Oasis or Mirage?

We explored more of the Mojave Desert this summer.  In particular, we went to Mojave National Preserve and Joshua Tree National Park.  We stayed in Needles and Twentynine Palms respectively.  My wife commented that one of the big differences between to the two places was trains--Mojave NP had them and Joshua Tree NP didn't.  Many of the early National Parks were created at the urging of the railroads to give passenger train riders a destination.

The Twentynine Palms stay was especially interesting because of 29 Palms Inn.  This is an eclectic array of structures occupying the western third of the Oasis of Mara, a classic California fan palm oasis.  Here's a screenshot from Google Maps--

Click this link if you'd like to open Google Maps and see the image in context.

Notice the line of vegetation that marks the Pinto Mountain Fault.  The grinding at the fault boundary produces an impermeable clay layer.  Underground water infiltrating from the higher land to the south comes to surface resulting in an oasis, although these days human or natural hydrologic changes have caused the flow to diminish to the point that there's no longer surface water without some pumping.  Some claim this place is the source of the name of the town of Twentynine Palms.  During the railroad expansion in the American West, Southern Pacific Railroad was granted ownership of the oasis, as well as considerable other property along its route.  SP sold the land to J.P. Roberts and his partners.  They built the Gold Park Hotel, a collection of cabins east of the oasis.  After a few years, Roberts decided he liked the wetter west end of the oasis better and had the cabins dragged there with a pickup truck.  The new location became the 29 Palms Hotel, later renamed 29 Palms Inn.  Roberts sold the inn to Harry Johansing, whose descendants have run the place ever since.  They're on the 5th generation.  In 1950, they donated the eastern 2/3 of the oasis to the National Park Service to become the Headquarters and Visitor's Center of Joshua Tree National Park.

The Real (This) American Life; The Casa Grande

In mid-May, my wife and I were driving across the deserts of central Arizona to deliver some photos to an exhibit in Gilbert of all places.  We listened to "Hot in my Backyard" on This American Life on the radio as we drove.  The program was an interesting discussion of the state of the dialogue relative climate change.  I decided to send Ira Glass and his staff a note to see if I could interest them in a discussion of the larger picture.  I never heard back, as is more common than not.  Here's what I sent.  Since I'm remaking this into a blog post, I've put some links into the text.

______________________________________________

Ira and Co.,

Your shows are very well done.  We listened to “Hot in My Backyard” recently while we drove across the desert to Gilbert, Arizona, to drop off a photo for an art show my wife had entered.  We stopped at the ruins of the lost Hohokam civilization at Casa Grande National Monument on the way home to Tucson.  The program was interesting and insightful, but missed the real story of our age.  I can’t honestly say that I heard anything that surprised me, but I’m a Ph.D. biologist by training.  We were discussing the likelihood of climate change in the 1970s and 80s.  An atmospheric scientist friend told me in the early 80s that in his circles there was speculation that if the Antarctic ice cap destabilized it could slough off in as little as 40 years.  For the moment, it’s stabile.  Watching the wave of realization that we can affect the world’s climate spread out from the scientific community across the rest of society is interesting.  You presented scenes of that wave of thought change well.  But what if climate change is only one subplot of a larger story, a distraction almost?

Irrational Exuberance--Fracking Frenzy

Since it's been the better part of a year since I wrote a post, a few things have happened.  The strangest one hands-down has been the hysteria over the blip in U.S. oil and gas production due to use of hydraulic fracturing on "tight" sediments.  A few days ago, George Mitchell passed away.  His company, Mitchell Energy and Development Corporation, developed the techniques that have spurred that production blip-- http://cgmf.org/p/family-statement.html.

It's pretty interesting that Mitchell became quite interested in sustainable living and created a foundation for that purpose.  Hydraulic fracturing, "fracking", is an inherently unsustainable production method for gas and oil.  A frack well is expensive to drill and has a miserable production curve.  And many reasonable people are concerned about the long-term environmental effects of adding fractures and fluids to sedimentary rock layers underlying vast regions of our country.  Dave Summers on his blog, Bittooth Energy, explains the specific case of Bakken (North Dakota) hydrofracking, where new wells must be drilled at a furious rate to attempt to compensate for the rapid production drop off of a shale oil well.  The Bakken is often pointed to as our salvation relative oil production; not so.

