Oil imports are down BIG - to 9,983,000 barrels each and every day for 2009.
So let's go to the videotape! (Or in our case, the calculator.)
9,983,000 X $80 X 365 days equals $291,503,600,000. Somehow I think that to be vaguely important.
You see, the U.S. trade deficit is ONLY about $400 BILLION for 2009, with nearly 75% of that for Oil. All we need to do is eliminate Oil imports and we will ONLY have a $110 Billion trade deficit! And this is with the US$ so low it could walk under a nickel without bending over.
The only reason Oil exporters were willing to do engage in this transaction is that The Powers That Be in those Oil exporting countries were, for all intents and purposes, US CITIZENS. They sent us their Oil, we sent them our "Money", they, as US citizens, repatriated that money and own a significant slug of the American economy and body politic. But this arrangement does not work out so hot for real citizens of those countries, and said arrangement is in its death throws - giving rise to militant Islam, confrontations with nuclear armed states, the destruction of our currency... among other unhappy outcomes. These policies were promulgated and and continued by Republicans and Democrats alike - including our current Hero in Chief.
We need new policies and a new political paradigm, and a way of accepting politically that which we have no control over - that we are going to be forced to live with smaller government, lesser services and benefits, and a new reliance on family and community (and when I say "community", it is with "family" as the foundation of the community), as well as self sufficient, enlightened self interest. I realize how painful this idea is for the Left... you guys felt you were sooooooo close - but everything held by Liberal dogma was built upon a foundation of plentiful and cheap Oil and energy, and that foundation is no more. You are going to have to come to terms with that, because the real risk now is a political crisis born of an insistence on having something that CANNOT be had.
Just look at California.
More soon.
Libertariananimal (at) gmail (d0t) com
34 comments:
I doubt you're going to have as much trouble with the Liberals of the U.S. as much you are with the "Sarah Palins" of the U.S. -- people that think we have lots and lots of cheap energy still available. I'll say it again: 80% of the Federal budget (the states are different but also similar) is for five wildly popular programs: S Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Interest on the Debt and Defense -- these are all mainstays of the Republican/Libertarian-wannabes. Don't worry about us Liberals. Worry about the torches and pitchforks coming from your BASE, who all insanely profit from government programs (like my white, Republican parents). Food stamps for the Liberal Negro welfare queens is a pittance compared to the programs listed above. You still don't see that, do you?
Dude, I don't think it's the libruls who have been out buying up all the ammunition to live out their Red Dawn KKK Randian survivalist fantasies. It's the wingnuts who are already very displeased.
And as wonderful as the Norman
Rockwell American tribal family was, it is pretty much a thing of the past. +50%divorce rates and birth control have taken care of that.
We don't have to yet institute the strict family planning that the Chinese have, but it will come unless we have bio or military dieoff.
Don't worry tho, the Chinese will help us figure it out when the time comes. And we will probably pay them to do it.
I would not count out the family just yet. The disposable family is a fad like hula hoops and (thank goodness, rap) It is not evolutionarily advantageous for us and will be a branch that dies. We will, out of necessity, go back to smaller towns, smaller diets and close knit families. There will be no room for the kinds of manufactured arguements over minutia like "being heard" and "following your bliss" and "co-dependence issues" that drives couples to counciling, where they spend money they don't have to enrich some therapist who goes home to drink and watch internet porn. Co-dependence is underated as a coping tool. We will be co-dependent or die.
Kathy:
Now that is reality. Well said. The family will survive, and even thrive.
Kathy, Codependency or Codependence describes a pattern of detrimental behavioral interactions within a dysfunctional relationship, most commonly a relationship with an alcohol or drug abuser.(from Wikipedia)
You are either being extremely ironic or mean something like interdependent.
Google 'co-dependent' and read about it a little. You might find it informative.
Kathy; rap and breakdancing, etc are ways of uneducated poor kids demonstrating their intelligence and fitness, in hierarchy with other boys and to impress the girls, like qualifications and football at better schools. So if all kids are poor, rap will be the demonstration of evolutionary advantage and so the future of the human race!
Just think if America had dedicated the same trillions to development of American energy resources and transportation since 2001 as it has to engagement in wars to hold the middle east together...
1. We would be much less dependent on foreign oil
2. We would be immune to a great deal of blackmail by foreign tyrants and thugs. It would be much easier for the US to take the high ground in many situations.
