The disgusting jockeying for political gain from the cluster f**k in the Gulf is merely further evidence that our political system simply cannot rise to this, or any other, challenge. "BP has a history of safety violations". (No Sh*t and WTF??!!) Of course they do! They have 140,000 full time employees that work with explosive, corrosive, flammable, combustable, etc.. materials. Does anybody really think that with all of those people and all of those moving parts there won't be any accidents/incidents? 30,000 to 40,000 Americans die on our highways each year, and another 250,000 experience catastrophic, life changing permanent injuries as a result of the USAGE of gasoline and diesel fuel... Where is the outrage about that?! It doesn't exist because there is little to no political gain to be had in addressing that.
Rational thought simply cannot withstand the MSM's endless propaganda. There is NO PERFECTLY SAFE WAY TO DRILL FOR OIL, especially deep deposits in very deep water. There is NO PERFECTLY SAFE WAY TO LAUNCH SPACE ROCKETS, either. BTW, I don't hear anybody trying to shut down AIR TRAVEL (or rail travel) every time a commercial passenger jet crash (or train crash) kills a couple hundred people.
Why not?
Because we ACCEPT this costs/risks as the cost of being alive and LIVING. So what's up in the GOM? Politics! The same lame-brains that will lament the loss of wildlife in this incident are more than complicit by driving their gasoline powered vehicle to a protest... killing a couple of animals on the road there.
I really think that drilling in deep water for very deep deposits is a bad idea. A REALLY bad idea (imagine that...a pro-Life, registered Republican thinks offshore drilling is not worth its consequences...). I am willing to endure the consequences of NOT DRILLING in those places. But if WE DO DRILL, let us not delude ourselves into thinking that ACCIDENTS/ERRORS IN HUMAN JUDGMENT will not occur.
They will.
Think about that when somebody proposes Nuclear as the alternative... and whenever you see some Leftie nit-wit climb behind the wheal of his/her hybrid gasoline/coal powered animal killing machine on their way to protest BP/Exxon/Chevron et al for destroying the environment and killing those poor sea birds...
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I hade someone in the comments ask me what I thought about Buffet et al, and MMT (Modern Monetary Theory).
I have a great many thoughts on the issue, and I will be covering them in the very near future in great detail. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept here is a link that will get you started and will link you to several other sites should you wish to participate in the discussion.
If you don't wish to spend the time, here is a hint as to what I think about the odds for success of MMT in the Peak Oil era: I bought a family farm and have provisioned it with diverse livestock, large gardens, tools, weapons, stored food, fuel... this is not to say that I am am certain of ANY outcome, only that the probability for systemic trouble is high enough to motivate me to do this. I also have Life Insurance even though I have enjoyed robust health all of my life. I also contributed to my self-employed 401k last year should the system NOT fail.
I deal in probability theory - not "certainty theory" (as if there was such a thing). Those pretending to deal in "certainty" are likely not in touch with "reality". "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." - Sun Tzu
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The rate of decline of imports of Oil into the U.S. remains within the limits projected by ELM and other models. We are 1/3 through 2010, and imports are down 7% for the year to date period from last year's year to date period.
Obama, like every other U.S. president of the post U.S. peak of oil production era (1970), clearly intends to kick the can down the road, rather than tackle the greatest issue to face America since WWII. To me, he has abdicated his shot at becoming a great President.
Read the dates as to when fuel efficiency will happen. LOLOLOLOLOLOL!!! Yee HAA!
Sorry, that got away from me...
Oil imports in the later part of this decade will be sparse, deep water drilling may or may not be happening. We will be driving a great deal less, and the whole "Food delivery by truck model" will be challenged in the extreme. It is nice that the administration is recognizing that over the road trucking consumes 20% of transport fuel... that percentage will RISE, not fall, as the total availability of transport fuels continues to fall - irrespective of the "fuel efficiency" mandates. The only mandate that will work is mandating rail rather than road. The physic's of moving a 40,000 pound vehicle across country on rubber wheels engaging in friction with an asphalt surface and wind resistance will NOT be impressed by mandates...