Despite the production problems with frack wells, many commentators project wondrous output for years to come, even claiming the U.S. could become a net producer and exporter of oil and gas.  Here's two studies that try to puncture these trial balloons of fantasy.  The New Economics Foundation out of Great Britain, explains that the expense of new sources of oil combined with declining production of conventional sources, will force economic contraction across the developed world.  The Energy Watch Group from Germany does a comprehensive analysis of all the major non-renewable energy sources; oil, gas, coal, and uranium.  They conclude that worldwide oil production actually peaked in 2012 and is on the the decline.  Other hydrocarbons and uranium, don't really look any better.

Review at least the executive summary of those two reports.  Then you decide if the exuberance you've heard in the popular press regarding U.S. energy production prospects has any rational basis.  I think it's a pretty classic example of wishful thinking on a national, perhaps a global, scale, but maybe I'm becoming curmudgeonly :)

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.

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.

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.

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...

Eurozone = Toast, Economists puzzled.

I listen a lot to NPR and BBB World Service.  Of course I hear over and over about the debt crisis in Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, etc.  I keep hearing about hopes for fixing financial houses and "returning to growth".  With increasingly expensive petroleum, that seems unlikely.  Gail Tverberg's overview explains that as oil gets more expensive, debt burdens of governments are likely to increase.  In Europe, it seems it's reaching the level that will drive some countries into default, which will lead to the dismembering of the Euro as a common currency.  Chris Skrebowski explains that the advanced economies can't tolerate expensive oil and still grow.  He estimates U.S tolerance limit for a growing economy is $90/barrel.  He estimates China can tolerate at least $110/barrel.

In my last post, I talked about the stress that $100/barrel oil puts on our economy.  I also expressed my puzzlement over economists' apparent inability to perceive a link between expensive oil and a stressed economy.  In a recent guest article in The Oil Drum, ecological economist David Stern sheds light on my conundrum.  He explains that when energy, i.e. oil, became very cheap in the 20th Century, economists began using mathematical models that ignored energy because it was such a small cost.  For 60 years, economists have used those models and been trained to discount the role of energy in a developed economy.

This realization led me to realize that the most important piece of planning for a future of more expensive and scarcer hydrocarbon energy is the paradigm shift.  Average citizens and the experts who are interviewed for news and analysis need to think about the world differently.  Until that occurs, they can't think rationally about the rest.

Recessions and Paradigms

Long time, no post, I know.  I had other concerns.

Presumably you've noticed we might be on the verge of another recession?  Notice too that economists and financial folks want to cast the situation in terms they think they understand?  But perhaps there's another factor that should be considered.  In the Peak OIl Task Force's analysis in their 2010 report (http://peakoiltaskforce.net/) they claim that the data on the U.S. economy over time shows that when our energy (oil) costs hit 4% of U.S. GDP, a recession follows.  In other words, energy costs drag on the economy until a tipping point is reached and there's an adjustment.  Other people have other estimates of what percentage we must hit before triggering a recession ranging up to 6%.  James Hamilton, an economist at UC San Diego, details a long history of economic downturns following oil "price shocks".

Let's do a bit of back-of-the-envelope calculation.  We consume roughly 20,0000,000 barrels of oil per day.  In 2010 our GDP was over 14 trillion dollars.  In February, oil at the New York Mercantile Exchange (http://www.nyse.tv/crude-oil-price-history.htm) broke the $100/ barrel mark for the first time since the last recession, when it topped out at $147/barrel.  Prices recently dipped back under $100, but not by much.  Using the nice round number of 100, assuming our economy hasn't grown much since 2010 and assuming there are 365 days in a year, oil energy costs work out to about 5% of our GDP.

At the very least, $100/barrel oil has to be a significant drag on the economy as that turns into higher costs for fuels and the raw materials for plastics and petrochemicals (fertilizer, for example).  We been reading about the effects of $4 gas.  Some of you know that I expect the U.S. and other economies to go through a series of recessions as the world demand bumps maximum oil production capacity, prices soar, and recession follows. Economies shrink, demand drops, price falls.  This pattern continues until production from the big oil reserves really starts to drop, as opposed to the plateau it's on currently, forcing continuous uncontrolled shrinkage.  Alternatively, economists and governments get past denial and develop aggressive control mechanisms to support a more graceful and predictable decline phase for the oil age.

 The United States Congress went into gridlock over raising the debt ceiling, some more European nations are looking shaky, so we have some possible triggers.  So will our economies just stagnate, or will there be full scale recession?  Any bets on how many recession cycles it takes before the paradigm shift occurs and there's a reanalysis of economic history and theory based on energy costs?  It occurs to me this is like what happened in my core fields of science when I was in college in the 1970s.  Geologists admitted plate tectonics was real and there was a drastic reinterpretation of geologic and evolutionary history based on the new paradigm.

