George Kenney has produced several excellent interviews on peak oil. Among them Down To The Last (Cheap) Drop, an interview with Tom Whipple and and Peak Oil Politics, an interview with John Hemming MP, a principal behind the formation of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas.

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Hello Prof. Goose,

Thxs for the links! Since Peakoil Outreach is increasingly going mainstream: we now need to figure out how to get Alan Drake and other RR & Mass-Trans experts vastly increased media exposure to really jumpstart the social impetus for Transit-Oriented Development [TOD] and relocalized permaculture.

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

Good links, thanks, PG. Jeff Goodell did an excellent job of presenting his case. And I thought Kudlow was more of a cornucopian. He seemed to understand the point of Jeff's article, that ethanol is just a boondoggle.

| _{The problem will solve itself.}
|  _{But not in a nice way.}

Interesting hearing Jim Jubak. The story of peak oil is gradually infiltrating MSM, and even being told in a way that it sounds like the establishment believes it.

She is a liar. Brazil is not doing cellulosic ethanol, they are doing sugar cane ethanol. Jeff missed that little trick she pulled.


She is a snake in the grass or misinformed.

As of tonight, I noticed on way home from work that gasoline is $2.52 at Walmart in central Kentucky, and low $2.60's most other places, back below the price of Diesel fuel by a dime or more almost everywhere.

Kentucky has just been through it's worst heatwave since 2002 or so, with some record high temps. I have managed to date not to turn on the air conditioning once, so far exceeding even my record of the last two years, that being to hold out to post July 4th. If I can hold through the next two weeks, no air conditioning for the summer! :-) In a way it's been fun, reminding me of my childhood summers before we had air conditioning.

The astounding part is that despite record heat throughout the south, the electric power so far has held flawless, with major cities such as Atlanta, Miami, Houston and Dallas able to carry peak loads that have not been seen in several years, an astonishing accomplishment given the lack of investment in infrastructure for the last half decade. One TOD poster mentioned an electric power crunch outside of Huntsville Alabama, and seemed surprised, but given the drought throughout the Tennessee River Valley, I am sure some TVA hydroelectric production must be suffering. I have a sister just outside of Anniston AL, and the heat and drought has been legendary. But the South has managed so far, a testament to the sturdiness of the energy and TVA system.

So, what's the story? Simply this: Most Americans seem to now think that the high oil prices are simply the normal "summer" run up, and sense no emergency, because even in difficult circumstances, they have not yet seen any signs of emergency. As prices have cooled coming down on the last big summer driving holiday, the view is things are pretty much normal.

When the talking heads refer to peak of any kind, everybody I talk to assumes (a) yeah, we need to do something before 2020 or 2030 and (b) what do you expect with the Chinese and Indians hogging everything up, it's like the Japanese and Europe did after WWII, folks in raw materials are getting rich though....

Some point here on TOD to so called "peak" emergencies in nations around the world, there was even a map depicting it on The Oil Drum. But the nations shown are riddled with so much corruption and bad investment, that there seems to be absolutely no indication that a shortage of oil or gas in the larger sense are to blame. Interestingly, several of the nations shown as in an energy emergency are net energy producers or exporters, or border them.

The credit crunch and mortgage problems? For the folks who seem aware of it at all, they think it's pretty much a scam, builders just trying to get higher prices for houses and the banks starting to balk at the outrageous prices. Not all that many people are in the market for a "first home" anyway, but some of the "flippers" have gotten nervous, and backed off. The great untold story in America is that many folks in their mid to late forties have already paid for their primary home, and now have no mortgage unless they want to play around with a vacation home, or a "flipper", a second or third piece of property to try to speculate on. The truth is, the middle aged boomers are in better shape than my parents were at the same, or even decade older, age.

Jobs? In our area, the businesses cannot stay staffed. In fact, at several professsional service firms and call center service operations the fear is losing the local branch (in some cases hundreds of good jobs) to areas that can provide staffing. The "birth dearth" seems to be catching up to us as the influx of young workers has virtually dried up.

As summer gives way to autumn, gasoline and oil demand will cool off considerably, and the issue will be natural gas, which right now looks good going into the winter. The financial issues will be interesting. The late summer/early autumn is always the thorny time of year for the markets, and has proven to be again this year. We could still see the market drop back below it's yearly low, and if credit tightens, much more. The Iraq war now looks to go on another half decade at minimum, and even if OPEC can do no more than hold flat on oil production, the money gushing out of the U.S., for war and oil in the Persian Gulf will begin to become crippling.

I once predicted that if current patterns held, the U.S. would run out of money long before the world ran out of oil. The only thing worse than if the oil is not "out there" somewhere, I said, is if it is.

Oh, one more thing. It seems somewhat apparent that the Cincinnatti Reds may indeed not win the World Series this year. Sometimes a person has to admit that unpleasantness is a part of life.

Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom

“Quant” hedge funds are in complete disarray. Their mathematical models are no longer reliably predicting stock price movements and hedge fund investors are quite literally loosing their shirts as a result. There is a good reason for this development. “Quant” hedge funds use complex mathematical models which use decades of past stock movements to predict future stock movements. They have been extraordinarily successful --- up to now. What has changed? The answer is simple and very telling. All past stock movements have been driven by rising availability of oil and gas energy resources. That has now changed. According to a number of industry (Peak Oil) studies, conventional oil production peaked in 2006 and is now in permanent decline worldwide. There is now no economic or financial precedent or data for mathematical whiz kids to draw upon to adjust their computational hedge models. There is no “past” stock trading data to establish cause and affect relationships. We are all in brand new economic territory, never before experienced by man. In other words, “Wall Street, we have a problem”.

George Kenney's interview of David Strahan is excellent, I agree. It is full of insights that one might not hear elsewhere due to Kenney's perspective and insightful questions.

One part of the conversation that I found especially interesting was the part where Strahan is talking about how certain economists have found that the traditional equations used to model economic growth fail to adequately explain the growth of the economy when labor and capital alone are considered. However, when one considers the increasing use of hydrocarbon energy, and includes that factor in with the value of labor and the value of capital, the curves start lining up nicely. I believe that Robert Ayres was one of the economists mentioned; another name was also mentioned, but I couldn't quite hear it clearly (it sounded like Reinhard Kimmel or Kumal?). If anyone can tell me the name of that second economist I would be grateful.