Saturday open thread
Posted by Yankee on February 18, 2006 - 12:22pm
Things are not looking good in Nigeria (also pointed out by Leanan):
Armed militants carried out a wave of attacks across Nigeria's troubled Niger delta on Saturday, blowing up oil and gas pipelines and seizing nine foreign oil workers.[editor's note, by Prof. Goose]Also, please check out this interview with Richard Heinberg and JH Kunstler with Jim Puplava over at FinancialSense (it's about an hour). I found it to be a good "primer interview" that you can send to people who might be inclined to listen. (Plus, there's a pretty cool plug in there regarding TOD by Heinberg about ten minutes from the end. Thanks for that, Richard.)
[editor's note, by Prof. Goose]And, after a night of -13F temps, Denver has initiated rolling blackouts. Sweet.
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http://www.financialsense.com/Experts/roundtable/021806.html
[There's not much new in this discussion to the PO aware, but it is interesting to hear Heinberg and Kunstler together in the same discussion. Even when they agree, their style differences are notable, to put it mildly.]
Aside from the nice words about TOD, it's a good primer interview as well...one of those you send to the people who can listen...
MIA: any acknowledgement that when crude prices jump on the start of public awareness of PO, as they will, it will cause enough economic contraction world wide to slow demand for oil substantially. Once demand slows, crude prices will temporarily drop, even after PO, but the scare should be enough to propel the adjustment process (more hybrids, less wasteful use of oil, more nuclear, solar, wind, etc.) Of course, eventually world economies will start growing again and quickly crude prices will spike even higher, and the whole recession, adjustment process will begin again. The net result of all this is that the world as a whole will have a lot more time to adjust to PO than is contemplated in this discussion.
Skipped over: the very important discussion of regional hegemony, bilateral deals, and production cutbacks by exporting countries to conserve their resources. These trends, as noted, will exacerbate the effects of PO (opposite to the effects of economic contractions discussed above). While this part of the discussion was exactly on target, I think, it failed to emphasize the early manifestations that we are seeing almost every week whereby China in particular and India less so are making bi-lateral deals that reduce the supply side of the global "free market" in crude. This is the future staring us in the face from headlines in our papers nearly every day. It is truly mind-boggling that such clear indicators of the direction of the future can be either misunderstood or ignored by virtually every single American (and European, so far as I know) political "leader".
Boris
London
It shows the danger of programme producers trying to obtain 'balance'. Without care niether side of the argument gets well put.
Thanks
Delta Farm Press is a publication for farmers, which usually prints articles about corn prices, soybean rust, farm subsidies, etc. But high fuel prices have been so brutal on farmers, they're now covering Kuwait's reserves.
http://www.deere.com/en_US/ProductCatalog/FR/category/FR_TRACTORS.html (not the utility tractors)
Forage choppers and combines are even higher hp:
http://www.deere.com/en_US/ProductCatalog/FR/series/spfh_forage_harvesters.html
In typical use, a tractor burns about 4.4 gallons of diesel per hour per 100 Hp in size. Then there is the cost of fertilzer, irrigation power, crop drying costs, transportation to market and so on. Historically 40% of the on-farm costs for alfalfa, a major feed crop for cows, is the direct or indirect cost of energy. For milk production the cost of feed is about half the input costs. The increasing production of biofuels displaces the production of either human or animal food, reducing their supply and thus increasing their prices as inputs. IMO, increasing energy prices are a double whammy for food agriculture (animal or human) and ultimately the cost of food.
Matt Stockton of the West Central Extension Center gave a presentation at an ag conference last week. He said, "There is no bigger headline ... than where our energy costs are going for diesel fuel and fertilizer."
I'm inclined to agree. Along with transportation, agriculture is the industry most dependent on petroleum. It will be difficult to maintain our current levels of production, let alone grow biofuel crops.
This year's growing season may well cause a real spike in the cost of food.
Remember, the spike in oil prices occurred after the last planting and growing season. This year, farmers see real hikes in all sorts of products necessary for growing. There is a direct correlation, the article says, between the cost of these products and the cost of oil and natural gas.
Perhaps because economists are not farmers, they have overlooked a real inflationary cause that will bite later this year.
I wonder what kind of demand destruction is going to occur here? Cut down on the calories?
My parents took me to a French restaurant over the holidays. They are light eaters, so I was really surprised when they ordered an appetizer, entree, and desert, and insisted we all do the same. In most restaurants, I can't finish the entree, let alone apps and desert. But they said portions were French-sized at this restaurant, and sure enough - you really could eat appetizers, entree, and desert. And walk out not feeling stuffed.
In any case, smaller portions would be the easiest way to deal with higher food prices. People get upset if you raise prices, but if the price is the same and there's a few less fries in the bag, they may not notice. Or if they do notice, they won't get too upset.
Other issues, driving and not walking a few blocks.
Living in NYC requires quite a bit of walking and hence obesity is lower as well as diabetes.
Oddly, New Orleans, with the best food in the world, also has high obesity but not so high diabetes. A bit of exercise goes a long way, even if eating a roast beef po-boy :-)
I was shocked during my summer evacuation just how much HIGHLY processed food clogs the supermarket and how little basic foods.
I am used to a large selection of rice types, frozen and fresh vegetables and a limited selection of frozen pizza and hot pockets, gourmet popcorn, etc. I found the reverse in the rest of America.
I have gained 20 lbs since moving to New Orleans, but it was GREAT tasting, well prepared food, not junk. Quite frankly worth any reduction in lifespan. Sex, laughter and good food are the primal pleasures of life. McDonalds is not.
Of course, it didn't come close to the Icelandic fish, soups, bread and milk (where do they get it and why is it so good?) that we ate most of the time...
The only benefit to this was that at least I always knew where I could find a restroom. lol.
The most common Swedish fast food is a fairly thin pizza with white cabbage salad with a mild sweet and sour taste and black pepper. Any place with a few hundred houses or more have a pizza baker that almost allways is run by an immigrant selling pizza and often kebab and fairly often cheap lager. 99% of the pizza owens run on electricity.
