Many observers in the Peak Oil community are baffled and disgusted by the angry denial of our dire fuel situation and its implications for our future, not only among the general public, but among our well-educated upper-middle class, including many prominent political leaders and intellectuals. The truculence of the general public is usually attributed to stupidity, ignorance, and "selfishness", and the unwillingness to make sacrifices to serve the "common good"; and the consensus among the aware is that we will have to become a more authoritarian and regimented society, perhaps even impose military law, in order to maintain civil order and assure the equitable distribution of remaining resources. "This country needs a good father," one commentator wrote, and commented approvingly on the regimentation and authoritarianism prevalent in the early 30s, remarking that we might have to impose these conditions again to make it through the hardship and upheaval of the massive shift that is upon us. Rationing is already under discussion, and various additional controls and government-imposed rules regulating use and distribution of resources, are also being discussed, some more seriously that others- and every single one, from the CAFE standards that the auto industry has resisted tooth and claw since their inception 30 years ago, to the government-mandated phase-out of incandescent light bulbs in favor of CFL bulbs and LEDs, is bitterly resented by the bulk of the citizenry, who feel the weight of over-reaching authority in every part of their lives.
That the authoritarianism of the environmentalist and peak oil believers, and their open contempt not only for common 'merikuns' and their wasteful ways,but for the concept of rights and freedom, might be exactly what triggers denial on the part of so many people who ought to know better, doesn't seem to occur to the environmentalist pundits and policy makers.
It also doesn't enter the heads of the authoritarians that the trends of the past 60 years that have made this country the most wasteful consumer of resources in the world, notably the build out of suburbia, and the corresponding total dependence on autos and trucks by our population, owe not so much to "market forces" or to the democratization of auto and suburban home ownership, as to government policies created by people who thought they knew better than we do what is good for us.
And what our leaders thought was good for us in those days was government-subsidized home ownership, taxation policies that incentivized the formation of large families, and lavish incentives for auto ownership, notably "free" highways to enable car ownership and facilitate the mass movement of the middle-income population out of the old cities to houses purchased with VA and FHA 3% down loans in new auto suburbs. Meanwhile, civic leaders across the country frantically cast about for ways to revitalize their rapidly emptying cities, and eagerly embraced the vision of urban planners and architects who wanted to demolish the unsightly slums around urban cores and warehouse the poor in high rise housing projects.
In short, it was our authoritarian welfare state that gave us the world's most wasteful and unsustainable built landscape next to Dubai, and is now shoveling the last of our wealth into sustaining and expanding it. This massive misinvestment is questioned by only a handful of our citizens, for our population was inducted by the corporatist nanny state into the passivity, consumerist ethos, and sense of entitlement that have made this country into a quagmire of towering debt and built an economy distorted by multiple layers of government subsidies and programs that reinforce the practices we need to discontinue, and disguise their true costs.
Therefore, we beg the question of just what a super-authoritarian, hyper-regimented Big Daddy regime can do for us that will produce any other outcome than further misallocation of resources in massively expensive boondoggles like the misbegotten high speed rail plan, multibillion dollar gifts to failing, obsolete industries like production home building in the far suburbs and our failing, obsolete domestic auto industry, and most of all, further intrusion into our private lives and restrictions on our personal and economic activities? Will erasing what few freedoms we have left to us and moving entire populations around like chessboard pieces according to the wisdom of a bunch of bureaucrats assure us of an orderly and peaceful transition to a lower energy regime and mollify the tens of millions of people whose expectations and hopes will be crushed but who will be expected to acquiesce to arbitrary authority in the most personal matters, with little or no explanation except for the usual crap about the "common good"?
Will the same government whose leaders have consistently lied to us for 50 years regarding the costs of the high-entropy economy its policies created and who, while knowing full well what the likely outcome would be, recklessly drove the creation of the worst financial debacle the world has ever seen, be able to lead us to any other end than the complete collapse of every system we depend upon for water, food, transportation, and every other necessity of life? And will these leaders be able to offer any other solution to the predicament of a country of 305 million people left with no resources, no means to make a living, and no way to procure food and housing and heat, but a military dictatorship with the complete cancellation of all our rights, vastly amplified state violence, and the death by mass slaughter or starvation of a substantial chunk of our population?
The coming difficult times of shortages, falling living standards, and failing systems will require all the fortitude, flexibility,skills and virtues individual citizens possess, in order to rebuild our communities into places that can sustain and shelter us and our civilized values. And the cornerstone civilized value is individual freedom, which is inseparable from personal responsibility.
Without the liberties, unprecedented in history, that we have secured at such a cost, we're headed straight back to the filth, brutality, and class tyrannies of the past, complete with the entire population enslaved in a neo-feudal society with draconian restrictions enforced by a brutal military.
And responsibility is the virtue that we have to painfully relearn, and in a large hurry, from the bottom of our society with its vast population of welfare entitlement junkies, prolific breeders, and criminal elements emboldened by our irrational justice system, through our middle classes with their passivity, complacence, sense of entitlement, and refusal to reckon costs and make necessary trade-offs, up to our financial elites that have been granted a license to steal trillions of dollars from the taxpayers, and have permitted to use their power to dictate legislation and policies that favor them, to turn this country into a low-wage cesspool, asset-strip the population by fraud and malfeasance, and sell our country to a nation ruled by a thug government ideologically opposed to the freedoms we have enjoyed and abused here.
After all, there is nothing "natural" about guaranteed personal liberty for every citizen regardless of class, color, ethnicity, or sex. The concepts of liberty and unalienable rights are the products of a highly evolved and literate civilization, which is also unnatural, a civilization with a high level of knowledge and technology, and with a broad and reasonably well-educated commonalty dedicated to preserving as much of it as possible, beginning with the philosophy that justified it and made it possible, that of freedom and rights and personal dignity. Without the will to preserve that, and the knowledge of its importance, we'll lose those values and everything that they made possible, including, most likely, our lives.
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Showing posts with label peak oil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peak oil. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Be Afraid
If oil in now at about $85 a barrel, where will it go when we experience a 5% to 7% drawdown in production? Chevron and other oil producers aren't spending approximately $120 a barrel on risky deep-sea drills because they think they will lose money on it, people.
And how many years will it take to deplete remaining reserves at this rate of depletion?
Given the hardship and economic turmoil described in this chart, we needn't expect such considerations as the human death toll and environmental consequences of offshore drills and the production of oil from "unconventional" sources (tar sands, deep sea drills) will weigh against the far greater toll should our complex systems that keep our grocery shelves stocked, treat our municipal water supplies, and supply the vast quantities of electrical power we need to live in comfort and have access to comfortable, sanitary living conditions, advanced medical car,and rapid emergency response, never mind the cornucopia of consumer goodies we all feel entitled to.
We are not prepared, nowhere near. We do not have decent public transportation, either for local or long distance travel. We will never be able to build all the nuclear power plants we need once the costs skyrockets due to escalating fuel costs. We do not have the rapid and high speed rail we will need to replace our planes. We do not have the wherewithal either jointly or severally to replace our soon-to-be-unlivable sprawl-burbs with well-insulated housing in dense, walkable towns and cities. We do not have the sustainable agriculture developed that we will need when it becomes prohibitive to use the chemical fertilizers manufactured with oil and gas. Most of us have no savings, let alone a 6 month supply of food. And thanks to the debt debacle of the past decade, we have no capital with which to build the systems we will need to retain our comforts, nor the industries that can supply us with the goods we will need in a different world than the one we live in now.
Maybe the religionists have a point- praying is what you do when you have nothing else left, and it seems appropriate now.
However, we could try to do just a few little things that might help. Since nobody, including all the leftist "greens", seems unduly disturbed by the recent deaths caused by the production of fossil fuels, could we try not to get all hysterical at the mere thought of building another nuclear plant near Chicago, or foam at the mouth because a train loaded with spent nuclear fuel might pass through town sometime. If we can tolerate a mine disaster that kills 29 minors, or a drill rig explosion that claims 11 men and spews oil allover the Gulf, could we front the theoretical hazards involved in a form of electricity generation that has not killed a single civilian in the U.S. or Western Europe in its forty-year history?
The Best Urban Neighborhoods For Post-Peak Living
There is endless discussion in Peak Oil and Survivalist circles regarding the optimal living arrangement for an era in which transportation will be difficult, expensive, and perhaps widely unavailable, and in which all the necessities of life- food, fuel, potable water, medicine, and common consumer goods, will be outrageously expensive, and their availability subject to supply chain disruptions and commodity scarcity.
Many Peak Oil prognosticators are extremely pessimistic about the prospects for extremely large cities such as NYC and Chicago, where denizens tend either to live in the suburbs with their thousands of square miles of auto-dependent sprawl, or in super-dense city neighborhoods with their thickets of super-large, energy-guzzling high rise buildings, and many people predict that the most successful settlements will be the small towns and smaller cities, principally those that have been battered the most by the cheap fuel extravaganza of the past 65 years, that saw our cities decimated as their populations bought automobiles and moved to distant suburbs. I expect that as the desert cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas fail, their populations will flee eastward and repopulate and rebuild these cities along lines that better comport with shrinking resources.
We here in Chicago can expect a massive influx of suburban refugees as the outer suburbs on the fringe of Cook County, as well as the collar counties, become non-negotiable for their middle and lower-middle class denizens Most of our lower middle classes (figure incomes of $25,000 to $65,000) live in the outer suburbs and exurbs, lured by the cheap houses and decent schools, and they will not be able to afford the 50 mile-each-direction commutes and multiple car ownership necessary to live in these places when gasoline prices start to rise even incrementally above current levels. In fact, they can't afford it now, thus the immense personal household debt levels that have become commonplace in this country in the past thirty years, and which render our population much less resilient and flexible in the face of the discontinuities we will face in the near future. These people will be hit first and the hardest as liquid fuels and all the goods and services dependent upon a ready and copious supply of them-in short, absolutely everything- become much more expensive, and this is already happening, as homes in the outer suburbs are losing value much faster than those in the cozy inner suburbs with their easy access to public transit and the city. Meanwhile, their better-off middle and upper-middle income brethren will be squeezed by much higher costs for everything, too, and they will be looking for convenience and freedom from the rising expense of the high-energy lifestyles of the recent past. However, many of the less affluent will cling to their homes because they cannot afford to take the heavy losses they will incur as these dwellings lose their utility and value. Most likely, more affluent middle class homeowners will be the first to recognize the inevitability of the suburban unraveling, and these people are the ones who are now making the choice to settle in the city in order to escape heavy transportation expenses and be close to work and within walking distance of retail and entertainment.
So we here in Chicago will very likely be dealing with floods of new arrivals, while we will be having problems of our own. We can be thankful that we have many people running our systems, such as our water treatment facilities and our electrical power, who have better brains than either our politicians or the Peak Oil prognosticators, and these people are aware of the challenges of maintaining essential services as basic maintenance and replacement become prohibitively expensive, which will happen as we descend the slope. Our major challenges will be to arrange things so that we can accommodate many more residents in comfort and offer access to public transit and retail, and to make sure that our public money is spent renewing our aged water and sewer infrastructure as quickly as possible, before high fuel prices drive the cost of construction and replacement out of our reach. This means that we need to immediately re-order our priorities, and stop the diversion of money towards unnecessary projects and allocate it to necessary repair and replace. Many neighborhoods that were badly beaten up in the cheap fuel years will experience rapid revivals, while others that have been extremely successful, such as our downtown areas with their dense concentrations of mega-high rise condo and apartment towers, will become extremely difficult to manage.
Therefore, I offer my personal, non-scientific assessment of a sampling of Chicago neighborhoods that I believe are the most advantageous locations for post-peak living:
1. Rogers Park/West Ridge/West Rogers Park- I don't name this neighborhood just because I happen to live in it and love it. Rogers Park has almost everything you need to live a low-energy lifestyle. For one thing, we have easy access to Lake Michigan,one of the world's largest sources of fresh water.That is is really handy should we experience problems with our water treatment facilities. Residents might want to equip themselves with home water treatment kits in order to take advantage of this priceless resource. Additionally, Rogers Park is within easy reach of 24-hour public transit, abundant retail for necessities, and most of all has an abundance of back yards, courtyards, parkways, parks, and vacant lots on which food could be grown should it become necessary. The housing is mostly 3-7 story multifamily buildings of 18-60 units, the new urban ideal, which provides support for local retail and public transit, while the area is not overburdened with high rise buildings. On the negative side, the area is burdened with elevated crime rates and a sizable pocket of deep poverty. However, the neighborhood's poorer denizens might be more amenable to the difficult adjustments and deprivations entailed in energy scarcity than their more affluent neighbors, and more willing participants in community agricultural projects.
2. Jefferson Park/Sauganash Park, ranging from well-paid blue collar to extremely affluant- this quiet safe- area in the northwest corner of the city is ideal for families who desire a single family home, yet also contains a full array of housing types, from 2-flats to large 3 and 4 story buildings. There is reliable public transit that runs 24 hours a day (Blue Line el and a couple of bus lines), and abundant retail. Transportation is difficult for many pockets of single family homes, but this is offset by an abundance of great homes at reasonable prices, and a high level of public safety.
3. Lincoln Square/Ravenswood/Albany Park- medium-to-high density, easy access to retail and public transit, many different types of housing from cheap apartments to large, beautiful single family homes. Access to the Chicago River. High level of public safety
3. Old Irving Park- an area of fine, large old homes on large lots big enough to farm,with access to the Blue Line, and short distance to retail.
4. Belmont-Cragin- high density area with access to public transit and dense retail. Medium to high density with many cheap apartments and small, inexpensive homes.
5. Wicker Park/Bucktown/Logan Square- Medium density area close to urban core with 24 hour transit nearby and dense retail.
As we can see from the sampling above, Chicago by and large is, by virtue of the way it is built, designed for much lower energy use than current levels and it and other Midwestern cities will have many instrinsic advantages in the post peak era. This city, like most older Northern cities that were founded in the 18th and 19th centuries and its original arrangements- clusters of high density housing and industry close to the city core- were those necessary for a pre-technological society. It was located on a major water body for access to water transportation and fresh water supplies, in an area of the country that contains the world's finest farmland and gets generous rainfall. It is well above sea level (about 500 feet), and enjoys close proximity to other Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic cities. However, many neighborhoods will be severely challenged, mainly because they are built to be reliant upon copious quantities of extremely cheap energy. I'm thinking mostly of the inner city neighborhoods that are densely packed with thickets of mega-scrapers of 30 stories or more. These buildings have much higher internal energy loads per square foot because of their reliance on elevators, water pumps, and need for large numbers of personnel to keep the buildings running properly. These neigbhorhoods include:
1. Downtown/Near North/Streeterville/South Loop- Thankfully, these neighborhoods are mostly inhabited by high-income people with large amounts of disposable money. They're going to need a lot of money to keep their super-high buildings functioning properly, for this area contains more really large (40 stories or more) high rise condo and apartment towers than any other in the city. These neighborhoods are advantageously located in the midst of dense retail and have access to better pubic transportation than any other part of the city. However, there is no possibility of growing edibles there. Worse, a massive percentage of its denizens are "yuppies" who rely for their high incomes on the very types of jobs- advertising, FIRE, law- that will see drastic attrition in a shrinking economy, and these middle income people will not have the wherewithal to meet rapidly rising energy costs in massive buildings into which most of them are shoehorned. While the True Rich, those who have ample fortunes and live in the best buildings in that area, will most likely be able to cope with escalating costs, many people in this area will lose their incomes just as their buildings become outrageously expensive to operate, and the end result is likely to be many empty and half-empty high rise rentals falling into decrepitude, and vastly compromised public safety and comfort.
