Peak Oil News

The End Of Fossil Fuel

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:09:24 PDT

forbes.com

By Chris Nelder, 07.24.09, 03:00 PM EDT

Prepare for a radically different lifestyle as global crude oil production peaks and begins to decline.

You will never see cheap gasoline again. You will probably never see cheap energy again. Oil, natural gas and coal are set to peak and go into decline within the next decade, and no technology can change that.

Peaking is a simple concept. We generally exploit natural resources in a bell-shaped curve, with the rate of extraction increasing over time until we reach a peak and then gradually slowing down until we stop using them.

Peak oil is not about "running out of oil"; it's about reaching the peak rate of oil production. It's not the size of the tank that matters, but the size of the tap.

The peak is usually reached when resources become too difficult to extract, or too expensive, or they are replaced by something cheaper, better or more plentiful. Unfortunately, we have no substitutes for oil that are cheaper or better.

According to the best available data, we are now at the peak rate of oil production. After over a century of continual growth, global conventional crude oil production topped out in 2005 at just over 74 million barrels per day (mbpd) and has remained at that level ever since.

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The additional "oil" that brings the oft-cited world total to 84 mbpd today (down from 87 mbpd last year; according to U.S. government data) isn't conventional crude, but, rather, unconventional hydrocarbons, including natural gas liquids, "extra heavy" oil, synthetic oil made from Canadian tar sands, refinery gains, liquids produced from the conversion of coal and natural gas, and biofuels.

Oil production is expected to go into terminal decline around 2012. The principal reason is that the largest and most productive fields are becoming depleted while new discoveries have been progressively smaller and of lesser quality. Discovery of new oil peaked over 40 years ago and has been declining ever since despite furious drilling and unprecedentedly high prices.

When it begins to decline, rate of crude production is projected to fall at 5%, or over four mbpd, per year--roughly equivalent to losing the entire production of Latin America or Europe every year. The decline rate will likely accelerate to over 10% per year by 2030.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency estimates that the world would need to add the equivalent of six new Saudi Arabias by 2030 in order to meet declining production and growing demand. Obviously, there aren't another six Saudi Arabias waiting to be discovered, and unconventional liquid fuels simply cannot fill such a yawning gap.

Natural gas is likewise expected to peak some time around 2010-2020, and coal around 2020-2030. Oil, natural gas and coal together provide 86% of the world's primary energy.

By the end of this century, nearly all of the economically recoverable fossil fuels will be gone. From now until then, what remains will be rationed by price. There will be shortages.

Renewable energy--solar, wind, geothermal--currently makes up less than 2% of the world's primary energy supply, and although growing very rapidly, it is not on course to fill the fossil fuel gap, either.

As fossil fuels peak and then decline, the world's economies will be forced for the first time to live within a shrinking, not expanding, energy budget. They will adapt to this new reality by repeating the cycle we saw over the last 18 months: commodity price spikes, leading to economic destruction, leading to supply destruction, leading back to price spikes. Only in recessionary periods, like now, will there be excess supply.

How this will affect the global economy, and our lifestyles, cannot be overstated. Former chief economist for Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce World Markets, Jeff Rubin, and oil investment banker Matthew Simmons have concluded that it means no less than the end of globalization.

Americans, who constitute 4% of the world population but consume 25% of its energy, will have radically different lifestyles. Production of everything will have to be re-localized. Instead of our food traveling an average 1,500 miles before it reaches us, it will have to come from nearby and use organic methods instead of requiring 10 calories of fossil fuel inputs for every calorie of food we eat.

Rather than shipping ore to China and shipping it back to the U.S. as steel, we'll need to revive our domestic steel industry. "Bedroom communities" will die and ideally be reborn as fully functional independent communities. It means the end of long commutes.

The coming energy shortage is the most serious crisis the world has ever faced, but it could have a very positive outcome. In theory, the Earth's wind, solar, geothermal and marine resources could each provide more than the total energy the world consumes every day, if we had the ability to harvest them.

As fossil fuel prices rise, the price of renewably generated electricity will continue to fall. If we are wise and lucky, we will rapidly improve the efficiency of our built environment, deploy renewable capacity and convert to an all-electric infrastructure that runs on it. Fortunately, political momentum is now leaning strongly in this direction.

If we move fast to re-localize production and proceed with the renewable revolution, we could end the 21st century with a largely carbon-free economy, putting an end to climate change and averting resource wars. We would have healthier food and a safer, more resilient and equitable world.

Chris Nelder is the author of Profit from the Peak--The End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century and the coauthor of Investing in Renewable Energy. He blogs on GetRealList.

'$20 Per Gallon' by Christopher Steiner

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:40:56 PDT

Los Angeles Times

Christopher Steiner looks ahead and projects, $2 at a time, how rising gasoline prices will transform civilization.

By Matthew DeBord

Amazon.com - $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better

During the summer of 2008, Americans found out just how much was too much to pay for gas. On July 11, a barrel of oil hit $147.27, which translated into $4.11 for a gallon of regular gas at the pump -- the highest price ever reached in the U.S. And that was just the average. In some places, the price got close to $5 a gallon. It was the Summer of Pain.

Many people who'd never heard of "peak oil," or who'd been trading in one SUV for another, or who'd scoffed at the idea that Americans would ever drive less, suddenly learned that when the price of a finite commodity spikes, even cherished habits change. And it's not just about driving: Our entire American way of life, in fact much of the global economy, has been built over decades on cheap oil: Seafood and plastic toys from China can flow freely around the world. The price of bread and milk stays low. Airlines can engage in price wars.

But when the price of oil rises dramatically, inflation can kick in, scarcity can become the order of the day, freeways empty, General Motors and Chrysler slide into bankruptcy, and the American way of life grinds to a halt. Of course, after the price of oil crested in 2008, it quickly collapsed, leading some observers to speculate that the Summer of Pain was a blip on the radar.

But for the first six months of this year, the price was steadily rising. Though it has stabilized and even fallen in recent weeks, it may begin a slow, undulant march until gas literally costs too much for anyone.

This is the altered state of petroleum consciousness that Christopher Steiner, a trained engineer and writer for Forbes, envisions. And it's happening quickly, he points out. "As the middle class continues to explode in China, India, and scores of other spots circling the earth, hundreds of millions of additional cars will hit the roads," he writes. Many of those cars will be like the $2,200 Tata Nano, a "people's car" created for Indian consumers who've been riding bicycles and motor scooters for generations. "People want what Americans have had for decades: easy cars and an easy life. These people will get what they want, but in the process they will catalyze a global economic reformation on a scale never seen. . . . " Even the tattered remnants of the Detroit Big Three want a piece of this market: As General Motors left bankruptcy at home, it was selling more cars than ever in China.

Steiner has adopted a nicely readable structure for the book. Starting at $4 a gallon, each chapter tracks what will happen when gas hits a particular price, escalating by $2 until he gets to $20. He visits an airplane graveyard in order to explain how $8-a-gallon gas will crush the airline industry. At $14, he checks out an abandoned Wal-Mart "ghost box" and imagines a grim end to the car-dominated exurb. "Stores will return to the downtowns of yore as small towns' populations . . . return to the small-town infrastructures that their grandparents and great-grandparents built."

By $18 a gallon, high-speed railroads serve our travel needs, and by $20 a gallon, we just can't do oil anymore. And like a lot of people who've studied our post-oil energy options, he comes down on the side of nuclear. Eventually, he's replaced transatlantic flights with leisurely ocean passages akin to the grand liners of yesteryear. Except these new Queen Marys will run on nuclear reactors. Personal cars will be a thing of the past. Citizens of the future will wonder why we ever thought we needed them.

By now, you may have noticed a great bifurcation here, typical of newbies to the study of spiking oil prices. We Americans will find our existence irrevocably altered to the point where we are forced to inhabit a downmarket green fantasy, harvesting power from wind and ocean currents, breaking our addiction to automobiles and generally living with less. Meanwhile, the developing world will have become the new first world, with a middle class with disposable income that Americans lack filling China, India and other rapidly growing countries with roads, cars and petroleum products. At least until all the oil runs out and they, too, must convert to lives of noble deprivation.

Some of Steiner's speculations will happen. In particular, rising global energy demand could have a disastrous impact on food cultivation, which at the industrial scale needed to feed a populous planet requires fertilizers synthesized from natural gas. Nuclear power will be an obvious alternative-energy choice when gas settles into double-digit per gallon prices.

Personal mobility could be another story, however, and here Steiner gets into tricky territory when he latches onto start-up electric car companies and gee-whiz mobility providers. In fact, good old internal-combustion engines running on gas may be with us for much longer than he thinks. Even $10 per gallon gas would be acceptable if efficient gas and hybrid engines can achieve significantly higher mileage, which is technologically feasible. Widespread electrification of transportation will come, but we could have to wait until the middle of the century, or even longer. The romance of the personal automobile won't fade so fast in the U.S., especially if it increases its hold elsewhere.

There's also a glaring omission in "$20 Per Gallon" that should be addressed. Much of the ground that Steiner covers, with a certain boyish, gearhead utopianism, was traversed in much more apocalyptic fashion by James Howard Kunstler in his 2005 book, "The Long Emergency." Kunstler's arguments, which are actually more ecological than economic, are well known and widely debated. So it seems remarkable that Steiner, who comes to many of the same conclusions, fails to acknowledge a book that's been around for four years and actually anticipated the 2008 gas mini-crisis. "$20 Per Gallon" also reads at times as if it were hurriedly written. Still, Steiner has served up a terrific speculative primer on a future of much pricier energy and all that it may entail.

DeBord writes the Shifting Gears blog for Slate's the Big Money and has written widely on the automobile industry and the future of mobility.

‘Peak oil’ debate is no longer on hold

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:57:49 PDT

BusinessDay

Put a group of oil experts under one roof for a while and their discussion is likely to drift to the subject of peak oil — a point in time when maximum oil production is reached, after which it goes into permanent decline.

The advent of peak oil has long been brushed aside by some because it seems like a far-fetched, if not a ridiculous, idea concocted by alarmists. This is despite deafening cries that it is a real and serious threat.

Even among those who agree that it will happen, views differ sharply on the date . Some, like author David Strahan, say it could be as soon as 2017.

Recent data show that the debate can no longer be dismissed as a figment of the imagination among peak oil “enthusiasts”.

According to the Washington, US-based Worldwatch Institute, oil production is in decline in 33 of the 48 largest oil-producing countries. The research organisation says most of these countries are past their oil production peaks. Iran peaked in 1974, Nigeria in 1979, Venezuela in 1970 and Mexico in 2004.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, is expected to reach its peak in 2014, while in Iraq this is estimated in 2018.

Last year’s study by professional services group Ernst & Young showed that in the period between 2003-07, oil production in the US remained flat at about 1,2-million barrels a day.

Oil companies had difficulty in finding investment and production opportunities, say Ernst & Young.

But not everyone is convinced about peak oil. BP chief economist Christof Rühl says the argument for peak oil is baseless. “Peak oil has been predicted for 150 years. It has never happened, and will stay this way,” Rühl has reportedly said. He says oil is about price and not about availability.

Economist Tony Twine of consultants Econometrix echoes the view that price is everything.

“All energy — gas, oil and coal — is exploitable at a given price. If the price falls below a particular price it becomes worthless to produce. That is why I say many of the peak oil arguments are not well based.

“They all assume an oil price at 30, 60 or 200 a barrel,” he says. What is known as “oil availability” differs at different oil prices, Twine says.

“The projections that are being made about peak oil are sensible in particular contexts. But whether they are universally true is another matter,” he says.

Even in 30-50 years’ time, if oil demand is greater than supply, oil prices will rise “and currently unexploitable deposits will become viable to exploit”, Twine says. O il wells now considered marginal will become profitable .

Twine says there is a tendency to look at oil in terms of its energy content. “But there is a range of products that come out of a barrel of oil — from fertiliser to solvents that end up in paints, washing powder and synthetic fibres. Almost anything that you can see and feel has a little bit of oil in it.

“As oil becomes scarce and more expensive, its use as a source of energy will diminish. But its use as a feedstock for the chemicals industry will take longer to disappear,” Twine says.

Richard Worthington, climate change programme manager for the World Wildlife Fund in SA, says the advent of peak oil should influence how hydrocarbons are used. “It highlights the need for greater efficiency,” he says. C limate change considerations have supers eded peak oil discussions.

Worthington says fears of peak oil should not be the main driver of the move away from fossil- based energy sources. At some stage fossils will be depleted, he says. “Now there is talk of peak oil, then it will be peak energy and then peak coal,” he says.

Indeed, depletion of gas and coal reserves is a double whammy. National oil and gas company PetroSA’s Mossel Bay gas-to- liquids refinery is set to run out of natural gas by 2011.

The offshore fields south of Mossel Bay will not be able to keep up the supply of 36000 barrels a day the refinery needs.

The dwindling gas reserves are to be expected, says Twine.

“Gas and oil fields in SA and Mozambique have always been known to be constrained in terms of reserves. They have always been marginal in terms of big investment spending,” Twine says.

