Opinion noted.

It is a kind reminder. That's all.

Look, the goal is to get these folks as many readers as possible and grow the site.

If you do not wish to take 15 seconds of your day to click a button and help in that endeavor that's fine.

I thought it was quite sympathetic, actually. It never stopped me from ignoring the button - nor makes its absence me ignoring them.

It worked for me. I completely ignored the reddit and digg buttons (they are at the top of the story, before I read it).
This reminded me of them and I judged the article worthy of a digg.

There are a lot of crap posts around. That reminder is not one of them.

My Icelandic friends have a dislike for anything that eats Icelandic fish (except humans that pay Icelanders for Icelandic fish :-)

I have eaten Minke whale (not endangered, but competes by eating fish). The fewer seals, the more fish for us !

Icelanders do wear fur without shame.

And seal flipper pie sounds good !

Alan

Ah! It's jellyologist! You are the fellow that insists there is PLENTY of oil, aren't you? And you are the fellow who Stuart reminded that world discoveries peaked in the early 1960s. You geologists must surely be off your game if world discoveries have gone down, down, down for 40+ years! Why, I'd say that must be sheer incompetence, especially since there must be SO MUCH OIL out there!

You should haul your butt back to work, jellyologist. You and your wife have a lot of oil to find in the next few years. Or maybe you are not a competent geologist at all, eh? Well, whatever you are, you are NOT finding much oil lately, are you? And neither are your geologist friends.

*end sarcasm, for the sarcasm impaired*

Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett

Well older people will simply have to tough it out.

Seriously. They are going to get wiped out anyway if we do nothing. If they are on fixed incomes they face a uncertain future no matter what we do. Your solution does not help them in the least its a pipe dream.

Before we spend the tax money I proposed on techno dreamland we need to provide housing and transport for the poor and the old relocating them if necessary. As you see we have our own equivalent of the third world inside the US. Or you can drive your pretty hybrid through Compton when gas hits 7 dollars a gallon.

Once you grasp the real situation I think you will see we need to solve our biggest problems first with what we have and only then can we use whatever resources remain to try and create a better life.

Nothing against hybrids mind you but your not solving the real problems we face. Hybrids without crushing gas taxes to prevent the tragedy of the commons are useless. And crushing gas taxes result in the same problem for the old and poor. Hybrids do nothing but allow the wealthy to continue to live a better lifestyle.

Now if you wait until the money for gasoline is going into the true cost and not taxes you have nothing for the old and poor. Look at the EU they have high fuel taxes and they old and poor there are not dying. Nothing wrong with moving to better technology but recognize its not a solution.

"Bicycles are not an option for older people who live in the snow belt."

They could always use tricycles. We're in the "snowbelt" and have an 80+ year old woman in town who uses her tricycle for transportation. Besides, most of the year we don't have any snow. Most of the "older people" around here could really use some exercise.

And there are futuristic ideas - Segways and light rail. Or are only ideas involving thousands of pounds of personally directed metal shell an option?

I'm always suprised on this site when I see how little people realize the incredible amount of generating capacity that would be needed to replace petroleum with electricity. And that about half of our (USA) electric generation is from coal. No solution there........

Surely there are futuristic ideas, such as switching to electric powered transporation and reworking our streets to include charge/ discharge ports at every stop light for our PHEV's.

Looking at the predictions of peak coal and peak gas, you have to wonder if there will be many driving cars in the future, electric or otherwise. You may end up seeing bus stops at every stop light.

Keep trying to come up with solutions?!?

Some humans may be doing that, but on the whole most people in "developed" societies are happy to allow, or actively work to exacerbate (knowingly or unknowingly), the conditions that cause the suffering in the first place. As long as their quality of life is good, they are happy.

You could say the problems are simply too overwhelming for any one person to be able to do much about it - and that is true - however, political discussion in wealthy countries primarily has to do with who gets even more wealthy in that country. There is almost never any concern for the fundamental systemic problems faced by the majority of the world's human population. Too many see it as a zero sum game - we win when others lose.

MILLIONS of people live in slums all over the world TODAY. We (the "comfortable" people of the "first" world) could do something about that. We choose not to. MILLIONS of people are malnourished TODAY. We could do something about that. We choose not to.

Does it really make much of a difference if geological realities force even greater problems than the problems we ourselves create? The majority of human beings today live in deplorable conditions. In future, the majority of human beings will live in deplorable conditions. The only difference being there will be fewer human beings.

Sorry for that ray of sunshine, but I am tired of the hypocrisy*. Talking of peak oil and global warming as a big problem because of the effect they will have on poor people is, in most cases, simply hypocritical. If it was the poor (and, in too many people's minds, racially inferior) people exclusively doing the suffering, most people would not care about peak oil or global warming. As proof I simply present to you today's energy-intensive, highly polluting societies. (Canada and the United States in particular.)

