Economic LocaLization (WELL)

Contact:  Spring Senerchia, 707-459-1256; spring@redinet.org

Subject:  Regional Localization Networking Conference

Improving and coordinating the efforts of groups working towards sustainable, localized economies is the focus of a conference to be held in Willits, CA from April 7-9, 2006.  

The conference aims to share best practices on group organization and activities, develop consistent messages for the public, politicians and business leaders, and foster on-going communication among localization practitioners.  A Saturday evening presentation by David A. Schaller, Sustainable Development Coordinator of the US Environmental Protection Agency is included in the weekend activities.

The "relocalization" movement is especially active in Northern California and Oregon (see:  http://postcarbon.org/_tmp_maps/NorthAmericaOutpostsImageMap.html), and while anyone is welcome to register, preference is given to attendees from this region.  Each local group is encouraged to send one application form with a list of delegates to the conference.  These forms are available at:  http://www.willitseconomiclocalization.org/RLNC.pdf

Willits Economic LocaLization (WELL) sponsors this event.  WELL's mission is to foster the creation of a sustainable economy based on local resources.  (See:  www.willitseconomiclocalization.org).

Posted on Energy Bulletin - "The world has already passed the point of no return for climate change, and civilisation as we know it is now unlikely to survive, according to James Lovelock"
http://www.energybulletin.net/12126.html

His book Revenge of Gaia is not due for publication in N. America for a month or two, so I suppose that has something to do with it. Still, his views have huge implications for a post-peak-oil society - especially since some think we're going to have to rely on coal for a myriad of uses for a time. Imagine the additional environmental havoc! Anyone read the above article yet? Thoughts? It's brought back that acute sinking feeling in my heart and stomach that I carried around after I found out about PO...I guess I got used to it. My brother has 3 little kids and it gives me shivers to think about what their adulthood will be like. What my "golden years" will be like...

http://www.emagazine.com/view/?3066

Well, except maybe the chickens.  Bird flu, y'know.  ;-)

Seriously, it seems like a reasonable way to cover your bets, without spending too much money.  If the energy crunch doesn't start to bite for 50 years, you haven't given up your job, etc.  If the zombie hoards are roaming within five years, well, at least you have neighbors to help you defend your vegetable patch.  :-/

Mexican oil output could drop sharply - report

High prices have bolstered investment that will lead to a 2.2 million-barrel-a-day increase in the amount of oil that can be produced, the Paris-based International Energy Agency said. Global consumption will rise 1.78 million barrels a day. Prices plunged this week after the Energy Department said U.S. oil and fuel inventories were above normal for this time of year.

``The IEA report confirms the bearish sentiment in the market,'' said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research in Winchester, Massachusetts. ``Inventories are more than adequate, but geopolitical worries have been supporting prices. We haven't heard anything inflammatory from Iran's president recently.''

With booming growth in China and India absorbing oil, attention has been focused on the effect of rising demand in pushing up oil prices. The Group of 8, a club of the world's richest capitalist democracies and Russia, meeting Saturday in an icy, mist-covered Moscow, focused instead on the extremely tight supply around the world.

"We're all concerned about the risk of rising energy prices and what they do to global growth," John W. Snow, the United States treasury secretary, said after the meeting at a hotel....

Oil-importing countries, including the United States, would like to see producing nations increase supplies on world markets, easing prices even as China and other quickly developing economies burn more oil.

A recent jump in Russian oil production -- by 10 percent or more a year at some companies -- compensated for growth in Chinese demand early this decade. But overall supply is expected to grow only about 2 percent next year.

I ask Shaw's question. Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

http://macroblog.typepad.com/macroblog/2006/02/betting_on_ben_.html

and predict that the Fed, under new chairman Ben Bernanke, will continue to raise rates a quarter point at each of its next two meetings. This is a little more "hawkish" behavior than had previously been expected, when the Fed was thought likely to level off after maybe another raise.

JDH at Econbrowser is among those who fear that the Fed is going too far too fast, and that its inflation-fighting zeal is only going to succeed in sending the economy into recession. Supposedly though Bernanke means to quell worries that he will be too soft on inflation by putting on a show of toughness right off the bat.

