By Michael Riley
The Denver Post
8/17/08
Original article

VPO note - this article is a perfect example of the colossal ignorance involved in most reporting on energy. See in particular this one paragraph:

While critics charge that extracting oil shale may use as much energy as it produces, analysts point out that the key in the debate over liquid fuels is not how much energy is used but how much oil — a lot of oil is used to produce one barrel of ethanol, for instance; very little is used to produce a barrel of shale oil.

There is no difference between whether oil or something else is used to provide the energy to produce more oil. EROI is EROI, and if the EROI is below even 5:1, the energy source will be useless in continuing the complexity of civilization as we’ve known it. This article admits that the EROI of oil shale probably 1:1 or even negative, as it is for ethanol. So why pursue it? Private profit…at taxpayer expense, and at the cost of the health and even lives of the people who live above and around this oil shale deposit. For a brief video discussion of EROI, see here.”

GARFIELD COUNTY — The ramshackle collection of wellheads and electric cables hidden in a pine-covered draw west of Rifle doesn’t look like much now, but until three years ago it was the home of the oil industry’s equivalent of the Manhattan Project.

Over five years here, Shell Oil conducted a series of secretive experiments that have the potential to blow open the status quo of North American oil production, unlocking the vast reserves of oil shale that underlie Colorado’s Western Slope.

Early attempts failed miserably. Read the complete Post.

August 19, 2008
By JAD MOUAWAD
NY Times
Original article

VPO Note - while this article perpetuates the misleading frame of peak oil “theorists” — as if petroleum geologists, oil company CEO’s and investment bankers weren’t simply responding to hard data — it does report on former peak oil deniers admitting to “geopolitical peak oil” and “resource nationalism” (aka peak exports), which have long been part of rational thinking about peak oil — see our FAQ entry.

Oil production has begun falling at all of the major Western oil companies, and they are finding it harder than ever to find new prospects even though they are awash in profits and eager to expand.

Part of the reason is political. From the Caspian Sea to South America, Western oil companies are being squeezed out of resource-rich provinces. They are being forced to renegotiate contracts on less-favorable terms and are fighting losing battles with assertive state-owned oil companies.

And much of their production is in mature regions that are declining, like the North Sea.

The reality, experts say, is that the oil giants that once dominated the global market have lost much of their influence — and with it, their ability to increase supplies. Read the complete Post.

From households to nations, we need to get serious about food self-sufficiency
By THOMAS HOMER-DIXON AND SARAH WOLFE
From Monday’s Globe and Mail
August 18, 2008 at 8:28 AM EDT
Original article

Our baby was fussing for her next feeding, and our preschooler was turning somersaults on the couch as he negotiated for the next episode of Sesame Street. Meanwhile, we were up to our elbows in hot syrup and peeled peaches - and we still had another 15 pints of the little devils to go.

Canning our own peaches seemed like a terrific idea at first. We’d been talking about household self-sufficiency for years. We love Ontario peaches, and they were coming into season. And we’d even bounced the idea off our parents. During their recent visit, the conversation had turned to higher fuel prices and how they’d make locally produced food more competitive with imported food. So we announced our plan.

It was not received with overwhelming enthusiasm. “Canning fruit - especially peaches - is a lot of work,” they explained gently. “Do you know how it’s done?” “Oh, that’s okay,” we declared, “we’ll find instructions on the Web.” Read the complete Post.

Up to 90 gas stations in Alberta alone could be out of gas soon, following problems at a Petro-Canada oil refinery.
Alexandra Zabjek, Canwest News Service
Published: Friday, August 15, 2008
Original article

VPO thinknote - this is just a single mechanical problem at one refinery. Notice how quickly existing supplies ran out. What would happen in the event of a large-scale shortage?

EDMONTON - Up to 90 stations in the interior of British Columbia and Alberta could run dry over the course of the shutdown of local Petro-Canada’s refinery, said company spokeswoman Kelli Stevens.

She would not comment on whether individual store owners would be compensated for revenues lost while regular gas supplies are curtailed. Diesel supplies have not been interrupted. Read the complete Post.

Fraser River works as transport route
Environmental impact less when containers put on barges
Brian Lewis, The Province
Published: Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Original article

VPO note - the NDP under Glen Clark ended up wasting millions of BC taxpayer dollars in the 1990’s on the FastCat ferries, and took heat for it from the Liberals. But now those same Liberals are about to waste BILLIONS of BC taxpayer dollars on the Gateway project just when people are finally starting to drive less, and cheaper alternatives like barges & rail - that are better for our future - are available. See our FAQ on VPO’s Gateway 2.0 proposal.

VPO considers this a scandal, if there’s any meaning to the word.

A report commissioned by local port authorities but virtually ignored by the B.C. government for more than three years now raises serious doubts about the economic viability of building the $1-billion South Fraser Perimeter Road.

