Thanks Prof. Goose. It's an interesting interview.

For others, I was curious as to who produced it. You can find more info here:

http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/771
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/topics/peak_moment_television
http://www.peakmoment.tv/

Yep, Cuba is a peak oil miracle... except that...

https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/cu.html
Oil - consumption: 204,000 bbl/day (2004 est.)
Natural gas - consumption: 704 million cu m (2004)
Population: 11,382,820 (July 2006 est.)
.0179 barrels per capita / per day

Which puts them on a per capita oil consumption basis about where Mexico is!
https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/mx.html
Population: 107,449,525 (July 2006 est.)
Oil - consumption: 1.97 million bbl/day (2004 est.)
.0183 barrels per capita / per day

and the Dominican Republic, a fellow Caribbean neighbor, is much more efficient!
https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/dr.html
Population: 9,183,984 (July 2006 est.)
Oil - consumption: 127,000 bbl/day (2004 est.)
.0138 barrels per capita / per day

The real model for sustainability is Cambodia which has one of, if not the highest GDP to oil consumption ratios in the world.
https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/cb.html
Population: 13,881,427
Oil - Consumption: 3,750 bbl/day (2004 est.)
.000270 barrels per capita per day
GDP - per capita (PPP): $2,600 (2006 est.) (Not bad!)
Life Expectancy: 56 (Tad on the low side here)

Bolivia has a decent life expectancy (63.21) but is a bit less efficient:
https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/bl.html
Population: 8,989,046 (July 2006 est.)
Oil - consumption: 47,000 bbl/day (2004 est.)
.00522 barrels per capita per day
GDP - per capita (PPP): $3,000 (2006 est.)

Looking at communism as a model for REAL peak oil survival, it appears that North Korea, oddly enough has higher oil consumption than Cambodia and it's population is growing at 0.84% while Cambodia's is growing at 1.78%!

https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/kn.html
Population: 23,113,019 (July 2006 est.)
Oil - consumption: 25,000 bbl/day (2004)
.00108 barrels per capita per day.
Life Expectancy is 71 but I kind of doubt that the dear leader has included all the famine deaths lately.

I'm all for organic farming and sustainable agriculture but unfortunately a little math proves that the idea that Cuba will show us the way to survive after peak oil is probably just feel good communist propaganda.

Hello Prof. Goose,

Sorry you are ill--take care--but thxs for the great link!

Megan, as a representative for her generation, is a great beacon of hope for positive change. Give her more Peakoil Outreach time with 50 million other young North American women: peaceful detritus powerdown and biosolar powerup is an easily done deal. The guys will quickly fall in line--We need all the Earthmothers we can get!

Glad to see she and her organization believes that most of us will benefit by moving to a 50-75% agrarian labor force--maybe there is still hope for my 150 million wheelbarrows.

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

Palm oil based biofuels is the answer according to www.palmoiltruthfoundation.com. It's usually the feedstock that is expensive and palm oil is one of the cheapest oils around. And despite CSPI's crazy statements, most oil palm plantations are part of RSPO, for sustainable palm oil and not responsible for orang utan habitat loss or deforestation. Check it out if you are interested to learn more.

STRANGEST THING I HAVE SEEN AT TOD

When I came online a few hours ago, above the post/article about Ms Quinn was a newer post/article by Luís de Sousa, referring to Refuting Contrarian Arguments, the third in his trilogy to date, this one on price/supply arguments as made by economists. I read and studied it (good piece with charts) and then wrote a reply, (there were already three replies as I recall) because the piece touched upon some issues that have been giving me trouble. But when I came back from getting some sources for my post, the article was gone! Completely gone! Was it pulled for some reason, or did he pull it for further editing?

Oh well, not to be deterred, following is the issue that I have been dwelling on for some time, and although a bit long, I think that some here will find it out of the ordinary by the standards of TOD and very, very thought provoking if I do say so myself (I just did!) :-) Free of charge, for your amusement and enrichment (beside, how often do you get to respond to a story on TOD that at least for now, does not yet exist!:

TOD, THE CRISIS, AND THE LOSS OF "FAITH" IN A WORLDVIEW

Luís de Sousa, I am so glad you wrote this piece, and constructed such a wonderful post at just this time.

Because, as I have mentioned recently, I am man in a bit of an intellectual crisis.

