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Oil decline pressing Vermonters now
Carl Etnier, Rutland Herald (Vermont)
The United States responded to the 1973 oil crisis in many ways, including gasoline rationing, a 55 mph national speed limit and a year-round daylight-savings time. If oil production really has peaked and is entering a permanent decline, shortages like those of 1973 may be around the corner. How are we prepared to respond?
The short answer is that we aren’t, either at the federal or the state level. The U.S. Government Accountability Office concluded in a report earlier this year, “… there is no coordinated federal strategy for reducing uncertainty about the … timing (of peak oil) or mitigating its consequences.”
In Vermont, things are no better. A doctoral student, after interviewing top officials in Vermont state government, recently concluded that the state has no reliable response to peak oil.
At the local level, we’re seeing only the beginnings of a response. Many cities and towns have energy teams, knit together in the Vermont Energy and Climate Action Network. The Brattleboro Select Board has appointed a Peak Oil Task Force, which is drafting a report on the town’s vulnerability to peak oil. On Tuesday, the Middlebury Select Board began considering its own task force.
(2 December 2007)
Author Carl Etnier is an Energy Bulletin contributor. -BA
Connecticut legislator eases into debate: PO vs LNG
Brian Lockhart, Stamford Advocate (Conn.)
State Rep. Terry Backer, D-Stratford, is passionate about two things – protecting Long Island Sound and weaning the state off its dependency on foreign oil.
Those two passions have made it difficult for Backer to wade into the ongoing debate over building a liquefied natural gas platform in the middle of Long Island Sound.
“It does put me in a tough spot,” Backer said.
Broadwater Energy’s proposal for a floating terminal has been criticized by federal and state lawmakers concerned about its impacts on the environment and the recreational and commercial activities that occur daily in the Sound.
Backer is executive director of Norwalk-based Soundkeeper, a 20-year-old organization whose motto is to protect and preserve the waterway between Connecticut and New York.
He also is co-chairman of the General Assembly’s peak oil caucus, a coalition of lawmakers, that believes the state needs to address what some experts are forecasting as a sharply constrained supply of world oil.
(2 December 2007)
IBM engineer on peak oil
Greg Sellnow, Rochester MN Post-Bulletin
If Rochester resident Norm Erickson’s theory proves correct, American lifestyles 10 or 20 years from now could more closely resemble those of Richie, Potsie, Ralph and the Fonz than those of George, Jane and Elroy Jetson.
Erickson, a semi-retired IBM engineer, is what some are calling a “peak-oiler.” He is among a growing number of people in the country who believe that world production of oil either has already or will very soon hit its peak. And it’s all downhill from there.
The theory is that we’ve had the oil spigot on full blast for the last half-century. And all that available, relatively cheap crude has permitted us to build big houses, develop intricate and far-reaching transportation systems, establish suburbs, build six-bedroom homes with four-car garages, acquire vehicles the size of armored tanks, spread our families across multiple states and countries and buy fresh asparagus from Peru in the dead of winter.
But Erickson, 67, predicts that will all end soon. Sometime in the not too distant future, the peak-oilers contend, demand for crude will outstrip supply, making it a highly expensive commodity. We’re talking $10 to $12 a gallon for gasoline. Or more.
He might be right.
(1 December 2007)
Of Hand Mills and Heat Engines:
Peak Oil, Class Struggle, and the Thermodynamics of Production: (PDF)
Thomas S. Keefer , York University (Toronto, Canada)
… The edifice of global capitalism has been built upon an underlying energy regime which is about to enter a prolonged process of decline, thus necessitating a fundamental reshaping of social relations – into either a capitalist barbarism marked by bloody “resource wars” and ecological catastrophe, some kind of international socialist order that has broken the bonds of capital and reshaped human economic processes to the flow of available renewable energy resources, or the development of a new and higher stage of capitalism under a different energy regime capable of continued economic expansion and of rehabilitating near exhausted conditions of production. Regardless of which of these paths humanity takes, each represents a fundamental break with the energy regime that underlies today’s capitalist mode of production, and this process of transformation is bound to open up new arenas of political struggle and social contestation in every corner of the world.
… CONCLUSION: 15 THESES ON PEAK OIL
From an examination of the literature on the topic of peak oil and the theorizing of the thermodynamics of capitalist production, I advance the following tentative conclusions on the current debate over peak oil.
… 8) Most writers on peak oil have made two fundamental mistakes. The first has been a tendency to fetishize oil in such a way as to obscure the social relationships between human beings that make oil such an essential commodity in industrial production. Virtually all writers on peak oil naturalize capitalism as an economic system and fail to understand the relationship of exosomatic energy appropriation to the historic development of capitalism, which has always sought to use machinery as a substitute for and means of controlling human labour and as a tool for developing and consolidating patterns of unequal exchange and imperial domination. The second major mistake made by most Marxist and neoclassical economists has been to ignore the limitations on economic production imposed by thermodynamic laws which restrict the spatial and temporal extension of industrial capitalism. When questions of concrete social relations and entropic processes are included in the analysis of peak oil, industrial capitalism and a fossil fuel energy regime appears as an unsustainable anomaly and not as the future of human progress.
… 11) Developing a socialism for a world past peak-oil production requires a comprehensive reassessment of typical Marxist perspectives regarding growth and economic expansion. Successful revolutions which inherit a seriously damaged global ecology and ever decreasing energy stocks will require a return to a more labour-intensive economic system based on smaller-scale local production geared to renewable energy and material flows.
(19 October, 2005. )
Contributor Damjan writes:
“a kind of scholary social scientific work that is missing a lot in peak oil discourse.”
BA:
The conclusion on pages 50-55 (“15 Theses on Peak Oil”) is a good place to get the gist of the paper.
$100 oil fades fast
David Ebner, Globe & Mail
The prospect of $100 a barrel oil is evaporating as fast as it was conjured.
The commodity, which nine days ago was less than a dollar away from $100, is on Friday at less than $90, tumbling on the reality that oil supplies are adequate and that Saudi Arabia will likely fight for an OPEC production increase at a meeting next week to push the price lower so sagging demand for the product might rebound.
“Last week, we had suggested that the party for crude oil may be slowly drawing to a close,” analyst Marty King of FirstEnergy Capital in Calgary said in a report on Thursday. “Given the downward pricing pressure seen this week, it would seem that the guests continue to file out the door and the lights are being dimmed. Indeed, the lights may grow dimmer in the next few weeks.”
If you’ve got money in oil, Mr. King’s immediate advice is clear: “Profit take, for now.” On the “for now” bit, Mr. King means he sees oil remaining fairly high over 2008, predicting an average of $72 a barrel, which is higher than many forecasters, but he feels he might be lowballing it, talking about “real additional upside.”
…As for $100 oil, when will we see it? It doesn’t look like this year-and maybe not for a long while. But, of course, perhaps tomorrow-the wild world of oil rolls ahead.
(30 November 2007)
