Incredible times we live in, I have to say. The Los Angeles Times just published an editorial that’s pretty much straight up peak everything:

Even for Americans — who are constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start — even for us, the world looks a little terminal right now.

It’s not just the economy: We’ve gone through swoons before. It’s that gas at $4 a gallon means we’re running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It’s that when we try to turn corn into gas, it helps send the price of a loaf of bread shooting upward and helps ignite food riots on three continents. It’s that everything is so tied together. It’s that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the “limits to growth” suddenly seem … how best to put it, right.

All of a sudden it isn’t morning in America, it’s dusk on planet Earth.

There’s a number — a new number — that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, NASA’s chief climatologist, James Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several coauthors. The abstract attached to it argued — and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper — that “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”
The Los Angeles Times, Opinion, May 11, 2008

Looks like reality is starting to penetrate even the densest of places, the mainstream corporate run media. Maybe there is hope. We’ll see.

Well, any idea that a change from one state, expansion, aka ‘growth’, to one of contraction, would be smooth and relatively pain free is one you can probably get rid of right about now.

The Mauna Loa, Hawaii CO2 tracking station reports word CO2 levels at record highs.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a record high, according to new figures that renew fears that climate change could begin to slide out of control.

Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii say that CO2 levels in the atmosphere now stand at 387 parts per million (ppm), up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years.

The figures, published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on its website, also confirm that carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than expected. The annual mean growth rate for 2007 was 2.14ppm – the fourth year in the past six to see an annual rise greater than 2ppm. From 1970 to 2000, the concentration rose by about 1.5ppm each year, but since 2000 the annual rise has leapt to an average 2.1ppm.

Scientists say the shift could indicate that the Earth is losing its natural ability to soak up billions of tons of carbon each year. Climate models assume that about half our future emissions will be re-absorbed by forests and oceans, but the new figures confirm this may be too optimistic. If more of our carbon pollution stays in the atmosphere, it means emissions will have to be cut by more than currently projected to prevent dangerous levels of global warming.
The Guardian

Increased Coal Fired Power

In case you’re not clear on why this is happening, China is currently adding about 1 new coal fired electrical power plant per week, even though it’s barely able to supply them with coal as it is.

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Oil prices are of course directly related to the cost of their primary raw material, crude oil. And crude oil prices are hitting record high after record high (aproaching $126 bbl for June futures). The rise in crude oil prices has at least 3 separate causes:

1. The rapid devaluation of the US dollar. It has gone from about .85 to the Euro to up to 1.60 to the Euro, a collapse of about 45% in 10 years. So every barrel of oil now costs that much more to sell. That is the fault of the current debt hungry Republican administration, and republican admistrations going back to Ronald Reagan’s. So all you ‘personal responsibility loving republican’s out there, now you know where to start the blame game, right in your own house.
2. Global supplies peaking while demand is rising. All you free market loving people, this is what you wanted, a free commodity market, and this is what you get. When demand exceeds supply, prices rise.
3. And a bit added on the top, speculation in commodities, turning the right to buy commodities into a commodity itself, which is also in shorter supply, thus, again, the price rises to meet demand.

However, if you graph all of these, you’ll find that the primary driver is the supply/demand curve, not the ongoing collapse of the US dollar. Oil is currently at about 6-12 times 1998 prices, but the dollar lost less than half its value, so hopefully even the most math challenged among you can work out the difference, which is too much demand for too little supply.

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Bloomberg is really on a roll today for some reason. Rather than regurgitate the same nonsense that the normally uninformed mass media is prone to, Bloomberg actually posted an article about how A: incredibly difficult it will be to pump any oil at all from their recent deep sea finds, and B: how the technology to do it does not yet even exist.

So don’t get too excited about the coming drops of Brazilian oil.

Brazil’s plan to become one of the world’s biggest oil exporters hinges on exploiting crude six miles below the ocean surface in deposits so hot they can melt the metal used to carry uranium to nuclear plants.

Tapping what may be the biggest oil finds in the Western Hemisphere in three decades will require equipment that can withstand 18,000 pounds per square inch of pressure, enough to crush a pickup truck, pipes that can carry oil at temperatures above 500 degrees Fahrenheit (260 Celsius) and drill bits that can penetrate layers of salt more than one mile thick.
[…]
“This is a very, very technically challenging environment where no one’s ever done this,” Cline, who tracks the Latin American oil industry, said in a telephone interview from Washington. “These discoveries are in very deep water, and once you get to the seabed they are very deep under the floor, with a layer of salt that is definitely a difficult barrier.”

Brazil’s oil will be harder to develop than the Gulf of Mexico, where the deepest wells are now in production, Cline said. Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp., the two biggest U.S. oil companies, saw diamond-crusted drill bits disintegrate and steel pipes crumple when they attempted to tap deposits beneath the Gulf’s seafloor two years ago.
Brazil Oil Trapped in 500-Degree Heat, Metal-Crushing Pressure, Bloomberg

What’s amazing is that when you look at the technical challenges of drilling this deep, you start to realize that these fields now constitute our best hope for the future. In case you have trouble understanding this: there will be only more and more complex and expensive oil finds now. We are at the end of the road, and this level of challenge merely proves that we are in fact facing the true crisis, now.
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