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Visit this incredibly neat site, let the flash load and then just sit back and watch the counts rise. Overshoot mean anything to you? Yikes ...
And this is also worth your time. If you haven't seen the DVD "End of Suburbia", you can watch a short version at YouTube.
James Kunstler delivered a passionate, no bullshit lecture last night and I was there to hear him speak. While the talk was largely just a recap of his book "The Long Emergency", it was interesting to stick around for the more "off the cuff" Q&A session afterwards. I didn't learn much, but I liked thinking about other people's perspectives and line of questioning. As Kunstler said, in the future Americans will probably need to attend many more meetings to discuss local economic & energy issues. I feel like I broke the seal last night, since this was my first local energy "talk". I'm quite sure it won't be the last.
Kunstler ran through the peak oil problem and railed against the easy motoring society he so clearly detests. He claimed his was a message of hope, but it's difficult to find a ray of hope when you've been buried under an avalanche of bad news including: peak oil, global warming, misallocation of resources, psychology of pre-investment, stupid zoning & land use law and 3,000 mile ceasar salads. Kunstler just about burst an artery discussing the state of our rail system. He also stressed that there isn't any time to sit around and feel sorry for ourselves.
All valid points. I'm on board, though somewhat fatigued by the prospect of what lies ahead.
Someone asked what Kunstler himself has done to prepare for the long emergency. I was a bit taken back to find out that - other than choosing to rent (close to his downtown area) rather than own - he really hasn't done much. That's telling. Nobody knows what is going to happen in the future. In fact, there could be more conventional oil out there to be discovered and produced. That would delay the onset of any emergency. Then again, Ghawar could collapse tomorrow and the emergency would begin in earnest, and unstoppable.
Nobody knows. We'll just have to see what happens. In the meantime, get out of debt and move closer to where you work.
This MSNBC article only gets it partially right.
Yes, Americans are clearly not ready to reduce their use of petroleum. Nor will they feel compelled to do so before an actual shortage or severe crisis hits them and wakes them up. You can raise the price, but we found that $3 gas does not really reduce demand. Only shortage will provide the impetus for Americans to consider lifestyle change.
The article misses the point when it states
The problem is not that the world will soon run out of oil. Yes, consumption is rising - but more oil will be found ... the oil shale in Colorado amounts to another 1 trillion barrels (of oil).
That implies we can continue to run our lives in the future the way we're running them in 2006. That is a very dangerous message to send to readers. In fact, oil shale and oil sands and other alternative (read: much more expensive) sources of crude oil will never be produced at the same flow rate that traditional oil is produced. The world is consuming 85 million barrels per day. That figure is growing (remember China?). As traditional oil depletes ... alternative oil will not be able to replace so many millions of barrels per day.
Sure, oil is not running out. However, cheap and easy-to-extract oil that flows right out of a tap is definitely running out. The fact that MSNBC and the rest of the mainstream media can't seem to distinguish on this very important point is troubling.
In early September, Chevron announced it had struck paydirt in the deep water Gulf of Mexico with its Jack 2 well. The MSM locked onto this story like a feral pitbull. This find was being called our next Prudhoe Bay (Alaska) and some reports indicated they may have stumbled upon 15 billion barrels of oil. That's a lot of oil, folks ... and oil prices, which had been in Tom Petty (free-fallin, yeah!) mode even before the Jack 2 news, dropped further still.
Today, the price of a barrel fell below $60 and the DOW index hit a new nominal peak. Whew! It's a good day to be a Jim Cramer-type, I'm sure.
What the MSN neglected to do was ask the important questions about Jack 2 and what it means to the US. Fortunately, we have Matt Simmons of "Twilight in the Desert" fame around to provide this important info.
Matt offers some truly astonishing insights in that interview, including:
They [Chevron] finally figured out how to do a flow test for almost a month, and based on that flow test from that one well they’re willing to go ahead and drill more appraisal wells and they really hope that the Jack field might contain as much as 300 million barrels of oil. How that got translated into another Prudhoe Bay was saying, “gosh, if the 300 mile area of the Gulf of Mexico in this lower Tertiary rock formation that’s never been tested turns out to have about 50 or 60 additional Jack wells, it will be the equivalent of Prudhoe Bay.
This is the same thing as saying the 15 billion barrel number is a total guess.
And in the meantime we have a massive shortage of the type of expensive, complicated deep-water rigs that it would take to basically make even an elementary probing of this 300 mile area of the lower Tertiary.
So, we don't even have enough hardware to figure out how much oil is really down there in the near term. Typical!
Well, how long would it take to analyze the entire zone if we weren't constrained?
Our analysts think it would tie up about two-thirds of the deep-water rigs of that water depth for about a decade to do that job.
I believe Matt is referring to the world's supply of deep-water drilling rigs. Youza!
Matt then gives it to us straight:
So it [Jack 2 announcement] was a massive over-reaction.
Jack 2 might have been a fantastic, jizz-inducing oil find if it had been discovered under land in 1973. I think it's fair to say that Jack 2 will not be the answers to the cornucopians dreams in the next 15 years. By that time, global oil depletion will have enforced a semblance of reality currently not present.
Talk to you about Jack 2 in 15 or so.
In light of recent revelations from Bob Woodward's new insider book about the Bush administration, State of Denial, that show how senior Bush staffers (Condi Rice) ignored dire warnings from the CIA about imminent attacks from Osama bin Laden ... I thought it the perfect time to spread some link love to a fascinating website named Patriots Question 9/11.
Something just doesn't smell right about the 9/11 Commission. And it goes without saying that the Bush admin has stunk like shit for years.
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