What Price Pelican?


Our energy subsidy from the stored sunlight in fossil fuels is gigantic. The chemical and kinetic energy embodied in the thick gooey condensed organic matter from past eons is, for all human intents and purposes, indistinguishable from magic. Once in a while, like now, we see the downsides to our dependency on this elixir, in this case the ecological degradation of increasing areas of the Gulf of Mexico ecosystems, and collateral damage to other species.

These negative 'externalities' to oils procurement remain outside of our market system, and although they tug at our emotions, are not formally part of our institutional decision-making framework. This brief Campfire post is about how we value things that are priceless, in a system that forces us to put prices on most everything.

First, 2 assumptions:

1) WE ALL AGREE WHAT IS HAPPENING IS BAD

Everyone agrees that what is happening is bad. I.e. there is no one (or at least very few) out there thinking that the ecological damage occurring now, and what is yet to come, is funny or enjoyable. Even the staunchest conservative knows at some level that nature is important, and that soiling our nest is not advisable. Said differently, we are all on the same team that is rooting for a quick end to the oil leak and a as little as possible ecosystem impact in the months/years to come.

2)WE, NOT BP, ARE RESPONSIBLE

Yes, some human greed and error within British Petroleum played a role in this disaster. But from the vantage point of why we are getting our fuel from 20,000 feet below the oceans surface in the first place, BP, Transocean, Cameron etc. play very small roles. Everyone in the developed world is partially responsible for whats happening in the Gulf because of our insatiable demand for more (energy, stuff, experiences, growth). It is the fault of a society so dependent on liquid yeyo that we now have to dig deeper, farther and in more environmentally sensitive areas with each passing year.

The oil industry, just like the computer industry or the food industry, has the best and the brightest turning natural resources into products that people buy and in doing so turn a profit. The fact that the product that BP (and others) procures is equivalent to societal pixie dust, with one barrel of oil having 5,700,000 BTU (the amount of energy/work it would take me several years to generate) is not their fault. They are providing a service that we want. The problem is that we have taken this service, all that in entails, and the power that it offers, for granted. The Beverly Hillbilly-just-under-the-surface yeyo is gone and it may require some ecological shock and awe to alert us to this fact.

If you are a vegetarian, off the gridder who walks everywhere and doesn’t buy anything via corporations, then YOU have the ability/right to complain about your share of the commons that is being impacted by this tragedy. Everyone else, and some more than others, bears responsiblity for this situation and as such shouldn't only be casting stones at BP. And the United States, who uses 1 of every 4 barrels of oil produced worldwide, is more responsible than anyone else. Yes BP screwed up. But I think our society should understand that as the fossil energy frontier continues to close, environmental complications are going to increase from the search for the lower quality fossil fuel crumbs. The most unacknowledged point in our debt-laden, over-consumptive culture of entitlement is that our consumption relative to what is sustainable is too high not by 10 or 15% but by a factor of 4 or 5.

On the other hand, one could argue that the trajectory that brought us to this moment, given our fossil fuel jackpot and ambition and drive as a species was largely unavoidable, and as such is none of our faults. Our blame begins when we first understand the situation we are in and continue to choose convenience and fun over sacrifice and sustainability. The problem here is there exists no easy path to go down once the wide boundary understanding of our predicament dawns....



WHAT PRICE PELICAN?

In the field of ecological economics, scientists attempt to put a price-tag on the ecosystem service flows that mother nature provides. A recent, rough estimate of global ecosystem services is around $50 trillion per year - in the neighborhood of Global GDP. (Heres is a new RFF pdf Lost Ecosystem Goods and Services as a Measure of Marine Oil Pollution.) Acknowledging and integrating ecology into a market system is necessary and important. But there are obvious problems. What happens in a currency crisis where abstract wealth disappears - what are our ecosystems 'worth' then? Or, in a system of cost-benefit tradeoffs, what happens if we increase our financial wealth by 20% and lose 19% of our ecosystem services in the process - is this a good trade? How much is a sea turtle's suffering worth? A sea turtles life? The sea turtle species? Etc.

