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Peak oil study group’s Baldauf discusses policy options
Monica Trauzzi, OnPoint, E&E TV (video and transcript)
Should Congress address peak oil in its next energy package? What are the policy options for minimizing the impact of a potentially shrinking supply of oil? During today’s OnPoint, Jim Baldauf, co-founder and president of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, discusses the economic and geopolitical impacts of peak oil. He gives his take on the United States’ policy options for addressing a peak and weighs in on the ongoing debate over production numbers.
(7 October 2010)
Video at original. Online ranscript HERE -BA
ASPO-USA conference – John blogs the breakout sessions
John, Casaubon’s Book
I may have been trained as scientist, but when it came down to choosing among three competing and valuable breakout sessions in the same time slot, I choose "Peak Oil: Scenario Planning: Preparing for the Days Ahead" with John Michael Greer, André Angelantoni and Dick Vodra instead of the far more techie "The Outlook for Net Exports of Oil, Natural Gas and Coal". Similar choices had to be made with the next two sets of breakout sessions with "Message, Media and Outreach" winning out over "Analysis from The Oil Drum" and "Peak Oil: Investing Beyond Oil and Gas" in the second round. "Post-Carbon Responses to the Sustainability Quandary" won the third round.
These breakout sessions consisted of each of the speakers making a short presentation and then questions from the audience fill the last part of the session.
The choices I made were because I fully understand the issues of Peak Oil. I am more interested in what we are going to do to respond to it.
André’s presentation dealt with the concept of cultural conversations as something that has an existence of its own, an idea that is a version of the concept of a meme. Major cultural conversations are discourses ("Who will win the World Series this Year?") and sets of related discourses are epistemes ("Growth and progress must be continual and on-going"). So when you are have a frustrating talk with someone like that brother-in-law ("New technology will fix these problems!"), you are not only talking with them, you are talking to a discourse. The major point is that discourses defend themselves, which you have already discovered by talking to that brother-in-law of yours.
With peak oil, coming straight at us will be an episteme rupture. What will replace the existing episteme is anyone’s guess, although we all can work to help put in place one that more usefully and beneficial then the one we have.
Just remember, when you ready to slug that brother-in-law, it is really not totally his fault that he is a jerk – he just needs a new discourse to find him.
John Michael Greer’s presentation was entitled "The End of Investments". This is a topic that he has covered in one of his Archdruid Reports. Looking back at history, especially the decline of the Roman Empire, he predicts that the concept of investments will not be one that long survives in the world of long decline. Going beyond the concept that what we call economic growth will not be possible in a post peak world, so that much of we consider wealth will turn out be illusions, there is also possibility that the nice yellowish metal that is so popular right now ($1329.60/oz right now!) may not turn out be as useful as one may think. A pile of loot attracts looters as he put it. A historical example is the stockpiles of Roman gold coins that are found on a regular basis in England. Nearby is almost always the ruin of a post-Roman villa that was certainly sacked in search of those coins. Investment in things that can’t be looted or are not so alluring like tools, friendships and ties to one’s community might be a better bet.
Leave it to the Archdruid to propose an idea that makes even hard-core Peak Oilers uncomfortable. Later in the day I was speaking to a financial blogger who has done wonderful work on the implications of peak oil. I asked him what he thought of Greer’s talk. There was an awkward silence. Then he asked "What do you think…?"
The next breakout session was an attempt to explore the question of how we can create a new episteme. My co-blogger Molly Davis has already written a great post on this session that captures the challenges and contradictions that are part and parcel of this task. After listening to this session, I think that many may think that there is a comparison to making sausage here; one may not want to look too closely to the process if one is squeamish about things. Yet, an important point is that if we don’t starting constructing new discourses, eventually others will and their goals may not to be of our likening. An example that is already happening is a far-right nationalist party in Great Britain that has already adopted peak oil in their rhetoric. They wore Nazi Swastikas before they clean up their act and started channeling Churchill.
The third session was organized by the Post Carbon Institute and includes chapter authors from PCI’s new book "The Post Carbon Reader – Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises". PCI fellows Chris Martenson, Cindy Parker and Tom Whipple all spoke. While Chris Martenson spoke about personal preparation and education and Tom Whipple talked about economic issues, Cindy Parker’s discussion on public health and medicine as we move forward highlights a critical issue that is not receiving the attention that it deserves. It has been well documented that our current health care system is a massive resource hog that generates results inferior to ones costing half as much. What happens when the resources are not there anymore?
(8 October 2010)
Beginnings
Sharon Astyk, ASPO Liveblog, Casaubon’s Book
… Best quote of the day came from the bone dry but very funny former Secretary of Energy and of Defense (at different times, not simultaneously) Dr. James Schlessinger. "Can we rise to meet the political challenge? I see absolutely no cause for optimism." Best moment was Nicole Foss’s sleeper hit – I think the majority of ASPO attendees didn’t know what to expect from her. Most useful presentation to me was Art Berman’s brilliant assessment of shale gas.
