Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Marco Bertoli At the end of February, The Oil Drum published an article I wrote called Efficiency and Resilience: After Jevons Paradox, the Piggy Principle. Its content was a strictly theoretical discussion of energy efficiency and its impact on the consumption and resilience of societies.
Conventional crude production – Latest figures from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) show that crude oil production including lease condensates decreased by 107,000 b/d from February to March 2010, resulting in total production of crude oil including lease condensates of 73.41 million b/d.
In the first post of this series, I mentioned my initial encounter with winemaking and wine drinking on an island in Lake Erie, after which I read anything and everything I could find about wine. One of the first books I read was Leon D. Adams’ The Wines of America, a book long since out of print. While reading it, I was very surprised to learn that Ohio was once the leading wine producing state!
Last night’s presidential speech on the Gulf oil spill had been pre-billed by the Washington Post as Barack Obama’s “Jimmy Carter moment.” But reading any of Carter’s speeches (a good one to start with is that of April 18, 1977) side by side with last night’s bromide is an invitation to nostalgia and bitter disappointment.
They are determined to believe, along with their university and USDA partners, that they are controlling erosion simply because they quit using moldboard plows and use no-till planters. The pretension reaches hilariously ludicrous proportions.
In 2006 when I first met Julian Darley, author of _High Noon for Natural Gas_ and the founder of the Post-Carbon Institute, the world was excited by then-famous “Jack” oil field find in the Gulf of Mexico. Both of us were watching the way the world was interpreting the data – people were claiming that there might be 10, 12, 15 billion barrels of oil – five miles down underneath the ocean…Darley, framing the issue brilliantly, observed that “this isn’t salvation, this is digging around in the couch cushions for loose change.”
“If we refuse to take into account the full cost of our fossil fuel addiction—if we don’t factor in the environmental costs and national security costs and true economic costs—we will have missed our best chance to seize a clean energy future.”
–President Barack Obama, Carnegie Mellon University, June 2, 2010
The most distinctive feature of the last years of the Soviet Union may have been the way it continued to pour money into its military — and its military adventure in Afghanistan — when it was already going bankrupt and the society it had built was beginning to collapse around it. Successive American administrations have blindly headed down the very path that had led the Soviets to ruin.
So here I am. I fully intended to be giving the England match my full attention right now, but I’ve been left distinctly restive by this afternoon’s long session by Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth, and feel the need to put some thoughts down.
After 17 months in office, it now seems clear that the Obama administration is not going to confront the peak oil issue straight on, unless absolutely necessary. Like the Bush administration, the hope remains that gas prices will remain affordable and economy-disabling oil shortages will not develop until after the administration leaves office.
It’s been nearly 5 months since I started DOTE. The traffic stats are very encouraging. The number of visitors has increased almost every week during that whole period, although there has been a great deal of volatility. But DOTE is still a minor league blog, and will remain so for some time to come. I am about halfway to my initial goal of 1000 real visitors a day (as measured by Google Analytics).
In all of the descriptions of perilous situations that I have studied, arising during adventures on the high seas or in the high mountains, or during armed conflict, a single mistake rarely proves fatal. More often than not, death comes as a result of a sequence of bad choices which reinforce each other. These choices may not appear bad at the time–but they certainly do in retrospect! The end result is a situation in which no further steps can be taken that would not be either harmful or futile. This is the essence of checkmate: no moves left. At that point, none of the previous moves can be undone. Nor do they even exist, really: they have gone off to an imaginary universe populated by the regretful ghosts of those who didn’t make it.