In my opinion, stopping the oil flowing should be paramount at any (financial) cost. Rockman and other level heads from industry on this website seem to be coming down in favor of 3+ relief wells being drilled, as each additional relief well improves the odds somewhat of stopping the flow. Is something with 10% marginal odds of stopping the oil flow worth it? 1% .001%? Our economic system can’t really do such multi-currency calculus. We have to do it ourselves. By definition, these decisions will not be financial in origin, but based on intuiting probabilities between 'bad disaster' and 'terrible disaster' as defined by our built in neural algorithms. That some people are thinking along these holistic lines is itself hopeful, because such thoughts make sense only when we entertain non-market impacts which is where we are headed sooner or later. Is a few billion or a few hundred billion $$ to bail out superfluous banks more or less important than bailing out an ecosystem that will translate the suns flows into benefits for us, our children's children, and countless other species into the future? Ultimately, we have to look to ourselves to find out our value systems.

The situation in the Gulf is a signpost of our moment in history. 30% of our oil production, and a higher percentage in the future, comes from offshore - so the stakes of our decisions here are non-trivial. Envisioning a system that uses less, and a gameplan that gets us there without breaking the system itself is a tall order. Any such vision will compete with a cultural mythology that American abundance is due to some special combination of hard work, creativity and divine decree instead of privileged access to concentrated once-and-done resources. Whether we drill or not, oil is depleting globally and its scale won't be replaced by flow-based energy sources. Thus to me, what's happening in the Gulf is a clarion call to our societal value systems more than any words or analysis could ever be. If we don't look at our own consumption and its wide boundary environmental impacts and instead continue to translate the problems of the Gulf into cost/benefit terms denominated in $, we will have lost this opportunity for change.

CAMPFIRE QUESTIONS

1) Would you be willing to give up 1%?, 10%?, 20%?, 50%? of your oil consumption, both that you use directly and use indirectly in the products you buy to assure ecosystem health? Why or why not?

2) Can we put a $ value on aspects of our lives outside the market system? If so how?

3) If the main real reason not to add more relief wells is cost, is two the optimum number? That is, what would the prudent number of relief wells/rigs be if money was de-emphasized as a factor?

** Pelican picture from this series of images from AP photographer Charles Riedel. Whale painting 'Breach' by Vladimir Kush

If you are a vegetarian, off the gridder who walks everywhere and doesn’t buy anything via corporations, then YOU have the ability/right to complain about your share of the commons that is being impacted by this tragedy. Everyone else, and some more than others,

Try "opting out" sometime. Try a teepee or recycled cardboard or whatever and see how long you last before you either end up in a jail or are assaulted or both or worse.

Of course opting out is not an easy thing, especially in the US. But the hypocrisy Nate points out remains, and the difficulty is in any case how, by choice, we have together built an energy intensive and oil dependent culture. Opting out by small steps is something I'd like to see everyone try, and a way of changing the culture.

My own project this weekend is to find a set of durable grocery bags I can use around town, and never take another free plastic one.

"Opting out" is impossible. More than that, it is often lethal. This culture suffers greatly from a lack of diversity, tolerance, and empathy to put it mildly.

Culture change is a kind of phase change and I would be surprised to see "small steps" add up to anything significant here; a punctuated (dis)equillibrium versus a kind of social gradualism. Based on our tendencies, I expect great wretching convulsions rather than a gradual, peaceful powering down. I am seeing a lot of folks making the attempt to "opt out" being "offed" by those attempting to "hold on".

"Opting out"

"Danny Barak of Leader Capital Markets jumps to his death"

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/business/danny-barak-of-leader-capi...

Now thats the kind of opting out I wouldn't mind seeing more of from the criminal elements in the FIRE economy.

Harsh I know but at this point I am getting really fed up.

Maybe he listened to Bill Hicks? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

How desperately individuals cling to their powerlessness has always mystified me; in this type of forum and in more political ones you consistently find chains of statement like "doing this is wrong, and will inevitably doom us" combined with "we can't possibly do anything else because we just can't". There seems to be an inner need to recite your own formula for powerlessness in public repeatedly, like the beads of a rosary, that others might believe and see how doomed and powerless they are themselves.

Culture is nothing but the behaviors of individuals; without participants, culture disappears, and without active participants in an element of cultural behavior, that element disappears. If you don't believe cultures change, you are strongly advised to avoid history books, and old people!

There's a fine line between promoting personal responsibility and victim-blaming. Ultimately, this is a systems issue and to attempt to solve it through individual means is not going to solve it. It's an important discussion. How do we empower change, both within individuals and within the culture itself?