Long story short (rare for me) the history: I grew up in the 1960’s-70’s. I was in the gasoline business as a teen in the first crisis, and owned a retail gasoline outlet and service shop as a young man in the 1978 crisis. For me, and many of my age and inclination, we have seen “peak”. The collapse of world oil production with the rise in price was astounding, the “big valley” of production of the late 1970’s to early ‘80’s still a magnificent thing to gaze on in charts:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/oilproblem_2004Scenariovan_deaspoassociation_for...

Surely, no combination of events could cause every nation on Earth to drop in production at the same time, by such fantastic amounts? And consumption dropped at the same time...there was only one explanation: The oil age was over. It was done. Alternatives and massive reduction in consumption were coming soon, they had to. We were on to the next phase of modern civilization.

But, in 1982, something went awry. The price began to drop, the supply began to rise, and fast! It became the biggest slaughter in the energy industry. How could it be? Where had the oil been that suddenly appeared out of everywhere? What had went wrong? We know, the North Sea, massive Saudi Arabian output, consumption declines (at least for a while) but why had no one seen this coming? To this day, it is one of the great examples of the madness of crowds, and the power of panic. But, in my heart, I felt, I KNEW in fact that we, the ones who had predicted the end of the oil age were right. We were right in principle, just wrong in timing. The collapse would come, and it would be catastrophic . We just got the timing wrong. Oil could not be replaced. Now, I am suffering an intellectual crisis. Because now, I am becoming more and more convinced that I was wrong in principle as well as in timing.

Let me talk about why.
---------------------------------------

My crisis began when I began studying energy, as opposed to just oil. You see, like so many here, I had long believed that oil could not be substituted for. It may even show in some of my earliest posts here. I was convinced that, as Matthew Simmons and others say, oil is not just another commodity. It is simply too special, in it’s density, it’s portability, it’s convenience. But more, much more, it has a special chemistry, that is simply not found anywhere else. It is the most special of hydrocarbons.

I have began to gravely doubt that argument, an argument I would have made with great intensity not so long ago.

Because, when we say we need oil, what we really mean is we need energy. Oil just happens to be considered the most usable, affordable, portable and convenient, and it has the infrastructure built up around it. But, what we really need is energy. And what we really need is heat energy, i.e., something that will burn. The history of changing from one thing that will burn to another is not new, as humans moved from wood, to peat and manure, to coal, to oil, to natural gas. The changes are still going on, with new concoctions such as propane and now hydrogen have been introduced.

Of course, we now know that it is the hydrogen that was needed all along, the carbon simply stabilized it where it could be easily stored and used. But if you think this is going to be an argument for the “hydrogen economy” you would be wrong. That argument can wait for another day, and I assure it will return, soon, with a vengeance. For now, we are going to talk about hydrocarbons, which no one doubts oil is, as is natural gas, propane, wood, coal, peat, tar sand and shale oil and manure and methane.

But these hydrocarbons must be rare, and not able to be substituted for in any possible way correct? That is the “specialness” almost the “holiness” of oil. But what if oil is not holy?
What if it is not as big, nor as good as we have been told? Thus we begin the great sacrilege, in an age that worships oil and oil as the one true godlike fuel.
-----------------------

The second and very major blow to my “faith” that oil could not be substituted for was one of scale. This hit full force right here on The Oil Drum (TOD):
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2186
Illustration of proposed “replacements”
http://spectrum.ieee.org/jan07/4820/ncmo01

It is hard for me to convey upon others the absolute sense of wonder and astonishment I felt on studying this illustration and these numbers: The world consumed one cubic mile of oil per year. One cubic mile. I was astonished, and for the first few days, was as dazed as when I had first confronted the prospect of “Peak” back in 1978 (although we did not have the PR savvy in those days to coin such a phrase). I was somewhat disoriented....one cubic mile. Could it really be such a small volume? I searched for ways to disprove it. Surely, humankind consumed a far greater volume than this! All the rigs, the miles of pipeline, the offshore manmade monsters, the holding tanks around the world, the fuel tanks of the vehicles, the retailers, the strategic reserves, the massive supertankers, all for ONE CUBIC MILE PER YEAR WORLDWIDE? IT COULD NOT BE TRUE.

BUT, it seems that it is true. The monstrosity of an industry that is needed to find, to extract and to move only one cubic mile of oil per year is truly astounding. It is dizzying really, the steel, the manpower, the pumps, the high technology, the water injection, the MONEY, for ONE CUBIC MILE PER YEAR. Compare it to anything else about the Earth: The wind blowing on it, the sun shining on it, the land surface, never mind the seas, the weight and volume of living matter, constantly in action, in production, moving, always moving, compared to humankind's paltry one cubic mile that they find as addictive as air itself! It was the beginning of a change for me, one that I am just now beginning.
----------------------

It so happened at that time that I was in intense study of a path that Robert Rapier had laid out for me in a post he did on TOD referring to his R-squared blog, on the subject of bio-butanol.