*In general. I don't mean to attack you or other people who sincerely care about the planet and human suffering, wherever it occurs.

It's rough, but not hopeless. I'm sorry that your thinking about it ends up in hopelessness. I don't agree that this is the only conclusion, but I'm not surprised, and many more will end up with this dread as we go along.

We're certainly all on one, finite Planet, but we're not all on one boat. The vast array of places where humans live today will become increasingly fractured, which will be devastating for some who rely too thoroughly on imports, but will also be restorative and protective for those places that are being depleted by exports. Meanwhile, the tools and techniques we've devised over the last few centuries have been disseminated worldwide, (in varying degrees) as have literacy and multi-lingual skills.

I'm not concerning myself with Warlords, Famines or other causes of Dieoffs. I fully expect them. It's a good day to die, but I may just keep dodging what bullets I can, while I can. It will happen in one place, but not in all, and not forever. You keep your eyes open and do your best.. find allies and keep your Good Wolf well fed.

I don't for a minute buy this suggestion that 'Ingenuity and Inventiveness' have deserted us through some scatological reading of the Patent Office Database. Rubbish! The combinations of tools and materials that we now know how to work with is not going to disappear, even if there are a bunch of civil wars, Dictatorships, whatever Haranguing Hordes scouring the scene..

It'll be the best of times and the worst of times.

'What's so great about discovery? It's a destructive, invasive process.. What you call progress, I call the rape of the natural world.' ... 'Life.. Finds a way..'
Ian Malcolm, Rock Star, Scientist.. Jurassic Park

including forced sterilizations.

I sure hope you've already voluntarily had yourself sterilized.

Garth

You will also have trouble staving off the starving people.

Maintaining the food supply is important. Probably one of the most important things we could do is to introduce sustainable agriculture where possible. We need to wean ourselves off fertilizer and more important well water. The biggest problem here is actually water. This is not and easy problem to solve since irrigation from ground water is probably the biggest part of the success of the green revolution. Its not a easy problem to solve by any means but whats important is to recognize and focus on the real problems we need to solve.
I agree its tough to jump right to the heart of the problem but you have to make this leap or we are going to have a very very tough time. As I said below cheap oil allowed us to basically paper over these problems and keep them contained we did not solve anything. Once the crutch of cheap oil is gone we have no choice but to solve these tough problems. Just about every single problem we have turned a blind eye towards over the decades since WWII is going to grow rapidly over the next few years.

To bring the situation home. Whats going to happen in America if we are faced with a civil/guerrilla war on our southern border. Eventually we will see heavily armed bandits crossing the border and piracy at sea.

I suspect Venezuela would be more than happy to finance and arm bandits attacking the US directly. And what will the US have to do to stop this. Invade Venezuela great then what will the Chinese do? And you have my Nuclear proxy scenario.
The point is we cannot hide as most of the world goes down.

Also remember WWI did not start at the center of Europe. And Germany did not invade France to start WWII. Don't forget the Mongols. In short the big wars start with conflict at the edges and build and the powerful are forced to take positions. Peak oil fueled civil and regional war covering almost half the world will sooner or later drag in everyone.

And finally here in America we have the seeds in place to turn into a Neo-Nazi state acts like the patriot laws have eroded civil liberties and we have illegal immigration esp from Mexico instead of Jews but we are not in great shape politically to prevent dissolution of democracy as we face some of the biggest problems the world has known since WWII.
The worlds political and social institution esp in the third world will be stressed and broken.

Of course we can keep tilting million dollar windmills and patting ourselves on the back about how smart we are. But looking back it was our own arrogance that got us to here today I guess its only fitting that it will eventually be our undoing.

In order to keep feeding the 6 million as best possible, it would seem like we should give agriculture top priority, with what energy is available. I am not certain what we need to do to make this happen.

I suspect they will give agriculture priority for what energy supplies are available, for a while. But you are going to have an economic implosion, and skyrocketing food prices, which means more and more people won't be able to buy food. That's when you get social breakdown and violence.

I practice and teach sustainable small-scale agriculture. I live in a rural, socially progressive state (Vermont). The vast majority of people living here are not farmers, not even serious gardeners, and many don't even have access to farmable land. And we're probably a lot better off than most places in the U.S. I'm trying to figure out how I can keep my own neighborhood fed. I live in a rural area but there are lots of other houses around within walking distance. I had a neighborhood meeting with five of my neighbors last year and talked about Peak Oil. Only one of them is doing anything to prepare to feed himself. It takes years and years of practice to learn how to produce food consistently. If people haven't started now it's probably too late.

