There’s a good interview with Dr. Dennis Meadows, co-author of the original Limits to Growth. It’s long, about an hour, and if you don’t understand the core concepts behind sustainability and population overshoot, you definitely want to give this a listen.
This is from the July Issue of the ASPO newsletter, Issue 91.
One of the more interesting articles in it was a decent timeline for what’s happened to us as a species, I’m quoting the whole section since they don’t mind reproduction of the material.
By odd coincidence, Nate Hagens from the theoildrum.com also just published a new article on human development and oil addiction, which fits in quite well with the following ASPO article, being largely historical/biologically oriented too.
1061. Peak Oil : A Turning Point for Mankind
The term Peak Oil now enters the dictionary as the importance of the issue finally hits the mainstream. The International Energy Agency, which is the OECD watchdog, has long been aware of it having issued a warning in 1998 that demand would outpace supply by 2010 save for the entry of a mysterious element, termed Unidentified Unconventional, which was evidently a coded term for shortage. But recent statements made to the Press suggest that it is finally going to come clean in the 2008 issue of the World Energy Outlook to be published in November, and explain the true position in no uncertain terms.
Given the central role of oil and gas in the modern economy, the peak of production is likely to be a turning point for mankind of almost unparalleled magnitude. It prompts consideration of the historical evolution of societies as a basis for evaluating what the reactions might be.
I had to take a break from writing for a bit. Things are really moving fast, if you’re really interested, the best sites I know of are on the link bar to your right. For the economy, theautomaticearth.blogspot.com is doing a really solid job day in and day out. Nice work Ilargi and stoneleigh.
There’s not a lot of point at this time in repeating what others are doing well, although I have to admit, sometimes I come across an article that really makes me think. I mean, all this money floating around, it’s really not real. It never is physical at all. In fact, when I think back on what the best religious and philosophical systems have always said, this whole idea of money actually having meaning is pure delusion, in a very real sense, not as an abstraction, it simply doesn’t even exist today as anything at all substantial beyond some bits moving around computers, as that article correctly notes.
The entire way of moving money around is just a way to distribute power, to grab hold of a thing that some believe to be real, but which could be turned off literally with a few switches. Try it. Just turn off all the key banks’ systems, and suddenly those webs of credit, debt, etc, all vanish. They have no substance, and exist only as relationships, faith more than anything else.
Personally, I prefer more physical states of reality, at least when it comes to our day to day existence. I’m also a big fan of real free markets, you know, the ones where big corporations don’t control every phase of distribution and consumption. Sometimes when I hear these ‘free market’ psychopaths babble on about the ‘free market’, meaning for example the GM, Ford, Toyota, Hyundai, and so on, corporations manipulating trade, consumer minds, politicians, and so on, as an example of a free market. What a joke.
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I didn’t want to lose this, here’s the transcript of his recent testimony
Same old stuff, but it’s getting more intense by the week.
And Senators, ladies and gentlemen, simply stated, our main energy problem begins and ends with imported oil. Seventy percent of the oil we use is imported. With current oil prices, we are getting close to exporting $700 billion a year overseas because of our addiction to imported oil. That’s nearly four times the cost of the Iraqi war. We purchase it from a few friends and a lot of enemies. We are paying for the war against ourselves and we have got to stop it, some way, somehow.
And the price of oil will go up further. Over the next 10 years, you’re looking at exporting $10 trillion out of this country. It will be the greatest transfer of wealth from one country to other parts of the world in the history of mankind. It is a clear and growing threat to our national security, and our national economy. It has to be stopped. We are on the verge of losing our Super Power status. It’s time to quit the blame game, and look for solutions and leadership to solve the problem.
Richard Heinberg recently wrote a short piece for The Ecologist (and believe me, all you head-in-the-sand denialists are about to wake up to a harsh dose of reality, so you might want to start paying attention to the people who are right, and who have been right all along) discussing the speed of systems collapse as of now.
