James Howard Kunstler writes about the problems he sees us heading towards when it comes to our energy needs:
As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will bleed into another. Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as well as government spending. These systems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis. What’s more, the stress induced by the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking across our nation.
And that’s the worst part of our quandary: the American public’s narrow focus on keeping all our cars running at any cost. Even the environmental community is hung up on this. The Rocky Mountain Institute has been pushing for the development of a “Hypercar” for years — inadvertently promoting the idea that we really don’t need to change.
I wanted to post about this because it’s now the top story at reddit. The idea that people need to change their lifestyle in the face of a crisis is a difficult message for any politician or pundit to put out there. If the predictions turn out to be overly alarmist, all it does is make people complacent towards the real dangers that exist. This is a common problem with the environmental issues we face, and why I often compare them to the foreign policy issues we face. When either side of the ideological spectrum exaggerates the dangers (whether it’s Kunstler on the environment, or Joe Lieberman on Iran), it only works against those who are intent on fixing the problems.
I tend to believe that Kunstler is underestimating what the demand for technical innovation will produce. When people are faced with the prospect of giving up their lifestyle, their financial calculus changes. When this happens across the globe, I believe we’ll see some radical changes, but we’re not returning to a time where everyone is cut off from the rest of the world again. The innovations of the 20th century (commercial air travel, computers, the internet, space travel, and television) were largely inconceivable to someone in 1900, and the major advancements of the 21st century are largely inconceivable to us now. It’s not a bad idea for people to change their lifestyles, and with the price of oil what it is, many people are going to anyway. But what we need to do most of all is place more emphasis on science in our educational systems. And we need to return to a time when our government valued and respected science so that the innovations that build the 21st century come from America, just as they did in the 20th.
Roger Rabbit Agrees With GOP Chair!!
“I think humor has the potential to be far more devastating to your opponent than the meanest thing you can say about them.”
— Washington State Republican Party Chair Luke Esser, quoted in The Seattle Times
I couldn’t agree more! I make deprecating fun of Republicans every day. It’s easy to do because they’re so fucking ridiculous. Their ideas are ridiculous. Their lies are ridiculous. Their candidates are ridiculous! Their spin, propaganda, and shills are ridiculous. Everything about them is ridiculous! So, the temptation to ridicule them is irresistable.
Ridiculing Republicans is what I do. It’s easy, it’s fun, and it’s patriotic! Show me a Republican and I’ll show you a laughingstock. =:-D
The Barack Obama/Jimmy Carter approach ain’t gonna sell. It didn’t work for Jimmy Carter, and it ain’t gonna work now. We DO NOT have to give up our lifestyle, nor wreck our economy.
The fact of the matter is that we have plenty of oil. We have untapped oil that exceeds what Saudi Arabia has. But librul politicians have been on a decades long attack against the oil industry, and as Obama’s spiritual mentor would say “the chickens have come home to roost”. So as Jeremiah would say “God damn Congress!!”
The fucking idiots in Congress passed a bill last week outlawing restrictions in oil production. (Note, they apparently do know that supply and demand affects price, not the fact that GWB is from Texas.) But they aimed it backwards; instead of aiming this bill at OPEC, they should aim it at themselves. Let’s outlaw Congress’ attack on the energy industry. Let’s make it illegal to pass any law or erect any legislation that would in any way cripple production of oil. Let’s let the oil industry fix this problem NOW.
About 2/3rds of the cost of a fill-up is raw material; the rest is refining, transportation, and marketing. $4 gas is very directly a result of $130 crude prices. And today’s high crude prices are an artificial construct of the financial derivatives markets, not a product of supply-demand fundamentals.
Oh sure, the supply-demand equation has changed with the rise of China and India as consumer nations. But virtually everyone in the oil industry, from Saudi shiekhs to Wall Street analysts, say fundamentals support a price of only $50 to $80 a barrel, and the rest is a result of frothy financial speculation on oil futures. I tend to believe them.
The world’s most expensive, hard-to-get oil can get tapped for considerably less than $80/bbl. At that price, plenty of petroleum substitutes are available. You can, for about $40/bbl., convert the U.S.’s abundant supply of coal into petroleum fuels.
In fact, the world’s problem is not too little fossil fuel, but too much. A couple years ago, National Geographic quoted a leading atmospheric scientist as saying, “We’re going to run out of atmosphere before we run out of fossil fuels.”
A case in point: The tar sands deposits in Canada and heavy-oil deposits in Venezuela, by themselves, contain about 3 times as much oil as the world’s original petroleum reserves.
Right now, alternative fuels from these so-called unconventional sources aren’t flooding into the market for the same reason deep-sea and arctic oil isn’t gushing into the world’s tank farms and refineries: The infrastructure to extract, store, and transport them has yet to be built, and building it requires enormous capital and decades of effort.
But there’s another reason, too: The industry isn’t pouring capital and effort into developing these sources. Why? Because the CEOs who get paid big bucks to gamble with billions of their shareholders’ dollars don’t believe today’s high oil prices are going to stick.
Neither do I. It’s a bubble, folks.
The real problem facing our society is not $4 gas, but $2.50 gas, which is what we’re going to be paying when crude prices come back down to earth, which they’ll do and fairly soon. That’s why I began selling my oil stocks two weeks ago. Oh, I can’t time the market or individual stock issues — no one can. I may be too early by weeks or months. But I don’t want to be holding my oil shares when the shine comes off crude prices. Better too soon than too late. The applicable word here is “crash.” That’s what nearly all the experts think oil prices are going to do.