H owever, he believes that the Mozambique gas fields will have a longer life span and are likely to fuel petrochemicals group Sasol for a longer time. Sasol’s synfuels plant in Secunda gets natural gas from Mozambique through an 865km-long pipeline.

njobenis@bdfm.co.za

Could $20-Per-Gallon Gasoline Make Us Happier?

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:07:36 PDT

NPR

Listen – mp3

When it's time to fill up the gas tank, many fear the price of gas will return to the $4-a-gallon days of last summer. But according to author Chris Steiner, our lives would be a lot happier and healthier if gas prices rose into the double digits. Steiner explains himself, and the title of his book: $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better.

Amazon.com Review
Imagine an everyday world in which the price of gasoline (and oil) continues to go up, and up, and up. Think about the immediate impact that would have on our lives. Of course, everybody already knows how about gasoline has affected our driving habits. People can't wait to junk their gas-guzzling SUVs for a new Prius. But there are more, not-so-obvious changes on the horizon that Chris Steiner tracks brilliantly in this provocative work. Consider the following societal changes: people who own homes in far-off suburbs will soon realize that there's no longer any market for their houses (reason: nobody wants to live too far away because it's too expensive to commute to work). Telecommuting will begin to expand rapidly. Trains will become the mode of national transportation (as it used to be) as the price of flying becomes prohibitive. Families will begin to migrate southward as the price of heating northern homes in the winter is too pricey. Cheap everyday items that are comprised of plastic will go away because of the rising price to produce them (plastic is derived from oil). And this is just the beginning of a huge and overwhelming domino effect that our way of life will undergo in the years to come. Steiner, an engineer by training before turning to journalism, sees how this simple but constant rise in oil and gas prices will totally re-structure our lifestyle. But what may be surprising to readers is that all of these changes may not be negative--but actually will usher in some new and very promising aspects of our society. Steiner will probe how the liberation of technology and innovation, triggered by climbing gas prices, will change our lives. The book may start as an alarmist's exercise.... but don't be misled. The future will be exhilarating.

Amazon.com Review
Q&A with Christoper Steiner, the author of $20 per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better

Steiner, an engineer-turn-journalist, explains how the simple but constant rise in oil and gas prices will change our lifestyle, but not necessarily for the worse. Read this Q&A to find out more about this revolutionary theory.

Gas prices are going up again this summer, but are you really suggesting prices might rise to $20 a gallon?

That figure lies far ahead in the future; it's hardly an imminent thing. But most people don't require much convincing to know that $2 gas isn't sustainable for the long term. Oil is a finite resource that the whole world demands--a world that grows more gasoline consumers every day. It's important to understand that this book isn't about oil statistics, it's about our lives and the ways in which we live will change.

What do you hope readers will gain from reading your book?

Readers should gain an appreciation for the kind of change that lies behind the growing price of gas. Weaning ourselves from gasoline isn't a scary thing, it's an exciting thing. We're talking about cleaner environments, more walkable lives, better public transportation and more vibrant cities.

What are some of the surprising ways you think rising gas prices will change our everyday lives?

I don't think people realize how close our airline industry is to an all-out collapse. The book details a massive airline extinction at $8 per gallon, and in fact, serious change could take place even before then. It's certainly not something that should be celebrated, but the collapse of that industry will open the door to new ones, such as widespread high-speed trains in America, a phenomenon that won't take serious root until plane tickets become luxuries rather than conveniences. Beyond the airlines, I think people might be surprised to think that their future may not include Wal-Mart, and that their food world may condense, ruling out things such as sushi, but introducing things such as local organic fruit, vegetables and meat.

Is this pure speculation and fantasy or what kind of research did you do?

I consulted experts in a bevy of industries throughout the whole book, so this is not a random exercise, far from it. That said, it can be hard to forecast exactly at what gas price each change will happen. There are many unforeseen factors that can accelerate or forestall a certain change, such as government involvement in building high-speed train networks. If the government funds trains aggressively, change will be effected quicker, obviously. But I do feel that all of the changes represented in the book will happen eventually, whether they take place at gas prices of $10 per gallon or $12 per gallon.

So how scared should we be of the changes to come?

There is little to be scared of. The rising price of gas will unlock countless doors to innovation, opportunity and change.

Why does your book's subtitle say rising gas prices will change our lives "for the better"? How so?

We've grown used to engorging ourselves on the back of cheap oil and it has lead to all manners of problems. As the price of gas goes up, we'll live closer to work, school, eat healthier foods and even be skinnier and safer. The book profiles research that connects cheap oil to America's obesity rate and to the daunting numbers of people that die on our roadways. As the price of gas goes up to, say, $6, we'll save more than $30 billion on obesity-related diseases, 10,000 fewer people will die in car crashes and thousands of people will be spared heart attack deaths related to air pollution. Those kinds of effects will only be magnified as the price of gas rises further. And that's just a sampling of the benefits.

In what ways will rising gas prices improve our economy and job market?

America has lost much of its manufacturing mojo during the last 20 years. A green revolution, fueled by a search for alternative energies and technologies, could change that. Not only will there be need to produce things such as solar panels, electric cars, and new city infrastructure, but the power of globalization will be blunted by higher gasoline prices. The advantages of, say, making a computer in China decrease as the cost of fuel increases and the cost of transporting things all over the earth rises-that will lead to manufacturing jobs returning here, to home soil.

In what ways will the rising cost of gasoline boost innovation?

The innovation game is one that many people anticipate as oil's grip on the world ebbs. New technologies will be needed in all arenas that oil touches, including cars, trains, our homes, the plastic we use and the roads we drive on-and those are just a few examples. The opportunities for inventors in a world with less oil will be prolific.

What kind of places did you visit for your research and why was it necessary to visit them?

Good books need good stories, and it's hard to tell a good story from just talking to people over the phone, so I got out there and did things. I worked on an electric UPS truck in Manhattan for a day; I spent some time on a fishing boat hauling in Asian carp; I descended into one of New York's new train tunnels currently under construction; I rode our nation's fastest train to meet the Amtrak CEO in Washington. I'm not anointing my book or my stories as good--that's up to the reader--but creating an enriching storyline within a nonfiction book was my goal, so I'm hopeful I did that.

So now that we know this, what should we do in the here and now?

Preparing for the future isn't about buying the latest gadgets or the car with the best mileage. Those things help, of course, but they're mere pings in a coming cacophony. People who will do the least amount of adjusting in the future are those who already live more sustainable lives. Where you live largely determines how you live. Buying solar panels for a house at the far edge of the suburbs, for instance, won't alter how the future affects you. Moving to a walkable neighborhood where groceries, your kids' schools, your office or a train are all within several blocks-that's a change you'll profit from and a place where the future will be kinder.

Peak Oil Day

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:15:20 PDT

Richard Heinberg's Museletter

By Richard Heinberg

On July 11, 2008, the price of a barrel of oil hit a record $147.27 in daily trading. That same month, world crude oil production achieved a record 74.8 million barrels per day.

For years prior to this, a growing legion of analysts had been arguing that world oil production would max out around the year 2010 and begin to decline for reasons having to do with geology (we have found and picked the world’s “low-hanging fruit” in terms of giant oilfields), as well as lack of drilling rigs and trained exploration geologists and engineers. “Peak Oil,” they insisted, would mark the end of the growth phase of industrial civilization, because economic expansion requires increasing amounts of high-quality energy.

During the period from 2005 to 2008, as oil’s price steadily rose, production remained stagnant. Though new sources of oil were coming on line, they barely made up for production declines in existing fields due to depletion. By mid-2008, as oil prices wafted to the stratosphere, every petroleum producer responded to the obvious incentive to pump every possible barrel. Production rates nudged upward for a couple of months, but then both prices and production fell as demand for oil collapsed.

Since then, with oil prices much lower, and with credit tight to unavailable, up to $150 billion of investments in the development of future petroleum production capacity have evaporated. This means that if a new record production level is to be achieved, further declines in production from existing fields have to be overcome, meaning that all of those canceled production projects, and many more in addition, will have to be quickly brought on-stream. It may not be physically possible to turn the tide at this point, given the fact that the new “plays” are technically demanding and therefore expensive to develop, and have limited productive potential.

On May 4 of this year, Raymond James Associates, a prominent brokerage specializing in energy investments, issued a report stating, “With OPEC oil production apparently having peaked in 1Q08, and non-OPEC even earlier in 2007, peak oil on a worldwide basis seems to have taken place in early 2008.” This conclusion is being echoed by a cadre of other analysts.

Maybe it’s a stretch to say that the production peak occurred at one identifiable moment, but attributing it to the day oil prices reached their high-water mark may be a useful way of fixing the event in our minds. So I suggest that we remember July 11, 2008 as Peak Oil Day.

We are now approaching the first-year anniversary of Peak Oil Day. Where are we now? The global economy is in tatters, yet oil prices have recovered somewhat (they’re now about half what they were in July 2008). World energy consumption is down, world trade is down, the airline industry is shrinking, and most of the world’s automakers are on life support.

It is too late to prepare for Peak Oil–a year too late, in fact. Now the name of the game is adaptation. We are in an entirely new economic environment, in which old assumptions about the inevitability of perpetual growth, and the usefulness of leveraging investments based on expectations of future growth, are crashing in flames. Even if economic activity picks up somewhat, this will occur in the context of an economy significantly smaller than the one that existed in July 2008, and energy scarcity will quickly cause most green shoots to wither.

It is impossible to say what will happen in the future with regard to oil prices. Clearly, very high prices kill demand by undercutting economic activity. Thus it is possible that the barrel price of petroleum may never break last year’s record. On the other hand, if the value of the dollar were to collapse, then the sky’s the limit for prices in dollars per barrel.

It is easier to forecast the oil supply trend: though we’ll see level-to-rising production temporarily from time to time, in general it’s down, down, downhill from now on.

Even though Peak Oil is now in the past, its annual commemoration on Peak Oil Day may serve an important purpose by reminding us why our economy is shrinking, and by focusing our thoughts on ways to facilitate the transition to a post-petroleum world.

What are some appropriate ways to commemorate
Mark your calendar. What will you be doing on July 11?

Help us “celebrate” Peak Oil Day by signing our petition.

Spectre of peak oil prices loom

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 07:41:04 PDT

canada.com

By Barbara Yaffe

Oil at $200 a barrel is not far off and with it a new world order that will see the demise of globalization.

That prediction is put forward in a new book by well-known Canadian economist Jeff Rubin: Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller.

Money, of course, makes the world go round and when transportation costs become punishing people start looking to buy local.

The author reasons that the price advantage currently held by low-wage countries will simply disappear.

And Rubin cites a second factor that substantiates his theory -- the introduction of carbon pricing.

The U.S. -- and Canada and presumably other developed countries -- soon will mandate a cap-and-trade scheme that would impose tariffs on goods deriving from nations that don't similarly restrict carbon emissions.

What this would mean is extra duties, or a pollution tax, on imports coming from places like China. Such tariffs again would negate the cost advantage of imports from low-wage countries.

All of which explains why North American labour unions are starting to find common cause with environmentalists, one example being the Blue Green Alliance, bringing together the Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers of America.

Here's the sort of calculation that's not lost on the three-year-old alliance: Higher transport costs flowing from $200-a-barrel oil would impose the equivalent of a 25 per cent tariff on Chinese imports, while a carbon tariff would be about 17 per cent. Presto -- a 42 per cent duty on Chinese goods.

The result? The potential revitalization of industrial sectors in Western countries that in recent years have bled jobs to foreign lands. Don't write off the American Rust Belt quite yet.

"At the same time as North American and European markets return to local sourcing," writes Rubin, "they will sever their trade links with the developing world and force that world to find another way to grow.

"As our world becomes smaller, their world becomes poorer."

This will cause economic havoc in the developing world, a situation that, predicts Rubin, will be further aggravated by the shutting off of a critical safety valve, migration.

Higher oil prices, after all, will mean more unemployment and fewer job openings in the developed world.

These predictions may seem a bit fanciful with oil at $60 a barrel, as it is now.

But Rubin, and most others, believe recent low oil prices are directly related to the ongoing recession and will surge again once economies start bouncing back.

The book, besides predicting a return of robust manufacturing and agricultural sectors in the developed world, is not a bearer of much good news.

The economist believes we are in for an era of repeated recessions, caused by ballooning oil prices that are inevitable given that oil reserves are in decline.

The only way to avoid such a fate is to wean ourselves off our debilitating addiction to petroleum.

Rubin's is one of a raft of books published in recent years warning of crisis and devastation if we fail to adapt to the fact that the aggressive burning of fossil fuels no longer is viable.

In view of all these dire warnings, citizens would be correct to wonder what exactly is on the reading lists of their politicians, who in their legislative priorities seem all but oblivious to the pending doom.

byaffe@vancouversun.com

Spectre of peak oil prices loom

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 07:40:49 PDT

canada.com

Book Review: Blackout

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 12:11:48 PDT

Domestic Fuel

By Joanna Schroeder

Under the surface we seem to have a lot of it. It’s fairly inexpensive but this is changing as demand rises to meet increased energy needs especially in countries like China. So we have a lot, its cheap, let’s use it, what’s the problem? Right? Wrong!