2. Lincoln Park/Lakeview- These neighborhoods are a lot like downtown, with way too many really large residential buildings. Offsets are excellent transportation and a lot of retail. But their support base, like that of downtown neighborhoods, is due to erode rapidly as the economy shifts to lower energy consumption and occupations that were dependent upon a high-consumption economy disappear. This is another area with no possibilities for local food production beyond a few tomato plants on balconies.
3. Uptown- This area has an immense concentration of low-income housing, including CHA high rises and "flophouse" single room occupancy hotels, along with more non-profits serving challenged populations than almost any other neighborhood on the north side. While the alderman, Helen Schiller might be more amenable to projects that enhance the area's sustainability (i.e. fish farms), her progressive stance is more than offset by her willingness to tolerate disorderly populations and criminal activity. The large Asian population is a plus, for these people are often recent immigrants who live much more frugally than most Americans and are more likely to be involved in running local sustainable business. For example, the large garden at the corner of Kenmore and Ainslie is owned by a private individual who supplies many local restaurants with produce grown there. So this area is a very mixed bag.
4. Edgewater- I love Edgewater and it is probably my favorite North Coast neighborhood all around. However, this neighborhood has a number of liabilities when viewed in terms of sustainability. Most of these liabilities line Sheridan Road and are at least 25 stories high, and inhabited mostly by moderate-to-middle income people, including many extremely elderly folk, who could find the cost of keeping these buildings with their prodigious energy demands functional ratcheting out of reach as fuel costs escalate. On the plus side, the neighborhood has easy beach access, excellent 24 hour public transportation, and prolific retail featuring the necessities of life. Additionally, local zoning authorities have established a height limit of 7 stories for new buildings. Edgewater high rise dwellers need to think about how they will run their elevators in times of power outages and hyper-expensive electricity, and whether the proposed windfarm off Edgewater Beach will be capable of carrying their energy-intensive buildings in the possible absence of reliable baseline power generation.
I've only discussed some of the north side neighborhoods. The south side of the city, which contains half the population of the north side but twice the land area, presents a whole different array of problems and possibilities. While the area is beset with widespread poverty and joblessness, it is also the site of many promising experiments with local agriculture and boasts a number of large community agricultural stations and community gardens.
Many Peak Oil prognosticators are extremely pessimistic about the prospects for extremely large cities such as NYC and Chicago, where denizens tend either to live in the suburbs with their thousands of square miles of auto-dependent sprawl, or in super-dense city neighborhoods with their thickets of super-large, energy-guzzling high rise buildings, and many people predict that the most successful settlements will be the small towns and smaller cities, principally those that have been battered the most by the cheap fuel extravaganza of the past 65 years, that saw our cities decimated as their populations bought automobiles and moved to distant suburbs. I expect that as the desert cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas fail, their populations will flee eastward and repopulate and rebuild these cities along lines that better comport with shrinking resources.
We here in Chicago can expect a massive influx of suburban refugees as the outer suburbs on the fringe of Cook County, as well as the collar counties, become non-negotiable for their middle and lower-middle class denizens Most of our lower middle classes (figure incomes of $25,000 to $65,000) live in the outer suburbs and exurbs, lured by the cheap houses and decent schools, and they will not be able to afford the 50 mile-each-direction commutes and multiple car ownership necessary to live in these places when gasoline prices start to rise even incrementally above current levels. In fact, they can't afford it now, thus the immense personal household debt levels that have become commonplace in this country in the past thirty years, and which render our population much less resilient and flexible in the face of the discontinuities we will face in the near future. These people will be hit first and the hardest as liquid fuels and all the goods and services dependent upon a ready and copious supply of them-in short, absolutely everything- become much more expensive, and this is already happening, as homes in the outer suburbs are losing value much faster than those in the cozy inner suburbs with their easy access to public transit and the city. Meanwhile, their better-off middle and upper-middle income brethren will be squeezed by much higher costs for everything, too, and they will be looking for convenience and freedom from the rising expense of the high-energy lifestyles of the recent past. However, many of the less affluent will cling to their homes because they cannot afford to take the heavy losses they will incur as these dwellings lose their utility and value. Most likely, more affluent middle class homeowners will be the first to recognize the inevitability of the suburban unraveling, and these people are the ones who are now making the choice to settle in the city in order to escape heavy transportation expenses and be close to work and within walking distance of retail and entertainment.
So we here in Chicago will very likely be dealing with floods of new arrivals, while we will be having problems of our own. We can be thankful that we have many people running our systems, such as our water treatment facilities and our electrical power, who have better brains than either our politicians or the Peak Oil prognosticators, and these people are aware of the challenges of maintaining essential services as basic maintenance and replacement become prohibitively expensive, which will happen as we descend the slope. Our major challenges will be to arrange things so that we can accommodate many more residents in comfort and offer access to public transit and retail, and to make sure that our public money is spent renewing our aged water and sewer infrastructure as quickly as possible, before high fuel prices drive the cost of construction and replacement out of our reach. This means that we need to immediately re-order our priorities, and stop the diversion of money towards unnecessary projects and allocate it to necessary repair and replace. Many neighborhoods that were badly beaten up in the cheap fuel years will experience rapid revivals, while others that have been extremely successful, such as our downtown areas with their dense concentrations of mega-high rise condo and apartment towers, will become extremely difficult to manage.
Therefore, I offer my personal, non-scientific assessment of a sampling of Chicago neighborhoods that I believe are the most advantageous locations for post-peak living:
1. Rogers Park/West Ridge/West Rogers Park- I don't name this neighborhood just because I happen to live in it and love it. Rogers Park has almost everything you need to live a low-energy lifestyle. For one thing, we have easy access to Lake Michigan,one of the world's largest sources of fresh water.That is is really handy should we experience problems with our water treatment facilities. Residents might want to equip themselves with home water treatment kits in order to take advantage of this priceless resource. Additionally, Rogers Park is within easy reach of 24-hour public transit, abundant retail for necessities, and most of all has an abundance of back yards, courtyards, parkways, parks, and vacant lots on which food could be grown should it become necessary. The housing is mostly 3-7 story multifamily buildings of 18-60 units, the new urban ideal, which provides support for local retail and public transit, while the area is not overburdened with high rise buildings. On the negative side, the area is burdened with elevated crime rates and a sizable pocket of deep poverty. However, the neighborhood's poorer denizens might be more amenable to the difficult adjustments and deprivations entailed in energy scarcity than their more affluent neighbors, and more willing participants in community agricultural projects.
2. Jefferson Park/Sauganash Park, ranging from well-paid blue collar to extremely affluant- this quiet safe- area in the northwest corner of the city is ideal for families who desire a single family home, yet also contains a full array of housing types, from 2-flats to large 3 and 4 story buildings. There is reliable public transit that runs 24 hours a day (Blue Line el and a couple of bus lines), and abundant retail. Transportation is difficult for many pockets of single family homes, but this is offset by an abundance of great homes at reasonable prices, and a high level of public safety.
3. Lincoln Square/Ravenswood/Albany Park- medium-to-high density, easy access to retail and public transit, many different types of housing from cheap apartments to large, beautiful single family homes. Access to the Chicago River. High level of public safety
3. Old Irving Park- an area of fine, large old homes on large lots big enough to farm,with access to the Blue Line, and short distance to retail.
4. Belmont-Cragin- high density area with access to public transit and dense retail. Medium to high density with many cheap apartments and small, inexpensive homes.
5. Wicker Park/Bucktown/Logan Square- Medium density area close to urban core with 24 hour transit nearby and dense retail.
As we can see from the sampling above, Chicago by and large is, by virtue of the way it is built, designed for much lower energy use than current levels and it and other Midwestern cities will have many instrinsic advantages in the post peak era. This city, like most older Northern cities that were founded in the 18th and 19th centuries and its original arrangements- clusters of high density housing and industry close to the city core- were those necessary for a pre-technological society. It was located on a major water body for access to water transportation and fresh water supplies, in an area of the country that contains the world's finest farmland and gets generous rainfall. It is well above sea level (about 500 feet), and enjoys close proximity to other Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic cities. However, many neighborhoods will be severely challenged, mainly because they are built to be reliant upon copious quantities of extremely cheap energy. I'm thinking mostly of the inner city neighborhoods that are densely packed with thickets of mega-scrapers of 30 stories or more. These buildings have much higher internal energy loads per square foot because of their reliance on elevators, water pumps, and need for large numbers of personnel to keep the buildings running properly. These neigbhorhoods include:
1. Downtown/Near North/Streeterville/South Loop- Thankfully, these neighborhoods are mostly inhabited by high-income people with large amounts of disposable money. They're going to need a lot of money to keep their super-high buildings functioning properly, for this area contains more really large (40 stories or more) high rise condo and apartment towers than any other in the city. These neighborhoods are advantageously located in the midst of dense retail and have access to better pubic transportation than any other part of the city. However, there is no possibility of growing edibles there. Worse, a massive percentage of its denizens are "yuppies" who rely for their high incomes on the very types of jobs- advertising, FIRE, law- that will see drastic attrition in a shrinking economy, and these middle income people will not have the wherewithal to meet rapidly rising energy costs in massive buildings into which most of them are shoehorned. While the True Rich, those who have ample fortunes and live in the best buildings in that area, will most likely be able to cope with escalating costs, many people in this area will lose their incomes just as their buildings become outrageously expensive to operate, and the end result is likely to be many empty and half-empty high rise rentals falling into decrepitude, and vastly compromised public safety and comfort.
2. Lincoln Park/Lakeview- These neighborhoods are a lot like downtown, with way too many really large residential buildings. Offsets are excellent transportation and a lot of retail. But their support base, like that of downtown neighborhoods, is due to erode rapidly as the economy shifts to lower energy consumption and occupations that were dependent upon a high-consumption economy disappear. This is another area with no possibilities for local food production beyond a few tomato plants on balconies.
3. Uptown- This area has an immense concentration of low-income housing, including CHA high rises and "flophouse" single room occupancy hotels, along with more non-profits serving challenged populations than almost any other neighborhood on the north side. While the alderman, Helen Schiller might be more amenable to projects that enhance the area's sustainability (i.e. fish farms), her progressive stance is more than offset by her willingness to tolerate disorderly populations and criminal activity. The large Asian population is a plus, for these people are often recent immigrants who live much more frugally than most Americans and are more likely to be involved in running local sustainable business. For example, the large garden at the corner of Kenmore and Ainslie is owned by a private individual who supplies many local restaurants with produce grown there. So this area is a very mixed bag.
4. Edgewater- I love Edgewater and it is probably my favorite North Coast neighborhood all around. However, this neighborhood has a number of liabilities when viewed in terms of sustainability. Most of these liabilities line Sheridan Road and are at least 25 stories high, and inhabited mostly by moderate-to-middle income people, including many extremely elderly folk, who could find the cost of keeping these buildings with their prodigious energy demands functional ratcheting out of reach as fuel costs escalate. On the plus side, the neighborhood has easy beach access, excellent 24 hour public transportation, and prolific retail featuring the necessities of life. Additionally, local zoning authorities have established a height limit of 7 stories for new buildings. Edgewater high rise dwellers need to think about how they will run their elevators in times of power outages and hyper-expensive electricity, and whether the proposed windfarm off Edgewater Beach will be capable of carrying their energy-intensive buildings in the possible absence of reliable baseline power generation.
I've only discussed some of the north side neighborhoods. The south side of the city, which contains half the population of the north side but twice the land area, presents a whole different array of problems and possibilities. While the area is beset with widespread poverty and joblessness, it is also the site of many promising experiments with local agriculture and boasts a number of large community agricultural stations and community gardens.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Natural Gas Supplies Overstated
The Energy Information Agency, the statistical arm of the U.S. Energy Department, stated that it has been overstating natural gas supplies and is preparing to make substantial revisions in the methodology it uses to calculate supplies of natural gas.
EIA spokesman Gary Long stated that the revision in the methodology used to compile the 914 report, which reports monthly gas production data, will result in "significant downward revisions" in production numbers.
The common belief is that while oil may peak, that we have a nearly-infinite supply of gas and that "peak gas" is not even a remote possibility, thus the current emphasis on converting our auto and truck fleet to gas, which is also essential as a backup for solar and wind power without which these unreliable and intermittent forms of power generation simply won't work. Nolan Hart at Zomba writes:
"We suddenly have over a one hundred year supply of natural gas at current consumption rates and that number has been growing by about one decade more each year since 2005. New discoveries such as the Eagle Ford shale in south Texas are adding trillions more cubic feet to the natural gas inventory. So, peak oil, yes. Peak natural gas, no way"
The italics are mine. We have one hundred years of natural gas at current consumption rates. Now, if we ramp up consumption just 2% a year, then how much do we have? How about a 5% increase, which is very likely? We can roughly figure that a 5% yearly increase in consumption will mean we will use over 50% more per year in 10 years, which obviously means that a 100-year supply will shrink to 20 year supply in about that many years. Now, how much will our consumption increase if we switch to gas for electrical power generation, and if, in ten years, at least half our fleet of 200 million cars and trucks runs on gas?
Considering our heavy dependence on gas as a feedstock for heavy industry, electrical power generation, and most of all, for the chemical fertilizers for the factory farming so despised by the environmentalists, but whose productivity is the only thing standing between our population of 305 million people and major famines, is it provident and sensible to enable the population in the notion that all we have to do is convert our vehicles to gas power, and we'll be able to continue on as we have since WW2?
At this time, natural gas is being touted as the panacea for the energy crisis, and there is a powerful political impetus to increase our gas consumption drastically, especially for generating electricity and powering our fleet of vehicles. It seems easier and more economical to many policy makers to build gas-fired plants to replace polluting coal plants, than nuclear, which are more expensive and employ relatively novel,difficult-to-understand technologies that a significant percentage of the population fear and misunderstand.
And anything is easier than telling our car-crazy population that the Automobile Age is as good as over, and that most of us are going to have to re-arrange our lives rather drastically.