The first fast food that became common is the hot dog, it is still popular but has been complemented with hamburgers. There are probably more independent hamburger friers then McD, Burger King and Max (A local chain that is very Swedish in a 100% american way, good burgers made with a recipie more like swedish meatballs. ) Sushi is becomming very popular, probably due to the sweet and sour taste familiar from pickled herring.
We have as usual imported most american things including critizism of McDonalds. We have had and still have some young left wingnut green vegans who even burned down one McDonalds in my town a few years ago. This resulted in some more policework and people basically waiting for them to grow up. This seem to work but the next generation of left wingnuts seem to become extreme feminists. It is probably a phase in their lives some people go thru. :-) A need to hate. :-(
Myself I used to buy a McD hamburger of cup of cofee about two times each week untill they stopped serving bicyclists at the drive in a few meter from the main bicycle road to the university.
The butter and skyr are special as well).
The cows are a historic breed (no imported bulls/semen allowed) that has lower than typical milk production and they feed on grass and herbs )fresh 1/2 the year, hay the rest). The herbs add something to the milk (I have noticed subtle differences, I assume based on diet).
And the pylsur ! Their hot dogs (think mutton :-)
Do the Kiwis make sheep based hot dogs ?
I have to disagree - the reason for American obesity is NOT a surplus of food - it is the type of food that we are eating - its the silly low-carbohydrate diet that has caused the problem - grains, potatoes, breads, pastas, pastries and sugar -- people eating a low-carbohydrate diet have to eat MORE in order to be "filled" - and being thinner is NOT a sign of good health ...
Thanks
It's not what we eat that matters. It's how much. The food is highly processed, which makes it more likely we'll eat it. (People will eat more potato chips than they will boiled potatoes.) But it's the portion size that counts. French food isn't exactly known for its health value, after all.
There have been studies done of potion sizes in the U.S., and they've gotten immense over the past 50 years. McDonald's used to serve just hamburgers, what would be a very small drink now, and small fries. Now few except children order the hamburgers; instead, they get QuarterPounders, BigMacs, etc. The smallest drink is bigger than the one they used to sell, so is the smallest fries. They aren't the only ones, either. CocaCola used to sell 5 oz. bottles of Coke. Now cans are 16 oz., bottles are 20 oz., and 64 oz. or larger cups are common on fast food and convenience stores. Bagels are more than twice as large as they used to be, and muffins are something like five times as big. Even the standard dinner plate has gotten larger.
When I look round an american diner the ones that are eating the two plate meals are the grossly fat ones. The obesity problem is a combination of three main factors: sedentary lifestyle, near unlimited access to food, poor choice of food.
For most people the problem can be solved by awareness and willpower, should they choose. Though peak oil and recession may come to the rescue of the uninformed and weak willed soon enough.
Being excessively thin or excessively fat are both signs of ill health, for maybe 70% of americans being thinner would be a sign of better health, LOL.
"Willbros Group Inc. said the hostages were taken from a boat that was on contract for Shell, Nigeria's top international oil producer. The attacks sparked a fire at the Forcados terminal, which has a capacity of 400,000 barrels a day, and an explosion at the Chanomi pipeline, Shell spokesman Don Boham said.
``It could be that it shuts down all of Shell's onshore operations in Nigeria,'' Simon Wardell, an analyst in London at Global Insight, said in an interview today. ``The markets are going to discount Nigerian production in the price of oil.''
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000006&sid=agaxJWl1PfHU&refer=home"
If that's true, $60 a barrel is going to look like a bargain.
There are rumors that Shell is going to pull out of Nigeria entirely.
I didn't think Nigeria was that big a deal, but the news out of there is getting worse and worse. Plus there's the wicked cold snap in the U.S., and the fact that oil prices usually start rising around now. February is typically a low point for oil.
Sooner or later there will be total disruptions greater than this due to simple probability, it would be crazy to think otherwise ;)
Wasn't the food for oil program created along these lines?
We now know that the UN is not the enity to do so; so would the US, China or India be given the green light to do so; as in this case?
Wondering ...
It did some good things and some bad things. It developed order and infrastructure, it taught english and cricket. It exploited resources and labour, but provided markets and trade routes. It attempted to impose its religion and values where it could but mostly pragmatically accepted when it couldn't. It supported good and bad local rulers as it suited them, it granted peaceable independence eventually - it may have been too late for some and too early for others.
Your thought is a valid one and worthy of debate. The best of the British Empire model without the worst would be a useful model. But on one thing I must totally disagree: it cannot be by a country, it must be by the UN. If the UN is inadequate for the purpose then it must change to become fit for it, and we must wait till then.
I personally believe that the US mostly does its best to sabotage the UN. I advocate a significant proportion of all countries' military forces and spend being ceeded to UN control, I would start at 5% and steadily increase that to between 20 and 30%. I would include nuclear weapons and aim to put all of them under UN control within 20 years by which time I would hope they are down to at most 10% of current levels.
In other words, supply disruptions that would not be news five years ago are now a big deal.
I am also sorry to hear more bad vibes (literally) from the big solar stirling project in Calif.
But I can note that the engines on sun in Sandia are close relatives of the automotive stirlings of the 80's. Mean time to failure of a couple thousand hours might be just barely ok for automobiles. But---.
I don't get it. Haven't recent inventory reports showed we're up to our ears in natural gas this winter? Is it a pipe capacity issue?
Sounds like things could get hairy out west. The fields are declining, the infrastructure is aging, the population has exploded.
I got up about 9:00 am this morning. At precisely 9:25, the power went off. When this happens, of course, you don't know how large the affected area is, how long the power will stay off and what caused it. It has been unusually cold here and in large parts of the midwest. Naturally, my computer here and everything else shut down.
Exactly 30 minutes later, as I can now see in retrospect because I didn't have any way of telling the time, my power came back up. A friend had gone into the downtown area. There was power where she was but as she was driving home, she encountered a blacked out area. There was a major car accident on almost every large intersection she saw. She took a detour (the long way home) passing in and out of the blacked out area. By the time she got home, her (and my) area had been turned back on.