Author Richard Heinberg writes in Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis, “In short: two of the defining trends of the emerging century–the development of the Asian economies and climate change–both center on coal. But coal is finite non-renewable resource. Thus, a discussion of the future of coal must also intersect with a third great trend of the new century: resource depletion.”

In the first part of the book, Heinberg takes the reader through a deep analysis of just how much coal is available throughout the world. Keep in mind, forecasts assume that current energy use stays the same, but it is increasing each year, making coal available for a shorter amount of time. Best estimates are that the world will see Peak Coal by 2025 and many believe that the world has already witnessed Peak Oil.

Now, you’re just waiting for me to say there is no such thing as clean coal. So there, it’s out in the open. In the second section of the book, Heinberg talks about the link between coal and greenhouse gas emissions and discusses the technologies to create “clean coal”. They are all challenged to say the least.

At the end of Blackout, Heinberg details three scenarios that involve coal, climate and energy. They are all very disturbing, but Heinberg has a way of tackling issues head on.

“For strategic purposes, it is important to understand our human tendency to discount future problems. We must assess which threats will come soonest, and make sure that out sometimes frantic efforts to respond to these immediate necessities do not exacerbate problems that will show up later. Peak Oil is clearly the most immediate energy and resource supply threat the policy makers must deal with….”

He continues, “If energy scarcity forces policy changes before climate fears can do so, then perhaps world leaders will find that it makes more sense to ration fuel themselves, rather than the emissions they produce.”

rhshovelHeinberg continues by warning if we don’t get a grip on the real amount of fossil fuels supplies we have left as well as a deeper understanding of the environmental and economic consequences of burning fossil fuels..hello Blackout.

Wow, conservation…what a novel concept…good thing the fuel economy standards (aka CAFE standards) were finally improved.

“…Otherwise, the policies pursued are likely to be ineffective, counterproductive, and inconsistent.” Can you say proposed Climate Bill?

I’m a huge fan of Heinberg and he doesn’t disappoint with Blackout. You can buy this book or any book I review by clicking here.

BTW - Richard Heinberg is going to be a guest on the premier of national radio program Pure Energy, hosted by Sean O’Hanlon. The show debuts on July 13, 2009 at 6:00 p.m. EST on 880 The Biz and can also be heard live on www.PureEnergyShow.com.

Peak Oil Blues

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:54:03 PDT

Peak Oil Blues

Are you 'coping' or 'freaking out' about Peak Oil?

What's a 'normal' reaction to learning about a post-oil world?

Fear? Anxiety? Shock? Depression?

No one really knows.

Many people say preparation is "90% mental," but how do you separate out what's "mental preparation" from what's just "acting mental?"

Here we explore what we've learned about various emotional reactions.

Our goal is to help you build the kind of world you want to live in. Sanely.

The Peak Oil Crisis: Stifling a Rebound

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:36:10 PDT

Falls Church News-Press Online

By Tom Whipple

Since the beginning of the economic troubles some 18 months ago, the question on nearly everyone's mind was; "When will the recovery begin?"

A lot of water has gone over the dam in the last 18 months. An official recession has been declared, millions have lost their jobs, much of Detroit has gone bankrupt and the government has spent trillions on bailouts and stimuli. Three months ago the collective wisdom of investors concluded that the recession was nearly over. This resulted in one of the faster rebounds the stock markets have ever known --- based on the flimsiest of evidence and much wishful thinking.

In the last six months the demand for oil has fallen and stockpiles grew while, oddly enough, prices rose. Part of this increase was caused by speculators hedging against the falling dollar, and part was caused by still more wishful thinking that the demand for oil would soon recover.

A year ago prices rose to the previously unimaginable high of almost $150 a barrel. Oil producers made one last effort to keep up with demand and in doing so may have pushed world oil production to an all time high - the "peak" in peak oil. While it took six years for oil prices to climb, it only took six months for them to plunge into the $30's causing panic amongst the exporters of OPEC.

This led to a series of OPEC production cutbacks which were supposed to reach 4.2 million barrels a day (b/d) but petered out around 3 million due to quota-cheating by several of the more desperate and less honorable OPEC members. In the world outside of OPEC oil production has been steady in the last year with some notable drops in production. In Mexico, output from its largest oil field has been dropping much faster than expected due to depletion. In Nigeria insurgent attacks on oil facilities have brought production down to about 1 million b/d when the country should be producing closer to 3 million. In Venezuela, President Chavez has been busy expropriating the remaining pieces of the oil industry still owned by foreigners. Drops in production can be expected soon.

The net result of all these voluntary and involuntary cuts is that world oil production has dropped significantly since reaching an all-time high last year. This drop in production when coupled with the normal declines in output from aging oil fields and the prospects that less oil will be coming into production from new fields than expected, has led many to declare that the all time peak in world oil production took place last year. While it will take several years to verify that this was indeed the case, inability of the world's oil industries to ever again increase production has unfathomable implications which are not as yet widely recognized.

A corollary of the low oil prices and the lack of easy credit have led to a slowdown in the investment going into new oil production projects. While this has little immediate impact on the availability of oil, some years down the line it means that all of the new oil needed to offset depletion will simply not be there and that world production will decline faster than expected.

One can conjure up numerous scenarios of how oil, which at least currently is indispensible for economic growth, may or may not play a part in an economic rebound.

One scenario could be that the credit and financial markets are so far beyond redemption that the world economy will continue to decline indefinitely without reference to how much oil is available. The demand for oil would continue to decline and prices would remain relatively low so that there will continue to be sufficient oil available to support the deteriorating world economy. This scenario, of course, is one that few are willing to entertain, especially in light of the trillions being spent by governments all over the world to revive their economies.

While the notion of a quick recovery this year or early next year seems to be fading, most now believe that while a recovery may be slower than we would like, it will come eventually - it always has, particularly in the experiences of most living today.

The latest estimates from the International Monetary Fund say that world-wide GDP will be down about 2.7 percent this year. The world's spare oil production capacity currently is around six million b/d. This, however, is not a static number as the world's capacity to produce oil from existing sources is withering away at 3 or 4 million b/d each year and unless this much new supply is opened, then total world supply must inevitably shrink.

Now there is no question that very high oil prices would quickly choke off economic growth. Every dollar per gallon increase in the price of oil products drains about $800 million each day from the pockets of consumers in America. Worldwide it drains about $3.5 billion each day. Most observers believe that as soon as worldwide demand for oil gets ahead of supply there will be multi-dollar per gallon increases in the prices of oil products.

There seems to be little doubt that over the next few years, the world's oil supply will be forced into irretrievable decline from a combination of geologic and geopolitical reasons coupled with a lack of adequate investment. Should the demand for oil increase in the next year or so, there will still be some room for increased production without unacceptable prices increases for a while. The longer a recovery is delayed, however, the better the chances that oil prices will quickly surge to recovery-choking levels. While there are long-term solutions to this problem they will take decades to implement.

At last some governments are worried about the slowly emerging situation. Last week the British Prime Minister ordered his cabinet to start working on emergency plans to prevent rising oil prices from destroying the prospects that there will ever be an economic recovery.

Do you believe in 'peak oil'?

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:24:09 PDT

Investors Chronicle

By Jonathan Eley

Debate has raged about 'peak oil' ever since Shell geologist M. King Hubbert first outlined the theory in 1956. It's the idea that once around half the world's reserves of oil have been extracted, production enters a slow and inevitable decline that no amount of investment can reverse. Believers in peak oil argue that once it becomes apparent that the peak is near, or even past, prices will rise sharply, and permanently. Detractors say the theory ignores geology and technological progress.

YES, says Matthew R. Simmons, founder of Simmons International:

"Many supposed energy experts refute peak oil, and mistakenly think the term means that we are running out of oil. Peak Oil does not mean "running out of oil". The world will likely never run out of oil, but the flow of usable oil has almost certainly already passed its high-water mark. Over the next five to ten years, our current oil supply will likely decline by as much as 15 to 25 per cent. In the meantime, despite the recent recession fears, the world's planned use of more oil is staggering.

The factors propelling growth in world demand for oil are simple. We have an expanding global population. There is no logical reason to assume that oil demand has peaked, or is even slowing down.

Oil consumption can never exceed available supply. So if supply dwindles, then demand must also stop growing, a task not easy to even contemplate. If demand grows while supply shrinks, shortages will occur. Human nature will create hoarding and oil consumers will begin "topping off their tanks". The risk of this occurring is far higher than most think.

The data proving that oil supply peaked in 2005 is not perfect, but it is solid enough for a jury to "convict with reasonable certainty." Just look at just the production declines from key producing countries like Mexico, Norway, the UK, Indonesia, Argentina, and many others in the past four years.

All that is needed to end the Peak Oil debate once and for all is an independent audit of the world's 300 largest producing oil fields. Sadly, too many of these fields, owned primarily by Opec countries, still guard their production and reserve numbers as "state secret." But the time is fast approaching when world leaders will demand honest facts about the flow rates of these key fields. When this happens, the proof that oil has already peaked will be air-tight. "

Simmons is an US investment bank specialising in services to energy companies. www.simmonsco-intl.com

NO, says Peter Odell, professor-emeritus of international energy studies, Erasmus University:

"Claimants for a near future peak in global oil production fail to recognise the processes whereby reserves and production evolve. They equally avoid the central role played by both economics and politics in equilibriating the markets.

The world's currently proven and potential reserves of oil - both conventional and non-conventional - eliminate any significant up-side restraints on the growth of production . On the contrary, near future constraints on oil supplies will be imposed by slow demand growth (of no more than 1.5% per annum).Thereafter, the eventual continuation of a steadily increasing supply of oil for global use will be based on the present creation and future maintenance of a 40-plus years' reserves-to-production ratio.

Peak-oilers, however, argue that annual additions to reserves which comprise both new discoveries and reserves' appreciation in previously-discovered fields should not be taken to indicate the replacement or replenishment of reserves' stock. Additions to reserves in previously found fields must be dated back to the year of initial discovery.

Backdating reserves with hindsight - in the context of newly developed technologies of reserves' assessments and recoverability - is simply inappropriate to the continuing economic evaluation of oil exploitation. It makes the past look more attractive than it really was, while the present is unjustly made to appear inadequate.

The current declaration of proven reserves of 1400 billion barrels will likely rise to 1750 billion barrels or more by 2020 so providing continuity for the future of the oil industry for decades ahead.

Even without any further discoveries peak oil production will not occur over this period. Unless, that is, the price of oil collapses so undermining profitable investments in the industry. Or as a consequence of a consistent fall in demand because of renewable energies' expansion. Only then, will peak global oil production necessarily occur."

The Coming Oil Crisis

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 22:43:36 PDT

Newsweek.com

By Mohammed J. Herzallah

Canadian economist Jeff Rubin has a somewhat oracular reputation. Since 2000, he has predicted a massive oil-price spike, and he was among the first in 2007 to prophesy that oil would soar over $100 per barrel (a few months later, he said $150 a barrel and was basically proved right again). Now, even though oil has dropped considerably from its peak, Rubin warns that it's bound to skyrocket once more and cause another, even greater economic crisis. In his new book, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, he lays out how this energy crunch will occur—and why it will spell the end of globalization.

The scenario goes something like this: the ongoing depletion of the world's oil resources, coupled with soaring demand from emerging economies like India and China, will send the price of crude through the roof, Rubin says. This will seriously escalate transportation costs, which in turn will cripple international trade, reverse commercial interdependence and disable the global economy. The resulting age will be one in which nations are isolated, technological progress is sluggish and travel is infrequent. The Middle East will be less relevant than it is today, and food scarcity will emerge as the foremost international problem. Countries with a shortage of arable land will scramble and compete to buy agricultural real estate from other nations (for example, as Saudi Arabia is already now doing in Sudan) to alleviate their ever-worsening food crises.

Rubin's future isn't all bad. To offset the effects of the energy crisis, governments will have to invest heavily in national infrastructure (especially public-transportation systems); national industries once hurt by outsourcing and foreign competition will thrive; and the environment will become cleaner as people are forced to use less fossil fuel and as cars disappear from the streets. But Rubin warns that governments can do only so much—successful adaptation to an energy-starved world will largely depend on individuals altering their energy-consumption norms. Still, he is willing to bet that people will make the right choices. All in all, he says, "don't be surprised if the new, smaller world that emerges isn't a lot more liveable and enjoyable than the one we are about to leave behind."

Rubin's argument is powerful. There's no denying that the international economy has become critically dependent on oil as its main source for energy. Yet, like other believers in the "peak oil" theory, he falls into the trap of underestimating society's capacity to meet future fuel challenges through innovation and conservation. The story of energy over the past century has been one of breakthroughs, not retreat—so although the energy problems we face today should be a cause for concern, global integration will continue to deepen and the world is not likely to get smaller any time soon.