Our lives depend on the ability of our leaders to clear a path through the hype generated by the advocates for various energy source. Most of all, they, and we, need to be able to envision a future in which all our fuel sources could be in decline, including uranium; and devise approaches designed to conserve these fuels and use them as efficiently as possible, while developing technologies that utilize more plentiful fuels whose cycle can be extended for centuries, such as thorium, one of the most plentiful elements on the planet.
EIA spokesman Gary Long stated that the revision in the methodology used to compile the 914 report, which reports monthly gas production data, will result in "significant downward revisions" in production numbers.
The common belief is that while oil may peak, that we have a nearly-infinite supply of gas and that "peak gas" is not even a remote possibility, thus the current emphasis on converting our auto and truck fleet to gas, which is also essential as a backup for solar and wind power without which these unreliable and intermittent forms of power generation simply won't work. Nolan Hart at Zomba writes:
"We suddenly have over a one hundred year supply of natural gas at current consumption rates and that number has been growing by about one decade more each year since 2005. New discoveries such as the Eagle Ford shale in south Texas are adding trillions more cubic feet to the natural gas inventory. So, peak oil, yes. Peak natural gas, no way"
The italics are mine. We have one hundred years of natural gas at current consumption rates. Now, if we ramp up consumption just 2% a year, then how much do we have? How about a 5% increase, which is very likely? We can roughly figure that a 5% yearly increase in consumption will mean we will use over 50% more per year in 10 years, which obviously means that a 100-year supply will shrink to 20 year supply in about that many years. Now, how much will our consumption increase if we switch to gas for electrical power generation, and if, in ten years, at least half our fleet of 200 million cars and trucks runs on gas?
Considering our heavy dependence on gas as a feedstock for heavy industry, electrical power generation, and most of all, for the chemical fertilizers for the factory farming so despised by the environmentalists, but whose productivity is the only thing standing between our population of 305 million people and major famines, is it provident and sensible to enable the population in the notion that all we have to do is convert our vehicles to gas power, and we'll be able to continue on as we have since WW2?
At this time, natural gas is being touted as the panacea for the energy crisis, and there is a powerful political impetus to increase our gas consumption drastically, especially for generating electricity and powering our fleet of vehicles. It seems easier and more economical to many policy makers to build gas-fired plants to replace polluting coal plants, than nuclear, which are more expensive and employ relatively novel,difficult-to-understand technologies that a significant percentage of the population fear and misunderstand.
And anything is easier than telling our car-crazy population that the Automobile Age is as good as over, and that most of us are going to have to re-arrange our lives rather drastically.
Our lives depend on the ability of our leaders to clear a path through the hype generated by the advocates for various energy source. Most of all, they, and we, need to be able to envision a future in which all our fuel sources could be in decline, including uranium; and devise approaches designed to conserve these fuels and use them as efficiently as possible, while developing technologies that utilize more plentiful fuels whose cycle can be extended for centuries, such as thorium, one of the most plentiful elements on the planet.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Stone Walls of Denial
Blame the speculators.
Since oil reached the $70/barrel mark and continued north while gasoline approached $3/gallon, the public wailing has begun, and hundreds of websites lobbying for congressional action to limit speculation have sprung up, demanding action to limit the price of oil.
The Democrats ,who are suffering badly in the polls as a result of their heroic attempts to rewrite the law of supply and demand as it applies to overpriced housing and overextended borrowers, will almost surely take the bait and embark on another adventure in misconceived economic engineering, and pass laws to limit commodities speculation, specifically speculation in oil futures. If there's anything Obama and his fellow Dems don't need just before the 2010 elections, it's four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, so look for a lot of frantic posturing and blatant pandering, in the form of legislation aimed at commodities speculation.
And if the commodities speculation is "regulated", expect spot shortages and long lines at the stations, because the law of supply and demand never rests. Speculators do not control prices, they merely respond to situations as they set up. If indeed there is an ample supply of a commodity and prices really are inflated artificially, the "bubble" will burst, for you can make just as much money shorting as you can on the long side of the trade. Why are the speculators not shorting oil? Could there be a fundamental reason for the steady rise in liquid fuel prices, such as the decline of almost every major oil field in the world, coupled with rising demand from developing nations?
The fact is that we have likely reached the absolute peak of global production, and have probably crossed it; and are now on the "bumpy plateau" , the period in which oil production is flat-lining before the descent down the other side of the slope. This period is bound to be defined by increasing volatility in prices as upward-arcing prices due to declining supplies and increasing global demand,which will quash economic activity, producing demand destruction, which results in temporarily lower prices, until the economy starts to recover, and then the cycle will repeat.
This is very, very bad news, and there is really no way to mediate the situation except to reduce our demand, and drastically. That's the "free market" solution to rising energy prices and declining production: just use less. Much less. And make whatever adjustments in your life you have to make to do that. That might mean moving closer to work, swapping your house for an apartment, moving back to the city or near a rail stop, taking the bus or train to work, or even having only one television set on at a time. It will mean, most likely, consuming less of absolutely everything. Most of all, it will mean radically reordering our built environment to enable far lower energy use, and that will take money and time we no longer have. We've wasted our time and money doing the opposite of what we need to do to mitigate the situation and make life with a fair degree of technical amenity possible as supplies dwindle, thanks to 65 years of disastrous public policy designed to promote sprawl development, auto dependency,destruction of our cities and waste of resources in the name of 'growth'.This country has simply built into its structures and systems an inflexible demand for copious amounts of cheap fuel, so much that with the best efforts at conservation in the world, most people in the U.S. simply cannot make a living or procure the necessities of life- heat, food,water, clothing- without consuming massive amounts of fossil fuels.
While Americans have wallowed in complacency and a sense of entitlement, China has for years past been busily locking in future oil production to fuel the rise of its middle class and their aspirations to the American suburban lifestyle. India, also, has a burgeoning middle class, and these two developing super-powers have been hard at work building power generation facilities, and inking contracts for future supplies of oil and other essential minerals.
And far from leveling with the citizenry regarding our prospects for continuing the Post WW2 lifestyle with its waste and excessive dependence on motors, the current administration has erected more walls of denial, and added a couple of trillion dollars to our mountain of public debt to pretend that we can continue as we have for the past 60 years. Instead of deregulating the railroads, eliminating subsidies to private airlines, and curtailing highway construction, we are devising new subsidies for auto and air transportation, suburban subdivision building, and consumer debt, while starving the systems and industries we will need as fuel supplies become ever more constrained. Enabling the citizens in their ignorance and denial by capping oil prices will not help us in making the necessary adjustments and sacrifices we will all have to make to survive the massive economic shift taking place. Manipulating the market by regulation in order to pander to the public's desire to continue obsolete lifestyles and wasteful consumption may help you win the mid-term elections, but it will only incentivize the very behaviors we need to curtail to make a successful adjustment to new necessities.
Since oil reached the $70/barrel mark and continued north while gasoline approached $3/gallon, the public wailing has begun, and hundreds of websites lobbying for congressional action to limit speculation have sprung up, demanding action to limit the price of oil.
The Democrats ,who are suffering badly in the polls as a result of their heroic attempts to rewrite the law of supply and demand as it applies to overpriced housing and overextended borrowers, will almost surely take the bait and embark on another adventure in misconceived economic engineering, and pass laws to limit commodities speculation, specifically speculation in oil futures. If there's anything Obama and his fellow Dems don't need just before the 2010 elections, it's four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, so look for a lot of frantic posturing and blatant pandering, in the form of legislation aimed at commodities speculation.
And if the commodities speculation is "regulated", expect spot shortages and long lines at the stations, because the law of supply and demand never rests. Speculators do not control prices, they merely respond to situations as they set up. If indeed there is an ample supply of a commodity and prices really are inflated artificially, the "bubble" will burst, for you can make just as much money shorting as you can on the long side of the trade. Why are the speculators not shorting oil? Could there be a fundamental reason for the steady rise in liquid fuel prices, such as the decline of almost every major oil field in the world, coupled with rising demand from developing nations?
The fact is that we have likely reached the absolute peak of global production, and have probably crossed it; and are now on the "bumpy plateau" , the period in which oil production is flat-lining before the descent down the other side of the slope. This period is bound to be defined by increasing volatility in prices as upward-arcing prices due to declining supplies and increasing global demand,which will quash economic activity, producing demand destruction, which results in temporarily lower prices, until the economy starts to recover, and then the cycle will repeat.
This is very, very bad news, and there is really no way to mediate the situation except to reduce our demand, and drastically. That's the "free market" solution to rising energy prices and declining production: just use less. Much less. And make whatever adjustments in your life you have to make to do that. That might mean moving closer to work, swapping your house for an apartment, moving back to the city or near a rail stop, taking the bus or train to work, or even having only one television set on at a time. It will mean, most likely, consuming less of absolutely everything. Most of all, it will mean radically reordering our built environment to enable far lower energy use, and that will take money and time we no longer have. We've wasted our time and money doing the opposite of what we need to do to mitigate the situation and make life with a fair degree of technical amenity possible as supplies dwindle, thanks to 65 years of disastrous public policy designed to promote sprawl development, auto dependency,destruction of our cities and waste of resources in the name of 'growth'.This country has simply built into its structures and systems an inflexible demand for copious amounts of cheap fuel, so much that with the best efforts at conservation in the world, most people in the U.S. simply cannot make a living or procure the necessities of life- heat, food,water, clothing- without consuming massive amounts of fossil fuels.
While Americans have wallowed in complacency and a sense of entitlement, China has for years past been busily locking in future oil production to fuel the rise of its middle class and their aspirations to the American suburban lifestyle. India, also, has a burgeoning middle class, and these two developing super-powers have been hard at work building power generation facilities, and inking contracts for future supplies of oil and other essential minerals.
And far from leveling with the citizenry regarding our prospects for continuing the Post WW2 lifestyle with its waste and excessive dependence on motors, the current administration has erected more walls of denial, and added a couple of trillion dollars to our mountain of public debt to pretend that we can continue as we have for the past 60 years. Instead of deregulating the railroads, eliminating subsidies to private airlines, and curtailing highway construction, we are devising new subsidies for auto and air transportation, suburban subdivision building, and consumer debt, while starving the systems and industries we will need as fuel supplies become ever more constrained. Enabling the citizens in their ignorance and denial by capping oil prices will not help us in making the necessary adjustments and sacrifices we will all have to make to survive the massive economic shift taking place. Manipulating the market by regulation in order to pander to the public's desire to continue obsolete lifestyles and wasteful consumption may help you win the mid-term elections, but it will only incentivize the very behaviors we need to curtail to make a successful adjustment to new necessities.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Oil Reserves "Exaggerated by One Third"
A number of years back, prominent energy analyst Matthew R. Simmons, in his Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, stated that Saudi Aramco and other oil producers routinely overstated their reserves, and this claim is now being seconded by Saudi Aramco itself, which recently admitted that the famous Gwaihir field, the world's largest oil field, is showing distinct signs of exhaustion and that its production might peak as early as 2015.
Other voices are now chiming in. Scientists and researchers from Oxford University in UK state that global oil reserves are overstated by a third by producers, Saudi Aramco prominent among them, in order to bolster investment and market share. Additionally, a paper published recently by these researchers states, such authorities as the ever-optimistic International Energy Agency (IEA) and Energy Information Administration (EIA), and political leaders who rely on these agencies for policy guidance, have taken these overly optimistic estimates at face value even though they have been unofficially recognized as exaggerated among oil insiders for many years.
The Oxford researchers also point out that "unconventional" sources of oil such as the Canadian tar sands and deep-water offshore fields are also included in reserve estimates. While these sources certainly count as reserves, they are extremely expensive to exploit and oil prices must rise substantially to justify their production. These difficult-to-access sources of oil most likely will become our principle sources in a few years, as the "elephant" fields in the Middle East, Mexico, Russia, and South America pass their peak production. Production from Mexico's formerly massive Cantarell is collapsing , and Mexico, which has been a major supplier of oil to the fuel-guzzling U.S. will soon cease to export oil.
Here in the United States, the world's most energy-dependent nation, we are airily complacent and inert in the face of declining global oil supplies and rapidly increasing global competition for the remains, while other hungrier and less complacent industrial economies, notably cash-rich China, are not taking their futures for granted and are aggressively locking up future supplies of dwindling natural resources. American political leaders are coming late to recognition of the direness of the fossil fuel situation, and even as they unwillingly, and almost in passing, acknowledge that supplies might be a problem in some distant future, that we have plenty of time and in any case can switch to natural gas, another resource subject to peaking and inevitable decline as we ramp up consumption.
We will probably need $4 a gallon gasoline and deeper economic hardship as a result, to shake us awake and motivate us to do what we desperately need to do, which is develop new means of energy production and most of all change the way we live, consume, and inhabit the land. By then, it will be too late to mitigate the effects of a sudden and drastic contraction in available fuel supplies.
Other voices are now chiming in. Scientists and researchers from Oxford University in UK state that global oil reserves are overstated by a third by producers, Saudi Aramco prominent among them, in order to bolster investment and market share. Additionally, a paper published recently by these researchers states, such authorities as the ever-optimistic International Energy Agency (IEA) and Energy Information Administration (EIA), and political leaders who rely on these agencies for policy guidance, have taken these overly optimistic estimates at face value even though they have been unofficially recognized as exaggerated among oil insiders for many years.
The Oxford researchers also point out that "unconventional" sources of oil such as the Canadian tar sands and deep-water offshore fields are also included in reserve estimates. While these sources certainly count as reserves, they are extremely expensive to exploit and oil prices must rise substantially to justify their production. These difficult-to-access sources of oil most likely will become our principle sources in a few years, as the "elephant" fields in the Middle East, Mexico, Russia, and South America pass their peak production. Production from Mexico's formerly massive Cantarell is collapsing , and Mexico, which has been a major supplier of oil to the fuel-guzzling U.S. will soon cease to export oil.
Here in the United States, the world's most energy-dependent nation, we are airily complacent and inert in the face of declining global oil supplies and rapidly increasing global competition for the remains, while other hungrier and less complacent industrial economies, notably cash-rich China, are not taking their futures for granted and are aggressively locking up future supplies of dwindling natural resources. American political leaders are coming late to recognition of the direness of the fossil fuel situation, and even as they unwillingly, and almost in passing, acknowledge that supplies might be a problem in some distant future, that we have plenty of time and in any case can switch to natural gas, another resource subject to peaking and inevitable decline as we ramp up consumption.
We will probably need $4 a gallon gasoline and deeper economic hardship as a result, to shake us awake and motivate us to do what we desperately need to do, which is develop new means of energy production and most of all change the way we live, consume, and inhabit the land. By then, it will be too late to mitigate the effects of a sudden and drastic contraction in available fuel supplies.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Is $80 A Barrel the New Floor For Oil?