And when we go back to $2.50 gas, Americans will go back to their fuel-piggish driving habits. You can count on it. After all, God gave them their gas hogs and the right to drive them as much as they want. Or so we, as a nation, believe anyway.
What this country needs is $5 gas. What America needs is higher gas taxes, and the most productive thing we could do with the revenues is invest it in mass transit. $5 gas will do more to solve our traffic congestion than all the highway construction in the world. We can’t build our way out of congestion. But we can tax our way to a more rational transportation system, and that’s what we’d do as a society if we had any brains. Because, despite the abundance of oil and oil-alternatives in the ground, it won’t last forever, but more immediately, we won’t necessarily be able to access it because, you see, the oil companies don’t believe we’re willing to pay $4 or $5 for gas on a continuing, long-term, permanent basis. And they know we don’t have to, because market fundamentals don’t support today’s crude prices. If they invest their companies’ funds on the premise that they’ll be able to get $130/bbl. a year or two years from now, they’ll lose their asses and they know it.
With the money gushing into Exxon’s coffers, many people assume that Exxon is ramping up development of new oil sources as fast as they can. They’re wrong. Exxon is using its windfall profits to increase dividends and buy back shares — in other words, distributing it to shareholders — not investing in developing new oil sources. Exxon’s capital investments as a percentage of revenues are at an all-time low. The story is the same with other private oil companies. And you don’t see the governments that own 90% of the world’s in situ oil reserves spending big bucks on developing new supplies, either. Why would they? Why spend money to flood the market with supply and drive down the price of your product?
There isn’t, you see, a supply shortfall. Only a superabundance of speculators — and a financial system that allows them to drive crude prices ever higher. It’s the futures market, not the supply chain, that needs fixing.
Rabbit – Do you understand how the “fundamental” price of a barrel of oil is determined? We taught this to Sheik Yamani back the late 60s which led to the early 70s oil shock.
The short version is this: A commodity facing a downward sloping demand curve has a revenue maximizing price. A few years ago, I was able to find enough data to build the demand curve and calculated the revenue maximizing price for a barrel of oil. My calculation was within 5 cents of what the actual market was at the time.
This past week, a stalinst show trial was held in Congress. All the moonbats got to grandstand for a few minutes. The oil industry execs said that the fundamental price of oil should be between $30 and $90 per barrel. But I couldn’t find anything beyond that… I couldn’t find any hard economic analysis to back up the $30 to $90 assertion.
Does anybody out there have any real hard price/demand data that would show what the fundamental price should be? It’s an easy calculation if the data is available.
We’re not driving toward disaster, we’re reproducing toward disaster.
In 1900 there were 1.6 billion people on earth.
Today there are 6.6 billion people on earth.
In forty years there will be 9 billion people on earth.
It’s lonely being the only person who can see the big picture.
$4 gas is cheap. I understand gas costs $11 in Istanbul and they have terrible traffic.
These are the “good old days”.
Kunstler is a good writer but he’s way too pessimistic and his pessimism is a barely concealed rage against suburbia. Most people don’t know he jumped on the gloom and doom wagon over the Y2K problem.
Peak oil and climate change are much, much bigger problems of course but again nothing we can’t solve if we could only defeat the subsidized, well-connected and hugely rich status quo.
Sounds like a tall order but it’s been done before.
There isn’t, you see, a supply shortfall. Only a superabundance of speculators — and a financial system that allows them to drive crude prices ever higher. It’s the futures market, not the supply chain, that needs fixing.
And a lack of investment supply. A lot of loose money sloshing around and nothing for it to do but seek the highest return in bubbles like real estate (oops scratch that) and oil and gas futures.
@2 “The fact of the matter is that we have plenty of oil. We have untapped oil that exceeds what Saudi Arabia has.”
Redneck, my friend, please overlook all the mean things I’ve said about you. After all, you had it coming — plus more. But I digress. What I’m wondering is if you could find enough kindness in your heart to share with a cute, sweet, furry, huggable bunny where these oceans of untapped indigenous domestic oil are located. I have some idle investment funds looking for opportunities, you see.
In short, Redneck, talk is cheap. Show me the oil! Where the fuck is it? And don’t give me this ANWR garbage, because ANWR is no Saudi Arabia. ANWR is only a measly, piddling 7 to 10 billion bbls. which is nothing — the U.S. alone goes through that much in a little over a year, not counting the rest of the world. You know as well as I that global consumption exceeds 30 billion bbls. annually and ANWR is only a 3-month supply at best.
So, where is this oil you’re talking about, man? If you’re referring to coal, then yes, I agree with you — coal can be converted to petroleum fuels at today’s prices and we have enormous domestic coal reserves. Or, if you’re talking about squeezing more oil out of old wells, yes, I agree there’s some potential there, because conventional production practices leave two-thirds to three-fourths of the oil in the ground and we now have the technology to get some of that oil the old-timers left behind — but you’re talking about stripper wells, my friend, wells that kick out a few dozen or a couple hundred barrels a day and you can’t get the kind of oil you’re talking about that way, even though the U.S. has over a million oil wells.
So, do you know something I don’t, Redneck? Where is the fucking oil, my friend? Or, are you just blowing smoke out of your ass, like you usually do?
Does anybody out there have any real hard price/demand data that would show what the fundamental price should be?
Wrong question. In the past year, the price of oil has doubled. What economic conditions have changed in such a way as to account for that amount of increase?
@4 Oh, I see. You’re the guy that governments and oil company CEOs come to for the fundamental support level for crude prices. That’s why you’re so fucking rich that you have time to spend several hours a day spewing on an obscure little local political blog.
