Author Archive

The Geography of Nowhere – A Review

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

The Geography of Nowhere

The Rise and Decline of America’s Manmade Landscape
James Howard Kunstler
Simon & Schuster, 1993

While I’ve read a few other of Kunstler’s books (The Long Emergency, Home From Nowhere), I hadn’t gotten around to reading his first major non-fiction work, The Geography of Nowhere until last week.

Some of you may not be familiar with Kunstler, who is fast becoming a major spokesman for the post peak, long emergency world that is already now becoming increasingly obvious. A good place to start is his blog, named, typically abrasive Kunstler, ClusterFuckNation. While his polemical style doesn’t always work, it’s usually not that far off target, and he’s proving himself to be right far too often to just dismiss his thoughts out of hand.

To get a sense of how he thinks, check out a recent (March, 2007) talk he gave at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club.

You can also read a transcript of a 2005 [Matt] Simmons-Kunstler interview. Matt Simmons is a well respected oil industry investor who wrote a seminal book on the coming decline of Saudi oil production (read it if you haven’t, it’s great) Twilight in the Desert. Simmons, like Kunstler, seems able to engage in critical thinking, and is able to look at reality without falling into fantasy, so it made some sense for them to do this interview together.

Overview

From the author’s own site:

my first non-fiction book on the tragic sprawlscape of cartoon architecture, junked cities, and ravaged countryside where we live and work. I argued that the mess we’ve made of our everyday environment was not merely the symptom of a troubled culture, but one of the primary causes of our troubles. “We created a landscape of scary places, and we became a nation of scary people.”

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Robert Hirsh Interview on CNBC

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

Watch this one, Hirsh is the author of the Hirsh report, commissioned, then ignored, by the US federal government. Ignore the second guy they interview, who is just repeating the same tired non-solutions, drill more now… as if that’s a solution, use up everything now rather than saving some for the future.

And then check out the comments re Hirsh, peak oil, from the always entertaining T. Boone Pickens, legendary oil investor, and recent convert to alternative energy development.

Watch Part II of the Pickens interview here.

(click on images to go to actual viewing page, I couldn’t get the actual link to the flash files)

Robert Bryce Interview

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

I highly recommend this interview, it’s quite long, about 25 minutes of the 55 minute recording, but it’s the first part of it. Bryce points out some very common fallacies about energy independence, bio-fuels, etc.

If you’re using Windows, you can stream it from this page, or just download the mp3 and listen to it like a podcast.

It’s a US Presidential election year and all the candidates are talking about energy independence. It’s a national security issue and very much part of the US climate change debate. But US author Robert Bryce says such talk, for any country in the world, is based on a dangerous delusion

Robert Bryce has little time for the ideology of either the Neocons or the Greens and as for the politics and economics of ethanol, he argues that something is very rotten in the state of Iowa.

His book: Gusher of lies: the dangerous delusions of “energy independence” (19 May 2008)
www.energybulletin.net

Barcelona Ships in Water – Part 2

Monday, May 19th, 2008

I wrote about this story a month or so ago. I have to admit, this makes me sad. I lived in Barcelona, and I really like that city, and the Catalans in general. But even in the 90’s, when I lived there, two things were getting quite obvious:

  1. Catalonia was VERY dry. Dry as in global warming/drought dry.
  2. Far too many Northern Europeans were moving there, either to live, or to make vacation houses along the Costa Brava, and wanting of course to maintain their high resource consumption Northern ways.

In a year that so far ranks as Spain’s driest since records began 60 years ago, the reservoir is currently holding as little as 18% of its capacity – at a time of year when winter rains would usually have provided an essential boost by now.

Rainfall figures show a consistent series of shortfalls in recent years – just as Barcelona’s population has expanded to more than five million and the region’s booming agribusinesses demand ever more irrigation.

For residents here, the arrival of water by ship is a profound shock – normally it’s the drier areas further South that are notoriously parched.

Now the Barcelona authorities are having to take the unprecedented step for any major European city of topping up supplies by the highly visible means of giant tankers arriving in relays, each bringing 28 million litres, up to a dozen ships coming over the next month.
Ships bring water to parched Barcelona, bbc.co.uk, 13 May 2008

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Distillates: Diesel and Heating Oil Shortages

Monday, May 19th, 2008

In the maze of crude oil production and refining, things are not done the way most people think they are. A good case in point is distillates. Distillates are a technical term for refined diesel and home heating oil.

petrodiesel, is produced from petroleum and is a hydrocarbon mixture, obtained in the fractional distillation of crude oil between 200 °C and 350 °C at atmospheric pressure.

The density of petroleum diesel is about 850 grams per litre whereas petrol (gasoline) has a density of about 720 g/L, about 15% less. When burnt, diesel typically releases about 39.8 megajoules (MJ) per litre, whereas gasoline releases 34.7 MJ/L, about 15% less. Diesel is generally simpler to refine from petroleum than gasoline. The price of diesel traditionally rises during colder months as demand for heating oil rises, which is refined in much the same way.
Diesel, wikidedia.org

But this isn’t the real problem with Distillates. The real problem is that they form only a certain percentage of what is refined from each barrel of crude oil. The ratio is I believe roughly 1/3, in other words, from 3 barrels of crude, you refine 2 of gasoline and 1 of distillates.

However, as you probably have heard, distillates like Diesel are rising in price, far more than gasoline currently. This is not an accident, and is going to have almost immediate affects on all trucking, and in some parts of the country, home heating. The latter is especially worrisome, because we are already seeing record prices for heating oil, but in the very near future, we may be getting actual supply shortages, ie, heating oil not available at all.

The reasons for this surge in distillate prices are easy to understand. Conventional oil production, from which distillates are made, has been flat for the last three years while demand from Asia and the Middle East has been increasing rapidly. The trend into higher-mileage diesel-powered cars in Europe and other places, which has been underway for many years, is having a major impact on the demand for diesel. In some European countries, diesels now account for over 70 percent of new car registrations.

Moreover, a worldwide mismatch is developing between the demand for distillates and for gasoline. A recent OPEC report claims that in the last seven years, the demand for distillates grew by 5.2 million b/d while the demand for gasoline increased by 2 million b/d. OPEC notes that during the same period, refiners added 1.2 million b/d of fluid catalytic cracking and coking capacity used to produce gasoline while adding only 700,000 b/d of hydrocracking capacity used to make more distillates.
Tom Whipple, ASPO, www.aspo-usa.com, 19 May 2008

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