Peak oil – May 15

Click on the headline (link) for the full text.

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

Renowned energy strategist sees extraordinary changes ahead
Mella McEwen, Midland Reporter-Telegram (Texas)
As he prepared to discuss the future of the world’s oil and natural gas business, Henry Groppe, a renowned oil and gas strategist and founder of the Groppe, Long & Littell consulting firm in Houston, urged his audience to keep two things in mind:

“One is the dominance of the oil and gas industry. It is part of everything in the world; it is vital to world economies and it has now passed agriculture as the biggest industry in the world. At a $60 price, the world’s crude oil business is $1.75 trillion a year. Second, keep in mind that there are extraordinary changes ahead for Texas and for the United States.”

Groppe, the luncheon speaker at Thursday’s Fueling the Future Energy Conference, said he believes the world is facing a permanent oil shortage and is moving into a new era.

There are, he said, two dominant schools of thought on the future of the oil industry. “One is represented by my good friend Matt Simmons, who sees the imminent collapse of oil production and the end of oil as an available commodity. Then there is the Department of Energy and companies like Shell and Exxon who say production will be increased by 50 percent in the next 20 years. We disagree with both camps.”

He is, he said, somewhere in the middle…
(12 May 2006)

Progressivism at the peak
James Howard Kunstler, Clusterf*ck Nation
Is it even possible these days to define a valid doctrine of political Progressivism? The notion of progressivism per se really comes from that brief and amazing period in the early 20th century when technological advance was lifting so many out of misery that social justice actually began to seem a plausible political goal rather than an idealist fantasy, and social reformers raced to catch up with the advances of telephones, motorcars, and sanitary engineering.

Progressivism also may have been fatally tied to the accompanying reality of robust industrial economic growth, which itself was tied to abundant new energy resources, mainly oil. The belief that more of everything would become available raised the moral issue of allocating it fairly. Since we now face declining energy resources, and perhaps long-range economic contraction, we would appear to also now face the awful task of allocating less of everything — which may be as impossible in practice as it sounds.

So the question now might be: what kind of economic justice is possible?

The group that used to composed the broad American middle class of industrial workers and managers is disintegrating economically. What will concern them in the years just ahead will be their ability to barely hang on to what they’ve got, including the roofs over their heads and their health. They will be in no mood for a political movement that is preoccupied with pseudo-psychotherapeutic exercises in self-esteem building along racial and gender lines.

Allocating scarcity will probably be impossible on the grand scale, which is the federal level. The Republicans have succeeded in recent year by enabling allocation of false wealth, credit, but their ability to continue that will come to an end with the housing bubble implosion, which will destroy the presumed value of the main asset all that credit has gone into: suburban houses. When that happens, there will be nothing to allocate but grievance.

True Progressivism sought justice in human affairs, that is, in socio-economic relations that people had some control over. What can we hope to control now? Not the price of oil in worldwide markets.

The entire thrust of American life the past forty years has been toward the privatization of public goods. That is why suburbia will turn out to be such a fiasco — because the public realm, and everything in it, was impoverished, turned into a universal automobile slum, while the private realm of the house and the car was exalted. The private goods of suburbia will now have to be liquidated and we will be left with little more than parking lots and freeways too expensive to use.

A true Progressivism of the years ahead has to begin by concerning itself with a redefinition of what our public goods really are — and in practical, not abstract terms. That’s why I harp on the project of restoring the railroad system. Not only will it benefit all classes of Americans in terms of sheer getting around, but it would put tens of thousands of people to work at something with real value. It would also begin the process of healing public space ravaged by cars for almost a hundred years.

A true Progressivism would concern itself with the comprehensive reform of all land use laws, policies, codes, and tax incentives that promote more new car-dependent suburban development. A new Progressivism would put dwindling public monies into the re-activation of our harbors and shipping infrastructure. We’re going to need it. It would direct remaining agricultural subsidies into explictly organic, local farming enterprises, not to the Archer Daniel midland corporation. It would revive the legal practice of restricting monopolies in business. It has to lead us in the direction of making other arrangements for how we live…
(15 May 2006)
If you want to find the original article, you’ll have to look around Kunstler’s site.
James Kunstler has recently re-designed the site, and it is now difficult or impossible to give URLs that will take you to specific parts of the site; it’s all www.kunstler.com/ . The problem is that new design uses frames, which many Web usability experts such as Jakob Nielsen disapprove of (Why Frames Suck (Most of the Time)). Although some of the problems with frames have been solved, there are better, more modern ways to achieve the same effects.