Instead of pretending to be a trailer-park yahoo with 4 college degrees and a Hummer, you’re now M. King Hubbert. The trouble with your latest identity theft is the guy you’re impersonating has been dead for several decades. Would you like his Social Security Number? I can get it for you. It’s available on the internet. Oh, you didn’t know that SSN’s of dead people are publicly available? Well, they are. Richard Nixon’s is 567-68-0515.
So, if you’re so fucking smart, what’s the fundamental price right now?
I’m waiting. (tick, tick, tick, tick, tick … )
And I don’t think the price will ever drop in any dramatic way. China and India will just sop up any extra supply. Other countries around the world have ideas of their own as well.
I read the other day that most demand growth is actually in the oil producing countries. Yeah, places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, West Africa, etc. Makes sense – it is their oil. Why shouldn’t they make cheap oil and gas available to their own people?
We and Europe and Japan getting more efficient ironically just helps China and India and the rest of the world. Which is ok in my book. We had our turn. Now it’s their turn.
@5 Not to worry, nature will take care of that problem. One way or another.
@7 Yeah, there was a really interesting article a few months ago in, I think it was Atlantic or Harper’s, about how our economy now depends on bubbles and there’ll always be another one just around the corner.
I had thirty bucks in my pocket the other day and put a quarter tank in the minivan at ARCO. ARCO which is generally the cheapest gas.
Then the next day I shopped at Safeway, got the 10 cents/gallon discount and filled up the remaining half tank for $40 bucks. They were matching the ARCO price for regular so I got a good deal – even better than Costco.
Pretty scary $80 to fill the tank and that’s scrounging for a loss leader. I’ll have to drive the minivan a lot less.
Gee. I remember in the late seventies a president Carter who predicted all this and tried to do something about it — only to have Ronald Reagan (the very first retarded president) reverse it all.
I want my 40 acres and a mule — and some seeds that haven’t been genetically altered.
Rabbit – Go to the American Petroleum Institute, and get the file “Access to Federal Lands”. I’d post the link, but apparently goldy has the filter setup to prevent links from being posted. API says fed lands alone have 102B bbl.
@11 “I read the other day that most demand growth is actually in the oil producing countries. Yeah, places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, West Africa, etc.”
Those countries don’t have enough people to consume enough supply to cause a quadrupling of prices since Bush took office.
There are houses that were built in the late seventies (when there were builder and consumer tax incentives to do it) that are totally energy independent. They are off the grid. A house like that, an electric car, and the collected works of Ed Begley, Jr. are all you need.
One word: Deregulation.
@5 Troll is partially right. The world can support billions of people if they live very, very modestly. If everyone on the planet wants a car, roads, to be obese, and every gizmo made……
re 16: Or, you are too stupid to figure out how to do it. Look for the thing that says ‘link’ when you post a comment.
Laissez faire economic ideology. Letting people do whatever they want, regardless of its impact on society. Looking the other way at deceit, manipulation, and creative accounting. Monetary policies that knock the legs out from under the dollar helps. But what’s really fueling speculation in oil futures more than anything else is low margin requirements in commodities exchanges. Back in 1929, people were allowed to buy stocks with 5% down and 95% borrowed money. In the current oil bubble, speculators are purchasing contracts with 5% down and 95% borrowed money. Want to know where our next financial crisis will come from? Guess …
MTR family portrait
To underestimate the extent to which cheap and abundant oil has greased the skids of existence over the last 60 years is a tempting mistake. Take a three-sixty look around the room you’re in right now–everything you see has been affected in one way or another, directly or indirectly by fossil fuel. The salad in the corner grocery store travels an average of 1200 miles to your plate. And though science and technology should never be underestimated, blithley assigning this problem to the solved file is a form of cold-fusion, whistling past the grave yard.
Here’s some oil, Rabbit:
http://blogs.moneycentral.msn......n-u-s.aspx
@11 “And I don’t think the price will ever drop in any dramatic way.”
Oh yeah, it will, wait and see.
17 – Iran? West Africa? Mexico? Russia? Don’t forget Iraq who has had an explosion of car buying since the invasion.
Europe/Japan/US demand growth has moderated or even declined slightly in response to price signals. Demand in the developing world has exploded.
@14 Don’t worry, this isn’t going to go on much longer.
The long-term trend in gasoline prices, in inflation-adjusted real terms, is downward. U.S. consumers spend a smaller percentage of their income on gasoline today than they did in 1970. That’s why it’s been so damned hard to dampen our car culture.
@18 If you can live on the mushrooms growing in the basement.
24 – 4.3 billion barrels and we use what?
7 billion per year?
Some oil is right. Better than nothing I guess.
25 – Ok a worldwide depression on the scale of the 30’s can drive down the price dramatically and for a long time.
But history doesn’t often repeat. It mostly rhymes.
Meanwhile, on the home front, Sound Transit appears to have re-engineered their political strategy, but nothing else.
They plan to split Phase 2 into two parts to make it more palatable to voters. But they still want to build the same super-expensive system, along the same route, at the same cost, and with the same unfair tax.
By dividing Phase 2 into subparts (1) and (2), they can boast that Phase 2 will be completed in 12 years instead of 20 years, and will cost $10 billion instead of $18 billion. Then they’ll come back for the rest, and in the end, we’ll end up paying for an $18 billion light rail system that took 20 years to build — exactly what voters rejected last year.
