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Monday, April 26, 2004
This is an example of a captioned picture of my sandtray at work.
It's very easy to link to photos and caption them.
I use a wonderful free Photobucket service to host the photographs.
When I am composing (or editing) a post to my weblog,
I use the linking tool to associate the photo URL (in my photobucket album) with the caption text.
Comments-[ comments.]
It's very easy to link to photos and caption them.
I use a wonderful free Photobucket service to host the photographs.
When I am composing (or editing) a post to my weblog,
I use the linking tool to associate the photo URL (in my photobucket album) with the caption text.
Monday, April 05, 2004
As always, it's great to hear from Terry Garcken. I've posted his recent Letter to the Editor of the Ventura Country Star.
I've just become convinced from doing the research that the peak in oil "production" and its subsequent indefinite decline will happen in the near future. I put the word, production, in quotations because no one produces oil. We extract it, and as much of it as there may seem to be, it is a finite amount. There is no doubt concerning the last sentence. The only question is when the decline in the extraction of oil will begin. I believe that it will happen soon and we are woefully prepared for it!
Any comments?
Recent coverage of the rise in gasoline prices ignores an underlying issue that oil geologists and others have been warning of for 50 years -- an issue that we continue to ignore at our imminent peril. This issue has two parts to it. First: between now and 2015, the maximum possible amount of oil that human's will be physically capable of extracting from the earth, regardless of OPEC, politics, regulations and conspiracies (there is no one to blame here), will on average begin to decline and will continue to decline indefinitely. Second: all of the feasible alternatives to oil, combined, can replace only a fraction of the energy and other essential products provided to us by the current level of our oil consumption -- estimated in 2001 to be roughly 20 million barrels a day for the U.S. alone and roughly 80 million barrels a day for the world.
The consequences of this are profound. Most immediate will be an unending and steepening upward trend in the prices of the energy-dense fuels needed for transportation -- gasoline, diesel fuel, and kerosene (jet fuel). This will undercut one of the principal pillars of the U.S. economy and of the "global economy" -- cheap, fast transportation of resources, goods and people. Moreover, continual and permanent increases in general energy costs do not support the conventional economic models that insist on constant growth, to which we have become so accustomed. To put it mildly, we're in for one long recession.
More alarming are the consequences that the impending decline in world oil extraction and the resulting rise in oil prices will have on our industrialized agriculture. Overshoot by William R. Catton, Jr., published in 1980, makes a convincing, well documented argument that the human "carrying capacity" of the earth has been increased ten-fold by the use of petroleum-derived fertilizer and pesticides and by the petroleum driven mechanization of agriculture, over what it would be without oil. In that book Catton also demonstrates that one consequence of industrialized agriculture is to reduce the ultimate sustainable carrying capacity that will be left when the oil is gone. In his book, The Party's Over, 2003, Richard Heinberg's analysis concludes that when the oil runs out, the world's human population will need to be less than 2 billion to remain within the earth's human carrying capacity. Nearly everyone alive today will experience some of the consequences of this decline in oil extraction rates. Our children will have to deal with one of the most difficult times in human history.
Conventional wisdom says that as oil becomes more expensive, alternatives that are currently not "economically competitive" will supplant oil. Heinberg argues, case-by-case, that no alternative, nor any combination of alternatives, can take the place of oil. Central to his analysis is the concept of "net energy yield" or what he calls "Energy Return On Energy Invested" (EROEI). Besides the investment of money, obtaining any form of energy for performing useful work also requires an investment of energy: to find, to mine and to process the raw forms of that energy, and/or to build the machinery and infrastructure for trapping and making that energy form useful. If the resulting amount of energy available for useful work is not greater than that invested -- an EROEI greater than 1 -- that energy source is useless, no matter how much money is thrown at it. As a point of reference, prior to 1950, the EROEI of U.S. domestic oil was better than 100. Today, estimates of the EROEI of imported oil range between 8.5 and 11.1, and this decline will continue, as more energy intensive extraction methods must be employed to obtain the residual oil in existing wells.
I suspect that most of your readers will dismiss this letter. Before doing so, however, I challenge them to spend some time reading the material that can be found at web sites such as that mentioned above and, and/or reading Heinberg's book cited above (in paperback). His careful analysis of the alternatives to oil, and of those arguments claiming that we have nothing to worry about, are the best of any of the several books I have read on the subject.
