Well he isn't great, but he's a whole lot closer than "solar and wind" Obama. Drilling in the US would produce energy. Nuclear power will be required to run the PHEVs.

Well, cap-and-trade will just be another opportunity bubble for Wall Street to push paper around while making big bucks for the dealers. And Sen. McCain's domestic energy policies would surely be just window dressing as "our guys" pump Iraq dry during decades of occupation as we await "stabilization" on the way to our bankruptcy. Sen. Obama's policies may differ in the margins, but once Dick Cheney whispers "Peak Oil" in his ear, his fundamental approach will likely be identical.

Don't make your choice based on energy policies.

Pretty standard GOP. To wit, decide what they want to do first, and then claim that will fix any existing problems whether that makes sense or not.

The "X-Prize" idea is a step. But what is needed is a realization by governments that they are not inventors nor very good administrators.

In the mobilization for World War I communications infrastructure was monopolized of security reasons. The concept of "natural monopoly" expanded to power generation and transportation infrastructure. We locked in place for a century the wonderful innovations of Bell, Ford, Edison and the Wright Brothers. Governments managed the details of HOW to implement infrastructure.

Challenging HOW with a different WHAT was not allowed. We created a mono-culture of infrastructure that mirrors the mono-culture of agriculture that caused the Potato Famines.

In 1984 communication infrastructure was de-monopolized. Long protected analog networks were re-tooled to digital and then fiber and wireless. Stunning examples of how free-markets, a rich ecology innovates better than a mono-culture monopoly.

We need a different WHAT. Masdar is implementing Personal Rapid Transit (PRT). Heathrow is implementing PRT. Uppsala Sweden is implementing PRT. This is a great technology. Hopefully we will implement it on a vast scale. Summary of the industry. And here is a statement of Performance Standard for beating 100 miles per gallon.

Also, hopefully PRT will not be monopolize this effort. As great as it will be, it should be modified and/or displaced by better. There is always a better way.

Also, hopefully the concept of "X-Prize" will shift to the government setting standards of performance, WHAT is needed, and allow the rich ecology of a free market to churn the HOW.

BTW, I have talked and/or met with both McCain's and Obama's staffs about this. Not much response from either.

Jerome, you write:

[McCain's]concrete proposals include more drilling in the USA, more nuclear energy,, and, in an apparent nod to standard Republican economic fare, less regulation ...

I don't understand why you included a mention of 'more nuclear energy'in a context that implies you consider it to be a bad idea. In fact, 'more nuclear energy' may be the only realistic alternative to 'more drilling'. Or the choice may between 'more nuclear energy' and total economic collapse. It's as matter of relative risk and determining which is the lesser evil.

After peak, the growth rate in produced oil is negative. This will produce a halving period, as opposed to the doubling period that results from a positive growth rate. So if the rate of growth goes to -3.5% then in 20 years production will be half. Actually it might be even worse for the USA because we import 60% of what we use and most of the decreased production of the world could come out of what we import; we might be down by 2/3 instead of 1/2 in 20 years.

So what would be the point of building more refineries!!!

Building a new infrastructure, whether it is nuclear, wind, solar cells, batteries, electric motors, electric cars, etc., requires additional resources including energy. If we are in an energy deficit, then putting an additional burden on the system means that someone must give up some of what they are consuming to free resources for the new infrastructure. Conservation is a very limited source of freeing up resources, so very rapidly we will not be conserving but we will be deprived; a very dangerous situation.

This is an impossible situation. It certainly is beyond the capacity of politicians and bureaucrats to solve it. The best they can do is get out of the way, but this is not going to happen because every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks he knows what needs to be done, and the politicians are just going to do what seems to be currently popular as the clamor to do something grows louder and louder. As the public pain increases the clamor grows. Look at the ethanol disaster for example, or the government blocking nuclear plants for the last several decades.

Just remember that government solutions crowd out private solutions. Resources are limited so if government directs them into the solution they see, then the resources are not available for private solutions, including what you think you should do on your own to protect yourself.