In other words, Sound Transit is responding to Prop. 1’s defeat by trying to pull a fast one on the voting public, not by redesigning the system to use our tax dollars more responsibly. They’re deploying attractive young PR flacks and expensively-printed slick literature instead of design teams. It’s the same bullshit, repackaged.
What we have here, folks, is a public agency that is tone deaf to the people it taxes and unresponsive to citizen input. That’s not surprising, considering they’re unelected and have already been given taxing authority by the Legislature. And, by God, they’re going to use it! Come hell or high water, they’ll collect a half-penny sales tax for 30 years and spend it all! To hell with whether we taxpayers get good value for our money! Remember what people said about AT&T when they were a monopoly?
“We don’t care. We don’t have to.”
That’s Sound Transit in a nutshell, circa 2008. I’m still a “no” vote because, much as I would like to support mass transit in our community, they haven’t offered a rational, reasonably priced, sensible transportation system that I can support. This is a case of incompetents taking a good concept and butchering it beyond all recognition.
@31 It won’t take that, or even a mild recession. All bubbles are self-pricking, and this one is no exception.
The foundation of any financial bubble is the buyers’ belief that someone will pay even more for the commodity than they did. But eventually, as prices go higher, all markets run out of willing buyers, and then one cow smells danger and moments later the whole herd is stampeding for the exits.
When it occurs, it happens very fast. High-flying stocks, for example, can shed 50% of their value in less than a minute in this era of computerized trading. That’s what makes speculating so dangerous — there’s no warning, and you don’t have time to get out.
And it’s utterly insane that our government allows hedge funds to buy oil contracts with only 5% down.
@21 No, what Redneck says about links is true. After Goldy changed to the new format, I had to discontinue posting links because a link automatically kills my comment — it never gets posted. It goes into spam and is vaporized. I e-mailed Goldy about it, and he said there’s nothing he can do about it, because he’s now using external software that he has no control over. I would have to change my screen name to post links, and I’m not willing to do that. If MTR says he has the same problem, I believe him. This might be hard to understand for someone who doesn’t have a problem posting links, but it has to do with the fact that spammers use certain screen names (and “Roger Rabbit” is one of them), and so the filtering software is programmed to intercept these screen names. It doesn’t affect all of us, but it hinders some of us.
@23 That’s funny! See #1.
@24 This isn’t a new discovery. This oil was found in 1951, and has produced many studies and reports since then. It’s shale oil, which is extremely difficult and expensive to get out of the ground. The State of North Dakota estimates there’s about 167 billion barrels of oil in place within the state boundaries, but only 2.1 billion barrels is recoverable with current technology. The USGS estimates total recoverable oil from the Bakken Formation at about 3.6 billion barrels — about a third of the size of ANWR. That’s roughly a 40-day global supply.
The North Dakota “play” is being developed exclusively by independents. The major oil companies aren’t touching it. Why? Because when crude prices come back down to their fundamental support level, there won’t be enough quantity or margin in these wells to make it worth their time. Independent producers will pump thousands of barrels a day out of North Dakota, and this oil will create hundreds of local jobs, but it won’t make America self-sufficient in oil.
As for the claim that North Dakota is America’s biggest oil find ever, that’s journalist hype. It’s poppycock. Far more oil came out of the east Texas fields, and out of the Los Angeles Basin, than will ever be extracted from Bakken — unless someone figures out a way to unlock shale oil from its reservoir rock.
That’s not easy. The best oilfields — e.g., Saudi Arabia’s — consist of porous rocks like limestone. Shale is a dense, hard, nonporous rock. To get oil out of it, you have to fracture the underground rock formations, then inject water or carbon dioxide under pressure to force the oil through the cracks to the wellbore. Only a tiny percentage of the total oil contained in the underground rock makes it to the surface. The recovery potential is something like 1% to 3%, compared to 33% to 90% for a conventional oilfield. So, the gross estimates of oil in place aren’t very informative; what counts is recoverable oil, and in the case of North Dakota we’re talking maybe 4 billion barrels tops, which hardly compares to the giant Middle East fields holding hundreds of billions of barrels of oil.
Getting even that much depends on recent developments like horizontal drilling and enhanced tertiary recovery techniques coupled with high market prices (because these techniques are expensive), which is why nobody bothered to drill there for 50 years.
Lee,
Kunstler is a great read every monday–he defines acerbic. Is his prognosis correct? There is no doubt that “peak oil” is a real phenomenon. Since we have an oil-based economy, an ever outward shifting supply curve is going to impose drastic constraints sooner or later, and right now there is no inexpensive energy equivalent on the horizon.
The assumption that “something” will come along, or positing that “we cannot envision the great technological leaps” sometime in the future may well turn out to be the greatest self delusion of our age.
Are we returning to the horse and buggy era or will we all die in the fumes first? The center may indeed not hold.
Troll and All Facts Support My Positions have nailed it. Our planet is on a crazy march to reach a peak of 8 to 9 billion human inhabitants by mid-century, if it doesn’t “all fall down” before then. Yes, Troll, it is indeed lonely to see facts that seem preposterous to most of humanity. It’s like that New Yorker cartoon: “54% can’t do the math, 46% can’t do the math.” But you can assuage your lonliness by reading “Yes” magazine and “The Great Turning” by David Korten. My question is, when push comes to shove, will we turn or burn?
