Presentation at Oct 11 peak oil forum in London On

PEAK OIL IS NOT ABOUT THE OIL!

Introduction
That's a damn fool thing to say.
Of course peak oil is about the OIL!
But it is about so much more.
The real importance of peak oil, to me, is not about the gasoline to run your car, SUV, van or pick-up, your motor-home, motorcycle, moped, lawn mower, or your power boat, houseboat, ATV, snowmobile, sea-doo or skidoo.
And it's not about fuel for ships, planes, jets, tanks, trains, tractor trailers or heavy equipment.
Despite the fact that it is the highest single usage, our production of the gasoline that runs our cars is only about 40% of our overall oil usage, or about 10% of our overall energy usage.
If we eliminated all personal vehicles and the gasoline to power them, still 20% of America's remaining oil usage (America consumes 25% of all oil used in the world) would have to be satisfied from crude oil imports.
If we replaced every car on the road with an electric car, and limited future production to electric cars, our overall percentage of energy usage for personal transport would increase, not decrease.
Electricity production would have to more than double to power a fleet of electric vehicles equivalent to gasoline powered vehicles on the road today.


If Peak Oil is not about the oil, What is it About?
Suppose you woke up tomorrow morning, picked up the morning newspaper and found yourself staring at a big, bold, red headline which said;
OOPS, SORRY! WE WERE WRONG! THE OIL IS ALL GONE!
I'm not suggesting there is even a remote possibility of that but.... What would be the biggest impact?
Not being able to get any gas for your car?
Having to forget about that Carribean vacation this winter?
Being twenty blocks from the nearest mall?
That there will be no more HD TVs and you didn't buy one yet?
The biggest single impact of that reality would be F O O D ! !
Think about it;
* No more pesticides to keep insects from destroying our crops,
* No more herbicides to keep aggressive weeds from overrunning our fields and gardens,
* No more fuel for irrigation pumps to water crops to keep them from shrivelling up with the advance of global warming,
* No more fuel to run the tractors and equipment that farmers need to; till the soil; plant crops; weed crops; harvest crops;
* No more fuel to; deliver the crop to the co-op; deliver it from there to a processing plant; process the crop into "food"; refrigerate the food in storage; deliver the food to a distributor; refrigerate it at the distributor; deliver the food in refrigerated containers to your local food store; keep the food refrigerated at your local supermarket; run your car for the trip to the supermarket to buy food; refrigerate that food fresh when you get it home; power your stove and oven to cook that food.

We can ultimately do without cars, without HD TVs, DVD players, CD players, computers, electric woks, microwave ovens, electric fry pans, power lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, leaf blowers, power tools, etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Many people will be convinced that they cannot but eventually, of course, they will have no choice.
B U T . . . . . . . .
You absolutely cannot do without food, without water, without breathable air, and without some protection from the elements.
Those are the basic necessities of life.
The ultimate impact of peak oil is this.
We have, in the last two centuries, made the availability of these essentials of life dependent upon oil and the energy that we derive from it and other fossil fuels.
And upon a global, perpetual growth economic system that is itself dependent upon cheap and plentiful oil and other fossil-fuel-derived energy.
Our food is totally dependent on oil and other fossil fuels from the time the ground is plowed to receive the seed to the cooking of that food in our homes.


The Misplaced Focus of the Peak Oil Debate
It is very difficult to get people's heads out of the gas tank when we talk about peak oil.
If we do not, however, we will not understand the real seriousness that peak oil represents for global human society.
Yes, peak oil will seriously affect the amount of fuel and energy available to run our society.
But let's accept that as a given, move on to the more serious issues.
The continued obsessive focus in the peak oil discussion/debate on the energy aspects of oil is like a drug addict going into a methadone treatment program.
It keeps us focussed on the energy addiction rather than changing our focus to planning and building for a life beyond that addiction.
Methadone is an alternative drug plan for the addict.
In order to continue to feed our oil addiction, or the energy/fuel underpinnings of that addiction, we continue to thrash around for alternative fuels through which we can continue to support our addiction "when the good shit is all gone"!
Because that is what oil is, the most flexible energy-dense fuel we have ever discovered.
Energy being the central focus of the peak oil discussion, in my opinion, turns the average person off hearing or listening to the peak oil message.
In so doing, it keeps them ignorant of the most serious consequences of peak oil and the decline in global oil supply to follow.

More important, keeping the peak oil debate focussed on energy keeps the rules of that debate stacked in favour of the economists and "energy experts" who argue;
* that peak oil forecasts have no validity,
* that peak oil forecasters are a bunch of wing-nuts,
* that we have enough oil left to last for centuries.
Just recently the head of Saudi Aramco claimed that there is enough oil left in the world to last another 140 years. The ex head of Exxon/Mobile recently claimed there is oil enough left to last several centuries.
Perception is reality.
In the mind of John Q. Public, the CEO of Exxon or the head of the USGS or the head of Saudi Aramco or Daniel Yergin of CERA or George W. Bush and Dick Cheney themselves are all considered to be THE Energy Experts,
not Colin Campbell or Ken Deffeyes or Kjiel Aliklett or Jean Lahererre or Jeremy Leggett or Senator Udall or Richard Heinberg, and certainly not me.
There are only a few voices from inside the oil industry that are speaking out honestly about peak oil, people like Matthew Simmons and Ali Samsam Baktiari.
If we keep the peak oil debate focussed on the energy component of oil and other fossil fuels we place ourselves squarely in the position of having to attempt to discredit the cornucopean and socially acceptable opinions of all of these recognized experts in the eyes of the public.
That's not going to happen!
The nucleus of the peak oil debate always has been and always will be, until after it has become reality, on the timing of peak oil.
When will the peak be?
The answer to that question has always been, nobody knows!
We won't know global production has peaked until some time after it happens, and it will still be debated for some time after that.
In 1971 "energy experts" crowed that Hubbert's Peak Oil forecasts were rubbish because America was producing more oil than they ever had before.
And, they would soon find, more than they would ever produce again!
The problem with the timing of peak oil and our response to it, as was clearly outlined in the Hirsch Report that was commissioned by, delivered to and shelved by the U.S. Government, is that it will take us decades to prepare the infrastructure needed for a viable and sustainable post-fossil-fuel society.
It will also take most of the energy available in the remaining global fossil fuel reserves to effect those changes in infrastructure.
If we wait until peak oil is upon is - there are many who argue that it already is - to begin to make these changes and if we attempt to maintain business as usual right to the bitter end, it will indeed be the bitter end.
If the preparation of the infrastructure needed for that future supportable/sustainable society has to compete for energy and other oil-derived materials with a still "driven" global growth economy, there simply will not be enough left to get the job done.
Nor will there be the social, political, business and industrial motivation to concede the need for infrastructure change and divert the fuels needed to sustain that growth economy into projects that are a clear concession that global economic growth is on its last legs.


Carrying Capacity: Global Food is Dependent on Oil
Peak oil is about 6.75 billion human beings dependent for their food and survival on a petrochemical created and supported artificial carrying capacity, about petrochemical dependent global agriculture, about a petrochemical dependent global food distribution system.
Peak Oil is about our ability to feed ourselves.
It is about an estimated non-fossil-fuel-supported "real" global carrying capacity of 1-2 billion people.
It is about how we move food around the world to feed those 6.75 billion people. On any given day there are millions of tons of food products on the move around the world.
It is about grapes and tomatoes in January, ice-cream in July, Canadian bacon and pancakes and maple syrup in New Zealand and New Zealand spring lamb, kiwi fruit, tamarillos and macadamia nuts in Toronto and London, and about the energy use that makes all that happen.
There are no nuclear-powered, solar-powered, wind-powered or hydrogen-powered refrigerated food ships on the high seas.
There are no nuclear-powered or hydrogen-powered 747s flying tomatoes up from Chile in February.
The Oshawa Food Terminal in Toronto doesn't have its own nuclear power plant.

Whether we like it or not, our food production, processing and distribution system is global and it runs on oil, not just for transport but for planting, harvesting, storage and processing.
Our food, the most critical essential of all human life on earth, is dependent on a single finite commodity that is about to become more scarce with every passing year, a resource that will run out some time during the lifespan of our grandchildren or great grandchildren.
Or maybe within the lifespan of our own children.
That the global supply of oil will eventually run out if we continue to consume it is an absolute certainty.
That we will have to learn to live without oil and the other fossil fuels is an absolute certainty.
That the social infrastructure around us will have to change before we run out is an absolute certainty IF we are to mitigate the worst of the impact.
As the old Fram oil filter commercial said, "you can pay me now or you can pay me later but it'll be a lot more expensive later".


