Spring Break

April 9, 2007
     Last week, I was in Illinois walking the majestic Beaux Arts-vintage main quad of the State U in Champaign-Urbana. The flowering trees were in full bloom, the grass was green and speckled with dandelions, and the leaves on the privet hedges were unfurling. Then I came home to upstate New York where everything is brown, gray, and dead-looking, and humps of snow still remain on the north side of every building. I called the heating oil man to get 100 gallons because our tank was close to running on fumes and the daily high temperature lingered in the 30s.

     This is the flip side of the abnormally warm early winter we had. The jet stream, for whatever reason, has pulled a flag of frigid air over the northeast US, the region which proportionately uses the most oil for home heating, as opposed to natural gas. The weather forecast says they see frigid days and nights as far ahead as they dare to look.

     Gasoline use typically shoots up around this time of year as spring breakers hit the road. Meanwhile, US Department of Energy's EIA reports that US refinery inputs are115,000-barrels-a-day short of their 15-million-barrel-a-day "threshold" (which I take to mean their required capacity to keep things humming), while imported gasoline supplies (we get some of that, too) also fell short. The EIA's monthly report concludes: "...consequently, as gasoline demand began to grow in earnest in April, gasoline supply has failed to keep pace, resulting in continued significant stock declines and sharp upward pressure on gasoline prices in recent weeks." Gasoline prices are now 11.9 cents per gallon higher than at this time last year.

     The EIA has to be more reality-based about current activity than their future projections, because the current import-export and refinery figures are out there for other people and other data-gathering organizations to see. The EIA's future projections are a joke. They are based on the fantasy that everything will be okay despite what we see happening now. The EIA projects that all the world's oil producers will increase their oil production hugely by 2030. They see Saudi Arabia shooting up to 17.1 million barrels a day when, in fact, Saudi production fell 7 percent just over the past year alone to 8.4 mm/b/d. They see Mexico shooting way up, despite the announcement last year by Pemex that the Cantarell field (60 percent of Mexico's total production) is crashing at a minimum rate of 15 percent a year. They see Russia zooming way up, despite the fact that Russia is probably past the 70 percent mark of its original total reserves. If you go to this EIA chart, you'll see practically everybody's production shooting way up in the decades ahead, even the US, which, in reality, has seen nothing but steady annual decline for more than thirty years (we produce half now of what we did in 1970).

     The EIA is a perfect reflection of the public it serves. It appears to conduct daily business in a responsible way while it resolutely refuses to face the obvious realities of the future. My own town is a good example of non-reality-based planning. Our mayor announced last week that we are going to construct a 1500-space parking structure to go along with an expansion of our minor-league convention center, all based on money raised through bonds. I can't imagine a worse investment. The last thing this town will see in the years ahead is an increase in motor-oriented tourism. And the last thing that business organizations will spend their money on in a future of energy scarcity and diminished revenues will be trade shows.

     The price of gasoline seems to be the only signal that the American public receives on its collective walkie-talkie. It looks to me as though gasoline prices will head close to the $4-a-gallon range in some parts of the country this summer. When that happens, the US government, as represented by the DOE's reporting agency (EIA) will not have a coherent story for the public. I imagine as this occurs, the new Democratic-controlled congress will call for hearings to investigate US oil companies. They'll haul in the executives from Exxon-Mobil and the rest of the bunch and threaten them with a punishing windfall profits tax. I wonder if the oil company chieftains will tell the politicians the truth: that peak oil is for real and it's here.

Comments

[Mike]

Awww, c'mon Jim, keep your head up. I have no doubt the Flying Spaghetti Monster will continue -- as he has for the last 11 springs -- to descend to earth under cover of darkness just before dawn on Flag Day, and inject all the world's great oilfields with a bountiful supply of bubblin' crude for the remainder of the year!

(He prefers it to the marinara sauce you'd expect.)

Everything'll be juuuuuuust fine.

[Kickaha]

I commute 100 miles a day. There are precious few jobs in the town, where I want my children to live, we have NO public transportation, and I haven't even had a nibble in my attempts to car pool.

