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You’re going green …or else
John-Paul Flintoff , Sunday Times (UK)
Zac Goldsmith inherited his concern for the environment from his Uncle Teddy, his political zeal and fortune from his father James and his looks from his mother Annabel. On Thursday his long-awaited report on green issues is published. We get a sneak preview
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…I had never met Goldsmith before but I had read plenty of descriptions of this golden boy of the green movement. He is clever, rich and good-looking (his sister is Jemima, former friend of Diana, Princess of Wales and ex-wife of Imran Khan). I expected the former Etonian also to be languid – he was expelled for possession of dope – but instead I am taken aback by his oomph.
Dressed in a sharp blue suit, he sucks furiously at roll-ups and shoots off ideas so fast that I can barely keep up. We meet in a garden overshadowed by Conservative HQ on Millbank, central London, to talk about the forthcoming Quality of Life review that Goldsmith, Tory parliamentary candidate for Richmond Park, Surrey, has prepared for David Cameron. His co-chairman on the review was John Gummer, the former environment minister. They took advice from a huge range of individuals and groups, from Greenpeace to EDF Energy. “We cast the net wide,” says Goldsmith.
The full report will be published on Thursday, so this is something of a warm-up. Goldsmith, although not yet a professional politician, sticks to his brief with only minor wobbles and what he really wants to talk about is energy. Many geologists believe that global oil supplies are approaching peak volumes. Some say they have peaked already, that we will never produce more oil than we do now. Meanwhile, global demand shoots up and up. Pessimists predict severe and unending economic depression as demand exceeds supply.
“Peak oil informs everything,” says Goldsmith. “People ought to know about that, but they don’t. When it’s going to peak or if it’s happened already I don’t know, but if oil ran out tomorrow we would be stuffed. We depend on it for everything.”
Goldsmith’s review aims to tackle this grim situation by means of several painless measures: “We have not imagined policy ideas that are going to be repugnant to people.”
I nod, reassured. For instance, since much energy generated at power stations is lost before it reaches our homes. Goldsmith and Gummer propose to encourage a system of micro generation by introducing a “feed-in tariff”, rewarding households and businesses that install renewables so they can generate their own power.
(9 September 2007)
Leftist discussion of Peak Everything
Pen-L discussion list
The Buffalo In Da’ Midst started a discussion on the Pen-L discussion lsit (leftist intellectuals, with an emphasis on leftist economics) by quoting from Richard Heinberg’s forthcoming book, Peak Everything. The idea was received by some with a little skepticism (“Think this book qualifies for peak baloney.” wrote sartesian).
Louis Proyect (of Marxmail) rose to the occasion by defending a peak oil position:
Look, by all admissions oil supplies as we have known them will disappear toward the end of the 21st century. That has enormous social and political consequences. Socialists are obviously overwhelmed by the tasks of the conjuncture but we are obligated to think about how humanity will survive in an epoch of declining resources. I think that life can be a lot more pleasurable than it is today, even if that means relinquishing private automobiles, tract housing and all the other accouterments of post-WWII affluence.
Jim Devine sums up the traditional leftist position which disparages ecology:
It’s not nature that messes up our lives. Rather, it’s capitalism (and other class modes of production) which misuses nature and misuses people.
sartesian is perhaps the most articulate skeptic:
I do have a favorite quote from a Hubbertist, think he was speaking at the M. King Hubbert seminar at the Colorado School of Mines: “Let’s get this straight. Oil companies have no interest in producing oil. They only care about producing money.”
Guy must have read [Marx’s] Capital. I think any thorough examination of the history of oil production since Spindletop will show that the “classic” categories of Marxist analysis, profit, profitability, rates of reproduction, overproduction, provide a much better understanding of the past, current, and future predicaments of capitalist petroleum extraction, than do Hubbert, Campbell, with their peaks, offsets, etc. etc. Oil is produced as a commodity, first and last.
(8 September 2007)
An interesting exchange in several ways. It shows that many on the Left view peak oil with suspicion, as do many on the Right. The Left sees in it the hand of Big Oil, whereas the Right sees the perfidious influence of environmentalism. Economists of both the Left and Right share the same Cornucopian assumptions about unlimited resources. Both tend to make predictions based on their ideologies rather than looking at the scientific case.
Also, there are honorable exceptions on both Left and Right. -BA
Running Dry
James D. Hamilton, The Atlantic
The world’s most essential oil field may be in decline.
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No country is more important to oil markets than Saudi Arabia. The kingdom produced roughly 9.2 million barrels of crude a day in 2006, and accounted for 19 percent of world oil exports. Many analysts expect it to supply a quarter of the world’s added production over the next few years. And as the only producer with significant excess capacity, it has played a crucial role in alleviating temporary supply disruptions, increasing daily production by 3.1 million barrels during the first Gulf War, for example, when oil production in Iraq and Kuwait dropped by 5.3 million barrels.
The Ghawar oil field is the kingdom’s crown jewel. Stretching for more than 150 miles beneath the desert, it is the largest known deposit in the world. It produces perhaps twice as much oil as any other field, and has doubtless accounted for more than half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production. Yet the Saudis have been removing oil from this reservoir for half a century. Sooner or later, its production must fall.
James D. Hamilton is a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego; his analysis appears regularly at www.econbrowser.com.
(October 2007 issue)
The rest of the article is behind a paywall.
