Cassava Chips Life Cycle

SUBHEAD: Harvesting and growing cassava trees to make baked chips for your own dips.  

By Juan Wilson 4 September 2012 for Island Breath -  
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2012/09/cassava-chips-life-cycle.html)


Image above: The goal - a fresh guacamole ready to be devoured with hot crisp cassava chips. Photos by Juan Wilson unless noted.

[Author's note: Cassava contains cyanide. The amount varies widely and should be considered when using cassava in your diet. With the right variety and use there is little risk. With even the more dangerous varieties, simply soaking, cooking or fermenting the peeled root is all that is usually needed to make them safe. "Societies that traditionally eat cassava generally understand some processing (soaking, cooking, fermentation, etc.) is necessary to avoid getting sick.^[36]" See (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava).]


We love eating dips and chips. For years we've been making baba ghanoush with our own eggplant and guacamole with or own avocados. Until recently we've scooped up these delicious dips from commercially packaged chips made of corn, rice and taro.

 Now we are experimenting with making our own chips with cassava. The results have been successful enough to now share. This article will also include our experience with the whole life cycle needed to reproduce the cassava.




 Image 1 above: A cassava tree with a 2" trunk ready for harvesting. Photos by Juan Wilson unless noted.

To make chips you first select the tree you will use. Cut it down and be careful not to destroy the smaller branches (1/2" in diameter). Use a mattock to clear the ground around the tree until you detect reaching the tops of the laterally arrayed root lobes. They should be about as big around as a good sized potato chip.

Image 2 above: Flooding hole above cassava root structure. Photos by Juan Wilson unless noted.

 I usually then flood the hole around the stump to soften the earth. Then using a hoe and pick carefully clear around the roots as required to free them without breaking them into little pieces.


Image 3 above: An example of a full harvest of cassava root structure from a single tree. From (http://fruits-veges.blogspot.com/2010/08/root-cassava-is-yummy.html).

A perfectly cleared root structure looks something like this image above and can have almost a dozen good sized lobes.

 
Image 4 above: Some of the root lobes unearthed from hole. Photos by Juan Wilson unless noted.

 Once you have the lobes out of the ground wash them of all dirt. One good sized lobes can make a serving for two. Use a scrubby as needed.


 
Image 5 above: Cassava branches ready for replanting. Photos by Juan Wilson unless noted.

You will use the downed cassava tree for reproduction. Cassava can be reproduced by merely sticking a green branch from the downed cassava tree into the ground. Lop off as many of the the smaller branches as you want to grow more trees. One tree can easily start another dozen.




Image 6 above: A cassava sapling planted from a branch at six months old. Photos by Juan Wilson unless noted.

To start them mere dig or puncture a small hole in good soil and push the branch into it. The leaves will fall from the branch. Keep the area around the branch from drying out for any long period, but otherwise little or no maintenance is required. Once new leaves start the plant can be left alone. If the new leaves droop water the sapling. You'll get a better harvest if the soil is somewhat loose and free of rocks. Soil amendments like chicken droppings and compost can help, but you should find cassava an eager grower.

   
Image 7 above: A peeled cassava root partially sliced for chips. Photos by Juan Wilson unless noted.

After the lobes are thoroughly washed cut the tips off. There will likely be some brown outer skin over some partially exposed white under skin. Use a knife tip the break away the outer white skin. It should peal away evenly and without great effort. It's the inner white core we will use for the chips. We bought a small electric meat slicer for about $30 from Walmart for slicing chips.

Slicing chips thinly and evenly is very important. Too thick and they won't be like chips after they are cooked. If they are uneven and some will be burned and some damp out of the oven. Try slicing the chips as thin as you can and maintain a full uniform cut across the cassava root. If you have several root lobes I suggest you slice them all and freeze the results in one quart plastic bags to serve two. Several bags should result from one harvest.

   
 Image 8 above: Baking tray being loaded with seasoned root slices. Photos by Juan Wilson unless noted.

When we are about to bake chips we oil them. I've tried two methods that work. One way is to dampen two layers of paper towels with extra virgin olive oil. Lay the chips on the oily towel and press down lightly. Then turn the chips over and repeat a light pressing into the towel. Season the exposed oily side of the chips lightly to taste with garlic powder and crushed see salt.

Then two oven cookie sheets with the oily towels and lay out the chips in the pans. The other way is to buy a can of spray-on extra virgin olive oil that is available at Big Save under Pam and Western Family brands. Spray oil lightly on the cookie sheet. Place the cassava slices closely together on the sheet. Lightly spray the slices and season. Turn them over and lightly spray them again. Season to taste.


 

Image 9 above: Two trays of chips cooling before serving. Photos by Juan Wilson unless noted.

Place the two cookie sheets into the oven at 300-325ºF. Toast for 15 minutes. Turn the chips over and Toast for another 15 minutes. This part can be quite tricky. Much is dependent on how thick the chips are. Until you are confident of the results watch the toasting closely. Enjoy! .

Game Over? or Overtime?

SUBHEAD: Arctic sea regions as wide as one kilometer are “frothing” from previously frozen methane.  

By Albert Bates on 4 September 2012 for The Great Change -  
(http://peaksurfer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/game-over-or-overtime.html)

 
Image above: Pretty? The stuff of our nightmares - a methane hydrate gas crystal. From original article. For more illustrations see that post.

As we reported two years ago, an international group of scientists, the Arctic Methane Emergency Group has been sailing into the Arctic waters around Norway and Russia to take samples of methane bubbling from ocean clathrates — frozen methane deposits on the sea floor. Some of their findings, very preliminary, are now making their way into the blogosphere, but like many, we await peer-review published articles or discussion in the next IPCC report — AR5 — due in 2014, before we draw hard conclusions.

The preliminary reports, if they can be believed, are frightening.

One report last February was titled, “Global Extinction within one Human Lifetime as a Result of a Spreading Atmospheric Arctic Methane Heat wave and Surface Firestorm.” Its author, Malcolm Light, predicted, “This process of methane release will accelerate exponentially, release huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere and lead to the demise of all life on earth before the middle of this century.”

Light wrote:

“The warning about extinction is stark. It is remarkable that global scientists had not anticipated a giant buildup of methane in the atmosphere when it had been so clearly predicted 10 to 20 years ago and has been shown to be critically linked to extinction events in the geological record (Kennett et al. 2003). Furthermore all the experiments should have already been done to determine which geoengineering methods were the most effective in oxidising/destroying the methane in the atmosphere in case it should ever build up to a concentration where it posed a threat to humanity. Those methods need to be applied immediately if there is any faint hope of reducing the catastrophic heating effects of the fast building atmospheric methane concentration.”

Light’s proposed geoengineering solution is to piggyback on the Air Force’s HAARP high energy communications network to broadcast a 13.56 MHZ pulse to transform methane in the stratosphere and troposphere to nanodiamonds and hydrogen. Other geoengineering proposals include genetically engineered methanotrophic bacteria that eat methane in soil and air and iron-based catalysts that can oxidize high concentrations of methane in ocean water and raindrops.

All of this seems a bit frantic and desperate, enough to push the skeptical scientist in us to ask, “Are we really there yet?”

Some arctic sea regions as large as one kilometer in diameter are indeed “frothing” from massive gas releases from previously frozen CH4 deposits. Beginning in 2010, Igor Semiletov of the Russian Academy of Sciences said his research team discovered more than 100 plumes, and estimates there are “thousands” over a wider area, extending from Russian mainland to East Siberian Arctic Shelf.

“Earlier we found torch-like structures, but only tens of meters in diameter. This is the first time we found continuous, powerful, impressive seeps more than 1,000 meters in diameter. It’s amazing. We carried out checks at 115 stationary points and discovered methane of a fantastic scale—on a scale not seen before,” Semiletov said.

In our March 2010 post, “Various Bubblings,” we wrote:

Of course, as we have noted here before, warmer oceans, methane from permafrost and clathrate bubblings are all tipping points that accelerate climate change and are multiplicative - 2 or 3 orders of magnitude times anthropogenic emissions, once their threshold is crossed. Earth, meet Venus. The toxic gas fireballs rolling across Kansas, destroying and poisoning everything in their path, are described in Peter Ward’s book, Under a Green Sky. As Wallace Broecker says, “The climate is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks.”