If things go bad as JDH fears, a U.S. slowdown would likely impact the rest of the world as American imports are a major economic driver these days. This could lead to a scenario with a softening of oil demand and a drop in prices over the next couple of years.

The Daily Show is anchored by John Stewart, also known as a fake news anchor.  The show is meant for comedy...it is shown on the Comedy Channel.  But, the show has much "real" news at the same time.

Rick

Unfortunately people also use the terms confusingly to indicate actual amounts bought and sold during some period. People will say that oil demand last year grew by x percent, a decrease from growth the previous year. But that's not correct. You can't speak of demand that way. A better term would be "consumption". You can say that oil consumed last year grew by x%, but you can't look at the data and say what demand was. Demand by its nature involves a range of possible outcomes.

It is better to think of supply and demand as forces that tug on prices, than as amounts. When demand is high, that pushes prices upward. When supply is high, that pushes prices downward. And vice versa, low demand draws prices down and low supply draws prices upward. Think of the price as a weight suspended with springs above and below it, where the springs are supply and demand. Stronger demand raises the price while greater supply lowers it.

If we think of supply and demand in this way, then it makes sense to say things like that demand next year will grow over this year, while supply will grow but not as much. And this allows us to understand some paradoxical conditions. Demand could grow from one year to the next, but consumption could fall, if supply were tight. The common usage of saying "demand" as a synomym for "consumption" makes it impossible even to describe this situation!

I hope people will bear this in mind when they read economic analyses and reports. Supply and demand are forces that affect price. But when we are looking at actual amounts in the past, that's not supply and demand, that's production and consumption. Keeping this distinction in mind makes it easier to think clearly about what is happening.

"We have 4 billion barrels in strategic stocks," Claude Mandil told Dow Jones Newswires. Even taking account lower estimates, he said, the IEA could keep oil supplies flowing for a year and a half.

The IEA, the Paris-based energy watchdog, has reported falling demand because of high costs of crude.

*** Does anyone has any comment it?

We spend our time pouring over trends, prices, reserves, gold prices et al, employing MathLab, Fibonacci numbers and other sophisticated tools, and expousing wisdom to each other about the future. We kind of think we are getting a handle on it.

On this Valentine's day however - let's spare a thought for those poor hapless souls living in a basement somewhere, whose job it is to manipulate this economy from day to day. Think about having to wake up, and decide (a) how much SPR oil to dump on the market today (or not), (b) which soundbyte to let CNN have to explain the overnight fall in the gold price(which you engineered yesterday afternoon), (c) talk to Mr Snow's speachwriter about a "strong dollar statement" somewhere, release REPO money to the preferred banks with which to buy assets today,  and so on and so on. And to do this day after day, week after week. Talk about a burden.

So to those of you think it is hard to understand this mess we found ourselves in, imagine how hard it is having to invent it! To those that toil to guide the invisible hand of the market, I say thank you.

http://dailyreckoning.com/Issues/2006/DRUS021406.html

Has there been any discussion on the Olduvai Update?  I have been away...

==AC

While I'm here, were are the women? I get the distinct impression that TOD is almost exclusively male dominated at present. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Is this healthy? Aren't women half the world? Don't women really need to hear about all this? After all they traditionally nuture our children, organize our families, and generally, historically, destroy far less than men.

Also, what happens to culture and the arts post peak? All those wonderful, evocative songs by Brian Wilson and Bruce Spingsteen and others. Songs about cars and girls. Do they all go the same way as old folk songs about fishing for herring and threshing? Will anyone even want to hear or sing them? Will Bruce and Brian's song be frowned opon and forebidden? Maybe the old songs from our pre-industrial past will return in our post-industrial future?

I think one can get "lost" at times in the forest of numbers, charts, modelling, and all the rest of it. It can at first appear almost overwhelming to most people I'm sure. Peak Oil is almost like going back to school - a school that only teaches math! Not that I don't have respect for scientific discipline and methodolgy. My respect is actually growing especially after TOD. I just think scientist need to become far more social active. I mean they have the knowledge and people have to be told. We should all emulate Hubbert in this respect. There's no point have a career if we don't have a society.