For every person you have trying to get off the grid, you have others who go into rabid rages about Earth Hour and pledge to turn on every damn light in their house to counter-act the efforts. While advocating for the US to take the plunge to get off of fossil fuels and transition into clean, alternative, renewable energy, I have been told that I have no legitimate voice until I give up my computer and stop heating my home here in cozy Alaska. Seems to me that the most THAT would do is to silence it. I could make all kinds of falsely superior statements about how few miles I put on my car, how long I keep dinosaur PC's instead of replacing them, dissavow the consumerist drive to have the latest and greatest - and for the companies that set up such waste in continually unveiling new models of cellphones, tv's, computers and other technologies to keep us buying, buying, buying - but it is all BS. I do eat. Much of what I eat is transported and packaged. I heat my house. I own a car. And yes, not only do I own a computer, I love it and it is on a lot.

Speaking of history, I think our recent history in the US proves well how powerful campaigns can be to create individual and collective change within the culture. Smoking is a great example. Individuals impacted the system enough for the system to develop the political will to get behind the idea of change. The system then created quite effective policy and mass education/advertising changes - and many more individuals were led to change as a result. Tobacco companies are no longer #1.

The question is: how to we harness the same elements to make transformative change in individuals and our society when it comes to oil? And do we have the will to do it?

"There seems to be an inner need to recite your own formula for powerlessness in public repeatedly..."

Hi, everybody! I'm Ghung, and I'm powerless.

... and proud of it!

I agree.

Over the past 3 or 4 years, partly due to "luck" circumstances (ie. having money stucked aside as a safety net), partly due to choice, partly due to the good chance that in the future I'll have a lot less money than I have now, we (my family, wife, 6 year old kid and me) have made a consciou decision to vastly reduce our consumption of everything. I've cut my electricity usage by half, driving to a 3rd of what it used to be, shopping also a lot and so on. And guess what? No one at home is more unhappy because of that. We still have an enjoyable life, we still enjoy the ocasional luxuries, etc...

I count myself as part of the "haves". is there any doubt that if the majority of the western population went this way and cut their consumption the same way we did, things would be a lot better?

This does not mean I am unaware of all the other things I do which are still ecologically bad, nor that I am unaware that things need to change by a big factor. But I still hope it's not too late to abandon the hope of a reasonable solution to the problem we're facing.

I have some from these guys.
Pretty good over all and good value.
I like the cotton better than the synthetic ones that can be bought at most stores.

http://www.ecobags.com/Canvas_Bags

I've seen great grocery bags (and other stuff) made by crocheting old plastic grocery bags. A video:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Healthy-People-Healthy-Planet/Crochet-Rec...

Neat idea, and not a bad way to make use of plastic bags that have already been produced.

The little cozy to hold a 12 oz aluminum can is a little ironic, though. :-)

A new "twist" on a old skill.

Cool.

PDV,

I live in a small , though nice, wooden shed.
It was up to 87 degrees yesterday yet I still have not turned on my one window air conditioner. Instead I worked pulling grass in my garden from the corn and potatoes.

I buy almost no food from the supermarkets. I wear worn out clothes.

I heat with wood that fallen trees provide. I use about $50 of electricity a month.
That runs a few electrical lights, my computer and a refrigerator.

I am healthier than anytime in the last 30 years of my life due to my diet and work.
I have traveled the world and lived once in very large cities.

I am surrounded by live woodlands and do not take the life of animals unless absolutely necessary to protect my source of food. I eat mostly what I produce and set by.

Can you say the same? What is YOUR lifestyle choices? Are you on a path to reducing your footprints on this earth or do you just wish others to do so?

This is not a contest.

There are way too many people on this tiny little planet for outrageous competition. It's either time to get along or time to reduce our numbers. Either we cooperate or we war.

Passingby, you've come a long way, but you've got an incredibly long way to go. We all do. Good luck to you and to us.

Conserving fuel may be in fact be folly. The faster we go through it, the sooner we can get on with our (little) social experiments.

"This is not a contest."

Oh but it is. Will we die off due to lack of natures resources or will enough be left for a remnant to survive?

That is a contest. So far most are losing it.

'Little social experiments'?

Yes I agree. Only total,all out commitment and action will be otherwise.

But one starts with baby steps , since our current generation is so far out of it. No ability to return to the past. So those who are sucessful, Darwins choice by evolution, will survive.

The game starts NOW. Well actually started some time ago its just that few heard the starting pistol shot.

I am not in the lead but I can see the leader ahead , way way up there. He has amazing stamina, plenty of strength and he never falters. Some say he is superhuman. A spiritual being perhaps? I think he is the common man who has finally learned his lesson. We can all enter this race but few will finish. Already many have fallen out.