If you are relying of McCain or Obama to save you from the consequences of depleted resources your are mistaken. As I write this, in the background, Obama on the news is promising Latinos to rebuild the infrastructure (he mentions roads, bridges, dams, levies), provide everyone health care and a college education, to send more troops to Afghanistan, and to invest in new energy technology. Yea! Give me a break!

It strikes me as ironic that the GOP can blame the Dems for the lack of a comprehensive long term energy policy. Since Jan 20, 1981 the Dems have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress for only 2 years. That is 2 out of the last 27 years. For 6 of the last 7 years the GOP has controlled the White House and both houses of Congress yet failed miserably at instituting an energy policy that is anything other than let the market decide. They have roundly ignored the Hirsch Report's recommendations for the last 7 years and have kissed Big Oil's butt while holding hands with the tyrannical House of Saud. Their knee jerk response to the price rise has been to call for tax cuts and turning a blind eye on Big Oil's and Big Coal's rape of Mother Earth. Somehow we are to expect something different from a man who has been silent on energy policy during his long tenure in Congress to offer up anything truly helpful. Can we really expect new tricks from that old dog?

I have just finished reading the first 37 comments on this article. If the lack of agreement I see here among a supposied like minded group is so evident, it is no wonder why nothing has been done on a national scale where there are dozens of competing positions.

A Bemused Observer

"....But when one moves to his recommendations, the gap is suddenly yawning with this diagnosis. His concrete proposals include more drilling in the USA, more nuclear energy, and, in an apparent nod to standard Republican economic fare, less regulation (for refineries) and lower taxes (on gas)...."

I am sure those overbloated cornucopian USGS world reserves have plenty to do with "...lets just go and ramp up drilling in the lower 48..." to solve our crisis right now.But I suspect what the USGS is prevaricating about is telling us that they pad their world reserves with tar sands and oil shales.

If they really want to go after the oil shales in Utah and Colorado along the Green river, I guess thats their perogative.I hear Shell is buying up land and water rights in the area.If they do that however, you can kiss the Grand Canyon goodbye.The Green River flows into the Colorado River as it enters the Canyon.The lower 48 realistically cannot be 'drilled' anymore to have any sort of measurable impact.The parties definitely over in the lower 48 as far as conventional drilling goes.There would be nothing conventional about open pit mining for oil shales.
They are already doing alot of drilling off the coast of California right now.I just drove down the coast not long ago and saw several offshore rigs in the Santa Barbara area, by coincidence.

As far as nuclear,I do not think many people realize that a nuclear power plant, no matter how safe operating proceedures are carried out, emit radioactivity under normal operating conditions by venting coolant contaminated with radioactive elements.They claim it is not a significant amount,however, and is no more dangerous than back ground natural occurring radioactivity.
Cool. Whats there to be worried about then?
Im sure we could always find a cheap house downwind from one of those reactors no matter what the housing market was doing.

He also rightly points out that US dependency on imported oil has been growing, and that the amounts of money paid out to often hostile oil-exporting countries are reaching record levels.

Americans and europeans can't understand simple logic. If you not want your enemies to be hostile kindly take your armies out of their countries. You have no right to be their. Their natural resources are their, if they not want to take it out of ground or not want to sale it its their right. No matter how bad a dictator they have you have absolutely no right to go there unless their majority ask for your help.

When you not understand and still go there they fight back and then labelling them hostile brings you no good. You are the aggressor, the invader, the looter, the bandit. They are the defender, the freedom fighter. No matter how fancy your weapons are or how loud your noise is or how bad words you use for them the reality is that you are the evil, they are the good.

If your only justification of invading them is that you think they have wmds then they have a bigger reason to invade you because you have more wmds and its not only what they think, you also admit that you have them and lots of them.

If you think they can't handle it and you can then understand who has proved to be unable to handle it. America is the only country to use nuclear weapons in war and not once but twice, so that shows a lot. If you say that is story of long ago and you are mature now then look at how easily nuclear weapons were lifted and transported hundred of miles in your country and how easily a mishap could have happen. Also take a look at the vulnerability of british nuclear weapons system as recently told by telegraph newspaper.