The Peak Oil Crisis: A Letter From Baghdad

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:23:29 PDT

Falls Church News-Press Online

By Tom Whipple

A couple of weeks back the peak oil community received a letter from an officer serving with our forces in Iraq.

Despite numerous distractions in Iraq these days, this officer is so concerned that peaking world oil production will soon become a serious problem that he began discussing the future of America's energy supply with soldiers in his unit. What he concluded has a message for us all.

He found that most people have no trouble accepting the premises of peak oil- that there is a finite amount of crude underground, that the easy and cheap to extract oil is nearly gone and that world production will go into an unstoppable decline. The disconnect from reality, however, comes when contemplating the consequences of this event, for nearly all believe there are many obvious alternatives to oil. We know what they are: nuclear, solar, wind, waves, tides, shale, oil sands, coal-to-liquid, biomass, etc., etc. In the mind of most, it is a rather simple matter of switching from oil to any or all of the alternatives so that life-as-we-know-it can continue without missing a beat.

The more likely consequence, that peaking of world oil production will cause severe economic hardships that will take decades to mitigate is simply not a future that most are willing to entertain. Arguments that oil consumption has grown so large in the last 100 years that once depletion starts the development of similar amounts of alternative energy will take a very long time are simply not believed. This micro-survey makes an important point because it mirrors the common sentiment across the land as reflected by the media and political leaders. Even if oil should go into depletion someday --- there is simply not a problem.

Our letter-writer believes the reason for this commonly held opinion is the saturation of TV and the print media with the message that our oil companies are hard at work getting ready for the next generation of energy sources. Should we ever need alternatives to oil, all will be in readiness. Millions are spent on a continual drumbeat of such ads each month. They are impossible to avoid and have left most with the impression that all will be well - your oil industry is on the job.

This all-will-be-well message is always bereft of detail. Nowhere is there mention, of the vast amount of oil being consumed around the world each day, anticipated rates of depletion from existing oil fields, nor of the trillions of dollars that will be required to finance the next round of exploiting increasingly more difficult to recover oil. From time to time, the message is punctuated with the word "technology". Not any particular technology, just the implication that the technology which has brought our civilization this far will be there when we need it.

It comes as no great surprise to discover that American's perceptions are shaped by advertising and the mainstream media. In most cases, no great harm is done. A lot of advertising may elect a less than optimal candidate to public office or convince people that they really need to buy something. Usually, there is little harm done although from time to time concerted, successful efforts to set public opinion can have lasting and serious repercussions.

The current issue of the Columbia Review of Journalism contains a post mortem of how well the financial press covered the mortgage meltdown which triggered what could be turn out to be a very memorable recession. After reviewing 730 stories written between 2000 and 2007 pertaining to the mortgage industry, the authors concluded that in the main the financial press missed the run-up to the meltdown until it was too late. This left government convinced that it had to step in with trillions of dollars to stem a complete breakdown of the financial system. Although a few lonesome voices saw what was coming, as a society we were clueless until the banks started going under.

Just as millions were lulled by ever increasing home values that could make people rich, the same millions are being lulled by perceptions of a seemingly endless supply of cheap energy that will continue in some form so far into the future that we need not worry.

The heart of the peak oil question today is not whether oil is going to peak sometime soon - it probably already has. The issue is how soon people and their governments recognize that we are going to have to make substantial changes in our lifestyles and bear unprecedented costs in order to hold our civilization together in some recognizable fashion. Changes of this magnitude do not come easily.

Some hint of what is to come was seen last summer when a combination of factors drove gasoline prices in the U.S. to $4-5 a gallon. The initial political reaction was to denounce scapegoats - Arab oil producers, speculators, environmentalists. Fortunately or not our global recession intervened, forcing the demand for oil down by several million barrels per day taking the pressure off prices and delaying important decisions to another day.

For now, the matter rests. The new U.S. administration and congressional majority clearly is dedicated to reducing carbon emissions in a timely fashion and is taking many other steps that eventually could have an impact on oil consumption. However, there is still no official acknowledgement that adequate oil supplies are going to be a major problem in the near future and that hopes for a smooth transition to alternative forms of energy without sacrifices and expense is simply not going to happen.

Like the soldiers surveyed in Baghdad, a critical mass of Americans and their political leaders are simply not ready to accept the consequences of what is about to befall us. We were a lot closer to understanding during the price spike last summer. Now It seems clear that it is going to take much higher energy prices before we as a nation understand the consequences of peak oil.

It's Official -- The Era of Cheap Oil Is Over

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:35:42 PDT

tomdispatch.com

By Michael T. Klare

Every summer, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy issues its International Energy Outlook (IEO) -- a jam-packed compendium of data and analysis on the evolving world energy equation. For those with the background to interpret its key statistical findings, the release of the IEO can provide a unique opportunity to gauge important shifts in global energy trends, much as reports of routine Communist Party functions in the party journal Pravda once provided America's Kremlin watchers with insights into changes in the Soviet Union's top leadership circle.

As it happens, the recent release of the 2009 IEO has provided energy watchers with a feast of significant revelations. By far the most significant disclosure: the IEO predicts a sharp drop in projected future world oil output (compared to previous expectations) and a corresponding increase in reliance on what are called "unconventional fuels" -- oil sands, ultra-deep oil, shale oil, and biofuels.

So here's the headline for you: For the first time, the well-respected Energy Information Administration appears to be joining with those experts who have long argued that the era of cheap and plentiful oil is drawing to a close. Almost as notable, when it comes to news, the 2009 report highlights Asia's insatiable demand for energy and suggests that China is moving ever closer to the point at which it will overtake the United States as the world's number one energy consumer. Clearly, a new era of cutthroat energy competition is upon us.

Peak Oil Becomes the New Norm

As recently as 2007, the IEO projected that the global production of conventional oil (the stuff that comes gushing out of the ground in liquid form) would reach 107.2 million barrels per day in 2030, a substantial increase from the 81.5 million barrels produced in 2006. Now, in 2009, the latest edition of the report has grimly dropped that projected 2030 figure to just 93.1 million barrels per day -- in future-output terms, an eye-popping decline of 14.1 million expected barrels per day.

Even when you add in the 2009 report's projection of a larger increase than once expected in the output of unconventional fuels, you still end up with a net projected decline of 11.1 million barrels per day in the global supply of liquid fuels (when compared to the IEO's soaring 2007 projected figures). What does this decline signify -- other than growing pessimism by energy experts when it comes to the international supply of petroleum liquids?

Very simply, it indicates that the usually optimistic analysts at the Department of Energy now believe global fuel supplies will simply not be able to keep pace with rising world energy demands. For years now, assorted petroleum geologists and other energy types have been warning that world oil output is approaching a maximum sustainable daily level -- a peak -- and will subsequently go into decline, possibly producing global economic chaos. Whatever the timing of the arrival of peak oil's actual peak, there is growing agreement that we have, at last, made it into peak-oil territory, if not yet to the moment of irreversible decline.

Until recently, Energy Information Administration officials scoffed at the notion that a peak in global oil output was imminent or that we should anticipate a contraction in the future availability of petroleum any time soon. "[We] expect conventional oil to peak closer to the middle than to the beginning of the 21st century," the 2004 IEO report stated emphatically.

Consistent with this view, the EIA reported one year later that global production would reach a staggering 122.2 million barrels per day in 2025, more than 50% above the 2002 level of 80.0 million barrels per day. This was about as close to an explicit rejection of peak oil that you could get from the EIA's experts.

Where Did All the Oil Go?

Now, let's turn back to the 2009 edition. In 2025, according to this new report, world liquids output, conventional and unconventional, will reach only a relatively dismal 101.1 million barrels per day. Worse yet, conventional oil output will be just 89.6 million barrels per day. In EIA terms, this is pure gloom and doom, about as deeply pessimistic when it comes to the world's future oil output capacity as you're likely to get.

The agency's experts claim, however, that this will not prove quite the challenge it might seem, because they have also revised downward their projections of future energy demand. Back in 2005, they were projecting world oil consumption in 2025 at 119.2 million barrels per day, just below anticipated output at that time. This year -- and we should all theoretically breathe a deep sigh of relief -- the report projects that 2025 figure at only 101.1 million barrels per day, conveniently just what the world is expected to produce at that time. If this actually proves the case, then oil prices will presumably remain within a manageable range.

In fact, however, the consumption part of this equation seems like the less reliable calculation, especially if economic growth continues at anything like its recent pace in China and India. Indeed, all evidence suggests that growth in these countries will resume its pre-crisis pace by the end of 2009 or early 2010. Under those circumstances, global oil demand will eventually outpace supply, driving up prices again and threatening recurring and potentially disastrous economic disorders -- possibly on the scale of the present global economic meltdown.

To have the slightest chance of averting such disasters means seeing a sharp rise in unconventional fuel output. Such fuels include Canadian oil sands, Venezuelan extra-heavy oil, deep-offshore oil, Arctic oil, shale oil, liquids derived from coal (coal-to-liquids or CTL), and biofuels. At present, these cumulatively constitute only about 4% of the world's liquid fuel supply but are expected to reach nearly 13% by 2030. All told, according to estimates in the new IEO report, unconventional liquid production will reach an estimated 13.4 million barrels per day in 2030, up from a projected 9.7 million barrels in the 2008 edition.

But for an expansion on this scale to occur, whole new industries will have to be created to manufacture such fuels at a cost of several trillion dollars. This undertaking, in turn, is provoking a wide-ranging debate over the environmental consequences of producing such fuels.

For example, any significant increase in biofuels use -- assuming such fuels were produced by chemical means rather than, as now, by cooking -- could substantially reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, actually slowing the tempo of future climate change. On the other hand, any increase in the production of Canadian oil sands, Venezuelan extra-heavy oil, and Rocky Mountain shale oil will entail energy-intensive activities at staggering levels, sure to emit vast amounts of CO2, which might more than cancel out any gains from the biofuels.

In addition, increased biofuels production risks the diversion of vast tracts of arable land from the crucial cultivation of basic food staples to the manufacture of transportation fuel. If, as is likely, oil prices continue to rise, expect it to be ever more attractive for farmers to grow more corn and other crops for eventual conversion to transportation fuels, which means rises in food costs that could price basics out of the range of the very poor, while stretching working families to the limit. As in May and June of 2008, when food riots spread across the planet in response to high food prices -- caused, in part, by the diversion of vast amounts of corn acreage to biofuel production -- this could well lead to mass unrest and mass starvation.

A Heavy Energy Footprint on the Planet

The geopolitical implications of this transformation could well be striking. Among other developments, the global clout of Canada, Venezuela, and Brazil -- all key producers of unconventional fuels -- is bound to be strengthened.

Canada is becoming increasingly important as the world's leading producer of oil sands, or bitumen -- a thick, gooey, viscous material that must be dug out of the ground and treated in various energy-intensive ways before it can be converted into synthetic petroleum fuel (synfuel). According to the IEO report, oil sands production, now at 1.3 million barrels a day and barely profitable, could hit the 4.4 million barrel mark (or even, according to the most optimistic scenarios, 6.5 million barrels) by 2030.

Given the IEA's new projections, this would represent an extraordinary addition to global energy supplies just when key sources of conventional oil in places like Mexico and the North Sea are expected to suffer severe declines. The extraction of oil sands, however, could prove a pollution disaster of the first order. For one thing, remarkable infusions of old-style energy are needed to extract this new energy, huge forest tracts would have to be cleared, and vast quantities of water used for the steam necessary to dislodge the buried goo (just as the equivalent of "peak water" may be arriving).

What this means is that the accelerated production of oil sands is sure to be linked to environmental despoliation, pollution, and global warming. There is considerable doubt that Canadian officials and the general public will, in the end, be willing to pay the economic and environmental price involved. In other words, whatever the IEA may project now, no one can know whether synfuels will really be available in the necessary quantities 15 or 20 years down the road.

Venezuela has long been an important source of crude oil for the United States, generating much of the revenue used by President Hugo Chávez to sustain his social experiments at home and an ambitious anti-American political agenda abroad. In the coming years, however, its production of conventional petroleum is expected to fall, leaving the country increasingly reliant on the exploitation of large deposits of bitumen in the eastern Orinoco River basin. Just to develop these "extra-heavy oil" deposits will require significant financial and energy investments and, as with Canadian oil sands, the environmental impact could be devastating. Nevertheless, successful development of these deposits could prove an economic bonanza for Venezuela.

The big winner in these grim energy sweepstakes, however, is likely to be Brazil. Already a major producer of ethanol, it is expected to see a huge increase in unconventional oil output once its new ultra-deep fields in the "subsalt" Campos and Santos basins come on-line. These are massive offshore oil deposits buried beneath thick layers of salt some 100 miles off the coast of Rio de Janeiro and several miles beneath the ocean's surface.

When the substantial technical challenges to exploiting these undersea fields are overcome, Brazil's output could soar by as much as three million barrels per day. By 2030, Brazil should be a major player in the world energy equation, having succeeded Venezuela as South America's leading petroleum producer.

