The United States of Terrorism

I spent a couple of minutes today reviewing one of my favorite books, one that taught me more about the system of modern medicine than any other- "The Great Influenza" by John M. Barry.

Let me share one short passage with  you.

"As terrifying as the disease was, the press made it more so. They terrified by making little of it, for what officials and the press said bore no relationship to what people saw and touched and smelled and endured.  People could not trust what they read. Uncertainty follows distrust, fear follows uncertainty, and, under conditions such as these, terror follows fear."

So, you see. Terrorism, I mean real terrorism, not just silly boogeyman bullshit like the Department of Homeland Security masturbates about all day long, is created by government officials and members of the mainstream media.

This is true whether the subject is the H1N1 "SwineFlu" virus of 2009 or the Iraq War or especially Peak Oil.

People are stupid, but not that stupid.

Just because 60 Minutes is dumb enough to broadcast a story about there being plenty of oil in Saudi Arabia doesn't mean that people believe its true.

I found it interesting last week when everybody jumped on Joe Biden just because he gave an "honest" answer and realistically recommended that you keep your loved ones off the mass transportation systems. He was right. If the H1N1 was as virulent as the 1918 H5N1 then it would make good sense.

Believe me, as a former airline captain, I love the airlines, I love the freedom of being able to fly wherever I want to go on a moment's notice. But I also understand the potential for the airlines to spread a pandemic disease so wide and so fast that it gets out of control.

The best that I can tell, the world got lucky in March and April 2009 and the H1N1A didn't kill a hundred million people. At least not yet. It could easily come back in a newly mutated and more virulent form after multiple passages through humans over the next few months. Don't be surprised if we have to shut down all the airports in October or November if the H1N1 gets turbocharged again or the H5N1 goes wacky.

The bigger danger is the threat from the terroristic policies of governments and corporations and the media stooges they control.

You can fool some of the people some of the time....

I talk to people everyday about Peak Oil.

Most people look at me kinda sideways and make sure to nudge their children closer to them.

Peak Freakers are scary to soccer moms!

But I'm stuck in a world where I need everybody else to help me survive, I can't do it by myself.

I'm committed to spreading the awareness of Peak Oil to anybody who gives me even half a chance.

But it is obvious that most people feel terrorized by their own government. They know the government is lying.

Bailing out the banks? What a joke! I can't imagine why anybody would ever pay taxes again.

Maintaining the status quo is the obvious plan of the U.S Congress and whatever administration is in power at any given time.

Pointing the finger at Osama Bin Laden is a neat trick but I think lots of people are starting to wise up and realize that the so-called "War on Terror" is a big joke and the joke is on anyone stupid enough to believe that the infinitesimal threat from some fanatics on the other side of the world is anything like the immediate danger from a ModernMediaMachine that is completely manipulated by lobbyists and Political Action Committees.

Terror is terror.

It starts with distrust. Any idiot can tell the media is bullshitting them.

I respect your right to "believe" that Obama and his green shoots are going to turn the "economic crisis" around and soon we will be back to growth and Business As Usual as long as you respect my right to tell you you are totally wrong and the world is experiencing an energy crisis not an economic crisis and that the U.S. economic system designed on exponential debt and phantom dollars whipped into existence out of thin air by the Federal Reserve and not connected to any physical reality is a fundamentally flawed system.

Peak Oil is the Black Dragon. We already peaked 4 years ago so there won't be anymore growth. Get used to it.

The terror comes from the fact that the government and the media is making little of Peak Oil.

Is the World Wide Web Sustainable?

I like the Web, don't you?

Email is convenient for me. News is convenient. Weather data is a snap.

The Web has become so fundamental to our way of life that it is obviously assumed to be sustainable, that it will last forever moving forward. But, is it really sustainable?

The consistent decrease in net energy available to civilization necessitates an exploration into the future viability of the Web assumption.

I haven't heard any discussion about the sustainability of the Web. Have you? Please send me some references if you have.