It is one thing to know that natural gas supplies are tight. It is quite another to experience a rolling blackout just because the weather got colder. I won't be forgetting this anytime soon.
I understand even less why there would be traffic accidents. Is it something like, the traffic lights stopped working, so drivers, seeing the lights were out, decided to interpret "no light" as "green light"?
I mean, what gives????
Roughly half the households in the country use natural gas to heat their homes, while about a third use electricity and almost 10 percent use heating oil. The remainder use wood, alternative fuels or have no heat at all.
Source: Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program
Heating oil is used mainly in older homes in the northeast. New homes almost all use natural gas or electricity, for environmental reasons, I think.
And getting worse. According to the Census Bureau, of houses completed in 2003 that had heating, 70% used natural gas. Not to mention what added electricity generating capacity is using:
And we know that "oil and gas" is predominantly gas. I continue to maintain that "peak gas" in North America is going to hit people's lifestyles harder than "peak oil" does in the next few years. The US can outbid the developing countries for oil; the capacity to move natural gas from outside the continent is simply not there, and the decline in production will hit home directly and immediately.
No one saw this coming. As recently as 2000, we thought we had hundreds of years worth of natural gas left. You never see the peak until it's too late.
Combined cycle generation (burn NG in a jet engine like turbine and then use exhaust to create steam for steam generation) became reliable and economic about 15 years ago. Result is about 50% more electricty for the same fuel burn.
Some of the new NG is to replace old NG steam plants. Looks bad on a graph, but good for the economy, ecology, GW and Peak Gas. Much of the new NG is for new demand, not so good for the above.
In addition, in 2004, 34.3% of NG burned for electricity was in cogeneration plants. Combined cycle, cogeneration is as efficient as one can get. Waste heat can be as little as 1/3 of the total.
http://www.whispertech.co.nz/main/dcwhispergen/
It's a New Zealand site, Powergen in UK are importing some for a domestic trial. I'd guess there's something like it available in the US.
As far as the car accidents go, it is my understanding that every intersection should be treated as a four-way stop when the grid goes down and the traffic lights no longer work. So, we must ask Shaw's question
Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
In UK were have a strange road device called a 'roundabout' which functions well in the absence of electricity. The US doesn't seem to have discovered this. Maybe it's partly due to a cultural disposition for going in straight lines. That could be something to do with relative space: in UK we might like wiggly roads since the added complexity would increase perceived distance, whereas in US one might prefer the converse.
Communities often resist roundabouts, though, because they slow traffic down. Drivers don't want to be slowed, and the community worries that if a roundabout is installed, people will cut through their neighborhood to avoid it. (Which is often what happens.)
Traffic lights...one problem with them in SUVs. Seriously. They are so high they block the vision of drivers in cars. So if you're behind an SUV that's turning, you can't make your turn until they it clears the intersection, because they block your view of oncoming traffic. Someone did a study that estimated this slowdown at intersections, caused by SUVs, amounted to thousands of dollars per SUV per year - in lost time and productivity, and additional gas use.
I think there are three reasons for this.
They slow down the trafic flow and slower traffic gives fewer and less serious accidents.
They do not reduce the number of accidents in crossings but the accidents happen in much slower speeds and shallow angels avoiding people being seriously hurt.
They give a trafic flow with fewer complete stops and sudden accelerations and good capacity, some people like this and it probably saves fuel.
Myself I prefer to wait for cars and not for a light to turn green. An annoying thing is that it has becomme common to place odd or ugly artwork in the middle of the roundabouts that hides part of the traffic flow.
My favorite roundabout is one that has four car roads and four tunnels for bicyclists and in the middle of the roudabout there is a quite small and cute bicycle roudabout. Some traffic planner had a good sense of humour.
But when they get overwhelmed by traffic flow they size up and thruput goes down. The prefered solution seems to be to add separate "right turning" lanes to get some of the flow out of the roubabout proper or build much larger "motorway" type of crossing but they are very expensive and only built in large cities. I suspect that having some traffic lights on a road system with mostly roundabouts can help the flow by creating empty slots for traffic held back by stronger flows but this is only a wild guess.
Large roundabouts are usually built with tunnels for walking and bicycling since there otherwise is a large accident risk. Traffic lights seems to mostly get built where there is no room for a roundabout or when there is a large flow of pedestrians or bicyclists.
Some experiments have been done with micro roundabout to more or less only slow down the traffic flow but they usually only get people annoyed. Seems like someone somewhere talks a municipial into building a few dozen of them every 5-8 years resulting in curses, removal and a few years later someone else repeats the mistake.
Every time I use it I wonder what it must be like to be an American tourist in a hired car driving on the 'wrong' side of the road, using a manual gear change for the first time because automatic gears are still rare, not used to any sort or roundabout, coming on this monster in heavy traffic.
However, the problem in this case is a shortage of natural gas. I'm not sure why, because only two days ago, Xcel was saying they had plenty.
And some people are reporting their power was out a lot longer than 30 minutes, and the blackout area was a lot bigger than a few blocks.
http://www.bp.com/genericsection.do?categoryId=92&contentId=7005893
http://server4.ihostphotos.com/show.php?id=14416
The environmental and economic justice issues related to the oil industry's activity in Nigeria will be excluded from public discourse while all resistance to the corporatist aganda in Nigeria will be lumped together as "brutal anti-democracy" and "anti-west," and "against the great march of industrial progress."
The first casualty of war is the truth. Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Bolivia, Columbia, Nigeria....all are being seen through the distorting smoke-and-mirrors of propaganda.
If oil prices do skyrocket, won't this make the warmongering propaganda all the more believable to most people? It will be easy to define scapegoats and "enemies" for people to direct all of the fear and frustration toward.
My biggest concern right now is that oil shortages will be managed by propaganda as follows:
1. "First-world" nations, and especially the USA are victims of demonic, diabolical evil-doers who are denying us the oil we want and deserve.