Atmospheric CH4 concentrations have risen more in the past 4 years than in the previous 20. Methane has a much shorter lifespan in the atmosphere than CO2, but it is 50 to 70 times (in the short term 100x) more potent as greenhouse gas. It doesn’t go away when it decays, either. It oxidizes into CO2.

The last IPCC assessment (AR4) concluded that the risk of a melting clathrate event triggering a sudden shift to a much warmer planet is minimal. A sustained increase in sea temperature will warm its way through the sediment eventually, and cause even the deepest, most marginal clathrates to start to break down, but it will typically take of the order of a thousand years or more for the temperature signal to get through.

One exception, however, may be in clathrates associated with the Arctic Ocean, where water is shallower and clathrate ice crystals are stabilized by lower temperatures rather than higher pressures. Recent research carried out in 2008 in the Siberian Arctic has shown millions of tons of methane being released, apparently through perforations in the seabed permafrost.

Shakhova et al. (2008) estimate that not less than 1,400 Gt of carbon is presently locked up as methane and methane hydrates under the Arctic submarine permafrost, and 5–10% of that area is subject to thawing. They conclude that “release of up to 50 GtC of predicted amount of hydrate storage [is] highly possible for abrupt release at any time.” That would increase the methane content of the planet’s atmosphere by a factor of twelve, equivalent in greenhouse effect to a doubling in the current level of CO2.

Another wild card in the clathrate deck is whether a near-term effect would be global cooling, not warming. Sudden concentrations of flammable methane could bring about explosions and fireballs that would produce lots of smoke and dust, which would lead to global dimming, comparable to nuclear winter. The evolution of dust and smoke, if it caused global cooling, would likely only last a short time before the particulates washed out of the atmosphere. Elevated temperature forcing from levels of methane and the derivative carbon dioxide would then take over. The greatest consequence, apart from incineration of coastal cities, would be an alternating series of extra cold and extra warm years, arguably more devastating to crop production than a trend in one direction or the other.

Professor Gregory Ryskin, in a paper published in Geology in 2003, concluded:

The consequences of a methane-driven oceanic eruption for marine and terrestrial life are likely to be catastrophic. Figuratively speaking, the erupting region “boils over,” ejecting a large amount of methane and other gases (e.g., CO2, H2S) into the atmosphere, and flooding large areas of land. Whereas pure methane is lighter than air, methane loaded with water droplets is much heavier, and thus spreads over the land, mixing with air in the process (and losing water as rain).

The air-methane mixture is explosive at methane concentrations between 5% and 15%; as such mixtures form in different locations near the ground and are ignited by lightning, explosions and conflagrations destroy most of the terrestrial life, and also produce great amounts of smoke and of carbon dioxide. Firestorms carry smoke and dust into the upper atmosphere, where they may remain for several years; the resulting darkness and global cooling may provide an additional kill mechanism.

Conversely, carbon dioxide and the remaining methane create the greenhouse effect, which may lead to global warming. The outcome of the competition between the cooling and the warming tendencies is difficult to predict.

Another significant contributor to atmospheric methane is fracking — the explosive fracturing of geological formations to release oil and natural gas (see illustration). While difficult to quantify, we can expect a significant bump from this source for at least the next few decades, just from wells already completed. And once the bottle is uncorked, you can’t put another cork back in.

U.S. shale gas production is projected by EIA to increase over the 2012–2035 period by 3 million barrels of oil equivalent (Mboe) per day (it currently contributes 700,000 boe/d, and a recent Harvard study projects the 2020 shale gas potential contribution to be 49 Mboe/d). The USGS estimates that the Green River Formation alone holds 3 trillion boe, “around half of which is deemed recoverable.” Which is not to say that which is not deemed recoverable won’t also find its way to the atmosphere. Then add European fracking, Asian fracking, and Middle Eastern fracking, and what do we get?

We’re fracked.

A recent item from New Scientist highlighted the clathrate issue but unfortunately provided more smoke than light. The August 17 report described research led by Graham Westbrook of the University of Birmingham and Tim Minshull of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2009GL039191). Their team sailed into the west of the Svalbard archipelago, which lies north of Norway, where they found CH4 plumes being heated by the West Spitsbergen current, which has warmed 1 °C over the past 30 years. The methane being released from hydrates in the 600 km2 area added up to 27 kilotons/year, which suggests that the entire hydrate deposit around Svalbard could be releasing 20 megatonnes a year. Globally, extrapolating to all shallow, cold ocean areas, that translates to around 0.5-0.6 GtC/yr, or about 10% of fossil fuel emissions.

Said New Scientist, “Methane hydrate could be used as a new, somewhat greener fossil fuel, but extracting the methane without releasing any into the atmosphere remains a challenge.”

Indeed.

The pity is, no one is even trying to extract fossil energy without releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, or offsetting them with net sequestration reverses like carbon farming. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are climate deniers. Ryan has accused scientists of engaging in conspiracy to “intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change.” He has implied that snow invalidates global warming. When he wasn’t busy sponsoring the Akin plan to distinguish “legitimate rape,” he voted to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from limiting greenhouse pollution, to eliminate White House climate advisers, to block the U.S. Department of Agriculture from preparing for climate disasters like the drought devastating his home state, and to eliminate the Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E).

Barack Obama offers no better choice. He wants to expand fracking and build a pipeline to carry the gooey tar sands through nine states, even though a spill into the Kalamazoo River has yet to be cleaned because no-one knows how to remove tar from a river.

So what are we left with? Jill Stein, MD, Green Party candidate. She hasn’t got a chance, but she does have a microphone. She was arrested at a sit-in in Philadelphia earlier this month when she protested Fannie Mae housing foreclosures. The Green Party’s platform is more forward-looking if a bit naïve:

Strong International Climate Treaty

Economic Policy for a Safer Climate

Repay Our Climate Debt

More Efficiency and Conservation

Clean, Green Energy and Jobs

Clean, Green Agriculture

Encourage Conservation and a Significant Decrease in our Energy Consumption

Institute National Energy Efficiency Standards

Move Decisively to an Energy System Based on Solar, Wind, Geothermal, Marine, and other Cleaner Renewable Energy Sources

End the Use of Dirty and Dangerous Energy Sources

Plan for Decentralized, Bio-Regional Electricity Generation and Distribution

De-Carbonize and Re-Localize the Food System

Electrify the Transportation System

Transition to Non-nuclear Energy Future

Contrast that with the Republican platform:

We strongly oppose all efforts of the extreme environmental groups that stymie legitimate business interests. We strongly oppose those efforts that attempt to use the environmental causes to purposefully disrupt and stop those interests within the oil and gas industry. We strongly support the immediate repeal of the Endangered Species Act. We believe the Environmental Protection Agency should be abolished. We encourage a comprehensive energy policy that allows more development of domestic energy sources and reduces our need for foreign energy. Energy policy should be cooperative, economically viable without taxpayer funded subsidies, and environmentally safe, but not restricted by overzealous environmental activism. We support immediate removal of government barriers to free market solutions to production and distribution of energy including restrictions on:

• drilling and production operations on public and private lands and waters
• refineries
• electric power generation and distribution
• federal gas mileage standards (CAFÉ standards) and fuel blends

We support the elimination of the Department of Energy. We support the immediate approval and construction of the Keystone XL and other pipelines that will reduce our reliance on imported oil and natural gas from unstable or unfriendly countries. We support land drilling and production operations including hydraulic fracturing. We support the repeal of legislation mandating ethanol as fuel additives and/or primary fuel.

We have not provided the Democratic Party’s Platform because, although it has not been adopted yet, would essentially do the same as the Republican’s while trying to look and sound just like the Green’s. It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. At least the Green Party wears its own wool.
So, given a choice between tweedledum and tweedledumber, we choose neither. We plan to vote Green.

.

The Future of Work

SUBHEAD: New technology will destroy more jobs than it creates. That may be an opportunity for positive change.  

By Charles Hugh Smith on 3 September 2012 for Of 2 Minds - 
  (http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/labor-day-2012-future-of-work.html)

 
Image above: Painting "The Ride Home" by Mark Bryan, 2005. From (http://www.artofmarkbryan.com/ride_home.html).
 
