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ASPO 5 Live – Day 2
Rob Bracken et al., ASPO-5 Live blog, OilPoster.org
Second batch of daily reports from the fifth annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil in Pisa.
- Pictures from the Conference
- And Now a Few Words from Chris Skrebowsky
The range of speakers and their interest is also very stimulating as one wrestles with ideas and concepts not in one’s immediate specialty. What is becoming ever clearer is that Peak Oil is just one component of a range of challenges confronting our societies and our way of life — climate change, food supply, water resources and energy resources. Happily most still retain considerable optimism about our collective ability to survive and adapt. Fewer and fewer believe the new emerging world will be much like the old. Some are mildly apocalyptic, but most retain hope and humor about our collective futures. - ASPO-5 Day 2: Charles Hall Calls Ethanol “Unviable”
With temperatures in Pisa soaring into the 90s, Charles Hall delved deep into what he calls “one of the most important defining issues of the future”: energy return on investment (EROI). The concept, he said, embodies a kind of bottom line for oil-addicted societies, defining the range of feasible energy-production options. It stops dead any project that costs more energy to produce than you get from burning it. - ASPO-5 Day 2: Dennis Meadows Says We’ve Already Overshot
Thirty-five years after he co-wrote the landmark study, Limits to Growth, Dennis Meadows told ASPO-5 that almost all of his original predictions of ecological collapse are coming true. “We have already overshot,” Meadows said. “Collapse is not inevitable but it will very tough to avoid.”Meadows said peak oil is one of a number of limits that mankind is confronting. “Were facing a lot of peaks and oil is just one of them,” he said. “We are also drawing down our fertile soils, groundwater, and forest stocks.” Governments, he said, will be overwhelmed trying to deal with them.
- Alice’s Musings on ASPO Pisa
Richard Heinberg explained the depletion protocol developed by Colin Campbell and Kjell Alekett. For me, this was the most important presentation of the meeting, because it answered many of the objections and questions I had about how this could possibly work. - ASPO-5 Day 1: Robert Hirsch Says Mitigating Peak Oil Will Cost a Trillion Dollars a Year for 20 Years
Confronting peak oil will cost industrialized nations dearly, Robert Hirsch told ASPO-5, offering the crowd a preview of his new report — set to be issued in the next few months — that follows up on his groundbreaking US Dept. of Energy sponsored study from 2005. - Luis de Sousa’ Impressions
My main feeling is that a Peak Oil date is converging to the 2010 – 2012 time frame: Laherrere, Campbell, Skebrowski, Koopelar are just a few of the people pointing in that direction. As for the midpoint, or the peak in the mathematical Hubbert Curve, it was passed last year. Deffeyes can consider himself an historian now. - Thoughts on The First Day From Roger Bentley
As I have recently come to realize, oil peaking is counter-intuitive. In my view, it is this – rather than more sinister explanations – that is the primary reason for the topic not being better understood. Oil peaking in a region occurs when the region still has large reserves in the ground, when technology is expected to raise the recovery factor of these reserves, when new fields are still being discovered, and when more oil is known almost certainly to await discovery.
(20 July 2006)
More excellent on-the-fly reporting. Thanks Rob & co. for probably foregoing some end of day drinks and socialisinig to bring these reports to us.
-AF
Traffic jams are bad, but what’s next could be worse
Michael Abraham, The Roanoke Times
Gaso-lunacy!
It’s a dreary Friday afternoon, raining. I’m in the company van headed for my last delivery, trying to make my way through the nightmare intersection at South Franklin and Cambria streets in Christiansburg. The line I’m in stretches so far I can’t even see the red light. I begin to think of traffic and gas prices.
I had read an article about a Christian organization called Pray Live that convened a group of clergy around a Washington, D.C., gas station. In a press release, the group posited that many people “are overlooking the power of prayer when it comes to resolving this energy crisis.”
Not issued was how the group concluded that the Almighty would necessarily support a move to make gasoline more affordable and thus spur our profligate consumption…
The Democrats, amply displaying their typical cluelessness, offered a smorgasbord of blame and remedy. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid deemed price increases “unacceptable” and last spring announced his support for the Menendez Amendment, which would give drivers a 60-day vacation from the federal fuel tax. The primary effect of this counterproductive move would be to worsen the already burgeoning national debt…
We live in a blame-free, guilt-free society. Prescient Jimmy Carter asked Americans to understand our energy situation and deal with it in a constructive way, but it cost him his job. Telling people anything other than what they want to hear is political suicide.
I’m not running for office and have nothing to lose in telling you the truth. If you’re looking for someone who really deserves the blame, find a mirror…
Today we’re seeing the first ill wind of Peak Oil, the point at which all the world’s wells can no longer yield at the rate consumers can consume. Don’t tell me we should be drilling the continental shelves or the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, because these are our last strategic petroleum reserves. Today there are simply too many mouths feeding at diminishing troughs.
Only lunatics tell a society addicted to cocaine that it’s the government’s job to make cocaine affordable. Our automobile-based transportation monoculture and the unprecedented energy gluttony it inspired is doomed.
Either by enlightened choice or by the forces of nature it will soon be dramatically curbed.