It is a contest. Of LIFE! Join us.

PDV: It is a contest.. the owners of the first 100 shares of my fuel CSA (community supported agriculture) are the winners.

This is my car, which gets about 1/3 to half it's BTU's from corn ethanol, next to sweet sorghum, the crop I believe I can get at least 500 gallons of fuel per acre from with zero fossil input.

Once I have 100 shares for 100 gallons of fuel at $10 per gallon (that's $1000 per share), then I can get the farmland leases and equipment leased to be able to grow sweet sorghum for ethanol and soybeans for oil and process them both on the farm, with no petroleum inputs.

email hozer-fuelcsa at hozed dot org if you are serious.

You win!

Your car doesn't require any fuel to make, the factory doesn't require any fuel to operate, the your car ownership doesn't require the sale of dozens of heavy, fuel guzzling SUV's and giant pick up trucks to enable its construction and marketing, the roads you run on don't require any fuel to either make or maintain, the snowplows in the winter don't need any fuel, the other supplies on your farm can be brought there by levitation, the destinations you drive to don't require thousands of others to drive there too, the products sold at these destinations don't require fuel ...

That the economy your farm operates within - the loans, sales, agreements, land taxes, land leases, legal system, government(s), other businesses, finance and management(s) aren't absolutely reliant on hundreds of millions of people every single day taking something that a big company convinces everyone is worthless and burning it up ... a one time use with no return ... so that company and all the others in the economy can take a few pennies here and there for themselves.

How much are shares of you getting rid of the car altogether?

PDV, you are too quick to be flippant. I have tried to 'opt out' for the past 12 years. Not enough to fix the problem, but my footprint is approx 40% of UK average.

Live in a normal house, grow 80% of own food. Heating by coppice wood. Electricity from wind. Do still drive, 5000 miles a year in a car that gets +/- 40mpg. Have cut that from 8000 miles. Will cut it further.

People forget their business life. Nature doesn't differentiate, there are no off-balance-sheet vehicles when it comes to all the problems of environmental overshoot. We run a successful and pretty harmless business, again heated by wood, powered by wind. Mail-order vegetable seeds - we are training our customers to save their own so they won't need us when the time comes. We have cut and cut every bit of our environmental impact that we can think of. It probably isn't enough.

But I've not ended up in jail or assaulted yet. And we have given 35,000 sets of seed-saving instructions to home gardeners, while providing employment to 5 local people.

Agree that the problem is big and probably unfixable. But unthinkingly dismissing those who are actually trying to find a path to the solution is really unhelpful.

Ben

Ben, I take it you are the Ben from Realseeds.co.uk/ ex Bridith Mawr intentional community?

I and several other gardeners I know love your stuff; great seeds and website, and I totally agree with the philosophy behind it. Our grandkids might really be glad you kept some of the heirloom varieties going! Peak oil is a big hurdle for agriculture to overcome, and we need some smaller scale low energy growers to show the rest of us how it could be done.

Hope the growing season is being kind to you so far: The cold snaps and following hot, dry period we have been suffering in North Germany has caused a lot of bolting to seed in my patch, but I guess it will have been a little more wet in West Wales. I am currently sorting out seed for overwintering so I will be sending some business your way soon!

I hope any Oil Drum gardener buying seed in Europe considers using Realseeds.co.uk, they have a great selection of unusual varieties that you can seed save yourself. No connection, honestly!

If I had the space and time I'd do it something like that here. But I do share seeds and growing instructions localy, though not on a scale and not for profit. As far as I know only 3 people on my block grow food in their yards. I have the biggest garden so far, Josh cross the street has one, but I have not seen how big his is this year, and the people besides us have fruit trees and a pecan.

We have Blackberries, strawberries, blueberries, I've wild harvested some seeds of dewberry and blackberry I am starting. We have Pecan, and Black walnut, and will add kiwi, and more blueberries, mulberry, and anything I can fit into the shed filled yard. We have plans for a pond, and have more raised beds to plant, soon as we cut down a sick tree( also need the sunshine it'd shading).

Seed saving is one of those things we can do to save time and money elsewhere.

The reasons that doing little now, will take time to filter back to the people that make things is, that our lack of business will have a lag time. Likely about 2 years, but the more we do now, the more impact we will have and the more momentum we'll have in our own changing mindset numbers.