Anybody who is still in denial regarding the reality of Peak Oil need only consider the type of drilling being done now. Never has so much money been committed to such high-risk drills in places so difficult to access and requiring so much new and expensive technology, for such relatively trifling yields, as with the deepwater drills being done by Chevron and Petrobas.
Newsweek writer Matthew Philips, in his article last week, Journey to the Center of the Earth, called this deepwater field, which could contain enough oil to supply the U.S. for ten years, "perhaps our best shot at energy independence." If so, we are destined for considerable economic hardship and material deprivation going forward, because the cost per barrel of drilling alone is nearly 50% more than the current price of oil, about $80 a barrel.
Chevron's offshore drilling platform, the Tahiti, is located about 190 miles from the shore in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, where the drill must plunge through 7,000 ft of water, then through a thick layer of much and a salt bed beneath it that is over a mile deep, and then through several miles of crust to reach a paybed estimated to contain 85 billion barrels of sweet crude. That's a real giant, a stunning find relative to the relatively piddling yields projected for other deep sea drills, which are expected to yield 15 billion barrels at best, or the Bakken formation, which is considered to be good for 3.5 billion barrels at the most.
But it will not be cheap oil, and we can put to rest any dreams we may have of seeing $30 a barrel oil ever again.The project is expected to cost about $100 Million, which means that if it yields the 85 billion barrels thought to reside there, the cost per barrel will be $117.64. And that assumes that all 85 billion can be recovered, and that nothing major goes wrong with the project to cause massive cost overruns, which are pretty optimistic assumptions.
Why would Chevron do a drill that costs at least $117 a barrel when oil is currently trading around $80? Now we know why oil companies have been a little recalcitrant about obeying the command to "Drill, baby, drill!" and you have to figure that there must be a very powerful incentive to induce the people who front the money and risk to do the drilling to embark on such a massively risky project. Chevron is, after all, a business, and we can safely assume that it isn't doing this to take a $37 a barrel loss. The oil producers can only be extending themselves to this extent in the belief that near-future oil prices will support these projects and give them a decent return on this massive investment, and they must have a reasonable basis for believing that the supply/demand balance will work in their favor.
There is less dispute everyday over whether Peak Oil is a reality, and the major argument now is not if but when, and the estimated years of arrival are closer together. Kenneth Deffeyes believes that 2005 was the year that global production peaked, and points out that production has never exceeded that year's level. Other analysts say 2008, and most ominously of all, Sadad as Husseini of Saudi Aramco predicts that its Gwaihir field, the largest in the world, will reach peak production in 2015.
Just as the early Peak Oil prognosticators warned, demand is increasing while each new discovery is smaller and harder to exploit, and we're now arriving at the interstice between increasing demand and declining supplies, and arguments about exactly what year the peak will occur or has occurred are really beside the point. We will be paying more for less, not only oil, but everything that is somehow dependent upon it. And that means just about everything.
Looks like we are in for a long economic convalescence.
Newsweek writer Matthew Philips, in his article last week, Journey to the Center of the Earth, called this deepwater field, which could contain enough oil to supply the U.S. for ten years, "perhaps our best shot at energy independence." If so, we are destined for considerable economic hardship and material deprivation going forward, because the cost per barrel of drilling alone is nearly 50% more than the current price of oil, about $80 a barrel.
Chevron's offshore drilling platform, the Tahiti, is located about 190 miles from the shore in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, where the drill must plunge through 7,000 ft of water, then through a thick layer of much and a salt bed beneath it that is over a mile deep, and then through several miles of crust to reach a paybed estimated to contain 85 billion barrels of sweet crude. That's a real giant, a stunning find relative to the relatively piddling yields projected for other deep sea drills, which are expected to yield 15 billion barrels at best, or the Bakken formation, which is considered to be good for 3.5 billion barrels at the most.
But it will not be cheap oil, and we can put to rest any dreams we may have of seeing $30 a barrel oil ever again.The project is expected to cost about $100 Million, which means that if it yields the 85 billion barrels thought to reside there, the cost per barrel will be $117.64. And that assumes that all 85 billion can be recovered, and that nothing major goes wrong with the project to cause massive cost overruns, which are pretty optimistic assumptions.
Why would Chevron do a drill that costs at least $117 a barrel when oil is currently trading around $80? Now we know why oil companies have been a little recalcitrant about obeying the command to "Drill, baby, drill!" and you have to figure that there must be a very powerful incentive to induce the people who front the money and risk to do the drilling to embark on such a massively risky project. Chevron is, after all, a business, and we can safely assume that it isn't doing this to take a $37 a barrel loss. The oil producers can only be extending themselves to this extent in the belief that near-future oil prices will support these projects and give them a decent return on this massive investment, and they must have a reasonable basis for believing that the supply/demand balance will work in their favor.
There is less dispute everyday over whether Peak Oil is a reality, and the major argument now is not if but when, and the estimated years of arrival are closer together. Kenneth Deffeyes believes that 2005 was the year that global production peaked, and points out that production has never exceeded that year's level. Other analysts say 2008, and most ominously of all, Sadad as Husseini of Saudi Aramco predicts that its Gwaihir field, the largest in the world, will reach peak production in 2015.
Just as the early Peak Oil prognosticators warned, demand is increasing while each new discovery is smaller and harder to exploit, and we're now arriving at the interstice between increasing demand and declining supplies, and arguments about exactly what year the peak will occur or has occurred are really beside the point. We will be paying more for less, not only oil, but everything that is somehow dependent upon it. And that means just about everything.
Looks like we are in for a long economic convalescence.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
The Death of the Space Program: Are We Squaring With Reality or Are We Volunteering to Die as an Advanced Society?
I'm sure that most of the people who share my views regarding our country's financial condition and energy outlook won't concur with me, but when the death of our space program was announced, I felt an overwhelming sense of loss at what seems like the final capstone on forty years of national decline, during which this country has lost its lead in almost every branch of technology, and has become an impoverished debt addict and de facto colony of China.
The news that President Obama has canceled the funding for Constellation program was no doubt applauded by many people as a victory for common sense and fiscal restraint, and seems not to have registered at all among most of our citizens. In many quarters, the space program is regarded as a costly,wasteful, ecologically unjustifiable boondogle of little immediate utility and doubtful future benefit that consumes gargantuan quantities of fossil fuels and siphons massive amounts of tax revenue from projects of more immediate utility, such as our vast military apparatus and the ongoing efforts to re-inflate the housing and credit bubbles so that our top banksters can justify their multimillion dollar bonuses and the rest of us resume flipping houses and generating loan fees.
To many other people, notably the doomsayers of the Peak Oil community, it was only inevitable that this Promethean endeavor, with its massive energy and financial requirements, would be the first of our advanced technologies to be triaged on the descent from the absolute peak of our energy production, wealth, and technological advancement- a long, steep, wrenching path down hill that, many predict, will end with the death of any technology more advanced than wood-powered steam engines and water-driven mills. Damien Perrotin, of The View From Brittany, states in his post, Farewell to the Moon: "This pattern is likely to repeat itself as the decline in net energy available to our society makes keeping an advanced technology more and more difficult. There won't be any technological cliff, no abrupt return to the Middle-Age. Technologies will just lose momentum as the resources needed to advance them become scarcer and scarcer."
We will be reaching that point very soon, and there is considerable evidence that we might already have reached it. Yet what is more obvious is that the United States has passed its own peak of scientific achievement and advancement , and has lost its former lead in almost every field that matters, just as it has destroyed its manufacturing base and relinquished its economic lead to China and India in the process. More ominously, we have sat idly by as China moves aggressively to lock in its claims on a massive portion of the world's future oil production. At the same time, we have deliberately retarded development of nuclear power, an industry this nation pioneered and once led, and are stalled at the starting gate in the development of more advanced nuclear technologies, such as the molten salt and liquid fluoride thorium reactors, that could provide us with abundant clean energy for many generations going forward, while other nations, notably India, are not waiting for our blessings and are aggressively developing them.
Now, we are relinquishing to other major powers the chance, slender though it may be for anyone, of achieving a human landing on Mars, and developing the rich mineral resources that reside there and on Triton, a moon of Saturn thought to possess vast hydrocarbon reserves. These extraterrestrial mineral resources may well be the only way we will be able to fuel our technology in the coming century. The window of opportunity for developing the technology necessary to send humans to Mars and there build a small settlement from which to conduct extraction operations is narrow, being the brief interval between the present time, and the hour in which we reach the point on the downslope of fossil fuel production at which liquid fuels become so expensive and scarce that any effort that doesn't pertain directly to production of bare life necessities will be off the table. That window is closing very quickly. Moreover, as the grieving Charles Krauthammer points out in Closing the New Frontier, the Ares booster and Orion capsule are essential basic steppingstones along the arduous path that leads to a successful landing of humans on the red planet, and without those stepping stones, our hopes of ever attaining this are crushed. How will we ever make it to Mars and succeed in building a mining settlement if we can't even get to the moon, or into low orbit?
An alert reader might note a certain logical inconsistency in my position here, given my frequently-stated opposition to large-scale, multi-decade government programs that rely on the taxing authority we've granted the federal government, and whose effects cascade and amplify down through generations and produce unforseen consequences that we never bargained for, and that divert money away from private development and enterprise, which tends to be more sustainable and appropriate, to massively overscaled projects that not only cannot justify themselves economically, but destroy the fine-grained economic networks that support large-scaled private enterprises. The space exploration program would seem to be that, and on steroids- a vast undertaking that oftentimes seems more about national vanity and the daydreams of science fiction writers than about anything that we need to continue as an advanced nation, and that to many is absolutely unjustifiable in a period in which we are increasingly challenged in staying housed, fed, and warm. Obama himself, in announcing the decision to eliminate $3 billion for the Constellation project from the 2011 budget, framed it as a victory for free enterprise, stating that the private sector is welcome to pick up where NASA is leaving off.
That would be all well if even we still had a significant private sector. Would it be that our most successful and adventurous entrepreneurs, people like Elon Musk or Bill Gates, could organize a concern that might be capable of running even a rudimentary space program.But we no longer have a strong, confident, independent private sector that is capable of raising the gigantic amounts of capital required for such an undertaking. Most of all, though, we no longer have the business and political climate in which it is feasible to make plans that take up to a half-century or more to develop and implement, and in which investors feel secure enough to venture massive sums of money in highly speculative enterprises with massive capital requirements and multi-decade paybacks.
What we do have is a tower of unrepayable debt created by the financialization of our economy, and the most uncertain business climate in two hundred years. The uncertainty created by capricious changes in regulation and taxation, and the mounting costs of servicing government debt, have elevated the risk involved in long-term enterprises requiring massive capital outlays to levels unacceptable to most investors, and the result is that capital has fled heavy industry in this country, and gone into enterprises with a short payback period and immediate results-hence the decline of manufacturing and the flood of money into casino-type financial instruments where the payback is more rapid and the risk is perceived as being more manageable. The result of this process, of course, is the complete destruction of our heavy industry and the perversion of our financial markets, which were created to facilitate industry and commerce, into casinos that have enriched only a relative handful of players who belong to the financial cartel, while impoverishing the country and destroying our ability to finance the productive enterprises that could rebuild our economy.
As a result, the only entity with the wherewithal to support really large and speculative enterprises is the federal government, with its unlimited taxing authority. This would not have been the case a century ago, when people like Vanderbilt and Carnegie built the giant industries that made America not only the richest country in the world, but the most advanced and the one in which the incredible benefits spread to the greatest number of people, elevating our common citizenry from dirt-floor rural poverty to the most comfortable mass living conditions in the world, and offering them opportunities for advancement in a variety of fields that did not exist just 30 years before, just as it created the richest and most successful entrepreneurial class ever to exist at that time.
The result is if any major speculative venture is going to happen, it will be the government or nobody to finance it, and the process of determining just what will receive how much money, or any at all, will be driven not be consideration of the costs and benefits, or long-term needs, but by a purely political considerations, most of all by lobbyists and pressure groups. And as it happens, the most influential pressure group is the financial cartel, who as a group are not much concerned for the ongoing well-being and access to the decencies of life for the 98% of the population that doesn't get paid $40 million dollar bonuses for destroying our financial system. The Wall Street bonus babies won't be the ones suffering as our technology withers and our population spirals down into the poverty, filth, and degradation that was the lot of the majority prior to the industrial revolution, and is still the rule for most of the world's population, but will find a way to profit from our destruction, if only because they'll be able to recruit armies of poorly-paid household servants for a pittance.
Most of all, though, it will mean the end of our aspirations as a people. The greatest gift of the great thinkers and doers of past centuries was what they aspired to, and their passionate belief in the ability of humans to fulfill those dreams. A person might fall considerably short of his goals, but he surely won't exceed them, not even by accident. As Theodore Sturgeon once remarked, if you aim for 100, you might get that or you might get 50, but if you aim for 0, that is exactly what you will get. Now is the time to ask ourselves just what we aspire to- to greater knowledge and whatever advancement is possible to us, or to the life that was lived in the days of hand plows, childbirth on the kitchen table, and streets slimed with horse-droppings. There's no question of which manner of life is more easily attianable, and the human-haters are applauding every step backwards to it we take. Which will we choose?
The news that President Obama has canceled the funding for Constellation program was no doubt applauded by many people as a victory for common sense and fiscal restraint, and seems not to have registered at all among most of our citizens. In many quarters, the space program is regarded as a costly,wasteful, ecologically unjustifiable boondogle of little immediate utility and doubtful future benefit that consumes gargantuan quantities of fossil fuels and siphons massive amounts of tax revenue from projects of more immediate utility, such as our vast military apparatus and the ongoing efforts to re-inflate the housing and credit bubbles so that our top banksters can justify their multimillion dollar bonuses and the rest of us resume flipping houses and generating loan fees.
To many other people, notably the doomsayers of the Peak Oil community, it was only inevitable that this Promethean endeavor, with its massive energy and financial requirements, would be the first of our advanced technologies to be triaged on the descent from the absolute peak of our energy production, wealth, and technological advancement- a long, steep, wrenching path down hill that, many predict, will end with the death of any technology more advanced than wood-powered steam engines and water-driven mills. Damien Perrotin, of The View From Brittany, states in his post, Farewell to the Moon: "This pattern is likely to repeat itself as the decline in net energy available to our society makes keeping an advanced technology more and more difficult. There won't be any technological cliff, no abrupt return to the Middle-Age. Technologies will just lose momentum as the resources needed to advance them become scarcer and scarcer."
We will be reaching that point very soon, and there is considerable evidence that we might already have reached it. Yet what is more obvious is that the United States has passed its own peak of scientific achievement and advancement , and has lost its former lead in almost every field that matters, just as it has destroyed its manufacturing base and relinquished its economic lead to China and India in the process. More ominously, we have sat idly by as China moves aggressively to lock in its claims on a massive portion of the world's future oil production. At the same time, we have deliberately retarded development of nuclear power, an industry this nation pioneered and once led, and are stalled at the starting gate in the development of more advanced nuclear technologies, such as the molten salt and liquid fluoride thorium reactors, that could provide us with abundant clean energy for many generations going forward, while other nations, notably India, are not waiting for our blessings and are aggressively developing them.
