[Seed] IEA sees oil supply crunch looming

Goody do, Ms. nearing!

Well, the documentary might work on some people, but I doubt if would work on most. I don't mean to be pessimistic. Rather, I just think there are wildly varying differences between projections published by the US Government and some large energy companies and those projected by the oil-company scientists in Crude.

Check out this report from the EIA (that's right, IEA rearranged! Chance? I think NOT!), a US Department of Energy statistical agency that is "independent." There's a couple of graphs there depicting a peak in oil production as early as 2025 and as late as 2047. These are nice, polite, safe projections that tell us there's plenty of time to find energy alternatives, nothing like those of Colin Campbell or Ken Duffeyes in Crude, which are within the next few years.

While I don't have the specific methodology for the creation of these projections, the differences can be explained in a few ways. One is to use, as a figure, the whole of remaining world supply without regard to how difficult it is to remove the second half of any oil reserve, and the associated price hikes that brings. Another is the variance between the claims of OPEC countries (run by regimes that are not enamored of the truth) and the actual remaining reserves they possess. It doesn't help OPEC if their oil prices rise past a certain threshold, which would surely be result of dire supply projections. A third is that the US Energy Department isn't taking into account the growth of demand from China and India, which is already surpassing older projections. A fourth is that it's almost impossible, even with complete data, to know what the present supply situation is until years after the fact; our knowledge of oil reserves is on a permanent two or three year delay.

There's yet another complication. A great many Americans base their geopolitical opinions on the kind of faith structure we see in religious belief. Patriotism, at its heart, is a kind of state cult that treats devotion to the state as devotion to a God-type. Hence, to doubt the state is a kind of political blasphemy.

The United States is so focused on a cheap-oil economy, on the profligate use of a finite supply of fuel, that the impact of having dismantled our mass-transit infrastructure, of using automobiles almost exclusively for land-transport of goods and people, of the wasteful 1/10 calorie ratio between food production/oil-product-for-food-production, is lost in a miasma of belief. People literally construct the mythos that petroleum whistle-blowers are unpatriotic, that there will, in accordance with Energy and Defense projections, be bountiful supplies of petroleum or at least ethanol fuel well into the future, and most importantly that the actions of individual people are insignificant and unimportant next to the sheltered belief in government. Americans are people living in a participatory democracy that act like they're living in an authoritarian regime.

It is that mentality, in my opinion, that most cripples American society in confronting what may be the worst crisis of energy, economy and simple food production we've ever seen.

Wonder what the per gallon price at the pump will have to be before we make some serious lifstyle adjustments.

Hello Mr. or Miss Prospero1,

Thank you for your comment.

If I may treat your question literally, Americans do not have enough options to make sufficient lifestyle changes in the limited time available. The American infrastructure is so car-oriented, and unnecessarily so, that the time it would take to convert to a mass-transit friendly system is probably greater than the amount of time remaining before gasoline prices become prohibitive. Government subsidies already make gasoline artificially cheap, and as the federal government slowly slides into bankruptcy, even this might prove unsustainable.

In this case, by the time market forces encourage a change in consumer behavior, it will already be too late. The laissez-faire paradigm has become obsolete.

If the problem is to be addressed, it would require a mobilization of effort on par with the Second World War, to rebuild America's train network and convert the existing fleet of trains to electric power, to eliminate all long-distance transit by individual vehicles, a complete reconstruction of city-centers and a complete abandon of suburbia in favor of high-density, walkable neighborhoods, a drastic reduction in military forces and the demonetization of enormous swaths of the US economy, specifically in communications, media and information technology. At the same time, an enormous shift to renewable energy resources would be required, and a complete overhaul of the corporate food-supply system, and a series of "Manhattan-Project" sized initiatives in cooperation with scientists from all over the world would have to be undertaken.

ALL THIS HAS TO HAPPEN NOW. Every day that such is delayed, the task becomes more difficult. There is no laissez-faire solution to this problem. It is so large and so portentous that it requires a new paradigm, a new type of economy, a new ethic.

Alas, I have no faith that humans will be able to survive it.

None of which will happen.

Ms. Nearing,

Sorry to have taken so long in replying to these. I detect an element of fatalism in these comments. While I think I understand why this is so, I must also say that it was never my intention to...bring you down.

Thing is, human beings have survived through some very horrible events in the life of our species. Despite these things, we have produced a truly wonderful legacy that is oft buried in our failures. Not the least of that legacy - and in the spirit of eat, drink and be merry - is the love of life and the determination, against all odds, to keep living despite them.

I don't know if you're a Tolkien fan, but I've heard it tell that Tolkien's work contains a principle derived from the pagan ethos, that despair is a kind of secular sin. Each of us is born into a world in which we're going to lose. In the end, you and I and everyone else is going to die, whether it's Peak Oil or WWIII or a fall in the kitchen. But we keep going in spite of that, and we should not despair, because none of us knows what will happen. We may guess, but we simply do not know.

In this sense, doom is a state of mind. We doom ourselves by believing that we are doomed. In his work, Tolkien's characters keep fighting despite this. The Elves have fought for thousands of years against their own disenfranchisement, even though they know their project will fail, and that they will have to leave Middle Earth in the end.

I don't think the story of Peak Oil is any different (except that it isn't fiction). We are also in an epic, heroic struggle for which the end is not certain. And we must not despair, nor dismiss the great struggles in our stories as trifling fantasy. Tolkien himself did not fight through the trenches in the Great War, or send his son Christopher off to fight the Nazis, only to write a book for which he thought we'd derive no applicable value.