Can't make a hike without taking a first step. Can't just stand there complaining that we'll never be able to finish and all is for nought, why bother going on a hike today, I can't see the logic in getting out in the sunshine and maybe getting leaves on me and seeing the wonderful views, no way not me I'd rather stay inside and pout. That gets nothing done folks. You got to take a step to walk forward.

Hugs from Arkansas,
Charles, BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed future.

Here is the most dedicated "opt out" I've heard of recently:

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_13843274

With that said, the statement that you can't complain about anything unless you have opted out is pure bullshit. People live within inherited societal frameworks that are relatively immutable. Everyone has an obligation to live as responsibly as possible within that framework, making choices that sustain the framework if it is good, and change it if it is bad, but that does not mean that unless you forgo any use of the framework whatsoever, you can't complain about the situation. Poppycock. Using that paradigm someone born into Haiti has no right to complain about their ancestors denuding the forest unless they refuse to eat food cooked over a wood fire. Total bullshit.

Speaking of "Opting Out", did others here spot the June 6th New York Times article on the Peak Oil "Doomsday" cult?

Imagining Life Without Oil, and Being Ready

snippet:

Americans have long been fascinated by disaster scenarios, from the population explosion to the cold war to global warming. These days the doomers, as Mrs. Wilkerson jokingly calls herself and like minded others, have a new focus: peak oil. They argue that oil supplies peaked as early as 2008 and will decline rapidly, taking the economy with them.

A nice plug for one of the posters here.

I used to walk almost everywhere I needed or wanted to go. I sometimes took a bus on rainy days. I have had back trouble for year over 20, and re-injured it early last year, so I had to stop walking, but I also stopped going place.

I do as much business( contacts and such online, or over the phone).

I live a very low water impact lifestyle. A quart of water in a basin, and a wash clothe is a sponge bath, If you need you can have several a day and use a ton of water less than even the lowest flow showers. How do you wash your dishes. Low flow dish washer is what my parents use. I use a little water to soak things that need it, eat things that I can have fresh or eat out of the can if I use can products, buy in bulk at locally soruced stores, or online through bulk supplies, to reduce packaging. I recycle the boxes in the garden in worm beds. The starch peanuts go in the soil too. I recycle almost everything my city allows, and recycle everything else in one fashion or another.

I RainWater Harvest when I can, and even have plans for that water to be used in the house. Filter media can be devised so you can filter rainwater without using off the shelf filters. Peak Moss, Sand and other materials are available in plans all over the internet and in books.

I use edible landscaping, and harvest locally found wild foods whenever possible, I re-seed them as well, and collect wild plants to put in my yard. I write about what I do in my blog, or keep track of it in a notebook, or my head. Last year I took 2 showers. The rest of the time it was sponge baths And my water use that way was a bit less than 100 gallons for bathing everyday of the year, water off that went into my yard. Even though I paid double for it to the city for water use and sewer return.

I don't try to use plants that are not water hungry in my non-garden areas, and I use spot watering, not over head spraying to cut back on wasted water that way.

I spend money on food more than I will eat, because I give it away to needy people I know, both family and friends and strangers.

If we have to drive somewhere, we make as many trips as possible in one outting. My parent's whose van this is, are on a limited budget and were frugal before I showed up on the scene.

We repair clothes instead of buying new if they break or wear out. My dad has a suit that is over 35 years old, still fits him, still in good condition. We scrounge from the trash of others and repair and give away to those that can use a fixed item, or we use it ourselves.

Reduce, reuse, recycle and refuse to be your own worst enemy.

I still think I could reduce energy by 40% and be fine, and I don't have lights on if I don't need them. In fact I am still trying to get my parents who are frugal already to be more so.

And Living in a tent, or cardboard box is not that bad, though some places frown on the homeless, see my profile link to my blog and the homeless blog I have (been a while since it had an up to date post, homeless people don't seem to want to write much online).

We all could do better, little things help, then they lead to bigger things and so on and so on. Jesse Goodrum the lady involved with the HUSH project( see homeless blog) met a young person once, who did not order food when him and his friends were going out, he'd eat what they left on their plates. Inspiring stories are out there, just look for them.

Hugs from Arkansas,
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed future.

The 1st photographer to get a picture of an oily Nutria is gonna be next Iwo Joe.

The 1st photographer to get a picture of an oily Nutria is gonna be next Iwo Joe.

The nutria's are not native and they have been very destructive to levees. The govt has put bounties on the pelts in the past in an effort to eradicate them. Apparently they continue to breed in significant enough numbers that they manage to continue to thrive however.

