JAMES KUNSTLER: Oh Six

[Tace]

by James Kunstler -- Clusterfuck Nation

The sheer weight and inertia of American life kept our systems on their feet through 2005, despite a worsening economic climate and some harsh body blows, like the hurricanes that pounded oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico. In a way, some perverse law of sociopolitical physics seemed to concentrate all the year's destructive potential in the devastation of New Orleans, Biloxi, and other Gulf Coast towns -- while the mighty din of motoring and cheeseburger sales roared on elsewhere without pause from Cape Cod to Catalina.

snip

The world oil allocation system is now so fragile that any disturbance in one producing region can send damaging shock waves around the planet. There is no more "swing producer." The United States squeaked through the huge loss of oil production capacity this fall by taking oil from our own strategic petroleum reserves and from Europe's. These actions kept oil prices in the high fifty-dollar-range through the holidays, giving Americans a false sense of festive security. Those withdrawals are now over. Global demand for oil is still increasing. The strategic reserves will now have to be refilled (they're called strategic reserves for a reason). This will start oil prices moving upward again -- they already have moved above $61 as of this morning.

I can't predict whether some maniac will drive a Zodiac boat into a tanker in the straits of Hormuz, or fire a shoulder-launched missile at an Arabian refinery. If nothing like that happens, the first year of post-peak will express itself in turbulent oil markets. Fear of not getting enough will rule. Futures will be overbought and then dumped or shorted and then overbought again. This will at least increase the violence of the ratcheting effect in the markets. Overall I expect to see $100-a-barrel oil at some point this year. Last year I made a bet with a friend that oil would end 2005 at $75. I lost the bet. But it is a fact that the price of oil altogether ended the year 40 percent higher than 2004, so it is not as if the markets did not show extraordinary stress.

New laws regulating gasoline mixtures will also contribute substantially to higher gasoline prices (perhaps as much as 40 cents a gallon). So I will predict gasoline breaking through the $4-a-gallon mark sometime this year.

more

http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=2009

[Dogmudgeon]

1. Kunstler Goes Motoring

The main argument I have with Kunstler is his elitism -- and the conclusions to which it leads him. In his world-view, it is the peasantry, and not his own class, which eats fast food, lacks artistic taste, and takes the gas-guzzler out on Sunday morning after church for some of his favorite bête noir, "Easy Motoring". He's looking for maximum pain and optimum timing to cause it, which explains why he blew most of his predictions for 2005. "Decadent American Philistines!" he rants, "you shall surely pay for your ugly suburban malls and ignorance of the Fine Arts!"

But moderate his taste for the lash of culture, and the picture comes back into focus. If Kunstler is a culture vulture, at least he's one who fears the very loss of the carrion on which he dines. And I don't think Kunstler is alone in his fear. The Captains of Industry no more want their children to grow up in a landscape more informed by Mad Max than Sky Captain than do you or I, ourselves members of the "'1337" Internet world. The fall-back will be moderated as much as possible, class and wealth nonwithstanding.

So I expect the "peak" to continue for some time yet, and the economy to rumble along as we make as many changes as we can to keep things going more-or-less as they have been. It's possible that we will avoid a super-depression, World War Three, and a Die-Off, that final era of massive human death.

The wild card in the deck won't be the energy industry. It will be the environment. Right now, North America is enjoying an early-winter warm spell; Europe is shivering in some of the coldest weather it's had in years. But if that weather super-system should happen to move around in the next few weeks, North America could be in a similar fix, suffering from historically low temperatures and bad weather. Since the world oil and natural gas markets are far more sensitive to American demand than European, the prices of these commodities will jump.

Consider a bigger climate disaster -- a temperature "crash" in the North Atlantic caused by the loss of thermohaline currents, which are already on the decline. Northern Europe would be plunged into a long year-round winter, and North America will soon join it as the prevailing Northern Jet Streams cool down and dip below 40N latitude.

And that's not considering the effects of climate change on agriculture.

Although I have no love for the plutocrats who control the world's energy supply, I have no illusions about their fabled lack of humanity, either. Some of them, maybe many of them, think about the future, and lose sleep over it. Right now, they may be working overtime to keep energy markets as stable as they can. But will they be able to guide their industries through a rough passage that may last longer than the whole history of their industry up to now?

The next fifty years of our history may be reckoned from the moment that some key, anonymous, middle-level energy-industry manager uttered the expression, "uh-oh!"

--p!
Buzzarde des Artes, Baby

[megatherium]

2. I think you've pretty much gotten it right. Kunstler is over-wrought.

My fear is that the "solution" to our energy crisis will turn out to be coal gassification and oil shale. This might keep us motoring just fine for decades to come. But the cost to the environment would be horrendous even before the full force of global warming is felt.

[IrateCitizen]

3. Oil shale is a red herring

Check out some of Ken Deffeyes' writings on this. Oil shale isn't even oil -- it's rock with hydrocarbon deposits that hasn't gone deep enough under the earth's surface yet to become oil -- call it "pre-oil", if you will.

Furthermore, it takes vast amounts of energy to extract and refine -- oil to run the machinery, more fuel to heat the rock to the point that the hydrocarbons "melt" out of it, and more still to refine it.

Personally, the thing I like to follow -- and what Kunstler largely ignores -- is the localist impulse that is driving some rather creative solutions to these problems. Kunstler remains stuck in a mode of thought that there is no space for localism in a big-box, suburban world -- and that it will take the utter collapse of the present situation for anything else to take shape.