So how well is my sustainable mini-farm going to fare when the stuff hits the fan? Are my unprepared neighbors going to just curl up and die while I sit here munching on my home-grown potatoes? And what about all the masses of people in the cities who will have no access to food? They're only a tank full of gas away.

I don't expect we'll go quietly into the long night though being humans and all.

Gail,

I've mentioned Vandana Shiva several times but if you have missed it here is her site.

http://www.zmag.org/bios/homepage.cfm?authorID=90

You will find here no lover of the green revolution nor of western corporate agri-business. Which is lucky because neither of those work.

India has an agricultural past that spans millenniums and all the tools we need and as well it even has something relatively unknown in the West, humility.

It depends upon timeframe.

Housing built in 2000 will need major repairs starting in the 2020-2030 time frame (new construction has gotten consistently cheaper and less durable, decade by decade, since 1945 as builders got smarter). The operating costs (including repair) for most US housing can exceed their replacement cost + new operating cost (the classical definition of scrap decision).

Perhaps 1/3rd of Americans would chose the option that I outlined today IF IT WERE READILY AVAILABLE ! Go post-Peak Oil a half dozen years and that % will grow significantly.

I disagree about the "cheaper". PHEVs have limited life spans (battery life is still unknown) but all cars get into accidents, most have problems with salt, almost none have the durability of my 1982 M-B 240D :-) OTOH, Urban Rail has extraordinary life spans. Industry standard in the US is bus life (they are built MUCH tougher than PHEVs) of 12 to 15 years; rail cars 30 to 40 years and I use 1923/24 built streetcars :-)

I used an 1897 built subway everyday during ASPO-Boston, I live close to an 1834 streetcar line.

Once ridership density gets high enough, (even without reducing "gold plating" common today; 1% for "Art in Transit" is a small part of it) "first cost" for Urban Rail will be lower than PHEVs.

And PHEVs support a high energy density Urban form; Urban Rail creates low energy density TOD.

I do NOT believe in 100% of anything (except scrapping 100% of the H2 & H3 Hunner, Escalades, Expeditions, etc.) as a solution. If, in 2037, half of Americans lived in energy efficient housing within a mile of an Urban Rail stop or station, I would be satisfied (and hopefully they would be as well).

PHEVs will also be part of the solution, but hopefully a smaller part than Urban Rail since they preserve a high energy use Urban form.

Best Hopes,

Alan

Gail,

I just did a word search through the article as well as all the comments by all of us well educated souls. The word was ration and the winner was generation, and rationing was not mentioned at all.

Sort of says something about the idea of conservation doesn't it?

Not really. Build enough of them, and you could overwhelm the intermittency. That would be a trifle expensive...

Now if you were to say "if we build enough windmills to provide the power we need, we'll still need backup from other sources", then that would probably be technically true, but it would be misleading.

Remember, wind isn't the only generation source that has variance. In fact, all sources do. Most of it (maintenance, refueling, etc) can be scheduled, but not all. Nuclear can be tripped very suddenly - it doesn't happen all that often, but when it does the plant is offline for more than one day. The size of nuclear plants, and the duration of outages amplifies the impact of the variance, such that a small market like Ireland, for instance, has ruled out nuclear.

The key is managing the variance, and reducing it to tolerable levels. This can be done in many ways, and in much the same way as is done to match nuclear's flat output with the variation in demand.

You need:

1) Geographical diversity, including expanded long-distance transmission, perhaps with HVDC that has roughly 5% loss per 1000 miles). Additional LDT would make the grid more robust, and reduce the variation of wind by increasing geographic diversity and reducing the ratio of variance to mean production;

2) Demand management, similar to the kind of daytime demand charges that moved so much industrial/commercial consumption to the night time, thus creating "baseload".

"Baseload" itself is a bit of a misconception. Humans live in the light, and in effect have evolved to use solar energy. "Natural" night time energy use is very low. A large % of what we call "baseload" is Industrial/Commercial demand which has been shifted from daytime to night time by very simple Demand Side Management (DSM): charging higher rates, or "demand charges" for peak daytime usage.

DSM could be easily expanded. The first, obvious place to start is eliminating flat pricing for residential. A second is going to dynamic pricing, to reflect variable costs.

"negawatts" in the form of reduced demand as a result of DSM is also very cheap.The most obvious use is with plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles (PHEV's), such as the Chevy Volt series hybrid that could be charged at night and during peak production periods. PHEV storage will be cost-justified by the vehicle owner, and reduced rates for scheduled charging will be a bonus. As PHEV's expand they will provide an enormous synergy with variable sources like wind and solar;

3) Storage, such as the Ludington, MI pumped storage facility that has time-shifted nuclear production for 30 years, PHEV’s, flow batteries (as currently used in Ireland), and compressed air (see article in next post); and

4) Backup generation capacity, such as inexpensive gas turbines for the rare extended outage, powered by gasified biomass (which is very efficient for power generation, even though very, very inefficient for liquid fuels). Remember, capacity is very cheap, if you don't have to use it often. The cost of diesel and natural gas generators is almost entirely in the fuel.