The analysis of the sustainability of the Web reminds me of some of the truly nutbag statements I see on a daily basis about our energy choices, for example: I often hear people try to "explain" to poor little old me about the "fact" that "wind is carbon free" or "solar doesn't use any oil."

Well, those kind of statements just emphasize the complete lack of competency of the author to discuss energy.

Solar panels use tons and tons of oil. They do so at every level of the supply chain that it takes to design, develop, fund, manufacture, transport, install, maintain, sell them and deliver energy to the grid.

The same with wind power. You have to build factories, with oil. Build components like steel towers and even carbon-fiber blades, with oil. You have to transport the components, with oil. Feed the workers, with oil. Etc., etc..

The Web is the same.

It takes oil to build the components. It takes about 630 units of energy from oil to make one unit of silicon computer chips.

It takes oil to build the servers, the switchgear, the cabling, the fiber optic, to lay the fiber optic, to build satellites and deploy them, to fill the maintenance trucks with fuel and feed the maintenance workers.

It seems to me that at some level it would be interesting for some clever doctoral candidate to attempt to conduct a real energy-based cost analysis of the Web. I'll bet the real numbers would make us gasp. Unfortunately, life calls, or I might attempt such a difficult analysis here.

All I am saying is that I doubt if it is going to be so simple to keep the Web up and running in a world of collapsing EROEI.

But, I think the military, for one, will take resources away from something else to protect the continued operation of the Web. Like, taking energy away from somebody that they could otherwise use for food production. This is more than sad. It is potentially inhumane.

Think about it.

Enjoy the Net Energy Free Fall as it gets worse this year, and next.

The Crisis is Energy, not the financial markets!

The idea that the Global Crisis is financial in origin is a catastrophic misunderstanding that is continuing to prevent the creation of a solution. Wall Street, global media and governments are filled with fools who mistakenly think that sub-prime paper was the origin of the problem.

These people have a fundamentally flawed view of reality.

They fail to understand that the growth of the industrial world over the last 100 years was only possible because of cheap energy from oil, not because of "brilliant" financial geniuses and "talented" leaders.

The U.S. property bubble and it's collapse was entirely due to forces driven by energy and the complete failure of governments to use energy from oil to build an energy-sustainable world before Peak Oil caused the current catastrophic crash in global energy markets that is forcing a Power-Down from the unsustainable days of essentially free energy from oil.

The longer the world stumbles along thinking that the problem is with financial markets, the deeper the energy crisis will become and the harder it will be to start to rebuild fundamental infrastructure that could eventually bring back the possibility of new growth.

The world will have to learn how to adapt to the new paradigm of NO GROWTH because global oil production will no longer support it.

Massive debt taken on by the U.S. and other nations during the current crisis will likely cause the collapse of many nations, including perhaps the U.S., unless the economists start to understand that the economy is supported by energy, not the other way around.

This is hard for most people to grasp. For a simple reason.

Everybody alive today has been taught the wrong lesson. We have all been taught, every day of our lives, that energy was "free," meaning that rock oil was so cheap that it was basically free.

That was never true and now we are getting bit by our failure to understand the fundamental nature of natural resources like oil and the necessity of the peaking, depletion and lowered EROEI or net energy on the downside of the curve of production.

If this view of the economy doesn't quite make sense to you, I suggest you watch some of Chris Martenson's videos to learn about the connection between energy and the economy.

"Growing Liquids Supply Challenge"?

The "Growing Liquids Supply Challenge"? Hmmm....

Doesn't that sound like it could be Peak Oil?

Check out the graph above from page 12 of the "One Year Later" September 17th 2008 update to the 2007 "Hard Truths" report issued by the National Petroleum Council, an oil industry organization.

Go ahead, click on it. I dare you.

It's interesting how this oil industry group avoids the term "Peak Oil" at all costs. They don't want to call it Peak Oil. They want to sanitize it and call it a "growing liquids supply challenge."