Now, we are relinquishing to other major powers the chance, slender though it may be for anyone, of achieving a human landing on Mars, and developing the rich mineral resources that reside there and on Triton, a moon of Saturn thought to possess vast hydrocarbon reserves. These extraterrestrial mineral resources may well be the only way we will be able to fuel our technology in the coming century. The window of opportunity for developing the technology necessary to send humans to Mars and there build a small settlement from which to conduct extraction operations is narrow, being the brief interval between the present time, and the hour in which we reach the point on the downslope of fossil fuel production at which liquid fuels become so expensive and scarce that any effort that doesn't pertain directly to production of bare life necessities will be off the table. That window is closing very quickly. Moreover, as the grieving Charles Krauthammer points out in Closing the New Frontier, the Ares booster and Orion capsule are essential basic steppingstones along the arduous path that leads to a successful landing of humans on the red planet, and without those stepping stones, our hopes of ever attaining this are crushed. How will we ever make it to Mars and succeed in building a mining settlement if we can't even get to the moon, or into low orbit?
An alert reader might note a certain logical inconsistency in my position here, given my frequently-stated opposition to large-scale, multi-decade government programs that rely on the taxing authority we've granted the federal government, and whose effects cascade and amplify down through generations and produce unforseen consequences that we never bargained for, and that divert money away from private development and enterprise, which tends to be more sustainable and appropriate, to massively overscaled projects that not only cannot justify themselves economically, but destroy the fine-grained economic networks that support large-scaled private enterprises. The space exploration program would seem to be that, and on steroids- a vast undertaking that oftentimes seems more about national vanity and the daydreams of science fiction writers than about anything that we need to continue as an advanced nation, and that to many is absolutely unjustifiable in a period in which we are increasingly challenged in staying housed, fed, and warm. Obama himself, in announcing the decision to eliminate $3 billion for the Constellation project from the 2011 budget, framed it as a victory for free enterprise, stating that the private sector is welcome to pick up where NASA is leaving off.
That would be all well if even we still had a significant private sector. Would it be that our most successful and adventurous entrepreneurs, people like Elon Musk or Bill Gates, could organize a concern that might be capable of running even a rudimentary space program.But we no longer have a strong, confident, independent private sector that is capable of raising the gigantic amounts of capital required for such an undertaking. Most of all, though, we no longer have the business and political climate in which it is feasible to make plans that take up to a half-century or more to develop and implement, and in which investors feel secure enough to venture massive sums of money in highly speculative enterprises with massive capital requirements and multi-decade paybacks.
What we do have is a tower of unrepayable debt created by the financialization of our economy, and the most uncertain business climate in two hundred years. The uncertainty created by capricious changes in regulation and taxation, and the mounting costs of servicing government debt, have elevated the risk involved in long-term enterprises requiring massive capital outlays to levels unacceptable to most investors, and the result is that capital has fled heavy industry in this country, and gone into enterprises with a short payback period and immediate results-hence the decline of manufacturing and the flood of money into casino-type financial instruments where the payback is more rapid and the risk is perceived as being more manageable. The result of this process, of course, is the complete destruction of our heavy industry and the perversion of our financial markets, which were created to facilitate industry and commerce, into casinos that have enriched only a relative handful of players who belong to the financial cartel, while impoverishing the country and destroying our ability to finance the productive enterprises that could rebuild our economy.
As a result, the only entity with the wherewithal to support really large and speculative enterprises is the federal government, with its unlimited taxing authority. This would not have been the case a century ago, when people like Vanderbilt and Carnegie built the giant industries that made America not only the richest country in the world, but the most advanced and the one in which the incredible benefits spread to the greatest number of people, elevating our common citizenry from dirt-floor rural poverty to the most comfortable mass living conditions in the world, and offering them opportunities for advancement in a variety of fields that did not exist just 30 years before, just as it created the richest and most successful entrepreneurial class ever to exist at that time.
The result is if any major speculative venture is going to happen, it will be the government or nobody to finance it, and the process of determining just what will receive how much money, or any at all, will be driven not be consideration of the costs and benefits, or long-term needs, but by a purely political considerations, most of all by lobbyists and pressure groups. And as it happens, the most influential pressure group is the financial cartel, who as a group are not much concerned for the ongoing well-being and access to the decencies of life for the 98% of the population that doesn't get paid $40 million dollar bonuses for destroying our financial system. The Wall Street bonus babies won't be the ones suffering as our technology withers and our population spirals down into the poverty, filth, and degradation that was the lot of the majority prior to the industrial revolution, and is still the rule for most of the world's population, but will find a way to profit from our destruction, if only because they'll be able to recruit armies of poorly-paid household servants for a pittance.
Most of all, though, it will mean the end of our aspirations as a people. The greatest gift of the great thinkers and doers of past centuries was what they aspired to, and their passionate belief in the ability of humans to fulfill those dreams. A person might fall considerably short of his goals, but he surely won't exceed them, not even by accident. As Theodore Sturgeon once remarked, if you aim for 100, you might get that or you might get 50, but if you aim for 0, that is exactly what you will get. Now is the time to ask ourselves just what we aspire to- to greater knowledge and whatever advancement is possible to us, or to the life that was lived in the days of hand plows, childbirth on the kitchen table, and streets slimed with horse-droppings. There's no question of which manner of life is more easily attianable, and the human-haters are applauding every step backwards to it we take. Which will we choose?
Friday, January 1, 2010
The Hidden Reserves of Gull Island and Other Cornucopian Legends
Stressful times have a way of infusing new life into old superstitions and legends, and sure enough, now that oil prices are making a choppy path back to triple digits and existing elephant fields are showing symptoms of exhaustion, the conspiracy theorists are reviving rumors of vast, untapped supplies of oil, "enough to last two hundred years", or is "bigger than Saudi Arabia".
The two most enduring legends are Gull Island and the Bakken Formation.These two fields were discovered decades ago, and any hopes that these fields could approach the production of Gwaihir or Cantarell have been dashed many times over. The vast reserves simply are not there, but the myth dies hard. A Google search brought up hundreds of articles on each field, and in the case of Gull Island, the conspiracy hacks claim that the U.S. government has conspired to cap these wells and keep secret their existence in order to drive up oil prices. There are many plausible explanations for the shutting in of productive wells by the producer, and it's not difficult to imagine that a producer might wish to put a floor under oil prices, since a temporary glut can drive prices to points below profitability, but it is difficult to imagine a vast government conspiracy to raise oil prices in view of the fact that oil production is heavily subsidized in the U.S. with a vast variety of tax favors and incentives, in order to keep prices artificially low, and current prices are still low enough to render offshore drills and extraction from the Calgary sands prohibitively expensive and risky. Wells are shut in when the energy required to work them exceeds the energy that can be extracted from them, that simple, which is why the tar sands projects have been shut in and the offshore drills are not being done- the cheap, easy sweet crude is mostly gone, and what remains is the stuff that is difficult and expensive to get out of the ground. This means that price of oil must be at a certain level to justify the development of these sources, and when it isn't, they will go untapped.
Every report of fabulous reserves at Gull Island and government conspiracies to keep them from being exploited trace their roots back to Lindsey Williams, a Baptist missionary who published a book in 1980 called The Energy Non-Crisis, which describes the Gull Island field and speculates that it might contain enough oil to supply the U.S. for 200 years; in other words, that it is another "elephant" field. That there are thousands of websites echoing Williams' amazing claims is testament to the resilience of cornucopian myths, for Gull Island has indeed been explored and drilled, but it is not producing anything like the 2 million barrels a day that he claims it is capable of, but more like 4,000 barrels a day at the most from Gull no. 1 and Gull no.2. Gull Island State no. 3, drilled in 1992, was a dry hole. According to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC), and by the words of ARCO geologists working at the site, “both the geologic evidence and the small area not yet developed into oil fields around the Gull Island wells preclude the possibility of a giant oil accumulation.”(Petroleum News)
According to Alaska's Division of Oil and Gas, the largest pool at Gull Island has thus far produced 396 million barrels of oil, and has perhaps 164 million remaining- and that is the largest of the pools. Therefore, we are probably talking about 1 billion barrels of oil at the most to be had from this legendary field, which, while respectable, is piddling relative to the truly large fields containing 5 billion barrels or more, let alone the supergiants of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. It's difficult to believe that any consortium of industry players or government bureaucrats could keep such a find a secret for longer than it takes to file for the drilling permits. Perhaps it's a matter of public perception; to most people out here, 164M sounds like a lot of oil, and 5 billion is staggering, for most people do not realize that the U.S. rips through 7 billion barrels a year. Nor do they realize that while we once found much greater quantities of oil than the world used, that now the finds are very small relative to global demand, which is growing while new discoveries are smaller and smaller. A recent white paper authored by Dr. Robert Hirsch, Giant Oil Field Decline Rates and Their Influence on World Production, makes it clear that the world's giant fields are in decline and that the decline rate vastly outpaces the rate of new discoveries.
The Bakken Formation, a gigantic formation that is nearly 200,000 square miles in size, was first discovered in 1951 and then abandoned for decades as impossible to work because the petroleum is encased in layers of impermeable dolomite,and is a truly tantalizing find. The formation stretches across three states and provinces, and some geologists speculated that as much as 400 billion barrels of oil might reside in the layers of impermeable shale and dolomite. However, it turns out that, based on current production, that the most the formation can be expected to yield, given current levels of knowledge and technology, is about 4.1 billion barrels. While that is a pretty respectable number, it won't come near meeting our ongoing demand, let alone that of rapidly developing economies in Asia such as China, India, and Indonesia with their huge populations of a billion people or more and rapidly devoping industrial economies.
The cornucopian tales of vast, unlimited resources and conspiracies to price them out of reach to the needy population are matched by the myths of "green" Perpetual Motion machines spun by the fantasists of the Green movement, and the current liberal political regime has bought into them hook, line, and sinker. Environmentalists Amory Lovins and Al Gore, who are the most prominent propagators of the alt-energy myths, have attained almost God-like status among the Green contingent, as well as considerable influence within the Obama administration. The plot line of green fantasies of the unlimited energy that could be realized from solar, wind, and geothermal power is similar to that of the fossil fuel cornucopians. We could, they say, run our cities and transportation entirely on wind, solar, and geothermal were it not for government coddling of the fossil fuel industries and deliberate obstruction of alternative technologies. "Whole cities are run on wind power!" exclaim the fantasists, and they point to such "cities" as tiny Rock Port, Missouri, pop.1300, as examples of the superiority of "renewable" energy. The little hamlet near the Nebraska border has achieved energy independence by means of four wind turbines that cost $90 Million and that generate 5 megawatts a power per day. A closer look reveals that not only is this expensive power -it translates to a minimum .20 cents per kilowatt hour under the best circumstances, but that the system must be tied to the nation-wide grid for backup power when the wind is not blowing. In other words, like solar power, it is reliant upon fossil fuel backups to assure reliable, uninterrupted power generation, thus blasting away fantasies of energy independence from "renewables". Additionally, the Rock Port project is one node of a much larger project in the area, which meant that the turbines cost much less than they would as a "stand alone" project, and the town was, under its previous arrangement, paying a substantial premium for power transmitted from distant places, known as a "wheeling charge", for the line loss involved in transmitting electricity over vast distances, which elevated its power costs significantly. In other words, Rock Port is a special situation, a tiny community in a remote location that has benefited from a convergence of unusual circumstances: the high cost of importing power from remote sources, the loss of other alternatives such as the hydro that used to supply the town, and proximity to a large wind farm and the existence of ideal weather for wind generation, along with a tiny population and copious federal subsidies. Such a combination of factors doesn't set up often, and even so, the town is ultimately reliant upon fossil fuel for its power given the intermittant nature of wind power and the difficulty of storing it.
But no matter how often and convincingly these myths are debunked, they retain their life and their power over a frightened population traumatized by the loss of the industries that made this country, for a time, the wealthiest and most productive nation ever to exist; blindsided by the vicious reversal and revealed fraud of the "growth" economy that seemed invincible just a few years ago, and now confronted with steep, irreversible financial losses and, worse, the permanent loss of our high level of comfort and the terminal depletion of the resources that have made it possible. Right now, we are in denial, which is the first stage of the grieving process, and that denial is manifest in the cornucopian fantasies of government coverups of giant oil finds and suppression of alternative energy sources that could, people believe, make it possible to continue our current obscenely wasteful consumption of resources. Such denial is utterly human and completely understandable.
But it won't help us in the task of reorganizing our economy and communities in keeping with reduced energy imputs and the contraction and eventual loss of industries reliant upon cheap, plentiful lifestyles. We will soon progress to the second stage of the grieving process, which is anger, and millions of people consumed with pain and rage will target the usual scapegoats, which would include our political leaders, who will pay a steep price for pandering to the wish-based fantasies of a population steeped in denial.
However, the steepest price of all will be paid by the 290 million or so "ordinary people", whose failure to reconcile their desires with emerging conditions will set them on a collision course with unpalatable realities, and who will thus be driven into corners defined by no-win choices and who will not have the alternatives available to our financial and political elites.Most of us will not be able to fly off to pristine little communities buried in remote spots, or accumulate vast stockpiles of provisions and ammo in gated compounds guarded by private armies.
And at that point, the "bargaining" stage of the process, we will not be the ones setting the terms of the deal. The hard facts of resource scarcity in combination with a population utterly unprepared to cope with life on terms vastly different than those of the past 70 years will set the terms, and we will have to cope however we can, minus the skills and mentality that could make the difference between life with a certain minimal level of tech amenity in solid communities in an honest, productive economy; and the chaos, scarcity, and rampant violence of a society rapidly devolving into savagery and civil breakdown as its fantasy-driven denizens wander witlessly from place to place in search of illusionary prosperity and safety, and of leaders who will tell them exactly what they want so badly to believe, which is that we can flout the laws of nature and continue to consume vastly more than we produce, whether energy or the goods the energy makes possible.
The two most enduring legends are Gull Island and the Bakken Formation.These two fields were discovered decades ago, and any hopes that these fields could approach the production of Gwaihir or Cantarell have been dashed many times over. The vast reserves simply are not there, but the myth dies hard. A Google search brought up hundreds of articles on each field, and in the case of Gull Island, the conspiracy hacks claim that the U.S. government has conspired to cap these wells and keep secret their existence in order to drive up oil prices. There are many plausible explanations for the shutting in of productive wells by the producer, and it's not difficult to imagine that a producer might wish to put a floor under oil prices, since a temporary glut can drive prices to points below profitability, but it is difficult to imagine a vast government conspiracy to raise oil prices in view of the fact that oil production is heavily subsidized in the U.S. with a vast variety of tax favors and incentives, in order to keep prices artificially low, and current prices are still low enough to render offshore drills and extraction from the Calgary sands prohibitively expensive and risky. Wells are shut in when the energy required to work them exceeds the energy that can be extracted from them, that simple, which is why the tar sands projects have been shut in and the offshore drills are not being done- the cheap, easy sweet crude is mostly gone, and what remains is the stuff that is difficult and expensive to get out of the ground. This means that price of oil must be at a certain level to justify the development of these sources, and when it isn't, they will go untapped.