Reaader MB says that you can also access the pages without frames: www.kunstler.com/mags_diary17.html
-BA

Unlikely guru has reporter’s eye, poet’s heart
Stephen Hume, Vancouver Sun
James Howard Kunstler, scheduled to address the Gaining Ground conference in Victoria in June, has been compared to George Orwell for his ability to cast an honest and appraising eye upon subjects that the rest of us wrap in warm, self-gratifying illusions.

The conference organizers refer to him as a “cautious champion of the new urbanism.”

Yet cautious doesn’t seem to be a word that adequately captures either his dramatic ideas or the spirited skill with which he expresses them.

He’s lionized — and in some quarters demonized — at the moment for his chilling book The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, a dystopian examination of the fate that may await civilization in the waning decades of cheap energy.

But he’s also justifiably celebrated for three earlier books which established his reputation as an astute analyst of contemporary society.
(13 May 2006)

Norway would if they could
Mobjectivist
Any wonder that Norway should consider going the green route outlined by scandihoovian neighbor Sweden? Someone at peakoil.com recently posted updated Norway oil production data. The fact that Norway, along with the UK, release this information to the public, shows a lot of candor on their part. Commendable, yes, but it still appears that oil production continues to drop like a rock with the March ’06 number.

(12 May 2006)
Related from GraphOilogy: Some Detailed Views on Norway’s Oil Production.

Swedish Dept. of Energy issues 100-page report on Peak Oil
Original: “Swedish department of energy thoroughly debunk Peak Oil”
aoeu, peakoil-dot-com
The Swedish energy authority (energimyndigheten) has released a 100 page report where they, point by point, analyze the arguments of “Peak Oil” and “the establishment”.

Oljans ändlighet – Ett rörligt mål! (The end of oil – A moving target!) [PDF]

The consensus is very much in favor of the establishment.

I think it’s very interesting that peak oil receive this amount of scrutiny that a whole report is released about it from a government agency.

The report seems very knowledgeable and takes up all the issues but discounts them out of hand. To someone that has heard very little about peak oil it will seem very convincing.

Translation of the foreword:

One of the tasks of the energy authority is to follow and analyze the world around us and pass on the pertinent knowledge to decision makers. This report is a part of the work to spread such knowledge.

The last couple of years we have seen heavy increases in the price of oil. This has initiated a debate where the increase in price is explained by scarcity of extractable oil, but also that political instability is preventing extraction and investment in new capacity. Others point to temporary capacity problems caused by rapidly increasing demand. As a part of the continuing surveillance of the world around us the authority has carried out a study of the oil market with the purpose of shedding light on these questions.

In the report it is established that in the foreseeable future the resource base (i.e. the extractable reserves) hardly will set a limit to the continued utilization of oil. The political development, where oil has become a weapon for internal political struggles, a weapon or bargaining chip against other countries, and finally where oil consuming countries, outside of the international oil market try to strengthen their control over the flow of oil, constitute an evident threat against the supply within mainly the OECD area.

At the same time it is established that the development isn’t set in stone. The reserves in politically stable regions, mainly unconventional oil like tar sands and oil shale, but also extraction of oil at great depths under the sea and in arctic environment would be able to supply OECD with the oil needed to a price considerably lower than today, assumed that early and purposeful investments are made in these areas.

In Sweden work is being carried out to put forward proposals for how our dependence of oil is to be decreased. The Energy Authority supports this work and intends this report to be seen as a part of this work. If the work of the oil-commission is to be successful in the long term it is demanded that the purpose of a decreased dependence of oil is clear and explicit, based on real circumstances. Not until then can the proposals be anchored in the long term and have needed acceptance in all of society. The largest contribution of the report is to clarify that for Sweden it is continually the question of climate that is the main and driving purpose. In addition to that the security of supply also argues for a continuingly decreasing dependence on oil.

The collected assessment of the authority is that in a national perspective both the global climate and supply disturbances from political causes is reason enough to lower our dependence on oil, in spite of if the risk for a physical shortage of oil is small or not during the foreseeable future.

The report has been created within the department of system analysis by the expert Urban Kärrmarck.

[aoeu goes on to summarize the arguments in the report]
(14 May 2006)
Thanks to aoeu for making this information available at peakoil-dot-com. It’s hard for those of us who don’t read Swedish to make a judgment on the report. Searchng for more information on the author, Urban Kärrmarck, yielded nothing in English. -BA