They must not be delicious.

They must not be delicious.

Well given what they eat on I doubt they will be bad for you. They are rather ugly critters to look at though. In a pinch though, of starve or die, I would do what I have to. The big question is how to make it tender enough.

http://www.nutria.com/site14.php

Heart Healthy 'Crock-Pot' Nutria

2 hind saddle portions of nutria meat
1 small onion, sliced thin
1 tomato, cut into big wedges
2 potatoes, sliced thin
2 carrots, sliced thin
8 Brussels sprouts
1/2 cup white wine
1 cup water
2 teaspoons chopped garlic
Salt and pepper to taste
1 cup demi-glace (optional)

Layer onion, tomato, potatoes, carrots and Brussels sprouts in crockpot. Season nutria with salt, pepper and garlic, and place nutria over vegetables. Add wine and water, set crockpot on low and let cook until meat is tender (approximately 1-1/2 hours). Garnish with vegetables and demi-glace. Makes four servings.

For more recipes, click on a link below.

Nutria Chili

Nutria Ragondin Sausage Jambalaya

Nutria Sausage

Smoked Nutria and Andouille Sausage Gumbo

Stuffed Nutria Hindquarters

Enola's Smothered Nutria
© 2007 : All rights reserved. : Privacy Policy

If I see some in the meat section at Costco, I'll pick some up.

At a zoological park near St. Augustine, Florida I once saw them feeding nutria to the alligators.

At a zoological park near St. Augustine, Florida I once saw them feeding nutria to the alligators.

Well now that is definitely putting them to good use. I am sure the alligators enjoyed the meal also, they are pretty sizable critters, so should be very filling for them.

Most people down here prefer the short form of the name. "rat" or "rats" short for Nutria "Rat" If that is name is used most people know what it means in relation to our marshes and swamps.

It is worth pointing out that in all likelihood, the Nutria is a fish. Let me explain: In the 1500s the Pope declared that the Capybara was a fish. Since the Capybara and the Nutria are pretty closely related, I think if one is a fish, they both are. There are a lot of good fish recipes to consider. Maybe a Baja nutria taco?

The Popes list of things that are fish:

Beavers
Capybaras
Muskrats
Sea turtles
Iguanas
Sea birds

Apparently this declaration was made because fish was in short supply when Lent came around, not because of some great taxonomic insight.

I'm calling you on cute mammal haten. What right to you have to decide if one of God's creatures is invasive? Hell if anyone is invsive it's us. I mean look at the Bearing Land Bridge, where you think that came from? Eh? That's right. Paleoburton. Bastards. Likely financed by hot Enrock money. This planet needs help. I look to the sky for help from the Martian Secret Service --- altho... Mothra Jones is reporting Mars is in the hands of BlueMarble Types. Bastids!

All we can really do is Prey.
Pls, send me money.
thks.
.5mt

A Nutria is just as much God's creature (if that is the measure of analysis), where ever it is found.
If there can be an inconvenient Nutria,
there can be an inconvenient Pelican.

Both species seem to have a pretty fast reproductive capability.

We have extremely thick concentrations of brown pelicans in California. I've seen some rocky Islands that are completely covered by roosting brown pelicans, and the islands are covered with thick layers of their guano.

I've seen some other birds that find pelicans extremely inconvenient. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNNl_uWmQXE

I've seen some rocky Islands that are completely covered by roosting brown pelicans, and the islands are covered with thick layers of their guano.

You say that like it is a bad thing! Think of it as a source of NPK...

They're basically giant rocks, and they're within a marine preserve, so they'll never be used as a source for fertilizer.

Both species seem to have a pretty fast reproductive capability.

If you think that is something you should see the herds of gulls I have seen and shi**ing all over everything, cars, trucks, equipment wherever they can land, you haven't begun to live until you get a little on you.

I still have not been able to figure out what they are good for however.
I don't think they are even fit to eat, but maybe that is why there are so many of them. Kind of like mosquitos and the marsh gnats a real nuisance.

If you think that is something you should see the herds of gulls I have seen and shi**ing all over everything, cars, trucks, equipment wherever they can land, you haven't begun to live until you get a little on you.

Perhaps its just their way of expressing what they think of us and our machine based civilization...
To be honest there are some people who I believe should be generously covered with more than just ordinary guano.

The brown pelican was just taken off the threatened species list seven months ago.

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/nov/12/nation/na-pelicans12

The nutria is an invasive species, pelicans are not.

