Thursday, November 1, 2012

The Big Flatline

Canadian economist Jeff Rubin's second book has been published in the U.S. with the title "The Big Flatline: Oil and the No-Growth Economy".  It came out in the spring of 2012 in Canada titled "The End of Growth".  It's available on Amazon both in print and on the Kindle.  If you don't have a Kindle, you can get the Kindle reader for PCs and Macs, or the Kindle App for your mobile device.  You can also find it on iBooks for an iPad or iPhone.  I purchased the iBooks version for $12.99.

This is the follow up to Rubin's "Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization".  Clearly he doesn't like short titles.  His blog can point you to that book--http://www.jeffrubinssmallerworld.com.  That book explains why we're running out of cheap "conventional" oil.  That's the kind of oil where you drill a simple hole and oil wants to come out.

The End of Growth/Big Flatline is overall the best general introduction to the issue of economic peak oil, combined with some rational projections about what might happen.  Plus some suggestions.  Jeff says that there's a lot of oil left in place.  My quick calculations confirm that--at most we've extracted 1/5 of what's in the crust, either as oil in sediments or as "tar sands" that can be cooked into oil.  Then I think the oil shale (not shale oil...) is quite a bit more.  That's organic material that hastened turned into oil yet.  Shell and other companies have been trying to cook oil shale into oil cheaply enough to be economically feasible for years.  Again, the concept of economically feasible oil leads us to a peak and and a decline

Jeff is also strongly of the view that what will really cause a decline in the greenhouse gas production that had driven climate change is economic contraction, not well-meaning but ineffective initiatives and agreements.  He spends several pages toward the end of the book illustrating the unreality of those good intentions.

Get a copy of Jeff Rubin's book.  It's pretty readable and informative.





Sunday, August 26, 2012

The Cheapest Calories

When we visited Maui recently, I saw sugar cane for the first time--


Sugar cane came to the Hawaiian Islands with the Polynesians in the range of 300-800 AD.  It was a part of a complex and sophisticated lifestyle.  As the Hawaiian version of the industrialization of agriculture, the plantation owners of the 19th century started large-scale cultivation and the importation of sugar to the United States.  Massive, industrial scale sugar production has enormous human and environmental health impacts.  William Banting wrote about this almost 150 years ago.  The issue gets much less attention than it should.  As we ride down the back side of the petroleum curve, the effects may actually worsen.

I started to comprehend the human effects about 11 years ago.  In 2001, a friend of mine started the Atkins Diet.  Atkins is a low-carbohydrate diet.  He lost weight, which puzzled me.  I had been running marathons and further since 1978.  Except for trying to eat a vaguely (as I imagined) balanced diet, I ate what I pleased with some allowances for avoiding sugar crashes in endurance bouts.  I sort of bought into the low fat, calorie management conventional diet concepts.  As it turned out, I wasn't thinking like an evolutionary biologist, despite my degrees in the field.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Aloha Petroleum

We visited the Hawaiian Islands recently, specifically Maui.  As usual, I got interested in the natural history of the place, including human impacts.  Our resort was in a part of the island that's mostly a mesquite bosque, with mongooses scurrying back and forth.  The mongooses were too fast for me to photograph, but the mesquites, called Kiawe Trees, held still--


Mesquites, mongooses, and innumerable other plants and animals share something with petroleum; they're all imported.  Hawaii is famous as a living laboratory of biogeography.  The archipelago is so remote that living things only rarely reached the islands on their own.  Their descendants evolved into an array unique of species, like the Haleakala Silverswords and the Nēnēs.  When people, beginning with the Polynesian ancestors of the original Hawaiians, first arrived they brought new plants and animals, often wreaking havoc on the native ecology of the islands.  Europeans and Americans were fuzzy on what was useful.  The links above describe the spread of Kiawe trees, which were useful to people, and mongooses, which weren't.  The Polynesians who settled Hawaii, starting in 200-500 AD, had a pretty good idea what was useful.

Monday, May 7, 2012

Plug-in airplane, only $495,000

I was wrong.  I've been telling people it isn't practical to build an electric airplane.  Well not only is it practical, you can actually buy one right now.  Popular Science has an article on the Volta Volare GT4.  The GT4 uses an electric motor to spin its propeller.

(URL from the Pop Sci article)

The GT4 has a range of 300 miles on batteries alone.  It also has a supercharged gasoline engine that runs a generator to produce electricity.  Combined range is a 1000 miles, which seems to be decent for this class of aircraft.  Volta Volare's website says you can reserve one for $9900.  You will have come up with an additional $485,100 to actually purchase one.  This is almost enough to make me get a pilot's license, assuming I won the lottery.  I'd best go check my tickets...