Decline in Global Food Production
Peak oil is about a continuing diminishment in our global food production capability and global food security while our population continues to grow.
Over the past ten years there has been a net reduction in the global food grain production.
The global food grain crop has gone down in each of the last three years and will continue to decline because of;
* grain-crop land now being increasingly converted to the more profitable production of ethanol crops,
* grain production increasingly diverted to the feeding of meat animals as global meat consumption per capita increases,
* continuing decrease in available grain-crop land as large tracts of that land are taken out of production due to soil loss, rising soil toxicity, growing salination due to over-irrigation,
* continuing degradation of natural soil fertility due to the overuse of chemical pesticides and herbicides.
According to the UN, over the past several years the global emergency food grain reserves have diminished from a marginal 119 day supply to a sub-critical 57 day supply, and continues to decline because we have produced less grain over the past decade than is being consumed.
With the bulk of the world's grains for export being grown in the northern hemisphere, the bulk of the world's arable land being in the northern hemisphere, the bulk of the global desertification being along the equatorial boundary, and the bulk of the world's grain importing nations being along the equatorial boundary or in the southern hemisphere, when the global grain reserve dips below the critical level of sixty days it is no longer a question of total annual grain production against demand.
The timing of that production and the timing of the demand becomes a critical factor.
Too much of the global demand occurs during the months in which the northern hemisphere is not producing new grains to replace that being consumed.
Already there is a risk, at certain times of the year, that freshly harvested grains combined with grain reserves cannot meet the constant demand
The further the reserve level drops the greater the number of people placed at risk of starvation.
Sufficient global food production will be the most critical and urgent global geopolitical problem over these coming decades.
Food will increasingly become a weapon of war.
Food will increasingly be the biggest lever used in the negotiation of trade agreements between countries and regions.
One of the first changes made in Iraq following the U.S.-led invasion was to flood the country with patented seeds from companies like Monsanto and Cargill and bring in laws under the newly-elected puppet government against the millenia-old practice of seed saving.
The idealist in me believes that control of field crops and the seeds that grow them should not be placed in the hands of multinational corporations,
that the simple change or insertion of some obscure, recessive gene into the genome of a plant should not allow right of access to that plant or seed to be "owned" under patent by any organization.
The idealist in me believes that the right to grow food must remain a universal human right not to be usurped by corporations.
That right will become ever more critical as we pass global peak oil.


Unsupportable/Unsustainable Global Urbanization
Peak oil is about 6.75 billion people increasingly concentrated into severely fossil-fuel dependent, ever-growing, concrete-and-steel urban/suburban enclaves,
each a high-tech, virtual world cut off by concrete, steel and asphalt from the natural world that sustains it,
a world in which the majority of people have never seen the food that they eat growing in the garden or the field.
200 years ago, as we began our move fully into the fossil-fuel age, less than 10% of the human population, or about 75-100 million people, lived in cities, less than a handful of which exceeded 1 million population.
In the last decade we have surpassed 50% urbanization globally or about 3.5 billion.
While our global population has risen about 7 times during these ten generations of the fossil-fuel age our urban concentration has increased forty fold!
At the beginning of the fossil fuel age there were just a few cities over 1 million population. Now there are hundreds, and several over 20 million.
The Golden Horseshoe, a continuous expanse of urbanization stretching around the west end of Lake Ontario from Oshawa to Niagara, is home to nearly eight million people.
There is more concrete and asphalt in the golden horseshoe than in the rest of the province combined.
Imagine, if you will, how a city the size of London will function without oil and other fossil fuels like natural gas and coal......
In my book "Oilephant Down" I included a small segment called "every day" in which I tried to detail the amount of oil-dependent activity that takes place in a city of a million people in a single day.
Most of the feedback I have had on the book mentions that segment and how disturbing it is (most readers being city dwellers) to think of that and the impact on all of that activity as the global oil supply diminishes.
The simple reality is that large cities are neither supportable nor sustainable without oil.
They would not be even with the type of community infrastructure characteristic of pre-industrial society.
Before the fossil fuel age there were, in all of history, fewer cities of one million population than there are in Canada today.
Those cities depended upon large amounts of energy in the form of slave labour, complex irrigation systems, complex road and water transportation arteries, and the growing and organized storage of extensive food crops within the city itself.
There is one other very important difference between large cities before the industrial revolution and those today.
Those cities occupied and grew within horizontal space, usually with integrated food production space growing right along with them.
Our cities today are stacked vertically, concentrated in a density never approached by those ancient cities.
Our open ground between structures has been covered over with concrete or asphalt or converted into manicured lawns.
This adds a level of energy dependence (vertical) that those cities in historical times never had to contend with.


About Soil Fertility
Over the past two centuries we have all but abandoned the discipline of soil science in favour of artificial chemical soil productivity.
We no longer concern ourselves with the biological complexity of soil.
If we want to produce and retain more crop we just dump on more natural-gas-derived artificial fertilizer,
spray the crop with more oil-derived herbicides to keep down the competition from weeds,
spray the crop with more oil-derived pesticides to keep the bugs and other insects away,
and irrigate the crop, using fossil-fuel derived energy, to make up for the lost moisture-holding ability of the sterile soil on which we grow the crops.
For all practical purposes our commercial agricultural soils serve no more purpose than to hold the roots of the plant in place.
I spoke before about estimates that the earth's true carrying capacity without fossil fuel support is 1-2 billion people. Those are not my estimates nor do I particularly agree with them.
On a global basis, as a result of the Green Revolution, the global crop yield has been increased dramatically over this past half century.
Unfortunately, in the same time, the global population has more than doubled.
Yet there are countless examples around the world where crop yields on small plots, without the aid of artificial chemical inputs, have been dramatically higher than those achieved in large scale, chemically-assisted monoculture.
Properly managed with natural organic methods with absolutely no artificial inputs there are many examples where a family of four can produce enough food to support themselves on as little as an acre.
Properly managed and supported the soil has tremendous natural fertility that today's methods of commercial agriculture cannot come near duplicating.
The problem is this.
Our commercial agricultural soil, at least in North America and Europe but probably throughout the world, has been raped of its natural fertility.
If we take away the artificial life-support system that we have those soils on, the patient will die. Those soils have no fertility left.
To understand why, one must understand what natural soil fertility is and how it works. Then one can see how our modern farming methods have destroyed it.
Plants, like ourselves, to survive need clean air to breath, clean water to drink, food to eat, and protection from climatic extremes.
The air they get from the same place as us. One big difference, though.
We animals breath air for the oxygen and then we exhale carbon dioxide.
They breath air for carbon dioxide and then exhale oxygen.
A very nice symbiotic relationship.
The water plants need they get primarilly from the soil in which they grow with some water absorption through the leaves.
That brings us to the food plants need.
Where does that come from? A bag of 23-10-5 (or whatever the numbers are) NPK fertilizer?
Plants get the bulk of their nutrition from the soil. But how?
Do they have little mouths under the ground and physically eat the dirt?
Well, surprisingly, the answer to that is sort of..... yes!
Plants receive their food, and most of their water, through their roots, just like we do through our mouths. There is one major difference, however.
We eat whole foods. Then bacteria, enzymes and other micro- organisms digest and break down those whole foods in our stomach into their component parts of vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats, starches and sugars, then pass the waste parts through our digestive tract and.... well, never mind the rest.
Plants don't have stomachs, at least not in the same sense as we do, in which to "digest" their food, nor bowels and bladders for disposal of wastes.
In a large sense the plant's stomach is the soil.
The micro-organisms that break down the soil into nutrients in the form the plant can use exist outside the plant, in the soil, many on the outside surfaces of the plant's own roots.
The microorganisms convert, for example, raw minerals in the soil into a bio-available oxide form that plants can utilize. They then make them available to the roots of the plant.
The waste products of that process are expelled by those micro- organism back into the soil.
What nutrients do plants receive from the soil?
Primarilly minerals.
The cells of plants, like all living organisms, are made up of a full spectrum of minerals and other basic elements like hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and so on.
The most important mineral for plants, as for ourselves, is carbon - the basis of life on earth - but most minerals are required, the majority in minute trace amounts.

How have we destroyed soil fertility?
How is natural soil fertility destroyed by modern farming methods?
* First, and most important, critical soil microorganisms are destroyed by pesticides.
* The organic content of the soil, necessary for retaining moisture and for supplying carbon to the plants, is not replaced in the soil with the application of organic matter in the form of manure and compost.
* Vast amounts of living top soil are lost every year through wind erosion and water erosion.
* Tilling and harvesting with heavy equipment form an impermeable hard-pan 6-8 inches below the surface of the soil that blocks the ability of the soil organisms and plant roots to reach nutrients deeper in the soil.
* This hard pan prevents soil organisms from migrating below the frost line for the winter.
* Irrigation leaches critical mineral nutrients out of the top soil down through the hard pan where they are no longer available to plant roots.
* The top soil becomes increasingly toxic with the build up of salts from over irrigation. Each year thousands of acres of farmland in North America are taken out of production because the soil is too toxic to produce crops.
* Constant turning of the shallow top soil destroys the soil humus which binds the soil together, and kills many anaerobic soil microorganisms by exposing them to the air.
* Nutrients extracted from the soil in crop harvesting are exported from the farm and are not replaced except for the NPK in commercial fertilizers.
* Fall tillage brings microorganisms from deeper in the soil up to the surface where they may be killed with the onset of winter.

Rebuilding natural soil fertility
Rebuilding natural soil fertility will require redressing injustices that we heap on the soil, particularly the life-supporting top soil, for that soil to become productive again after we are forced to abandon modern farming practices on the downslope of Hubbert's Peak.
That effort could take several decades.
If we wait until we are forced into it with the decline of our ubiquitous agricultural chemicals we will face a period where the productivity of our soil drops well below both the current level allowed by those agrichemicals and the level of the natural soil fertility that we will have to achieve.
In other words, unfortunately, the longer we wait to start moving toward natural rather than artificial fertility, the greater the risk that the carrying capacity will temporarilly drop below the sustainable level.
Briefly, we need to;
* Repopulate agricultural soils with critical soil microorganisms,
* Break up the impermeable hard-pan below those soils,
* Restore a full-spectrum mineral balance to food producing soils,
* Restrengthen topsoil with adequate organic matter and humus,
* Adopt agricultural practices supporting good soil management,
* Move away from broad-acre monoculture farming practices,
* Implement alternatives to soil-compacting heavy equipment,
* Develop non-chemical methods of pest and weed control,
* Develop aggressive composting schemes to return organic matter to the land from which crops are harvested,
* Revitalize the use of manures and compost to restore fertility and soil organic content,
* Rebuild moisture-holding capability of soil instead of irrigation.