Care for a paradigm shift?

Fossil Fuels, Strange Arithmetic

I'm a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  I've been disappointed by AAAS's silence on the issues of hydrocarbon decline.  In one of the email bulletins they send out, they had a link to a panel discussion on energy.  Here are the opening two paragraphs--

Fossil fuels provide about 80% of the world’s energy and, despite dire predictions since the early 20th century, supplies will not run out any time soon, according to speakers at a AAAS discussion on meeting global energy demand.
“Oil is good for 50 years at current consumption rates, [and] could be extended longer as you go to more difficult resources,” said Steven E. Koonin, under secretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy. “Coal—there are hundreds of years.”

This is an extraordinarily ill-thought out set of statements.

Evolved to Run

Recently, I had occasion to read the best-seller Born to Run.  I decided I needed to read the book when an acquaintance began describing the contents.  He talked about events I was a part of, since I've run with the Raramuri (Tarahumara) Indians in the Leadville 100 mile run.  While the book was a mixed bag, it makes some good points that are relevant to our current situation and our future.

Shortly after I acquired the book, I learned Micah True, one of principal figures in the account, was scheduled to give a talk at a local running shop.  I attended and enjoyed the evening.  From what I heard, running has declined amongst the Raramuri as roads and vehicular transport has penetrated to their villages.  The Raramuri have a history of putting on races that pit village against village.  Top runners are higher-status members of society.  Yet even so, easier modes of transport stop the running.

Likewise for our society.  Despite all the evidence that high levels of activity and exercise have enormous physical and mental benefits, most people will take advantage of labor-saving devices and transport.  And even among the fit, most transport uses internal combustion vehicles, not feet or bicycles.

So I'm very curious to watch the reaction and evolution of behavior as it gets more and more expensive to use vehicles.  Since so many of us are in dug into a hole of poor fitness and excessive weight due to inactivity, digging out will be difficult.

Getting Nowhere and Missing the Train

We spend a lot of our time in U.S. National Parks.  In fact, just this morning I did a 5+ mile run in one a few minutes from my house.  Our vacations tend to center around trips to national parks.  I've lost count of the number of times I've been to the bottom of the Grand Canyon--

The junction of South Kaibab, N. Kaibab and Bright Angel trails.

I've been on all, many  times.

However, most of the big famous parks are literally in the middle of nowhere.  How do you get there?  It turns out that the existence of, and access to, at least some of the national parks is intimately linked to the interests of American railroad companies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Pod People

It occurred to me awhile back that I should experiment with food crops that make sense for the desert.  Since I have a yard full of mesquite trees and mesquite pods are supposed to be quite edible, that seemed like a good starting place.   See what I mean?

That's a flowering agave in the foreground, but notice lots of mesquites behind it?  The native mesquite around here is Prosopis velutina.  Well, I'm getting a lesson in the uncertainties of agriculture.  We had a cool spring and lots to plants, including mesquites, had a delayed flowering.  No problem, I thought.  I talked to my horticulturist friend Gene while I waited.  He said that nutritional quality of pods varied widely.  Pods with reddish highlights are supposed to have a higher sugar content.

Is Oil Reefer Madness?

How many times have you heard someone talk about "our addiction to oil"?  I'm getting a bit tired of it.

Physiological addiction occurs when you consume a pharmacologically active substance such as opiate narcotics, alcohol, nicotine, or caffeine in sufficient quantities with sufficient regularity that you crave the substance and have withdrawal symptoms if you don't get the compound often enough and in sufficient quantity.  Once past the withdrawal phase, your body and brain may not need the substance and may function better.  The tetrahydrocannabinol (THC in marijuana) referenced in the famous poster from the pot exploitation film Reefer Madness may actually be less dangerous and more beneficial than some of the other addictive substances.  I leave that to the reader to decide...

None of this is true of oil.  Oil is like air--we need it to function and there's no good alternative.  The United States consumes more than any other nation.  We could probably consume less and still maintain the world's highest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and our economic and military dominance.  But not a lot less without big changes.  Morgan Downey has a great interactive graph on his blog, scarcewhales which he hasn't posted to in a while, unfortunately.  He's busy on other projects.  What you'll see on that graph is pretty strong evidence that America's oil consumption per person has overall risen much less than many other nations in the world.  We've also maintained our position as the nation with the highest per capita GDP.