New Powers, New Problems

The IEO report hints at other geopolitical changes occurring in the global energy landscape, especially an expected stunning increase in the share of the global energy supply consumed in Asia and a corresponding decline by the United States, Japan, and other "First World" powers. In 1990, the developing nations of Asia and the Middle East accounted for only 17% of world energy consumption; by 2030, that number, the report suggests, should reach 41%, matching that of the major First World powers.

All recent editions of the report have predicted that China would eventually overtake the United States as number one energy consumer. What's notable is how quickly the 2009 edition expects that to happen. The 2006 report had China assuming the leadership position in a 2026-2030 timeframe; in 2007, it was 2021-2024; in 2008, it was 2016-2020. This year, the EIA is projecting that China will overtake the United States between 2010 and 2014.

It's easy enough to overlook these shifting estimates, since the reports don't emphasize how they have changed from year to year. What they suggest, however, is that the United States will face ever fiercer competition from China in the global struggle to secure adequate supplies of energy to meet national needs.

Given what we have learned about the dwindling prospects for adequate future oil supplies, we are sure to face increased geopolitical competition and strife between the two countries in those few areas that are capable of producing additional quantities of oil (and undoubtedly genuine desperation among many other countries with far less resources and power).

And much else follows: As the world's leading energy consumer, Beijing will undoubtedly play a far more critical role in setting international energy policies and prices, undercutting the pivotal role long played by Washington. It is not hard to imagine, then, that major oil producers in the Middle East and Africa will see it as in their interest to deepen political and economic ties with China at the expense of the United States. China can also be expected to maintain close ties with oil providers like Iran and Sudan, no matter how this clashes with American foreign policy objectives.

At first glance, the International Energy Outlook for 2009 hardly looks different from previous editions: a tedious compendium of tables and text on global energy trends. Looked at another way, however, it trumpets the headlines of the future -- and their news is not comforting.

The global energy equation is changing rapidly, and with it is likely to come great power competition, economic peril, rising starvation, growing unrest, environmental disaster, and shrinking energy supplies, no matter what steps are taken. No doubt the 2010 edition of the report and those that follow will reveal far more, but the new trends in energy on the planet are already increasingly evident -- and unsettling.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Henry Holt). A DVD of the documentary film based on his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available by clicking here.

The Peak Oil Crisis: Watching a Mega-Crisis

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:34:14 PDT

Falls Church News-Press Online

By Tom Whipple

In the last few weeks there have been a number of developments that may provide an insight into the next few years - but first let's review.

We, in America, are deep in the midst of a four-sided crisis. The first side is an economic slump; second, surprisingly, is our government's panicky efforts to stabilize the situation; third, the imminent peaking of fossil fuels and numerous other resources that seems to be in abeyance for the moment; and fourth, global warming which in the long run could overshadow the other three by a wide margin and is attracting considerable amounts of government and Congressional attention.

The important point is that the four aspects of what could easily turn out to be the mega-crisis of the century are all interrelated. Developments in any of the four will cause perturbations for better or worse in the others.

Most believe our current economic problem was caused by the extension of too much credit, too freely, and to the wrong people, over the last 30-40 years. Some, however, are suspicious that the many-fold run-up in oil prices from their historic $10 or $20 a barrel that sopped up so much consumer purchasing power may have had more than a little to do with our current economic problems.

While the consequences of the economic downturn are well understood, we are just starting to appreciate that the massive governmental effort to keep a recession from turning into a depression is threatening unprecedented repercussions of its own. In the last 10 months, the U.S. government and its central bank have spent or issued guarantees approaching $12 trillion in efforts to boost the economy. During the current fiscal year, the US will sell $3.25 trillion in new securities vs. $892 billion worth last fiscal year. Some are already calling this phenomenon the "bailout bubble" and are worried that deficit financing on this scale could destroy the dollar and take much of the U.S. economy with it.

People who claim to understand such things continue to assure us that additional trillions in deficit financing will not be a problem and that anything is better than allowing our economy to slip into another great depression. Despite the government's best efforts, however, interest rates have begun to rise and last week took a rather substantial jump. This in turn could hamper a recovery in the housing market. The recent fall of the U.S. dollar is a companion signal that all is not well. Whether the falling dollar and the increase in interest rates will continue much longer is anybody's guess, but it won't take much more of a move before prospects for an early economic recovery are seriously harmed.

While many different natural resources - fossil fuels, minerals, fresh water - are in danger of running short within next few decades, oil production which probably has already passed its all-time peak looks like the best bet to interfere with, and eventually stymie, an economic recovery. Crude oil prices have doubled since the end of January and may go higher on expectations that an economic recovery is underway. While crude prices are still less than half the $147 a barrel they reached last July, it is getting close to the level where economic damage could be inflicted. While the demand for commercial fuels for trucks and jet planes is down, gasoline demand has not fallen much as prices have edged up.

While the interaction among the four major factors that will have much to do with our economic future - the recession, the bailout, peak oil, and global warming - is easy to understand, the timing and nature of all the possible interactions are difficult to comprehend. Oil supply and demand are relatively easy to track, but no one as yet seems to have a firm insight into whether, when, and how fast massive deficit spending is going to lead to serious trouble.

Any increase in demand from a revitalized economy is almost certain to drive oil prices higher. In the last eight months, OPEC has reduced its oil production by about three million b/d which has kept production closer to demand for the time being. Although a few members of OPEC currently have surplus production capacity that could be turned into increased production, every year we are extracting some 30 billion barrels of mostly easy and cheap-to-produce oil. The simple message is that in three to four years excess production capacity is likely to be eaten up by depletion. After that increased oil production will become very expensive and take considerable effort. Much higher prices and considerable economic damage are virtually certain.

To summarize our situation: If and when the U.S. and world economy rebounds significantly, the increased demand for oil will quickly lead to higher prices which in turn is likely to choke off the rebound; if the U.S. and world economy continues to contract, demand for oil and oil prices will fall for a while, but the economy will be approaching depression levels; if the massive deficit-financed bailouts lead to lack of interest in U.S. government securities and a weaker dollar, interest rates will soar and choke off economic growth; if the U.S. and other governments seriously clamp down on carbon emissions to control global warming, higher energy prices are likely. Our economy and future stand at a crossroad.

No one can claim to have much insight into the likelihood and timing of the many possible developments that could spring from our multi-sided crisis. The one thing we can be sure of, however, is that the four sides of our mega-crisis are inextricably connected. Any change, either for good or ill, sooner or later will cause changes in one or more of the others.
None of this bodes well for a return to life as we knew it only a few years ago.

We're in for a shock

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:20:16 PDT

baltimoresun.com

Vaunted cap-and-trade bill does nothing about oil dependence

By Gal Luft

Now, when the first signs of economic recovery may be in sight, it's time to ponder what kind of recovery we are likely to witness. Will it be the traditional V-shaped recovery in which economic growth bounces back from a slump, or will it be a W-shaped, double-dipped one in which one crisis follows the other for several years to come? Much of this depends on the price of oil.

Nearly a year ago, oil prices hit their near $150 peak. This price shock, according to some economists, contributed materially to the recession that a few months later caused prices to collapse by nearly $100 a barrel. The global recession shrank demand for crude. But all of this is going to change once growth resumes, and the oil market is far from ready to absorb the resurgence in demand.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently concluded that even with the current recession, by 2030 global demand for oil could increase by 25 percent. The agency found that at expected rates of oilfield depletion, to meet future demand for oil, four new Saudi Arabias will have to be added to the global oil market between now and 2030. But the current economic conditions have thwarted the much-needed investment in new production. The IEA predicted that investment in oil and gas exploration will fall by 20 percent in 2009, and the Saudi oil minister is predicting a "catastrophic" shortfall in petroleum production.

For the U.S, such an oil shock would come at a terrible time as hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded governmental stimulus and bailouts percolate into the economy, leading to inflationary pressure and devaluing the dollar. This would force OPEC members which conduct their oil transactions in dollars to keep prices high in order to ensure sufficient government revenues.

While the next oil crisis is staring us in the face, Congress prefers to lower its eyes. What seems to be the signature energy legislation of the 111th Congress, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, (also known as the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill) does virtually nothing to shield the economy from the devastation the coming oil crisis would no doubt cause. The bill's renewable electricity mandate, which requires utilities to get 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020, would discourage the use of coal and natural gas, but since only 2 percent of U.S. electricity is made from petroleum it will do nothing to address our oil dependence problem. The bill's "cash for clunkers" program may help drive stockpiles of unsold Detroit cars off the lots, but in terms of oil dependence it is equally meaningless.

Even the provisions to encourage deployment of electric and plug-in hybrids, while important and useful, will not affect our near-term energy security, at least until battery costs are significantly reduced.

Sadly, the one provision that could have made a difference, an Open Fuel Standard to ensure 50 percent of new cars are flexible-fueled - capable of running on any blend of alcohol and gasoline - was watered down to meaninglessness by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Such a standard, which adds less than $100 to the cost of a new car, could have enabled consumers to choose a fuel alternative at the pump if and when gasoline prices rise to $5 a gallon.

Devoid of any provision that could help strip oil of the strategic status derived from its virtual monopoly over transportation fuel, the Waxman-Markey bill is sowing the seeds for the next oil shock.

A better course would include not only an Open Fuel Standard but the removal of trade barriers affecting alternative fuels, such as the 54-cent tariff on imported ethanol. With a significant portion of our fleet capable of running on alternative liquid fuels and with free trade in alternative fuels allowing scores of developing countries to export billions of gallons of sugarcane ethanol to the U.S., we could withstand the next oil crisis with relatively little pain.

Congress and the Obama administration should ensure that any energy bill includes provisions that address not only the long-term implications of greenhouse gas emissions but the much nearer adversity coming to a gas station near you.

Gal Luft is executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in Potomac. His e-mail is luft@iags.org.

An Inconvenient Talk

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Sun, 31 May 2009 08:11:41 PDT

The Walrus

Dave Hughes’s guide to the end of the fossil fuel age

By Chris Turner

Dave Hughes is driving north on Highway 2. Headed out of Calgary, where he worked for thirty-two years at the Geological Survey of Canada, mapping the nation’s coal reserves. Bound for Edmonton, where he grew up and earned two degrees in geology. It’s not yet dawn, the sky deep black and the windows of his pickup truck like mirrors, the southbound lanes a line of smeared headlights as long-haul commuters make the trek the other way into the capital of the oil patch. Hughes sips coffee from a reusable mug, fighting back sleepiness. Just another commuter trailing a cloud of burnt dinosaur bones on his way to work.

Dave had to start out fifteen minutes earlier than the requisite ungodly hour so he could pick you up at your house. So you wouldn’t drive yourself. Save a few hydrocarbons, he’d joked. He’s a coal man, a geologist, and he always refers to the holy trinity of fossil fuels whose flames have stoked the past 200 years of industrial growth — coal, natural gas, and especially oil — in that same semi-technical way: hydrocarbons. Dave Hughes has a lot to say about hydrocarbons, mainly how there’s no possible way to keep running the engine of a modern global economy for much longer at the pace we’re burning them. Which is why you felt compelled to join him in the black chill of this late-autumn morning. Because that seems like a pretty big deal.

Dave came right to the curb out in front of your house, your personal chauffeur, because you said you were interested in hearing his talk a second time, and he’ll do his level best to bring his talk to just about anyone who asks. The Talk, he usually calls it, and you can tell it has been a proper noun in his head for a good long while now. Somewhere between that first lecture back in 2002 at the University of Calgary and the 155th, the one he’ll give later today at a Natural Resources Canada research facility outside Edmonton, it became his passion, his quiet crusade, his data-freighted inconvenient truth. The Talk. One hundred fifty-four times. Geoscience symposia and energy industry summits and sustainability conferences. The Greater Vancouver Regional District and the Nova Scotia chambers of commerce. A petroleum trade show in Inuvik and a renewable energy confab in Flagstaff, Arizona. The Canadian Institute’s Coalbed Methane Symposium and the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. The audiences vary, but The Talk only tightens, takes on layers, attains a porous firmness like sedimentary stone. It is crowded with hard facts, and it is intended to overwhelm audiences with its certainty. It’s a reality check, a doozy of a reality check, and Dave doesn’t have much time these days for anyone who won’t face this reality.

Talk No. 147 took place at an urban sustainability forum at the Westin Hotel in Calgary. That’s where you first saw it. The title slide read “The Energy Sustainability Dilemma: Powering the Future in a Finite World,” and identified its presenter as J. David Hughes. Since then, you, too, have come to think of it as The Talk, and its author simply as Dave. Dave was on the bill that day with such dignitaries as the mayor of Calgary and the premier of Alberta. The officials talked about how to turn this boom town into a place that was “all things energy,” but nothing they said had any real resonance after The Talk. When the provincial sustainable resources minister came up to congratulate himself for setting aside some new provincial parkland on the edge of the city, it was as if he’d just awakened from cryogenic freezing, blipped in from some ancient time long before the existence of the world described in The Talk.

