peristaltor

In a few years, I expect, the cheap fuel will start becoming more and more scarce, necessitating a move from agri-industry to more local, small-scale food production. To do the work once done almost ubiquitously by fuel-thirsty machines, more and more people must dedicate more and more time to produce fewer and fewer of the calories we consume each day. What options do we have?

On one hand, we have sustainable non-industrial food production that emphasizes habitat maintenance. It can be personally rewarding but proves labor intensive.


Pay attention to what Joe has to say
about people that try his "pickers."

On the other hand, there are tens of millions of people who farm part-time -- for fun! There must be an enormous latent interest in agriculture out there! All we need to do is pique the interest of these part-timers and encourage them to ramp up food production! We may not be doomed!

Oh, wait . . . those 63.8 million potential farmers are only growing virtual crops. When the hoe and the plow proves heavier than the mouse, I suspect interest in actual farming will wane.

We are soooooo screwed.

kmo delivered another great podcast the other day, interviewing economist Frank Rotering. Prof. Rotering has an interesting take on human progress and the limits the planet itself places on our expansion, part of which resonates well with what I accept.

For example, I whole heartedly agree that our biological imperative drives our expansion, the desire to eat the richest food (to give us strength and build our energy reserves as fat) and live in the best areas conducive to sating our desires to, well, eat and reproduce a lot. The number of simple behavioral studies that reveal this simple unconscious drive abound, each confirming that despite what we say, we are greedy little piggies that crave tasty (meaning energy-rich) foods and sex with the most reproductively viable candidates. Remember, folks, Darwin's "survival of the fittest" referred to reproductive winners, the organisms that most successfully got as many biological copies of themselves made before they croaked.

Where Frank went off the rails in the talk with kmo, though, was where he started talking about . . . capitalism. Wait, haven't I gone over this already?!?

But then the Professor did something very few who throw the C word about willy-nilly actually do: He explained what he meant. I'm not saying he got it right in my eyes, but I will say he at least had the courtesy to quote Marx's writings directly and explain the nitty-gritty details that might elude the less familiar. Someone who has obviously read Marx so carefully is rare to find even amongst Marxists. That was refreshing.

This explanation, though, confirmed something that has been nagging at me for quite some time: That Marx himself missed the most salient element of capitalism's expansionist tendencies, specifically by ( by conflating the necessity to expand with the ability to expand. )

Remember just a few weeks ago Warren Buffett bought BNSF outright? The press blather was predictable: "Our country's future prosperity depends on its having an efficient and well-maintained rail system."

Last night, though, while discussing an oil-poor future, my economist friend mentioned an alternative situation for buying the rail: electrification.

From The Journal of Commerce:

Earlier this year, BNSF Railway’s chairman, president and CEO, Matthew K. Rose, said he was in talks with transmission line companies that want to install new power lines in the railroad’s right of way. And he said BNSF was exploring whether that could help the railroad convert large parts of its sprawling western network to electricity.

Industry sources indicated other large carriers were looking at the same options, as Congress and the Obama administration push to upgrade the capacity of the U.S. electricity grid and tie in more alternative power sources including wind energy farms.

My friend also sent me a post from a rail site (sadly, one locked down to members only) which said:

If the wind- and solar-power crowd are really able to create some critical mass in their plans for mass conversion to such energy generation, transmission corridors for new high voltage lines are going to become necessary in the West. The battles for these rights-of-way are already starting to brew in several places in the West. . . .

Single steel pole towers, which are more easily situated on a railroad right-of-way than the old wider-footprint lattice-work towers, are now capable of handling up to the 765,000 volt lines being discussed for transmission from potential wind and solar fields in the West. . . .

Combine this observation with Buffett's planned wind farm facilities and one sees a definite business plan shaping up.

Buffett started as an oil man. He knows what's coming: Fuel shortages leading to ever higher fuel prices. Electric rail lines -- fed by the power lines sharing the corridor -- give him an incredible advantage, if he can get the major routes powered in time. And because he bought the rail outright, he won't have to dither about with quarterly stockholder reports. This means he can take his sweet time electrifying without worrying about "enhancing shareholder value" every few months.

Decades ago I dated a chess player, a very good chess player, one who trained with chess masters and knew first hand many of the names in competition at that time. One day in the smokey basement pub where chess players meet to play, she came back from a game downright pissed off.

She had lost. Now, she was very good, but people win and lose all the time. I asked her why she was so upset. Her explanation stumped me: "He played like a fish," she said.

Huh?

I had her describe what it meant to play "like a fish." She explained that fish make wild, unpredictable moves, that their play doesn't fit any recognizable pattern.

"But he won," I said. I suppose comments like this are one of the big reasons we haven't seen each other in almost 20 years; but I was honestly then trying to understand the difference between a truly great player who wins and a "fish" who wins. To me, they both win, so what's the difference? After all, if a master sat me down and schooled me in the ways of the board, I wouldn't know if I was undone by a lost Fibunacci Bishop or a Pawn's Gambit or the Flirty Queen. I would only know that I lost. Checkmate.