This is one big reason pumped storage hasn't been more widely used: until very recently natural gas peak capacity has been dirt cheap, and so relatively large-scale, long-term projects couldn't be justified. They often had to be paired with other large projects, like nuclear plants.

So, the upshot of the above is that wind doesn't have to be 100% reliable, just reliable enough.

As a system this would be significantly cheaper than coal, once you added in coal's external costs. Whether it would be cheaper than nuclear depends on how you value nuclear's external costs, especially the Price-Anderson liability cap, weapons proliferation risk, and opportunity costs for foregone investment in renewables.

What some nuclear advocates have described as irrational NIMBYism and unreasonable regulatory delay is really the political process, lurching about in an effort to put a value on those external costs.

General Compresson has a very clever proposal for reducing or eliminating the intermittency of wind power.

Here's a recent article about it: Saving wind power for later.

I expect the growth of solar to be much higher than it is right now. CIGS vastly reduces the need for expensive silicon and generally promises to scale very well for large production volume (think printing press technology). I'm very optimistic solar will take off in a big way between now and 2019. Beyond that I expect even more dramatic technology to appear on the horizon to help us with energy extraction and storage.

I've been watching the CIGS technology unfold. Here's my list of companies investing:
Norsk Hydro
Solopower
Miasole
Nanosolar
Daystar
Konarka
Flisom
Honda!!!
Wurth
Heliovolt
CIS Solar
A pretty impressive list and the U.S. govt is committing about 1/3 of its solar R&D funds to CIGS (that last is from memory so take it with a grain of salt)

I'd be happy to give you pre-publication comments, if you think that would be helpful, for material on wind, solar & EV/PHEV's.

That will be good. My main thought while reading it was why solar was omitted as an alternative when it seems to be one of the best alternatives. If every home had even a 1kW array think how far that would go to reducing the need for central power generating stations.

I think solar has the best potential for solving our energy problems. No heroics are involved. It is just a matter of solving the puzzle. How do we structure atoms in the right configuration to capture solar energy at a low cost? Once we crack that nut we'll have enormous amounts of power available.

Eventually solar power must be tied with energy storage but that too is a solvable problem.

I don't mean to gloss over these two problems lightly. They may turn out to be very difficult problems. However, it you went back in time and someone told you man would never fly you could argue that in fact it was possible to fly. You could argue from basic physical principles that it was possible to build a machine light enough with enough power from an on board engine that it could achieve flight. On the other hand, if someone said man will never go faster than the speed of light or that man will never invent an anti-gravit device at this point we'd have to agree with them in the sense that we don't have any inkling that such things are even allowed in this universe. Solar power and energy storage are not difficult problems of this order.

You completely misstated the reality of this project

No I didn't. I said this:

I have no idea if this is real but...

The main components of seaweed are fucoidan and alginic acid. While an enzyme for breaking down fucoidan has already been discovered, the scientists are looking for an enzyme that breaks down alginic acid. They are also looking at the possibility of using genetic modification technology.

Does seem to be a pie in the sky sort of project doesn't it?

This sort of hyped up crap gets very tiring. Because of junk like this I've begun dismissing any alternatives out of hand.

Same as with all that GM Volt hype. It was just a PR move to counter "Who killed the electric car?" GM has shown little real initiative to build it, and no other large car maker will touch it with a ten foot pole. But now everyone claiming PHEV will save the day just point to as proof.

The only plan that seems remotely feasible to me is Alan's move to rail but I don't see anyone championing that.

Sorry for the rant. I just get so tired digging though all this crap. Why is the responsibility to debunk this obvious garbage on me? and the people who promote this pseudo science are free to do it again and again.

No nuclear 'ain't clean' but then what is clean, not wind or water or sun they all take energy to set up and that energy for the moment is, of course, coming from fossil fuels. The time required to move to another type of grid using W W S is not available.

We can do nuclear, for the nonce, gradually shifting to wind water and sun. Maybe nuclear fusion will eventually fulfill it's promise of cheap and clean power (and we can go on to other things like casual trips to Bermuda and the Maldives {oops now where did they go?} then on to other things like peak copper and aluminum etc...you bring out the misanthropic in me clifman).