Global Food Distribution: Isolation from Source of Food
Peak oil is about the ever-increasing miles of separation between 6.75 billion human beings and the food upon which they depend for survival.
200 years ago, at the start of the fossil fuel age, people grew the majority of their own food.
What they didn't grow was acquired within five miles of home and was produced by someone they knew by name.
Today, the food on your table has travelled an average of 2500 miles, has been through dozens or perhaps hundreds of pairs of strangers' hands.
You probably do not even know the grocer from whom you buy your food.
Any food produced in an area will only be consumed in that area by chance, and will have travelled at least hundreds of miles from farm to co-op to processor to distribution centre to the local supermarket before it arrives back on local tables.
A critical requirement following peak oil, ideally beginning now, is the relocalization of the food supply.
The food eaten locally should be grown and processed locally.
That's a simple statement but a tremendous geo-political and economic hot potato.
Grocery stores and supermarkets do not acquire their food from local growers and producers.
In fact stores of food chains are generally contractually obligated to NOT acquire their product locally.
And that situation will continue until either public pressure or legislation forces it to change.
And it's not just a local problem. The local municipal government cannot, on its own, take control of and change that situation. They cannot bring in local legislation requiring food stores within their jurisdiction to acquire their product locally. That's not where the control rests.
Much of the control and legislation impacting the ability to relocalize the food supply exists at the provincial level, some at the federal level.
Food is required, generally under provincial legislation, to be channeled through co-ops, inspection agencies and marketing boards.
Even the control of what a farmer can produce is controlled at the provincial level.
It is provincial legislation and regulation that prevents that local farmer from selling his produce locally.
So the process of relocalization of the food supply is going to require an unprecedented degree of cooperation between different levels of government.
That's going to take time, commitment, and a tremendous amount of effort. It's also going to require the visible and vocal public demand for and support of these changes.

Consumerism and Finite Resource Depletion
Peak oil is about a global "consumer" society created by and still extremely dependent upon cheap, energy-intensive fossil fuels.
We have over 300,000 products in our daily lives made from oil or oil derivatives, all of which have travelled an average of 5-6,000 miles before arriving in our homes.
The parts that make up that new Japanese car you buy may have collectively travelled more miles before being assembled than that car will ever travel after you buy it.
We each throw away or discard more reusable materials in a single year than any one of our grandparents would have used in a lifetime.
The products we buy today are a product of "planned onsolescence" designed to be used and usable only until the next model comes out and then to be thrown away and replaced.
That's what consumerism is.
We no longer "use" this planet's vital non-renewable resources.
We "consume" them, use them and throw them away.

Unsustainable Global Growth Economy
Peak oil is about a global economy totally dependent on perpetual growth which is in turn totally dependent on the energy derived from cheap and abundant fossil fuels.
They are no longer cheap or abundant and never will be again.
What multinationals do not achieve in real growth they gain through virtual or apparent growth,
through movement of inventories and capital (for many poor nations over 60% of their foreign trade is inventory transfer out of the country) amongst globally dispersed operations (much of it for tax avoidance),
and through the aquisition of smaller, weaker competitors (very often for the simple purpose of eliminating competition by shutting them down).
Most multinationals are so highly debt-leveraged to support competitive acquisition and merger that they need a minimum of 2% "real" annual sales growth just to service their debt.
Sales gained through acquisition come at the cost of even more debt.
Acquisition is for the appearance of growth for the corporation to be able to attract continued investor cash injection.

National Sovereignty over internal resources
Last, and certaily not least, peak oil is about the ability of a people or a nation to exercise sovereignty over the remainder of its energy and other resources in order to manage and control them in a future of diminishing and eventually depleted energy resources.
We no longer do.
Canada is the only country under the current NAFTA agreement that has abandoned its sovereignty over its own energy resources.
Mexico didn't and the US sure didn't.
And, because of the probable carryover, Canada may be the only country that would do so under the proposed, but fortunately embattled and delayed, FTAA.
Hugo Chavez in Venezuela sure as hell won't, nor Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil nor, probably any other South American or Carribean country.
Paul Celucci, the former US ambassador to Canada has even recently suggested that access to our fresh water resources should be written into the NAFTA agreement.
Peak oil is not about the oil. It is about;
* peak food,
* peak carrying capacity,
* peak technology,
* peak manufacturing,
* peak mobility,
* peak population,
* peak globalization,
* peak water,
* peak civilization,
* peak pollution,
* peak species extinction.
Through the use of the energy density of oil and other fossil fuels we have taken more out of this planet than we ever should have been able to achieve.
Now it is time to see if we can live and survive with the results of our ingenuity.
The issue is not the oil!
The issue is the impact of what we have done with it...... and what we will do without it.
May God be with us. We are going to need all the help we can get.

Peak Oil and Overpasses

I know it is a dangerous game to link every piece of news to peak oil. You will have to forgive me for stepping into this one. Over this past weekend there was a collapse of an overpass in Laval Quebec, a suburb north of Montreal. Two cars were flattened by the collapse killing five people. I was not surprised, have been expecting this sort of event to start occuring on a regular basis. And I expect it to be more so as we pass peak oil and start on the downslope on the other side of Hubbert's Peak.

People often point to the economic collapse of the Great Depression and say we got through that one and we'll get through the next one. Society didn't fall apart. The ubiquitous overpass is one very major difference between now and then. In this past half century the overpass has become as common as overflowing refuse containers on city streets. They are everywhere. I will be journeying to London Ontario in a week and a half and I will be driving under at least a hundred overpasses on that trip.

Canadian highway infrastructure, especially those bridges and overpasses, will be severely tested on the other side of peak oil. And the reasons are fairly simple.

* It is probable that highway maintenance will decline for lack of funds, or privatized off to the lowest bidder.
* Our weather extremes take a tremendous toll on highway infrastructure, that being one of the major reasons for our high maintenance costs. Extremes of temperature constantly expand and contract the bridge structure causing stress fractures in the concrete and even in the rebar.
* Our obsessive overuse of corroding salt on our highways takes a heavy toll, especially on bridges, overpasses, and elevated sections of highways.

If one looks at the chain of events in the Laval overpass collapse you can see these future problems dramatically. Over an hour before the collapse the roads department was called by citizens reporting chunks of concrete falling from the overpass on to the roadway. A roads crew showed up at the site, picked up the chunks of fallen concrete and left (they have since claimed that they were going to request an inspection later). An hour after the picked up those fallen pieces the whole one side of the overpass collapsed. That overpass was only 36 years old and was designed to last for sixty. And this was the second overpass collapse in the same area.

Welcome to peak oil highways.

Peak oil and Optimistic Pessimism

On one of the online peak oil forums in which I actively participate there are several members who rejoice as they enthusiastically bring to the group every new pronouncement from the secret land of the energy fairies. This is done with the drive and verve of a snake oil salesman who has just received a new shipment of bottle corks. One could be kind and assume that this is done to bring balance to the discussion in the face of such an overwhelming mass of doom-n-gloom pessimism. And their certainly is a reasonable amount of that around. But, in my mind, that is wholly reasonable. Most of the forum members who are posting messages are relatively new to the concept of peak oil. As such they are overwhelmed by the implications of peak oil and, when they understand the deepest of these implications, quite frankly most of them are frightened, desperate, and find little solace as they look at the geopolitical world around them.

As each of these new whiz-bang energy alternatives is discussed it becomes increasingly clear that none of them is going to be able to offer any serious mitigation to the problems global society will face on the downside of Hubbert's Peak when the global oil supply can no longer keep pace with global demand. The simple reality that we all sooner or later come to terms with is that oil has been the most energy intensive fuel source this planet and our species has ever seen or will ever see. And when peak oil newbies, as they are affectionately called, fully understand the depth of our total societal reliance on oil despair often replaces former denial, even if only temporarilly. The constant reaching out for salvation from the energy fairies is largely seen as just another form of denial. The constant expression of relief at every new alternative energy development project or every new piece of new technology that promises unprecedented energy efficiency is generally viewed as the cruelest of false hopes.

Our forum members who so enthusiastically revel in every new positive piece of energy news, probably understandably, tend to view the generally negative reception of such news as doom-n-gloom. They tend to categorize those who reject these pieces as doom-n-gloomers or trolls. "Who," they ask, "doesn't want society to be able to carry on as long as possible." These techno-fix members do not accept that their wish, their hope, and their endless pursuit of sustaining techno-fixes in ultimately short-sighted in the extreme. This is largely based on the fact that they see energy supply as a problem in isolation. They choose not to consider the extreme damage that we have done to the environment and the extreme psychological damage that we have done to the human species as part of the problem of which peak oil is but a very dominant syndrome. They tend to reject reminders that, at least for the past half century, global agriculture and our ability to feed ourselves has been totally based and dependent upon fossil fuels. They tend to reject reminders that our everyday world is made up of over 300,000 products made from or derived from oil, many of those products themselves critical to the efficient and effective running of global human society. They reject reminders that the current social infrastructure has been built with the first half of the world's oil endowment and that it will take that second half of our oil reserves to rebuild the infrastructure into a sustainable post-oil model.