Technology and the Web are destroying far more jobs than they create. We will need to develop a "Third Way" based on community rather than the Market or the State to adapt to this reality.
What better day to ponder the future of work than Labor Day? Long-time correspondent Robert Z. recently shared an essay on just this topic entitled Understanding the 'New' Economy. The underlying political and financial assumption of the Status Quo is that technology will ultimately create more jobs than it destroys. Bob's insightful essay disputes that assumption:

Over the past 15 years, the global economy has experienced structural changes to a degree not seen in nearly 150 years. Put simply, the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s has given way to a post-industrial economy. In this post-industrial economy, technology has now evolved to the point where it destroys more jobs than it creates. Still, most people are Luddites to some extent. Human nature is to resist dramatic change, either actively or passively, until we have no other choice.

If you don’t believe that, just listen to our presidential candidates. Both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama will give us happy talk about maintaining entitlement benefits (e.g., Medicare and Medicaid) that cannot possibly be sustained. They will talk about energy self-sufficiency. They will talk about creating jobs. They will tell us that we can somehow ‘grow’ our way out of our economic distress.

But neither candidate will admit that technology now destroys more jobs than it creates, because to do so would be to commit political suicide. The fact is that none of the happy talk will ever come true. Instead, the Federal Government, with the tacit approval of both major political parties, continues to run trillion-dollar-plus deficits year after year in a futile attempt to spend our way out of our economic problems and to sustain an economic model that cannot be sustained.

Those who believe that bringing manufacturing back to the US will also bring back jobs are trying to fight a war that has already been fought and lost. Why? The answer is technology. It’s actually a fairly simple process now to bring production of many items back to the US, simply because of automation and robotics. A factory filled with robots can operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, so long as the raw material inputs keep flowing into the factory. Robots don’t take breaks, don’t make mistakes, don’t call in sick, don’t take vacations, don’t require expensive health insurance, and don’t receive paychecks.

A fully automated robotic manufacturing facility might require only 100 workers, while a traditional assembly line facility might utilize 3,000 workers. That’s a huge difference in the number of jobs. The simple fact is that most of the lost manufacturing jobs are never coming back. What about all the marketing, administrative, accounting, and IT jobs that we think can’t be outsourced or automated? Well, retail enterprises now tailor any number of special offers directly to individual customers by mining data from reward programs.

That doesn’t take an expensive ad budget or a huge marketing department, since it’s all automated. Have you ever noticed that most of the advertising you see while you surf the Web is tailored to things you might be interested in buying? That’s all automated – huge numbers of marketing professionals are just not needed. In the accounting world, ‘lean accounting’ attempts to streamline accounting processes and eliminate accounting inefficiencies.

A byproduct of ‘lean accounting’ is often greater use of technology and a significant reduction in the number of accountants and accounting clerks. In the IT (Information Technology) sector, computer algorithms for high-frequency stock trading (HFT) have become so complex that specialized software now writes new HFT programs and algorithms. That reduces job opportunities for programmers.

The net result of all these examples is not job creation. It’s job destruction. How about government jobs and government-related jobs? Well, think about the US defense budget. It’s a huge example. We surely do not need as many tanks and fighter jets as we used to, now that we have remote-controlled drones to do many of the jobs required. And with the availability of these drones, we might not need as many aircraft carriers, ships, or military personnel either. What about the Post Office? Do we really need daily mail service in an electronic world?

The point is that as we let go of old methodologies, whether in the private sector or in government, huge numbers of jobs simply disappear. As a society, we need to admit that ‘free-market’ capitalism is not going to bring back these lost jobs. Thanks to technology, society is capable of meeting basic human needs (food, clothing, shelter, transportation) with far fewer workers percentage-wise than were needed in the past. But as a society, we also need to admit that socialistic solutions won’t work either, simply because human nature is to take care of ourselves and our families first.

Once we have provided for ourselves and our families, very few of us are both willing and able to provide for every stranger that might knock on our door seeking assistance. As a nation, we must at some point address any number of major economic issues, including the massive overhang of debt (public and private) that cannot possibly be repaid and demands for future entitlement payments that cannot possibly be met. As a society, we ought to admit that we cannot borrow our way to prosperity. Unless interest rates are zero forever and creditors are willing to forego scheduled repayments forever, borrowing our way to prosperity is a mathematical impossibility.

One point is certain. Even if we find the political will to deal with the mathematics of our economic problems, we will never find long-term solutions to our economic issues until we recognize the profound economic changes wrought by technological advances. This is especially true with respect to our traditional view of a job and a paycheck. While it is true that new opportunities will always exist, these opportunities may not be as plentiful as the jobs of the past once were.

And these opportunities will generally require more advanced skills than many of the jobs of the past. Technology has fundamentally changed the nature of paying work, and it is also one of the major economic issues of our time. About the author: Bob Z., of Vancouver, Washington, is a Corporate Finance executive who retired in 2007 from an upper management position with a Fortune 500 corporation.

Thank you, Bob, for your forthright appraisal of technology and jobs. The decline in labor's share of the GDP (gross national product) is sobering. Here are some other points to consider:

1. The build-out of a new technology creates a large but temporary number of jobs. This has been the case for some time: the construction of the railroads created a jobs boom that soon disappeared in a financial bust as rail was over-built and profits were non-existent for many of the extraneous or duplicate lines. Telephony and telecom followed similar arcs, and did the build-out of the Internet infrastructure.
   
2. Technology maturation leads to diminishing return on labor as incremental advances in productivity are capital-intensive. Semiconductor manufacturing is a good example; fabrication facilities (fabs) cost upwards of $2 billion each even as the number of workers need to operate the fab declines. Profit margins on many high-technology products are razor-thin, flat-screen displays being a prime example, and diminishing margins further pressure labor costs.
   
3. Software is leading the next-generation industrial revolution, automating many tasks that were considered "safe" from automation. As Bob pointed out, this includes securities trading and accounting. (I would add tax preparation for the majority of tax situations.) Can the law, academia and government remain immune? Unlikely.
   
4. Although few dare contemplate this, the low-hanging fruit of technology may have already been plucked. Take healthcare as an example: antibiotics and vaccines virtually eliminated many diseases at a very low cost per dose (though some diseases are coming back due to unvaccinated host populations and bacterial adaptation). Antibiotics are "one size fits all" technologies: they act basically the same on every target bacteria and in every host.
   
   Compare that universality to the spectrum of individual responses to cancer treatments and other medications: one size does not fit all, and many of the most profitable drugs of the past few decades treated symptoms, not the underlying illness. It is increasingly clear that there is no "magic pill" that kills all cancers, or even specific cancers in all patients. Lifestyle diseases such as diabetes appear impervious to "magic bullet" cures, as the causal factors of the disease are complex. The same can be said of diseases of aging and environmental factors. In other words, the notion that tens of billions of dollars in high-tech research will yield "one size fits all" low-cost treatments of complex diseases has been shown to be problematic, and very possibly a fantasy.
   
5. The Internet is destroying vast income streams that once supported tens of thousands of jobs in industries from finance to music. Craigslist has gutted the once-immense income stream from newspapers, and web-based marketing has shredded print-media advert page counts. Global competition and pressure to maintain profits and margins relentlessly drive enterprises to slash payrolls.
   
6. As I have discussed here many times over the years, the rising costs of taxes, benefits and regulations have squeezed small businesses. In response, many small companies rely on automation and software to perform tasks that until recently required a human worker.

Those small businesses that cannot prosper via technology are going under, and the risks posed by ever-higher costs have raised entry barriers to starting a small business. These trends are visible in this chart:

The array of web-based tools available to entrepreneurs now is astonishing. Why take on the risks of hiring people when you can do the work yourself with low-cost web tools and software? For many small enterprises, that is the only way to survive.

Advanced societies face a dilemma that cannot be solved by more debt or more technology: how to distribute not just the output of the economy, but the work and responsibility so that everyone has an opportunity to contribute and earn their keep.

Those who have plowed through my books know that I see community as the only viable way forward. Many aspects of human life cannot be turned into a "market opportunity," nor can they be taken over by the insolvent central-planning Central State. Paying people to stay home and rot is not a solution, but neither is paying people more than they produce in competitive markets.

There is a "Third Way," but we've lost the skills and infrastructure required. Of the three elements of civil society, the Market and the State have crowded out Community. We either re-discover the labor-value of community or we devolve further into a potentially "death spiral" social and financial instability.