If iran must be invaded for trying to have nuclear technology then usa, russia, britain, france, china, india, israel and pakistan must be invaded first and in sequence because of having that technology.

If iran must be invaded for trying to help hizbullah which saved lebanon from israeli invasion then israel must be invaded before that for invading lebanon at first place.

If you are so good that you want to "free" the people from dictators then don't forget robert mogabe of zimbawe, janta of burma and musharraf of pakistan.

If you want to bring democracy in middle east then learn to respect already existing and flourishing democracies there in iran and palestine and not hate them just because you not like those particular political parties that are in power in those democracies.

As an Obama supporter I nevertheless think it's time someone hit Barack pretty hard on a number of his recent energy policy commentary(ies). Much of which is coming from his energy advisor, Jason Grumet, who himself was an early cheerleader for corn ethanol. More of the same here in the US: highly educated, highly intelligent people who appear to be intellectually unequipped to see the problem in its totality.

Remember, we are Americans so the overestimation of our grasp of problems and their solutions is not only way, way overestimated by ourselves, but especially overestimated by the rest of the world. We're nothing special. That's what needs to be understood. And even if McCain or Obama really did have a clue, and their advisors had a clue, the dead-weight emanating from American society would pull them--and will pull them--down into the abyss. This most recent flurry of societal finger-pointing at speculation as the cause of the oil price is a deep, intellectual embarrassment for us. And that's only one example.

More of that coming.

Gregor

Hello TODers,

IMO, the Presidential candidate, who wants to win by a huge, landslide margin, just has to propose the following:

-------------------------------------
All golfers must henceforth walk the course-->pushing a hand-powered rotary lawnmower [with grass-catcher] ahead of them all the way, with their golfbag slung across their back.

No caddies, No golf carts, No professional greenskeepers. No power tools allowed for course upkeep. PGA tournament golfers must cut and collect a minimum of 500 lbs of grass-clippings in order for their 18-hole golf-round to be considered official.
-----------------------------------
I think putting this into the public discussion arena will generate sufficient awareness of Peak Everything that the voters will flock to vote for this proactive candidate. Then relocalized permaculture can move speedily ahead.

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

Why is this story in "The Oil Drum:Europe"?
I'm new here, but that just doesn't make any sense.

Jerome,

I agree that the contradiction between "conservation serves a critical national goal" and build more refineries indicates a real shortcoming in understanding. On the other hand, as stupid as the gas tax holiday is, the tax is such as small fraction already that it can't have a big effect on demand. It will really just lead to poorer highway repair. Demand reduction in the US might happen through European level fuel taxes, but we have a speedier way: declare a fuel shortage and institute our rationing plan. One should see a big dollar recovery if we were to do this I think. Do you agree?

Chris

Hello TODers,

A 'British Bhopal' for their Organic Gardeners? This is the last thing the UK needs as they go postPeak. Yikes!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/29/food.agriculture
-----------------------------
Home-grown veggies ruined by toxic fertiliser

Gardeners across Britain are reaping a bitter harvest of rotten potatoes, withered salads and deformed tomatoes after an industrial herbicide tainted their soil...

...Shirley Murray, 53, a retired management consultant with an allotment near Bushy Park in Hampton, south-west London, said several of her allotment neighbours had used the same manure bought from a stables and all were affected.

'I am absolutely incensed at what has happened and find it scandalous that a weedkiller sprayed more than one year ago, that has passed through an animal's gut, was kicked around on a stable floor, stored in a muck heap in a field, then on an allotment site and was finally dug into or mulched on to beds last winter is still killing "sensitive" crops and will continue to do so for the next year,' she said.

'It's very toxic, it shouldn't get into the food chain. You try to be as organic as you can and we have poisoned our food....
-----------------------------
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

Weighing in from Australia - and stepping way outside my field of expertise, so this will all be subject to correction by wiser heads.

I think a missing factor in energy policy is financial. A case should be made for building a regional banking sector, with government as final guarantor, having a mandate to finance local developments which would support relatively self-sufficient economic regions. That is, privilege decentralized infrastructure and productivity over national and international systems, even though the latter have better economies of scale and can accumulate capital more rapidly.