(18 July 2006)
Good article. Although, perhaps we need a balance between not letting ourselves off the hook for grotesquely unsustainable consumerism, while also understanding that the problem is also a systemic, not just an individual or even cultural one. Helena Norberg-Hodge provides this counterpoint:
In America, as in much of the West, the resistance to looking at the bigger picture is partly fuelled by a sense of guilt and self-blame. Western consumers are told again and again that it is because of their greed and selfishness that people are starving in Africa, that seas and soils are polluted, that the climate is changing. They are even told that Muslim anger stems from ‘envy’ of their lifestyle. It is no wonder that many are reluctant to think deeply about global issues.
But we need to remind ourselves that the root of the problem is not so much our individual greed as a system that generates greed. The shocking truth is that our taxes are spent to support giant corporations that in turn employ society’s brightest minds to generate unhappiness and insecurity. Advertising uses sophisticated psychology to turn the needs for love and belonging – of even our 3-year old children – into voracious consumerism. The message is, “if you want to be loved, if you want to be seen, buy this”. So it is that children from Tibet to New York, from Kenya to Cairo become desperate to have Nike sneakers, Barbie dolls and McDonald’s hamburgers. The desires of these children do not emanate from some sort of innate western greed. They are the product of a system that is making us all less content, more insecure, more fearful of one another and the future.
Blaming ourselves and feeling guilty does not help us to change this system. We need instead to see through the misinformation and manipulation, to understand the structural pressures that are leading to greed, fear and fundamentalism worldwide. Only then can we help to turn things around. Even the tiniest step at the level of policy would have a positive ripple effect on people and the planet.
-AF
The Mark II Economy (Draft 1.1)
Thomas L. Wayburn, PhD, Dematerialism
[ This article refers to a modeling system developed by Thomas Wayburn using the more advanced features of spreadsheets. Computer models have been used since at least the 1970s to gain insights into economies and energy systems – such as the program developed as part of the Limits to Growth report to the Club of Rome and its MIT-developed successors World 2 and World 3. For further background on the importance of modeling, see Dick Lawrence’s 2004 paper The Case for Modeling World Energy Flow and Sholto Maud’s Where to with ‘Emergy’ Literacy? -AF ]
The Mark II Economy provides a computational laboratory in which the energy analyst can perform experiments on a simplified economy that replicates many of the important features of a real economy. The Mark II Economy is simple but not very simple. The governing equations are troublesome enough that mathematical analysis might be replaced by numerical experiments in most instances. Also, numerical simulation is a useful tool to verify conclusions reached analytically…
My first simplified economy, the Mark I Economy, had only one economic good, which I referred to as a “potato”…
The Mark II Economy has five sectors, namely, (i) agriculture, A, which produces agricultural units (AU), (ii) manufacturing, M, which produces manufacturing units (MU), (iii) transportation, T, which provides transportation units (TU), (iv) energy, E, which sells energy units (EU) produced by Nature, and (v) commercial, C, which produces nothing…
Final Thoughts
…
Piecing together various types of alternative energies – unless nuclear energy be considered an alternative – cannot “keep the train rolling”. Personally, I favor the soft-energy, “Earth as a Garden”, natural economy, but this requires a political sea change that must sweep the entire nation. It cannot be managed locally. We can act locally, but we must communicate globally. If we do not effect political change nationally, global events will swamp local action, which will be viewed as nothing better than Personal Salvationism.
Rapidly introducing energy-saving and renewable-energy technologies will have enormous energy consequences that many of us will not like. Many people believe that the necessary technological changes cannot occur without the help of entrepreneurs, and they may be right. See, for example, groups.yahoo.com/group/globalvillages/message/501 for a rebuttal to some remarks made by me.
The ultimate goal is to prevent Die-Off. I am trying to convince the reader – not necessarily with ER/EI studies; but by showing that, if commercial activities are not included in the EI computations, society will be left with many activities that have no energy to support them. If this is not recognized a priori and the required political changes do not take place, commerce will continue to suck the blood out of the economy to the detriment of feeding the poor, for example. Commerce won’t stop simply because no energy has been provided to carry on its activities. It will continue to misappropriate the energy needed for vital activities, since commerce has been and will continue to be a predatory economic parasite.
Traditionally, socially progressive thought has tried to effect change by appealing to our moral natures. Peak Oil presents us with a challenge and an opportunity. Perhaps, for the first time during my lifetime, it is possible to demonstrate mathematically the need for social change. (The single most powerful intellectual tool of which I am aware is a properly closed balance equation.) Perhaps, very few people are accessible through their mathematical propensities, but those who are can be stunningly convinced of a need to change their minds when confronted with mathematical proofs. I wish to take advantage of that. Unfortunately, I shall put a number of people to sleep who do not wish to be bothered by mathematics however elementary. (I know people who are bored by their children’s grade school math homework.) I hope that people like you take the trouble to understand the mathematical argument presented here and make it evident to people who are bored by mathematics by making it interesting in some other way.
(16 July 2006)
For those not bored by maths, version 1.1 of Mark II Economy is available here: dematerialism.net/Mark-II.Economy.xls
Tom notes that “it is now and always will be under development” and welcomes your feedback.
-AF