This is a great topic and one that is hotly debated. On one side are groups that show calculations that when mining uranium at low concentrations from hard granite that the total process uses more energy than it produces. On the other side are groups that document existing mines and purport to show that the would be bankrupt if they were so inefficient.

It is really hard to tell. Like ethanol production nuclear power is heavily subsidized and it is very difficult to document all of the energy flows involved.

Personally, I'd like to see us enact vigorous conservation efforts and life style changes and as a last resort try to build more nuclear plants.

"Ah yes, let's bring back slavery"

Did we ever get rid of it? Taxes and credit card interest. How much of your work is for anothers profit?

Anyway I realize you are making fun of my post...

but why not force condemned men to toil away?

matt

The SHPEGS idea is very new (a few months old), but is very rapidly moving out of the concept stage and in the past few months there have been several serious commercial inquiries into investment and development of the system.

My personal goals and the goals for the project have a not-for-profit information and idea gathering focus. The intent is to attempt to keep the original thought, general system design and deployment projects information publicly available and allow commercial ventures to have a revenue stream in deploying and operating the system, rather than a single entity controlling the IP. My belief is that the system is relatively simple and the R&D investment is small enough that ventures will embark on building and deploying the system with a business model around selling energy products. In the worst case, the idea has been published widely on the Internet since August 2006, and that has to establish prior art.

On the very small scale demonstration project the components are all commercially available. In the simplest form, the system is an air exchange heat pump pool heater with an absorption cycle rather than mechanical compressor and a convection tower rather than forced air fans. There are many vendors of binary heat recovery power systems that may be adapted to the system. Ground thermal loops are established for structure heating.

In the Northern U.S. and Canada, there are not that many other options for renewable power generation. New hydroelectric is very limited and although there have been many wind turbine installations and will be many more, they are limited to 10-20% of the grid total. Although the summer solar isolation in the midwest is high, the low isolation and temperature in winter make traditional direct solar unfeasible.

One of the major difficulties with promoting the concept of this system is that the technology sits between power generation, HVAC, geothermal, OTEC, etc. and mechanical engineers generally don't have the broad skill set to understand the system. Physics and chemistry academics and chemical engineers seem to get the concept easily but it has been a battle to get some mechanical engineers that haven't had exposure to industrial absorption heat upgraders and heat pumps to understand that the system is always moving heat from hot to cold and is a steam engine not an air conditioner.

In addition to the base load power generation, the seasonal thermal storage has high value for structure heating in northern climates. In Regina, Canada, although most newer homes are R-2000 compliant, most families use as much energy for home heating as electricity and transportation combined. Integrating the SHPEGS system with bio-methane and ethanol production would lower the fossil fuel inputs of these products.

He claims about 4% thermal efficiency from the final setup, and thinks this will make money.  In contrast, Luz had a similar solar-concentrating powerplant setup achieving 20%, and went bankrupt some years back.  The conclusion regarding the viability of SHPEGS is left as an exercise for the reader.

Keithster,
Thanks.

Nick,
I don’t know that I accept the validity of Maslow’s hierarchy, at least, not its universal validity. My initial background was in Austrian Economics, which, I think correctly, essentially recognizes an individual-specific hierarchy of needs, then wants, with diminishing marginal returns going up the scale. Needs/wants in this model are infinite, though the imaginary construct of perfect satisfaction is approached asymptotically, any level of satisfaction, as they say, only fully existing anyway at the moment of exchange/transaction (afterglow is recognized, but difficult to build into the system, except to the extent that it fades).

Self-actualization/improved mental health, and other such abstractions, may be (and doubtless are), wanted by many who have sated their more mundane desires, but such wants must at least in part be a function of both IQ and personality (below a certain IQ threshold they can not be meaningful, and having passed that, will not be to a great many personality types who only conceive of “self-actualization” in terms of material accumulation/competition).

The name of the game, in general, for humans is not, as I see it now, so much “want-satisfaction” per se, as status competition (once the immediate, unavoidable, physical wants are met) (if we conceive of status as a form of abstract “want” then we can fit it properly into the Austrian hierarchy, but it gets a bit awkward to discuss in those terms). For the most part, this is accomplished through material accumulation/consumption (and explains why accumulation/consumption so quickly become relative in focus rather than absolute), but it does not necessarily, of course, have to be: most of what are expressed as “higher” motivations are merely less/non material ways of competing for status, or ways of competing for status differently conceived.

It is amusing to me how many people will act in ways that are not only obviously contrary to their material interests, but jeopardize their lives and those if their families, to obtain the “higher” satisfaction of having realized (if only internally) the enhanced status associated with such otherwise (generally) incomprehensible sacrifice.