3. We would be financially stronger internationally due to much smaller balance of trade deficit.
4. The oil imports displace by internal savings and production would be available to the rest of the world.
5. Millions of jobs would be created in enterprises that would be both profitable and remain in the US.
6. We could disengage from the middle east.
7. The US has many critics and detractors who have benefited greatly from the dirty business the US has had to engage in to hold the world together. They have far fewer natural energy resources than we. They would now be getting their chance to do better! :)
Regards,
Coal Guy
Bur,
We don't have lots and lots of cheap energy. I'd much prefer Sarah Palin. She, at least, is interested in doing something proactive. The Left thinks that as long as they continue to print money, the stores and gas stations will stay full. The day of the CAVE people will soon be over. (CAVE = Citizens Against Virtually Everything).
We certainly aren't going to support exponential growth into the future. The present plan, or lack thereof, however, points us to complete economic implosion in the next 5 to 10 years. The US desperately needs to start NOW to develop what we've got in a rational manner to get us past this transition from fossil fuel. There WILL be a liquid fuel drought soon. It is too late to stop it or control the descent for that matter. Nothing started today will produce or save a drop of fuel in less than 5 years. Every day that nothing happens only worsens the disaster.
You talk about lots of gas at the pumps and food in the grocery store. So, not to worry. Look ahead! The day of reckoning is coming soon.
You talk about lesser fuels and more expensive fuels with disdain and full certainty they will never be used. Absolutely and certainly they will be used. Think about it this way. You are snowed in in a cabin in the woods. There is a freezer full of steak, a freezer full of hamburger and a 100lb bag of dog food. Not long after the steak runs out, the hamburger begins to look really good....
Regards,
Coal Guy
Coal Guy,
Excellent point. We will all end up vegans eating soy product kibble. It can be flavored to whatever rings your bells. Much healthier life style,too.
Same with transportation...we started out walking (it's what our body is designed for) and after all the hot rod Hummer culture, that's where we'll end up. Walking. It's a lot healthier too.
It'll all be OK.
Before the oil boom if a place was too dry to grow field crops, the grassland was used as grazing pasture. The great plains aren’t going away though the Ogallala Aquifer might.
Sarah Palin has had her 15 minutes. When she resigned the governorship, she lost all hope of ever being considered as a serious candidate. The voters don't like quitters (too bad Bush didn't quit :))
Also there is lots of oil out there still: peak oil does NOT mean we are running out of oil. It will just cost more, and the people who can afford it will get it. The question is, in a car-dependent country like ours, who will get left behind?
All political systems are unstable. They are always morphing, because the attributes and virtues that enabled the creation of an earlier step in the series disappear, and new ones arise.
In the case of the USA, however, the new 'virtues' are really vices, and they are only enabling the entropy of the systems. As Rousseau pointed out, polities and nations are organic entities, with maximum lifespans. You can only try to to guide the decay so as to postpone the demise of the system.
Peak Oil is just the knife that is going to finish off the American system before it would have died otherwise.
I think it will be a hard death. Preserving wealth in anything not bolted down, literally, will be almost impossible. Between the government's depredations, thieves, Ponzi schemers and dreamers, and stupidity, most wealth is on its way to being squandered.
Land. Food. Tools. Animals. Families. Skills. Perhaps precious metals. Lead (for bullets). Zinc and copper for casting. Seeds.
Most comments on this blog and others are bargainings with the Devil, who is going to have his due no matter how clever your rationalizations are.
One thing you see very little of is the concept of karma. Whether or not karma exists as a spiritual force, nature kind of works that way: however un-PC it is to say, AIDS was and is spread by what used to be considered vice.
Single-motherhood produces children who are at an extreme disadvantage. This also used to be considered a vice.
Squandering your wealth on "consumer" goods used to be considered a vice. Same with debt, etc. etc.
We've become a society that has turned vices into virtues, and virtues into vices.
This alone, without peak oil, would have led to our downfall. The energy situation is almost too cosmically perfect as a set-up to really teach us a lesson. Hopefully the survivors will put those lessons to good use, so the whole cycle can start again, but from an unimaginably poor resource base. Unfortunately (or not?), we will be leaving future societies almost no concentrated liquid fuels and rich veins of metallic ores with which to restart the human comedy of civilization.
I don't think that civilization can live up to its promise without a deep seated belief in the divine, and divine punishment. I say that as a not particularly religious person at this time, but just look around at the moral degradation. The video games most children are allowed to play would make our ancestors grab the nearest umbrella and run for the caves, because they would be expecting the fire and brimstone any moment.
The thoughts I just expressed mark me as a primitive believer in old superstitions. Good and evil? What a joke!