I would suggest that we are the world's dominant power precisely because we consume and process more energy from oil and other sources than any other nation.  We convert that energy into a fabulous array of goods and services, incredible air and land transportation systems,  and a military machine that can project all over the globe at a moment's notice.

If that's an addiction, it's tough to overcome.  Since we don't have much choice as oil supply tightens, I'd very much like to see us using the power and wealth we now possess to leverage new energy sources, transmission systems, and transportation infrastructures so that we can maintain as much as possible.  I'd also like to see as many as you as possible out of your cars and planes so that we can save as much oil as possible for the tractors, mining trucks, trains, and jets that support all the things we need and use.  We should our feet, bodies, and brains more.  The real addiction is to inactivity.  A fit population would feel better, work harder and smarter, and produce more value.

Any chance I'll see a few more folks on my bike rides to work soon???

Growing Fuel? Not with food crops.

Notice I'm not piling on and writing about the Gulf Oil Spill.  It is worth noting in passing that even if the spill amounts to several million barrels over several months, that will still only come to a tiny sliver of the world's 85 million barrels per day of consumption.  And that ties to my real topic for this post.

I asked a friend of ours who studies the world food supply how much food in calories the world produces.  Joel sent me some numbers and a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

In 2009, the world produced 2.2 billion metric tons (mt) of cereal grains, 0.4 billion mt of oil seeds, 0.16 billion mt of sugar, 0.29 billion mt of meat, and 0.14 billion mt of fish.  Since most of the meat was made by feeding the cows and pigs the cereal grains, lets drop those out.  And I'm skipping dairy, since it's mostly water.  So the world produced about 2.9 billion mt of food in 2009.  I wondered how much of that is usable energy.  A study I came across at the University of Florida, puts the metabolizable energy in wheat, corn, and soybeans all at about 1500 calories per pound.  Since those grains make up the biggest share of the 2.9 billion mt, that gives us a ballpark figure of 9.57 quadrillion calories produced in 2009.  A barrel of oil has approximately 1.39 million calories of energy.  So at about 31 billion barrels of oil a year st current rates of consumption, that's 43 quadrillion calories of oil per year.

That means there's over 4 times as much energy in the oil we burn in a year compared to the food we grow in a year.  Can we expect ethanol produced from food crops like corn or even sugar cane to provide a significant fraction of our transportation energy requirements?  David Pimental, a respected ecologist at Cornell University, has performed extensive analyses of biofuels, especially corn.  He summarized his work last year in the Harvard International Review.  You should go read the article for yourself, but he calculates that if all the corn grown in the U.S. in a year could be made into corn ethanol, it would provide only 4% of our energy consumption.  But that's not taking into account the whole energy budget, I think.  Last year, we used 33% of our corn production to produce 9 billion gallons of ethanol, which only has about 2/3 the energy of gasoline.  The works out to the equivalent of 143 million barrels of oil, which sounds decent.  However, since the most optimist estimates of the amount of energy put into corn versus energy back is 1.3 to 1, that means we burned 109 million barrels of oil to get the corn ethanol.  That leaves 34 million barrels of oil equivalent.  The U.S. uses 20 million barrels of oil per day.  So we used 1/3 of a year's corn crop to produce slightly less than a 1.5 days of transportation energy.  Using all the corn would only give us 1.3% of our energy needs for the year.

Obviously, trying to pour our food into our gas tanks won't get us very far.

Post-Roundup World

Donny hit Send just as the WiFi shut down as the sun dropped and the farm's solar panels stopped working.  The Ωmail service some former Googlers had built with the wreckage of Gmail after Google folded wasn't free, but it was the best way to keep in touch with his wife back in the city.  He, Fred, and 4 other guys had come here in Fred's Prius because Fred had learned there was a farmer with WiFi in the dorms who hired city workers, albeit not for the same pay as the more experienced latino workers.  The immigrant latinos weren't coming up nearly as much since the economic collapse in the U.S.  They had been able to carry enough gas in the Prius to get to the farm, but weren't as sure about finding gas on the way home over the deteriorating roads at the end of the season.  Donny locked up his iPad in his locker and got into bed.  He thought for a few minutes about  the uselessness of his Ph.D. in Economics, but the hard work tilling, planting, and pulling weeds was better than the sporadic dole in the city.  The farmer paid his wages directly into PayPal, which had managed to stay in business and take over some of the functions that the failed banks once performed.   The handful of remaining banks only troubled themselves for what passed for wealthy in America's shrinking economy.  The farmer numbered amongst those wealthy few.  He had bought up several of his failed neighbors and had enough cash to pay for human workers, since machines were now too expensive to run.  Donny thought wistfully about his wife and kids, and of the oil-rich world of his youth, when life was easy and people weren't starving back in the city, but exhaustion quickly put him to sleep.  