2. We must attack and conquer these evil-doers with whatever combination of weapons will be most effective.
3. We must occupy oil-rich regions and keep pipelines and seaways used to transport oil secure through military force.
4. Anyone who dissents from the above is offering "aid and comfort" to our enemies, and will be punished as traitors.
My guess is that cooperation and "powerdown" are laughable to the US political establishment. Will other political elites join in the war for oil disguised as "war against terror" of "war for democracy?" England is already "with us" in this war and France sides with the US government lately. What about China, India, and Russia? What about Canada and Latin America?
How do we respond to this? Are there any MSM or mainstream politicians willing to challenge the Resource War? Roscoe Bartlett has a start understanding energy issues, but I've not heard him oppose war at all.
Is the violence in Nigeria and Iraq and the political tension with Venezuela a prelude to an acute war, or do the elites plan to wear opposition down over a long period of overwhelming but lower-level violence?
Meanwhile, we keep using more and more of that good old petroleum. What do we do?
6.3. Fortress World
In the Fortress World variant, powerful regional and international actors comprehend the perilous forces leading to Breakdown. They are able to muster a sufficiently organized response to protect their own interests and to create lasting alliances between them. Arising within the cynical and pessimistic social mood of Barbarization conditions, these alliances are not directed at improving the general well-being, but at protecting the privileges of rich and powerful elites. This is viewed as a matter of necessity in a world in which wealth, resources and conventional governance systems are eroding. The elite retreat to protected enclaves, mostly in historically rich nations, but in favored enclaves in poor nations, as well.
Outside the fortress, the majority is mired in poverty, denied access to scarce resources and restricted in mobility, expression and basic rights. The authorities employ active means of repression to guarantee exclusive access to needed resources (such as oil fields and key mines) and to stop further degradation of the global commons of air and ocean resources. Draconian measures are required to control social unrest and migration. Strategic mineral reserves, freshwater and important biological resources are put under military control.
From Branch Points: Global Scenarios and Human Choice (pdf)
When I read that the DOD has put out some $300+ million in funds to start building detention centers on US territory, maybe they have decided to plan for fortress world. I think a very real scenario involve warfare, the loss of the republic, and a permanent warfare state. PO is only a problem if you need a lot of people living the "American way of life." If only a few get to live that life, the PO problem goes away.
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett has had face time with the President on this issue and nothing has changed. Maybe the whole point all along is to deal with PO with more crude methods. Pardon the pun.
From now on everything will only depend on the ability of "solitary people" to take leave of the previous ideological illusions, having recognized the metaphysical necessity and inevitability of a new systematization of a social sphere - not according to the scale "the rightist against the leftist", but according to the scale "friends of aggression" against "enemies of aggression".
And who knows, whether the mondialist integration of people, who are objects, people, who are victims, into the one planetary liberal community, into One Absolute Object provokes the emergence of a new and last character of the world history - the Absolute Subject, Subject without confines, which will commit the conclusive act of the eschatological drama.
From todays Globe and Mail
"cod: a biography of the fish that changed the world"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140275010/102-8546628-9060923
"The Doryman's Reflection: A Fisherman's Life"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1560256699/002-0935355-8097647
I'm sure there are others, but those two viewpoints painted the picture for me.
I hate to come off as elitist, but if you're not at least a vegetarian, then I don't think you can honestly say you are serious about mitigating the effects of peak oil, or promoting sustainability or limiting mankind's impact on the environment because you are not doing the single most effective and easy personal thing you could be doing to help.
Another post was a general overview of food production called "Our Oil-Laden Food Chain".
... or make that burrito long on rice and beans, short on chicken.
Will keep you posted.
FWIW, there is a "bike town" marketing effort that tries to build up critical mass in various places:
http://www.bicycling.com/biketown/home.html
(Austin is the Texas attempt ... perhaps a recognition of existing city culture)
I for one, am moving incrementally towards a vegetarian diet: restricting meat to one meal a day and only a few ounces.
I've thought about Y2K and how it was such big event and yet absolutely nothing happened. It makes me wonder how that happened.
The conspiracy side of me wants to think that the elites, knowing about Peak Oil, wanted to understand what societies reaction would be when faced with an end of the world scenario. So, invent some scare, (Y2k) and see what every one does. That way it's better understood what will happen with PO shows up.
Just a thought. Guess I better go take my medicine. lol.
You really can't compare Y2K to peak oil, global warming, or any other problem without Y2K's essentially small constellation of technological fixes. But nonetheless I'll take it as a point of minor optimism.
Do you think the levees would have failed if we had known Katrina's exact path and strength five years in advance?
BTW, have you seen that laptop designed for Third World nations? It's crank-powered, no hard drive. $100. There's a lot of interest from Westerners who want to take it camping and such. I suspect it would be a hit among the peak oil crowd, too.
Nigeria wasn't writing a lot of COBOL code twenty, thirty, and forty years ago. We were.
Most of the third world that has computers is running BackOffice and SAS. They didn't write ten thousand different mainframe legacy code products like we did, so they didn't have to fix them. They just plugged in the latest upgrade and the problem went away. All that upgrade code was written in America and Europe.
Simple.
its a good hobby for many reasons
Water should also be considered in the livestock equation as well, the animals drink a lot and the feed that they eat is also using a lot of water
Clear the area of lawyers how, exactly? A la Cheney?
Off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, used to be one of the biggest sources of protien on the planet; the Cod Fishery ... when Jacques Cartier first showed up 500 years ago, all one had to do was drop a bucket into the ocean to sweep up enough fish to feed the crew ... it's now virtually completely gone - destroyed - and what's so poignantly pathetic about it is:
Scientists had been warning for years that it was being over-fished, but nobody listened!
Yet another sad story of what happens when the most informed are shouted down by the biggest short term self-interests who entertain a larger theatre of ignorance.