My idea for this thread was inspired by the recent post dealing with the problem of how one contacts and attempts to start a dialogue with "ordinary people" about Peak Oil and it's consequences. I have an idea that may be of some help/relevance, give us clues, or remind us of things we've foregotten as we've all become emmersed in this  this amazing and let's face it, frightening subject. If we think about how we first become aware and got involved, maybe there are useful lessons to be learned about how to approach others and spread the word? Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong oil rig, but who knows? I should add that once I start writing I don't know when to stop. It's a drawback from writing way too much, sorry. Anyway, my idea is as follows; How did each one of us, as indviduals come get involved in Peak Oil in the first place? How did we react to the news? I'll briefly summerise my entry into this area, if I may, to start the ball rolling?

About a year and a half ago I was doing some research for a politial thriller I was plannning to write dealing with the massive corruption and murky politics surrounding the sale of arms to Saudia Arabia. I thought it would be a challenge for me and interesting for readers to learn something about Saudi Arabia at the same time as ripping yarn unfolded. There was so much incredible material. The book was righting itself. My writing desk was covered with books and notes. Suddenly I heard a Suadi Prince on the radio, he was complaining about Americans criticizing his country for the not producing enough oil to satisfy American demand. He said it wasn't their fault. The problem was not in Saudi, but in the United States. Refinery capacity was simply too low. There was a bottle-neck and the true source of the problem. Saudi could produce all the oil the Americans wanted, for as long as the American could pay for it. I thought this was interesting. It almost seemed like a paradox. I was confused. Was it true? Why hadn't the Amrican built more refinery capacity? I started to think a lot about this and put my pen down. A few days later, whilst making dinner I was listening to a BBC radio broadcast about the problems facing small, specialized companies in globalised economy, there was a short interview with a company based in Canterbury in Southern England. This small company dealt exclusively with the oil industry, finding and providing oil companies with whatever they needed, be it men or materials and as quickly as possible, anywhere in the world. For some reason the interviewee started talking about American refinery capacity! Basically he said that the American oil companies hadn't built any new refineries because they knew there wasn't the extra oil available to make it worth their while, especially from Saudi Arabia. One doesn't build a refinary to refine air, I think he said. The journalist doing the interview didn't seem very interested in this startling statement, but it really interested me! This small British company was apparantly agreeing and contradicting the Suadi prince at the same time. Couldn't this mean that Saudi reserves were smaller than the prince had said? Was it really true that the oil companies knew there was far less oil out there than they said in public? If they knew this why did't the American politicians know too? If they did, infact, know, why hadn't they told the American people? I had so many questions and so few answers. Sorry for the cliche. It was frustrating for me. By now I began to think that the arms story was less interesting than the oil story? Surely the core of my thriller should really be the secret information about the true state of Saudi oil production and reserve levels. This information was priceless and of enormous strategic importance and clearly not only for Saudi Arabia. This information was worth killing for. Suddenly the American invasion of Iraq seemed less like madness and more like piracy. This could be on hell of good story. But needed to learn a lot more about oil!

A few days later I stumbled into The Oil Drum and my troubles really started. What I learned on TOD and other sites shocked me, and fascinated me in equal measure. Hubbert's Peak, Die-off, The Long Emergency, and all the rest of it, on and on and on. It's all pretty mind-boggling. The potential consequences for our civilization kind of knocked me of track for weeks. I could think of nothing else, and I was reading everything availble about the subject, in book form and on the net. I used to think that I had an almost infinite capacity to absorb and understand massive ammounts information when I was interested in a subject. I didn't know what being tired was. As a child I was able to reading two books at the same time, while looking up at the television and listening to the radio. After all, I reasoned, life is short and there is so much to learn and understand. Who needs to sleep? I could sleep when I was dead. But, even I started to reach overload after a few weeks reading about Peak Oil for fourteen hours a day. It was all too much.