Oil was a gift that mankind was not really ready for, developmentally. The Shah of Iran gave an interview once, in the 1970's, in which he presciently called the burning of oil as a motor fuel a sinful waste: oil was so precious for other uses (chemistry, medicine, agriculture). But he's gone.
Interesting post and responses, but there seems to be a trend:
1/ If only we'd ......., when we had the chance.
2/The Hollywood Solution. We can still save The American Dream if Sarah Palin/Superman/An as-yet unknown oil reserve under Chicago saves us.
3/ We'll all go back to traditional ..., Mother-and-Apple Pie values.
Its obviously too late for 1/.
2/ is a dream. One look at EROI (energy return on investment), the apalling pollution and climate change issues for all fossil alternatives makes tar sands and many other 'energy saviour' schemes a joke.
3/ The reality of an armed, mostly urban, car-and-aircraft based culture with almost no alternative infrastructure, and used to a wealthy, aspiration-based society, readjusting to a less endowed rural future just doesn't bear thinking about.
I think its time we talked of Peak America, as well as Peak Japan, and possibly Peak Western Society. Get used to it.
P.S. Here's a realistic assessment of the possibilities of America's energy future, NOT including fossils:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c30/page_231.shtml
and go through the pages. The conclusion is the best US investment would be concentrating solar power stations in the deserts, as are being built in Egypt now. Better than tar sands!
sorry, that should be:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c30/page_234.shtml
Aaaargh! OK, it should be:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c30 and then Page 234!
Sorry folks!
Kathy, as the music industry shrinks, commerical rap will shrink too, but it's father is hip hop which is far from a fad and in fact in the right hands is a powerful force for good. Hip hop (not rap) educates, motivates and inspires. I was listening to a hip hop track today about oil, or black gold as he calls it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwZSFltvCbk&feature=related
Hip hop has taken me through many tough times, keeping me motivated and positive with wise words. Listen to the words of this. Nothing but positivity and knowledge flowing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNkE-sgoqw8
At exactly which point do you start to realize
That life without knowledge is, death in disguise?
That's why, Knowledge Of Self is like life after death
Apply it, to your life, let destiny manifest
shed a little light
Now y'all bloomin like a flower with the power of the evident
The most important time in history is, NOW, the present
So count your blessings cause time can't define the essence
Hard knuckles on the second hands of workin class watches
Skyscrapers is collosus, the cost of living
is preposterous, stay alive, you play or die, no options
No Batman and Robin, can't tell between
the cops and the robbers, they both partners, they all heartless
With no conscience, back streets stay darkened
Where unbeliever hearts stay hardened
My eagle talons STAY sharpened
etc etc etc..
It takes a good 25 years to turn over an infrastructure, be it telephone, cable TV, Interstate Highways, whatever. Transition from fossil fuels will in an orderly manner needs at least that time. That time does not exist. It will be worse on Europe than it is here, because the resource base is smaller. The transition in lifestyle will be more marked in America, but overall we'll end up better economically. The third world will suffer most. But, it will be bad everywhere.
bFrankly, this won't turn out all right. The world's population today depends on fossil fuels for fertilizer, fuel for tractors and transportation in order to secure a stable food supply. Hungry people are unhappy people. Unhappy people riot and start wars. The more gradual the transition, the better the outcome. Food on the table trumps CO2 in the air every time.
Regards,
Coal Guy
I really appreciate this blog and all the comments from the core set of folk here. Most everybody I run into in my daily life is such a mental lightweight, being that they are so clueless on all of these energy/life/economic subjects. Not so here. Every time I visit this blog and the comments, I'm scrambling to keep up with you all. It's good to have something to keep myself in check with.
Too bad there are so few that really get "it" (or at least are willing to admit as much.) Scary times are upon us and having a population around us that is 99% clueless is what will undoubtedly be our worst undoing.
Affluence all too often begets a rot from within. Our society isn't half of what it once was. I wish people around me would spare me all the BS flag waving and chanting about how great the US is. I highly doubt that in the aggregate the US possesses enough of the applicable life and work skills as well as the personal fortitude to get us to the other side of where we want to go past this Collapse. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
Sometimes I doubt what I'm seeing all around me, thinking, no, it can't be that bad - people aren't really continuing on with these decisions. Y'all are a great help in maintaining focus. Thanks.
Pub,
You sound like some kind of intolerant, racist, right wing, religious zealot! Good and Evil, Right and Wrong? Pish Posh! Of course that is against the loony, permissive backdrop of our off-course society. I received the following in a email a few days ago. It gave me a chuckle. We all could use one.