The Joy of Ex

SUBHEAD: The world may be going through extreme flux right now but that doesn't mean it won’t be worth living in.  

By Jason Heppenstall on 2 September 2012 for 22 Billion Energy Slaves - (http://22billionenergyslaves.blogspot.dk/2012/09/the-joy-of-ex.html)

   
Image above: The newly-revealed Naked Lady of Northumberland, etched into a post industrial landscape scarred by the coal pits of northern England. In original article. From (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-19458150).
 

Yes, the ex I am talking about is ex-industrialism. As our world gazes down from the mist shrouded plateau of Hubbert’s Peak onto the unfamiliar terrain of a lower energy future it’s quite natural that we are experiencing a feeling of giddiness and fear. The way down is unknown and, as I mentioned last week, there may be some pretty steep cliffs that we somehow have to traverse. We don’t know what the journey down is going to be like, but we do know that at some point – perhaps after a couple of centuries, perhaps sooner – we’re going to reach the flat ground with which we have been familiar throughout most of our human history.

At that point in time we’ll find that the flat terrain on the far side of the foothills of Hubbert’s Peak isn’t half as nice as the forested green lands our ancestors set out from all those years ago. For a start it’ll be covered in the smouldering wrecks of industrial society and girded with concrete. Furthermore, there will be fewer species of animals and the climate will be chaotic. And just why is the ground covered in bones? Those with access to history books will probably wish we had never discovered how to use oil in the first place.

But the fact is that we did. Whether the planet was looking to evolve a burrowing species to release the buried carbon back into the atmosphere and bring on a huge epoch-defining change in its chemistry we will never know. Some could be forgiven for thinking just that, given the steady drumroll of scientific news that we’ve been hit with recently. Let's recap. The Arctic ice is at a record low. The oceans are turning into warm battery acid. The world is gripped by severe drought and severe flooding. Human numbers continue their relentless explosion. Microwave pulse transmissions from mobile phone masts and wi-fi devices are causing mutations and killing trees in ever greater areas. More nations are scrambling for nuclear technology. 

I’m going to stop right there.

The reason I’m going to stop there is because I don’t want this blog to turn into a doomer blog. I’ve been reading a few doomer blogs recently and I’ve come to the conclusion that the only thing they achieve is to put a spell of paralysis on you. In my experience the only way to break this paralysing spell is to actually do something along the lines suggested by Gandhi i.e. be the change you want to see in the world. Doomers disempower both themselves and those who read what they have written. 


The world may be going through extreme flux right now but that doesn't mean it won’t be worth living in. It’s difficult to write that without sounding trite, because people are desperate and people are scared, but really, if you think about it, all the talk of sterilization and suicide pills isn’t exactly helpful is it?

I have three simple thoughts that I keep in mind to avoid despair (and God knows, I have also been there). 

The first is that the scientists might be right about many observable phenomena but they are not all-knowing. They might have identified a few positive feedback loops which will likely cause us an immense amount of trouble, such as white ice giving way to blue water, methane release etc. but they can’t possibly predict any negative feedback loops which might limit the destruction. Nobody knows for sure what is really happening and the effect it will have on us (but just to be clear, yes, it is a silly and dangerous idea to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere).

The second point to bear in mind is that we have no idea what rippling effect our individual actions will cause. When Rosa Parks sat down on a bus seat in 1955 she could have had no idea that it might lead to a black man being elected president over half a century later. By following through on our thoughts with decisive actions we cross a boundary between the non-physical world of thought into the physical world. Humans, being social primates, copy behaviours, and there is no way of knowing when we are nearing tipping points in human behaviour. The so-called hundredth monkey effect is a case in point.

Thirdly, we have very little clue as to how the currents of human psychology, as influenced by religion, can change course. But change they do, and quite often it is very swiftly. At present, the religion of our industrial society is that of progress. Some people convince themselves they are atheists and progressives, but it’s impossible for our conscious minds not to latch onto some kind of meaning in the universe, so in fact they are just deluding themselves. 


They say that the universe is just a lot of balls whizzing around and banging into one another and that its creation, as well as the advent of life and consciousness, is just a normal phenomenon not worth dwelling upon. But it is far from unlikely that as the promises of the industrial age implode one by one this obsession with material progress will look more and more hollow and something far more profound will replace it. If and when it does, I’m hoping that it will be an Earth centred spirituality, which will (again) mean that we’ll just be getting back to normal.  


Don’t believe it could take hold? Have a look at the picture below, which was taken in the world’s most advanced industrial nation a couple of days ago. In case you're wondering what's happening, tens of thousands of Americans are gathered around a giant wooden man which, at the culmination of of the festival, is set alight to joyous celebrations. Who is that man? He's The Man, that's who.

So all of these things give me hope. Hope is a terribly saccharine word that is often used by lazy people who don’t do anything to bring it about. So I’m going for a Hope 2:0, which is like the old hope but you have to earn it. And being the father of two children I have to have hope – there can be no better way to invest in the future.

I have been here once before ten years ago. Despite the economic boom (or probably because of it) I decided that the sanest thing to do would be to move somewhere we could have a small farm. Given the huge disparity in property prices between northern and southern Europe it meant we could swap our small terraced house beside a main road in a dull part of Copenhagen for a large eight bedroom stone farmhouse with an acre of land in the foothills of Spain’s Sierra Nevada. It was a no-brainer, as far as I was concerned, but people told us we were ‘brave’. I didn't see anything brave about it – it just seemed like common sense.

Fast forward a couple of years and the house we had bought as a ruin (so many houses were abandoned in the rush to the cities after Franco had fallen) was more or less restored to habitability. Along the way I had received some very useful lessons about water supply, electricity, heating and sewage. Plus, I could also add ‘olive farmer’ to my CV. 

We began to live the low-energy dream, and probably for the first time in my adult life, I actually really enjoyed life. Living with the seasons and the sun, and only having a small amount of electrical energy proved to be very liberating. I found out how bountiful nature could be, and in our garden alone we grew olives, figs, almonds, apples, pomegranates, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, grapes, cherries, chestnuts and quinces. A vegetable garden provided even more food, and if it was meat we were after we could always have asked our neighbour to shoot a jabali (wild boar) for us, although we never did.

No, we were not self-sufficient in any way, but we put a big dent in it. We became part of a network of friends and neighbours. Whatever your problem, you could usually find someone to help you out, just as you would have to be willing to help others out in need. That’s what it’s all about, in my opinion.

[Ah yes, I hear the naysayers say, but you had the money to achieve your dream. True, but I know plenty of people down in Spain who had next to nothing but still achieved something similar, getting hold of scruffy pieces of unwanted land and living in self-built caravans and trucks etc. Embedded in the same ecosystem, they were also able to grow the same plants and trees as me - the sun and rain didn't discriminate. Life is a conundrum that only we can solve.]

Alas this dream wasn’t to last, but before it ended I did have one revelation. I used to get up each morning just as the sun appeared over the top of a distant mountain, bathing my Eden-like garden in light. I would walk around the land with a cup of tea, usually with our three mousers at my heels (who wait all night for this moment), just taking note of all the plants and how they were doing. 


Perhaps I would think that a bough on an old olive tree would need lopping off because it was getting too unbalanced, or maybe I would just note that a particular tomato plant was not doing so well on a particular patch of ground. I would dig in the soil with my fingers, assessing whether it needed irrigating and gauging how much organic matter it had within it. I gazed at the industrious ants and the bark-coloured cicadas (thankfully silent at this time of day) and stood still so as not to scare the myriad brightly coloured birds that came to drink in our irrigation pool. I listened to the deep throbbing hum of a bees’ nest within a eucalyptus tree, and of my neighbor’s goats bleating as sounds from the valley carried up on the cool breeze.

 

 

In this way I entered into a very intimate relationship with the land and, day by day, week by week, season by season, that relationship deepened. I realised I was filling my head with knowledge, and that filled me with a deep joy. But as this joy deepened, I was also filled with something like alarm at how much there was to know and learn, and how much junk my head was already filled with.