Because if we believe that oil is “holy”, “special” and cannot be substituted, surely this must be even more true of gasoline. It took humankind decades of technology, of science, of engineering to produce quality gasoline, a tribute to the technical acumen of thousands of brilliant technicians. We had done what nature could not do.

Or had we? There is in nature a tiny bacterium called Clostridium acetobutylicum. It is often referred to as the Weizmann organism, after Chaim Weizmann, the microbiologist who isolated it. This bacterium can be used in the fermentation of any sugar/starch containing biomass into butanol:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Butanol

Look if you will at the molecular structure of butanol. It is a hydrocarbon of great elegance, an alcohol, that due to its 4 carbon structure can act as a one for one replacement for gasoline. It is astounding. An almost natural gasoline.

It was during this study that I realized, despite the slander that the bogus ethanol trade has brought down on all biofuels, that nature is making hydrocarbons daily, by the billions of tons. Life, and the production of active microbes were going on before humans began the “chemical” trade, and have never eased up. As long as there are conditions on Earth for any kind of life, it can be presumed they never will. I learned that ethanol is not the only kind of alcohol there is (and in fact is the least elegant of alcohols), and that alcohol is not the only natural hydrocarbon there is. The world swims in the production of natural alcohols, methanes, algaes, and lichen.

I will leave you to ask yourself: Is it remotely possible to extract from the constant production of billions of tons of natural hydrocarbons, to convert the force of a planet of winds, to capture enough of the volume of the sun, to capture enough of the force of moving water, to equal ONE CUBIC MILE OF OIL? One cubic mile. Would it not be the gravest insult to even our generation’s primitive engineering to believe that it could not be done? And remember, in of this one cubic mile is contained all the waste of the SUV’s, the massive 400 and 500 horsepower engines, the high speed boats, the mis-designed aircraft, cars that do not even bother to capture their own gravity on deceleration, and the consumption of a consumer culture that has NEVER KNOWN efficient and elegant engineering. The waste is easily two thirds of that one cubic mile of oil.

My “faith” in the irreplaceable/non-substitutability of “oil” has been shaken. My “faith” that the volume of oil the world consumes is so great in comparison to the scale of the Earth that it cannot be replaced by the nature of the Earth well harnessed has been shaken. My “faith” that the oil gathering and consuming enterprise, with it’s monstrous consumption of resources to gather and burn ONE CUBIC MILE per year is was not a folly of primitive engineering and habit is shaken. Could we have WASTED SO MUCH FOR SO LITTLE? And what does that say about the vaunted “superiority” of oil? Were we just fools that fell into “oil worship”?

At a personal level, you must understand the blow to self identity this can be: I have sought fuel efficient cars, live frugally, drive a Diesel. The “belief” that we were a world in oil crisis, if not now, soon, has been a part of me since my post high school days. It helped decide my investing, my thinking, my lifestyle.

Have I built my life, my thinking, around a “one cubic mile” folly, falling into worship of a black goo that was neither superior nor all that important, except that the overlords of industry and technology by chance choose it over a dozen or more other better, cleaner easier alternatives, and provided it the “incubator” of infrastructure?

I am doing some very heavy thinking and studying right now. Thank you for your time and attention, and thanks to TOD for putting me on many of the tracks that are opening up a new world for me. I close with my recently adopted tag line:
We are only one cubic mile from freedom.

Roger Conner Jr.

Lessons from the Cuban leaders:

1. Close down the newspapers
2. Throw the dissenters in prison
3. Make your rivals 'disappear'
4. Steal all property
5. Declare yourselves 'Leaders for Life'

Lessons from the Cuban people:
1. Find something that floats and get your ass to the US.

I live in a little town
Where people sharpen tongues on boredom
And test the edges on souls.

I live in a little town
Where the homegrown beauty is the homegrown beast
And losers love their girls-with-staples.

I live in a little town
Where coming home means growing small
And the sound of music is rattling bars.

-- Paul Gilmore

Cuba must be one of the countries least adapted to the realities of peak oil, in the entire world.

Their power generation is almost solely based on burning oil.

It's one of the places where oil crisis means the grid comes crashing down.

But western commie useful idiots don't look at boring stuff like grids and power plants...

http://iea.org/textbase/stats/pdf_graphs/CUELEC.pdf

Is it just me, or is Megan HOT.... :)