@38 People worried about the ever-increasing human population should be more concerned about the impending crash of the world’s fisheries than the distant crash of oil supplies. Cheap oil is no longer available in the quantities we want to consume, but there’s still an awful lot of expensive oil and oil-equivalents out there — probably enough to push the oil peak beyond my lifetime and maybe yours as well. And remember, re-engineering cars to get twice as much mileage effectively turns $4 gas into $2 gas. Considering how many Americans flocked to gas guzzlers during the oil price crash of the 1990s and early 2000s, doubling our average mileage efficiency is no trick at all — all it requires is for people to trade in their 12-mpg pickups and SUVs for 24-mpg sedans. On the other hand, fish is an important human food resource and we are not only stripping the oceans of their wild fish stocks but we’re also altering the ocean ecosystems in ways that impair their ability to support fish populations. Supplies of fish for human consumption are shrinking even as human population and demand for fish expands. And then, we have the idiot Republicans in Alaska who want to dig up the world’s most productive salmon river to get at copper, molybdenum, and gold ores in the rocks underneath — these fools would readily trade a perpetual supply of one of the world’s best food fishes for a few hundred temporary jobs and a few billion dollars of private profit for a handful of greedy miners.
@38: The central point of Diamond’s book Collapse is lost on most of us.
Alas.
@34…RR…
I have zero problem posting links. Might it not help if, instead of complaining about how you only have dial-up, you got into the game by getting high speed Internet access such that you’re able to compete with the big boys?
The Piper
@39..Roger. All well and good (that recent news story about acidic oceans was pretty fightening), but this is a chicken-egg argument. Which came first? Collapsing fisheries or exploding world population? Throw in cheap abundant energy (i.e., oil)…a heady brew indeed.
@41 Worry about spending your own money, and let me to decide what my financial priorities are. In any case, my inability to with post links without having my comments get kicked into spam filter oblivion has nothing to do connection speed. That affects my ability to download videos, yes, but watching the videos you link to isn’t my highest financial priority. If you want me to watch them, then you should pay my broadband bills. As for me, I’m perfectly content to make do with POTS.
I don’t totally discount doom and gloom but I prefer to believe in what I’ve seen work in the past: technology advance.
Big example: most of us wouldn’t be around if it weren’t for the Haber process.
Jared Diamond is an entertaining read but I don’t think his studies of the distant past completely apply to our current situation.
@26 “Don’t forget Iraq who has had an explosion of car buying since the invasion” Yer right YLB. How do you think they make all them car bombs!
YLB..perhaps. But Diamond demonstrated pretty conclusively that past societies collapsed when they hit the wall of used up natural resources. Our resources are fixed (air, water, arable land, forests, oil, you name it). With exploding 3rd world demand, we may well be embarked upon a path to disaster.
Kunstler’s vision of disaster within 50 years time may be premature, but I tend to agree that we cannot continue to live and develop as we have in the recent past.
@42 “Which came first? Collapsing fisheries or exploding world population?”
Neither. Overfishing and polluting aren’t directly correlated to population levels. Diamond points out in his book that the 1,000-year-old Anasazi Indian settlements in the U.S. Southwest were abandoned because of ecological collapse following human-caused deforestation, and that the ancient Easter Island human society suffered a drastic population crash for the same reason.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, a Native American population of several hundred thousand was supported by the salmon runs for 10,000 years. They understood that overfishing would destroy their livelihood and for thousands of years their cultural systems ensured the escape of at least 50% of the fish. Interestingly, that’s the same figure that modern scientists have arrived at as the escapement rate required to sustain the fish runs. One assumes the earliest Indians figured this out by trial and error. Perhaps they fished out some of the smaller streams, which later were recolonized by salmon (salmon are good at recolonizing, which is why volcanic eruptions, floods, and other temporary disruptions don’t permanently wipe out fish runs), and a light bulb went on and they got a good handle on how many fish had to get through their weirs in order to keep fish coming up the rivers year after year. In any case, they got the numbers right and put effective conservation practices in place through their taboo systems, and never ran out of food supply until white men showed up.
The stupid and greedy white men took every fish they could lay their hands on. By the late 1800s, commercial fishermen were taking over 90% of the fish, and by 1890 most of the Pacific Northwest’s major salmon runs had collapsed. It took the white man only 50 years to destroy the salmon runs. A lot of people think the dams killed off the salmon, but they’re wrong. We had lost most of the Columbia River salmon by 1900, more than 30 years before the first dam was built.
It is overexploitation, fueled by ignorance and greed, that results in wrecking our resource base long before population pressures would do so. In the modern era, the fundamental problem is that science is subordinate to politics instead of the other way around. We know what we’re doing wrong, but the people and institutions running our society aren’t willing to listen.
According to National Geographic, only 500 species go extinct every day…. We got lots more to go!
By the way, the answer is simple. Electricity. It is free (unless the wind stops blowing, sun stops shining, and tides stop moving) Electric cars? Recyclable (mandatory).
I went to Florida a few months ago, and there was not one single day I was there that the wind did not blow 10mph plus (avg) for a whole week. They need coal fired powerplants like a cancer survivor needs a carton of cigarettes.
I have read many times there was enough wind energy in North, and South Dakota, and Montana alone to power the whole USA.
It has already been proven that even with today’s technology electric cars work extremely well. Imagine what a few billion in research could do.
Exxon doesn’t make a profit off electric cars…..
The Seven Sisters
The Great Oil Companies and the World They Made
by
Anthony Sampson
Hodder and Stoughton, 1975, ISBN 0 340 19427 8
By the way, gasoline costs society over $20 per gallon. Exhaust fumes cause cancer and treating it is expensive. You add environmental costs, and military costs, along with eliminating the subsidies, and the true cost is over $20 per gallon. Possibly $30 per gallon.
We just pay for it in different ways…..