I do believe much of the status is self-conceived more than socially conferred (ie, these people are driven by the need to feel better than others, to exult in the moral superiority obtained by having acted righteously or refrained from sin, etc.), though they tend to find each other and build echo chambers to validate these inner assessments (how much of the internet can be described this way…?)

Many, if not most, of these people are regularly counterproductive to their own stated values, because the values are not essential in themselves, what is essential is this combination of felt moral superiority obtained through the appearance of having these values and the ratification of this superiority by their own discovered sub-society. Hence, we have the “environmentalists” prattling endlessly about “conservation” and “efficient land-use” who will do nothing whatsoever to address population growth, or rather, who are violently hostile to any attempt to stem population growth, which is causing most of the problems they pretend to be combating.

I mean, it’s all very obvious: even if you do succeed, for example, in lowering per capita consumption, if you don’t stop the population from growing, any realized savings will eventually be overwhelmed and absolute consumption will rise. The Oil Drum has had some good posts on that topic.

The Birkenstock types living in huts made of recycled tires (“sustainable!” “off-grid!”) are not seriously trying to address actual social problems in the world, rather, they want to a) feel better about themselves; b) be accepted and valued within their chosen peer group.
(While they may pretend to be “setting an example” or “exploring alternative, sustainable ways of living” the example they usually succeed in setting tends to be frightful enough to deny them meaningful converts, which, as I’ve been saying, is rarely the point, merely the rationalization. Of course, as we’ve also discussed at length on this site, if they really were successful in their efforts to proselytize for conservation on any meaningful scale, which is to say, if they did reduce demand for energy measurably, they would just lower the price of energy, making it easier for those outside the flock to continue their profligate ways.)

Anyway, I think you are being kinder to these people than they deserve. To me, they claim to want to “kill off a consumer society” not because they are trying to save the members of that society from vapid, banal pursuits (guiding them to a sort of Buddhist awareness beyond mere material want gratification), but because they view those people as inferior to themselves, Those Who Are Above The Wants of This World, and want them to suffer (or at least want their own superior status recognized.

You are certainly right in identifying this approach as centered on the United States, or at least the “West” (it is rare indeed to find denunciations of those in the Third World who actually are living in the supposedly spiritually fulfilling conditions of scarcity and impoverishment for attempting to improve their material condition). That’s reserved for us, because the status game is in the West; nobody ever won any points by showing that he could underlive a Kalahari bushman.

I have to say, though, $10,000 a year! Status competition aside for a minute, I must find money itself more of a kick than you…. I like the things that money can buy.. books, music, sports cars, independence…. and of course, status, if nothing else, even if only conferred by money, brings women. Hard to do that on 10k/year.
All the best,
Erik Meyer

I think that much of that desire is to topple the overconsumption induced by our current society, not the satisfaction of basic necessities.

As for the basic economic needs of other people: we're using an enormous amount of resources now. The current system obviously does not succeed in bringing them where they are most needed. A little shake-up is in order.

Well, hmmm....have you read Kunstler much? You begin to understand where this comment came from...

I was half joking, though I do think, if APD applied to anyone, it'd be Kunstler, against whom, if only indirectly, most of my comments were levied. We'll say he's a representative of what I was describing, and, to the extent you identify with (or seem otherwise similar to) him (or his type), I'm putting you in that category (though nothing I said had anything to do with you personally at all).

I tend to share most of the doomer's conclusions about things like production trends, just not necessarily their interpretation of the magnitude of the likely consequences of those trends... or maybe the feeling that all of those consequences are my problem.

Memmel,

You're absolutely right: Africa is going to be hard-hit by peak oil. So will many developing nations.

OTOH, China and India have the resources to deploy wind turbines, solar and PHEV's.

The more the OECD nations develop cheap alternatives, the better off the rest of the world will be, both because the OECD nations will be using less, and because they will be making alternatives feasible.

"I'm not a doomer I just want people to come up with real answers not crap about how windmills in Kansas are going to same the day."

I'm not sure how to answer that. Windmills aren't crap. Do you have a specific reason for believing that they are? I'd be happy to address it.

"Can you not see the insanity of thinking about technical approaches that allow 1% of the worlds population to a nice life as SOLUTIONS ? "

The point is, that these technical solutions will work just as well as fossil fuels, and will work for everybody, not just 1%.

Africa has always been a catastrophe, and it's even worse now because the Africans cannot, or will not, do anything to control their population growth.

Doubtless the Africans would themselves be consumed with anguish over our plight were the roles somehow reversed.

Or maybe not. Solutions, to the extent they exist, always apply most immediately at home. If they can be shared with others, as they have been for quite some time now with Africa and the rest of the Third World, so be it. If not, then that cannot be helped.