Teddy Roosevelt made the first major step to preserve the species, it took 100+ years to bring them back.

There are no inconvenient pelicans.

Your "logic" is exceedingly poor.

Alan

All together now:

All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.
Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom,
He made their horrid wings.
All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.
Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid,
Who made the spikey urchin,
Who made the sharks, He did.
All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small,
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.
AMEN.

"All things Dull and Ugly" Monty Python Sings

The only good nutria is a dead nutria.

As usual great post.

1. i figure i have given up about 50% in the past five years. During the next five i expect to give it all up.

2. can't, it's priceless

3. I heard there were about 30+ deep water drills in the gulf recently shut down by Obama. Suggest 4 be assigned to drill relief wells. the rest should be assigned to Maconda Tract and told to drain it and deplete it of crude as a fall back just in case the relief wells don't work.

How about if I answer #2 with a policy suggestion rather than a philosophical discussion?

The American Energy Independence Act of 2010 (KISS version)

1- Immediate $1.00 per gallon gasoline tax, progressively increasing over a period of 10 years until pump prices reach $8.00 per gallon.
2- Immediate $30.00 per metric ton tax on emission of atmospheric carbon, progressively increasing to $100.00
3- Refund the entire amount collected to every holder of a social security number in the form of a monthly American Independence check.
Cut cost of administration to the bone by treating every citizen equally.
4- Require that the entire Act be written on a single page of paper and mailed to every citizen along with their first check. Make sure that that first check arrives as soon as the Act becomes law, not a year later.

I predict that within a few months the Tea Party rabble will be castigating big government and demanding that it not mess with their monthly Independence Checks------.

All it would take to put such a policy in place is a revolution as thorough as the French Revolution -------.

The Obama (pbuh) worshiping teacuppers would love it. Stay home, do nothing, get a check.
We. Want. Something. Here. NOW.

Agree. Amend his plan an use the money to fund tax credits for companies which successfully install and connect to the grid solar and wind-generated electricity. Same credits for companies who successfully upgrade/add capacity to the grid. Fund rebates (ye, subsidies) for PHEVs and EVs.

Get something for somehting.

This plan would reduce our use of oil, including imported oil, including oil from counties with significant portions of their population who want to harm us...

My community offered an incentive program for businesses to install solar systems and they would buy back the electric for a very good rate. So many people signed up that the gov reached their limit with a couple of months. Now there's a list you can get on for the program but it's very unlikely they will be accepting new contracts anytime soon.

Either way, my next big investment into my business (I've got 13,000 sf of roof) is to install a solar system.

But first, I'm switching to a TDI diesel to drive my butt around town, so I can start using bio-diesel as much as possible. There's a guy about a mile away who makes it and then I can wave at BP and the other bastards when I drive past them.

You might want to read up on the Alaska Permanent Fund. Every Alaskan gets a check from the oil and gas royalties paid to the state, and everybody gets an equal amount, just for being an Alaskan and sitting on your ass.

You do realize that a massive increase in gasoline tax would empty out rural areas completely and likely kill all small farms, even if you exempted diesel?

Just askin'.

Gyrfalcon
Last time i was in Austria and the UK i noticed that the rural landscape featured a multitude of small farms and none of the corporate mega-factories that have taken over our countryside. Doesn't look like the effect you predict happens in the real world of $8 gasoline---.

Heisenberg, the reason for a totally revenue neutral revenue stream in the Energy Independence Tax is to defuse the no-taxes mentality that is firmly embedded in the brain stem of the American public. Of course we should support desirable technologies in their start up phases, and remove subsidies from mature ones like oil, coal, nuclear, and (rather soon) wind to allow a market based decision matrix to operate, but this should be done through a separate revenue stream.
We should use the carbon tax mechanism to set the overall environmental policy goals and put a price on external costs now ignored by the market.

Oh, I see. So you would then advocate building the kind of extensive rail/bus network that prevails in those countries, and require there to be central market towns every so many miles, as well, before quadrupling the price of gasoline?

Seriously, the countryside is very different here, and the automobile has killed village market centers in favor of more distant urban areas with big box stores. It's simply not valid to compare the dynamics of a 1000-plus-year-old civilization and its land use/ownership patterns with the U.S.

And you make energy policy on the assumption that everybody lives in the suburbs or cities at all our peril.

horizonstar,

I grok that the issues are complex and any mitigation even more so, and that the American political arena is the biggest problem of all. I applaud your ideas for a direction of mitigation.

