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We Want Solutions!
James Howard Kunstler, Clusterf*ck Nation
Wherever the environmentally-informed gather these days (i.e., the clusterfuck-aware), a nervous impatience often mounts, and ends up expressing itself as an outcry for “solutions.” For example, at the Telluride Mountain Film Festival, where I happened to be this past weekend, along with a couple of hundred other people who spewed airplane exhaust across the stratosphere to get there. This year’s twin themes were the Castor-and-Pollux of Clusterfuck Nation, Global Warming and Peak Oil.
Many frightening documentary films and Powerpoint talks were served up in the opening symposium (including ones by Dennis Dimick, the editor of National Geographic, Daniel Nocera of MIT, and yours truly) and, as the morning wore on, the audience grew visibly impatient, until one speaker dropped the word “solutions,” and the audience gave out a big whoop of approbation.
It only made me more nervous, because this longing for “solutions,” strikes me as a free-floating wish for magical rescue remedies, for techno-fixes that will allow us to make a hassle-free switch from fossil hydrocarbon power to something less likely to destroy the Earth’s ecosystems (and human civilization with it). And I think such a wish is, in itself, at the root of our problem — certainly at the bottom of our incapacity to think clearly about these things.
I said so, of course, which seemed to piss off a substantial number of my fellow festival attendees.
My position on this can be easily misunderstood. I don’t want civilization to collapse (I like Mozart and access to root canal).
(28 May 2007)
Oil Prices; Blowin in the Wind
Rolf E. Westgard, Brainerd Daily Dispatch
..Today we must spend more and drill deeper, on land where the sea has retreated, or in the deeper ocean. Chevron has a new find in the deep water Gulf of Mexico. Their single discovery well, the Jack 2, cost more than a hundred million dollars. And it will take many such wells to develop the reservoir.
A consortium of oil companies has just completed ‘Blackbeard’, the deepest well in the Western Hemisphere. So named because the well is near the Gulf of Mexico island where the famed pirate is supposed to have hidden his treasure, Blackbeard took a year to drill and cost more than a hundred million dollars. It’s a 35,000-foot deep dry hole.
The nations which have most of the world’s remaining oil potential are often unstable, even hostile, and they want the lion’s share. The time is past when a western oil company could pay whatever dictator was running a country a few dollars a barrel, and pump out the oil. ..
Oil will remain the world’s primary source of transport fuel, plastics, building materials, pesticides, and numerous other products for decades. Just be prepared to pay plenty for it.
Rolf Westgard of Bay Lake is a member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists and a regular speaker to civic groups on peak oil and alternate energy.
(25 May 2007)
Limits To Growth?
Ian Welsh, Huffington Post
In 1972, the Club of Rome published the infamous Limits To Growth. The book (which I read in the early eighties) used a computer model to simulate the world and predicted that we would be running out of a lot of key resources by, well, now. It said, simply enough — that there were limits to growth.
Needless to say, we haven’t run out of the resources that Limits to Growth expected us to run out of, though with the rise of Peak Oil and such, the triumphalism of the late nineties, where practically every commodity’s price was at generational lows, is not quite so sharp. Nonetheless, it’s certainly the case that the Club of Rome got it wrong – at least in terms of timetable, and perhaps overall. It’s worth, in this time of the resurgence of environmentalism, and the basic argument that there are limits to growth “the rest of the world can’t have a Western style of life”, to walk back and examine why the Club of Rome got it wrong.
They made three main mistakes with respect to production — they didn’t account for substitution; they didn’t account for marginal production and they didn’t deal with technological advance.
…The late science fiction author Robert Heinlein got caught in the Malthusian trap, assuming that food production would be a problem by the end of his life. He got it wrong, and admitted it, and wrote that he believed the reason he had gotten it wrong was because the controlling resource wasn’t the amount of land under cultivation, but was petroleum – 1st world agriculture had become so energy intensive, and in particular petroleum intensive, that oil shortages were where the problem would arise.
Which leads us back to the modern day.
The problem we have is twofold — the end of cheap energy in the form of oil; and a limited carbon sink.
…So in terms of using substitution we’ve got a problem — there really isn’t a good substitute yet, and we aren’t working very hard on making sure that there is. There are a lot of reasons for that, but the simplest reason is this — a lot of people are getting very rich from the current situation, and they like it that way.
…Let’s bring this back to the idea of limits of growth. Do they exist?
Yeah, they do — for any given economic and technological system.
…That doesn’t mean the earth’s theoretical carrying capacity isn’t very close to infinite. If we could capture much of the solar energy blasting through with any amount of efficiency, and if we could use that energy in a way that didn’t overwhelm Earth’s ability to sink them; or to mitigate them, we could support a much larger population in an even better than 20th century standard of living.
(28 May 2007)
Ian puts a cheery spin on the thesis of Limits to Growth.
Unfortunately, his criticism of the 1970s book doesn’t seem to have much relation to what the book actually said. Consider what Matthew Simon wrote in a long rebuttal to the book’s critics (Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could the Club of Rome have been correct, after all? PDF):
After reading “The Limits to Growth” I was amazed. Nowhere in the book was there any mention about running out of anything by 2000. Instead, the book’s concern was entirely focused on what the world might look like 100 years later. There was not one sentence or even a single word written about an oil shortage, or llmit any specific resource by the year 2000.
[page 11]
Also see this essay by the authors of the original book, on the occasion of a revised edition.
-BA
Countdown to $100 oil (41) – oil more expensive than it appears
Jerome a Paris, European Tribune
Oil prices, when you look at the most commonly used index in America, the WTI, quoted on the NYMEX and shown above (via wtrg.com), does not appear to have moved much in the last 6 months: after coming down from last summer’s peaks, it has mostly traded sideways between $60 and $65 per barrel, with a short excursion to the low 50s in January.
So why have gasoline prices been going up so much lately? Price gouging by the oil companies is a temptng answer, but there is actually a simpler answer: the price of oil is wrong.
[graph]
This graph above shows the evolution of the price of Brent, the other widely used international oil price, quoted in London. Brent and WTI are both light crudes (i.e. the best quality, most expensive kind), and WTI used to trade slightly above Brent (typically up to $1 higher). In recent weeks, WTI has been trading several dollars lower than the Brent – and than other international prices – thus creating an impression in the US of stable oil prices when they have in fact been going up again lately.
The reason behind this is that WTI no longer reflects the balance of the world oil market, but only that of the Cushing, OK oil market.
As this article (WTI Benchmark Temporarily Breaks Down: Is It Really a Big Deal?) explains, this has been caused by narrow logistical considerations:
…The problem, as the article alludes to, is that many financial instruments are based on WTI prices, and that it would be highly inconvenient to change the benchmark (what do you move to? How do you convince everybody to move to the same benchmark at the same time?
…What is distorted is the way oil prices are currently perceived. To most outsiders, the WTI price is the only one ever used and headlined, and it is not showing the price increase that other indices (and that gas prices, that follow actual oil supply prices) are ‘enjoying’ lately. Thus that apparent mismatch between oil prices and gas prices.
Oil is currently not in the low 60s, it is above $70 per barrel and that explains 30 cents on gas prices.
(28 May 2007)
Also at Daily Kos