Meeting the Challenge: Matt Simmons Calls for Hard Look at ‘Conservation Production’ (Part 1 of 6)
Energy Tech Stocks
There’s been a lot of talk recently about whether the slowing U.S. economy will have a hard or soft landing. Matthew Simmons, the noted investment banker who has gained a global reputation on the basis of his clarion call that global oil production is showing signs that a steep decline is just around the corner, doesn’t think a soft energy landing is possible.
But he does hold out hope for a bumpy landing.
To meet the challenge of future energy requirements, Simmons told EnergyTechStocks.com that one of the first things that must be done is to institute a policy of “conservation production.” He believes that such a policy, while it would produce potentially serious near-term economic dislocation, would enable the world to avoid the production collapse he fears.
Conservation production essentially is the recognition that oil production can not be maintained at its present rate and must be scaled back in order to stretch out remaining supply for as long as possible, thereby buying more time to find alternatives.
“We must start discussing the concept,” he said.
(4 September 2007)
The second in this series of 6 articles about Matt Simmons has been posted: Force All Oil Producers to Give Transparent Data.
As has the third in the series: Look to The Oceans for New Sources of Oil .
Bill Paul, managing editor of EnergyTechStocks writes:
The other 5 Simmons stories will run interchangeably over the next 2+ weeks with a six-parter featuring American Petroleum Institute’s chief economist John Felmy. The Felmy series started Wednesday. Also Wednesday, there’ll be an intersting story (under the title “Investor Alert”) about an investment banking firm that has basically broken ranks with Wall Street and declared that “peak oil” is upon us.
A TOD Community Update
Prof. Goose, The Oil Drum
I wanted to give you an update on TOD and the community this evening.
Some time in the next couple of days, The Oil Drum will surpass 6.5 million unique visits and 16.3 million page views since our inception a little less than two and a half years ago.
But the big occasion that prompts this update (Yes, I actually skipped the last couple of milestones…) is that the TOD Mothership just had its first month with 1 million page views; we also had our best month ever unique visit-wise (around 430k unique visits). (Those stats can be found here and here.) We also averaged 3200 feed downloads from our RSS link each day (those don’t count in our traffic stats). That’s a lot of traffic, and we are humbled by its magnitude.
And it’s not the same people coming every day either. According to Google analytics, we had around 129,000 unique IP addresses just over that month. (That’s better than some really really crappy cable channels, if I am not mistaken–but it should be noted that with DHCP, it’s hard to tell what that number really means.) The average visit to TOD is around six minutes (which might be a reason that The Economist bought an ad with us, eh? *laugh*).
Even more importantly, TOD:Europe and TOD:Canada are growing at even higher rates than the mothership. (Those folks deserve some serious applause, they’ve been doing amazing work building their sites and putting together content in the TOD tradition; well done!)
(4 September 2007)
Congratulations, TOD! A real peak oil success story.
Yet more evidence of the slick public relations machine, as peak oil skeptic Duncan Clarke calls the movement. -BA
ODAC News
Douglas Low, Oil Depletion Analysis Centre
Global Oil Production
1a/ August Oil Supply Falls 1 Million b/d Short Of Demand (Energy Intelligence [Energy Intelligence Briefing], Wed 05 Sep)
1b/ OPEC Oil Production (Energy Intelligence, Fri 07 Sep)
1c/ August Oil Production (Energy Intelligence, Thu 06 Sep)
1d/ MegaProjects data and Global Oil Production (Petroleum Review, Feb 2007)
Peak Oil and Climate Change at the APEC Meetings
2/ Don’t blow it APEC, habitable planets are hard to find (crikey, Thu 06 Sep)
Russia – Oil Nationalism
3/ Building a Super-giant? (Russia Profile, Wed 05 Sep)
Food
4a/ Hot Winds Severely Damage Australian Wheat (Planet Ark [Reuters], Thu 06 Sep)
4b/ Australia’s Dry Threatens Wine Drought (Planet Ark [Reuters], Thu 06 Sep)
4c/ EU Approves BP Joint Venture for Biofuels (Planet Ark [Reuters], Fri 31 Aug)
4d/ The Looming Food Crisis (The Guardian, Wed 29 Aug)
4e/ Low grain harvest, rising food prices and China’s ethanol plan (Energy Bulletin, Sun 09 Sep)
Population – Russia
5/ Where Have All the Children Gone? (Russia Profile, Thu 06 Sep)
Kazakhstan – Kashagan Oil Field
6/ Eni Standoff Leaves Kashagan In Turmoil (Energy Intelligence [Petroleum Intelligence Weekly], Fri 07 Sep)
Economics – UK
7/ Mortgages to rise as crisis grips the markets [UK] (The Telegraph, Fri 07 Sep)
Peak Oil in the Sunday Times
8/ You’re going green …or else (The Sunday Times, Sun 09 Sep)
Natural Gas Flaring
9/ Oil Industry Flares $40 Billion a Year in Gas (Spiegel Online, Fri 07 Sep)
Asian LNG Spot Prices
10/ Nuke plant shutdown strains Asian markets (Oil and Gas Journal, Fri 07 Sep)
Economics – the Subprime Scam
11/ Attorneys General step up pursuit of wrongdoing on Wall Street (The Independent, Sat 08 Sep)
(10 September 2007)
Sept 5 ODAC News has also been posted.