Business men and Politicians only listened to the few experts who where doubters of the pending crisis (often those who's opinions they somehow subsidized), and - seeing as they where only interested in short term profit or re-election - idiotically - the government actually provided subsidies to fishermen who wanted to invest in equipment ( bigger boats, nets, etc ) to further increase their take of the known-to-be-endangered stocks!
Technology was the answer - and the less fish there where, the more technology was subsized and payed for to go after it - total "free market as the answer" insanity ... until the Cod Fishery was completely destroyed.
Does any of this sound painfully familliar?
"Plus ca change " ... and all that ...
Their fisheries, including cod, are stable to growing slightly and are clearly sustainable.
Their fondest desire is to thin the fish eating minke whale (tastes good BTW) so as to allow more fish for man.
A completely vegan population would leave wild fish and pasture raised ruminents "on the table" and reduce the food available for humanity.
Even in said urban context, animals can play a huge role in the trapping of energy. Obviously factory farming is one of the relics that we will be leaving behind (and good riddance too!), but animals are able, as someone astutely pointed out earlier, to eat things humans can't. Get a goat or a sheep and let it out in your back forty, but then one must balance whether to feed it over the winter (which is why a lot of slaughtering gets done in the fall). Chickens are one of the best examples of a way to concentrate protein. Feed them any kind of grain based feed and they will concentrate it at 2:1 ratio (eggs). Which means you can get some high protein eggs, poo poo, scratching/pest control and the occasional tough chicken thigh. I think looking at Cuba and traditional China would be a wise idea in this age of declining energy (Cuba did it, China has - until recently - managed to maintain soil fertility across 100's of years)
P.S. I just got an advance copy of The Power of Community:How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. If you didn't get a chance to see it at ASPO-USA or some other location, I highly recommend ordering on.
http://www.foodfirst.org/dr12
I agree with your other points: a largely vegetarian diet is more efficient but mixed farming will be essential IMO, for all the good reasons you suggest and more. I'm omnivourous and produce almost all my vegetable needs all year round (excluding grains, flour, spices and condiments, essentials that don't grow outdoors in UK) from a relatively small urban garden plus a not large allotment.
Preparing for sanctions, Syria switches to Euro......
Courtesy of Green Car Congress:
This whole oxygenation requirement has been a major fiasco. Aside from ethanol, which is expensive, the only reasonable oxygenator was MTBE. So oil companies were effectively forced by regulation to add MTBE. Then the stuff turned out to be a carcinogen, to leak out of underground tanks, to get into ground water, and to cause all kinds of havoc. All due to this regulation, which it turns out doesn't even really clean the air that well, there are other ways that are better and cheaper.
Anyway, this should reduce the cost of gasoline a few cents as we move into the summer driving season.
The patchwork of about 15 different gasoline blends around the country came about in good faith from the EPA's attempts to clean the air in polluted areas. But it's a big headache from a refining point of view, and it's easy for even refiners acting in good faith to have one blend come up short because of mistaken forecasts. With refiners operating near capacity as it is, high gas prices are then much more likely, at least regionally.
I'd be much happier if the EPA just settled on one good grade for the whole country, or perhaps two blends (one for most places and one for problem areas). If it were strict enough then CA could stop putting in its own requirements as well.
I think the EPA would be quite happy to have only two versions of RFG for the country, as long as the blends solved the local pollution problems. It's a real pain for us to test and certify all those different fuel blends. Unfortunately, the pollution problems differ, and no one wants a more expensive blend for another area with a more severe pollution problem. My understanding of the oxygenate issue was that states near the corn belt often chose ethanol because of politics. Other areas chose MTBE because it worked well at lower cost. Or they had chemical plants in the area that made the stuff and fewer corn farmers.
I'm not sure that 100 mile rule makes sense for California! All the oil fields I am aware of are in the nearby offshore waters. It might work for Florida but the geography is different in California.
Santa Barbara is a tough situation. It's one of the main areas where there are thought to still be potential offshore fields, but it's also where the 1969 oil spill triggered the modern environmental protection movement. The first Earth Day was held in Santa Barbara the next year. To say that the region is opposed to offshore drilling would be a considerable understatement.
If and when our thirst for oil becomes so acute that they start drilling again off Santa Barbara, you'll know the peak is near.
This certainly goes into the "when you find youself in a hole, just keep digging" category.
Nigeria suspends 380,000 bpd oil exports after attack
Saturday February 18, 7:52 AM EST
LAGOS (Reuters) - Royal Dutch Shell suspended exports from the 380,000 barrel-a-day Forcados terminal on Saturday after militants bombed the tanker loading platform, a senior oil industry source said.
The company is still trying to ascertain the damage to the platform, which is located three miles offshore, but has already begun shutting oilfields in the area which feed the terminal, the source added.
"Of course no ships can go near there now. This is going to be a major deferment," the senior industry source said.
http://money.excite.com/ht/nw/bus/20060218/hle_bus-l18725390.html
Anyone know?
Let's see what google reveals!
http://www.940news.com/nouvelles.php?cat=24&id=21845
Someone has probably misread the information.
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_508.shtml
HO is the man, of course, if you're talking about the actual geological technical issues. But as I said, we have so many knowledgeable contributors and people that understand energy issues here at TOD.... I'm always grateful for the information they give me.
I thought it was particularly ironic when I had my rolling blackout today that when I was finally able to re-boot my computer, all I had to do was go to TOD to find out why my power went out!
One of the greatest websites in the world and proud to be a contributor.
I keep an LED light bulb from www.superbrightleds.com/edison.html that has 8 LEDs and uses 7/10 of a watt in it. I have a 5 watt flourescent bulb if I need more light. (they also make 3 & 4 watt compact flourescents)
Even a small UPS will let me get around in the dark all night :-)
My UPS died some time ago and I have not replaced it.
My machine came back up so I'm happy but insecure.