I hear this type of thing from environmentalists all the time, that we cannot address population growth here (which, as everywhere in the West, is entirely immigration driven), because population is growing elsewhere. Bob Bartlett, late editor of the Wall Street Journal Editorial page, once famously remarked, “the destiny of Europe was decided in North Africa.” (ie by massive increases in the birth rate of North Africans). That’s the elite consensus.

I don’t share it.

Sealing the borders is not hiding, it’s protecting what is yours. The rest of the world understands this.

The poor we will always have with us, but if their numbers were not artificially allowed to explode exponentially in our own countries, we could see that their basic needs were met. What we cannot do is meet the needs of all the poor on the face of the planet (to think this is even possible in a resource constrained world with an exploding birthrate is arrogant to the point of madness), and if we try to do that while simultaneously allowing them to pour into our countries in limitless numbers, we really will be overwhelmed and ground under. That’s the way of the world.

Unfortunately, at times my style can get a bit opaque... I personally love this site, and check it repeatedly every day. I don't disagree with the core conclusions that most of those referred to as Peak Oilers have come to, though I do think the magnitude of the "catastrophe" is a bit overstated at times, and at times more than a bit.

My view is that we can all say whatever we'd like, but the world will go as the world goes regardless, and where it will not go is in the direction of voluntarily "powering down." Furthermore, whether we want the human footprint to be scaled back or not, it won’t be, for simple reasons of demographics, though it could have been in the West had the West not embarked upon a suicidal project of mass Third World immigration after the true catastrophe of the last War (1914-1945). (That’s too far off topic to delve into at length on this site, but it is how I see things.)

My counterargument to those I’ve characterized as ‘doomers’ is that the world is too large for you to waste your time obsessing over action plans to ‘save it’ from whatever is coming. Those of us who have read the trends have an obligation to ourselves and our families to do what is necessary to adapt to these trends (and I’d say profit from them), but more than that, we can’t do.

I think that we can, with appropriate planning and a bit of creative action, thrive in the world that is coming, even if the world at large sinks back into the abyss it only crawled out of in the last few centuries.

And try to have a good time too. Most people live as they always have, abject, impoverished, despairing, and miserable. That’s the human condition. It doesn’t have to be ours as individuals.

Gail,

First Great Job. I too am glad to see more women post.

Also, have you looked at what these folks have done and are doing?

http://www.postcarbon.org/

There might be synergy there somewhere.

John

Pull anything you want from the FAQ on my blog.  Also look at the reference library.

Thanks for the reply. Can you address immigration? I have read that immigration currently accounts for more of our population growth than births/deaths (2/3 to 1/3). If we stopped immigration immediately it would have an immediate and undeniable effect on population. We would "lose" around 1.5 million people a year - 1 million legal + .5 million illegal. And then their is the "compounding" that takes place. Had Ted Kennedy not gotten Congress to reopen immigration in the mid 1960's we'd have tens of millions less people in this country. And a need for a significantly lower amount of oil, coal and natural gas each and every day.

We can talk about families having only one child, but the idea would not be popular. If somehow it were started now, it still would be a long time before there would be a big impact on population.

I am not saying don't allow it. But don't subsidize it. Don't give any credits or deductions for children past the first. Charge for public education for children after the first. Even stopping it at the second child would be a big help. It may seem radical to people now, but it won't in hindsight.

It seems like a reduction in the birth rate would have an immediate impact. If it has to have an immediate big impact before we do it, then it would be difficult to justify doing a lot of things that can help. Windmills don't have an immediate big impact, nor does solar, nor does wave or tidal. Hybrid cars also don't have an immediate big impact.

I hear people like Simmons talking about conservation being out best hope. Well if we figure out how to conserve energy consumption 25% per person over the next 30 years we'll be using the exact same amount we do now if we allow population to grow the 100 million they are predicting.

"It will be a while before you get the same mileage out of E10 and esp E85 that you got before."

Not to be rude but it could be a very long while.

Energy content of gasoline is about 132MJ/gallon.
Energy content of ethanol is about 89MJ/gallong.

Since ethanol based fuel has less energy per volume than gasoline using ethanol will always reduce your mileage unless your use of gasoline was horribly inefficient.

Global warming from a former petroleum geologist's viewpoint

Kelvin S. Rodolfo

To understand greenhouse warming from human-generated carbon dioxide
requires a proper geological grasp of two things: First, the
photosynthesis-respiration cycle, the most important element of
Earth's delicately balanced surface environment; second, the enormity
of geological time over which the world's petroleum accumulated, in
contrast to the one and a half century during which we have burned
half of it.

Photosynthesis transforms sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into
hydrocarbons containing stored chemical energy, with a "byproduct" of
free oxygen. The stored energy is released by respiration, whereby
animals and fungi power their existence by "burning" the hydrocarbons
with oxygen, releasing "waste" water and carbon dioxide, and thus
completing the cycle.