Keep in mind, we’re sailing here on a very big ship, with a lot of inertia, so changes happen in a sort of surreal slow-motion time frame that requires something of a coherent overview to understand, although everyone of course immediately understands things like $100 fill-ups on their excessively large SUVs and trucks.
Heinberg’s point below, however, is worth some serious thought. I guarantee you I’m going to look at his suggestion very seriously, and I recommend you all do too.
As the Great Unraveling proceeds, there may in fact be only one occupation worthy of our attention: that of identifying the qualities that make our species worth saving, and then celebrating and exemplifying those qualities. If we concentrate on doing that, perhaps we win no matter what. Outwardly, it will probably look a lot like what many of us are already doing: working to save a species, an ecosystem, a human community; to make a village sustainable, or to halt a new coal power plant.
Taking in traumatic information and transmuting it into life-affirming action may turn out to be the most advanced and meaningful spiritual practice of our time.
How Do You Like the Collapse So Far?, 05 Jun 2008
Here’s some thoughts from people interviewed about high fuel costs in Europe from a recent article in The International Herald Tribune
“This concerns everyone who drives,” Schneberger said. “And that makes a lot of angry people.”
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“Crude was our life and we didn’t know that everything depended on it,” said María José Aragón, a 56-year-old government worker in Madrid. “Groceries have gone up 20 to 30 percent. A loaf of bread that used to cost 30 cents now costs 55 cents.”
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“The prices are nightmarish,” said Arutsun Hachaturyan, the manager of a jewelry business, who said he pumps about $1,200 in gas a month into his black Range Rover. “This is Russia,” he said, while filling his tank at a Moscow gas station. “We live on oil.”
International Herald Tribune, Social pain of rising fuel costs spreads in Europe, May 29, 2008
At some point, who knows when, who knows how it will happen, governments are going to have to start understanding that our population depends on the oil that has now peaked. The adjustments will not be trivial. How will they explain this reality to them? The premise was that everything depends on cheap oil, and that premise is fast proving itself to be correct. And Europe is far better equipped to handle high fuel costs than the USA.
A very informative piece in the oil drum about how crude oil is refined, in terms of light sweet versus heavy crude, how much of each product (gas, gasoline, diesel, bunker fuel, etc) they get from each type, using different refining technologies.
This should help you understand a bit better how refineries are limited in the ratios of say gasoline and diesel / heating oil (’distillates’ below) from every barrel. Keep in mind also, there is an energy cost to converting the heavier crudes which this article didn’t get into much, but the article’s comments did mention that question. Interesting stuff, well written, and informative, helps clarify the processes involved in creating our various fuels.
When a refinery purchases crude oil, the key piece of information they need to know about that crude, besides price, is what the crude oil assay looks like. There has been a lot of discussion here at various times about “light sweet”, or “heavy sour”, and how these qualifiers affect the ability of a refiner to turn these crudes into products. So, I thought it would be good to devote an essay to this subject, and discuss how different types of crude can affect a refiner’s bottom line.
Let’s compare light sweet oil to heavy sour oil by looking at a pair of assays:
Liquid Volume % Generic Light Sweet Generic Heavy Sour Gas (Boiling Point to 99°F) 4.40 3.40 Straight Run (99 to 210°F) 6.50 4.10 Naphtha (210 to 380°F) 18.60 9.10 Kerosene (380 to 510°F) 13.80 9.20 Distillate (510 to 725°F) 32.40 19.30 Gas Oil (725 to 1050°F) 19.60 26.50 1050+ Residuals 4.70 28.40 Sulfur % 0.30 4.90 API 34.80 22.00 Table 1. Comparison Between Assays of Light and Heavy Crudes
I say, if we’re going to be addicted to, then run out of, this petroleum stuff, then let’s at least understand what the stuff is, and what it’s used for, and how it’s processed into all those fun compounds we’ve grown so overly fond of….
