John Tierney's brilliant energy plan
Posted by Yankee on February 7, 2006 - 1:18pm
Topic: Policy/Politics
Tags: energy plan, john tierney, oil, peak oil [list all tags]
If you have access to Times select (through a library, your own subscription, whatever), you might be interested in reading John Tierney's NYT column on what he thinks it means to be addicted to oil. In a nutshell, he dismisses any possible future energy problems, because he just assumes that the next, latest, greatest thing will inevitably come along: "The problem with Americans is not that we're addicted to oil. As soon as oil becomes more trouble than it's worth, we will sensibly stop putting it in our cars."
Toward the end he goes on to say:
The United States spent decades propping up the shah of Iran only to see the country fall into the hands of our archenemies, but Iran is still exporting oil -- and it is a lot more reliable producer than Iraq, despite all the money and lives we've spent there. The best guarantee of future oil supplies is the sellers' greed, not our diplomatic and military efforts.I'm very frustrated by this, you know?When something finally comes along that's cheaper and more reliable than oil, no national energy plan will be necessary. Capitalists will be ready to sell it to eager American drivers. For now, the best strategy is to buy gasoline and stop worrying that it's sinful or dangerous.
My frustration is that government takes the easy way out and prtends they are taking care of the future. The Pres holds hand with Saudis. The Pres talks about hydrogen cars. No need to worry, right?
As I've said before (and elsewhere) we'd be better off with either a true free market plan OR a mananged energy plan. The damange comes because we really have a free-ish market plan in the background, with just enough of a "planning" veneer to satisfy the consumer (for now).
At some point the consumer will wake up to the disconnect ($3/gal gas? 4?) but in the meantime the kabuki continues.
In terms of BTU equivalent, we use--from oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear -- the energy equivalent of a billion barrels of oil every five days. We use the energy equivalent of Prudhoe Bay every 60 days. It will be very difficult for any alternative energy source or sources to make up more than a small fraction of this rapidly depleting conventional energy supply.
For example, in Canada, even with increasing production from tar sands, total oil production year over year is basically flat. When you plug in the net energy calculations, total Canadian oil production is actually going backwards, on a net energy basis, year over year.
However that doesn't mean that after the adjustment we will necessarily have a lower quality of life...it all depends on what we do in the meantime.
There are of course some things that we really truly need to survive. Food, water, shelter, clothing are the basics needed just to keep the body alive - things like companionship and friendship would be needed by most people.
When energy prices go up, and people will have to go without, they will still remember and miss the things that they used to own and the things they used to do, and they would resent the fact that this is no longer possible. People would be inclined to reach for anything to keep things going so that they don't have to give up their material things.
My thinking is that there needs to be a fundamental shift in thinking so that quality of life is measured in entirely different ways. If we can reach a point where many of the materialistic and consumeristic urges are gone from our lives, then giving up material things up is no longer a hardship. In fact, it can be liberating in the sense that having stuff that you no longer want or need is a nuisance.
Such a change does run against human nature to a degree, but I believe that many of the wants and desires are planted in our minds by the media. For that matter, I doubt that most people could make such a change overnight - it will take a while to unlearn consumerism.
A non-materialistic society would seem to be incompatible with a capitalistic society. Right now with growth being an economic requirement, there is almost a need for people to buy more crap each and every year in order to keep the whole thing humming along. I have seen other comments here where people suggest that a new economic paradigm is needed - the problem is that nobody really knows quite what it is going to look like.
That is going to be long and slow. I spend a lot of time on home theater forums (a very fun hobby which I will miss tremendously). There are a bunch of very smart, very knowledgeable people on these forums. However, almost uniformely, they spend an amazing amount of time talking about advancements in the future, how much prices will go down, what the equipment will be like in 5 or 10 years. It is almost sad to think about what a shock the future is likely to be to these guys.
They could then recover some of the cost by selling tickets...
It wont be home theater any more, but small scale theater.
And it would generate social capital for them.
The world is literally awash in usable energy, we just need to develop the technologies to use it effectively.
We are well along the path to the chaos of Peak OIl - it will make things fall apart. And looking at the current government, and the possible next government of this country only makes this more obvious to well read people. Things will slowly unravel, and it will get progressively worse. I'm already getting ready for next hurricane season - it's just around the corner, and the government hasn't repaired a single levee. There are blue tarps all over the Gulf Coast skylines still...
Wake up!! Only your local government is in your control, and only your local government can do anything anyway. The federal guys simply do not care other than for appearances sake. Changes will come, but they will be forced by circumstances and prices. It's not going to be easy to go cold turkey - but that is what we are left with.
The handwriting is all over the media and the internet - read it and get yourselves and your families ready. It's just a matter of when and what manner things fall apart.
THE BEST-CASE SCENARIO HANDBOOK -- A Parody by John Tierney.
John Tierney is a columnist and
writer for The New York Times.
He recently won his second
Nobel Prize and is often
mistaken for Brad Pitt
Of course, Tierney is engaging in some humor but I see a lot a validity in that Brad Pitt comparison not so much because of good looks, no, I believe it's the similarity of intellect we must look at here....
P-O-E T-A-Y T-O-E. Right?
Huh George, did I get it right, did I get it right?
All kidding aside, our country desparately needs leaders who can "intellectualize" at levels well above 3rd grade spelling bees.
Popularity contests are not the "smart" way to go.
Well, that is no doubt true.
What he leaves out is that it's only the extremely wealthy American drivers who will able to afford to buy...
Matt over at LATOC just posted a link to this gem:
whoowey, TPTB have set their intellectual dobermans onto us. run for cover before they tear you limb from limb!
"Whatever" can go wrong, eventually will, even Murphy's Law.