Every report of fabulous reserves at Gull Island and government conspiracies to keep them from being exploited trace their roots back to Lindsey Williams, a Baptist missionary who published a book in 1980 called The Energy Non-Crisis, which describes the Gull Island field and speculates that it might contain enough oil to supply the U.S. for 200 years; in other words, that it is another "elephant" field. That there are thousands of websites echoing Williams' amazing claims is testament to the resilience of cornucopian myths, for Gull Island has indeed been explored and drilled, but it is not producing anything like the 2 million barrels a day that he claims it is capable of, but more like 4,000 barrels a day at the most from Gull no. 1 and Gull no.2. Gull Island State no. 3, drilled in 1992, was a dry hole. According to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC), and by the words of ARCO geologists working at the site, “both the geologic evidence and the small area not yet developed into oil fields around the Gull Island wells preclude the possibility of a giant oil accumulation.”(Petroleum News)
According to Alaska's Division of Oil and Gas, the largest pool at Gull Island has thus far produced 396 million barrels of oil, and has perhaps 164 million remaining- and that is the largest of the pools. Therefore, we are probably talking about 1 billion barrels of oil at the most to be had from this legendary field, which, while respectable, is piddling relative to the truly large fields containing 5 billion barrels or more, let alone the supergiants of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. It's difficult to believe that any consortium of industry players or government bureaucrats could keep such a find a secret for longer than it takes to file for the drilling permits. Perhaps it's a matter of public perception; to most people out here, 164M sounds like a lot of oil, and 5 billion is staggering, for most people do not realize that the U.S. rips through 7 billion barrels a year. Nor do they realize that while we once found much greater quantities of oil than the world used, that now the finds are very small relative to global demand, which is growing while new discoveries are smaller and smaller. A recent white paper authored by Dr. Robert Hirsch, Giant Oil Field Decline Rates and Their Influence on World Production, makes it clear that the world's giant fields are in decline and that the decline rate vastly outpaces the rate of new discoveries.
The Bakken Formation, a gigantic formation that is nearly 200,000 square miles in size, was first discovered in 1951 and then abandoned for decades as impossible to work because the petroleum is encased in layers of impermeable dolomite,and is a truly tantalizing find. The formation stretches across three states and provinces, and some geologists speculated that as much as 400 billion barrels of oil might reside in the layers of impermeable shale and dolomite. However, it turns out that, based on current production, that the most the formation can be expected to yield, given current levels of knowledge and technology, is about 4.1 billion barrels. While that is a pretty respectable number, it won't come near meeting our ongoing demand, let alone that of rapidly developing economies in Asia such as China, India, and Indonesia with their huge populations of a billion people or more and rapidly devoping industrial economies.
The cornucopian tales of vast, unlimited resources and conspiracies to price them out of reach to the needy population are matched by the myths of "green" Perpetual Motion machines spun by the fantasists of the Green movement, and the current liberal political regime has bought into them hook, line, and sinker. Environmentalists Amory Lovins and Al Gore, who are the most prominent propagators of the alt-energy myths, have attained almost God-like status among the Green contingent, as well as considerable influence within the Obama administration. The plot line of green fantasies of the unlimited energy that could be realized from solar, wind, and geothermal power is similar to that of the fossil fuel cornucopians. We could, they say, run our cities and transportation entirely on wind, solar, and geothermal were it not for government coddling of the fossil fuel industries and deliberate obstruction of alternative technologies. "Whole cities are run on wind power!" exclaim the fantasists, and they point to such "cities" as tiny Rock Port, Missouri, pop.1300, as examples of the superiority of "renewable" energy. The little hamlet near the Nebraska border has achieved energy independence by means of four wind turbines that cost $90 Million and that generate 5 megawatts a power per day. A closer look reveals that not only is this expensive power -it translates to a minimum .20 cents per kilowatt hour under the best circumstances, but that the system must be tied to the nation-wide grid for backup power when the wind is not blowing. In other words, like solar power, it is reliant upon fossil fuel backups to assure reliable, uninterrupted power generation, thus blasting away fantasies of energy independence from "renewables". Additionally, the Rock Port project is one node of a much larger project in the area, which meant that the turbines cost much less than they would as a "stand alone" project, and the town was, under its previous arrangement, paying a substantial premium for power transmitted from distant places, known as a "wheeling charge", for the line loss involved in transmitting electricity over vast distances, which elevated its power costs significantly. In other words, Rock Port is a special situation, a tiny community in a remote location that has benefited from a convergence of unusual circumstances: the high cost of importing power from remote sources, the loss of other alternatives such as the hydro that used to supply the town, and proximity to a large wind farm and the existence of ideal weather for wind generation, along with a tiny population and copious federal subsidies. Such a combination of factors doesn't set up often, and even so, the town is ultimately reliant upon fossil fuel for its power given the intermittant nature of wind power and the difficulty of storing it.
But no matter how often and convincingly these myths are debunked, they retain their life and their power over a frightened population traumatized by the loss of the industries that made this country, for a time, the wealthiest and most productive nation ever to exist; blindsided by the vicious reversal and revealed fraud of the "growth" economy that seemed invincible just a few years ago, and now confronted with steep, irreversible financial losses and, worse, the permanent loss of our high level of comfort and the terminal depletion of the resources that have made it possible. Right now, we are in denial, which is the first stage of the grieving process, and that denial is manifest in the cornucopian fantasies of government coverups of giant oil finds and suppression of alternative energy sources that could, people believe, make it possible to continue our current obscenely wasteful consumption of resources. Such denial is utterly human and completely understandable.
But it won't help us in the task of reorganizing our economy and communities in keeping with reduced energy imputs and the contraction and eventual loss of industries reliant upon cheap, plentiful lifestyles. We will soon progress to the second stage of the grieving process, which is anger, and millions of people consumed with pain and rage will target the usual scapegoats, which would include our political leaders, who will pay a steep price for pandering to the wish-based fantasies of a population steeped in denial.
However, the steepest price of all will be paid by the 290 million or so "ordinary people", whose failure to reconcile their desires with emerging conditions will set them on a collision course with unpalatable realities, and who will thus be driven into corners defined by no-win choices and who will not have the alternatives available to our financial and political elites.Most of us will not be able to fly off to pristine little communities buried in remote spots, or accumulate vast stockpiles of provisions and ammo in gated compounds guarded by private armies.
And at that point, the "bargaining" stage of the process, we will not be the ones setting the terms of the deal. The hard facts of resource scarcity in combination with a population utterly unprepared to cope with life on terms vastly different than those of the past 70 years will set the terms, and we will have to cope however we can, minus the skills and mentality that could make the difference between life with a certain minimal level of tech amenity in solid communities in an honest, productive economy; and the chaos, scarcity, and rampant violence of a society rapidly devolving into savagery and civil breakdown as its fantasy-driven denizens wander witlessly from place to place in search of illusionary prosperity and safety, and of leaders who will tell them exactly what they want so badly to believe, which is that we can flout the laws of nature and continue to consume vastly more than we produce, whether energy or the goods the energy makes possible.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Shrinking Horizons and the Devolution of American Rail Transit
As I usually do at Christmas, I took the Amtrak Lincoln train to St. Louis to visit my family. I usually enjoy the ride even when the train is substantially delayed, for even though Amtrak service and amenities are very basic, they compare favorably with air travel in comfort and decency. After my last plane trip to St. Louis in 2005, a red-eye out of Midway, where I was subjected to vicious incivility usually experienced only at an open-seating rock concert, I decided I'd had enough of the savagery of modern air travel and reverted to travelling by Amtrak.
Amtrak service, while not luxurious by any standard, is still extremly comfortable relative to air travel, offering ample leg room, wide, deep seats,the opportunity to get up and walk around, and the freedom to enjoy my electronic devices at will along with an outlet at the seat to plug them into without fear that they'll somehow derange the landing gear or radar. Additionally, the atmosphere is relaxed and the personnel are genial and courteous. The only downside, really, is that it is just too slow, taking 5.5 hours minimum to travel between Chicago and St. Louis, and long delays of 30 minutes or more are distressingly frequent. Everytime I ride, I consider that there were once about a dozen interurban trains traveling between these two cities, and that in the 1920s, speeds of 100MPH were ordinary for passengers trains in the U.S., whose passenger rail system was the envy of the world. Nevertheless, I usually enjoy the trip, and settle into my seat with my music collection, headphones, and a book for the ride.
But the arrival in St. Louis is a distinct downer, and I get just a little depressed as the train rolls into its pocket at the new station downtown. Often, I ride to the charming old commuter station in Kirkwood, which is so close to my mother's house that in fine weather I can walk there, but the layover between St. Louis and the last leg to the Kirkwood Station has been lengthened to two hours, and I can think of better uses for that much time than milling around at the ugly new station, staring at the dismal scenery surrounding it and wondering why we let our cities, and our country, be reduced to this.
Nothing illustrates the devolution of rail transit in the United States like the contrast between the magnificent old Union Station at Market and 18th Streets in St. Louis (pictured at top), and St. Louis' new Gateway Multimodal Transportation Station, a bizarrely configured series of small, boxy segments jammed underneath a tangle of highway overpasses on 15th Street.
While old Union Station, built in the 1890s when St. Louis was the largest rail hub in the world, sits proudly on Market Street opposite beautiful Aloe Plaza with its incredible Carl Milles fountain, affording the rail travelers of the past an imposing view of the city, and grand welcome; the new station, with its two platforms and four pockets for passenger trains, is hidden away in a desolate pocket in downtown's neglected backyard. As you exit the station, the sight that greets you is not a lovely park with sweeping views of the city's skyline, but a dank, dark parking lot under the tangle of highway ramps and support pylons, the USPS parking lot across the street, and a jumble of weed-choked vacant lots and decrepit buildings, from where you can get a glimpse of Union Station's clock tower to the north and west, and your first thought is: why was $31 Million spent on this ugly jumble of buildings that will surely be inadequate to the needs of revived rail in the future, while the magnificent old building on Market Street sits underutilized, as a floundering shopping mall?
Where was the vision here? While rail travelers visiting the city are dumped into this ugly pocket in the city's service alley, Union Station's beautiful mall, which underwent a second renovation in 2007, is languishing, and continuing to lose traffic and retail tenants. The area surrounding the station is thinly populated, and poorly anchored by St. Louis' moribund downtown business district. Basing Amtrack service at Union Station would not only revive the lovely old structure as a rail station that could accomodate vastly expanded passenger rail in the future, but would present the city in its best light to visitors and would feed traffic to the hotel and shopping mall, while providing an impetus to further residential and commercial development in the immediate area.
This sad place is not only indicative of our lack of commitment to rebuilding our transportation system in keeping with the reality of dwindling fuel supplies, but most of all, illustrates the shrinking of our vision of the future and our acquiescence to increasing failure and dysfunction.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
The Oil Industry at 150: A Celebration or a Funeral?
You have to wonder if Alex Epstein on the blog Voices for Reason, grasped the irony of the title of his recent post, Oil at 150: An Unhappy Birthday. The blog is operated by The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, which is headed by her designated spokesman and intellectual heir, Dr. Leonard Peikoff.
This article was a follow up piece to his previous post, Oil at 150:Celebrating Oil's Birthday, a short piece lauding the first drill in Pennsylvania 150 years ago and the ensuing discovery of the incredible power and versatility of the liquid that literally built the modern world and to which we owe every essential of modern life.
In his follow-up post, Mr. Epstein lamented that there had hardly been any comment on the occasion at all from either our opinion makers or oil industry leaders themselves.
That might possibly be because for the oil industry and for everyone who aspires to a lifestyle better than that of a 19th Century subsistence farmer, this is a time of grief, not joy, for the landmark Epstein commemorates will more likely be the industry's tombstone, and no one knows it better than oil industry insiders themselves.The most prominent Peak Oil spokesmen are, after all, alumnae of the oil industry; Colin Campbell and Kenneth Deffeyes are retired petroleum geologists who spent their professional lives in the employ of major oil producers, Matthew Simmons is a prominent investment banker and oil analyst, and former U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, who remarked on disparity between growing demand for oil and the ever smaller and less frequent discoveries of unexploited reserves, is the former Chairman and CEO of Halliburton. Each of these men, along with dozens of fellow executives and scientists in the energy industries, has expressed their conviction that we have arrived, or will soon arrive at, the peak of global oil production and the inevitable steep decline in available oil supplies.
And none of them, nor anyone else, can say for sure what will replace oil, but there is among them and other students of Peak Oil, the disquieting thought that there will be no replacement for it. And neither the cornucopians nor the "green"' promoters of renewable energy care to dwell on the thought.
I like Alex Epstein and many of the other intellectuals whose writings appear at The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, and intend no disrespect for them or the Objectivist philosophy that they articulate and that I share, when I say that their extremely linear logic regarding the necessity of oil fails to factor in a number of important points, like the possibility that we will likely have to do with a steeply reduced supply of it. Another contributor, Dr. Keith Lockitch, author of The True Meaning of Earth Hour, criticizes the movement to reduce carbon emissions because a steep reduction in emissions would mean a steep reduction in our lifestyles. His reasoning is likewise rigidly linear to the point of simple-mindedness: it says, our comfort and advanced technologies depend upon the ability to consume large amounts of fossil fuels, therefore we must have fossil fuels, and since we demand them they must therefore be available. Well, what happens when they no longer are available, or supplies are steeply reduced from current levels? Will our demand for them in and of itself produce them once every oil field on the planet is in steep depletion along with most gas wells and coal mines?
This is not Objectevist thinking, this is not rationality. This is wish-based thinking that refuses to recognize a distressing reality.
Unfortunately, Dr. Lockitch, Mr. Epstein and other writers at the Center have fallen into the Cornucopian trap that has ensnared most "conservatives", a variety of wish-based thinking that believes that just because our civilization badly needs dense, energy-intensive fuels in order to drive our advanced technology and supply the comforts and amenities that are the difference between a long, healthy life with opportunity, choice, and incredible luxury; and a life that's nasty, brutish, and short, that those fuels will always be there and that the market will provide them simply because we want them, need them, and demand them.
The "conservative" cornucopians are as in denial regarding the hard limits we are confronting as the "liberal" environmentalists and "greens" in their approaches to the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels and other essential resources, and just as irrational, and neither mode of thinking will help us negotiate the tectonic economic and social shifts that are sweeping the globe, and sweeping away our favored way of life and the assumptions we have based our thinking and planning on.