Well, too bad. I'm going to call it what Hubbert called it, Peak Oil.

Peak Oil, Peak Oil, Peak Oil. There, we got that straight.

But, check out the graph. Do you notice anything scary about it?

See that prominent gray band starting from the left at about eighty-something million barrels of oil PER DAY? Then, going DOWN to the right, the gray band is prominently labeled "4-7% Production Decline."

Production decline, starting in 2007, and going DOWN all the way to the end of the projected period in the year 2030.

That means Peak Oil. Plain and simple. And, this data is mostly from 2006 and 2007 and was updated in 2008.

Peak Oil is HERE! Even the oil industry is showing this.

But, it gets worse. Notice the UPPER gray band? That range shows the projected DEMAND curve according to the 2008 International Energy Outlook.

Look how bad it gets. In just 2015, a mere 6 years from now, the projected shortfall in "liquids" is 30 to 45 MILLION BARRELS PER DAY!

By 2030 it is even worse, catastrophic! The projected shortfall, to keep up with the projected demand of about 110 MMBOPD is 70 to 100 MILLION BARRELS OF OIL PER DAY!

That is just outright ridiculous!

No way is the world all of a sudden going to find and produce an extra 70 to 100 MMBOPD in 2030 when we can't even keep producing eighty something per day in 2008!

No way!

Notice up at the top of the graph, it says clearly, "Increasing Demand and Natural Production Decline Create Growing Need For Significant  New Production Capacity"

That might be the understatement of the century.

This is why the Global Economic Crisis is about to get a lot more interesting.

Are you living sustainably, with your own private energy supply?

Houston, We've Got A Problem!

Buzz, buzz, buzz. Twitter, twitter, buzz.

Can you hear all the noise out there?

And not just the ModernMediaMachine.

It's on Twitter, it's on MySpace, it's on Facebook, on text messages.

Houston, we've got a problem!

But, is all the buzz, buzzing about the real problem? It's NOT just the economy, I can assure you.

Did you see "Apollo 13"? Classic.

Did you catch the part in the story line where the crew was scheduled to do a live broadcast while flying towards the satellite of a small, water covered planet, third out from it's sun?

And, the ModernizingMediaMachine of the time decided that watching real live human beings flying from the tiny home planet where they evolved to an entirely different celestial object was just not interesting enough for "ratings" to rate being broadcast?

Amazing!

What does that remind you of? All those Demon Derivatives weren't too interesting until they started to crash the global economy huh? Or sub-prime mortgages, or greedy bankers or sleeping politicians.

And, do you remember the part where they were buzz, buzzing, trying to figure out how to get the astronauts home again safely and finally, at one point, one of the engineers explains that the only thing that matters is ENERGY!

ENERGY!

That's all that matters. If you don't have any energy, nothing else on the spacecraft is going to work or make a difference at all.

Hmmmm.......

Is this sounding familiar?

Every day I talk to people about Peak Oil and for even the nicest, most intelligent ones, their eyes just seem to glaze over with the whole subject.

Pick a subject, any subject. Paris Hilton, pro basketball, the Academy Awards, whatever.

Anything is better than actually discussing our emergency situation with our spacecraft.

Make no mistake about it, the Good Ship Blue Marble is in trouble!

Ask yourself, if you are reading this, and therefore at some level you "care" about Peak Oil and our energy emergency, how many people did you tell about the problem today? What about yesterday?

Make a list. I dare you. How many people do you know that can even explain what Peak Oil is?

Global Warming is warm and fuzzy now. Lots of people are freaking out over that.

But hardly anyone seems to have the slightest concern that our main source of energy is crashing and we don't have a replacement ready.

Ever since I first learned about Peak Oil in 1981 I've watched with amazement while the people around me just kept burning, and burning and burning. And, I can assure you that nobody, I mean nobody wanted to hear about Peak Oil. I learned to only discuss that "strange" subject with other "earth scientists." Nobody likes a party pooper do they?