We rarely ventured out into what I termed the ‘real world’ i.e. outside our valley, which was backwards even by Andalucian Spanish standards, and even a trip to nearby Granada, which is by most accounts one of the world’s most beautiful old cities, started my head spinning. I became, in effect, a country bumpkin. When people came to visit it was impossible not to notice the look of alarm written all over their faces. My father in law, who is Italian, flatly failed to believe we were living there. It just didn’t compute in his head and he muttered ‘You can’t live here,’ over and over.

Unfortunately it turned out that he was right and so it was all the more of a shock when the long arm of fate took us by the scruff of our necks and dumped us back in the fashion and techno-progressive utopia of Copenhagen again. I then spent five hard years paying off debts and generally being made to feel that I should NEVER try to escape from the system again. Don’t even think about it!

All of this is to illustrate the point that as our fuel supplies dwindle and our world begins to look more chaotic and dishevelled we are going to need to learn a lot of things. But it’s not just necessity; whole worlds of knowledge and learning are there just for the taking. Here’s an exercise that I did a couple of weeks ago when considering what I would like to learn in this life before I die. I came up with the following, after some thought:

• To sail a boat
• To learn Greek
• To learn thoroughly one area of history
• Permaculture for my local environment
• Wild pottery
• Woodland management
• A musical instrument
• An oriental martial art form

By contrast, I know people who have either abandoned learning altogether and are just content to sit in front of the television and be drip fed reality programmes, or instead focus all of their brain power on learning new IT systems. 

All of the subjects I have mentioned above can be done for little or no money and don’t consume much energy. True, it helps if you’re an autodidact, but that should only be considered a limiting factor. I have already started, having bought some CDs online, which I listen to as I am running, plus various books I have been reading over the past year. What’s more, I am learning something else too, although I don’t feel ready to talk about it here just yet. If you have read this far you’ll probably have a fair idea about what it is. This also ties in with my longer term plans, which I’ll also be revealing here in good time.

So, far from feeling a terrifying paralysis about the future, what I actually feel is that for many of us it will be like the opening of a lotus flower. Yes, there are huge unknowns and sharp cliffs, but there are also many opportunities for enlightenment and learning. What I think many people need to do is break away from the online incubators of despair – indulging in them is like drinking from a pool of poisoned water. It also doesn’t do any good to continually tune into the television news.

I could say that the future is going to bright and powered by windmills and solar panels. I’ve noticed that those kinds of blogs attract a lot of followers and positive ‘if only we wish hard enough/pump more money into Tesla then it will come true’ comments – but I’d be telling a lie. As far as I see it – and I’m no sage, just a regular bloke – the future’s going to be messy and hard, but not apocalyptic. 


Those of us who at least recognise this now will get the chance to engage it on something like our own terms, whereas those who don’t will likely end up shivering in cold and dying of boredom in hugely overcrowded housing complexes and wondering when that great Thorium powered future they had unknowingly mentally and spiritually invested in was going to turn up and save them.

Instead, what we should be doing is focusing on the positive, while still maintaining a clear understanding of the multiple and complex threats that face us. If you want to read something that more or less chimes with my outlook there can be no better publication than Resurgence. 


This plucky magazine has been going for around 40 years and is edited by Satish Kumar. People write in it for free and there are (almost) no adverts – just artwork and poems in their place. It’s heavily influenced by the thinking of Schumacher (Small is Beautiful) and great thinkers such as Tagore. It has just joined forces with The Ecologist, creating a synthesis between environmentalism, the arts and science. I know that every time I receive it through the mail and read through it it gives me plenty of inspiration – so I would heartily recommend anyone who doesn’t already do so to take out a subscription and see if it does the same thing for you!

Here endeth the commercial message.

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Join Up!

SUBHEAD: Republicats. meet the new third party in America's national political tragedy - Reality.

By James Kunstler on 3 September 2012 for Kunstler.com - (http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/09/join-up.html)


Image above: One of many mashup "Obomney" effort illustrations of the choice we face. From (http://keepittrill.com/online/2012/06/democrat-republican-voting-lesser-evils-wrong/).

Reality is the only party with an agenda consistent with what is actually happening in the world. Reality doesn't need to drum up dollar donations from anyone. Reality doesn't have to pander to any interest group or subscribe to any inane belief system. Reality doesn't even need your vote. Reality will be the winner of the 2012 election no matter what the ballot returns appear to say about the bids of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to lead the executive branch of the government.

In the vicious vacuum that national party politics has become, the Republicans and Democrats are already dead. They choked to death on the toxic fumes of their own excreta. They are empty, hollow institutions animated only by the parasites that feed on and squirm over the residue of decomposing tissue within the dissolving membranes of their legitimacy. Think of the fabled Koch brothers as botfly larvae and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association PAC (SIFMA PAC) as a mass of writhing maggots.

These are desperate days in the republic. Between the two empty spectacles of the official party nominating conventions, a terrible nausea rises in the collective gorge of the swindled body politic. The putative contest of ideas is a dumbshow in a hall of mirrors. None of it avails to reduce, mitigate, or even acknowledge, the tensions that may tear this country apart, in particular the web of fraud that shrouds all the operations of money and banking - which is to say: the fate of everything the nation thinks it has invested in itself and its future. In the USA of 2012, anything goes and nothing matters. Reality has a different view of where this all ends and how it will work out.

Compare and contrast the platforms of the Republicans and Democrats with the Reality Party:

The two major parties both propose that the colossal machine of everyday life in America can not only run indefinitely, but continue expanding, and include ever more member people who trade ever more schwag. All that is required, they say, is twiddling the settings of the machine, to get it back to running smoothly as it did in the good old days before the mystifying crash of 2008. They disagree slightly on which dials to twiddle. Reality knows we have entered along-term compressive economic contraction; that there is no way we can persist in the current living arrangement; and that the necessary outcome to avoid immense human suffering can be described as the downscaling and re-localizing of everything we do.

The two major parties regard the rule of law as optional, especially in money matters. Neither party has any will to interfere with a broad array of financial rackets that range from the blatant manipulation of markets, interest rates, and currencies to computerized front-running thievery, traffic in booby-trapped derivatives and counterfeit shorts, pervasive accounting fraud, channel stuffing, irregularities in central bank bullion leasing, flagrant confiscation of private accounts, municipal bond-rigging flimflams, "private equity" looting operations, offshore banking dodges, and untold other scams, rip-offs, and cons that have crippled the basic functions of finance, namely: price discovery, currency as a reliable store of value, and the allocation of surplus wealth for productive purpose. Reality knows that the absence of the rule of law is suicidal.


Reality is incapable of pretending that it doesn't matter. Reality provides work-arounds for intractably dishonest political arrangements: civil war and revolution. Both are invoked out of extreme desperation and have unpredictable outcomes. Like Reality itself, they are what they are.

The two major parties pretend that so-called "entitlement" programs can be simultaneously reformed, improved, and abolished - that is, you can have your cake and eat it (with ice cream) at the same time you throw it in the garbage. Reality rejects this incoherent juggling act and proposes that Americans better just make other arrangements for old age, routine medical care, and daily bread. This implies cultural as much as economic transformation and it will occur emergently no matter what empty promises anyone makes.


People who want to get food at regular intervals will have to find some way to make themselves useful to others. Medicine will return to the local clinic model and doctors will have to find another motivation for practice besides the acquisition of German automobiles. Old people will have to prevail upon their offspring for care and protection, and they will be expected to play a useful role in the household or community in return if they are able-bodied.

The two major parties both proclaim that the USA is verging on "energy independence." Both parties are lying. Reality knows that the shale oil "game changer" is a mirage. By 2014, the "sweet spots" of the Bakken will deplete faster than new wells can be drilled, and the impairments of banking will constrict the supply of capital investment for that hypothetical future drilling. All the deregulation in the world will not alter the fact that future oil is expensive, exists in places where it is hard to work, and entails unappetizing geopolitical contingencies. Reality favors letting go of automobile-based living and the adoption of walkable communities connected by inland waterways and railroads.

The two major parties believe that the foreign wars are good for business as long as you can minimize the casualties on our side and keep war news off the TV. Reality knows that war as currently practiced by the US Military is a failure if 1.) you can't control the terrain in the foreign theater of operations, and 2.) you can't control the behavior of the foreign population. Notice that we can't do either of those things in Afghanistan or the sundry other places where the US military might be found today.
 