I felt like I had fallen through a hole in the fabric of reality and entered a parallel universe. There was just so much to think about. I mean this story was absolutely enormous, almost nothing compares to it in my opinion. Only two other stories seemed of greater or equal significance. The second coming of Jesus Christ or an alien spaceship landing on the Whitehouse lawn! (I've since added a third story. That we may have damaged the Earth's climate beyond repair with resulting catastrophic consequences, but that story will have wait.) But how could such a massive story remain so relatively unknown? Were all the journalists asleep? It was baffling. Why wasn't the mainsteam media full of this stuff? Unfortunately, it appears the mainstream media isn't there to "inform". It's there to "entertain" and ultimately to "control" us. It's the circus in the centre of Rome and we're about to run out of bread.

That's more or less how I came to learn about Peak Oil. I realize it's not the route most of the rest of you took, but it's perhaps illuminating all the same. Do we really need a rockstar to start talking about Peak Oil? Do we need Bono to get involved? I don't see it happening anytime soon, because there not enough charity involved.

Finally, I'd like to say how grateful I am to the getlemen who provide and maintain the core of this site. You are doing a first-class job of informing the rest of us about this fascinating and terrible subject. Also there are so many other really intelligent, smart, and creative people who contribute to TOD, at times one feels almost honoured to read their stuff. It's inspiring and also a little sad that our spicies is capable of so much intelligence and so much stupidity at the same time. It would be such a tragic waste to see our civilization fall apart when it really doesn't have to. Sometimes TOD is almost like being part of a "group-mind" or "braintrust", where concepts, ideas and information are knocked around and examined from many perspectives and new connections are made all the time. There is always somebody who knows something about a subject and adds something useful to the debate and standards are very high. I really feel at home on TOD. Though after this who knows? Maybe I'll go back into the shadows again pulling my tail behind me.  

To finish I'll touch on a subject that relates to everything else and especially the question of "What is to be done?" as Lenin once said. Recently we've been moving more and more in the direction of politics, or is that just my impression? This is an inevitable development, because the political consequences of PO are staggering. I know many people are turned-off by politics, but what's the alternative? We can't ingnore politics, like we can't ignore the social and economic consequences of PO, right? My problem is, that of the time scale involved in political change in a country like the U.S. I don't live in the United States, but I love American culture and Americans and have followed the American political scene since I was a child. The kind of change we're talking about doesn't happen overnight. It seems to take a frustratingly long time. But given the size of the problem of Peak Oil and the speed with which it appears to be coming at us, do we have time for plodding "Reform". Don't we need something more dynamic and quicker. I think I may be talking about the need for a kind of "Revolution". I think we need a kind of "revolution" in the organization of our political system. Personally, I would like to see society radically transformed, with a far, far, more democracy in all levels of society. With "power", also economic power, far more equally distributed than at present. I don't want to call it "socialism", but rather "citizens democracy" based on a huge redistribution of wealth. But what are the realistic chances of such radical change happening on a relevant timescale in relation to Peak Oil? Unfortunately, I think we're actually moving in the wrong direction and at some speed. The signs are not good. Iraq is just the beginning. Is Iran next on the list? And what about China? Will the United States really accept the rise of China to rival superpower status without war? Britain, after all spent a century fighting first France and then Germany. I really don't want to sound unduly pessimistic, because I'm not a pessimistic person. Temprementally, I'm an optimist, otherwise I wouldn't bother to be here boring you all like this. I just have lots of pessimistic thoughts. I really wish I thought we were going to get through the transistion period in reasonable shape, but I have my doubts. If we look to history as some sort of guide. After all, we have a lot more information about the past than about the future, the lessons are bleak, and I'm sorry to say this. Intelligent, creative, brave, and highly educated people, some of them actually even had a lot of power, far more than the average TOD member, knew what reforms were required in France, Russia, and imperial Rome and Spain. Unfortunately, they did not succeed in successfully reforming society before it was too late and meltdown/decline/revolution happened. So knowing the truth and being right, often is just not enough to avert disaster. I only mention this in order to indicate the scale of the political challanges we face. We need to substantially re-organize our political culture and then take on the task of changing society and our economic system. Unfortunately, History is often a bitch.

I'm shocked - shocked I tell you!  And here I thought the big oil companies were models of capitalist free market prowess.  Captains of industry navigating the troubles waters of the market, taking risks, winning and losing as the chips fall.  Now I find there are mere crony capitalists - more pigs feeding at the public trough.  Sigh. Another bubble burst.

Shall we talk about those profits they "earned" again?