I also challenge the editorial staff of the Star to assign someone to research material on this issue and write one of those comprehensive series of commentary on one topic such as those John Krist has so ably written in the past. We still have options for ameliorating the consequences of the impending oil extraction decline but the longer we wait, the less effective those options will be. We should be discussing this issue in the context of the upcoming national elections and I don't think there is any politician who wants to touch this. Jimmy Carter tried to warn us after the Oil Embargo of 1973 and was promptly thrown out of office by a population that preferred Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" message. Too bad -- if we had started seriously addressing this issue 30 years ago, we could have made the coming decades much less difficult.
Knute T. Garcken
Comments-[ comments.]
I've just become convinced from doing the research that the peak in oil "production" and its subsequent indefinite decline will happen in the near future. I put the word, production, in quotations because no one produces oil. We extract it, and as much of it as there may seem to be, it is a finite amount. There is no doubt concerning the last sentence. The only question is when the decline in the extraction of oil will begin. I believe that it will happen soon and we are woefully prepared for it!
Any comments?
Recent coverage of the rise in gasoline prices ignores an underlying issue that oil geologists and others have been warning of for 50 years -- an issue that we continue to ignore at our imminent peril. This issue has two parts to it. First: between now and 2015, the maximum possible amount of oil that human's will be physically capable of extracting from the earth, regardless of OPEC, politics, regulations and conspiracies (there is no one to blame here), will on average begin to decline and will continue to decline indefinitely. Second: all of the feasible alternatives to oil, combined, can replace only a fraction of the energy and other essential products provided to us by the current level of our oil consumption -- estimated in 2001 to be roughly 20 million barrels a day for the U.S. alone and roughly 80 million barrels a day for the world.
The consequences of this are profound. Most immediate will be an unending and steepening upward trend in the prices of the energy-dense fuels needed for transportation -- gasoline, diesel fuel, and kerosene (jet fuel). This will undercut one of the principal pillars of the U.S. economy and of the "global economy" -- cheap, fast transportation of resources, goods and people. Moreover, continual and permanent increases in general energy costs do not support the conventional economic models that insist on constant growth, to which we have become so accustomed. To put it mildly, we're in for one long recession.
More alarming are the consequences that the impending decline in world oil extraction and the resulting rise in oil prices will have on our industrialized agriculture. Overshoot by William R. Catton, Jr., published in 1980, makes a convincing, well documented argument that the human "carrying capacity" of the earth has been increased ten-fold by the use of petroleum-derived fertilizer and pesticides and by the petroleum driven mechanization of agriculture, over what it would be without oil. In that book Catton also demonstrates that one consequence of industrialized agriculture is to reduce the ultimate sustainable carrying capacity that will be left when the oil is gone. In his book, The Party's Over, 2003, Richard Heinberg's analysis concludes that when the oil runs out, the world's human population will need to be less than 2 billion to remain within the earth's human carrying capacity. Nearly everyone alive today will experience some of the consequences of this decline in oil extraction rates. Our children will have to deal with one of the most difficult times in human history.
Conventional wisdom says that as oil becomes more expensive, alternatives that are currently not "economically competitive" will supplant oil. Heinberg argues, case-by-case, that no alternative, nor any combination of alternatives, can take the place of oil. Central to his analysis is the concept of "net energy yield" or what he calls "Energy Return On Energy Invested" (EROEI). Besides the investment of money, obtaining any form of energy for performing useful work also requires an investment of energy: to find, to mine and to process the raw forms of that energy, and/or to build the machinery and infrastructure for trapping and making that energy form useful. If the resulting amount of energy available for useful work is not greater than that invested -- an EROEI greater than 1 -- that energy source is useless, no matter how much money is thrown at it. As a point of reference, prior to 1950, the EROEI of U.S. domestic oil was better than 100. Today, estimates of the EROEI of imported oil range between 8.5 and 11.1, and this decline will continue, as more energy intensive extraction methods must be employed to obtain the residual oil in existing wells.
I suspect that most of your readers will dismiss this letter. Before doing so, however, I challenge them to spend some time reading the material that can be found at web sites such as that mentioned above and
I also challenge the editorial staff of the Star to assign someone to research material on this issue and write one of those comprehensive series of commentary on one topic such as those John Krist has so ably written in the past. We still have options for ameliorating the consequences of the impending oil extraction decline but the longer we wait, the less effective those options will be. We should be discussing this issue in the context of the upcoming national elections and I don't think there is any politician who wants to touch this. Jimmy Carter tried to warn us after the Oil Embargo of 1973 and was promptly thrown out of office by a population that preferred Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" message. Too bad -- if we had started seriously addressing this issue 30 years ago, we could have made the coming decades much less difficult.
Knute T. Garcken