The two major parties also favor the application of war-time "security" operations on the US public inside our borders - i.e. spying, data harvesting, monitoring of cell phone and bank records., et cetera - contrary to what US law and the constitution says. Reality believes that, if the rule of law remains optional, the time will come when American government officials who authorized these activities may be dragged from their command centers and hanged from traffic signals by a citizenry pushed too far.

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama would label Reality a "terrorist movement" if they could and seek to blow it up with predator drones. But Reality is harder to stamp out than truth, which can be shouted down, papered over, fudged, outlawed, etch-a-sketched, exiled, and reviled. Reality is everywhere. It lurks inside and outside the doors of the phony-baloney convention vaudeville shows in its cloak of invisibility, ready to work its hoodoo on the feckless, the fatuous, and the wicked. Reality is America's last best hope. Join the Reality Party.

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Plenty of Oil

SUBHEAD: Why the oil industry doesn't want you to remember the past fifteen years.

 By Kurt Cobb on 3 September 2012 for the Energy Bulletin - 
(http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-09-03/why-oil-industry-doesnt-want-you-remember-last-14-years)

 
Image above: Photo of (S)HELL station by Matt Jalbert. From (http://www.mattjalbert.com).
 


What were the prices of oil and gasoline in 1998? Do you remember? Without looking them up (or looking below this line), make your best guess.

I've been taking an informal poll to find out what people remember about oil and gasoline prices in that year. So far, only one person has correctly characterized prices back then. Most guesses have clustered around $2.50 to $3 a gallon for gasoline (in the United States). Only one person could come up with a crude oil price which she guessed was around $55 a barrel. The answers show a vague recollection that oil and gasoline were cheaper than they are today. But just how much cheaper has been lost down the memory hole.

Okay, I know the suspense is killing you. Here's how gasoline and oil fared in 1998. The nationwide average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States in December of that year was 95 cents. The closing price for a barrel of crude oil sold on the New York Mercantile Exchange on December 31 was $12.05. Just three weeks earlier the price of oil had hit its nadir for the year at $10.72. Oil had started the year above $17 and steadily slid as the Asian financial crisis slowed the world economy and reduced oil demand. Gasoline prices dropped only a little during the year starting from the January average of $1.09 a gallon.

Why does the oil industry want you to forget this? Because after a 10-fold increase in the price of crude oil and a fourfold increase in the price of gasoline, the industry is once again trying to sell the same story of continued abundance that they were selling back in the late 1990s. But the manyfold increase in oil prices ought to make everyone doubt an industry which has repeatedly told us that huge supplies are just around the corner, and prices are headed for a crash.

Perhaps the best example of the oil industry's "Wrong Way Corrigans" is industry mouthpiece Daniel Yergin, head of Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), a prominent energy consulting firm. For a long time Yergin has been a frequent guest on prominent television news programs and a source for many print journalists. He is a darling of the media on energy issues, a media which is too polite to confront him with his abysmal record of predictions in the oil market. He was wrong in his public pronouncements every step of the way from the 1998 low in oil prices right up to the all-time highs of 2008, frequently predicting a large buildup of new supply and crashing prices. (One wonders why clients of CERA continue to buy the company's research when it has been so wrong for so long. But that's a story for another time.) Only at the end of 2008 did oil prices finally crash and then only because the world economy was headed into the worst economic decline since the Great Depression. But as soon as the economy revived even tepidly, prices rose back to $80 a barrel and then above $100 which is about where they are today.

The reason for high prices is actually quite obvious. Crude oil production worldwide has been stuck between 71 and 76 million barrels per day since 2005 (calculated on a monthly basis). Oil volumes have been tracing out a troubling bumpy plateau that many fear will mark the all-time peak in world production. These numbers are reported by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, and are widely considered to be the most reliable available. They reflect total production of "crude oil including lease condensate" (which is the definition of crude oil) from all sources worldwide.

Oil production has stalled despite the huge incentive that record high prices are providing for oil exploration and development. And, despite enormous spending by oil companies on exploration and drilling worldwide, we have only just kept production on a plateau for the last seven years. These high prices and enormous capital spending were the reasons given by Daniel Yergin for the expected buildup of production volumes. So what went wrong?

The simple answer is that we've exhausted the easy-to-get oil and are now left with mostly the hard-to-get oil. It only makes sense that the early oil pioneers harvested the easy oil first. Why go after the hard stuff at that point? We've since learned how to extract oil that is much harder to develop. This includes deposits far offshore and deep below the seabed as well as those locked in the Canadian Tar Sands, deposits that must undergo expensive and energy-intensive processing to convert what is really bitumen, a goopy, thick hydrocarbon, into what we call oil.

And, this leads me to a crucial concept which I find myself repeating over and over again in response to all the foolish Daniel Yergins of the world: The critical factor in the oil markets and a global economy dependent on large, continuous supplies of oil is the rate of production. The rate is the key, not the size of the world's reserves. It is the size of the tap, not the size of the tank that matters.

Let me offer another analogy to help explain. If you inherit a million dollars with the stipulation that you can only withdraw $500 a month, you may be a millionaire, but you will never live like one. That is increasingly the situation we face with oil. There may be huge resources of tight oil (often mistakenly referred to as shale oil) and of oil-like substances such as tar sands. But the expense, the necessary energy and increasingly, the amount of water required to extract and process them is so great that we have been unable to lift the worldwide rate of production significantly above its current plateau for a sustained period during the last seven years. Even with all our vaunted new technology, we have only just barely been able to replace the capacity lost each year to the inexorable decline in the rate of production from existing oil fields.

Recently, the head of a company well placed to judge trends in the worldwide rate of oil production said he believes that the all-time peak is in. Core Laboratories CEO Dave Demshur told attendees at the Denver Oil & Gas Conference last month that "[t]he maximum yearly oil production of the planet is taking place now." Core provides well analysis and reservoir management to oil and gas companies in practically every major oil region of the world. Demshur's statement is an unusual admission from an industry insider with access to information that spans the entire industry.

The truth is we won't know for sure that we've passed the peak in world oil production until long after it occurs. It may be a decade after the event before oil production turns down definitively and the peak becomes obvious for all to see.

Just to clarify, here's what peak oil does NOT mean:

• Peak oil does not mean we are running out of oil. This is a canard used by the oil industry to confuse the public. Nobody who understands world peak oil production ever says that it means we are running out. In fact, we won't run out of oil for a very, very long time. At the peak the rate of production will cease to rise, probably trace a plateau for a time, and finally begin a possibly slow and bumpy decline. That means we'll have less and less oil available each year. As oil becomes more and more expensive, we will use less, and we will ultimately reserve it for critical purposes for which we cannot find good oil substitutes.

• Peak oil does not mean that we won't find any more oil. We are finding oil every day. We're just not finding enough and putting it into production fast enough to grow production in the face of declining flows from existing fields.
• Peak oil does not mean the immediate collapse of modern civilization. However, if we stand still and do little to address oil depletion, peak oil will likely result in immense difficulties.

The industry and its paid spokespersons try to dazzle the public with talking points that include the notion that we have more oil reserves than we've ever had. That is questionable, and I'll explore that claim in a later piece. But again, I emphasize that reserves are not the salient point. It is and always will be the rate of production that matters more. If oil production stopped for a sufficiently long period--enough to drain all aboveground supplies--modern civilization as we know it would collapse. The amount of reserves would not matter since the rate of production would have dropped to zero.

What matters is how much we can produce for continuous input into the world economy. As you might intuit, we've built a financial system and physical infrastructure premised on continuous and rising levels of oil consumption. That's why peak oil matters so much, and why flat oil production has been a large contributing factor to the unstable world economy in recent years.

To further illustrate the importance of rate, consider the following: Half of all oil consumed since the beginning of the oil age has been consumed since 1985. We consumed exponentially larger amounts nearly every year until 2005 when a number of factors conspired to constrain supplies. We frequently hear about multi-billion barrel discoveries and think (wrongly) that oil must surely be plentiful as a result. So, here's another question to ponder: How long does one billion barrels of oil last the world at current rates of consumption? If you guessed something close to 12 days, you have a sense of the enormous challenges humans face in extracting finite resources at ever higher rates. Just multiply those multi-billion barrel discoveries by 12 to find out how many days the oil age might be extended by each discovery. You'll find the answer is, "not many."