Where's Your Beef Been?

Recently, the Population Reference Bureau and the International Food Policy Research Institute hosted their first "Malthus Lecture".  A distinguished researcher we know spoke on Meat.  How's that for a title?  This follows on the heels of a special issue of Science Magazine devoted to Food Security.  I subscribe to Science and I looked at outline of the lecture as well as the web sites of the food organizations.  With the world's oil production on the verge of a 4-5% annual decline, one would think there would be some discussion of effects on food supplies and human populations, but there's not.  Why is this?

Let's lead into this with my experiences with the iconic meat animal, the cow.   I go way back with cows.

Cattle ranching is a ubiquitous feature of the American Southwest.  All my field work as an undergraduate and a doctoral student was on range I shared with cows.  We're within running distance of a large ranch where we routinely hang out with cows, and my wife has photographed the  round-up.  She's helped with a round-up on horse-back on another ranch.  This shy girl was photographed in the arid Owens Valley in California on my way to the Death Ride.

Offshore Drilling and Arithmetic

Ok, I'm playing catch-up.  I've been otherwise occupied with other interests and psychotic computers.  But the recent plan by the Obama administration to open new areas to offshore oil drilling is provocative on several levels.

Oil wells are inherently messy and potentially damaging to the environment.  Nothing much can eat the oil, and oil makes life tough for creatures that encounter it.  Might have something to do with why petroleum has stayed stabile over geologic time scales.  There are some bacteria living at the bottom of Lake Baikal that seem to eat oil.  Since Baikal is the deepest lake in the world the bacteria probably can't be too choosy down there.  Correction--Reading about the Gulf oil spill indicates lots of bacteria in the ocean seen to eat oil.  It's painfully apparent that by no means all the oil gets eaten, however.

Unfortunately, we aren't going to do too well in the short term without oil to burn.  Over on my companion website, I'm trying to document the shortfall.  It's hard too see how we can cushion the decline in oil production from the good established fields that are declining around the world without some new production.

That's said, let's be realistic about what can be obtained by the new areas being opened up.  The New York Times article about the plan reports the Interior Department claims there could be "as much as a three-year supply" of oil in the area being opened to exploration.  The only actual figures quoted are "as much as 3.5 billion barrels of oil in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, "the richest single tract".  Assuming we could achieve the maximun practical recovery from a field of 70% of the oil, that's 2.45 billion barrels recoverable.  At the current U.S. consumption rate of about 20 million barrels per day, that's a 122.5 day supply, which isn't quite 3 years.  In another article in Bnet report the areas around Alaska could amount to 19 billion barrels, which sounds more substantial.  Applying our arithmetic, that works out 665 days for a total of 787.5 days, which is a bit over 2 years.  And that's assuming we keep it for ourselves...

The Oil Crunch; The ITPOES Report

The second report of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security was released last month.  Richard Branson, Virgin Group's founder is one of the members, and was in the news regarding the report.   People can download it from their website--http://peakoiltaskforce.net/.   I read through it, 60 pages, although I skimmed some of the appendices.  This might be the best recent analysis I've read, although I admit I've only skimmed the IEA's reports, which I think soft-pedal the situation.

The report has quite a bit of supporting information relative a projected oil production plateau of 92 million barrels per day.  This is significantly higher than the 89 million b/d I've seen claimed by Morgan Downey and others.   If true, this puts the point at which demand intersects with production (their "oil crunch") out a few years, rather than happening within the next year.  Same effect, but a bit further in the future.

Problematic Prius (Prii?)

What's the plural of Prius?   If it's like cactus, it should be Prii.  Regardless, they're included in Toyota's string of issues and problems.  This seems like a good time to discuss the technology and it's limitations.

I purchased a Prius last March when my Echo started to eat it's transmission.  It had had a hard life.  I looked around and realized that the Prius was practically the only vehicle that got better gas mileage than the Echo.  Thanks to the recession, they were easy to purchase.  I've really enjoyed mine, although the lack of gears to shift was an adjustment.  I routinely get over 50 mpg.