Doesnt help matters any. (I guess it depends whos reading, but for the most part)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aoScgxtHBbVM&refer=us
What is more interesting for me is the following:
When I add this to the SOTU speech I start to wonder what is the reason for this energy offensive now? Currently it seems like we have secured 2006 at least... Oil and NG inventories are high and demand destruction seems to work well for us mostly in places like China and India. Even concerns about Iran are not able to drive prices significantly higher. Probably we'll see some disruptions during the hurricane season but another Kathrina is highly unlikely. So... what he is up to? Or, if I leave aside my suspiciousness, maybe we are finally starting to prepare for the mitigation process? What do you think?
1. Keep taxes as low as possible on my rich friends, and
2. Elect Republicans so they can keep taxes as low as possible on my rich friends.
He sees that the sheep are getting a bout of nervous energy (pun intended)so he's decided (or Karl has, more likely) to "get ahead of the problem", show that "he cares". So he's talking about energy. Is he actually doing anything about moving the country in a direction to save energy? Of course not. It's all talk. He's gotten himself elected on talk twice and the only thing he's accomplished, aside from a cynical war aimed at keeping him in office, is to lower taxes on his rich friends.
1) If you look at the issue of "keeping taxes low on rich friends," throughout our history, don't you think this is a rather American trait, rather than anything necessarily unique of Bush or the Republicans.
2)
Isn't that how all of our Presidents get elected?
3)
It seems to me that this war has been the one thing that has consistently threatened to remove him from office. Whether it is reportedly manipulating WMD intel, leaks by Rove and Libby, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, NSA eavesdropping, etc.
If 2008 comes with 5$/gallon, people will demand explanation what were this government's actions (not just speeches) to prevent it and solve the problem. If there are none on the list GWB will be out of office no matter how many electronic voting machines are set up in the meantime.
My point was why did he pick this very moment when things seem to be settling down... I suspect there is something cooking on international scale, and I don't quite like it.
Well said. How could they not be, right? It's not like you get a free pass from Global Warming if you're a rich Republican.
On the international scale, though, isn't something always cooking?
Though I can argue it is not that important. The position of the president himself (herself? ohh dreams...) started to resemble the one of the Speaker of the Senate in recent years.
PO as "the world is not infinite" idea will be acknowledged by the public probably only after some significant societal transformation. For the average Joe the idea that there are limits is unbearable. "Gosh, isn't this why I came to this country? They told me that you can achieve anything here". This will not change quickly.
I had another coworker asking me about ethanol a few weeks back - probably in reaction to all of the GM nonsense on the air these days. I explained that I thought it was all smoke and mirrors because the cars are still gas guzzlers, but it didn't dissuade him completely.
People are becoming more aware of the fact that there is a problem. They are still looking for simplistic "solutions" that would allow them to continue life as usual, but there is an awareness that there is a problem. That is progress - last year at this time most people wouldn't have even thought that there was a problem.
On the other hand, yes, there is this huge problem with "lifestyle change" ... it's treated as more privation than opportunity. People like that SUV driver asking about ethanol are really asking how long they can hold out. I think he knows that the SUV will not last forever ... but maybe he and his family can squeeze by.
I hope that enough people will pick up on a happy, efficient, future. Maybe SUV guy will notice that the corolla/civic drivers have less worries, put off fewer trips, and have a few more bucks in their pockets.
On awareness of peak oil in governments. I suggest the following broad possibilities:
- They are unaware
- They are slightly aware but haven't properly heard or listened to much of the information
- They have heard but don't believe peak oil will occur soon or that solutions will be adequate
- They have heard and are scared, daren't tell 'us'
- 4. but they dare.
I think all the above are true for different sub-populations within our governments. Amongst the higher echalons I think we can disregard 1. since most have had presentations (eg UK parliamentary sub-commities, US house presentations, departmental reports). There will still be many who are at 2. and 3. - as we find amongst the general population. Sweden is the only country that seems to have made it to 5. as far as I'm aware.It is 4. that most interests me and is the group that I think many heads of state may be at now or soon. They are talking round the issue without daring to mention the dreaded words 'peak oil'. GW talks about addiction and techno solutions, Blair talks about climate change. They are doing what they see is their best to begin appropriate actions and prepare 'us' for what may happen without confronting their populations, and the world, with the scary truth.
To some extent they may be right, and I'm sure they can rationalise it so. Consider what would happen if GW stood up and said "Peak oil is reality, it will happen soon and then we will have less and less oil and gas, evermore." What would happen to oil and gas prices? Economies? Industries? The dollar? Perceptions of foreign policies, especially US?
We would have a bad go of it for a bit and then perhaps we would shake the hangover off, clean house and start taking things seriously. My God, maybe we would actually work WITH other countries and try to solve some global issues. I can dream can't I?
Yes, the politicians should be saying this now but they are not. Judge them accordingly.
'Probably we'll see some disruptions during the
hurricane season but another Kathrina is
highly unlikely'.
Do you have some evidence, or is it just
wishful thinking? After all, the planet is
heating up rapidly and in view of the warmer
than average winter in the US, surely we should
expect the summer to be a hot as last year if
not hotter. Hot land delivers hot water into
the GOM.
What I am interested in at the moment are the
continuing drought and abnormally high
temperatures in Texas (or has the drought now,
broken, but not been reported?)
Neither oil industry in GOM, neither Global Warming started last year with the advent of hurricanes. IMO for processes lasting decades if not centuries like GW it would be normal to see a gradual increase of the effects; if you compare 2005 to 2004 and years before you get the impression that a lot of what happened last year was pure bad luck. May be the danger will be rising with each year passing, but one year in a row does not make a trend.
In short don't count on the weather to solve your economical/lifestyle/whatever problems.
http://ogj.pennnet.com/articles/article_display.cfm?article_id=247889
Iran seeks more gas from Turkmenistan
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 13 -- Iran wants to increase its imports of natural gas from Turkmenistan and will accept a higher price, according to Iranian Foreign Minister Manuchehr Motaki.
"Iran wants a considerable enlargement of Turkmen natural gas imports and is ready to make proposals to Turkmenistan," he told Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov by telephone on Feb. 12.
Motaki said Iran accepts a Turkmen bid to increase the gas price. He said an Iranian delegation will soon visit Turkmenistan to sign a contract.