What these techno-fixers see as pessimism and doom-n-gloom is, in fact, an optimism and expression of hope, a hope that we will soon peak and start the slide down the other side in order to force us all to have to come to terms with eventual depletion and start working on developing the society in which we will have to live on the other side of depletion. There will be tremendous pain on the road to post-oil sustainability and most in the peak oil movement want to get on with the preparation. Any pessimism is based on the frustrating reality that current society has so many serious roadblocks to being able to get on with that preparation that even peak-oilers, despite their being fully aware of what is to come, cannot prepare properly because of those roadblocks. Yes, their pessimism is based on the belief that TPTB will do everything in their power to maintain the status quo as long as possible, regardless of the downside results of that effort. Their pessimism is based on a strong belief that the effort will be far too late and far too little, despite the fact that we have known for at least a half-century that the game would soon be up.

Those who see and understand the full implications of peak oil do not want to see an endless procession of new alternative energies and techno-fixes designed to maintain the status quo as long as possible. Yes, they take mild pleasure in seeing these things shot down. Not because they want to see disaster unfold on the other side of peak oil but because they realize that the longer we wait, the longer we prolong an unsustainable human societal model, the greater will be the unavoidable disaster on the other side. They want to mitigate the worst of that inevitable disaster, not worsen the situation by holding off any longer.

Relocalization and Retail Food Chains

One of the most important and critically necessary social adjustments to peak oil is relocalization of food security. Today the food on your tables has travelled an average of 2500km to get there. The dishes and the table on which they sit and the various equipment and tools involved in the preparation of that meal on the table have travelled an average of over 6000km to get to your home. The food production and distribution system on which you depend to feed yourself and your family has become a truly global system which is critically dependent on oil and other fossil fuels.

Even over these past several years the energy costs imbedded in that global food system have risen dramatically. There are periodic cost respites, slight dips in a steadilly increasing cost upslope. But even at this stage we are a long way from peak food cost. We will probably look back at these times of expensive food as the "good old days." The reason, of course, is that peak oil and peak food cost are not synonymous. If we arrive at peak oil still totally dependent on a global food system then peak oil is the starting point for an exponential rise in food costs that will turn food into a luxury item.

We cannot continue, over the long term to be so critically dependent on a global food system that is going to falter under the weight of future skyrocketing oil prices. And in this case the long term will probably be measured in years, not decades. If we are to feed our families as we slide down the downslope on the other side of peak oil, the cost of food must become the cost of food. The greater the energy cost component there is in that food, based on distributing it around the world, the more the cost of food is going to follow the rising cost of energy as oil moves toward depletion. Relocalization of the food supply, so that the food on your table is produced (including grown) within 100 miles of you, is the only realistic and sustainable way to take the energy cost out of your food costs. The food in your local grocery store/supermarket must increasingly come from local suppliers, local growers, local processors, local co-ops.

Ideally the bulk of the food on your table would be grown and processed and preserved by you, either on your own land or as part of a local gardening co-op. There are, unfortunately, many legislative hurdles in the way of this happening in urban areas on a large scale. That will remain the case until local municipal governments adopt a stance supportive of peak-oil preparation and undertake the process of changing municipal codes to re-orient towards mixed agriculture/residential zoning and move away from the fixation on manicured lawns. This will take time and probably will not occur in most municipalities until the reality of peak oil is glaringly obvious and the voters are not only receptive to such changes but demanding them.

In the interim, however, much of the relocalization could be accomplished through your local grocery store or supermarket acquiring the food on their shelves from local producers and processors. Though that would make a tremendous contribution to local food security, it is not going to happen under present practices and policies. Most food retailer chains are contractually obligated to their current food suppliers. This help them keep their prices down, at least helps them keep their costs down. Whether or not those cost savings are passed on to customers is another issue.

A key part of the contractual arrangement with the chain's suppliers is the issue of exclusivity or market share. The chain store is contractually obligated to buy certain percentages of their shelf stock from that supplier, to place that stock in specific shelf locations at specific heights with measured distance from particular competitors. A key part of that market share obligation that the food retail chains must commit to is to not acquire product from local growers/producers. The food crops produced by the local farmers basically cannot be sold into the local community but must be channeled into the food processing/distribution system through which it may eventually, but probably will not, make its way back into local food stores.

Probably the most critical challenge in relocalization of the food supply, therefore, is to be able to undo the contractual agreements that prevent local food retailers from independently acquiring their product from local growers and producers. This will probably require a serious amount of local public pressure. It may also require municipal governments to require local food retailers who wish to sell food within their jurisdiction to acquire a certain proportion of their product (a proportion that should increase over time) from local producers and suppliers.

Such changes would, initially at least, probably increase the local cost of food. This will be partly artificial but most certainly partly real. The retailer would, through these changes, lose much of their advantage of volume buying. But as the global oil and energy costs grow and the energy cost component in the food supply grows, the energy cost advantages of local supply will begin to kick in and the growing costs of food out of the global food system will surpass local costs and local supply will become an advantage. Over time it will become a critical necessity as well.

Peak Oil Methadone

The problem with Methadone treatment for drug addiction is that it keeps the focus on the addiction, through the use of an alternative, rather than shifting the addict's focus to preparing for and building a life for after the addiction. The problem with keeping the focus in the peak oil debate/discussion on the energy component of oil and trying to find alternative fuels to replace the energy derived from oil is that it keeps the addicts (all of us) focussed on the addiction rather than developing a new paradigm for life after the oil to which we are addicted is no longer available at a level that that addiction can be supported.

As long as we allow the peak oil dialogue to stay focussed on the energy issues we are playing right into the hands of the pushers who are feeding that addiction. We allow debunkers an easy target to focus on by promising all of those existing and potential energy sources. They offer ethanol which, like any good addict, allows us to continue to put out good money for the next fix rather than considering how to put food on the table. In a world that cannot produce enough food to feed our 6.5+ billion population with billions of dollars of oil-derived petrochemical inputs, we turn to ethanol to support our addiction at the expense of taking vital food producing land out of the food production system. The global emergency grain reserves over the past several years has dwindled from a marginal 119 day supply to a sub-critical 57 day supply. Global grain production has fallen below global grain usage in each of the past three years and will probably continue to decline while the population continues to rise.

The pushers feeding our addiction offer us coal to liquid (CTL), natural gas to liquid (GTL), tar sands and oil sands and oil shale, electric cars, hybrid cars, all to continue our addiction rather than offering methods of kicking our addiction and moving on with an addiction-free life.
We can not cure our addiction by continuing to substitute new alternatives in support of that addiction. At some point we have to get refocussed. The longer that takes, the more difficult it is going to be and the greater the number of casualties that will result.

Kick the habit.
Bypass the methadone.
Get clean.
Move on.

Chevron's "Jack 2" Deep Water Oil Discovery

So much hype over nothing! Give me a break. CNN, Fox, CNBC, and any other news outlet in North America have been all over this thing for the past 2-3 days. Why?
Chevron's "Jack Two" well is a "new" deep water well in the Gulf of Mexico in a field that "could" hold between 3 billion and 15 billion barrels of oil. They won't know exactly how much oil is down there until they drill more wells to get a true measure of the reserve. The reserve is a total of 28,000 feet down beneath about 7,500 feet of water. Chevron expects to be able to deliver crude from the well to market by 2010.
If absolutely everything about this "discovery" (it was actually discovered in 2000) is the best they could hope for, this whole field may be able to be pushed to deliver up to 500,000 barrels a day some time after 2013 from 100 or more wells.
But let us look at some hard realities.
Generally about half of the oil in a reserve is ultimately recoverable which, if the estimates are for the total reserve size, would mean that 1.5 to 7.5 billion barrels may ultimately be recoverable.
The oil is 28,000 feet down which will require tremendous amounts of energy to get it to the surface. It may even mean that it takes more energy to extract the oil and get it to a refinery (meaning a negative EROEI) than it ever produces in energy.
The well and the field are in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, hurricane alley. And being that far offshore in deep water it is very possible that they will not be able to deliver that crude to shore by pipeline, therefore having to have a tanker-loading facility on the platform. Any tanker being loaded would not be able to make a successful run for shore with a rapidly developing, unpredictable hurricane bearing down on the gulf. Even if they could deliver the crude to shore by pipeline, we have seen the tremendous destruction that can be inflicted on underwater pipelines by a hurricane like Katrina or Hugo.
Even if 15 billion barrels of oil can be extracted from this reserve, that represents less than two years of US demand and only 6 months of global demand. And it won't start to be delivered antil 2010 or later.
There is also a small technical geological issue involved here. It has generally been understood that the viable oil production zone goes down to somewhere between 15-20,000 feet. This is the deepest production well that has ever been drilled. No one knows how the production dynamics of such a deep well will play out. It may be that only a quarter of the oil down there, or less, is ultimately recoverable. The potential of applying technology like water injection or gas injection or lateral drilling on such a deep well are extremely limited. Once well pressure drops and production falls off wells on such a reserve are going to have dramatic and rapid production drops.
All in all, therefore, this "discovery" ain't no Ghawar. It is far too little far too late to make any impact on the long term global crude depletion curve. Sure is good for a November election though.