Even with gasoline at $3 a gallon, the same people zoom around my 45-mpg Toyota each day in their SUVs filled with only one person.

We truly are rushing toward a cliff with our eyes tightly closed.

[Chiprich]

Wonder why Buffet is buying railroads?

[Chiprich]

Wonder why Buffet is buying railroads?

[waitingforthealiens]

One item to the contrary: Trade shows and conventions will be the most efficient way to meet with and entertain business associates.

[Dave]

In NE Pa. we have recently witnessed the state kicking in 13 million bucks for the creation of warehouse business park right off of 81. The road is already jammed, its bridges in disrepair and the site is above a flood plain. To create the park a zoning change was done from conservation to industrial and 900 hundred acres of forest was clear cut enhancing an already bad situation with run off in area streams. When I was younger and a member of a Sierra Club group locally that had some guts I would have tried to at least put up some reistance to these abominations but of late I'm too damn old and tired to have go at it and search in vain for a new crop of young hell raisers to at least put up some resistance but none is to be found. The zombies are stoned on Prozac like drugs or drunk but there is nary a peep in opposition to the growth machine. So its off the cliff we go !

[Nudge]

JHK mentions an interesting point about gasoline prices being one of the few numbers to pass through the consciousness, however briefly, of Americans lost in the dark raptures of compulsive shopping and immediate gratification.

At what point do we feel the sting of higher fuel prices and make changes to that we use less of the stuff, somehow?

Almost every year I take a road trip out west, usually trying to hit the times when gasoline will be most expensive. Why? The roads are generally safer then. The few remaining SUVs have slowed down from Nascar speeds to something closer to the posted speed limit. Generally there seem to be fewer large cars being driven carelessly on the interstates when it gets much above $3/gallon here.

Of course, if you stand by routes 128, or 3, or 9 going into Boson, you won't see much difference in car counts. A few more people may carpool here and there, but it's still a big ugly mess of traffic, with lots of people driving singly in large SUVs as Kickaha mentions above. Most of those people are against the wall in terms of making choices that would lessen their dependence on personally-purchased fossil fuels. Public transportation here is pretty useless. Possibly the easiest thing to do would be to start encouraging carpooling in some meaningful way. Thus far our government has proved to be inept at making changes such as this. Some cities will go as far as to have HOV lanes in the busier parts of traffic, but there has been no effort yet to penalize those who use fuel wastefully.

I think it's going to take more than $4/gallon to get people to start making changes. Prices like this are already being paid on the left coast and in Hawaii, but apparently all the Hummers and Escalades and Suburbans and Excursions are still on the road and being used for the most banal local errands.

California is currently debating doing something a little more proactive:

“Call it the Robin Hood approach to global warming.
by Paul Rogers, Mercury News

"California drivers who buy new Hummers, Ford Expeditions and other big
vehicles that emit high levels of greenhouse gases would pay a fee of up to
$2,500.

"And drivers who buy more fuel-efficient cars - like the Toyota Prius or Ford
Focus - would receive rebates of up to $2,500, straight from the
gas-guzzlers' pockets.

"That's the provocative proposal from a Silicon Valley legislator whose "Clean
Car Discount" bill is gaining momentum, sending car dealers into a tizzy and
sparking passions among motorists."

Measures like this are already in place, AFAIK, in other parts of the world, where cooler heads generally recognize that simply letting everyone do whatever the F they want (no matter how obnoxious or polluting or dangerous to everyone else it might be) is not such a good idea if you're interested in having a stable society. It's only within the narrow confines of a culture obsessed with me-firstism and “Goddamnit, I have the right to drive as big a truck as I want”-ism that we could weigh personal freedumbs such as these against the costs of traffic congestion, fuel depletion, the larger costs of suburban and exurban sprawl, the many hours lost sitting in traffic by millions of people every day, the pollution from so many personal vehicles driving so far and idling so much every day, the healthcare costs of the problems caused by this type of living arrangement, etc.