Furthermore, Kunstler is wrong on how the peak will occur. Most petrogeologists like Deffeyes and Campbell see it not as a peak, but a plateau. This will result in a series of recessions as demand bumps up against supply, followed by economic recoveries as the price of fuel drops. The situation will certainly be chaotic, but not necessarily the immediate end of everything we know, as Kunstler believes. I'd say it would be more like a long, drawn-out series of fuel crises like the 1970's -- the last time that demand bumped up against supply. Except this time, it doesn't appear that there is an Alaska or North Sea waiting to come on-line and save us.

[hatrack]

6. Agree - it's an illusion - I saw Shell's oil shale guy present in November

They've successfully run one pilot oil shale retrieval plant on the Western Slope in Colorado. It worked, alright - in situ heating of kerogens eventually liquifies them to the point where they can be pumped out, then processed.

Couple of problems, though. For starters, the pilot plant he ran was a tiny experimental platform about 20 feet on a side - about the size of a typical bedroom. He also estimated that these formations could produce up to one million barrels/day, but that to do so would require building the equivalent of the entire generating capacity of the state of Colorado on site.

How would these plants be powered? Who could possibly come up with the tens or hundreds of billions which at a minimum would be required for this kind of full-on program? Where would the water come from for the processing?

He didn't go there, and no one at the presentation asked.

[IrateCitizen]

4. I agree with your assessment of peak oil vs. environment, p.

I've read a fair amount on agricultural issues, and most of it has frightened me more than anything about peak oil. For instance, the loss of topsoil throughout the American Midwest is downright scary -- it has gone from over 2 feet to something like 2 inches in a mere 140 years. What happens to our food supply when grain production plummets in these regions?

Also, how do we change back to less industrial modes of agriculture? Personally, I believe that Cuba is the place to look for the answers on this, but very few in the US are willing to do so.

And the points you make on the gulfstream are well taken. But aside from temperature shifts, what about air and water pollution? What about the drawdown of underground aquifers? There are so many ways in which the environment is going to bite us in the collective ass, it's hard to keep track of them all.

[IDemo]

5. This is one point ethanol pushers fail to address

The destruction of topsoil in the cornbelt has been enormous. Along with the creation of a huge 'dead zone' in the Gulf of Mexico caused largely by nitrogen based fertilizer runoff, corn does not have a good environmental record.

[poopfuel]

7. topsoil destruction

Sloppy, indifferent industrial agriculture is to blame for topsoil destruction.
Not ethanol.
With alcohol production made from only renewable energy sources, we can improve soil fertility, decrease the greenhouse effect, rescue our dead zones, move forward instead of backwards. Put an end to the practice of monoculture farming. If industry won't do it, we can do it ourselves on our own land.

This will be in Dave Blume's book, out in July 2006. "Alcohol Can Be a Gas: Fuelling a Revolution."
For more on his permaculture work, go to http://permaculture.com/permaculture/About_Permaculture/food.shtml
Or on his project in general permaculture.com.

[IrateCitizen]

8. I think the point the previous poster was trying to make was...

... that mass-production of ethanol, as touted by industry, involves the raising of large amounts of corn. Such a method for creating liquid fuel would be utterly unfeasible, given the environmental constraints (such as topsoil).

Now, if you're talking about making alcohol from various forms of biomass, or oil from algae, that's another topic altogether. However, to expect such efforts to satisfy our current national thirst for oil is not probable.

[poopfuel]

9. yes and no

Yes, doing it all from corn is not advisable but that's because of the methods of agriculture used to raise the corn. Most of our corn is used for feed. You can take out the alcohol, use the DDGS as feed and fertilizer and solve a lot of problems right there. No herbicide needed.

Mass production is quite possible. Most production in our country is from farmers. Using a monoculture:corn. For now, they just don't know any better. It's what the market bears.

Again, check out tbe book when it comes out. It will surprise you.

[IrateCitizen]

10. You're forgetting about two of the biggest inputs for farmers...

Nitrogen fertilizer that is created from natural gas, and petroleum to run all the equipment.

What I would like one "mass production" person to tell me is what liquid fuel they think will be used to run the all the machinery required to grow the corn necessary to create more liquid fuel.

Furthermore, much of the soil washing away is attributable to tilling of the soil.

Finally, the 'market' doesn't bear monoculture. It's what is subsidized by the government and pushed by agribusiness, to the tune of billions of dollars from the federal treasury each year.

[poopfuel]

11. yes and no (2)

Your last graf on the market is essentially true, but I don't think we can lay the responsibility on the farmers for that. Agribusiness, yes. They do benefit the most. I certainly would like to see that system corrected but not if it penalizes small and mid size growers who can't make it very easily right now. They don't feel they can change the rules of the game as put before them.

As I believe I said, input is not a problem in an intelligently designed energy system. One that needs no nitrogen fertilizer (I mentioned the DDG's, did I not?). One that uses methane to power the manufacturing of alcohol, using co=generation and no petroleum products whatsoever. FYI, methane is already being used in alcohol fuel plants in India and Brazil. And while sugar is an excellent crop, there are many fine alternatives. Sugar crops produce more than starch crops. Crop rotation would be effective here. Run the equipment on ethanol.

Is the present system broken? Yes. Are there means to fix it? Sure. Will we? Probably not. But that shouldn't stop those of us who know how from trying.

P.s. No till methods work quite well, I gather. Stupid farming need not be practiced. Mr. Blume didn't till and increased his soil's fertility and productivity by leaps and bounds. Check out the link I posted earlier.

[Delphinus]

12. As an aside,

I should be feeling very grateful for the warm winter respite we're having. My natural gas bill last month shocked me! Yet, when it's winter, I'd like to see snow. And freeze the pests out. And let the plants really go dormant instead of budding at the end of December. I think the entire global climate is f*cked up.