Peak Oil And Global Warming Do Not Fit Socially Believable Disaster Profile

No explosions. No volcanoes. No earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, floods, tectonic upheaval, no buildings falling. No hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes. No cinematic special effects, pyrotechnics. No dramatic, heroic rescues. Just a long, slow, grinding, debilitating, dehumanizing, hungry slide into...... nothingness.
The combination of the social destruction of peak oil and the ecological destruction of global warming and climate change could, over this next century, kill more people than ever existed on earth prior to the last century. Together they could reduce the human population to a billion or less, force the remainder to gather together into a few narrow pockets of ecologically and climatically sustainable regions.
To be honest, we have no idea how these two devestating forces are going to play out. The greater part of the human race are urban dwellers, living in a virtual world of technology reliant on incredible amounts of continuous energy for its very survival. We have disconnected ourselves from the land, from the real natural world that sustains all life on this planet, the only world that will eventually be left to us when the energy that sustains our technological world diminishes and eventually disappears and our urban enclaves begin to crumble about us.
How do you show people a long, insidious catastrophe like that? How do you compress the next couple hundred years into a ninety-six minute movie to make it visible? What special effects can possibly show people what this future is going to be like? How can we possibly show people what it is they need to see to understand what lies ahead and which compels them to prepare in order to even be able to survive the collapse and have a chance to be part of the rebuilding.
I know this is rather apocalyptic, but that's the mood I'm in right now. It happens every once in a while.

Homestead or Community?

There is a common thread running on three of the peak oil groups in which I participate that is at the heart of much of the duality within the peak oil movement. These threads are discussions on an article by Rob Hopkins in early September in Energy Bulletin. The article is entitled "Why the Survivalists Have Got It Wrong." The whole article can be found at http://www.energybulletin.net/newswire.php?id=20051.
This article illustrates an unfortunately common misconception of the peak oil movement and, specifically, of peak oilers. That misconception must, in my mind, betray a lack on understanding for the author of the article. It is as though the author is aware of peak oil (the article is, after all, in Energy Bulletin, one of the most trusted information sources for peak oilers) but knows absolutely no one "involved in" the peak oil movement.
The article starts from and stays with the premise that peak oilers are "run for the hill survivalists" who all adhere to a philosophy of building their own isolated, wilderness survival homestead, totally cut off from any involvement with or sense of responsibility to any community. I have addressed this issue before in other articles. The huge flaw in the argument presented in this article, however, is a perception that peak oilers arrive at this strategy by choice, by first choice in fact. Therein lies the betrayal that the author would seem not to know any peak oilers, at least not well enough to understand their motivation.
No peak oiler that I know, whether on the various forums I am involved in or personally, has as their first choice running off into the wilderness and disassociating themselves from community. Most "seasoned" peak oilers arrive at this option out of frustration after years of being considered a nut case, years of fruitless attempts to warn those around them of the coming danger. Eventually most peak oilers reach the point where they feel that if no one wants to listen, if no one wants to see the danger ahead and start to prepare, then to hell with them. There's too little time to prepare without wasting it on people who adamantly do not want to listen.
In every peak oiler's failed efforts are attempts to motivate community into preparation. This is with the clear recognition, to most, that the only viable survivability must be community based. Clearly individual preparation and the abandonment of and isolation from community is not their prefered approach.
Even though pursuing personal preparation is where most peak oilers end up, most still do so with the belief that sooner or later the wider community will "get it" and when they do the isolated, prepared peak oiler will be there to assist, to train, to educate, to organize. Most believe that when the community is ready, meaning the community ceases to be an impediment to preparation, they will reinvolve themselves with that community. I have an old saying that I think says it best; "The right idea at the wrong time is the wrong idea."

Ethanol/Bio-diesel VS Food

Thrashing about for an alternative source of energy to support business as usual as the global supply of crude oil goes into decline more and more energy companies, university research projects, and governments are turning to the enticing spectre of ethanol and bio-diesel. Increasing acreage of industrial agriculture soil around the world is being converted to the production of corn, soy, sugar cane and any other crops intended to be diverted into the production of motor fuels. There are serious proposals as well for the production of motor fuels from wood, from coal, from natural gas, and from seaweed.
All of this is coming about because the love affair with hydrogen that has been passionately engaged in for the past couple of decades has fizzled out in the face of hard geothermal realities, like one of those many moonlight kisses that cool in the morning sun. Hydrogen, even the most ardent supporter eventually accepts, is only an energy carrier, not an energy source. It takes energy to produce hydrogen and store it and convert it back into an energy bundle, and more often than not those working on hydrogen fuel options are facing the realization that it takes more energy to produce and convert hydrogen than the energy derived from the hydrogen itself.
The very important and sad bi-product of this new love affair with ethanol and bio-diesel is that it is severely impacting, and going to increasingly impact, our ability to feed and support even the existing human population, let alone support the ongoing increases in that population. For six of the last seven years the world has produced less grain crops than the world has consumed. The amount being produced has declined for each of the past three years. The world's emergency grain supplies have, over this past few years, declined from a 119 day reserve to a reserve level below the danger level, currently 57 days. And it is believed, by all reputable agronomy scientists, that global grain production will continue to decline as global warming, environmental pollution, soil toxicity, soil depletion, global aquifer depletion, fresh water contamination, and soil salination continue to exacerbate the problem.
As I have said repeatedly, peak oil is not about the oil, not about motor fuels, not about running our cars and SUVs and vans and all the other fuel-driven engines. It is about our inability to feed a growing human population. We can not do it today. When we lose the increased crop production capability that fossil fuels have given us, when we lose the artificial fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides and other agricultural chemicals that have been the underpinning of the green revolution that has seen our population more than double in the past half century, there is going to be a tremendous nutritional deficit throughout the world.
We cannot continue to pursue our western lifestyle as we have when it comes at such a huge price to the near-term human population of this planet. Past failures of agriculture were always local and were responded to by finding new territory and starting over again. There is no new territory left. We cover this entire planet and the whole process of economic globalization should have made one thing perfectly clear to everyone. In a greater way than the global economy was a global societal benefit, the abundance of human created problems we are facing on the near-term horizon will represent a totally unprecedented global catastrophe.

Shirley's Hands

Hands of solace to my child-felt pain,
Hands with music to play my song,
Hands of tolerant wisdom to read my words,
Hands of laughter,
Hands of love,
Hands of velvet,
Hands of steel,
Hands of labour,
Hands of rest,
Hands to hold the self in strong silent anguish,
Shirley's hands have felt
The full pulse of life,
Could hands be asked to do more?

An Argument Against Personal Peak-Oil Preparation

Most of those in the peak oil movement, and those not in the movement but who are aware of and "get" the serious implications of peak oil, are concerned with potential deterioration of society and potential anarchy and chaos on the other side of peak oil. It is a common situation that those who become aware of peak oil and understand the seriousness of it want to warn those close to them about the problems ahead. And it just as common that those same people, once rebuffed or labelled as a nut case, draw back and begin to quietly and unobtrusively focus on their own personal preparations. They do this in the belief, usually, that society won't wake up soon enough to prepare sufficiently to avoid the worst of what peak oil will have to offer.
I strongly believe that those personal preparations that people are making, even if they are correct for whatever peak oil scenario eventually unfolds, are not going to ensure their survival any more than making no preparations at all. In fact I strongly believe that the more successful their preparations appear to be in helping them survive the more visible a target they will become for those who have not prepared. Thieves don't invade the homes in poor neighbourhoods, they go up-town where the best pickings are.
That refocussing on personal preparations, that focussing on preparing yourself for survival regardless of what the community around you is or is not doing, is, I would argue, born of the same self-centredness that has broken down the fabric of our society and turned us all into cogs in the machinery of big business and big government. We no longer see ourselves as part of a community but rather simply residents within it. Our neighbours are neighbours by geographic proximity only.
There is a fairly simple split in the peak oil community regarding the method and model that people feel is best for surviving the fallout from peak oil. There is the live-off-the-land, lone-wolf, armed-to-the-hilt survivalist attitude of those who expect to be able to live in the wild by their wits alone, foraging and taking game as their sources of food, and satisfying all of their needs from nature. There is the go-it-alone homesteader attitude of those who think they can have a stand-alone, self-sufficient homestead on which they produce all of their food and satisfy all of their needs, very often assuming a nearby community from which to aquire those things they cannot produce themselves, that being a community, however, to which they feel no allegiance and for and to which they bear no responsibility. That community is there as a service to them.
Then there is the attitude of surviving within a community, a community that is interactive, inter-dependent, where all members contribute to that community and benefit from that community. It is this that is the closest to the normal psyche of the human animal. We are not lone wolves or individualistic wanderers. We are tribal, function best within a larger group, whether that is an extended family, a tribe, a village, a town, a bio-region or something larger (which I do not believe is ultimately workable in a post oil world). We are not all capable (if any are) of personally performing all of the tasks which ultimately are needed to ensure our long-term survival. Being part of a community allows different people to adopt certain skills and specialties in preference to others, specialization.
Community, the smaller the better, is, in my opinion, the only social modality that has long-term probability of survival success in a post-peak/post-oil world. Community is composed of people who know each other intimately and work together to satisfy their collective needs. It is a society of cooperation, not competition. It is a society of stewardship, not ownership. It is a society that collectively satisfies its combined needs, not one of building individual wealth. It is a society utterly foreign to the current North American mindset, a wholesale paradigm shift.