It makes you wonder if we will end up as "lucky" as Apollo 13 and make it home again?

Peak Oil Myths

Peak Oil is incredibly poorly understood.

I constantly come across people who have never heard of it, don't care, or want to change the subject to something more mainstream like the ball game or even some light celebrity worship.

Those that have heard about it often are suffering from various "beliefs" about Peak Oil. So, it seemed worthwhile to discuss a few of the major myths about Peak Oil.

Peak Oil Myth #1: We're running out. Wrong! Nothing could be farther from the truth. Peak Oil, by definition, means we are at most, halfway through. We probably have at least 1.3 Trillion barrels left!

Peak Oil Myth #2: Peak Oil is a scam created by the Big Bad Oil Companies. Wrong. It is amazing to me that most people are so illiterate when it comes to Peak Oil that they don't understand that "investor-owned" oil companies, like ExxonMobil, control very little oil and instead the truth is that it is the world's "national" oil companies, like Saudi Aramco, that control about 52% of daily production and 88% of global reserves.

Peak Oil Myth #3: Hydrogen will make oil obsolete so there is no reason to worry. Wrong! The "hydrogen economy" is a fairy tale. Hydrogen is an energy CARRIER, not an energy SOURCE. Hydrogen can at best be used to transfer energy from place to place but you can't drill hydrogen wells, not even in Iraq. Sorry Mr. Cheney!

Peak Oil Myth #4: "They" are working on "new technology" that will increase alternative energy. Wrong! There is no "they." There is just us. This is a giant failure in conceptualization. People just don't seem to understand the "miracle" of oil. Oil is an amazingly dense energy source. Nothing else we know about comes even close. That is why it is "worth" probably at least $300.00 per barrel and may soon cost that much or more with some tricky "supply and demand" price spiking and a little help from the "electronic herd." This is known as the "new technology myth." Even algal biofuels won't be scaled up soon enough to provide substantial relief from the impact of Peak Oil. Solar, wind, and the rest are no way getting scaled up fast enough.

Peak Oil Myth #5: The problem is Global Warming. Wrong. Global Warming, or it's popular alternative title, "climate change," is NOT the problem. Peak Oil is the problem. Why? Because first of all, global warming is a question. Even though evidence is mounting to support the conclusion that man's activities are influencing the amount of "greenhouse gasses" in the atmosphere and causing significant changes in energy flows, global warming is still a question. There may not be any such existent as a "climate" anyway. Or, the thing we perceive as a climate might be a natural, non-linear dynamic variation in weather across scales and drivers we don't yet understand. 

Peak Oil is a certainty. Geology is simple in that respect. Oil is a finite resource and the last of it will be very hard to find, really hard to extract and really expensive. The big problem between Peak Oil and Global Warming is that if global warming IS true, we need energy to re-tool the giant global machine we built that is spewing out all the greenhouse gasses anyway! Let me say that another way. We need energy to fix global warming. We will need energy to re-build our big machine. That's another reason is why Peak Oil is so important.

 Peak Oil Myth #6: The "Peak" is way, way off in the future, so technology will provide a solution by then. Wrong. Global Oil production seems to have already peaked, maybe in 2005! Even if it hasn't, it may be peaking right now, maybe "plateauing" enough so we really can't tell with our coarse oil inventory technology we have. Even the craziest, most optimistic "forecasts" put the global Peak at 2040 or 2050, even one says 2100. No way we have that much time. Don't fool yourself. The Peak is upon us now, deal with it.

Peak Presidents

Consider this: Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama.

And still, we have the threat of Peak Oil?

Hubbert told Kennedy about Peak Oil in 1962.

Oil production peaked in the United States in 1971.

Global Oil Production may have peaked in 2005.

Most people haven't even heard about Peak Oil.

I guess you can't fix something you don't know about.

Are you going to tell them, or should I?