The photosynthesis-respiration cycle is very efficient, but small
Amounts of hydrocarbons escape respiration by being buried in swamp
deposits or in oceanic sediments.

Deep burial of the swamps transforms the organic material into coal.
When the oceanic hydrocarbons are buried to depths of about 2 to 5
kilometers, the elevated pressures and temperatures slowly cook them
into oil and methane, which migrate upward, being of low density. The
petroleum is trapped if it enters the pores in sands or limestones
that are enclosed on the top and sides by impermeable rocks.

Given enough time, all coal and petroleum eventually must undergo one
of two fates. Either they are buried so deeply that Earth's internal
heat rips the hydrocarbon molecules apart, or uplift and erosion of
the carbon-bearing rocks releases the coal and petroleum back into the
surface environment. The Canadian and Venezuelan tar sands are oil
deposits exposed by erosion that have lost their volatile components.

Natural processes over the great lengths of geological time have
achieved a rough balance between carbon storage and release, leaving
the global environmental balance essentially undisturbed, leaving a
quasi-steady-state amount of carbon stored in Earth's crust.

Ignoring coal and methane to look only at oil, the best geological
estimates are: since about 600 million years ago, when the oldest oil
we use was formed, the Earth has stored only about two trillion
barrels. On average, this is little more than 3,000 barrels annually.

The most prolific oil-generating period was the 20 million years or so
of late Jurassic to mid Cretaceous time, from about 110 to 90 million
years ago, when more than half of the world's oil – including all in
the Middle East – was stored. Even during that period, the Earth
stored only about 50,000 barrels annually.

At present, Humanity burns about 29 billion barrels a year. That is
what the Earth has stored, on average, over about nine million years.

In other words, the carbon dioxide that Nature took out of the
atmosphere and tucked away as oil in rocks over nine million years, we
return to the air in one year. Over the last one and a half centuries
– the blink of an eye in geological terms – we have burned a trillion
barrels of oil and have dumped its carbon dioxide waste back into the air.

Even if TWICE as much oil has accumulated in the Earth's crust as our
best estimates - a totally unrealistic figure that not even the most
wildly optimistic "cornucopians" claim, we would be pumping into the
air in one year the carbon dioxide that nature had sequestered in the
rocks for over four million years.

Comparable amounts of carbon dioxide are also pumped into the
atmosphere by burning coal and methane. To the total 6.5 billions of
carbon returned to the air every year, deforestation also adds another
1-2 billion tons.

Thus is Humanity inflicting on Earth's delicately balanced living
environment one of the most severe traumas it has ever had to endure.
The resulting fever is what we call Anthropogenic Global Warming.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita may be only tiny symptoms of that trauma.

The Earth occasionally undergoes a severe trauma, such as the impact
of the Chixulub meteorite, ten kilometers in diameter, that 65 million
years ago caused massive extinctions of oceanic and terrestrial life
including the dinosaurs. Burning a trillion barrels of oil plus an
equivalent amount of coal and natural gas in less than two centuries
is a geological catastrophe of similar magnitude.

Given enough time after catastrophe, the Earth's surface environment
and its life have always managed to restore equilibrium, including
equable temperatures. They will do so again, regardless of whether
humankind survives or not.

But such a recovery cannot possibly begin while humanity continues to
accelerate its use of fossil fuels.

Even if we were to stop all fossil-fuel combustion today, it will
still take a very long time for our global environment and ecosystems
to recover.

Kelvin S. Rodolfo
Professor Emeritus
Dept. of Earth & Environmental Sciences
University of Illinois at Chicago
845 W. Taylor St.
Chicago IL 60607 U.S.A.

We don't need to piss them off :)

Actually they may be willing to take the matter to the UN.
The evidence is strong enough to warrant the UN at least looking into the matter. Considering the scope of the problem Peak Oil like Global Warming is something the UN is designed to address.

Geothermal can be used in many, but not all places.

Very low ground water temperatures make extracting heat inefficent; little better than resistance electrical heat. (Note: using unit for a/c in summer puts heat into the ground, some of which may remain for winter use).

Solid rock typically costs too much to install and has relatively low thermal conductivity. Likewise, some areas with dry soil and low water tables (deserts) may not be good sources to extract heat from.

New Orleans is a poor site as well. Ground temperatures are too high for efficient cooling use and our heating needs are minimal. And the soil is too unstable.

Other dense Urban environments can support only occasional or supplemental use (Manhatten has rock & density !).

My SWAG is that 3/4ths of American hoimes are at least marginal candidates for geothermal heat.

Best Hopes,

Alan