On another note, I never thought I'd agree with Barney Frank on anything, but... If TPTB are going to make the Fat Boys whole by buying mortgage notes, isn't it only fair that the borrowers keep the houses?
Regards,
Coal Guy
The Ant and the Grasshopper
Two Different Versions! .............
Two Different Morals!
OLD VERSION: The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed.
The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!
MODERN VERSION:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.
CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast.
How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, 'It's Not Easy Being Green.'
Acorn stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing, 'We shall overcome.'
Rev. Jeremiah Wright then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake.
Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.
Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer.
The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government Green Czar.
The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him because he doesn't maintain it.
The ant has disappeared in the snow.
The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Be careful how you vote in 2010.
Coal Guy wrote:You sound like some kind of intolerant, racist, right wing, religious zealot! Good and Evil, Right and Wrong? Pish Posh!
I was wondering how long it would take for someone to write something like that. Did I misunderstand, and you were being ironic? If you weren't being ironic, let me state something: I'm not intolerant or racist, nor am I "right wing", nor a zealot. I have numerous friends who are gay, lesbians, black, white, Asian.
I wrote my little piece as an experiment: to see how people would react to the idea that the Universe doesn't give a rat's ass about our social experiments in diversity, "compassion", tolerance, and lifestyle choices.
What did I say that was racist? (I'm starting to suspect you were being ironic, and not really accusing me of such bigotry). I merely posited the idea that many traditional notions of morality and family structure were there for a reason: whether you believe in God or think it's all social evolution, these forms and mores were there because they allowed us to survive and thrive in difficult, resource-scarce environments.
Only a world full of cheap, easy to find energy allowed new forms of life to develop that were the antithesis of the old values. Like hot-house orchids or a salt-water aquarium, they are difficult to maintain and require a lot of resources.
If things get really bad, how will single-mothers with no extended family fare, when the welfare state is dead? How will people who get diseases because of their sexual promiscuity be viewed?
It is not I who am bigoted. I enjoy and partake of the culture of excess and tolerance, but am planning for a world that, to our modern sensitive eyes, will be quite brutal. But this reversion to the mean will only seem sensible to our ancestors and descendants (and to the traditional, right-wing, religious bigots and zealots of the world. May they not unite to form a world government.)
Pub,
I was certainly being ironic! I couldn't agree with you more!! Unfortunately, these are the labels that you get stuck with when you point out the obvious.
For better or worse, the days in which our society can continue to condone and reward bad behavior are numbered.
Regards,
Coal Guy
Further, if you are a public figure and venture such opinions, the media are very happy to attach these undeserved labels to you, ad nauseum, until your life is destroyed. This is the purpose of Political Correctness. It designed to limit the range of discourse to that which serves the purposes of the Left. Because opinions such as yours above cannot be discussed in public, nothing will change.
Regards,
Coal Guy
If you don't accept EVERYTHING, you are intolerant.
If you take issue with public encouragement of a social problem that is more prevalent among one ethnic group than another, you are a racist.
If you are not an atheist, or at worst attend a left leaning church, you are a religious zealot.
If you believe in self-reliance you are a right winger.
It's just too easy.
Anybody have anything to say that's oil-related? :)
Lack of oil will bring all of this to a head. At the present rate of decline, oil imports will go to zero in six years. This is not the most likely thing. But, the next 3million missing barrels per day will certainly cut into miles driven by personal vehicles. That implies a big price increase.
Regards,
Coal Guy
An excerpt from "I'LL TAKE MY STAND
The Twelve Southerners"
(Clickable to full essay. How relevant? That's for the reader to figure out)
Turning to consumption, as the grand end which justifies the evil of modern labor, we find that we have been deceived. We have more time in which to consume, and many more products to be consumed. But the tempo of our labors communicates itself to our satisfactions, and these also become brutal and hurried. The constitution of the natural man probably does not permit him to shorten his labor-time and enlarge his consuming-time indefinitely. He has to pay the penalty in satiety and aimlessness. The modern man has lost his sense of vocation.
Religion can hardly expect to flourish in an industrial society. Religion is our submission to the general intention of a nature that is fairly inscrutable; it is the sense of our role as creatures within it. But nature industrialized, transformed into cities and artificial habitations, manufactured into commodities, is no longer nature but a highly simplified picture of nature. We receive the illusion of having power over nature, and lose the sense of nature as something mysterious and contingent. The God of nature under these conditions is merely an amiable expression, a superfluity, and the philosophical understanding ordinarily carried in the religious experience is not there for us to have.