Hate to rain on everyone’s parade.
Fossil Fuels = Kill
Just ask any Iraqi…..
Electric Cars = Answer
46 – Whoa! A lot is mistaken in that but I’ve got to go with the family to see the next Indiana Jones movie.
Later folks. Great discussion here…
Old technology matches a crusty old geezer: Rodent and his dial-up. How fitting.
The only way we’ll solve the energy problem is to talk the big oil companies into bankrolling alternative energy. As long as THEY can make money, their pals in the GOP will bless alternatives and we’ll all get a chance to get away from Arab oil.
By the way – there’s three month’s worth of oil at ANWR which would take years to get and which the oil companies have already said they’d sell to Japan so attention all righties – stop lying. It will cause your miserably small peckers to fall off.
Our state experienced something similar in the 1970s with respect to logging practices. That’s when timber employment and clear-cutting peaked, followed by a dramatic collapse.
In the 1970s, Washington’s forests were being cut at 5 times the sustainable rate. When the crash came, unemployed loggers and mill workers bitterly blamed environmentalists for putting restrictions on logging public lands. Given their immediate economic distress, their discomfiture was understandable, but these short-sighted individuals couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
What happened was after they had exhausted the tree supply on private forestlands, they demanded unrestricted cutting of forest lands, in order to preserve timber industry jobs.
Those jobs would have been lost anyway, in two ways. First, mechanization of logging was going to eliminate a large number of forest jobs even if the tree supply never ran out. But, as mentioned above, the cut rate was many times the tree replenishment rate, and eventually the industry would have run out of trees to cut. Then, they all would have been out of work.
What makes more sense, cutting all the trees to have a lot of jobs for a few years, or cutting at a sustainable rate so you have a smaller number of jobs, but will have those jobs forever?
In fact, it was economics — not environmentalism — that killed the Northwest timber industry and its jobs. The industry moved to the southeastern U.S. where the economics were more favorable to the bottom line, it’s as simple as that. Our region is a high-cost producer. We can’t compete against Canada and other parts of the U.S. Our logs and lumber cost too much. That’s the real reason why the Northwest timber industry collapsed.
But if economics hadn’t brought it down, mechanization and overcutting would have. There was no way that the hundreds of thousands of logging and lumber mill jobs were going to last. And the wanton logging practices of that era did immense harm to our other resources.
@53 I’ll pit my contribution to these comment threads against yours before an impartial jury of academics or other competent professionals anytime you like. What have you brought to this thread besides vacuous whining? Are you merely jealous because you own your stock portfolio instead of mine? My IRA earned a 50% return last year, and is in the black for this year despite the market downturn — how are you doing with yours?
If you feel I should have broadband and are willing to pay for it, contact Goldy and he’ll forward your check to me.
@54 An Oregon college professor (sociologist by training, as I recall) named Bruce Podobnik wrote a fascinating book titled, “Global Energy Shifts.” He demonstrates that historic changes in energy technology — from firewood to coal, and coal to oil — came about as a result of cultural rather than economic forces.
His discussion of the worldwide shift from a coal-based economy to an oil-based economy is particularly illuminating. For example, England was amply endowed with coal reserves, but prior to World War I decided to switch its navy to oil, even though England had to import all of its oil over perilous seas. They did it because oil gave naval vessels critical tactical advantages over coal-powered ships.
Prof. Podobnik points out that in the early 20th century, when the shift from coal to oil occurred, oil was 3 to 4 times as expensive as coal. But the shift occurred anyway because coal extraction is labor-intensive, and miners’ strikes had repeatedly disrupted coal production in the late 19th century. About 70% of the price of coal was labor costs, compared to less than 10% in the oil industry, which enjoyed relatively good labor relations because it could afford to pay workers decent wages. The coal industry, by contrast, abused and starved its workers.
What happened was, during the series of financial panics and economic depressions that gripped the late 1800s, coal producers tried to stay afloat by cutting wages and increasing production quotas, provoking a labor backlash that led to formation of miners’ unions and strikes. The working conditions in 19th century mines were appalling; coal mining was so dangerous that tens of thousands of miners died every year, and children as young as 10 worked in the mines. When companies cut wages by 25%, and at the same time raised rents in company towns and ordered workers to produce more coal, the workers walked out. In those days, capitalists and their lackey governments frequently used violence to break strikes, but in the end they capitulated to the miners because the skills required to extract the coal couldn’t be replaced with unskilled strikebreakers.
The coal industry’s customers — governments, militaries, railroads, and industrialists — watched all this unfold and decided the greater reliability of oil supplies was worth their extra price. The greater efficiency of oil-powered industry was a bonus they happily accepted. Once the oil industry ramped up production, a distribution network was built, and large supplies of oil became readily available, there was no turning back and the world economy completed its shift from coal to oil. But oil’s supremacy was not inevitable and might not have happened absent the coal industry’s labor problems, because the world still has enormous supplies of coal.
If Prof. Podobnik is right, then cultural factors, not economics, are keeping us enslaved to oil; and even running out of oil would not move us to another energy technology unless cultural forces did so — we would starve instead.
In other words, don’t count on market forces to get us from oil to new energy technologies. It will take a contemporary version of the 19th century’s rebellious coal miners to get us there, something that cuts the legs out from under the entrenched oil industry, some large political and/or social force capable of overwhelming deeply entrenched economic interests. It’s possible. Remember, oil was a much more expensive energy technology than coal when it achieved supremacy over coal, so the greater expense of today’s alternative energy technologies doesn’t mean oil will win the day. If history is a guide, our energy future will be determined much more by social factors than economic factors.