The Hydrocarbon Generations

Everyone alive today was born into one of the just twelve hydrocarbon generations since the onset of the industrial revolution late in the eighteenth century. One generation, statistically, is twenty years, that time between birth and the beginning of giving birth to the next generation. But real generations are not neatly separated by twenty year intervals like statistical models portray them. Right now there are people living who individually represent six generations. All of those people collectively are the present global human population. Over the period since the industrial revolution began the statistical relationship between generations and overall population have changed dramatically. One very important and overriding statistic is that in those twelve generations since the industrial revolution began the human population has increased sevenfold........ in just twelve generations!

At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the total global population was, by best estimate, about one billion. For the purposes of this article that population of one billion will be used as a base. When the generation born at the start of the Industrial Revolution began to have children of their own twenty years later, their children were being born into a world with a little less than 10 percent more population than when they themselves were born. That generation increased the global by another 12 percent more than that at the time their parents were born. Each new generation being born today is increasing the global population by more than 1.5 times (150%) the base Industrial Revolution population. During the hundreds and thousands of generations before the Industrial Revolution and the advent of serious hydrocarbon use, the human population had been relatively stable or grew by fractions of a percent from one generation to the next.

At the beginning of the industrial revolution, just twelve, short generations ago, we began building a global human infrastructure not only geared to the use of hydrocarbons but increasingly and critically dependent on them. Just as each generation cannot imagine their parents having sex, each generation cannot imagine living without the benefits they derive from hydrocarbons that did not exist in their parents' time.

It is impossible to separate the current global population from the use of hydrocarbons such as oil, coal and natural gas, thus the reason I call the past twelve generations the Hydrocarbon Generations. The utter explosion of human numbers in these past twelve generations is, in fact, diretly a result of that increased usage of and dependence on hydrocarbon fuels. Our global infrastructure was not only built through the energy derived from hydrocarbon fuels but that infrastructure itself is increasingly composed of products derived from those hydrocarbons. There are today over 300,000 products in everyday use in our society that are made from oil or derivatives of oil.

The dramatic rise in human population since the industrial revolution began is not a result of an equivalent rise in the number of children a couple are producing. In fact the number of children given birth by the average woman of childbearing years today is less than half those that would have been produced by a woman before the industrial revolution. In the largely agrarian societies that existed before the industrial revolution it was common to have more children to serve as helpers and labourers on the family farm and to serve as a source of security in the parents' senior years. As industrial society grew, and particularly as it evolved into a high-tech society this past century, children increasingly became an economic liability and cost, rather than the benefit they had previously been. With these changes families opted for fewer children on each of whom much more economic benefits were lavished.

The sevenfold rise in human population over these past twelve generations has essentially been the result of one overriding factor, the improved health and medicine resulting from the increased benefits of hydrocarbon usage. Prior to the Industrial Revolution the average life expectancy was about forty years. It is now over seventy-two years. That means that at the outset of the Industrial Revolution the living human population consisted of 2 generations. Today it consists of more than 3.5 generations.

More importantly, people are on average not only living longer, but a far greater number of people born are living long enough to produce children. Prior to the Industrial Revolution child mortality rates were often as high as 75%. Globally, even in 1960, the child mortality rate was still 19.8%. By 2001 that had been brought down to just 8.3% globally. With an average rate of 6 live births per woman in pre-industrial agrarian society, possibly only two of those children would survive to child-bearing age. Of the 2-3 average live births per woman today, on average over 91% of those children will survive to child-bearing age. In pre-industrial times, however, a larger proportion of females born would end up married and/or producing children. Today, with improved medicine, high divorce rates, fertility medicines and procedures, and birth selectivity through which, in many nations, unwanted female children are aborted, the number of females born that will eventually produce children has increased signifigantly from pre-industrial times.

In these past twelve generations not only has the human population increased sevenfold but the per person hydrocarbon usage has increased even more dramatically, from virtually zero to an average of over five barrels per year per person of oil alone. At the same time that we are inexorably increasing our dependence on oil and other hydrocarbons we are dramatically increasing the rate at which we are using up these irreplaceable, very finite hydrocarbons.

Here is the ultimate, unavoidable, and disastrous implications of that increased consumption. It is reasonably, though arguably, estimated that the total global carrying capacity for the human species, without the availability of those hydrocarbons, is about 1-1.5 billion, roughly the population during the early decades of the Industrial Revolution. The increase in human population since then has been irrevocably a result of our use of hydrocarbon fuels. The infrastructure we have evolved over these past twelve generations has been built of and through the energy derived from those same hydrocarbons. The dramatically increased pace of consumption of these vital resources is pushing ever harder on the acelerator of the train that we are all riding toward the hydrocarbon cliff, the cliff beyond which nature will help us balance the books between population and real carrying capacity. I'll leave it to your imagination as to how we get from a global human population of nearly 7 billion to one of 1-1.5 billion that can be supported without those hydrocarbons.

Tar Sands Are Not A Solution

The closer we get to a global oil crunch the more longingly governments and oil companies are looking at tar sands, oil sands and oil shale deposits around the world. Many of those see such unconventional reserves as the hope of the future as conventional oil reserves slide further down the depletion slope on the far side of Hubbert's Peak. Canada, of course, has the Alberta tar sands. Venezuela has the Orinoco oil sands. The US, Australia, Russia and various other countries play host to large reserves of undeveloped oil shale.
The most extensive exploitation of any of these resources is in Canada's tar sands. Billions of dollars of investment have been pumped into the Northern Alberta economy in massive projects like Syncrude. But there are serious problems developing even here, and most certain to be repeated if similar exploitation of the world's other oil sand and shale reserves. Cost overruns on tar sands projects have ranged anywhere from 50% to 200-300% and more. Total have today announced a three year extension on their tar sands development, pushing the projected completion date out from 2010 to 2013, based on severe over-runs on anticipated development costs.
And what comes out of the tar sands is not oil! It is a precursor to oil which requires extensive and very expensive processing to even turn it into a low-grade crude which the majority of North American refineries cannot process. Tar sands processing, at this stage, depends very critically on natural gas as a processing energy source, natural gas which itself is in decline despite record investments in exploration and development. Various of those projects are looking at alternatives to the natural gas, including coal to liquid conversion and nuclear, as the depletion curve on our natural gas reserves accelerates.
The current rush of investment funds into Alberta's tar sands is being sunk into new projects that will, even by the most optimistic estimates, come on line anywhere from five to twelve years in the future. We have already passed the peak in global conventional oil production and are clearly on the downhill slide. Unless there is a tremendous global spate of new refinery development of the type of refinery that can handle heavy sour crude, a global peak in overall oil production becomes increasingly meaningless. If the world's oil producers are no longer capable of supplying the type of crude that the world's refineries can process, even a dramatic increase in production will mean nothing if it can't be turned into the gasoline, diesel and 300,000 other products that are today produced from oil and oil derivatives. We will, for all practical purposes, be well past "peak useable oil" long before the new tar sands projects come on line. Even if miraculously we can ramp up tar sands production to 5, 7, even 10 million barrels a day, it will be of the wrong grade of crude and will not come near offsetting the fall off in production of useable oil that will have occured by the time they do come on line.
Governments the world over are now finally starting to accept that we are facing a looming global oil supply crisis. That is a remarkable shift from the level of political awareness even 2-3 years ago. The problem is that all the political dialogue centres on where to turn for an alternative energy source to replace the energy lost as the global oil supply declines. Thus far governments are not daring to ask the only question that will prepare us for the energy deprived future ahead of us: "How to we reduce our energy consumption?" Alternatives are not the answer. They only buy us some time. We have known for at least a half a century that sooner or later the oil would run out. We have wasted that half century in an ever-increasing binge of oil usage. We have done nothing about a change of direction, developed and sold to the people any new paradigm, at least at the levels that would have any meaningful impact on the future problem. As long as governments continue the pursuit of a business-as-usual agenda, tar sands, oil sands, and oil shale will not be able to fill the void.