Preliminary negotiations about the suggested increase of the Turkmen gas price from the current $42-60/1,000 cu m were held in Ashgabat on Feb. 3.
According to the Turkmen Oil and Gas Ministry, Turkmenistan delivered 5.8 bcm of gas to Iran in 2005. Contracts signed last year call for the supply of 8 bcm in 2006. Last month, Iran received about 786 million cu m of Turkmen gas.
Turkmenistan produced 7.03 bcm of gas in January, up 24% over last year, according to the country's National Statistics and Information Institute. Gas exports grew 28%.
In addition to Iran, contracts signed late last year stipulate the delivery of 30 bcm of Turkmen gas to Russia and 40 bcm to Ukraine in 2006."
So maybe this gas is to meet that need (while iran may have tons of gas it may not be on tap waiting to be piped to whoever wants it tomorrow)...
Has anyone else noticed as we approach peak/plateau that the World production/extraction rate is closing in on 1000 barrels/second?
BC
West Aust
He's even got the domain name:
http://www.1000barrels.com/
I tried the reference on a couple of sceptics last night and it helped them get a perspective. (of course then they get mad because they really don't want to it)
He has a more interesting position than that. To (unfairly) encapsulate it, I'd say his position is "technology will prevail ... but not soon enough."
He is trying very hard to make people understand that there is nothing available to replace oil for transportation on the timeframe that we need it.
In particular, I'm traveling now, while commercial air travel is still affordable. Now's the time to see the world, if you want to see it.
And is it not true that even if we drilled and found lots of oil we have no way to refind it?
Did not our congressional critters just dump on the nation refusing to Ok the building of refineries and drilling?
Hell even a Nuke plant is going to take 10 years to built once the jerks in congress get off their fat asses ...
But what the heck, our oil and gas stocks have been making a nice profit for us and therefore we sold the bike (LOL)
Human beings are meat eating animals and we love our motor vechiles ...
If you're driving 1000 pointless miles at least you can look over and say "hey, I'm not in that Expedition."
(The most energy efficient and environmental thing would probably be to stay home, in the dark, and drink tap water. I don't think we really expect anyone to do that.)
As i recall shortly after 9/11 there was a report that alcohol sales skyrocketed. Hmmm, i wonder how much was spent on that survey?
It's Time to live like you were dying!
i know i would!
Party On Fatlady!
I expect that discretionary utilities like cell phones, cable and broadband will start to see increasing defections as the middle class pays substantially more for energy. That'll just mean more layoffs, and one of my brothers is a cable guy.
It seems to me that apocalypticons from both camps ought to get together and share scare stories.
Maybe with those two, plus a currency crisis, we could hit the trifecta.
I think a US recession in the next couple of years is inevitable regardless of peak oil, and I expect peak oil to happen within five years should the approximate status quo continue. Different timings of just these two events could have markedly different outcomes. Should the recession follow peak oil (and especially if PO is perceived as causal) I expect a huge and partially successful effort to mitigate, which would probably mitigate the recession, too. Should recession happen before peak oil is widely appreciated oil demand would be depressed, the price would drop and we might meet the oil production curve as we are beginning to struggle out of recession - in a weaker position to mitigate and facing a more rapidly declining production curve.
Odds probably are that the recession / financial crisis happens before peak oil becomes sufficiently widely understood. The moral is clear: we must beat the drum LOUDER!
I need some WAGS.
Picture a 4 bed 3 bath house, with 4 acres of forest and 3 acres of fertile farmland, 2 miles from the beach with 65 inches of rain a year.
How much would you guess it would be worth now and how much it would be worth in 5 years if last spring was the production peak?
FWIW, the finanical talking heads who believe in peak oil think it will mean a boom in urban real estate and a crash in the suburbs. They think people will move closer to the cities, because they won't be able to afford to drive to work. They are recommending people invest in city properties.
I would say don't count on anything. Don't put it all in real estate, or gold, or t-bills, or bonds, or Exxon stock. Diversify, because even real estate can tank. Especially if it's underwater.
I've read various environmentalists on the oceans, the forests, the soil, fresh water, and of course global warming, but I've seen little of the above discussed.
The one thing I did read in a book on the evolution of the earth was that these various metals were separated out (here) by geological processes. The moon is dead, and therefore these separations did not take place. So all the elements are there -- but all mixed together. Separating them takes, as you all know, energy. So those that look to the moon are truly loony (yuk, yuk).
Water we drink,
Air we breath,
Space we sail,
Land we never.
We've already had problems with shortages of steel and concrete. Then there's silicon; prices have more than doubled, at least partly due to the sudden popularity of solar panels.
The U.S. imports a lot of its raw materials now (including silicon). It's okay as long as we can outbid everyone else, but if that changes...if the dollar collapses, or if countries start to hoard their resources for domestic use, as Russia and Iran did with natural gas during the European cold snap...yikes.
Like oil the more concentrated, cheaper and larger resources have been found and exploited. Increased energy will be needed to produce many of the metals in future. Location will be a problem, particularly for Europe which has generally exploited more of its metal ore resources than has North America. Some minerals are partcularly concentrated in specific areas, like copper in Chile. Huge amounts of energy are required to produce most metals from their ores and high technology is often required to do so efficiently, that could be problematic. Also they and their ores are heavy and (the ores) bulky, transportation could be an issue.
If things turn really bad global trade could virtually end. That would be a significant problem for re-industrialisation in many currently developed countries since virtually all the easily producable depletable minerals have been exploited. If we, as a species, blow it and have to rebuild from a mostly pre-industrial state the next industrial revolution will be much, much harder.
Thank you, Agric and others.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/193149858X/qid=1140435007/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-7691303-98374 31?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
I read the original when it was first printed but have not read a more recent version. It gave estimated production, consumption and reserves data for individual resources such as individual metals.
My bets? Tungsten, uranium, tin, and high indium byproduct mines.
Nope.