My own position is pretty far left. But I took the point of some articles by Ron Bailey on the venerable libertarian site, www.reason.com. Bailey was writing about climate change and carbon, how they seem to overwhelm every realistic mitigation scheme; and he wound up saying that the most effective use of the money would be to leave it in peoples' pockets, and let them make their own arrangements.

Something to that. Of course, people with a lot of money have a lot of choices, while those on a tight margin may find their only choices driving them from bad to worse. But what makes it especially threatening for the poor is that they don't have effective local organizations, nor entrepreneurial backgrounds, nor capital.

The local bank, serving a local community, used to fill that need. The bank was largely in the same boat as the local businesses, had to know them well, had an interest in their survival. I won't list all the pressures to amalgamate that have been working through the last century, but there's no doubt they have led to an incredibly streamlined system for disconnecting money from locality, and reattaching it to demographics, and to particular modes of saving and borrowing. And that has probably tended to optimize economic growth; but it has also tended to where productive capacity is centralized, but consumption is spread way out.

You have this maxim round here, Economize, Localize, Produce; and you've talked substantially about what this means for individuals. I've no doubt, as early adjusters, so to speak, you're way ahead of the game. But you can see how big the risks are, even with your eyes open, in making a bad call.

Surely, ELP needs to be done on the scale of a mini-economy that can look after itself, in terms of staple foods and transport, and finance. And I'd reckon that scale is substantially larger than the independent commune - more like a city with surrounding townships. That size is big enough to finance taxi fleets, light rail, wind farms, agriculture. Projects that would be Herculean for a family or commune become practical; and if there are better technologies coming, cellulose-to-ethanol etc, a regional economy can take advantage.

This picture of the mid-level is what's missing from not only Bailey's perspective, but pretty much everyone's. Neither Party apparatus in the US is thinking this way. And that's silly, because the mid-level offers a real chance for transition to a low-transport economy, while leaving in place the entrepreneurial modes and economic relations that people are used to. It's the economies of scale that have us hooked on the present levels of fuel consumption.

.

The $300M prize is NOT how people run serious R&D efforts.

There was a long discussion over at Environmental Economics, from which I repeat a few posts:
===
It sometimes makes sense to use public money to subsidize efforts that:
- require long-term research
- private industry hasn't thought about
- offer long-term benefits, but need a limited-time subsidy to help get down the cost curve to be competitive with longer-established technologies

Let's see:
- Strong universities have well-established battery projects
- Some car companies, especially Toyota & Honda, have been doing serious work on batteries.
- Various companies are trying much harder building electric cars.
- Venture capitalists look at business plans all the time for better batteries, and even fund some.

This doesn't sound inattention or lack of interest.

In any case, big ideas for crash R&D projects are generally silly, showing that people asking for them don't understand R&D portfolio management.

I worked 1973-1983 at Bell Laboratories, at its height 25,000 people and arguably the strongest industrial R&D lab ... ever. Its record for innovation is rather good, in part because for a long time it knew what business it would be in, and would support brilliant scientists working on things that might or might not pay off in 20 years. Monopoly money is nice: much of the bedrock for computing & communications, transistors, solar cells, lasers, UNIX, etc.

But, we had a standard mantra:

"Never schedule breakthroughs."

Rather, in R&D we did "progressive commitment", with R+AR being 5-10% of the total staffing:

Research (R)
Applied research (AR)
Exploratory or Advanced Development (ED)
Development
Deployment (scaleup)

This means, one has a bunch of small R efforts spread across many years. One selects promising ones to turn into AR efforts. The most promising move on to ED and then D. You only do D with technologies you know work. The big money is in scaleup and deployment.

You could never count on R/AR for anything in particular, or on any particular schedule, but you always kept an eye on them to grab anything interesting.

This also means that if you want to have large-scale effects soon, you do it with technologies you have in hand *right now*, while managing the R&D flow.

CA managed to keep the electricity/capita flat over the last 30 years, while the US as a whole rose 40-50%. This was just paying attention and making myriads of incremental improvements, not needing any magic technology.

