<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Bright and early every Monday morning, James Kunstler published his bulletin - basically a weekly report on US progress into The Long Emergency. Hope you all drop in to see it occasionally:<div><br></div><div><a href="http://kunstler.com/blog/">http://kunstler.com/blog/</a></div><div><br></div><div>This week he includes a few critical numbers on oil reserves, petroleum usage and also looks at the tar sands of Canada and the shale oil in the US in terms of their EROEI. But Kunstler is always good at putting the numbers into social, political and historical context.</div><div><br></div><div>Read on! <br><div>
<div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>-----------------------------</div><div>Keith Thomas</div><div><a href="http://www.evfit.com">www.evfit.com</a></div><div>-----------------------------</div></div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></div>
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<!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:24.0pt;line-height:31.0pt;mso-pagination:
none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:18.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:24.0pt;font-family:"Lucida Grande";
mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";color:#262626;mso-ansi-language:EN-US">Blowing
Green Smoke<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US">By James Howard Kunstler, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; ">on April 4, 2011</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; ">"</span><i>We also have Secretary Steven Chu, my Energy
Secretary. Where is Steven? There he is over there."</i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; "> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; ">- President Obama at Georgetown
U last week</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US"> Blame Steven Chu, then, because when it comes
to America's energy predicament, the president has been woefully misinformed.
Mr. Obama pawned off a roster of notions and proposals already product-tested
in the public meme-o-sphere. Almost everyone of these ideas is inconsistent
with reality, based on faulty premises, or represents some kind of magical
thinking. What they have in common is that they're ideas the public wants to
hear, whether they are truthful or not, because we don't want to change the way
we live.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US"> The central idea in Mr. Obama's speech is that we
will reduce our oil imports by one-third in a decade. This is a gross
distortion of reality. The truth is that our oil imports will be reduced
automatically, whether we like it or not. The process is already underway. The
nations that export oil to us are using much more of their own oil even while
their supplies have passed peak production and entered depletion. Countries
like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Mexico have some of the highest population
growth-rates in the world. They sell gasoline to their own people for less than
a dollar a gallon. At the same time China and India are driving more cars and
importing a lot more of the world's declining supply. (China has perhaps the
equivalent of a four-year supply of its own oil in the ground, and India has
next-to-zero oil of its own).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US"> One meme circulating around the Web these days is
that the USA has the equivalent of "three Saudi Arabias" in the shale
oil fields of North Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. That is not true. A
lot of this magical thinking focuses on the Bakken fields of Dakota. We're
currently producing less than 400,000 barrels a day out of Bakken and the
projected maximum ten years from now is around 800,000. We use 20 million
barrels a day in the US running suburbia, Wal Mart, and the US military. By the
way, Bakken shale oil requires extensive rock fracturing operations -
"fracking" - which means a lot of horizontal drilling, which means a
lot of steel pipe. It is not just a matter of sticking a steel straw in the
ground like we did in Texas in 1932.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US"> Note: much of the shale "oil" in other
western states is not actually oil. It is kerogen, an organic precursor to oil,
in effect organic polymers that have not been subjected to enough heat and
pressure to turn into oil. If you want to turn it into oil, you have to cook it
- which takes energy! That's after the mining operation to scoop it out of the
ground. That takes energy too. Or, you can send machinery into the ground and
cook it in place. That takes energy, too. We are not going to get oil out of
there anytime soon - and perhaps never.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US"> The "drill drill drill" gang is under the
impression that North America has vast unexplored regions where oil is just
begging to be discovered. This is not true. The New York Times reported after
Obama's speech - in a disgracefully dumb story by Clifford Krauss - that the
eastern Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Coast contain 3.8 billion barrels of oil.
Really? Hello! The US uses over 7 billion barrels of oil every year. Does the
Arctic National Wildlife refuge contain between 4 and 11 billion barrels (US
gov estimate)? Great, that averages out to about a year or so of US supply.
And I'm not even against drilling there, only against the idea that it
represents a meaningful "solution" to our problem.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US"> Meanwhile, the old standby Alaskan oil fields at
Prudhoe Bay are depleting so remorselessly that there may not be enough flow in
a year or so to move the oil through the famous pipeline.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US"> How about Canada's tar sands? Well, first of all,
they belong to Canada, not us, unless we want to change that - and that could
be politically messy. The tar sands will never produce more than 3 million
barrels a day. The operations are already too huge, costly, and damaging to the
northern watershed. Canada is our number one source of imported oil, but China
would also like to buy Canadian oil. Are we planning to invoke the Monroe Doctrine
to prevent Canada from selling its oil to parties outside the Western
Hemisphere? That could be messy, too.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US"> Mr. Obama returned to the popular theme of
bio-fuels. Our initial venture into this area was the ethanol fiasco which,
predictably, took more energy to make than it produced, and had disastrous
effects (still does) on corn commodity prices - in effect stealing from the
food supply in order to drive to the Wal Mart. The next venture will apparently
be in algae. We'll discover (once again) that what works as a science project
doesn't scale to run millions of cars.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US"> Mr. Obama told the nation that we have a 100 year
supply of natural gas. (The moronic Larry Kudlow of CNBC told his audience it
was 300 years). Neither of them knows what he is talking about (and evidently
Energy Secretary Chu doesn't either). So far, proven reserves of shale gas
amount to about a 4 to 6 year US supply at current rates, and total natural gas
reserves - including conventional gas, the kind that doesn't require fracking -
amounts to about a 12 year supply. The idea that we are going to ramp up an
entire natural gas fueling system for America's tractor-trailer trucks is an
absurdity.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US"> Ditto the notion that we are going to electrify the
US auto fleet.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US"> Here's something to chew on: we run about 250
million cars in the USA. Let's say we ramped up an electric vehicle fleet of 10
million cars - which, by the way, is a purely hypothetical and wildly
optimistic number. Do you think it might be a political problem if 10 million
lucky Americans get to drive electric cars while everybody else either pays
through the nose for gasoline, or can't even afford to own a car anymore?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US"> There are a few things you can state categorically
about the US energy predicament and the national conversation we're having
about it - including the leaders of that conversation in government, business,
and the media. One is that we are blowing a lot of green smoke up our
collective ass. None of these schemes is going to work as advertised. The disappointment
over them will be massive and probably lead to awful political consequences.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US"> Another is that we are ignoring the most obvious
intelligent responses to this predicament, namely, shifting our focus to
walkable communities and public transit, especially rebuilding the American
passenger railroad system - without which, I assure you, we will be most
regrettably screwed ten years from now. Mr. Obama had one throwaway line in his
speech about public transit and nothing whatever about walkable neighborhoods.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US"> The reason for this obvious idiocy is that it's all
about the cars. That's all we care about in the USA, the cars. We can't get
over the cars. We can't talk about anything except how we'll find magical new
ways to run all the cars. This is a very tragic sort of stupidity and if we
don't change our thinking about it, from the highest level on down, history is
going to treat us very cruelly.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-size:15.0pt;
font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";mso-ansi-language:
EN-US"> A special shout-out here to The New York Times,
whose abysmal reporting on these issues, once again, is due to their reliance
on a single source: the IHS-CERA group, Cambridge Energy Research Associates,
the paid public relations auxiliary of the oil industry, led by that mendacious
sack of shit Daniel Yergin, whore-in-chief.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span></span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
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