The Talk is in essence a constantly updated survey of the state of the planet through a hydrocarbon geologist’s eyes. It plows methodically through reams of energy-geek data. World Conventional Oil and Oil Sands Reserves, 1980–2007. Energy Profit Ratio for Liquid Hydrocarbons. Canadian Gas Deliverability Scenarios from All Sources. The small-font notes at the bottom of each PowerPoint slide enumerate sources that read like a general anaesthetic in print form: BP Statistical Review of World Energy, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, EIA International Energy Outlook. Pie charts and bar graphs with several rainbows’ worth of colour and an overabundance of italicized and all-capped words: “The absolute first priority,” that kind of thing. (By the way, it should be “to reduce energy consumption as soon as possible.”)

The Talk is all kinds of policy-wonky. Your eyes could glaze over. You could even miss the two slides Dave always says are the only ones you must remember. The first is a single-line graph depicting “World Per Capita Annual Primary Energy Consumption by Fuel 1850–2007,” which climbs by 761 percent over its 157-year timeline and flips from 82 percent renewable biomass (mostly wood) at the 1850 end to 89 percent non-renewables (almost entirely fossil fuels) at the 2007 end. The second critical slide has three line graphs in horizontal sequence, all tracking curves that begin in 1850, around the time humanity started drilling for oil in a serious way, and then spiking impossibly high at the right-hand, 2007 termini of their X axes. Global population today: 5.3 times global population in 1850. Per capita energy consumption today: 8.6 times that of 1850. Total energy consumption today: 45 times 1850’s.

You could also miss the way these figures resonate with The Talk’s voluminous data on oil and natural gas and coal reserves. You could miss how our current trajectory obliges us to rely on hydrocarbons for 86 percent of our projected primary energy needs in 2030, and how that fits with the strong case Hughes makes that the global hydrocarbon peak (the point at which global energy supply will begin an irrevocable decline, making the energy price shocks of the past couple of years start to look like the good old days) is estimated to occur nine years before that date.

Here’s the upshot: if you plan to drive a car or heat a house or light a room in 2030, The Talk is telling you your options will be limited, to say the least. Even if you’re convinced climate change is UN-sponsored hysteria or every last puff of greenhouse gas will soon be buried forever a mile underground or ducks look their best choking on tar sands tailings, Dave Hughes is saying your way of life is over. Not because of the clouds of smoke, you understand, but because we’re running out of what makes them.

Click to Continue…

Brain power can meet the energy crisis

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Tue, 19 May 2009 07:24:17 PDT

The Guardian

By Larry Elliott

Back in the 1970s, North Sea oil was seen as the saviour of the British economy. The money would be spent modernising industry so that it could play in the big league with the Germans, the Japanese and the Americans. Instead, we spent the money on unemployment benefit and tax cuts. The industrial renaissance never happened.

By the time the oil started to run out, financial services were the next big thing. The City would be Britain's unique selling point, we would pay our way in the world through banking, insurance, arranging bids and deals and by being better speculators than our rivals. With the banks bust and the financial sector in a state of petrification, we are now going to find out what life is like without artificial stimulants.

Dreamland

It won't be nearly as much fun as the years of living in a dreamland, but stripping away the pretence that there is some easy, painless solution to Britain's long-standing problems represents the first stage to recovery.

Britain has no shortage of talented people. There is plenty of creativity and always has been; the problem is that it has not always been channelled in the right directions. If ever there was a moment to remedy that systemic failure, it is now, because this crisis has only just begun. The first phase involved banks; the second phase will be energy.

Oil prices nudged above $60 a barrel briefly last week before falling back on news that inventories are high and that demand for crude is set for its biggest fall this year since 1981. An oil price at these levels looks suspiciously high amid the first fall in global gross domestic product since the second world war, although there are possible explanations. One is that commodity traders believe there will be a more rapid recovery in the global economy than anybody is expecting. A second is that the money central banks are pumping into financial markets through quantitative easing is spilling over into speculation. Third, and most worrying, the days of cheap oil may be a thing of the past. If this is the true explanation, there will be serious consequences.

In the post-war years, there has been a clear link between oil prices and global growth: the long boom of the 1950s and 1960s was an era when crude was dirt cheap; all four major recessions (1974-75, 1980-82, 1990-92 and 2007 to now) followed a spike in oil prices.

The last trough in oil prices occurred at the end of the 1990s, coinciding with the dotcom bubble and talk in the US of the new paradigm economy. Since then, the trend has been inexorably up, with supply struggling to keep up with strong demand from the mature markets of the developed world and the big emerging economies such as China and India.

Chris Sanders, of Sanders Research Associates, traces the origins of the current crisis back to the turn of the millennium, when the fall in production from the big finds of the late 1970s – Alaska, deepwater Mexico and the North Sea – ended the era of cheap oil.

A serious recession in the wake of the dotcom bubble was only averted because policymakers – Alan Greenspan in particular – manipulated interest rates to create another unsustainable boom. This did not mean the problem had been solved; indeed, putting it off for another day simply meant the problem grew bigger. Seen from this perspective, what we are witnessing is not the early stages of a new bull market, but a temporary lull in a much longer crisis that will see recovery hampered by high and volatile energy prices. Indeed, the volatility of crude over the coming years is likely to be as damaging as the fact that fuel will be becoming steadily more expensive.

To envisage this scenario, you don't have to accept that we are at – or close to – peak oil. There are many oil experts who have deep reservations about the notion that the moment of maximum petroleum extraction is at hand; they argue that rising prices will encourage exploration and make it viable for oil companies to extract crude from parts of the globe that were uneconomic at a price of $20-$30 a barrel. New and better technologies will be deployed to keep oil supply in tandem with demand.

Price signals

There is no doubting the economic validity of this case. Price signals do matter, and oil companies are far more likely to beef up their spending on exploration and new refineries if the oil price is $100 a barrel than if it is $10 a barrel. That's the good news.

The bad news is that even if the peak oil sceptics are right and there is plenty of untapped crude in the South Atlantic, Canada's tar sands or Central Asia, it is going to be more expensive to extract it. Oil has been critical to the development of industrial societies but energy firms, unsurprisingly, went for the oil that was easiest to get at and of the highest quality, since that meant low extraction costs and high profits.

In other words, the energy required to get fuel out of the ground was small; the energy return on energy investment (EROI) was high. But as companies have moved to tougher environments, the EROI on oil and gas production has fallen – one estimate is from 33:1 in 1999 to 19:1 in 2005. This global trend mirrors what happened in the US, where oil is still produced in large quantities but much less efficiently than it was 75 years ago. From an estimated 100:1 in 1939, the EROI for American oil production dropped to 30:1 by 1970 and 11:1 in 2000.

As Sanders puts it: "Today we are attempting to extract oil and gas in commercially viable quantities from offshore deposits that lie under more than 25,000 feet of water, rock and hot salt. It may well be possible to do so, but what is highly unlikely is that it will be possible to do so in sufficiently large flows to make a material difference to general prosperity. Another way of putting this is that economic growth rates are going to have to slow."

On the basis of what has happened in the recent past, we are likely to see oil prices on an upward trend but with wild gyrations. Frequent oil spikes when the global economy appears to be on the mend will be followed by a crash in prices as the impact of dearer energy raises business costs and bites into consumer spending power.

There is a silver lining to this cloud. Another half century of global growth at 5% a year powered by cheap fossil fuels would almost certainly be the death of the planet as we know it. But we are as ill prepared for the post-fossil fuel age as we were for war in 1939.

But we are at our best when we have our backs to the wall: let's establish a Bletchley Park for renewable energy schemes, where the best scientists work out how Britain will survive when the oil runs out. And let's do it now.

larry.elliott@guardian.co.uk

Moscow warns of future energy wars

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Fri, 15 May 2009 06:25:49 PDT

Al Jazeera

Russia has warned that military conflicts over energy resources could erupt along its borders in the near future, as the race to secure oil and gas reserves gains momentum.

A Kremlin policy paper, which maps out Russia's main challenges to national security for the next decade, said "problems that involve the use of military force cannot be excluded" in competition for resources.

The National Security Strategy's release coincides with a deadline for countries around the world to submit sea bed ownership claims to a United Nations commission, including for the resource-rich Arctic.

The paper, signed off by Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, says international relations in the next 10 years will be shaped by battles over energy reserves.

"The attention of international politics in the long-term perspective will be concentrated on the acquisition of energy resources," it said.

"Amid competitive struggle for resources, attempts to use military force to solve emerging problems can't be excluded.

"The existing balance of forces near the borders of the Russian Federation and its allies can be violated," it added.

The document said regions including the Middle East, the Barents Sea, the Arctic, the Caspian Sea and Central Asia could all be at the centre of competing claims for resources.

Russia, the world's biggest natural gas producer, has already accused the United States, with which it shares a small sea border, of coveting its mineral wealth.

But Moscow is also finding its control over natural gas exports under threat, as the European Union seeks alternative supply routes that would bypass Russia and the Ukraine.

The country is also embroiled in a territorial dispute with Norway over claims to the Arctic sea bed, where around 25 per cent of the world's untapped reserves are believed to lie underneath the ice.

Global security threats

The National Security Strategy also pointed to the US and Nato as major threats to global security.

It criticised a US plan to deploy a global missile shield in Eastern Europe, which has already infuriated Russia.

"The opportunity to uphold global and regional security will substantially narrow if elements of the US worldwide missile defence system are deployed in Europe," the document said.

But it added Russia would pursue a "rational and pragmatic" foreign policy and avoid a new arms race.

The document said Moscow would seek an "equal and full-fledged strategic partnership" with Washington "on the basis on coinciding interests".

How Much Oil Have We Used?

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:32:57 PDT

sciencedaily.com

Estimates of how much crude oil we have extracted from the planet vary wildly. Now, UK researchers have published a new estimate in the International Journal of Oil, Gas and Coal Technology that suggests we may have used more than we think.

The idea that we are running out of oil is not a new one, but do we even know how much oil we have extracted from since the first commercial oil wells were sunk in the middle of the nineteenth century? In 2008, chemists Istvan Lakatos and Julianna Lakatos-Szabo of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences theorised that less than 100 billion tonne of crude oil has been produced since 1850 and that the average annual production rate is less than 700 million barrels per year.

They compared proven reserves and estimates of yet-to-find (YTF) resources and echoed the sentiment that we will soon face oil shortages even though a substantial part of those reserves remain in the ground untapped.

Now, John Jones in the School of Engineering, at the University of Aberdeen, UK, suggests that the figures cited by Istvan Lakatos and Julianna Lakatos-Szabo for which they give no references grossly underestimates how much oil we have used already. Jones says that we have used at least 135 billion barrels of oil since 1870, the period during which J.D. Rockefeller established The Standard Oil Company and began drilling in earnest.

The oil industry now spans several generations, says Jones, and has historically been as uninterested in how much oil has been drawn as were economists, day-to-day and annual figures being of much greater concern. However, in 2005, The Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (ODAC) in London provided a total figure of almost 1 trillion barrels of crude oil (944 billion barrels) since commercial drilling began. Even that figure does not add up, Jones explains.

He has calculated a better estimate by using the volume of a barrel (42 US gallons, or 0.16 cubic metres) and a crude oil density of 0.9 tonnes per cubic metre. ODAC's 944 billion barrels is thus the equivalent of 135 billion tonnes.

Jones explains that this figure is of the same order of magnitude as the estimate offered by Lakatos and Lakatos-Szabo, but is nevertheless 35% higher than ODAC's figure. "Their assertion that less than 100 billion tonnes has been produced is significantly inconsistent with the ODAC," says Jones. The implication is that either ODAC or the Hungarian team are incorrect in their estimates, and suggests that clarification of this important figure is now needed.

Journal references:

1. Jones et al. Total amounts of oil produced over the history of the industry. International Journal of Oil Gas and Coal Technology, 2009; 2 (2): 199 DOI: 10.1504/IJOGCT.2009.024887
2. Lakatos et al. Global oil demand and role of chemical EOR methods in the 21st century. International Journal of Oil Gas and Coal Technology, 2008; 1 (1/2): 46 DOI: 10.1504/IJOGCT.2008.016731

Adapted from materials provided by Inderscience, via AlphaGalileo.

The Bottom

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Thu, 07 May 2009 09:00:05 PDT

jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com

By Jim Kunstler

Euphoria managed to out-run swine flu last week as the epidemic-du-jour, with "consumer" confidence jumping and the big bank stocks nudging up. The H1N1 virus fizzled for now, at least in terms of kill ratio, though we're warned it might boomerang in the fall with a vengeance. No one was surprised to see Chrysler roll over like a possum on a county highway, but the memory of their muscle cars will linger on like a California surfing song. Here in the northeast, where Sundays are not spent at the Nascar oval, the spring foliage reached the tenderly explosive stage and it was hard to feel bad about anything.