Perhaps it will seem puzzling that experts inside the industry--with a few notable exceptions--cannot grasp that the rate of production is the central issue. The best explanation I can offer is to quote author Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

And, here is where we get to the motivations behind the sunny optimism of the oil industry. If the public understood that oil supplies might be nearing an irreversible decline, it would demand the deployment of alternative fuels and efficiency measures to soften the blow in order to give us time for a transition to a society based on something other than oil. That would ultimately reduce demand for oil products and eventually end our dependence on oil. Oil companies might get stuck with significant inventories in the ground that they cannot sell, at least not at the prices or in the quantities they would like.

The more immediate problem for oil company executives is that their companies may soon find it impossible to replace all their oil reserves. Oil companies strive to replace at least 100 percent of what they produce so that their reserves don't fall. If investors come to believe that a failure to replace reserves will be ongoing year after year, they will mark down oil company share prices significantly. In fact, it's already happened, and it's likely to happen with more frequency as more companies struggle to reach 100 percent replacement. Such share price declines would, of course, make a lot of oil executives significantly poorer as the value of their stock and stock options plummet. Essentially, oil companies would be recognized as self-liquidating businesses.

All of this the oil industry wants you to ignore as it undertakes yet another public relations campaign to convince the world that supplies will only grow from here. Naturally, with prices near $100 a barrel, the public needs reassurance. The campaign is designed to lull both the public and policymakers into a somnolent surrender to a business-as-usual future that will leave us unprepared for the momentous challenges ahead.

Oil is the central commodity of the modern age. As of 2011 it provided one-third of the world's energy and the basis for countless petrochemicals necessary to the functioning of modern society. Oil's role in transportation remains critical; 80 percent of the world's road, rail, air and sea transportation fuel is derived from petroleum, and in the United States the number is 93 percent. Good substitutes for oil in transportation are still hard to come by.

No one can know exactly when world oil production will peak--not me, not the world's oil companies, not any government agency. The dangers we face if we are unprepared are potentially quite severe. With worldwide oil production essentially flat for the last seven years, the sensible thing to do would be to get ready now as quickly as we can.

Given what's at stake for oil company managements, it should be obvious why they are telling us not to worry. Given the publicly available production data, the persistently high price of oil, and the failure of oil companies to expand worldwide production even after enormous expenditures and effort, it should also be obvious why we shouldn't fall for the industry's beguiling but wildly misleading tale..

Shale Gas Bubble Burst

SUBHEAD: Drilling permits for fracking gas decline sharply for the Pennsylvania Marcellus formation. By Tom Corbett on 17 August 2012 for Examiner - (http://www.examiner.com/article/drilling-permits-decline-sharply-for-the-pennsylvania-marcellus-formation?CID=examiner_alerts_article) Image above: Fracking waste water pond in Bradford, Pennsylvania. From (http://riverreporter.blogspot.com/2010/05/gas-boom-dominates-bradford-county.html).

New data released yesterday by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection shows a severe decline in new shale gas well permits issued for the first six months of this year. Permits issued by the State have declined sharply since January 2012 and dropped for the last three straight months for both new wells and “refracks” of existing wells. The significant declines in permits come at a time when the shale gas industry has been crossing over into Ohio for the more lucrative wet oil infused shale gas and leaving the Marcellus. Yet the Corbett Administration is in all-out effort to speed up the State’s permitting process and fighting hard to keep Act 13 prohibitions in place to prevent local townships from enforcing their own zoning ordinances when it comes to shale gas drilling.

The State issued roughly 350 shale gas permits in January of this year while for July they issued a total of roughly 110 permits, more than a 70% decline. For May 250 permits were issued which decreased to 150 permits for June followed by another decline to 110 permits for July, a decline trend for permits which began back in 2011.

Further complicating the picture is the increasing role “refracking” is beginning to play in these operations. Refracking a well is used to keep up its output as aggressive production depletion rates remain a persistent fact of life for shale gas drillers. This means it is no longer clear from State’s data what permits are for new wells or to simply refrack existing wells needed to keep up output.

The declines for permitting are now occurring throughout the State including Susquehanna, Bradford, Tioga, Washington and Greene counties, the best “sweet spots” to date in the State for the industry. It appears not even the claims of wet oil infused shale gas in the southwest corner of the State are holding the drillers main attention.

Fractracker.org’s senior researcher Matt Kelso said the State’s data now confirms, “The industry is ramping down permitting, drilling and production efforts across the State for the time being.” Kelso also stated, “State data released yesterday now shows oil and gas production for the last 6 months to be just 50% of what was produced for the 6 month prior time period.” He cautioned the report may be incomplete as some shale gas companies have not reported thier production into the State DEP.

Kelso also observed the recent report by the Energy Information Agency regarding 2011 production rates which now have many claiming the Marcellus is well on its way to be the number one shale gas producer should be viewed realistically. He notes the EIA’s gas production report reflects results from the prior drilling ramp up activity in 2009 and 2010 and should be viewed in balance with recent drilling decline data from 2011 and year to date 2012.

Meanwhile Chesapeake Energy, BHP Billiton and numerous other gas companies heavily involved in shale gas drilling have written off billions of dollars in claimed shale gas reserves on their 2nd quarter financial operating results. This comes on the news the Texas Barnett and Louisiana Haynesville shale plays now appear to be peaking with annual production declines of 29% to 40% despite several thousand new wells coming online in these plays over the last year.

Even as the industry leaves Pennsylvania for the greener pastures of Ohio’s wet shale gas, the Corbett Administration continues to fight on to make drilling access even easier within the State. The Governor’s Act 13 overhaul of mining and drilling regulations early this year called for the controversial measure of prohibiting local municipalities from preventing shale gas drilling, toxic waste ponds, compressor yards and the rest of the industry’s heavy footprint from being governed by a given local township's zoning ordinances. Among other things, it meant a local township could not stop a shale gas rig with toxic tailing pond from being located near a school or in a residential area normally protected by local zoning ordinances. Setbacks and other zoning issues would be controlled by the State instead.

Several local townships filed an appeal of the State’s control over their zoning enforcement rights whereby Commonwealth courts struck down these Act 13 prohibitions last month. The Corbett Administration immediately filed an appeal to the State’s Supreme Court. More than 70 local townships then filed letters of support to the court in favor of lower court’s ruling. Yesterday the court ruled the Act 13 prohibitions cannot be enacted in any manner until they rule on the appeal at large.

Secretary Michael Krancer, who heads the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, whose lawyers assisted in filing the Administration’s appeal has been on record in the past as saying, “At the end of the day, my job is to get gas done.”

As the heated debate on hydraulic fracking continues, scant attention is being paid to the rapid decline rates of shale gas wells production compared to conventional gas wells. Historical well data continues to confirm up to 85% or more of initial shale gas production per well is occurring in its first 12 to 18 months then tailing off rapidly. Industry claims of “hyperbolic”, meaning long term per well operating lifetimes of 30 to 40 years, remain unproven. This has significantly stressed the financials of the industry as payback based on long productive output is not yet a proven part of shale gas dynamics.

For those who simply claim when the price for natural gas rises the drillers will return, little thought is being given to how high that price must go and if it will cross the threshold whereby the price needed will create its own ongoing price demand destruction.

For those who simply believe the answer is to mandate the use of more natural gas, electric utilities and many other large industrial users remain wary of getting hooked on natural gas due to the industry's long proven history of unpredictable price swings. A history of unpredictablity perhaps more should take into consideration.

See also: Ea O Ka Aina: Shale Gas Hype Unfolds 6/24/12 Ea O Ka Aina: Shale Gas Hype 5/8/12 .

Repeal the PLDC Act 55

SUBHEAD: That was the thrust of the testimony on Kauai where a hundreds of residents showed up on Friday night of a full moon over Labor Day weekend to save the island.  

By Andy Kass on 31 August 2012 for A Kauai Blog -  
(http://great-hikes.com/blog/repeal-the-public-land-development-corporation)

  
Image above: Juan Wilson (R), publisher of IslandBreath testifies against Act 55 to PLDC director Lloyd Haraguchi (L) in Lihue on 8/31/12. Photo by Andy Kass.
 

Long ago, I thought I could avoid politics on this blog. But in the end, everything is politics. If you hike and you want to protect the environment, if you live somewhere with limited resources and you want to save them, instead of being common sense, it’s politics.