If ever we needed rational philosophy, this is the hour, but the latter-day spokesmen of the philosophy that supplies the epistemology that supports it and defends it are frantically evading it and denying the conclusions to which it would lead them.Evasion, denial, and emotion-based thinking are the hallmarks of irrationality and subjectivity, which are not only cardinal sins in Objectivist philosophy, but will lead us to the same place that they always have, and will defeat our efforts to retain our civilization and develop the techniques and organization we will need to cope in a resource-constrained world.
This article was a follow up piece to his previous post, Oil at 150:Celebrating Oil's Birthday, a short piece lauding the first drill in Pennsylvania 150 years ago and the ensuing discovery of the incredible power and versatility of the liquid that literally built the modern world and to which we owe every essential of modern life.
In his follow-up post, Mr. Epstein lamented that there had hardly been any comment on the occasion at all from either our opinion makers or oil industry leaders themselves.
That might possibly be because for the oil industry and for everyone who aspires to a lifestyle better than that of a 19th Century subsistence farmer, this is a time of grief, not joy, for the landmark Epstein commemorates will more likely be the industry's tombstone, and no one knows it better than oil industry insiders themselves.The most prominent Peak Oil spokesmen are, after all, alumnae of the oil industry; Colin Campbell and Kenneth Deffeyes are retired petroleum geologists who spent their professional lives in the employ of major oil producers, Matthew Simmons is a prominent investment banker and oil analyst, and former U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, who remarked on disparity between growing demand for oil and the ever smaller and less frequent discoveries of unexploited reserves, is the former Chairman and CEO of Halliburton. Each of these men, along with dozens of fellow executives and scientists in the energy industries, has expressed their conviction that we have arrived, or will soon arrive at, the peak of global oil production and the inevitable steep decline in available oil supplies.
And none of them, nor anyone else, can say for sure what will replace oil, but there is among them and other students of Peak Oil, the disquieting thought that there will be no replacement for it. And neither the cornucopians nor the "green"' promoters of renewable energy care to dwell on the thought.
I like Alex Epstein and many of the other intellectuals whose writings appear at The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, and intend no disrespect for them or the Objectivist philosophy that they articulate and that I share, when I say that their extremely linear logic regarding the necessity of oil fails to factor in a number of important points, like the possibility that we will likely have to do with a steeply reduced supply of it. Another contributor, Dr. Keith Lockitch, author of The True Meaning of Earth Hour, criticizes the movement to reduce carbon emissions because a steep reduction in emissions would mean a steep reduction in our lifestyles. His reasoning is likewise rigidly linear to the point of simple-mindedness: it says, our comfort and advanced technologies depend upon the ability to consume large amounts of fossil fuels, therefore we must have fossil fuels, and since we demand them they must therefore be available. Well, what happens when they no longer are available, or supplies are steeply reduced from current levels? Will our demand for them in and of itself produce them once every oil field on the planet is in steep depletion along with most gas wells and coal mines?
This is not Objectevist thinking, this is not rationality. This is wish-based thinking that refuses to recognize a distressing reality.
Unfortunately, Dr. Lockitch, Mr. Epstein and other writers at the Center have fallen into the Cornucopian trap that has ensnared most "conservatives", a variety of wish-based thinking that believes that just because our civilization badly needs dense, energy-intensive fuels in order to drive our advanced technology and supply the comforts and amenities that are the difference between a long, healthy life with opportunity, choice, and incredible luxury; and a life that's nasty, brutish, and short, that those fuels will always be there and that the market will provide them simply because we want them, need them, and demand them.
The "conservative" cornucopians are as in denial regarding the hard limits we are confronting as the "liberal" environmentalists and "greens" in their approaches to the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels and other essential resources, and just as irrational, and neither mode of thinking will help us negotiate the tectonic economic and social shifts that are sweeping the globe, and sweeping away our favored way of life and the assumptions we have based our thinking and planning on.
If ever we needed rational philosophy, this is the hour, but the latter-day spokesmen of the philosophy that supplies the epistemology that supports it and defends it are frantically evading it and denying the conclusions to which it would lead them.Evasion, denial, and emotion-based thinking are the hallmarks of irrationality and subjectivity, which are not only cardinal sins in Objectivist philosophy, but will lead us to the same place that they always have, and will defeat our efforts to retain our civilization and develop the techniques and organization we will need to cope in a resource-constrained world.
Friday, May 8, 2009
The Democrats' Greenwash and the Automobile Welfare State
Does the United States already have enough damn corporate welfare? And do we have enough cars out there already?
The Cash-For-Clunkers bill, enthusiastically endorsed by Obama and an army of Democratic leaders, is expected to pass easily this week, and it is supposed to stimulate purchases of new automobiles. It will offer auto buyers a voucher (not a tax credit) of $3,500 to $ 4,500 to purchase new, more fuel-efficient autos.
We need to ask some questions about this.
Like, is it really "green" to give auto buyers a tax-funded voucher of $3,500 to $4,500 to replace a car that cost 27 barrels of oil to build and is possibly less than 5 years old, and buy a new "green" car?
Is the money to fund this program not taken from public transit and from people who can't afford a car on any terms?
Can people who've already maxed out their cards, are losing their jobs, and are falling into delinquency on all their obligations really ante up for new cars even with a handout from Uncle Sam?
Could we just possibly have an economy founded on industries other than housing and automobiles?
And is it wise, in an era of declining liquid fuels, to continue to subsidize auto ownership and driving, while starving public transit?
This country has been an Automobile Welfare State for the past 80 years as it is. The taxpayers at large, whether they drive or not, have been paying for this country's 5.7 million miles of paved highways and for the resource wars we are currently fighting, inasmuch as our only reason to be involved in the Middle East at all is because we need their oil to run our 200 million cars and trucks.
Obama is repeating Bush's mistakes, only in slightly different form. Bushco granted tax credits for buying fuel-guzzling SUVs, and his fiscal policies drove the creation of more suburban sprawl and created the credit bubble that resulted in our present economic debacle.
Obama has merely dressed the Republicans' failed fiscal and economic policies in green Democratic clothes. He has generated trillions of dollars in new Treasury debt to support the trillions in bad debt created in the past 6 years, in an effort to continue an economy based on printing fake money to keep the house and car sales machine going.
Obama has barely been in office three months, but is rapidly squandering his considerable political capital by continuing the very policies that set us up for this financial debacle to begin with. Worse, he is squandering the last opportunity this country has to prepare for the terminal decline of oil supplies and coming price shocks. If his policies don't start to work really quickly, he will find himself unable to accomplish any of the worthy goals he set for his administration and will be a one-term president.
Somebody needs to tell our current team that their chosen strategy, which is emptying out the treasury and printing unlimited quantities of fake money to support everything and everybody, has been tried before. They should read the history of the Perons in Argentina and see how well it worked for them.
Somebody really needs to get it across to Team Obama that paying people to drive cars and borrow money they can't afford isn't exactly the path to less dependence on oil or a stable economy.
The Cash-For-Clunkers bill, enthusiastically endorsed by Obama and an army of Democratic leaders, is expected to pass easily this week, and it is supposed to stimulate purchases of new automobiles. It will offer auto buyers a voucher (not a tax credit) of $3,500 to $ 4,500 to purchase new, more fuel-efficient autos.
We need to ask some questions about this.
Like, is it really "green" to give auto buyers a tax-funded voucher of $3,500 to $4,500 to replace a car that cost 27 barrels of oil to build and is possibly less than 5 years old, and buy a new "green" car?
Is the money to fund this program not taken from public transit and from people who can't afford a car on any terms?
Can people who've already maxed out their cards, are losing their jobs, and are falling into delinquency on all their obligations really ante up for new cars even with a handout from Uncle Sam?
Could we just possibly have an economy founded on industries other than housing and automobiles?
And is it wise, in an era of declining liquid fuels, to continue to subsidize auto ownership and driving, while starving public transit?
This country has been an Automobile Welfare State for the past 80 years as it is. The taxpayers at large, whether they drive or not, have been paying for this country's 5.7 million miles of paved highways and for the resource wars we are currently fighting, inasmuch as our only reason to be involved in the Middle East at all is because we need their oil to run our 200 million cars and trucks.
Obama is repeating Bush's mistakes, only in slightly different form. Bushco granted tax credits for buying fuel-guzzling SUVs, and his fiscal policies drove the creation of more suburban sprawl and created the credit bubble that resulted in our present economic debacle.
Obama has merely dressed the Republicans' failed fiscal and economic policies in green Democratic clothes. He has generated trillions of dollars in new Treasury debt to support the trillions in bad debt created in the past 6 years, in an effort to continue an economy based on printing fake money to keep the house and car sales machine going.
Obama has barely been in office three months, but is rapidly squandering his considerable political capital by continuing the very policies that set us up for this financial debacle to begin with. Worse, he is squandering the last opportunity this country has to prepare for the terminal decline of oil supplies and coming price shocks. If his policies don't start to work really quickly, he will find himself unable to accomplish any of the worthy goals he set for his administration and will be a one-term president.
Somebody needs to tell our current team that their chosen strategy, which is emptying out the treasury and printing unlimited quantities of fake money to support everything and everybody, has been tried before. They should read the history of the Perons in Argentina and see how well it worked for them.
Somebody really needs to get it across to Team Obama that paying people to drive cars and borrow money they can't afford isn't exactly the path to less dependence on oil or a stable economy.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
A Tragic Scam
The Obama administration is moving aggressively on its stated plans to implement various forms of renewable energy, and there are indications that massive changes in energy policy are being made without carefully considering potential costs......such as the lives of 300 million or so American citizens.
The urgency is understandable. At this point in time, oil production has most likely peaked, at least according to prominent oil geologists Kenneth Deffeyes and Colin Campbell, and gas supplies on this continent will reach their production peak at some point in the future. It's hard to determine exactly when, but a major jump in demand for natural gas will surely cause that resource to deplete rapidly. Worse, U.S. has made almost no provisions for lower energy consumption or for alternatives to oil, gas, and coal.
Unfortunately, we are engaged in a frantic struggle to pretend that we can manage a steep reduction of consumption of fossil fuels with absolutely no alteration of our habits or living arrangement whatsoever, and this pretense is driving our policy decisions, with results that will echo and amplify down through decades. Whether or not we will even have reliable electric power will depend on policies implemented right now, given the power of the government to impose broad policies and fund them lavishly, at the expense of the taxpayers. It is unfortunate that this country tipped into to total statism and has erected massive barriers to the individual initiatives and adjustments that could produce appropriate adjustments on a small, local scale, but we have to deal with things as they are.
When the feds decide to implement a program, it is done decisively, and broadly. Unfortunately, it is also done without due consideration of the costs involved, and least of all to unintended consequences. Worse, once a particular policy is in place, we seem unable to reverse it, or correct its more pernicious effects. The disastrous unintended consequences of programs put into place 40, 50, 75 years ago are still cascading through the system, producing the same disastrous results, only vastly amplified, and foreclosing the very actions and adjustments that otherwise might correct the distortions and massive misallocations of resources resulting.
And, just as we have been unable to control or reverse the destruction of our cities, the metastatic spread of suburban sprawl, or the overpaving of our landscape and our inflexible demand for outrageous quantities of fossil fuels that are the end results of the well-intended programs of Roosevelt and Eisenhower, we will find it very difficult, if not impossible, to control or reverse the end results of the energy policies of the Obama administration.
Therefore, it is deeply unsettling to read the broadside statements of Jon Wellinghoff, Chief of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, in which he states that no new coal or nuclear plants may ever be needed in the U.S. and that "renewables" such as wind and solar will fill the gap. Wellinghoff's statement is stunningly irresponsible given the energy demands of our current systems and the realities of solar, wind, biomass, and other "renewable" forms of energy generation as they are currently known. Notice that he is not promoting the development of wind and solar alongside nuclear, but is suggesting that we abandon all research and development of nuclear and coal in favor of solar, wind, biomass, and other renewable energy sources. Given Mr. Wellinghoff's position, we can safely assume that he will be driving energy policy going forward and that his priorities will be translated into rigid policies that will drive all development of energy sources during this administration, which is a very chilling thought.
As of this date, there is only the remote possibility that solar and wind can even fractionally fill in the yawning gap between supply and demand that will be left when oil, and later, gas supplies go into terminal decline. While solar and wind technologies may have great potential for large-scale power generation, they are at this stage of development creaky, unreliable, and intermittent sources of power that are extremely reliant upon the local weather conditions, and bear hidden costs that haven't been discussed, such as the vast amounts of land necessary for a solar array or wind farm capable of generating even a significant fraction of the power of a typical coal or nuclear plant, or the amount of water a solar plant consumes, which is a major issue in the critically water-short desert states that are the most advantageous locations for a large solar array.
The ethanol bubble has already burst. "A tragic scam,"energy analyst Matthew Simmons called ethanol and biomass, for it has become painfully obvious that a diversion of our diminishing farmland from food production to fuel production, in the amounts needed to produce enough fuel to run even a substantial fraction of our fleet of 200 million autos and trucks, would collapse our food supply and subject us to critical shortages of food that are usually referred to as famines. Yet the current administration is still emphasizing biomass and ethanol development.
None of this is to say that development of renewables should be abandoned in favor of coal and nuclear. Wind, solar, and geothermal need to be aggressively explored and developed, for nuclear is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and every technology that could supply power needs to be developed.
However, to baldly state that renewable energy can completely replace fossil fuels flies in the face of everything we know to be the case concerning the necessities of power generation. We know, for example, that while demand has dropped somewhat due to the economic situation, that we still have an inflexible demand-demand built into the systems we need to run our economy and our lives for massive amounts of power, and that that demand is barely being met by our existing generating capacity. We also know that demand will surely increase, for our population is still unfortunately growing at the rate of 5% a year. We know also that we will need to electrify our transportation if we want to have any, and that alone will cause demand to ramp up steeply. We also know that our existing fleet of nuclear plants is aging rapidly and will need to be replaced very soon just to keep up with current demand, and we know that the cost of coal in air pollution can't be borne much longer.
Wellinghoff and his confreres in the Green movement are perpetrating a scam- a tragic scam-in their insistance that we can run our systems or any significant fraction thereof on "renewables" while still maintaining anything like current levels of consumption. These people have no excuse for not knowing that a major shift to renewable technologies will have to entail a major cut back in consumption, and that is not possible at this point, nor will it be possible at all if we continue to foster the delusion that we can maintain current levels of consumption, let alone increase them, strictly by means of renewable energy sources.