@47: Market economic growth models do not work without the assumption of expanding population. As far as the native pacific northwesterners go, it is difficult to believe that 100-300 thousand people employing pre industrial technology could have “wiped out the salmon” even if they had wanted to.
But I agree market economics, with its non-captured externalities plays a significant role. Again, chicken meet egg.
@49: I may still have my copy buried in a box in the garage.
@58 Oh yes, they could have. On the tributary spawning streams, their weirs could span the entire stream and capture every single fish. You should read up on how the weirs were built to permit escapement, and how strictly-enforced tribal customs required their prompt removal from the streams after the designated quota of fish had been caught.
@58 (continued) The stock market depends on an ever-expanding economy which in turn depends on an ever-growing population. In fact, population growth accounts for a significant portion of the dependable long-term growth in corporate sales and profits on which stock investors depend for the capital gains that make stock investing worthwhile.
And, of course, this won’t continue forever. Someday, human population will reach a saturation point and stop growing, resource bases will reach their limits and put brakes on economic expansion, and perpetual economic growth will become a relic of the past. At that point, the capital gains engine comes to a stop and the stock market will cease to be a way for ordinary wage earners to multiply their savings many times over and perhaps become rich even though they never invented a breakthrough product or founded a colossal business enterprise. In short, the stock market is a goose that isn’t going to keep on laying golden eggs forever. That, too, will come to an end.
@61: This article tends to agree with you…(?)
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol7/iss3/art6/
@62 It is likely the current Pacific Northwest landscape, which was created by the last ice age 16,000 years ago, has never existed without humans. While the human presence in the Pacific NW is not precisely dated, it may go back 50,000 years or more. (Salmon and their evolutionary precursors have been around much longer, at least 40 million years, so humans are a relatively recent arrival.)
It is highly probable this region supported a continuous human society for at least 10,000 years. By any definition, of course, that must be considered a sustainable society. What adaptive changes it underwent to survive so long we do not fully know. I would guess, though, that as the aboriginal fishing technologies were relatively simple, they were “discovered” early on and the fish resource was the foundation of this society almost from the beginning and therefore the aboriginal fishing culture was, by definition, sustainable in nature because it sustained this society for 10,000 years (and perhaps much longer). The social organization and mechanisms by which it did so were intricate, as anthropologists’ discussions of the potlatch system reveal.
And then stupid white men came and convinced themselves the natives were “primitives” and “savages” …
The oral traditions among my rabbit relatives tend to confirm these views — even my granddad can’t remember a time when there were no humans around here, and he’s almost as old as the Pike Place Market.
The laugh is going to be on whomever is unfortunate enough to get elected in November to the presidency. The shit will hit the fan pretty heavily sometime in the next five of six years.
We can wait out. Invest for the long-term and hunker-down. That’s my advice.
I have a question for you gullible fools who believe in “global warming”.
How will we know when global warming is “fixed”? If the earth is too warm now, then it must be that there exists the perfect target temperature.
I’d like to know what you idiots think the perfect temperature of earth should be. I want a number. And if you can’t provide one, then how the fuck are you going to measure progress?
Didn’t think so…
Fucking idiots…
THe demented rants of Mark the Pinhead. What a silly fool. Even old Newt believes in the need to address climate change. But not crazy old Mark.
Carbon emissions are clearly impacting the atmosphere, and recent news stories also indicate that they are affecting the oceans.
Enjoy your rants Pinhead.
MTR – it would be more fitting if you just got hit by a bus and squashed like a pancake.
@36, Rabbit, you need to do better homework. It’s not shale oil. It’s sweeter than anything in the Middle East. And though this deposit has been mapped in the past, newer technology has allowed the true amount to become known. Hey, I’m not saying this piddling find will deliver us from doom. In fact, I believe the American people should be the true owners of any current and future oil finds under our soil. Let contracts to the best bid to pump it out for a certain guaranteed profit, and the rest goes into our tanks and the strategic reserve. No 400 million dollar bonuses for fat cats from resources belonging to the commons.
I want a number.
Pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 was 280 ppm of CO2 iirc.
Now pay your fucking gambling debt.
@3
Thanks for the post.
Hopefully prices will stay high until after GM and Ford retool their plants to make smaller cars and we get some bike lanes built.
@62
Thanks for the link.
@65 “How will we know when global warming is ‘fixed’?”
When you’re huddling in whichever cave you crawled out of shivering your ass off. Pay your gambling debt, you neanderthal troglodyte!!
@67 That’s too quick. He deserves something more lingering and painful, like bone cancer or syphillis.
YLB – Read the fucking question idiot. I don’t give a fuck about CO2. The question was temperature…. ya know like in degrees F.
Now give me a fucking number.
Holy shit. Apparently the debate is NOT over. ALgore wrong again.
31000 scientists say it’s bullshit.
Roger Rabbit
Wow. Interesting history, thx for the reads!
74 – The climate scientists claim that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations are altering the weather and due to increasing negative feedback scenarios could ultimately cause the oceans to rise.
So it makes perfect sense to target the concentration of those gases in the atmosphere.
But you’re not interested in things that make sense are you?
Just pay your fucking gambling debt and get out.
@68 “It is estimated that there is are significant reservoirs of oil shale beneath the Bakken’s 200,000 square miles (520,000 km²). There were first discovered in 1951, but have long frustrated efforts to extract oil.”
