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| <back | home Excerpts from Oil Analysts... Connect the Dots by James Howard Kunstler People are emailing me to ask is this the start of the Long Emergency? It is certainly an event of great significance. The effects of damage to our oil and gas infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico is already being felt in rocketing gasoline prices and a burgeoning supply crisis, especially in the southeast. The home heating situation is becoming a crisis before householders even turn their furnaces on. Half the houses in America are heated with natural gas, which is now clocking in at $12 a unit (1000 cubic feet). It was $3 a unit in 2003. It could go to $16. Connect the dots... Turning to New Orleans. . . viewing the hurricane damage on TV, it is hard not to conclude that most of the building stock in the city is irreparably ruined. One can’t help feeling that the city we knew and love is really gone forever. Some kind of urban settlement will remain, but New Orleans’ downtown of hotel towers and megastructures may be the first comprehensive ruin of the Modernist city. Much of the stuff just outside New Orleans, and along the Gulf Coast, was largely post-war suburban fabric — collector boulevards with their complements of fry pits, malls, muffler shops and subdivisions. We’d hope that the states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana will not undertake to rebuild them they way they were. The era of easy motoring is over now, and to rebuild suburban sprawl would be a double tragedy. Read the entire article: http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary14.html ...Dawn of Petrocollapse: New Orleans as victim of oil by Jan Lundberg Gas was already in very tight supply, as has been oil. Today’s sudden and heightened supply tightness can feed on itself, as history has shown. To say the least, this country is going to have a recession that could be rather dark by winter. A national and global economy that is not built for conservation and efficiency cannot accept “Stop! no more” from Mother Nature. Hence, the possible onset of general petrocollapse and the toll on consumers, even though for now consumerism still rides high everywhere in the U.S. except in the areas directly disabled by Katrina... How about “New Orleans: victim of Big Oil”? Suffice to say that it’s in our face that our petroleum lifestyle has immense drawbacks such as irreparable toxic spills and global-warming-charged hurricanes. Yes, the oil giants exercise extraordinary power. But they are not in control when it is the people who may or may not give them their money. Yes, oil prices go up. Due to subsidizing petroleum in a dying culture that guzzles poison hootch like a drunkard, we are actually paying many times the price that’s recorded (over $10 per gallon). If this is the point in our history when one may say in the future in retrospect that Katrina touched off petrocollapse and the transition to sustainability, will our behavior start to show some collective intelligence before Katrina’s big sister — total petrocollapse and climate distortion to the max — visits us? Read the entire article: http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24&It emid=2 Katrina, New Orleans, and Peak Oil by Richard Heinberg The scenes were heart-wrenching and mind-boggling: an entire modern American metropolis had effectively ceased to exist as an organized society...when it came to reporting on the damage to oil production and refining facilities, most media outlets took at face value the glib and non-specific assurances of the petroleum industry... And all of this is occurring at a time when the global supply of oil is barely able to meet demand... Katrina may mark the beginning of the inevitable unraveling of the petroleum-based industrial world system. The United States is the center of that system. Think of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast as a gaping wound in the national body. Organisms need a steady flow of energy in order to maintain their ordered existence; a wound is like an intrusion of entropy within the system. When wounded, the body essentially takes energy away from other parts of itself to restore order at the site of injury. In ordinary times, nations as “organisms” do this very well. But in this case the timing is bad, as energy is scarce anyway (the wound was incurred at the onset of what will soon become a global energy famine); the nation has already been hemorrhaging materiel and trained personnel in Iraq for three years; and the site of the wound couldn’t be worse: it is in the part of the national body through which much of its energy enters (the region is home to half the nation’s refining capacity and almost 30% of production). Thus it seems likely that the available energy may not be sufficient to overcome the entropy that has been introduced; rather than being contained and eliminated, disorder may fester and spread. Read the entire article here: http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/articles/479 Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and Peak Oil by Shepherd Bliss Civilizations have collapsed before. The causes of collapse often have to do with diminishing natural resources and losing wars, both of which seem to be happening for the US. The pending crises may come sooner than even Peak Oil theorists predicted. Another dozen tropical storms are predicted to strike the US during this hurricane season, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Warmer water in the Atlantic Ocean-resulting from global warming-is being blamed for what NOAA calls a “very active” hurricane season. How well prepared is the US for a series of hurricanes strengthened by global warming?... Hurricane Katrina’s devastating impact was worsened by three factors: 1) its strength was increased by global warming; 2) the lack of preparation to avoid such a crisis and the availability of the National Guard to help manage it; 3) the massive destruction by development of wetlands, which contain storm run-off. Global warming and our over-consumption of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas are related. Burning fossil fuels emits greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Among its symptoms are the strength of Hurricane Katrina, according to an Aug. 30 article in the Boston Globe by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ross Gelbspan, author of “The Heat Is On” and “Boiling Point.” Read the entire article: http://www.energybulletin.net/8626.html In The Background by James Howard Kunstler ...momentous things are swirling in the background. The price of gasoline may retreat sometime in two to six weeks, but I doubt it will fall below the $2.50 range again. In fact, having gone way above the psychological barrier of $3.00, the gasoline retailers may resist falling below that. There have been no new oil refineries built in the US since the late 1970s. There will be no new ones built now, despite the crunch on refined “product.” Why? Because the oil companies understand that they are in a twilight industry and refineries represent huge investments in future activity, which the corporations correctly perceive will be shrinking as global oil production passes peak. The biggest shock to the public lies a couple of months ahead when the cost of natural gas for home heating (50 percent of the dwellings in America) combines with stubbornly higher pump prices to whap them upside the head. Natural gas at around $12.00 is now many times what it cost as recently as 2003 ($3.00). A lot of Americans will be shivering this winter and some of the weak, old, and poor will die as a result. President Bush has already taken a hit on his appointees’ Chinese Fire Drill response to disaster management. But the toll from the energy problems the whole nation faces will be more insidious. Strapped for cash from filling their gas tanks, unable to buy Christmas presents at WalMart, and huddled around space heaters, the public will be wondering why they were so poorly prepared. Read the entire article: http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary14.html Katrina and the Coming World Energy Crunch by Michael Klare More than any other domestic disaster, Hurricane Katrina has significant implications for America’s foreign and military policies. ... But far more important than any of these is the impact of Katrina on the global oil supply and the resulting increase in US dependence on foreign petroleum... It is not the short-term picture that we should worry about the most; it is the long-term situation. This is so because the Gulf was the only area of the United States that showed any promise of compensating for the decline of older onshore fields and thus of dampening, to some degree, the nation’s thirst for imported oil. There has been much discussion about the potential for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska, but energy professionals scoff at the prospects of obtaining significant amounts of crude there; instead, all of their attention has been on the deep waters of the Gulf. Spurred by the Bush Administration’s energy plan, which calls for massive investment in deep-water fields, the big oil firms have poured billions of dollars into new offshore drilling facilities in the Gulf. Before Katrina, these facilities were expected to supply more than 12 percent of America’s Lower 48 petroleum output by the end of 2005, and a much larger share in the years thereafter. ... Read the entire article: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050919/klare In The Wake of Katrina: A Call To Prepare by Julian Darley ...Katrina has left about ten per cent of US natural gas supply shut in, on which electricity production increasingly relies in North America (and many other places). Unlike oil, there is no easy way for North America to get foreign replacement supplies of natural gas. There is mounting unease in high places that an American natural gas crisis will greatly worsen the difficulties with oil and gasoline supplies. There are many lessons that can be learnt from the horror of this hurricane - a horror that vast numbers of poor people in other nations already know so well: Be very wary of depending on far-distant places and people to furnish your safety, food, health, power, and fuel. The people of New Orleans knew their system was inadequate to protect them - some tried very hard to rectify the situation, but they failed. The most terrible lesson of Katrina appears to be this: we, the ordinary people of this planet, are pretty much on our own for oil peak. Most of our governments, except for a few at local level and some brave lone politicians, have not even admitted to the concept of peak oil, far less begun planning for it. We who care are now all New Orleaners, we are all vulnerable: the question is, are we going to do anything serious about it? Read entire article here: http://www.postcarbon.org/news/newsletters/sept2005 The Peak-Oil Crisis: The Storms of August by Tom Whipple ...It is becoming evident that $3-4 gasoline does not significantly reduce American consumption and that we will continue driving at our normal pace until stopped by still higher prices or general shortages. What does the hurricane damage have to do with peak oil? World production and consumption are currently balanced at around 84 million barrels a day. Losing a million plus of this for an indefinite period certainly doesn’t help increase production. This time, there is no sign of our Saudi friends coming to the rescue as in past oil crises. Given the decline of production taking place in most of the world’s major oil fields, it is becoming increasing difficult to make a case for significantly higher levels of world oil production are on the horizon. For the United States, borrowing our way out of the current predicament without any serious conservation measures (such as a 55 mph speed limit or rationing) certainly can’t last long. Several years ago Kenneth Deffeyes, one of the leading peak oil theorists, facetiously selected Thanksgiving 2005 as the exact date the world would reach Hubbert’s peak. You know, it is starting to look as if he just might be right. Read the entire article: http://www.fcnp.com/527/peakoil.htm Thanks to Linda Buzzell for sending these excerpts. <back | top^ |