Some background: After governor Lingle’s ferry fiasco, our new Democratic governor Neil Abercrombie seemed fairly progressive and environmentally minded. He fooled a lot of us. Last year, he encouraged and signed into law the Public Land Development Corporation (PLDC). Like all states, Hawaii is losing tax revenue because of the economic downturn and having trouble funding all its departments. The Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) is one of those deparments that provides services to the population (state parks, among others) without collect much revenue (a few usage fees, but no taxes). So it’s budget was cut (as were services and quality of the facilities), and its new mission is to make money somehow.

That somehow is through development, as in building things on the land that you can charge money to use. But instead of granting commercial concessions to build and operate these developments, the politicians chose a semi-independent corporation. You can read more about its creation and rationalization in these articles from last year. Joan Conrow also links back to her earlier articles about the PLDC, she is one of the few who were paying attention and trying to raise awareness. In the end, the PLDC sailed through the legislature and was signed into law by the governor without too much public awareness, or even well-defined rules. Google “Hawaii Act 55” for more.

Fast forward one year to tonight, when the rules governing the PLDC have been written outside of the legislative process, and, fortunately for the citizens, are being debated in public hearings. Now the true nature of the PLDC is revealed, and people who want to protect Hawaii’s environment and natural resources are up in arms. Here is a video from the meeting on the Big Island. There is a petition you can sign that explains the worst issues. Even the former DLNR chairperson under Lingle’s horrible administration, Laura Thielen, is against the PLDC. In meetings on other islands, many people had come to denounce not just the rules, but the PLDC itself and how it was created.

The photo above shows the PLDC representatives running the meeting in the Lihue elementary school cafeteria. I think the man on the left is Lloyd Haraguchi, the executive director of the PLDC. As the meeting dragged on and one speaker after another attacked the rules, the PLDC legislation, and the people who passed it, I started to formulate my own protest. But there were so many speakers that I had to leave before I could give my testimony. So I wrote it down when I got home:

Good Evening Mr Chairman,
My name is Mr. Localshill, I’ve been hired by MegaDevCorp to comment on the rules you’re proposing tonight. MegaDevCorp is a world-wide investment and development partnership that looks for opportunities to take money out of local economies. We’re a lot like Bain Capital, you might’ve heard of them. We are based on the mainland, though our tax shelter–I mean corporate headquarters–are in the Bahamas.

Whew, it’s getting late tonight–good thing you and I are getting paid to be here.
Anyways, I’ve identified 3 development opportunities on Kaua’i, and I just want to make sure the rules favor us so we don’t loose money.

1. Your harbors. We can take over your harbors and run them for a profit. We need the state to pass bonds to rebuild all the docks and buildings, and then we’ll manage them for you and charge 4 times what you guys get. But there are a lot of boat ramps that cut into our potential revenue, so you’ll need to stop maintaining those. Don’t worry, we’ll run a marketing campaign about how the public-private partnership is better for the people and gives them the services that DLNR was too underfunded to provide. But if that doesn’t work, the rules must include a guaranteed minimum payment from the state, in case we can’t collect enough usage fees.

2. Haena Luxury Condos and Time-Shares. Think of how much we can sell pieces of Bali-Hai for. We need to take over the Hawaiian lands and state park there, but don’t worry, we’ll keep 8 parking spaces in the 3-level parking garage for public access, just like at Ka’anapali. Hopefully, your rules will allow us to disregard shoreline setbacks, so we can get a lot of units real close to the beach for the view–pack’em in for better profitability. For building those towers, we also need rules that let us bring in Mexican labor because local labor is too expensive and may cause trouble if we unearth any bones in the sand.

3. A hotel in Kokee–we got the idea from your plan a while ago. Think of the lodge at Koele on Lanai: a grand lodge in the meadow (to replace that museum) and take back all the cabins and turn them into luxury bungalows. So we need rules that allow us to develop the state park and, ahem, evict the group who runs the museum. Probably need to tear down the CCC camp and clear some forest. We also need bigger and better roads up there, and close the campgrounds to keep the riff-raff out. Then we need space for a golf course through the meadow, and probably a zipline somewhere. We’ll sell it as an eco-lodge and offer helicopter tours. We’ll need you to put up a gate and give us 50% of the entrance fees, because we’ll be running the park for you.

Just think of all the great development we’ll provide for your tourists–you’ll see arrivals skyrocket because you’ll have more destinations and activities for them. However, we’re still expecting the state to spend millions on promoting the pristine beauty of Kaua’i so that our hotels are filled. And just think of all the minimum wage jobs for locals after we staff our management from the mainland. Because of these great benefits to the state, we’ll need some tax breaks and development incentives.

I know that’s a lot to ask for, so let’s talk it over sometime in private. I’d like to invite you and your family to the St. Regis for a week, and we’ll have time to chat on the golf course.

As I try to highlight in these extreme examples, there are several serious problems with the PLDC:

• The Hawaii government created an entity that has control of state (public) resources but which can exempt itself from the laws that apply to county and state government. The statutes of the PLDC clearly indicate that its projects are exempt from county zoning regulation. Essentially, this entity transfers the privileges of state sovereignty to private corporations.
• The PLDC is privatizing the state resources. As is always the case in these situations, potential profits are privatized, while the costs and risks are borne by the taxpayer. For example: if a developer creates a hotel on state land, the state still has to pay for sewer and road infrastructure to handle the additional burden. Incredibly, neighboring properties of a development project can be required to pay for infrastructure upgrades to match the development, for example installing sidewalks or underground utilities. Alternatively, if a development fails to meet its overly optimistic returns, the state is left paying for bonds or subsidies it promised to the private developer.
• A lot of native Hawaiians are opposed because most of the lands proposed for development are the so-called “ceded lands” that belonged to the overthrown Hawaiian Kingdom and are supposed to be held in trust. The state has always sought ways to get money for those lands, and being barred from selling them (they tried, the state supreme court stopped them) the PLDC was created to develop them with as little oversight as possible. The ceded lands are an interesting case because there are pieces of prime real-estate in towns, cities, and coastal areas that could be turned into housing or condos for tourists at prime rates. But then the land is gone and the development potential used up forever, in return for a small percentage of the revenue. The PLDC locks the native Hawaiians out of developing their own land, and gives the profits of development to outside corporations.
• The money has to come from somewhere. Normally, the state collects taxes and fees to provide services such as running a harbor. If a private company provides the same services, they need the same personnel and thus have the same cost, but they have to collect extra money to pay the state for the privilege, as well as for their profit. So somebody is going to pay more, and it’s always the taxpayer, the service user, or the tourist. The puropose of the corporation is to control the resource in order to extract extra money out of it for the benefit of its executives and shareholders. The purpose of the state is to hold and develop resources for the benefit of (and lowest cost to) the taxpayer.
• The PLDC is just another layer of bureaucracy, and a highly paid one at that. The cost of that bureaucracy is hidden because it pays itself by subtracting money from the money it collects for the state–thus increasing the cost of development. Also, the PLDC board weild great power but doesn’t seem accountable to anyone. They are seeming free from state ethics and transparency rules and they have great leeway to change their own rules.
• And perhaps worst of all: by design, the public is shut out of the development process. The state has strict rules for soliciting input and organizing meetings in the community of those who are affected by whatever it builds or develops. The PLDC is designed so that none of those rules apply to it. It can operate out of Honolulu, make decisions, and avoid scrutiny and legal challenges. It doesn’t have to hold hearing and take public input on the neighboring islands that are affected. It has the power, money, and land from the state, but it lacks the accountability to and oversight from the public.

The normal way to develop state land or redevelop existing facilities such as the harbors is for the DLNR to grant a concession. The private developer invests into the project, recieves profits, and pays fees back to the state.

The difference between a concession and the proposed PLDC is that state employees seek bids, approve contracts, and manage the concession. They have to abide by state laws including holding hearings and considering public input. All records are public and can be obtained upon demand. They are paid their normal salaries, not from some monies collected from the developer. The PLDC is just a way to avoid legitimate oversight and skim money from taxpayers, which is why it should be repealed.

The scary part is that my examples may not be so extreme. All it takes is a rotten politician, or a really greedy corporation, or a governor desparate to balance the budget before his re-election.

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