Another nice recent oildrum article, though ultimately unfullfilling, was Richard Heinberg’s Coal in the United States, an overview of US coal reserves. And, no matter what the long term survival of most species on this planet would prefer, we are going to end up using up as much coal as we can, no matter how badly it destroys our ecosystem. Why? Because we refuse to drop growth based economic systems feeding absurd desires and unrealistic expectations.
Even Al Jazeera is getting in on the act, in this recent feature on peak oil they did. Notice how they don’t give much credence to the ongoing denial of the Saudis that oil production is in any way problematic. Wouldn’t it be nice to see our own mainstream media stop giving credence to the nonsense that our political system is spouting in terms of oil, energy, financial problems, and so on? Dream on.
Imagine seeing something like this on American mainstream television, heh heh… some major peak oil theorists are interviewed, from the Energy Watch Group, ASPO, plus Robert Hirsch, author of the Hirsch Report (check out the pdf summary and full report), etc.
Hirsch, in case you don’t know, is the guy that Bush and company commissioned to do the research, then whose research they promptly chose to ignore when his findings didn’t fit with what the Bush group wanted to hear.
The show is cut into two parts:
Who said it’s all bad news? Globalization was always a totally false construct, built on a foundation of dirt cheap oil prices (around $10 a barrel until only 10 years or so ago), caused by a very temporary global oil glut.
So to see a story about globalization already collapsing at oil prices around 120 a barrel current really makes my day a bit more cheerful. Read on to see how rising oil prices are already impacting the US locally as well.
To summarize some other postings here, ship bunker oil, fuel oil, is from what I can gather basically Number 6 distillate, the heaviest, crappiest stuff, left over after they refine out gasoline, diesel, heating oil, and jet fuel. Read this nice overview in wikipedia if you want to learn the specifics. Check out this sample of current Los Angeles bunker fuel prices.
Noting there that all categories of bunker fuel prices are rising right along with crude oil futures, the following article now should be fairly easy to understand:
The rising price of oil is making international trade of heavy cargo prohibitively expensive, and acting as an incentive for importers to find products such as steel closer to home, new research by CIBC World Markets shows.
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If oil prices continue to rise, the soaring cost of global transport will act like a major tariff barrier and lead to a substantial slow down in international trade, they argue.“Globalization is reversible,” they state.
High oil prices will hurt trade, report says, Globe and Mail, May 27, 2008
Last week saw Barcelona receive it’s first shipments of water from France to alleviate it’s massive water shortage.
I’m going to follow this story for a while to see when the first major news source points to overpopulation coupled with the drought. Currently the best they seem able to do is tell us that Barcelona has about 5 million plus people, but it seems to be too much of reach for anyone to say that the arid land simply cannot support that population.
Barcelona is a preview of what’s going to happen in the American Southwest, with Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, and many other large metropolitan areas built in the desert soon to face the same issues as their water supplies become increasingly impacted by global warming initiated snowpack loss, overpopulation, and of course, a lifestyle that is simply absurd to even consider realistically in a desert in the first place.
Barcelona is a dry city. It is dry in a way that two days of showers can do nothing to alleviate. The Catalan capital’s weather can change from one day to the next, but its climate, like that of the whole Mediterranean region, is inexorably warming up and drying out. And in the process this most modern of cities is living through a crisis that offers a disturbing glimpse of metropolitan futures everywhere.
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The political battles now breaking out here could be a foretaste of the water wars that scientists and policymakers have warned us will be commonplace in the coming decades. The emergency water-saving measures Barcelona adopted after winter rains failed for a second year running have not been enough. The city has had to set up a “water bridge” and is shipping in water for the first time in the history of this great maritime city.A tanker from Marseilles with 36 million litres of drinking water unloaded its first cargo this week, one of a mini-fleet contracted to bring water from the Rhone every few days for at least the next three months. So humbled was Barcelona when prolonged drought forced it to ship in domestic water from Tarragona, 50 miles south along the Catalan coast, 12 days ago, that city hall almost delayed shipment and considered an upbeat publicity campaign to lift morale and international prestige.
Spain’s drought: a glimpse of our future?, independent.co.uk, 24 May 2008