Out on a walk last night, I finally reasoned why the term "fish" might be used. Hook a fish and drag it out of the water, and it flops about madly on the deck or the dock without getting anywhere. A chess "fish," therefore, might be someone whose play seems erratic and pointless. They don't seem to be getting anywhere, or going anywhere. Ah, but the schooled opponent of the fish is judging the fish's moves on a learned pattern, the movement of one who walks on dry land.

Let's take this fish analogy a bit further and suppose that the fish player is actually playing by rules applicable in the water. Those spastic arches and flops across the board make no sense to us dry-landers; but put us in the drink and we shall see the fish's twitches move it across great distances with an admirable economy of effort. We walkers, on the other hand, slap and kick and flap about and barely get anywhere in the water. (I have a video of myself scuba diving in Hawaii, if anyone needs images of an amateur diver for comic relief.)

All this led me to reconsider a word upon which I've been stumbling quite a bit lately: ( Heuristics. )

My brother metalmensch was sent to work in India a few years ago. Being my brother, he had his eye trained for things I, too, would find interesting, things beyond the travel brochure, things alien enough to folks like he and I that they verge on the outright fascinating.

He found such fascination in . . . trash cans. They weren't ordinary trash cans, no sirree. Check out one such can:


Litter can in Ramoji Studios

A few details simply must be noted. First, his Indian friends consider these cans "fiercely" embarrassing. That he was constantly shooting pictures of them in scenic areas like Ramoji Studios and the Taj Mahal was even worse. Shouldn't he be taking pictures of things worth viewing? Details of Indian life that might put the sub-continent in a pleasing light?

I'll get to why his friends thought his actions embarrassing in a bit. Right now, though, I'd like to share some podcast material that illustrates why I think we in the United States might have even more reason to feel fierce embarrassment: ( Simply, many of our buildings and neighborhoods are just as freakish and ugly as these cans. )

Jim Kunstler whipped out another gem in which he wrote:

For decades we measured the health of our economy (and therefore of our society) by the number of "housing starts" recorded month-to-month. For decades, this translated into the number of suburban tract houses being built in the asteroid belts of our towns and cities. When housing starts were up, the simple-minded declared that things were good; when down, bad. What this view failed to consider was that all these suburban houses added up to a living arrangement with no future. That's what we were so busy actually doing. Which is why I refer to this monumentally unwise investment as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

(Emphasis from the author.)

Why is he so glum about our economic expansion? ( For lots of really good reasons. )


Addendum, August 10, 2009: Calculated Risk shares a paper describing a move from expanded building from city cores to a "new era of infill and redevelopment." Which will have to happen if "this monumentally unwise investment" called suburbia is ever to be corrected.

Back in Jr. High, we had to undergo a couple experiments in education. Let's call them Simulation Gaming. In these exercises, we had to form groups and pretend to make the same decisions faced by early settlers to the continent, to the west, that sort of thing. How much of our money should be used to buy food? Machines? A decent ox? In the end, the team that prospered won. Supposedly we learned stuff on the way, mostly lessons in how any game can be gamed.

With all this talk about government/industrial collusion affecting the current spike in fuel prices, why not start the next generation right ( by teaching them how the oil market really works? )

Other than the intricacies of business and personal life management, simple book balancing and the importance of planning for the future, what should this simulation teach the class? The market is more than just a nebulous "other." The market is all of us, each working hard to maximize our own quality of life and forward our own interests. When supplies of any limited resource become too necessary, when we sacrifice self-dependency for convenience, simple shortages become life-changing, perhaps even life-threatening.

Oh, and to hell with limiting this to a class. I'd like to play this game myself.

X-Posted to peak_oil.

Robert Newman explains the historical politics behind oil. It's long but very informative. And funny. I've mentioned some of the points he makes before, but lots of his information is new to me.

Enjoy.

According to The Oil Drum, this amount so far represents the largest averaged amount of crude oil extracted from the drilling fields in one month. Write that number down somewhere. Keep that number safe for future reference.

Why?



Because that record was set in May, 2005:

1) Crude oil - Latest available figures from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) show that crude oil production including lease condensates increased by 455,000 b/d from June to July. Total production in July was estimated at 73.28 million b/d, which is 1.01 million b/d lower than the all time high crude oil production of 74.30 million b/d reached in May 2005.

Not long ago, I introduced readers here to M. King Hubbert's concept of Peak Oil. It now looks like Hubbert colleague Kenneth Deffeyes' prediction of a late November, 2005 peak was only half a year off the mark.

I thought I'd share some of my other investigative interests with the general LJ crowd. Y'know, just for chuckles. By now, most of y'all out there know of my interest in electric vehicles and alternative energy sources. There are lots of reasons for this interest; but recently, a very good reason -- and the evidence supporting it -- is making its way through the headlines.



( Meet Dr. M. King Hubbert. )


Addendum October 19, 2007: 74.3 Million barrels per day might just be the peak. We will know for certain only after years have passed, but it looks like this global extraction record was set in May of 2005.