If you see something in the world which isn't correct, then you must change it, or at least do what you can to help change it. Never before in history have we had such an ability to affect the circumstances of our existence. I don't know what our future holds, but I do know that we are only as doomed as we believe ourselves to be.

Thanks, Mr. or Ms. Prospero, for the kind and extensive comments.

Tell me what you mean by demonetization of big swaths of US economy.

This is based on a concept that I've heard sometimes called The End of Money. It isn't an anti-Capitalist or Socialist/Communist precept, as it may sound. Rather, it's what some think of as the natural end of technological advancement, that technology enables the refinement and delivery of goods and/or services to the point where they cost so little that cost, itself, vanishes in all or part of that economic sector. Basically, demonetization is a step towards a technocracy.

This is, in my opinion, the natural evolution of a free-market economies. I mention, specifically, communications, information technology and media because these parts of the economy can only remain for-profit institutions by force. Cable, radio and phone companies are already given an artificial right to the use of public infrastructure in order to charge the consumer to use what consumers have already paid for. For such reasons, the net-neutrality issue is central to the internet, because with the advent of video-sharing, streaming audio and VOIP, the cable/radio/phone triumvirate is doomed.

Similarly, the internet has provided opportunities to provide all the amassed knowledge of humankind to anyone with a connection. Tax revenue could be used to provide universal, broadband, free internet for every person in the world for less than what we pay companies to allow us access the same. The potential for education, technological and medical collaboration, and for cross-cultural dialog is infinite. We've barely scraped the surface of what is possible with existing technology, much less what is coming tomorrow.

There is similar potential for energy and transport. We, in America, often think of the current setup of highways, pavement and fumes as some necessity, when it is nothing of the sort. It is a system designed to nickel-and-dime consumers at every level of their lives by creating ultra-finite infrastructure that must be constantly renewed from a pool of limited resources, and thus constantly paid for by the user. Things might have evolved much differently had it not been for certain circumstances of history, but that's a digression I'll delve into another time.

At first, I decided we'd all need to give up cars. I've begun to think that may not be true....Yet I know very well that the technology to fuel passenger cars with something besides gasoline -- something renewable and green -- is all over the place....I don't see why the current distribution system, i.e., the local gas station, couldn't be commandeered to provide what those alternative fuels or power supplies are....But doable.

If you're speaking of biofuels, such is, in my opinion, a pipe-dream. Biofuel production is a way to artificially maintain the system of limited, centrally-controlled fossil-fuel distribution that already exists, and will not solve any of the problems associated with fossil fuels, except for imminent shortages. Remember, too, that biofuels supplant food crops. If the current goals of the EU and US were to be attained, mass-starvation might be the result in South America. Already food prices have been affected by biofuel crops. It is not even a temporary solution.

If you're speaking of hydrogen-fuel, there is great potential for it, but the technology isn't developed enough to compensate for a collapse in the face of fossil-fuel shocks. Too, gasoline infrastructure and hydrogen-fuel infrastructure are completely different. Every gas station would have to be replaced.

How wonderful would it be if the cities could be revitalized, and once again be places where people live, AND work, AND raise their families. How wonderful would it be if the fact that it's no longer cost-effective to visit each other in far-flung towns, and families begin to remain in one place for generations again.

There is an urban-planning movement based on this concept called New Urbanism, and it exists alongside other movements that often call for more stringent measures. The types of cities you speak of are old, pedestrian cities that were built before automobiles. Modern cities, conversely, are a product of military-base planning principles that were applied after WWII. Single-story box buildings, broad highways, utilitarian layouts, are all standard military methods, and are dependent on the exertion of energy supplies that can be associated with military imperatives. Plus, we have given police and firefighters undue influence on how our cities and highways are constructed. Instead of emergency managers adapting to the city, we adapt cities to emergency management.

I think you can have the best of both worlds. You can have compact, tight-knit communities but maintain the ability to travel far and wide. In fact, I'd hate to give up that ability.

if people dusted off the mule-drawn plow still in many a barn (I actually still see the occasional mule or horse drawn, single furrow plow, the kind that you walk behind, being deployed, believe it or not) and planted a big garden, remembered how to fish and preserve food and started doing it again.

Check out square-foot gardening. It's a method developed by an efficiency expert for more efficient gardening with less space, less water...less everything. The old agrarian communities likely had their advantages, but the extraordinary amount of work associated with traditional farming was completely unnecessary. You might also look into farming technology developed in Israel for low-nutrient soil and low water availability.

I like your concept of this being a national priority with assets and personnel mobilized to make it happen in a major way. I don't just like it, I love it. I hate to admit my first reaction is skepticism, given the atrocity that the government has become.

Your skepticism is well-placed. But people all over the world are far too skeptical, the result of slaving away at some traditions that should, rightly, have died in the dust of history. American conservatism, likely one of the most destructive ideologies in ever conceived, isn't traditional at all, but plays on this notion of traditional values without reference to whether they ever really worked all that well.

Make no mistake. We're not dealing with a constitutional government any more. The vast majority of the decisions that affect American life are made in secret and classified safely away from the constitutional process. Even the semblances of democratic institutions have, in recent years, been filled with demagogues and scoundrels that are working to tear apart the very nation they claim to serve. We seem to think when Bush is gone, the fight is somehow over, that we can just pick up where we left off and move forward. Nothing could farther from the truth.

Think what we could do with the $12 billion a month we're spending to destroy the middle east, should we somehow manage to pull off the miracle of getting out of there. We could do a great deal for our dear old country with that kind of money, couldn't we?

I should think so. As it stands, the war seems merely a spigot for corporations to drink from, and for our super-rich brethren to become even more, undeservedly super-rich.