We will get through this, but we won't be needing Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers at some point. Not to worry, the market will bring you great incentive to eat less.
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Enjoy the Nat Gas glut of 2010. If the GOM disaster means anything, it means the end of that.
15 comments:
You haven't heard any yelling and griping about commercial aviation cause the last time we had a BIG plane crash killing people was 2001. If that happens again, you will get your yelling. :)
The EIA site shows both oil and gasoline imports have been rising since the beginning of the year, and I mentioned that previously. But you added/subtracted in other things I guess. But it sure looks like stuff is getting imported (only recently).
If oil usage/imports is dropping, it is almost 90% industrial dropoff, cause the demand for oil and gasoline is as high as it has ever been (also according to EIA).
And as far as nuke power goes, you better get used to it. We have nothing left to expand. Coal and natgas are fossil fuels, and solar and wind can't scale up fast enough (if we even had the money for that). For 30+ years the nuke industry has kept their part of the bargain. No major nuke incidents since Three Mile Island. Just keep the uranium cool and everything will be fine. ;)
I have never bothered to read The Collapse of Complex Societies, but from the references I've read of it, I suspect that I could probably have written the basic thesis to it myself over the past years.
Division of labor is, of course, a great thing, but it can be taken too far. What I've always feared is the loss of general skills and knowledge in society. That is, every body can do one thing, and one thing only, well. But fix a faucet? Invest their money? Grow some food? Deal with a power outage? At some point I've always thought that a bit of personal knowledge diversity in all of us would create a greater social redundancy in times of crisis or failure. I take it that this is a fair part of Mr. Tainter's book that Kurt Cobb was referring to.
If that is the case, then I too agree that we may well have entered the era of negative returns on further increasing our social and economic complexity. Given this, I think a large part of the solution is personal diversification of living situations, knowledge, and investments/purchases.
Greg, you're on the right track.
Oh, and nuclear power? We'll attempt to go for it in a big way, and as society continues to descend into chaos and disorder, there will be corners cut. From then on, nuclear pollution and perhaps terrorist incidents will profoundly manifest themselves. Large power plants and regional/national power grids themselves require a stable economic, banking/investing, law enforcement, social, and governmental system, without which, such power systems prove unreliable and unmaintainable, as we see with the poor power delivery such systems attain in the depths of the Third World. We too may eventually be too unstable a place to support reliable large, centralized power generation and distribution.
We can do complexity, although it does get more difficult. However, if fools don't listen to the experts, disasters WILL happen. Deepwater Horizon is a case in point, it seems:
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/49604
Schlumberger pulled their people off the well hours before the explosion after BP wouldn't listen to them. Disaster followed. Like I tell my grandson, "If you keep doing what what you were doing after I warned you about what would happen, it isn't an accident."
Bur:
The EIA site show's one thing. Imports are down 7% year over comparable period year.
Oil usage is down BIG. Ethanol usage is up HUGE. Even with that, the total consumption of liquid fuels is down nearly 1.5 million bpd from 2006. Ethanol is NOT OIL. Ethanol was a ONE OFF. There is not another 1 million bpd bio fuel in the offing for the U.S.
Sometimes I think you merely enjoy being obstreperous.
Tweel:
I don't doubt that some one there made a very bad decision. I am not willing to accept these sources to indict anybody at this time.
Bu let us, for the sake of discussion, accept this version of events. Isn't that (human error) part of the complexity issue?
There's another aspect to trying to support ever higher levels of complexity: education. The more we specialize, the longer we need to stay in school, the more investment society needs to make in younger people's schooling, along with higher levels of debt that need to be taken on either by the students, their parents, the government, or a combination of everybody.
We've discussed this latter phenomenon here before and come to the conclusion that there is an unwinding to come in higher education. This will strain our ability to increase complexity and specialization even more.
Then too there is the near infinite level of regulation from government and the civil courts, requiring even more specialization and complexity. This too faces a significant unwinding.