Western Hemisphere Deep Integration - Hemisphere as Empire - Part 2

Ever since the original statement of what has come to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, there have been forces within the U.S. Federal government who have interpreted that Doctrine as "....shorthand for American colonialism in the Americas" and "a declaration of hegemony and a right of unilateral intervention over the nations of the Western Hemisphere". Those same forces have also tended to interpret the associated principle of "Manifest Destiny" as "a theoretical justification for U.S. expansion outside of North America."
There has, fortunately, been strong and continuous opposition to these interpretations that has kept such sentiment somewhat in check. Expansion has been subjugated through most of the past half-century to intervention. The operational unit that has been at the forefront of this intervention has been the CIA with its consistent involvement in the politics of Latin America.
With the current and increasing focus on global energy reserves, however, there is growing motivation to go beyond intervention. There have, even during that half century, been a number of cases of American military "intervention", the Bay of Pigs, Panama, Grenada, the drug wars in Colombia, the Iran/Contra involvement, the Cuban missile crisis being the major examples. Whether it be called intervention or otherwise, "In practice, the U.S used the Monroe Doctrine to side with whatever side of Caribbean conflicts favoured the United States". US interests, in its dealings with nations throughout the world, are increasingly and strongly focussed on energy. And the known and presumed energy resources of South America have very much captured the attention of the U.S. administration. The vast oil sand reserves of troublesome Venezuela, the natural gas reserves of troublesome Bolivia, the offshore oil reserves of troublesome Cuba, the offshore oil reserves of Brazil, the presumed reserves of oil and natural gas beneath Brazil's Amazonia region, all have the U.S. administration licking their lips as they face ever-dwindling domestic reserves and increasing geo-political problems in the middle east, Africa, Central Asia and other oil provinces. Even Canada, the now primary "foreign" supplier of both oil and natural gas, is already in decline on its natural gas and conventional oil supplies, and cannot ramp up oil sands production sufficient to satisfy America's future needs.
Through the efforts of the WTO, OECD, IMF, and World Bank the U.S. has gained considerable economic control over Latin America. But that is running into consistent political problems and serious defaults on major development loans. Latin America is costing a lot of money and, with various Latin American countries like Venezuela and Bolivia getting very uppity about sovereignty over their energy resources, the U.S. is getting less and less of what it needs and wants from those investments. The U.S. has attempted to increase its economic influence in South America through the OAS (Organization of American States) and through the proposed FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas). The FTAA proposals at this stage are floundering, partly through opposition to it being pushed by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. At this stage the administration are even considering the possibility of allowing U.S. companies to invest in Cuban oil development projects, something that would never have been considered just a couple of years ago. Such is the desperation of U.S. for oil and other energy sources over which they can have some hope of exercising any measure of control, with or without stability.
Heightening U.S. angst about Latin America, and even Canada to some extent, is the frantic pace at which China are getting involved in energy deals in the Americas. In fact, it is that Chinese activity and the expansion/intervention interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine and the principle of Manifest Destiny that are beginning to raise red flags in South America particularly. The ability of the U.S. to "control" the energy resources of South America to ensure meeting future U.S. energy needs are being severely compromised.
It is naive to assume that the U.S. administration and government are unaware of peak oil. With that awareness also comes the awareness that future trans-ocean transportation of energy supplies, whether oil, LNG, coal or other, will be severely compromised on the downslope of Hubbert's Peak. That awareness must lead to the awareness that ultimately beyond peak oil ones energy needs will have to be satisfied domestically or continentally. The easiest and most efficient means of transporting oil, natural gas and coal is by land, through pipelines or using railways. Both of these methods can be buffered against the decline in global oil supplies. But both require a continental base of energy supply.
If the U.S. cannot achieve continental/hemispheric energy security through economic control and political pressure it may feel that the other arm of diplomacy, the military, is the only means left open to them. It may not be enough to be able to isolate North America. The hegemonic aims of the nation may only be achievable with hemispheric energy control.

Western Hemisphere Deep Integration - Hemisphere as Empire - Part 1

Whatever borders and lines men arbitrailly draw on a map there are always powers in operation that wish to see them altered. All too often those powers are strong enough to attempt to do so. Borders separating peoples that have a natural affinity and relationship of language, colour, religion or otherwise are always being look at enviously by some power wishing to bring those divided peoples back together. One need only look at the history of Ireland and Northern Ireland, North and South Vietnam, North and South Korea, China and Taiwan, Pakistan India and Kashmir, Turkey Iraq and Kurdistan, Germany and the former east Germany, and more. In any large national area there are always those powers within the nation that seek to divide it, usually along lines of language or religion or ethnicity. Witness Canada and its factions for Quebec and Western separatism, the U.S. and its civil war and continuing separatism pressures in the south, in California, in the Pacific northwest, and others, the desires and attempts to divide Iraq into autonomous Sunni, Shia and Kurdish regions. The separatist pressures of areas like the Gold Coast in Australia. The frequent separatist efforts in the Normandy region of France, the Basque region of Spain. Pressures for autonomy in Brazils Amazonia region, Argentina's Pategonia region, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and of course the political implosion and break up of the former Soviet Union into independentent nations.
Not unexpectedly, whenever there is a serious difference in power - whether that be political, military or economic - between the different parties involved, and particularly when that power is gained due to an inordinate amount of external support, the party with that upperhand of power will generally use that power to have its way in the conflict. Ireland and Northern Ireland are still separate because of the disparity of power that Britain brings in its claims for and support of Northern Ireland. The Soviet Union broke up because it became economically and militarilly impotent against the powers working to destroy it. Quebec is still part of Canada, as is western Canada, because there is not sufficient support, both social and economic, to effectively push the desire for separation. Yugoslavia broke down because the powers seeking division strengthened and the external support from the Soviet Union for holding the nation together disintegrated. North and South Korea remained separated because of the balance of power between their separate supportes, China in the North and the US in the south. The falkland Islands are not part of Argenta because the passion and power that Britain chose to put into the defence of those islands could not be matched by Argentina, despite their proximity. Each such situation of desired union or separation can be analyzed to find out the reasons that it has either succeeded or failed.
The methods used to attempt to bring separate regions of cultural, ethnic or religious similarity together or to break down the unity of a country and drive the cause of separatism are as numerous as the examples. Two key constants to success, however, are money and military power. A well financed rebel army with passion and a will to fight for their cause, and a willingness to wait for the right opportunity, can achieve its aim, when the time is right, with relative ease and speed.
But I want to look at the opposite side of the coin, the building of a large nation or an empire from politically, ethnically, and culturally disparate entities. The building of a nation like Canada or the United States or China or India, or the building of an empire like the British Empire, the Roman Empire, The Soviet Union, the Spanish conquest of almost all of Latin America, save for Brazil. At various times in Human history a nation that has been a pre-eminent power on the planet (or at least the generally recognized "civilized" portion of it) succumbs to the desire to increase their national stature by building an empire. This generally, and unfortunately, is achieved by the invasion, capture, oppression or subjugation of other nations, states and peoples. The Roman Empire at its peak covered almost all of what then was recognized as "the known world". The British Empire was built on sea power, military power, cultural discipline and economic power and covered much of the planet. The Soviet Empire was built in much the same way as the Roman Empire, military conquest and cultural and financial domination of nations around them as they spread out from their core. Hitler attempted to do the same thing by turning Europe into an expanded German empire.
But empire building today is very different and very complex. The Soviet Empire disintegrated because the Soviet Union attempted to hold the empire together with military might, and the political, economic and cultural subjugation of the disparate peoples of the empire. It was probably the last empire where those methods would be used to try to hold the empire together. It was not, however, the last attempt at empire. There are at least three empires being built in the world today. One is relatively obvious, that being the European Union. It is an empire unlike any of the past.
The other two empire builders in operation today are, of course, the United States and China. Both are using very different empire building methods than have ever been employed in the past. Both are being driven by the same objectives: global economic domination and global control of energy resources. And both, I believe, will only pursue the present techniques as long as they gain them those objectives. When, not if, those techniques fail to deliver I believe both will then pursue more traditional and agressive means of achieving the empires they are trying to build. That will be the subject of part 2.

The Middle East Crisis and Peak Oil

There is an unfortunate tendency among many peak oilers to translate every global geopolitical event in terms of peak oil. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Those same people will, in the next breath, complain that the world's political leaders are unaware of peak oil and have no plans to deal with it. It has to be one or the other. It can't be claimed that politicians are ignorant of peak oil and at the same time claim that it is the motive force behind everything they do.
There is little question that the involvement of the nations of the western world in the events of the middle east are motivated by the presence of such large volumes of oil in that region. Western nations have been prepared to go to war in order to secure access to oil and other energy resources, and indeed non-energy resources, for decades and centuries. It can even reasonably be argued that most of the major wars of the past century have been a result of energy reserves and access to them.
To project this reality into a peak oil perspective and claim that current global geopolitical events have to do with political awareness of peak oil and the desire to secure the "last" of the world's energy reserves is misguided. The current middle east crisis, as with most previous middle east crises, is about religious bigotry and intolerance. It is about two different peoples seeing a completely different truth in the same set of facts. It is about the peculiarly human frailty of measuring each other by our differences than our commonalities. I have two cats, one a grey American Shorthair and the other a black/white/orange calico. It's odd how they seem not to bother about those obvious visible differences. I think all they see in each other is another cat. Yes, they will squabble sometimes over who eats off which dish at mealtime. But that has no basis in their physical differences. I do not, I must mit, know what their individual religious affiliations are.
I am not going to launch into a pointless polemic about learning to live together. I am not going to break into a few bars of "Ebony and Ivory". I am not above doing either, but they are not the point of this article.
My point here is a simple one. Do not draw connections between peak oil and world events that do not exist. The tendency is regretable that peak oilers looked to such a wide variety of world events as confirmation that their belief in peak oil is not misplaced. But it is a process of forcing those world events through a very narrow filter. The confirmation of political awareness of peak oil and political action to deal with peak oil will come when it comes. Whenever that happens it will be far earlier than the world is prepared to deal with it. Don't rush it.