Copper only give lower losses when the wire dimension is limited. Aluminium cables and high tension lines are thicker to get the same resistance and loss or less then the equivalent cost in copper.
Uranium can be partly solved by building breeder reactors but I expect it to continue its steep upwards trend, tungsten is quite widely distributed but may be expensive to mine due to the low quality of many of those ores, there's a good bit of tin about but exploitation of the most cost effective deposits has closed down older mines.
I heat my house with 2 corn stoves. The only thing cheaper is wood which is much more work. Why people want to heat with pellets amazes me. Corn is much cheaper per unit and has much higher per unit heating value.
Here is a more efficient method of consuming corn. 15% water in shell corn contains 7000 btu's of energy per pound, and 15% shell corn weighs 56 Lbs per bushel. That is 392,000 Btu's per Bushel. At $2.00 per bushel that is $5.10 per million Btu's. Then I checked kerosene it's about the same as distillate. 6.819 Lbs per gallon and 19,810 Btu's per pound or 135,000 Btu's per gallon, or 7.4 gallons per Million Btu's. At $1.76 per gallon that is $13.00 per million Btu's. NG spot today was about $10.00 per million Btu's. Now according to the USDA a bushel of 15% corn should yield 2.68 gallons of ethanol,and ethanol contains 14,000 Btu's per pound and weighs 6.59 Lbs per gallon. That means that a bushel of corn will yield 247,000 Btu's, so you see you lose 145,000 Btu's in the ethanol process, however the leftover mash is used for cattle feed. I don't know the efficiency of a corn burning stove versus a gas or fuel oil furnace, however it is certainly more efficient than using it to produce ethanol, as a significant amount of energy is used in the conversion process. Corn burner web sites.
http://www.bae.umn.edu/extens/ennotes/enaug01/burncorn.htm
http://energy.cas.psu.edu/shellcorn.html
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/12/09/051209141924.flu6l9pn.html
http://energy.cas.psu.edu/energyselector/cornpellet.html
says wood pellets yield more btus per lb.
What if, every family in suburbia planted a Peak Oil Victory Garden filled with tomato plants, carrots, lima beans, swiss chard, potatoes, and other good vegetables that can be canned and preserved. (Of course, this wouldn't work on the desert Southwest, but it will work in much of suburbia.) These gardens alone wouldn't solve a food shortage problem, but combined with the remaining big agribusiness farming, it would help. AND, then imagine that neighbors in suburbia agree to eliminate unnecessary car trips and start carpool system to combine their necessary trips (and foster a community spirit). It wouldn't solve the suburban transportation problem, but it would make life more livable out there.
Americans have faced a number of challenges over the centuries and have generally managed to come out ahead. Maybe through coordinated action, this thing can be, if not solved, mitigated. . . .
I planted a couple trees 30 years ago at my mother's house and she still keeps me (and many friends an neighbors) supplied ... avacados all week.
It's one of those places where the "efficient" and "environmental" solution is also a happy one.
Anyway, enough time there to tell you that it will not work there. 4 million people live in a city built for cars, not people. Many/most live behind walls and not only do know their neighbors name, they do not know what they look like, just what they drive.
I am usually the solitary walker as I walk a mile to the nearest store.
The US abandoned much of it's pre-existing housing stock after WW II, the same should, and likely will, happen to most of the 1980s and later McMansions.
(It seems to me that the capital costs, not counting operating costs, for new production projects are running on the order of $72,000 per bpd of new oil production from tar sands. If you look at the Canadian oil industry as a whole, it almost certainly costs the industry well in excess of $100,000 to add one incremental barrel per day of new oil production, on a net energy basis, and after accounting for depletion from conventional energy sources. In other words on a net-net basis, oil production from tar sands has to "pay" for the energy to get the bitumen out of the ground and to convert it to oil and then the new oil production has to offset the decline in conventional Canadian production, to get the net-net barrel of new oil production).
http://ca.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=businessNews&storyID=2006-02-16T203821Z_0 1_N16360232_RTRIDST_0_BUSINESS-ENERGY-CANADA-OIL-COL.XML&archived=False
Excerpt:
Partners in the Syncrude joint venture have targeted a midyear startup for their C$8.4 billion ($7.2 billion) "Stage 3" expansion, which will boost volumes by about 100,000 barrels a day to 350,000.
However, conventional light oil output in Western Canada is expected to keep slipping at the rate of about 4 percent a year as the region keeps maturing, Wise said. In 2005, Canada's light crude production averaged 830,000 barrels a day, down from 868,000 in 2004, the NEB said.
1 bpd ~ 70 KWt
1 KWt ~ $2500 (for Canada and US, I hear in Russia they make them for about $1000)
70 x 2500 = $175 000 per bpd.
And the output of the tar sands is oil burnt with ~15% efficiency, while electricity is used with ~90% efficiency.
Maybe it would be indeed a much much better idea to just burn these sands and get electricity. And we switch to plug-in hybrids.
http://www.dilbert.com
For anyone who reads this thread after Sunday, Feb. 19th, here is a more permanent link to the cartoon.
The link leads to a BBC business page which has a report on Statoil's re-injection of CO2 at Sleipner. This is of itself interesting regarding GW, but what caught my attention was the frank admission that this is being done as a business decision due to the high carbon tax in Norway.
Lesson - if you want a meaningful change in attitudes - hurt people in the pocket.
BTW, does anyone knows of a MSM site which gives comparable coverage on Energy, PeakOil and Global Warming to the BBC? It would be nice to compare coverage.
Coverage of global environmental issues on US MSM? Don't be ridiculous! You have already compared the relative coverage, LOL. But I'm sure US MSM can tell you what colour nail varnish Britney is wearing today. One must look to the less MSM US media for what you wish to see, here's a few:
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/
http://www.truthout.org
http://www.commondreams.org/
http://www.theatlantic.com/
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/
http://www.salon.com/
I suppose one could say the US media is more differentiated and much more insular, but I would say the best US MSM online coverage of the global aspects of these issues is probably about 5% of the BBC's.