For now, the "bottom" is in -- that is, the bottom of this society's ability to process reality. It may continue for a month of so, even after the "stress test" for banks is finally let out of the massage parlor with a "happy ending." But events are underway that are beyond the command of personalities. We're done "doing business" in all the ways that we've been used to, but we just can't get with the new program. Let's count the ways:

1. The revolving credit economy is over. It's over because we can't increase energy inputs to the system, which is one way of saying "peak oil." Of course hardly anybody believes this right now because the price of oil crashed nine months ago, along with global manufacturing and trade. But nothing has changed on the peak oil scene -- except perhaps that ever more new oil projects have been cancelled for lack of financing, which will boomerang on us (even if swine flu doesn't) in the form of much lower future oil production. In any case, the credit fiesta is over, and the "consumer" economy with it, because industrial growth as we have known it is over. It's over globally, too, though all regions of the world will not experience its demise the same way at the same rate.

The Asian nations may swap things around a while longer but China is basically screwed. They have less oil left than we have (which is saying, not much at all) and they won't corner the rest of the global oil market without starting World War Three. Meanwhile, they're running out of water and food. Good luck becoming the next global hegemon. Oh, and Japan imports 90 percent of its energy; India over 80 percent. Fuggeddabowdit.

Credit will not vanish everywhere overnight -- even in the USA -- because it is not distributed equally everywhere. But it will vanish in layers, and here in the USA a very broad layer of the lower and middle classes are now losing their access to it in one way or another -- personally, in small business -- and they will never get it back. Anyone who intends to thrive in the years just ahead had better plan on doing it on the basis of accounts receivable -- and what they receive might not even necessarily come in the form of US dollars. It may come in the form of gold or silver or in the promise of reciprocal services rendered.

This has enormous implications for two of the items in which our credit-dispensing operations are most deeply vested: houses and cars. Unfortunately, these are exactly the things that economic life has been based on for decades in our nation, which leads to the next categories:

2. The suburban living arrangement is over, along with all its accessories and furnishings. Taken as "all of a piece," the suburban expansion was one sixty-year-long orgasm of hypertrophy. We did it because we could. We won a world war and threw a party. We had lots of cheap land and cheap oil. It made lots of people lots of money and all its usufructs have become embedded in our national identity to the dangerous degree that the loss of them will provoke a kind of national psychotic breakdown. In fact, it already has. The completely unrealistic expectation that we can resume this way of life is proof of it.

The immediate problem is that we can't build anymore of it. The next problem will be the failure of the stuff that already exists. The first stage of that is now palpable in the mortgage foreclosure fiasco and, just beginning now, the tanking of malls, strip centers, office parks and other commercial property investments. The latter will accelerate and become visible very quickly as retail tenants bug out and weeds start growing where the Chryslers and Pontiacs once parked. The next stage, which involves large demographic shifts in how we inhabit the landscape, has not quite gotten underway.

3. The Happy Motoring fiesta is over. You'd think that with Chrysler crawling into the bankruptcy court, and GM just weeks away from the same terminal ceremony, the news media would begin to suspect that the foundation of everyday life in this country was cracking. Instead, all we hear is blather about "market share" shifting to Toyota. News flash: not only will we make fewer automobiles in the USA, but Americans will buy far fewer cars made anywhere. We'll keep the current fleet moving a while longer, but when it's too beat to repair, we won't be changing it out for a new fleet -- despite all the fantasies about hybrids, plug-and-drive electrics, and so on. The masses will be too broke to buy these things. What's more, they will be very resentful of the shrinking economic "elite" who can afford them. And, anyway, our roads and highways are destined to fall apart very quickly because there is no way we can sustain the necessary rate of normal maintenance. Meanwhile, we remain completely un-serious about public transit -- even about fixing the vestiges that still exist. The airline industry, of course, will be toast inside of five years.

4. Our food production system is approaching crisis. There's no way we can continue the petro-agriculture system of farming and the Cheez Doodle and Pepsi Cola diet that it services. The public is absolutely zombified in the face of this problem -- perhaps a result of the diet itself. President Obama and Ag Secretary Vilsack have not given a hint that they understand the gravity of the situation. It is probably one of those unfortunate events of history that can only impress a society in the form of a crisis. It also happens to be one of the few problems we face that public policy could affect sharply and broadly -- if we underwrote the reactivation of smaller, local farm operations instead of shoveling money to giant "agribusiness" (or Citibank, or Goldman Sachs, or AIG...). I maintain that this may be the year that the crisis gets our attention, because capital is suddenly harder to get than fossil-fuel-based fertilizer.

All these epochal discontinuities present themselves, for the moment, as a season of muted "hope" and general apathy. The days are suddenly mild. We've resumed old and happy habits of grilling meat outdoors and motoring to those remaining places that were not blanketed with franchised food huts and discount malls. We have a new, charming president with an appealing family. Newly-minted dollars are flowing to the "shovel-ready." The new bad news is less bad than the old bad news (or seems to be). And the year just past has been such a bummer that our hard-wired human nature tells us that good things must be just around the corner.

Personally, I think a lot of good things await us, but not the ones we're expecting -- not a return to buying slurpees on credit cards. It will be very salutary to leave behind the junk empire we've accumulated and move into an epoch of quality and purpose. For the moment, though, our hopes reside elsewhere.
____________________________________

My 2008 novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available in paperback at all booksellers.

The return of Peak Oil

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:52:50 PDT

Investors Chronicle

By Daniel O'Sullivan

If you thought that the slump in crude prices from their $147 per barrel zenith last July spelled the end of 'peak oil' theories, think again. One US brokerage thinks that, far from approaching the mythical peak, we are in fact already past it.

Peak oil is the notion that the rate of global oil extraction is nearing the absolute limit of what its geology can support, and that declining production is inevitable thereafter. The inference is that new demand from the likes of China and India spells rationing through permanently sky-high prices.

But Marshall Adkins, analyst at Raymond James, thinks the peak was last summer. He cites the behaviour of Saudi Arabia as evidence. The kingdom, which dominates Opec, can usually be relied upon to open the spigots in response to soaring oil prices, as it did in 2005, when oil hit $70 per barrel.

Yet last summer, Saudi Arabian output never exceeded 9.6m barrels per day, the same ceiling it reached in 2005. With massive economic and political incentive to pump as much as it could, the implication is this is actually the limit of what Saudi Arabia can supply to the world market.

There isn't much slack elsewhere. The US, Russia and North Sea producers already pump as much as they can, yet non-Opec production has still declined since 2007. Other Opec members were also pumping as much as possible last summer.

So, if everyone, including the Saudis, was flat out last summer, we have unwittingly already seen the current industry configuration operating at full capacity. And, as Mr Adkins agrees that fresh discoveries will not come onstream fast enough to offset decline rates at existing fields, we are therefore past the historical peak of daily oil supply.

If true, the realisation is too late for many speculators who went long of oil above $100 but have subsequently unwound those positions. Andy Awad of Greenwich Associates says a major contributor to surprisingly strong first-quarter profits from some large US and European banks was financial investors 'restructuring' commodity derivative positions - stumping up losses to date plus 'break fees' to buy themselves out of bets on sky-high prices for commodities, particularly oil.

Earth Angels

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:39:02 PDT

Willamette Week Online

Happy Earth Day! Bet you’re not as committed to “sustainable living” as these 22 Portlanders.

By Adrienne So

It’s 9 am on a Thursday, and the thermostat in my 1999 Volkswagen Bug registers 36 degrees. If I were going to work, I’d be shivering inside my parka and heels.

But this April morning, I’m snugly layered in thermals, flannel and fleece.

I lace my boots around two pairs of hiking socks as I get out of my car. Then I sling my pack on my back and start down the broad, winding trail toward Tryon Life Community Farm, where boots and flannels are pretty much everyday attire.

I’m here at the edge of Tryon Creek State Park in Southwest Portland to visit the 7-acre farm, a nonprofit that offers youth programs in the summer and holds other events year-round. I want to learn what life is like for the farm’s residential worker collective, known as Cedar Moon—16 adults and six children ages 3 to 9 who live in two buildings directly off a long, pothole-speckled driveway.

Approached by car, the two buildings appear low-slung and nondescript, nestled under layers of verdant foliage. Ten residents live in one building, which has single rooms for them as well as a rec room and kitchen for the community. The other 12 live in a second building, which has been quartered into mini-apartments, complete with tiny kitchenettes.

Descending the wood-chip-carpeted trail into the farm, however, reveals a collection of small structures—a sauna, an outdoor stage, a composting toilet (don’t worry; it doesn’t smell) and something called the “T-Whale,” where residents sip tea in the summer—clustered around an open pavilion, next to the skeleton of a huge outdoor kitchen that’s under construction.

Elsewhere, partially shrouded by a gigantic blooming star magnolia, tidy trails wind through gardens, where bees buzz, chickens scratch and an occasional volunteer hoes the beds. Beyond the gardens, a pair of dog-sized sheep in a wire pen demand to have their chins scratched. A flock of 20 chickens fusses. Farther down the trail, there’s a barn for goats, which shriek like children when hungry. On the farm, the sound of minivans whooshing by on Southwest Boones Ferry Road vanishes behind the the surrounding trees.

Each adult in this little piece of heaven pays for rent and food, most with money from their day jobs in Portland. They also share chores, like cooking, cleaning and tending community gardens, which grow everything from staples like leeks to rarer fare like exotic Asian greens.

Taken separately, each part of this setup is unlikely to turn heads. Many students and professionals live in shared housing. And many farms have residential workers.

Conspicuously absent, however, are commercial motives or convenience. People don’t live at Cedar Moon because they answered a Craigslist ad. Moving here is akin to taking a second job, one in which your roommates are your best friends and also your co-workers.

It’s an ancient idea, but one so modest it’s practically un-American—that with effort, you can live with less, and be happier and healthier at the same time.

In the face of so much going awry on the planet—ice caps are melting, irreversible climate change is looming, and buying compact fluorescent light bulbs doesn’t feel so empowering anymore—coming here is like the beginning of a religious conversion. There’s got to be a better way to mark Earth Day each April than holding hands and singing songs.

Brenna Bell, co-president of TLC Farm’s board of directors and spokeswoman for the farm and collective, says I’m not the only one with a sneaking suspicion that a better way can be found on the farm.

“The intersection of economic and environmental crises has led to more people actively questioning how they live their lives,” says Bell, a 34-year-old environmental lawyer with slim glasses and coveralls over a hugely pregnant belly (her first daughter was born four years ago with a midwife’s help in a maple grove on the farm, and Bell hopes to re-create that experience with this child when it’s born in June).

Hmm. Is going off the grid indeed a workable model? To answer these questions, the community graciously allowed me to hang around for a few days. Here is what I learned about what the farm residents call their “intentional living” lifestyle:

Intentional living is sharing.

Before John Brush—a lean 33-year-old with a goatee and glasses—came to the farm five years ago, he worked in youth social services. Now he is a mediation and organizational consultant, as well as one of the farm’s prominent resident nerds.

Brush says sharing is something most people learned in kindergarten and soon forgot. Sharing is the key to why the farm and collective works: By splitting up chores and food, residents can save both time and money.

Chad Dermann, who manages a farmers market in Portland, buys food for the community.

By buying in bulk and eating organic produce residents grow themselves, Dermann says they can serve meals more cheaply.

Residents also save money on child care. New mothers on the farm can go back to work as teachers, lawyers or accountants, while their children dig for worms or pick nettles under the watchful eyes of other farm residents.

The shared expertise of these 16 adults also means never having to go to a computer store or bike-repair shop again. Someone is bound to know how to troubleshoot a computer bug or change a flat.

And shared resources let the community slash its carbon footprint. None of the buildings has central heating, and the residents operate only one kitchen and one washer and dryer.

But here’s what no one can admit without feeling like a horrible person: Sharing is hard, psychologically as well as logistically. In order to maintain large common areas, personal space is sacrificed.

Bell estimates each farm resident has an average of 265 square feet of personal space, less than one-third the national average of about 845 square feet, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Navigating the farm’s common spaces requires exceptional conflict management skills, and conflict can range anywhere from annoying to agonizing.

For example, 22 people—including toddlers—place a huge burden on one washing machine. “People weren’t putting other people’s loads into the dryer in winter,” Bell says. “So, we created a series of signs indicating whether something should be spun-dried. And we set up specific mornings that were diaper-priority times.”

Relationship skills are just that—skills. You must learn them.

Resident Jenny Leis—a small, sprightly woman with thick gray hair and an animated face—has a habit of occasionally wiggling her fingers at me, a sort of small-scale jazz hands. I incorrectly attribute this finger-wiggling to a past life as a concert pianist. “Oh, whoops,” she says. “That’s how we signify agreement in meetings without disturbing your flow. Like, ‘I agree!’” she sings, wiggling her fingers once more.

I do not think I will pick up this habit.

Another point about sharing: The farm is within the urban growth boundary to provide an accessible demonstration of sustainable living. Before being accepted into the collective, community members must acknowledge their willingness to teach any outsider the intricacies of everyday life at the farm. That means even more communication. I consider myself a voluble person. But if talking were baseball, I am barely a decent community-league pitcher compared to these folks, who could pitch Game 7 in the World Series of Talk.