The most useful moment of the conference so far, however, occurred at the congressional briefing when a fellow from some think tank stood up, after listening to a panel of six experts explain, sometimes clearly and succinctly, sometimes with perhaps a bit too much technical detail, over and over again, what energy limits we’re actually running up against. The gentleman then asked a question that had already been answered quite clearly by several other presenters – "but what about all these big Deepwater discoveries, isn’t their impact enough…"
Here’s a guy who came to a policy briefing to learn something, who was at least marginally open, and who was challenging their presentation, but not with hostility. It was a useful and important reminder of how many times people have to hear a story, perhaps told many different ways to have it connect. My take is that the gentleman in question was simply seeking to reconcile what he was being told and what he had been told and that that was going to take multiple repetition.
It easy on the peak oil end to get frustrated with hearing the same story over and over again. It is easy to think that because we’ve said it once, we shouldn’t say it again. I admit, I tend to get easily frustrated with saying it again Sam – I don’t want to sit down and explain the basics every time. But that’s the project here – because out of 310 million Americans, maybe 1 million (and that’s probably a high estimate, actually) really get peak oil. That means 309 million aren’t yet able to grasp why you would want local or policy solutions to address it. That means 309 million people have no personal preparations and not the faintest idea why you would want them. And 309 million people are out there banging as hard as they can into "solutions" to a situation that isn’t solvable and that are making things worse.
Some people are going to accept arguments from authority – having a former Secretary of Energy Stand up and quietly tell them that peak oil is real and present is how you tell them. Some people will need graphs and data and want to see for themselves. Some people need a storyteller. Some people need a fiery debate. Some people need anger or joy or even fear. Some people need a celebrity. Some people need persuasion. Some people will never get it. But I can think of few things more useful than trying to turn one million people into two million. It isn’t going to happen only here, but so far, in the net, I think it isn’t a bad beginning.
(9 October 2010)
Attack of the Chicken People
John, ASPO Liveblog, Casaubon’s Book
I first saw one of them when I was having an early dinner on the first day of the conference. A man in a yellow chicken suit was riding up one of the escalators. He didn’t have the head on.
My wife came to town the second day to do some sightseeing at the Capitol while I remained entombed in the bowels of the hotel all day. When I first had a chance to talk to her, she told me how two people in chicken suits were handing out flyers outside of the hotel, one of which she took. Its title was "Oil Production: Is the Sky Falling? Or has the world just let the Post Office take over the oil industry?" The flyer blames nationalization of the oil industry by governments for the high prices and shortfalls in production that we are seeing. The flyer promotes, should we say, a number of superfluously plausible, but inaccurate ideas.
I went in search of the chicken people and found them on a corner of the sideway outside the hotel. They were two very nice minority teenagers hired from the neighborhood. I took one of their flyers after confirming that I was from the conference. They told me that the chicken costumes were to satirize the idea of the sky falling. I asked them what they were told to say to people. They vaguely answered that they were handing out something about energy production; seemingly their handlers had not prepped them extensively. I asked if they were being well paid. They said they were. They asked me if the conference was to end today. I said it was. I suggested evilly that they tell their handlers that I told them the conference would end tomorrow.
I ended the conversation by telling them that many in our conference wished that what was in flyer would be indeed correct. But we don’t think so. As I walked away I thought, "Yes, if by being correct we didn’t also blow our atmospheric back to the conditions found in the Triassic era or worse." After all, the dinosaurs are already dead.
(9 October 2010)
Peak Oil Theory, Data and DC Convention Deserve Our Attention
Andrew Kreig, Huffington Post
… Baldauf is also one of the headliners at ASPO’s sixth convention, which continues through Saturday with economists, energy and human rights experts as the group brings its important message for the first time to opinion-leaders in Washington, DC.
Among the headline speakers are former Nixon and Ford Administation Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, who was also the nation’s first Secretary of Energy under the Carter Administration. Ralph Nader and Bianca Jagger are among others, most of whom are prominent in energy, economics and academia.
Their thesis demands attention even from those inclined to skepticism or indifference. We risk losing big with the wrong choice. This is the game theory suggested by the Renaissance mathemetician-philosopher Blais Pascal, portrayed below, who famously posed "Pascal’s Wager," with the conclusion that our best bet is to live God-fearing and otherwise righteously.
(8 October 2010)
World oil shortages would center on liquid fuels, forum told
Nick Snow, Oil & Gas Journal
The world could face more of a liquid fuels than crude oil shortage as national economies recover, experts agreed at an Oct. 7 Capitol Hill forum. Global liquid fuels production hit a plateau in mid-2004 where it has generally stayed despite the strongest economic recession in decades, said Robert L. Hirsch, a senior advisor at Management Information Services Inc.
Several nations’ gross domestic products could plunge as a result, he warned at the event cohosted by the Environmental & Energy Study Institute and the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas. “The countries that would be hurt the most would be the ones relying most heavily on imports,” said Hirsch, who wrote a report on possible peak oil impacts for the US Department of Energy.
“It’s a liquid fuels problem, not energy. Anyone who tells you that windmills will help is early in his or her understanding of the issue,” he maintained.
(8 October 2010)