More R&D on energy efficiency of all sorts is quite welcome, but just throwing giant pots of money out there is silly. In particular, with a few rare exceptions, government employees are not equivalent to good venture capitalists in choosing and nurturing some kinds of projects.

====

The devil is in the details. I'm not against prizes in general - the DARPA prizes for robot cars have been terrifically productive ...

but those efforts are *very* different from creating new battery technology, i.e., they were really system integration efforts, often by teams of students. (And DARPA is a government entity with some track record of funding good R&D.)

My issue is seeing calls for massive R&D efforts, into areas that in fact could sue R&D funding. It's just that I've done R&D, or managed it, or helped evaluate project proposals for funding, or done R&D project trouble-shooting [including for a guy who was later Bell Labs President] for 35 years, and the devil really is in the details.

It would be nice to feel that those calling for such really understood R&D management... I can be convinced, but it is all too easy to waste money. Just out of curiosity, how's the US budget compare for military R&D and energy R&D? Hmmm.

Right now, if it were me, I'd be funding all-out efficiency efforts with current technology, and a lot of that is just policy. For example:

a) If the EPA weren't so busy fending off CA and its friends [gas mileage]

b) And the DOE weren't busy fending off CA's wish to require more efficient electrical transformers [and washing machines]

c) And if Congress could manage to renew Renewable Tax Credits

d) And if every state PUC rewarded utilities for being efficient, not just generating MW

We'd save large amounts of energy.

Hello fellow doomers

I have read enough this site is peak bs,,HENRY,, aren't we wise to say replacing oil with ethanol is a disaster,

I would much rather give my money to an american citizen or did you hear about 911 no?

aren't we just a little misleading to say the government has been blocking the utility's from building [ any new ] nuclear power plants...when it has been the environmentalist movement demanding environmental impact studies that go on for years and new ones are added before the first ones are completed,,,ect ect, our current president has been trying to build these nuclear power plants for years now and almost everybody here knows it,,,

Henry you said,,
Just remember that government solutions crowd out private solutions. Resources are limited so if government directs them into the solution they see, then the resources are not available for private solutions, including what you think you should do on your own to protect yourself.

bs,,,it's the other way around,,the private environmentalist movement has been crowding out the government that has been trying to protect all the people while the environmentalist movement have been trying to protect shellfish at the bottom of a river somewhere and place more importance on shellfish than on his fellow man and has meddled in our energy supplies now to a point where your trying to blame it all on the government to hide your blundering ways,,,just keep on building ng fired power plants and see what happens,,

The demand for oil is now greater than supply and we all know what that means,,, there is no need to cut off our electric supply at the same time,,, I think the most idiotic statement that I read here was the fuel supply for nuclear power plants will only last for a hundred years so there's no reason to build any more. As j Hendrix may have known there is no way out of here says the king to the lier,,,cheap oil is gone--cheap ng is gone--wind and solar do not replace neither of these as free as sunlight and wind may be.

So now your environmentalist movement proposal is to use very expensive oil to replace/update our current electric power supply system by adding one that is intermittent and dependant on the wind to supplement power for 3 hundred million people and does NOTHING ,,,to address our transportation fuel disaster that's upon us now ? .

it's a joke no ?

OK here's the deal,,,,there's no oil/gas to burn in the cars any more,,with nuclear electric we have a hundred years more to re tool and build electric cars or walk and bike it's just that simple

Thomas Edison may be right about electricity I hope so because we must electrify our road ways to be able to move food to the city's IE trolley trucks, maybe a little slower than what we have now but whats the hurry? timken bearing and Allison transmission will make a bundle building gearboxes for those GE electric motors,,,,or we can push our cart to the country put the veggies in it and push it a hundred miles back to the city and eat,,,it's just that simple.

a peak doomer.

The new carlrove inspired Republican mantra to "solve" the energy crisis is DRILL DRILL DRILL. On the west coast, the south coast the east coast in the Potomac River! Why don't the neons drill in Iraq instead. There is probably some oil there. Or was that their intention all along?