Juggling With Eggs (follow-up on "Eggs, and the Baskets that Hold 'em")

Which of the potential global crises and disasters ahead of us does one prepare for?
That is not a frivolous question. It is not like, "Pick a card, any card." To some degree there are preparations that one can and should make that will stand you in good stead whatever crisis overcomes us first. And, to be sure, the crises ahead of us are not theoretical, not remote possibilities. All are strong probabilities. The common question concerning all of them is; When? Which one will we have to deal with first?
In order to properly evaluate the risk and imminence of the various impending crises it is necessary to evaluate the underlying, mitigating factors involved. What are the variables that will affect when any of those crises will explode upon us and how seriously they will impact global society?
There are two clear and unmistakable mitigating factors common to all of the global crises we are facing; 1) human population; 2) lifestyle and its utter dependence on global fossil fuel usage.
The risk of a global pandemic is exacerbated by our massive human population, our incursion into more and more areas of virgin wilderness exposing new disease vectors, the ease of global travel and the associate potential of quickly dispersing a pandemic to global proportions, the global overuse of antibiotics and vaccines and the resultant overall weakening of human immune systems. At the same time, our ability to quickly, and hopefully successfully, respond to a global pandemic is heavilly dependent on the global medical infrastructure that our use of cheap fossil fuels has allowed us to construct. Once peak oil is upon us and as global society is impacted by diminishing oil and other fossil fuel energy supplies both the ease with which a pandemic can spread globally and our ability to contain and control it globally begin to diminish. One of the first casualties of peak oil will be an accelerating loss of the ease of global travel. Although the risks of a global pandemic are high, therefore, that risk is itself heavilly mitigated by peak oil.
Global overpopulation and its dependence on a human-created, artificial carrying capacity, is itself the most serious problem underlying all of the potential crises ahead of us. That human population, however, and the ability to produce, process and distribute enough food to support that population, is very, very heavilly dependent on cheap oil and other fossil fuels. The green revolution that allowed our human population to explode from two to 6.75 billion people is heavilly dependent on artificual fertilizers (produced from natural gas), herbicides and pesticides produced from oil, mechanized irrigation dependent on oil-derived fuels, and a global food processing and distribution system that is critically dependent on oil-derived fuels. When the global oil goes into decline, therefore, the artificial carrying capacity that supports our current population will begin to decline at an accelerating pace.
Global warming, though it may be debated whether fossil fuel usage is the cause, is certainly seriously exacerbated by our global use of oil and other fossil fuels. If peak oil and subsequent oil decline, coupled with a global decline in natural gas, sees a rush to the use of "dirty" fossil fuels such as coal, oil shale, and peat, our human impact on global warming will, in fact, worsen.
Our global consumer lifestyle, coupled with our massive human population, is depleting this planet's finite resources at a breakneck pace. We are not only looking at near term acceleration of depletion of oil and other fossil fuel reserves but also of a host of other finite resources including a wide range of base metals, arable top-soil, underground aquifers, climate- stabilizing rain forests, potable ground water, arboreal forests, and more. We cannot have our cake and eat it too. If we continue to "consume" earth's finite resources those resources will run out. That's what "consume" means. If we will not alter our patterns of resource "usage" we are looking at near-term very serious resource problems, problems that simply will no longer be able to support "business as usual". That global consumerism was built on and continues to rely critically on cheap oil and other fossil fuels. There are over 300,000 man-made products in every day use that are derived from oil or oil derivatives. Look around your home and see if you can find one product for which oil, in some form, was not involved in its manufacture and distribution.
Oil is at the very heart of human society. All of the man-made or man-exacerbated global crises before us are, to a greater or lesser degree, dependent upon our use of oil and other fossil fuels. Peak oil will, as a result, have a profound impact on all of those global crises ahead of us. Oil depletion will either exacerbate them or, in some instances, oil depletion and its impact on our population and global lifestyle may be a blessing in disguise. The singlemost crisis with the greatest potential for a severe near-term impact on global human society will be peak oil. The only problem is we do not, at this stage, understand to what degree and in what way declining global oil reserves will impact the severity and timing of these other global crises.

Peak Oil Is Not About The Oil

There is something that is very important for people to get theirheads around. Peak oil is not about the oil, not about gasoline anddiesel and heating oil and jet fuel. It's not about cars, SUVs,vans, trucks, busses, trains, planes or ships.Peak oil is about food and our progressive inability, after we passthe oil peak, to produce enough of it to feed our 6.5 billion globalpopulation. Even now, every day over 40,000 people worldwide die ofstarvation, malnutrition and nutrition related diseases. Each 1%gap between global demand and global supply will increase thosedeaths by 10-25%.Food production in today's world is critically dependent on oil (forpesticides, herbicides, agrichemicals, and agricultural, irrigationand distribution fuels) and natural gas (for artificial fertilizers)and clean water from ever scarcer and shrinking lakes and rivers andever shrinking underground aquifers.A shrinking global food supply is not just a problem for the thirdworld. Everybody has to eat and we in the developed world tend tolike to do that far more than those in the third world.Reversion to organic farming methods not dependent on artificialfertilizers and pesticides will not be as easy as the uninitiatedmay think. Our commercial agricultural land is essentially toxicand sterile through our use of petrochemicals and limited-nutrientartificial fertilizers. Commercial agriculture is essentially anexport business, exporting the nutrients from the soil on which wegrow the crops and never re-importing those nutrients. If theagrichemicals on which commercial agriculture relies were todisappear tomorrow, it is reliably estimated that those samecommercial soils will produce between 5-20% of the crops they dotoday, assuming even then that there is sufficient fresh water toirrigate them. It is estimated that it would take 10-20 years ormore to rebuild the natural fertility of thyose commercial soils.Without those agrichemicals that means a drop of 80-95% in theproductivity of those soils until their natural fertility isrestored.The other key factor, of course, is crop pests. Without oil-derivedpesticides crops will be susceptible to invasion by those pests innumbers possibly never seen before. We have, through our use ofpesticides, helped those pests evolve resistance. Commercialfarmers today use 33 times as much pesticides as just three decadesago and yet lose 25% more of their crop to pests than they didthen. We are already losing the battle against crop pests. Whenthe pesticides are gone we will lose the war. That same use ofpesticides have also prevented our crops from evolving their naturaldefences against pests. Our current crops generally have very lowsurvival potential without those pesticides. All of this, ofcourse, parallels our own weakened immune systems because of theover-use of antibiotics, vaccines and other modern medicines, all ofwhich take over the immune response rather than strengthen theimmune system.In closing, this is the important point. People will notreally "get it" about peak oil until they get their heads away fromworrying about transportation fuels and understand the implicationsfor food in our world of 6.5 billion people.

Eggs, And the Baskets that Hold 'em

We are, today, faced with an unprecedented smorgasboard of global problems and crises, the majority of which are either man-made or exacerbated and pushed toward criticality by human activity. Any one of these problems by itself, in the worst case, without concerted and coordinated international effort to head it off, could become a global disaster that could ultimately result in the near-complete breakdown of global human society with the potential loss of literally millions of lives.

Which of these problems do we address? Peak oil? Global warming? Atmospheric, water and soil pollution? Depletion of millenia-old underground aquifers? Topsoil erosion and depletion? Destruction of soil fertility? Unleashing of severe killer diseases? Human overpopulation? Food security? Species extinction? Habitat and rainforest destruction? Chemical saturation? War?
Few would today persist in a belief that all is well. Most people today recognize that there are multiple serious global problems that must be addressed. The problem is where to begin. Which one do we tackle first? Can we tackle them independently? Which one is the more imminent problem and which one do you prepare for? How many baskets are there to hold all these eggs or is everyone faced with having to put all their eggs in one basket? If they can only prepare for one global disaster, which one do they prepare for?

But how can any one person prepare for the anticipated impact of one of these future disasters when the society around them appears to be intent on ignoring them and carrying on business as usual? That's the rub, isn't it? Not many people could enjoy the stigma of being a Noah building an ark in the backyard, absorb the laughter and the ridicule of everybody perceiving them as some sort of cassandra, the boy who cried wolf, chicken little.

Pat Meadows, one of the regular contributors to various peak oil Yahoo groups in which I participate, consistently espouses her "theory of Anyway". Her preparations for peak oil are those changes that she considers right and that feel right regardless of when peak oil occurs or any of the other potential global catastrophes should become more imminent. All of those preparations are geared to continuing self-sufficiency and sustainability.

That may be all the preparation anyone can realistically hope to accomplish. There is such a huge wall of legislation and rules and laws standing in the way of effective personal preparation that one cannot really ignore the business-as-usual mindset of the society around them. There is likely not a jurisdiction in North america that would permit the construction of an outhouse in the backyard and the use of humanure on the garden, for example. Yet ultimately sustainability is not achievable unless all possible nutrients removed from the soil are returned to it.

I tend to strongly feel that peak oil is the most imminent and destructive of the large group of global crises ahead of us. But what if I am wrong? How can one take the chance of putting all their eggs in that one basket when there is a reasonable risk that one of the other global crises will be upon us sooner? I don't have an answer for that. But to use that as an excuse for doing nothing ensures that one will have to deal with the worst effects of whichever crisis hits us first.

Whatever preparations one makes must be flexible and adaptable to whichever crisis first demands our attention, especially when our governments appear to be paralyzed into inaction by the multitude of possible crises. The degree of certainty that governments demand before they take action will, in most cases, mean that whatever action they do take will be too little and too late. A politicians first priority is to get elected. The second priority is to get re-elected.
Picking an uncertain future catastrophe to head off, with the risk that it is the wrong crisis, does not allow a politician to atend to either of those priorities. Telling the voters that there is disaster ahead will guarantee any would-be politician that he will be watching from the sidelines. Any preparation for the crises ahead of us is going to have to be at the personal and grassroots level. Government leadership will never emerge in time.