After the goats have been milked and the chickens tended at 8:30 Saturday morning, one of these teaching sessions starts when volunteers begin arriving for the weekly work party to renovate the barn, part of which is slated to become a public space and office. I take my turn sifting clay and sand for plaster, while Brush explains earthen building techniques. It involves electron strength. I think.

I then head straight to Leis’ farm tour, which today has about a dozen visitors—a mixture of students, curious older women, and one visitor from a similar community in Oaxaca, Mexico. Then there’s a mushroom workshop and a wild foraging expedition, and more talking, more demonstrating and more learning. By 5 pm on Saturday, I am a beaten woman. I can’t process another word.

But as exhausting as the constant sharing and learning and communicating is, the benefits are worth the effort. As much as my cynical, dried-up heart would like for me to stop talking RIGHT NOW, I do conclude after my three-day stay that caring for the earth means first caring about each other.

Here’s an example: Earlier in my visit, I helped Bernhard Bach prepare dinner on a Thursday afternoon. A barrel-chested, stern-looking German man, Bach didn’t fit the profile of a typical farm resident, most of whom are in their 20s and 30s with an academic background in sustainability. Bach is 49 and works as a nurse in Portland. While I peeled and cut up Jerusalem artichokes, he chopped and sautéed leeks we had dug up from the garden.

I asked what had drawn him to the community a year and a half ago. “I went through de-WAHRS,” he said.

“The wars?” I asked. “You were in the military?”

“No, de-WAHRS. You know, after marriage.”

“Oh, divorce!”

“It’s different in Germany,” he said. “In a small village, you can’t escape everyone’s expectations. It’s difficult for you to become better than people expect you to be. Here in America, you can become anything you want to be. I believed in that, and I liked it.... Then my wife left me after 20 years.

“I was alone, and I realized this American way of life is not everything I expected it to be,’’ he continued. “I started looking for a village. I came here and volunteered a few times, and I liked it. When I applied, you know, I was not expecting to get in. Everyone here is so young. But I did, and I was glad.”

Most other residents had a similar story as to what attracted them. Yes, all had a common interest in sustainability. But most were aching for human connection in a world that is becoming increasingly devoid of it.

“Most people come home to their separate apartments after work, turn on a movie, go on the Internet, and don’t speak to anyone for the rest of the day,” says Brush. “City life can be isolating. We want to support people in making communities, without telling them what to do.”

It’s one solution to the “tragedy of the commons,” the theory that when individuals act in their own self-interest, they will destroy a common resource that is in everyone’s best interest to protect. It is now possible to add to that statement after visiting the farm: Individuals will continue to act in their own self-interest, unless they’re friends. The less connection we have to our resources, the less interest we have in protecting them—and by extension, each other.

Intentional living is holistic.

At first, “intentional living” looks like “intentional chaos.” On Thursday at 9:30 am, I can’t find a single student, let alone anything that looks like a classroom at the Mother Earth School, where I’m scheduled to help with the two dozen or so children who come here for classes five days a week. Finally, Bell catches me heading toward the barn and the farm’s three goats—I am obsessed with the goats—and shoos me uphill.

Another resident, Kelly Hogan, has allowed me to observe the year-round Waldorf-based kindergarten and preschool where the 3- to 6-year-olds eat, learn and play. All profits from the school, which charges $360 a month for tuition, go toward the TLC nonprofit.

Up on the hill, a “yome” (combination yurt and geodesic dome) huddles under the cover of trees. One of the teachers, Trent Price, tends a fire under a pot of water. Another, April Blair, assembles a grain mill on a picnic table. Inside the yome, Elena Wood, another teacher, is cutting vegetables at a table set with some of the tiniest cutting boards I have ever seen. The children arrive with vegetables to make their own midmorning snack—vegetable soup with dumplings.

The holistic part for the schoolchildren—and the full-time farm residents as well—is summed up in the phrase “plerk,” a word used by Blair and others to describe how play and work merge.

“I was tired of having my work and my downtime and my values out of sync with each other,” Brush says, regarding the farm’s adoption of plerk.

Tending a fire and collecting nettles are indeed more entertaining and educational than the coloring books I remember from kindergarten, though during the day we must rescue one girl from the advances of an ornery rooster and another from a blackberry bramble. We eat the soup and dumplings and wash our hands in a basin. Then we listen to a story in front of the honeybee hive before tromping off for free play in the woods.

Growing up on the farm means renouncing boundaries. Grinding a mill is more fun than recess, and learning about trilliums in a story is both entertaining and educational. School isn’t dreary work and useless play. It’s just...plerk. For the rest of my stay, I repeatedly talk about plerk, just because I like the way the word sounds.

Later, Bonsai Matt—a 34-year-old landscaper and gardener with thick black dreads—unconsciously illustrates the benefits of plerk. I find out he used to snowboard and rock-climb for fun. “Why did you stop?” I ask.

He gestures broadly at the vista before us—the greenhouse, the garden, the blackberry brambles and the adorable sheep pair. “I had enough to do here,” he says. “I just stopped thinking about it.”

Intentional living is questioning.

On Friday morning, I sit with Bell on the porch swing on the deck behind the community building, waiting to join Bonsai Matt in the garden. Two of the collective’s children climb onto Bell’s lap, and one carefully arranges my arms around a bald doll. Later, after I’ve started raking rows in the garden, Bonsai calls me to help him water the lettuces in the greenhouse. I follow him on his examination of the beds. While a lot of people like working in the kitchen gardens, Bonsai has a kind of de facto authority, just by virtue of knowing more than most about plants.

To me, the garden beds are about as indecipherable as The New York Times to a blind person. Every few minutes, Bonsai kneels down to pluck and hand me another bunch of fresh, succulent greenery. “This is lovage,” he says. Or, “You want some chives?” Pretty soon, I’ve taken a more active role in my own feeding. “What’s that?” I say. “Can I eat that?”

“Well, that’s a weed,” Bonsai says. He picks something else. “This is the most delicious thing in our garden,” he says, and hands me four or five wide, 3-inch-long leaves. When I chew them, a bright, sunshiny taste fills my mouth. “That’s lemon sorrel,” he says. “The tart taste comes from oxalic acid.”

Questioning everything is a key point of living intentionally. And, not coincidentally, a lot of people on the farm identify themselves as scientists, like Brush, who blows my mind by trying to explain the van der Waals forces between molecules.

“No one ever thinks about most things,” Bonsai says. “It’s like when someone asks, ‘How are you?’ Most people just say, ‘I’m good,’ and move on. Very few people take the time to say, ‘This is what’s going on in my life, and this is how I feel about it.’

“A lot of what’s wrong in the world,” he continues after a few minutes, “could be solved if people were more open, honest and humble.”

That’s definitely the approach at the farm. But constant questioning can be a humiliating, exhausting process. When you’re surrounded by relentlessly inquisitive minds, your basic assumptions are constantly being upended.

“Why do you like fashion?” Leis asks me later that day. We had spent the afternoon unloading salvaged wood for the sauna, and now we’re having tea sweetened with honey and goat’s milk.

I start to answer, then pause. Then start to answer, and stop again. “I don’t really know,” I say. “I’ve never asked myself that question.”

“When it seems that you can’t make sustainable choices, I like to break down the question,” Leis responds. “Is it because you like new things? Is it the primping? You can do that with handmade beauty products. Lena makes all sorts of natural shampoos. You should ask her about it.”

While I’m trying to break down why I like shopping (I like pretty things. Are flowers pretty?), I think back to earlier that morning. Before I went up to the community kitchen for lunch, I asked Bonsai for one simple tip to be more sustainable in everyday life. Without hesitation, he said, “Pee on your plants.”

“I always thought pee killed plants,” I say.

“Nope,” he says. “When diluted by rain, it’s some of the best fertilizer out there. And do you know how much water we waste by flushing all that fertilizer away? It’s crazy, once you think about it.”

Maybe it is crazy. When contemplating a multiple-member commune hidden in the woods, it’s terrifyingly easy to reduce the concept—and the residents—to a bunch of delusional pinko commies and trustafarians.

Certainly their anti-technology, (mostly) anti-convenience stance doesn’t help. No one wants to feel like a bad person because they occasionally enjoy the many fruits of modernization, like Popeye’s buttermilk biscuits or Netflix.

But if there was anything weird or strange about life on the farm, it was how utterly strange it wasn’t. Cooking in common and shared child care are hardly revolutionary innovations. Life on the farm was surprisingly familiar, a return to a way of life that vanished after the Industrial Revolution. Technological advances in the 20th century brought a lot of positive change—vaccines and clean drinking water come to mind—but a lot of social alienation and environmental destruction as well.

Standing under the blooming star magnolia, with the taste of fresh goat’s milk lingering in my mouth, the exigencies of modern life—with student loans and the like—seemed very far away. It was hard not to fantasize about setting up a similarly idyllic arrangement. Maybe on the coast. My boyfriend and I would live with several other friends and share childcare, cooking and gardening duties, but also have a widescreen television and a wireless Internet connection.

Leis has a routine greeting for strangers like me. “Congratulations!” she says whenever she starts a tour; most curious visitors come because they want to change something about their lives, and making the decision to do so is the hardest step.

When I got home, I started researching supper clubs to integrate more sharing into my life. But only after a hot shower, takeout pizza and Quantum of Solace in my blissfully empty apartment, of course.

TLC Farms organizes grassroots efforts for legislation promoting sustainability. One bill would make it easier to reuse graywater, or water already used for laundry or bathing. A measure to make graywater use legal in Oregon has passed the state House and is currently in the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee.

Three years after Cedar Moon began, eight of its original 14 inhabitants still live on the farm. One original member who left is Matt Gordon. A 29-year-old musician, Gordon says he returned last September to Northeast Portland to be nearer to the bands he plays and practices with. “It was a hard decision,” he says.

Brush estimates each farm resident has a carbon footprint of about 0.06 tons a year, compared with the average Portlander’s load, which varies from 2.1 to 3.2 tons.

April 22 marks the 39th Earth Day. The first Earth Day, coincidentally, marked the 100th birthday of Vladimir Lenin.

Earth Day Special: Energy and Food in a World of Limited Natural Resources

noreply@blogger.com (MK) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:15:44 PDT

fool.com

The world is running out of oil and the evidence is mounting. The term most commonly used in the discussions surrounding first the ceiling in oil discoveries and now more recently the ceiling of oil production is Peak Oil. Peak Oil since the mid 1950s has been argued as theory but their are more convincing arguments than just $4 a gallon gasoline (last summer) that support what should now be deemed as fact. The chances of finding another large oil reserve fall dramatically each day. Another fact that augments this point is that the largest reserves should be the easiest to find and still a major discovery hasn’t happened since Prudhoe Bay in 1969, 40 years ago. Not finding more oil would be well and fine if we simply didn’t use it at all but that’s currently not the case.

A shortlist of items made from oil (not just energy inputs or transportation inputs) include computer chips, dishwashing liquid, insecticides, antiseptics, tires, clothing, food preservatives, disposable diapers, vitamin capsules, fertilizers, water pipes, artificial limbs, aspirin and many other applications. It would be easy to substitute our energy gained from oil and oil based transportation as wind and solar come onto the grid. Unfortunately though the loss of the petroleum based household items and agricultural fertilizer (that is essential to higher crop yields) could significantly change the way we live.

Amazingly many have pointed to technological advances and rightly so. It becomes tough science though as most of the technological breakthroughs in the past have occurred thanks to petroleum. One solution that has been raised has been using biochemicals as replacements to existing petroleum products. I think many of us have seen corn-based plastics in cups and even corn-based fuels for ethanol but this only works as long as agricultural output remains high. This brings us to our problem. By using food as plastics and without the aid of petroleum-based fertilizers we still need a lot more oil to sustain consumption or we need to change our way of life.

One of the world’s foremost thinkers on this subject, Jay Forrester, actually created a systems dynamics model on resource depletion and its effects on population. A popular book “Limits to Growth” published in 1972 outlines the changes. The figure included in the link below is the original limits-to-growth model. It charts resources, births (b), services (s), population, pollution, deaths, food, and industrial output. While it is important to look at any future predictions with a little skepticism it is also clear that if we don’t make any more major discoveries in oil we must fundamentally change the way we get energy and how we use our resources.

With the suggestion of this model and the daily reduction in oil production, Richard Heinberg, an outspoken Peak Oil expert, sees no other way to tackle this problem other than a reinstatement of a communal agricultural society in the next 20 to 30 years. This would represent a drastic shift from our current vocational allocation of 1% to farming. But their still remain questions regarding one of the few factors under human control, our behavior. If we can cut back on consumption of natural resources, mainly those tied to oil, we may be able to ween ourselves off of what has been our economical life-blood and find other solutions. Is it realistic though for a generation and a people to change their entire system of life? While it could go as far as every family having a victory garden, it is the capitalist in me that calls out for a third way.

Sources and Further Reading:

The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse, Richard Heinberg, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC, Canada, 2006.

Fifty Million Farmers www.richardhienberg.com/museletter/175

Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil, Charles Hall and John Day, American Scientist, May-June 2009.

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Earth Day Special: Energy and Food in a World of Limited Natural Resources