I watched this today and it made me think again of the comment regarding rap hopefully being a fad. Watch this and tell me this guy does not speak more truth in a rational, thoughtful, well spoken manner than anyone you have seen for a long time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJuxb7HddOM
Without meaning to belittle this blog in any way, he presents as much knowledge in the interview as Jeffers does in his posts, and helps to reach a diverse audience at the same time.
Coal Guy: I'm interested to know why you think Europe isn't so well placed. As examples; France is 80% nuclear and 7% hydro for electricity production, last week Spain had its first month of over-50% wind electric generation, Holland and Germany are around 30% wind and hydro. All Europe is connected by high speed train. All Europe has gas pipelines.
Compare to USA with oil-based everything almost no nuclear and not much renewables, hardly any rail, big distances and a car/truck infrastructure.
But most of all, the Euro is still worthy of international investment. If you were a foreign Sovereign Investment Fund, would you invest in American infrastructure? Where's the money going to come from for all this investment? Where's the return?
Here is part 2 of the interview, in which talks about oil too. SOund sync is a little out but you dont need to watch him, just listen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2JWksiG86w
Pub,
That is a beautifully written essay. The take on the progression of our society is prescient. There is a lot to be learned from it. I would take issue in some part with their idyllic presentation of agrarian life. The paternal side of my father's family is a bunch of white trash, redneck farmers who have been farming the same land for the last 200 years. His experience as a child spending summers on his grandmother's farm in the 1930's was far from ideal. I'll spare the details, but the most pejorative phrase in his lexicon was "just a farmer." Perhaps the idyllic nature of the bucolic life can only be discerned at a safe distance. The agrarian life does provide certain social advantages. But that is not the most important point.
Perhaps the important thing to take away from the essay is the effect of day to day risk and its effects on behavior. The authors spoke of nature and closeness to nature as a driving force in agrarian life, and how the artistic and the Divine derive from this closeness. This seems to be a reflection of how much the farmer's success or failure is dependent on the weather, his own health and many other things outside of his control. He appreciates nature and is in awe of its power to reward or destroy. Survival in the face of a stream of random adverse events requires discipline and fortitude. A late frost, or an early frost, or insects, or blight, or a sprained ankle or drought, or series of such events can destroy a life.
Then, there is the work of it. If you guide your horse-drawn plow across 40 acres and plow a furrow every 18 inches, you have walked 218 miles in the end. Then there is the agony of stoop labor, and daily chores that MUST be done, regardless of health or weather. The Chinese say that there is a tear drop in every grain of rice. They are not tears of joy.
One of the driving forces in civilization is mitigation of such risk. Civilization provides efficiency such that resources can be stockpiled, and famine forestalled. The bad effects of minor disasters are eliminated, and perceived risk is lowered. This of course presents a moral hazard. Risk taking (moral and social decay) in all areas of life increases, since the social and economic fabric can absorb some of the bad effects of failure. Perceived safety begets arrogance to the benefit of Atheism and disregard of moral and ethical values. This continues until society is overwhelmed and a collapse occurs. Industrialization may be to blame for our collapse. This seems to be a particular presentation of a more general stage in the life and death of a civilization. Rome managed to sink to this point with a and lower with a large portion of it's population devoted to agriculture and without benefit of mass production.
Regards,
Coal Guy
Donal,
The US still has by far the greater adjustment. Europe is further down the path at this point. This is by necessity. A a French energy minister, whose name I don't remember, said about France's dedication to Nuclear Power, "No oil, no coal, no gas, no choice."
In the end, there is still a significant natural resource base in the US, a lower population density and more arable land. There is rail service most everywhere, just not high speed rail. There is still lots of manufacturing, just not what it was. Overall, I'd rather be here.
We do, however, have an acute surplus of crooked, misguided politicians. They come in all political colors. Any takers?
As Greg keeps saying, Left and Right are dead. At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, someone will stand up and identify THE PROBLEM. Things will turn around rapidly from there.
Regards,
Coal Guy
Coal Guy; So all you need is an American Chairman Mao, to send all those politicians (and bankers?) out into the fields and learn how to be humble!
Aaah, what a lovely thought!! ;-)
Donal,
We need an honest politicians to restore a free market and let it do it's job. Someone who understands the energy issue and is not beholden to the bankers or industrialists. Neither party in the US is providing that. Both are bad, one is considerably worse. It would be nice if a real statesman emerged.
Mao killed 90,000,000 of his own people. A few officials in the Hope & Change administration quote Mao. UGH! Have you got anyone in Parliament or the PM's staff quoting Stalin or Hitler? How bad does it have to get?
Regards,
Coal Guy
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