NIMBY is a huge factor, how many people that support Nuclear power plants would want one near their house? The diminished returns on complexity is what scares me about expanding Nuke's, many states are already starting to cut back on police/CO's and the like as budget problems hit home. I've ready many articles suggesting that we only have enough high grade uranium left for perhaps 30 more years at current levels, so although Nuke's have been proven fairly safe in the short run--will they just be another extremely expensive/overly complex stop-gap that will be dangerous if you believe things are going to collapse in the next 10-20years?
I read Tainter's work in college in the 90's, I think the author extrapolates quite a bit on his work--but his basic logic seems sound. Thomas Homer-Dixon wrote a couple excellent books--Ingenuity gap, and the Updside of Down, both refer to the diminished returns of a complex society struggling with resource/technological ingenuity overshoot.
-Meiyo
Stephan:
Sallie Mae did more to make education unaffordable than anything that could have been conceived...
Also, the idea that it takes every kid - those with a 180 IQ and those with a 105 IQ, or those just terribly more motivated than others - the same amount of TIME (in years) to become "educated" is just absurd. At some point, we will be forced to STOP trying to make life fair.
The legal system is already foundering in complexity to the point of ruin.
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/twip/twip_crude.html
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/twip/twip_gasoline.html
Please explain to me how the U.S. crude oil imports graph and the U.S. total gasoline imports graph show you anything except a (recent) increase.
I don't waste time arguing just to argue. I am NOT Italian. :)
Bur:
Because you are looking at graphs of SPECIFIC products: Gasoline, Distillate, Crude, etc...
When you total ALL products, the rate of decline is 7% year over year for the first 133 days of 2009 vs 2010:
http://ir.eia.gov/wpsr/wpsr.txt
Go to table 1 just above the second set of broken lines.
One or some of the products might be experiencing an increase in imports... but ALL petroleum products combined is the measure.
Some Simple Net Export Math
The simplistic Export Land Model (ELM) assumes an oil exporting country that hits peak production and then declines at 5%/year, with a 2.5% rate of increase in consumption, with consumption equal to 50% of production at peak production rate.
Instead of projecting net export volumes (and instead of discussing two exponential functions), an alternative, and simpler, way of portraying net export declines is to simply plot consumption as a percentage of production. When this number hits 100%, by definition the exporter transitions from net exporter status to net importer status.
In any case, at final peak Export Land was consuming 50% of production. At the end of year three, they were consuming 63% of production. Consumption, as a percentage of production, increased at 8%/year. So, 10 years after the peak, if we extrapolate the trend, they would be consuming 111% of production (the model shows them going to zero net oil exports in 9 years).
In 2005, Saudi Arabia consumed 18% of production. In 2008, they consumed 22% of production (EIA). Extrapolated out for 25 years (from 2005), in 2030, they would be consuming 104% of production (Sam Foucher’s modeling shows them approaching zero net oil exports between 2030 and 2035).
And of course, this presumably would work for ELM 2.0 (the observed tendency for developing countries like China & India, i.e., “Chindia,” to outbid developed countries for declining net oil exports).
Chindia’s combined net oil imports, as a percentage of (2005) top five net oil exports went from 19% in 2005 to 27% in 2008, a 12%/year rate of increase. Extrapolated out for 14 years (from 2005), to 2019, Chindia’s combined net imports would be 102% of (2005) top five net oil exports, i.e., 102% of combined net oil exports from Saudi Arabia, Russia, Norway, Iran and the UAE. If we take Sam's best case for the (2005) top five net oil exports, and if we extrapolate Chindi'a current rate of increase in net oil imports, we get the same answer (Chindia approaching 100% of top five net oil exports around 2018).
Total Products Supplied 18,902 (2010) 18,691 (2009) 1.1% is an increase, I think .... ?
Bur:
Total products supplied is UP (because of Ethanol and Thunderhorse), from a very, very low level (during the economic crash) but imports are DOWN.
More important, the per capita availability of Oil is going down like a rock in a pond.
There are no more "ethanols" and no more "Thunderhorse" 's. These were one offs. The import equation is what it is.
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