In coming years, as the oil supply problems setting up right now start to bite with a vengeance, we will need every alternative technology devised, including renewables, in addition to stringent conservation and the complete rearranging of our lives, to retain current levels of comfort and amenity. At this date, nuclear power offers our only hope of generating power sufficient for our current and future needs while reducing carbon emissions and toxic pollution. It would be criminal not to explore promising new nuclear technologies that offer much safer generation with new fuels whose supplies can be extended far past the time when Uranium 235 will be depleted, and failure to develop these technologies would be a tragic mistake that would almost surely result in the U.S. becoming another third-world country within 20 years.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Fade Earth Day
Well, it's too late this year, for the annual Earth Day idiocy is upon us, and all the “green” celebrities are consuming multi-year supplies of nonrenewable resources and spewing toxic fumes and greenhouse gases allover the planet in order to attend these events and urge action on their pet issue, global warming.
But maybe next year, we can rename the day. May I suggest Resource Conservation Day, or Human Civilization Day, or simply The Day of the Human? Because most people forget that that is really what it is all about, maintaining the planet so that it will always be able to feed us and house us and enable us to live lives that make being human worthwhile, and by the time all the attendees have gone back to their wasteful daily ways, the “green” movement will once more have failed to engage most of the population.
So it really doesn't matter what you call it. The environmental movement has done such a superb job of trivializing the issues of environmental degradation and resource depletion while alienating 90% of the population in the process, that nomenclature is beside the point. The fact is that not only does most of the population consider the Green movement trivial, but view its initiatives as elitist and fascistic attempts to control the behaviors and limit the pleasures, privileges, and economic opportunities of ordinary citizens while its promoters continue to live lavish, wasteful lifestyles that are distinctly not in keeping with either their own professed beliefs and dictates, or with the realities of our resource situation. Thus, the members of the population who always suffer first and the most from the consequences of resource depletion and environmental damage, specifically, the non-rich, are the very people most opposed to the actions and adjustments necessary to mitigate the waste of resources and environmental damage caused by our current arrangements.
Worse, the movement talks almost exclusively about Global Warming, as if there were no other or more immediate problems. Why do our environmentalists and “green” political leaders never name Peak Oil? They speak of “ending our dependence on foreign oil”, but they seem to deliberately skirt the real issue, which is that global oil reserves are depleting rapidly and that it is unlikely that we will ever again discover any “elephant” fields that will replace the dwindling middle eastern fields or collapsing Cantarell field in Mexico, on which this country has been dependent for nearly 20% of its supply.
This is tragic, because it isn't the Al Gores or Amory Lovins of the world who will suffer first or the most from escalating food prices and growing scarcity of fossil fuels or the things they supply, such as plentiful, cheap food, potable water, electricity, vaccines, heat, or basic sanitation and hygiene, as we head down the other side of the slope. Rocky Mountain Institute fellows will still be able to drive their hybrid cars to work at the Institutes headquarters located many miles from the city core, and Al Gore will still live in his Belle Meade mansion with its solar panels and other “carbon offsets” to the 12,000 Kw H electricity a year his family consumes- how does a small family use that much power, anyway? Our privileged classes most likely will never have to live near a toxic waste dump or open sewer, or in a town like Herculaneum, Missouri, where almost every home and yard is so contaminated with lead from the local smelter that the town's children routinely have lead levels in their blood twice the level considered safe, and residents are campaigning for a government buyout of their unsafe and unsaleable homes. And, of course, it will not be the sons (and, increasingly, the daughters) of the wealthy and sheltered who die fighting the upcoming resource wars that will probably define politics for the next century.
It is we, the non-rich and non-privileged, who will bear the heaviest losses as our fossil fuel supplies shrink. We are the people who will find ourselves stranded in distant suburbs rendered inaccessible and utterly valueless as 50-mile commutes, or for that matter, cars, become unaffordable to anyone who isn't in the top 1% of wage earners. We will be the people being cast out of the upper-middle and middle classes, losing our jobs and homes permanently,doubling up in overcrowded dwellings or living in shelters and Tent Cities, and scrambling for odd jobs to pay for increasingly expensive food, power, and water as businesses and industries dependent on reliable and copious supplies of fuel collapse and our best farmland is converted from food production to biofuel production, in the frantic race for dwindling fuel supplies.
It's a lot more fun to talk about “green” cars and architecture than it is to consider just where we're going to get the wherewithal to retrofit our existing buildings, let alone replace them, or how 80% of the population is going to get around without cars and how we will heat our houses when we lose our access to foreign oil and natural gas passes peak production. It's much easier to go out and pick up the trash the neighborhood slobs have spread around than it is to change our mentality regarding zoning and land use so that we can all live close to public transit and essential services, and provide at least part of our own food locally. That would mean more high-density, multi-use construction around transit hubs and fewer single-family homes; it would mean canceling new highway construction and road enlargements in favor of more commuter trains and buses, and it would mean allowing homeowners to keep a goat or a chicken or two, and allocating vacant land for community gardens and urban agricultural projects instead of building more condos to throw onto a glutted market.
But it's easier to spend one day turning out lights and wearing green t-shirts and then go back to life as usual, than it is to alter our daily habits and life arrangements to, say, cut our personal fuel consumption by 30% or more, so that we aren't completely blindsided by future oil price shocks and the dislocations they cause.
Therefore, the most urgent task for the Green Movement is to engage the general public and convince the population at large of the towering threat that unsustainable lifestyles present to their ability to live on any terms, let alone in comfort and with any level of technological amenity, as liquid fuels become scarce and expensive. People need to know that this is not an issue only of interest to the “elite”, that, in fact, many among our elite are doing everything possible to thwart positive changes and have managed to convince most people that conservation initiatives will harm them economically and deprive them of technological comforts and pleasures.
And just maybe we could just cancel Earth Day, because sustainable lifestyles and technologies need to be daily things, not just something that intrudes on the awareness of a hostile and complacent public once a year.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Locked Out:The Cuban Trade Embargo Compromises U.S. Energy Security
Some of this country's worst national traits- American complacency, sense of entitlement, frantic obsession with yesterday's battles and obsolete doctrines, and inability to discern blatant logical inconsistencies and hypocrisy in them, have combined to further compromise our energy security and assure a much rougher transition to a low-energy regime than we might otherwise have to deal with, if we have not, in fact, absolutely assured our own future misery and poverty.
It's difficult to understand how the population of this country, notably its "conservatives", can blithely acquiesce to what amounts to the sale of this country to China, the world's major communist power and a major human rights violator, while maintaining the draconian trade restrictions on a tiny island 90 miles from Miami. By some mental process that could not exactly be called "thought" or "reasoning" that I've always been at a loss to understand, most people have made their peace with the outsourcing of our entire economy to China and are somehow not bothered by the consideration that we have almost no manufacturing capacity left and could not mobilize for a major war; yet are just appalled at the thought of normalizing our relationship with Cuba to the extent of ending the 50-year-old trade embargo on the island.
The entire Cuba issue is a political "third rail", an issue so politically toxic that no administration, Republican or Democrat, has dared broach the idea that perhaps the embargo might not work to our interest and might, in fact, be producing results that are the opposite of our intention when we imposed it. For a while there, in certain American cities, the whole subject was so sensitive that discussing it in public could shorten your life substantially if not instantly, and not very long ago at all, half the population of this country could go absolutely spastic at the notion that a little boy just might be better off with his only living parent even if that parent resided in Cuba. I don't see people reacting the same way to the news that China is no longer permitting thousands of utterly unwanted baby girls to be adopted by foreigners, and even the "pro-life" contingent here doesn't seem too awfully upset by the prevalence of brutal late-term abortions there, which are forced upon Chinese mothers who violate the country's one-child laws- as long as we can get all the cheap goods from Chinese sweatshops we want.
I've always thought that Castro's regime would have toppled long ago were it not for the embargo, just as China's vastly more powerful communist party is now becoming ideologically compromised by traffic with the west and the rapid growth of its blatantly capitalistic economy and the expansion of prosperity and material amenity among its citizens. Ultimately, the communist regime there will fall, because the development of the new economy has undermined and compromised the ideology that justifies it, and we have to wonder just how much more quickly Cuba would have progressed toward freedom if we had established similar cooperation there.
We'll never know. However, we will soon know just what the embargo has cost this country and just how much we might have compromised our own future by our obstinacy and stupidity in maintaining the embargo, for the undeveloped island is now negotiating exploration and production contracts with Russia, China, and Angola, to drill in the Gulf of Mexico. American oil companies have never been able to exploit these deep sea fields because of the trade embargo on Cuba.
And now, they never will be able to, for other nations are stepping in where we have defaulted, and are locking up substantial portions of the world's remaining oil reserves for themselves.
Thanks to the temporary oil supply glut and corresponding low fuel prices, Americans are wallowing in complacency regarding our precarious supply situation, and our leaders don't seem unduly disturbed by the speed at which other nations are taking advantage of our financial mismanagement and diplomatic failures to lock up future exploration, drilling rights, and oil production. As it is, China, one of the only solvent industrial countries remaining, has taken ample advantage of its economic strength and everyone else's extreme weakness to make contracts for a big fraction of Canada's production, and that of the middle eastern countries.
Keep in mind that the race for the world's dwindling oil reserves is distinctly a zero-sum game. What other nations get, we don't get. Their gain is absolutely our loss.
While our leaders give some lip service to "reducing dependence on foreign oil", quite as though we had any of our own to speak of, other nations have been wasting no time taking advantage of our current economic weakness, and our incredible complacency, to step in line ahead of us, just as they are taking much more aggressive measures to reduce their energy consumption and develop alternatives. There has not been a nuclear power plant built in the U. S. in 30 years, while other nations are not only planning dozens of plants, but are utilizing new nuclear technologies that are vastly safer and more efficient than the old cold-water reactors built here. Other nations, less complacent about their fuel supplies than we and far more experienced in deprivation and shortages, are expanding their railroads and demanding ever more fuel-efficient autos and appliances, but our auto executives howl every time we mandate modest improvements in fuel efficiency, on the grounds that the cost of meeting them will stunt "economic growth".
It's probably too late for our oil companies to get a seat at the table in Cuba, even were we to end the trade embargo tomorrow. But there might be time to build a relationship with Russia, a major oil producer, another opportunity we have so far let slide, to our disadvantage. There might be a way to set things right in the middle east. We had better give it our best shot. If we don't want to employ diplomacy and a pragmatic approach to dealing with nations ruled by regimes we find distasteful on ideological grounds, and if we also don't want to steeply reduce our energy consumption no matter what it takes to accomplish that,then we had better work to rebuild our manufacturing capacity really, really fast so we can mobilize for the coming world resource wars, because the windows of opportunity are closing quickly and leaving us with no alternative.
It's difficult to understand how the population of this country, notably its "conservatives", can blithely acquiesce to what amounts to the sale of this country to China, the world's major communist power and a major human rights violator, while maintaining the draconian trade restrictions on a tiny island 90 miles from Miami. By some mental process that could not exactly be called "thought" or "reasoning" that I've always been at a loss to understand, most people have made their peace with the outsourcing of our entire economy to China and are somehow not bothered by the consideration that we have almost no manufacturing capacity left and could not mobilize for a major war; yet are just appalled at the thought of normalizing our relationship with Cuba to the extent of ending the 50-year-old trade embargo on the island.
The entire Cuba issue is a political "third rail", an issue so politically toxic that no administration, Republican or Democrat, has dared broach the idea that perhaps the embargo might not work to our interest and might, in fact, be producing results that are the opposite of our intention when we imposed it. For a while there, in certain American cities, the whole subject was so sensitive that discussing it in public could shorten your life substantially if not instantly, and not very long ago at all, half the population of this country could go absolutely spastic at the notion that a little boy just might be better off with his only living parent even if that parent resided in Cuba. I don't see people reacting the same way to the news that China is no longer permitting thousands of utterly unwanted baby girls to be adopted by foreigners, and even the "pro-life" contingent here doesn't seem too awfully upset by the prevalence of brutal late-term abortions there, which are forced upon Chinese mothers who violate the country's one-child laws- as long as we can get all the cheap goods from Chinese sweatshops we want.
I've always thought that Castro's regime would have toppled long ago were it not for the embargo, just as China's vastly more powerful communist party is now becoming ideologically compromised by traffic with the west and the rapid growth of its blatantly capitalistic economy and the expansion of prosperity and material amenity among its citizens. Ultimately, the communist regime there will fall, because the development of the new economy has undermined and compromised the ideology that justifies it, and we have to wonder just how much more quickly Cuba would have progressed toward freedom if we had established similar cooperation there.
We'll never know. However, we will soon know just what the embargo has cost this country and just how much we might have compromised our own future by our obstinacy and stupidity in maintaining the embargo, for the undeveloped island is now negotiating exploration and production contracts with Russia, China, and Angola, to drill in the Gulf of Mexico. American oil companies have never been able to exploit these deep sea fields because of the trade embargo on Cuba.
And now, they never will be able to, for other nations are stepping in where we have defaulted, and are locking up substantial portions of the world's remaining oil reserves for themselves.
Thanks to the temporary oil supply glut and corresponding low fuel prices, Americans are wallowing in complacency regarding our precarious supply situation, and our leaders don't seem unduly disturbed by the speed at which other nations are taking advantage of our financial mismanagement and diplomatic failures to lock up future exploration, drilling rights, and oil production. As it is, China, one of the only solvent industrial countries remaining, has taken ample advantage of its economic strength and everyone else's extreme weakness to make contracts for a big fraction of Canada's production, and that of the middle eastern countries.
Keep in mind that the race for the world's dwindling oil reserves is distinctly a zero-sum game. What other nations get, we don't get. Their gain is absolutely our loss.
While our leaders give some lip service to "reducing dependence on foreign oil", quite as though we had any of our own to speak of, other nations have been wasting no time taking advantage of our current economic weakness, and our incredible complacency, to step in line ahead of us, just as they are taking much more aggressive measures to reduce their energy consumption and develop alternatives. There has not been a nuclear power plant built in the U. S. in 30 years, while other nations are not only planning dozens of plants, but are utilizing new nuclear technologies that are vastly safer and more efficient than the old cold-water reactors built here. Other nations, less complacent about their fuel supplies than we and far more experienced in deprivation and shortages, are expanding their railroads and demanding ever more fuel-efficient autos and appliances, but our auto executives howl every time we mandate modest improvements in fuel efficiency, on the grounds that the cost of meeting them will stunt "economic growth".
It's probably too late for our oil companies to get a seat at the table in Cuba, even were we to end the trade embargo tomorrow. But there might be time to build a relationship with Russia, a major oil producer, another opportunity we have so far let slide, to our disadvantage. There might be a way to set things right in the middle east. We had better give it our best shot. If we don't want to employ diplomacy and a pragmatic approach to dealing with nations ruled by regimes we find distasteful on ideological grounds, and if we also don't want to steeply reduce our energy consumption no matter what it takes to accomplish that,then we had better work to rebuild our manufacturing capacity really, really fast so we can mobilize for the coming world resource wars, because the windows of opportunity are closing quickly and leaving us with no alternative.
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