(Wikipedia)
“Until recent years, the technology simply wasn’t available to economically extract the oil from the Bakken shales …”
(energyandcapital.com)
@75 Well well, Mark the Trailer Park Deadbeat Bet Welsher linked us to the notorious Oregon Petition as “proof” that global warming doesn’t exist. Let’s examine this in more detail — because it turns out Redneck misrepresented what those “31,000 scientists” signed.
“The text of the petition is often misrepresented: for example, until recently the petition’s website stated that the petition’s signatories ‘declare that global warming is a lie with no scientific basis whatsoever.’ The two-paragraph petition used the terms catastrophic heating and disruption, not ‘global warming.’ The original article associated with the petition (see below) defined ‘global warming’ as ‘severe increases in Earth’s atmospheric and surface temperatures, with disastrous environmental consequences’. This differs from both scientific usage and dictionary definitions, in which ‘global warming’ is an increase in the global mean atmospheric temperature without implying that the increase is ‘severe’ or will have ‘disastrous environmental consequences.'”
Many questions have been raised about the Oregon Petition. For example, it “had a covering letter from Frederick Seitz … and an attached article supporting the petition.”
Seitz indeed was a prominent physicist (he died in March 2008). He also was a “paid permanent consultant for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company” (Wikipedia) and founder of the politically tainted George C. Marshall Institute, which is “known for its skepticism toward the mainstream scientific opinion on climate change, and its strong support for the Strategic Defense Initiative,” and is funded by the usual rightwing suspects — Richard Scaife, the Bradley Foundation, and their ilk.
The article accompanying the Oregon Petition was based on satellite data that has since “been revised, and shows warming.”
“Raymond Pierrehumbert, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Chicago, said that [the article] was ‘designed to be deceptive by giving people the impression that [it] … is a reprint [from the National Academy of Sciences] and has passed peer review” which it is not, and has not. “Pierrehumbert also said the article was full of ‘half-truths’. F. Sherwood Rowland, who was at the time foreign secretary of the National Academy of Sciences, said that the Academy received numerous inquiries from researchers who ‘are wondering if someone is trying to hoodwink them.'”
After the petition and article appeared, the National Academy of Sciences issued a news release stating, “The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy.”
Questions also have been raised about the validity of the alleged 31,000 signatures of “scientists.” These signatories include, among others, one of the Spice Girls. In 2005, Scientific American reported that it “took a sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science … 11 said they still agreed with the petition… [s]ix said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer ….” Scientific American estimated the number of actual climate researchers signing the document at only 200.
(From Wikipedia)
Needless to say, the Oregon Petition is not taken seriously in scientific circles. Aside from the fact it doesn’t say what global warming deniers assert it says, it lacks the backing of a single notable academic or scientific institution or organization. It’s only known sponsor is the “Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine,” a 501(c)(3) group based in Cave Junction, Oregon, an isolated timber and mining town of about 1,400 people known locally as a haven for rightwing survivalists. According to Wikipedia, OISM listed 6 members (2 of whom have since died) and “does not enroll students or teach courses.”
Pay your gambling debt to Goldy, creep!
Someone must be paying Redneck to post that crap.
@62. Proud To Be An Ass
Thanks too for the link! Last summer, doing an Alaska cruise, I took the Potlatch Tour in Ketchikan. Admired the long houses and totem poles, but hadn’t realized just how sophisticated their society truly was.
Quite an old trick, MTR, you set the terms of the debate and then challenge others to prove the point you put into their mouths. The issue is all about carbon dioxide. This chemistry stuff likely does make youe simple brain confused.
Lee
Good post.
I think an education in science needs to go beyond those who might find solutions in the lab to the future leaders and the electorate,
We are all too ready to accept creationism and opposition to global warming as some kind of quaint eccentricity. After all, just because more Americans believe in angels than believe in Darwin, what harm can this do?
A LOT OF HARM.
As one example let me explain why I side with you on legalization of marijuana. Frankly I really would not care in marijuana is legalized, but I do care that the public and the politicians make their decisions based on a rational view of what we really know.
The amount of ritualistic behavior in our society is truly onerous. look at the idiocy in re VIOX, silicon breast implants, Agent Orange, Red Dye 2, asbestos, and, yes, marijuana.
Guilt for this luddism is not born only by the right. The left can be equally bizarre. For example, we become absolutely Orwellian abut terms like race and many on the left have a bizarre view of what a normal diet is for our species.
How does this relate to the current Malthusian threat? For one thing, the hope that science will find a perpetual motion machine is misplaced. There may be incremental changes in how we obtain energy but the simp;est physics text knows that the thermal capacity of Mother Earth is limited and thermodynamics tells us that work=heat.
So, I think you are being a bit of a Pollyanna when you dream that science will solve the energy shortage. I would rather see science eduction become a market force so that people make lifestyle choices that re consistent with a new world where energy is less abundant.
That world may actually be a better one than this one. European flats are certainly as attractive as American sprawl. The Internet brings an utterly new meaning to terms like “recluse” and ;celibate . And the shared wonder of science could be a great pleasure for all of us if we weren’t so damn stupid.
The oil crisis would disappear overnight if the governments across the county and developed world instituted mandatory telecommuting programs. The US government estimates 50% of its civilian employees could telecommute. All government/business managers would be required to come up with a telecommuting plan for their departments with all employees being allowed to telecommute unless the manager can prove a need for employee butts in a office chair. Oil consumption would drop in half within the year.
To enhance telecommuting technology, the city could give every business and residence in the City 1 gigb/s network access 1000 times the speed of Qwest and Comcasts’ steam age technology. The service would add only a small amount to the communication cost inherent in City Light’s smart meter program.