If we, as people of the United Parking Lot, want to pull out our heads for long enough to solve the problems of the energy crisis and the need to power down, then we're going to have to ask ourselves if we wish to continue with this train-wreck experiment in personal freedumbs gone awry, or if we're willing to switch to a more civilized way of coexisting. We're either all in this together or things will get nasty.

[TnMan]

The prediction on the Dems calling in the Big Oil folks (well, the domestic ones, anyway) is 99% certain. This will appease the man on the street who thinks gasoline should be free (I think that's why schmucks drive for miles to save 1 cent per gallon on their fill-ups). But it will be interesting to see if Big Oil will invoke Peak Oil to get off the hook - I suspect that will wait until we have a Democrat President AND Congress to boot.

[JS]

It seems like we have already lost 3 cities to The Long Emergency: Baghdad, New Orleans, and Detroit. Any bets on who will be next?

[JS]

I'm voting for Los Angeles which will be overrun by millions of Cantarell collapse refugees.

[Barry]

Nudge said: "If we, as people of the United Parking Lot . . . "
United Parking Lot . . . I like that . . . sounds just right.

[walt]

Big Oil MIGHT eventually want to talk about Peak Oil, but it will be an admission of their weakness if they do. It would be a clarion call for the necessity of change. Everything would be on the table - wind, solar, biomass, nuclear, much higher CAFE standards, conservation - that would only serve to weaken Big Oil's grip on our political discourse.

I'll take a partial objection to Jim's cynical take on the Democratic Party. The GOP is party of full denial: there is no shortage of oil and there never will be. Democrats know better but they also know that the media have so dumbed down the citizenry that Dems have little choice but to cater to the lowest common denominator here. Look at Al Gore. Here's someone who has preached the environment for decades and he has some of the highest unfavorable ratings of any pol in Ameirca. Joe Sixpack is absolutely certain that Global Warming is a plot of elitists to make him wear Birkenstocks.

We're coming back to a golden age of environmentalism not seen since the early 1970s. This change is coming only because Reality is now a flashing neon sign outside our hotel-room window. The media will continue to downplay the implications but this time not even Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity can spin this thing.

[montysano]

The mainstream media is dancing ever closer to speaking the words "Peak Oil." On both NPR and MSNBC this morning, they talked about (paraphrasing here) "supplies being tight, with no relief in sight." To me, that says "we no longer have enough gasoline", but maybe I'm just a doom-and-gloom moonbat.

Meanwhile, the powers-that-be in the Middle East (Iran, Saudi) may find this a propitious time (as the wheels continue to come off of the neocon machine) to remind us just whose oil it is. Iran smacked us around a bit last week, and I expect more to come.

[asoka]

Good post this week, Jim. I hope you walked or biked to Illinois... or you'll have the carbon footprint police all over your ass. :)

Just four years ago I remember distinctly being shocked to see, for the first time, gas prices over $2.00 a gallon in my small town.

It looks like we are the frogs in the water and we are rapidly reaching boiling point... and our own death.

[Nudge]

Barry: thanks for the compliment, but I think I got the "United Parking Lot" thing from one of JHK's much older posts.

But, yes, USA = UPL as far as I can tell.

As of 2004 (according to NOAA) the amount of land area (in the lower 48) that had been paved-over or built-over is approx the size of Ohio at 43,500 miles. Yet here we are, madly "shutting in" more ground cover as quickly as possible.

[American]

Champaign.

[Nudge]

JS wrote:
"It seems like we have already lost 3 cities to The Long Emergency: Baghdad, New Orleans, and Detroit. Any bets on who will be next?"

JS, let me be the first to cast a vote for Las Vegas, otherwise known as Sin City. Major rivers out west are disappearing quickly, as are the snow packs from which meltwater supplies much of the water needs out there.

Just toss in a drought, a little job loss, an energy price increase, and maybe a power interruption or two during the hot weather, and you've got an instant CF on your hands. Vegas is probably one of the most sprawled-out cities in the United Parking Lot, ranking up there with Phoenix and Atlanta.