In fact, the holes it opens in the so-called rationale for this 40-kilometre, four-lane truck freeway through Delta farmland and Burns Bog are large enough to drive an 18-wheel container truck through. Read the complete Post.

The Era of Catastrophe? Geologists Name New Era After Human Influence on the Planet
By Mike Davis, Tomdispatch.com. Posted August 11, 2008.

A striking report from the front lines of science suggests we’re officially entering a period in which humanity may simply outrun history itself.

Editor’s note: This TomDispatch article has been edited for length. You can read the original here.

1. Farewell to the Holocene

Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.

This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column. Although the idea of the “Anthropocene” — an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force — has been long debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge compelling evidence for its advent.

At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised. This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend … and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that “the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.” Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory. Read the complete Post.

Shoulder Season
From the Clusterfuck Nation blog

America is on vacation from its financial, fiscal, and economic problems, having left the centers of power in Wall Street and Washington for a Nantucket-of-the-mind, where, in a haze of artisanal vodka and bong smoke, it’s out in the cool dune grass watching imaginary whalefishes blow, leaving only the TV Bubbleheads behind back home. Larry Kudlow of CNBC was practically drooling into his cufflinks on screen last week when the dollar popped against the Euro, and crude oil slumped, and the equity markets climbed up a flagpole.

This sort of euphoria is actually an alarming pre-crash symptom, in this case of a patient (the US) entering the terminal phase of sclerosis. Our society and all its playerz — especially the appointed communicators — just can’t fathom the reality of the threats we face, which are 1.) the loss of primary energy resources, 2.) the loss of technological potency, and 3.) the loss of a comfortable standard of living. Read the complete Post.

A nuanced response to the PickensPlan website, by Chris Tidman.

The Pickens Plan

Plan A Big sales – Big profits

The Pickens team sells Big oil, Big gas, Big windmills in army-sized packages. They sell to Big buyers like Government, so their pitch is to Government. They are not offering oil, gas or windmills in little boxes to individuals or small groups because they do not want individuals to buy anything. - They just need individuals to help them sell the Big plan to Government. Will 1 million players in a population of 300 million be enough?

They will have to move quickly before Government learns that they can generate more energy at less cost with either solar/thermal or bio-gas, and there are better wind generators coming on stream that are cheaper, quieter and don’t kill birds - The high cost and the small amount of energy produced from solar PV has never threatened Government nor any of the organizations like Boone’s, but the push is on for Big boys and Governments to get off oil and keep their power positions.

Plan B

Join the Pickensplan as an individual- create a personal “my page” - become a “group organizer” - and get a free custom “my page”- post your pitch on the free “blog” provided,- participate in forums which advertises your name and encourages people to look you up and read your bio – and make lots of friends.

An organization, (within an organization,) attempting to get energy owned/managed by communities instead of nations — i.e. Big boys - would sure change the way things get done.

BTW when you join and they ask where you learned of the PP – don’t put my name down - anyone else will do - no need for them to know we’re on the same team.

‘Think Less………Act Locally’
The Rise of Localization
By Russell Precious

VPO note: the author refers to “localization” vs. “relocalization” because he doesn’t believe we’re returning to something that existed in the past, but rather moving towards something entirely new.

“The most personal reaction to landscape, to people, to ways of living, is that which is rooted in the local.” Wallace Stegner

In recent years it has been increasingly presumed that civilization was firmly entrenched on the path to some sort of nirvanic global village, a vision held equally by those representing both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’—albeit based on different principles and expected outcomes. The right viewed it more as an economic paradise of ever expanding markets and greater prosperity while the left saw it as a truly democratic world wide web of shared information and a diminishing gap between wealth and poverty.

Few have been willing to address the herd of elephants in the room that are poised to derail these presupposed outcomes. What are these elephants, and how did they (and we) get here? Read the complete Post.

by Rex Weyler
From his “Deep Green” column
Original article

As the era of cheap liquid fuels draws to an end, everything about modern consumer society will change. Likewise, developing societies pursuing the benefits of globalization will struggle to grow economies in an era of scarce liquid fuels. The most localized, self-reliant communities will experience the least disruption.

Oil is a fixed asset of the planet, representing stored sunlight accumulated over a billion years as early marine algae, and other marine organisms (not dinosaurs) captured solar energy, formed carbon bonds, gathered nutrients, died, sank to the ocean floors, and lay buried under eons of sediment. Like any fixed non-renewable resource, oil is limited, and its consumption will rise, peak, and decline.

World oil production increased for 150 years until the spring of 2005, when world crude oil production reached about 74.3 million barrels per day (mb/d), and total liquid fuels, including tar sands, liquefied gas, and biofuels reached about 85 mb/d. In spite of the efforts since, and tales of “trillions of barrels” of oil in undiscovered fields, liquid fuel production has remained at about 85.5 mb/d for three years, the longest sustained plateau in modern petroleum history. Discoveries of new fields peaked 40 years ago. Read the complete Post.