Just as most fervent religious believers would, when circumstances threaten their faith, they have to proclaim their faith ever more loudly.
Much of the economic & ecological history of the 20th century - especially the latter half - can be explained by fact that the world was on the steeply rising part of the global Hubbert curves for fossil fuels. Just as the tectonic theory explained many seemingly disparate phenomena, the Hubbert curve explains the Simon v. Ehrlich wager, the green revolution, population growth, etc.
Of course, human ingenuity is what enabled the growth of fossil fuels; but it remains to be seen whether and how this faith will persist on the Hubbert downslope. But the faithful have to believe & shout out that they believe it will triumph.
Now that we have worked up our froth over the John Tierney/Betsy Hart pieces and the other Julian Simon cornucopians, can we open a new thread for Tom Tom Friedman and his desire to be "energy independent"?
(I've always thought only the dead were "energy independent". But obviously Tom Tom has better ideas in his Moby Dick Cheney blow out editorial today in the --where else?-- New York Times --all the news that's fit for delay.)
Maureen and Paul wish they could be this guy. Tierney can barely write. Bill Safire should think about coming out of retirement.
Friedman supports a dollar tax on gasoline and has written on the subject. He has pull, maybe more so in a Democratic regime than a Republican one, but whatever. Better to get him on the winning team than to alienate him.
Now you have to ask yourselves:
(Clint Eastwood wants you to)
Why are "they" (the minions of the power elite) even bothering to pump out this black trash? (Poo pooing peak oil.)
The answer is because you TOD readers are having an effect.
You TOD readers are getting the message out. Are you feeling lucky now punks, huh, are you?
Exactly how you guys are getting the message out to the grazing, sleeping sheeple, I'm not sure; but you are. Pat yourselves on the back. Now get back to work.
You are making it onto "their" RADAR screen. Being a major part of SoTuS is being on the RADAR screen.
"They" are starting to get worried. "They" are shelling out bucks to Betsy Hart-o-mine and her ilk to write this Hakunah Mattada stuff and to disseminate it all over the newspapers.
Keep up the good works (as Max Weber would say).
Although I am inclined to characterize Tierney's and Hart's work as denial, or even ignorance, calling it propaganda is certainly clever. It's a polite way of saying: "liar" isn't it?
Senator, you are asking me those hard hard questions.
Thankfully, I am not under oath.
So let me evasively answer you.
No. I'm not calling them "liars".
To be liars (in my book), they would have to have a rational, cognitive understanding that they are disseminating a clear untruth and that people are not interpreting their words as sarcasm.
They are paid political hacks.
They are twisters of the twisted word.
That does not make them "liars".
It's been a while since I looked up Tierney's bacground. IIRC, he was an eco major or a poli sci major or an English major.
One of the hard hard concepts for real-science majors to get, is that your fellow student in college partied hardy. He/she did not have to stay up all night memorizing the periodic table and figuring out how to convert atomic mass into grams per mole. (OK that's too easy --but then again I'm just teasing with the toads.) He or she drank copious amounts of ethanol and learned to worship "geniuses" like tunnel-vision Adam Smith or commodities cornicopians like Julian Simmons. He or she became convinced that Chicken Little will always be wrong. (He's always been wrong before! Sound logic is sound logic.)
There must have been a couple of Chicken Littles pecking away on Easter Island, but the lumber-and-statues mob guys probably whacked 'em. Bad for business you know. That's why you don't read about them Chicken-Littlers in the Easter Island history books.
You are pretty sharp, not as good as this site's support staff, but good.
Still, I want to say "bite me".
Against the stupidity of men, the gods themselves strive in vain.
What can anyone really add to that? The verdict is in. Guilty as charged: Brain dead in the first degree.
This guy is glib to the point of being harmful. "Just reassure the people so they keep buying hummers and SUVs."
(Warning cross-thread link: it takes you to another TOD thread)
How much CO2 can we stand? Well, as soon as it's just too hard to breathe, we'll stop doing it...
Or rising sea levels:
Well, as soon as Houston is underwater, we'll stop living there.
Nice to know we're in the brave new world of free-market economics, eh?
People generally are not stupid, and believers in Peak Oil have no monopoly on the truth. The facts which convince readers here so thoroughly about Peak Oil scenarios are known to many experts who believe differently. Everyone involved in energy and related businesses has an incentive to inform himself about the likely future availability of energy supplies, and few accept the kinds of scenarios which are conventional wisdom around here. Again, if the situation were really so clear-cut and the facts so obvious as most people here believe, there would not be so many people in these businesses, as well as academics and government researchers, who don't accept the Peak Oil concept.
The truth is that the future is uncertain, and there is room for reasoned, rational disagreement about what is likely to happen with energy (as with much else). Viewing people who disagree with you as stupid is just going to close your own mind and prevent you from evaluating all the evidence dispassionately and clearly. It's a counter-productive approach to evaluating and planning for the future.
See for example, the classic by McKay, "Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds."
Are you trying to tell me and others on TOD that people who were borrowing on margin (i.e. most people) to buy stocks in 1929 were not stupid? Do you believe the Confederates who thought they could defeat the Union in 1860 were not stupid? Do you think the people who enthusiastically followed Hitler were not stupid?
I rest my case.
Nobody knows the future and many smart people have been wrong before. The Oil Drum is a great resource and I have learned a lot from it. But I don't believe any of you are able to see the future. I have studied these issues and think I have as good a perspective as anyone. However my ego isn't so big that I think I am better or smarter than they are.
Who do I believe?
I take engineers very seriously. I take petroleum geologists very seriously. To the best of my knowledge, they are all on the same page of the same hymn book.
I do not take people seriously who cannot think quantitatively. Sorry.