Albuquerque could be another hotspot but for slightly different reasons. Instead of local job loss, toss in local population increase due to all the folks coming to El Norte once the Mexican economy slides further.

[FARfetched]

I think there's a typo here:

``EIA reports that US refinery inputs are115-barrels-a-day short of their 15-million-barrel-a-day "threshold" (which I take to mean their required capacity to keep things humming)''

115 barrels out of 15 million is pretty trivial. Maybe that should be 115 thousand?

The cold weather JHK mentioned extended all the way down to Planet Georgia, where a late freeze may have done $10 million of damage to fruit crops. The butterfly bushes around FAR Manor look dead, and its no mean feat to kill a butterfly bush. We're supposed to start pulling out of the cold weather today, although it will take most of the week to get back to 70 degrees. More to the topic, the frigid weather has chased the motorcycle (42mpg) back into the garage, and I'll be driving the Civic (38mpg) most of the week. At least we still have plenty of firewood.

As far as gas supplies go, people aren't going to wake up until they see "NO GAS" signs going up at their local stations. I don't blame them for sleeping, really — who wants to be conscious through that special misery that is the daily commute? Being awake has its advantages, though: if nothing else, an office worker could begin arrangements to telecommute at least one day a week — when they start passing out rationing coupons, simply add another work-at-home day or three and save those coupons for something more important.

The thing I'm still chewing on, though, is farming. I live next to my in-laws' farm, where they have four chicken houses (that Mrs. Fetched does 90% of the work in) and pasture cattle (which might qualify for organic certification). The cattle don't need a lot of fossil fuel; there's some hay cutting for the winter but they pretty much get rotated through various pastures all year and the hay keeps them going through the winter.

The chicken houses, though, are a more typical factory farm setup. They need a huge amount of natural gas during the early part of a grow-out, and plenty of semi-reliable electricity all the time. That's saying nothing about the diesel required to bring feed & natural gas in, run the emergency generator (rarely right now), and transport chickens in & out.

I have some half-baked (ha) ideas now; I'll write more when I have time to think about it some more.

[3-D]

asoka:
You know, every time I hear that analogy, I always think this: "Frogs can't read a thermometer. What's our excuse?"

[ryan costa]

I started watching the show '24' for the first time. Apparently Los Angeles was Nuked early on. I said to myself, "At least it was only los Angeles"....

The Southwest is probably going to become a series of giant ghost towns, at least from the air. What i mean is, it will become a series of giant Ghost Highways. Obviously millions of people will still be living there, in one way or another.

The intersection of peak oil and global climate change means much less water and much less ability to ship water in: people need that energy to drive to the mall/work/school/church/anywhere --because everywhere there is nowhere, so you have to drive enormous distances to do anything or be anywhere.

As the way of life there becomes physically(economicly) less possible, there won't be the money to keep out illegal immigrants. Assuming things head south in Mexico, which is vastly overpopulated, Mexicans will begin emigrating En Masse into the Southwest, just out of habit. Because it looks like a nice place on tv.

[Weaseldog]

We had a mild freeze over the weekend here in Texas. It even snowed, though it didn't stick.

Yesterday was the last frost date for our region.

I don't think my tomatoes and peppers made it, but I can't be sure until it warms up.

[Sin nick]

*I live next to my in-laws' farm, where they have ....... pasture cattle (which might qualify for organic certification). The cattle don't need a lot of fossil fuel* - FARfetched.

No, but they fart methane, and methane is a greenhouse gas.

[Weaseldog]

"No, but they fart methane, and methane is a greenhouse gas." - Sin nick

So do humans.

[Weaseldog]

Alabama has lost its peach crop.

The whole US seems to be having problems growing food this year.

I'll have to look and see if my peaches survived.

At least in the metroplex, my garden was partly protected by the heat island effect.

[3-D]

"'No, but they fart methane, and methane is a greenhouse gas.' - Sin nick

So do humans."

I believe I have a solution to that! http://vhemt.org/ ;-)