NO. It would empty out the cities whose citizens would come to the farms to steal the food.

If we were really really lucky and started some years back we could have saved the communities. Turned the cities into many many village squares and learned to change part of it back to farmland and recreate farmers markets.

The small suburb I once lived in in the 60s was an outlier town near a big city. Even in the 60s they still had a country fair in the middle of town and produce was judged. There was a rail thru town and many rode it to the big city to work there.

Now its all fast junk food joints and sleazy juke joints. The people are mostly walking dead and don't know it. They steal and prey on each other. Most on welfare and bottom of the food chain.

It could revert back to what it once was but the nearby city tore down all the industry and put in shopping malls and tried to capture the 'sports' trade. Isn't working.

Exactly the opposite.
Everyone in a rural area would suddenly get real friendly with every farmer with a still, and you would have an immediate copper & stainless steel shortage because everyone that didn't have a still was building one.

The rural areas would have around $4-$5 a gallon ethanol, or vegetable oil biodiesel, or maybe even pyrolysis oil.

Cities would have a dramatically increased budgets due to far less need for road maintenance.

Suggest 4 be assigned to drill relief wells

No, sorry, tooo great a risk. 12 is the minimal number on a good day. 144 would be better. I suggest handing this over to the Dept. of Labor.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6555#comment-641142

Seems like not everyone liked my comment...

Re Campfire questions:

1) Would you be willing to give up 1%?, 10%?, 20%?, 50%? of your oil consumption, both that you use directly and use indirectly in the products you buy to assure ecosystem health? Why or why not?

I'd be willing to give up over 50% of my current already small foot print. Because it will happen regardless of whether or not we want that or not. As to how that might be achieved? I propose dedicating a campfire discussion to that topic

2 )How do we put a $ value on aspects of our lives outside the market system?

That's probably another campfire discussion in and of itself. Nate, given your choice of doctoral dissertation I'd love to hear your thoughts on this in a bit more depth.

3) If the main real reason not to add more relief wells is cost, is two the optimum number? That is, what would the prudent number of relief wells/rigs be if money was de-emphasized as a factor?

At this point cost should not be a factor in this calculation. Whatever the added cost of drilling two or more relief wells might come to, it pales in comparison to the damage already done to the Gulf ecosystem and the the additional damage that might occur if the current two relief wells should encounter problems or suffer delays. We need to do the calculation based on what the cumulative odds are for success. I would very much like to load the die in favor of the Gulf and not the house!

It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?"
Richard Feynman, Personal Observations on the Challenger Disaster

He also said this:

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

This sure ain't the time for fooling around!

Seems like not everyone liked my comment...

Maybe everyone is not living as comfortable as you are by the warm glow of LED lighting.

Some of us would just like to be able to go back to work before we have to retire permanently.
All the while trying to fix a 50 year old house while they are still physically able too.

The feeling is though, if the comments here are any clue, is the floor is being jerked out from under many who are nearing retirement age, all without a means of recourse. The last year has been very interesting to say the least.

I don't give a rip about my retirement. I'm more concerned about the quality of life for my kids and grandkids. I'd like to be able to say I left them a little somthin'.

I don't give a rip about my retirement. I'm more concerned about the quality of life for my kids and grandkids. I'd like to be able to say I left them a little somthin'.

So what's the plan, you will off yourself, so that you won't become a burden to them in the declining years? Given some of the things I have seen in the new health care plan, I guess you might as well.

Hah! Didn't you know? Old hydrolgists don't die, they just wash away ...

For some reason (pessimism?) I always figured I'd work to the bitter end. Maybe that's harsh.

For some reason (pessimism?) I always figured I'd work to the bitter end. Maybe that's harsh.

You know that is probably exactly what will happen to me. I was hoping to last at least until 70 working but the way this body seems to be breaking down. I am beginning to wonder. I just hope not to be a burden for my kids and to be useful for as long as possible.

I have a friend (engineering technician) who retired last year at the age of 80, another friend is a land surveyor who is 80 and still working. The blueprint shop owner always jokes that engineers will keep on working "as long as they have strength to lift that stamp" ha ha.

I just hope not to be a burden for my kids and to be useful for as long as possible.

Amen brother. If I get to where I can't work maybe I can at least tend the grandbabies & garden.

I have a friend (engineering technician) who retired last year at the age of 80, another friend is a land surveyor who is 80 and still working.

I know oilfield consultants/company reps that are 80 and still working and not like they need the money either. Now some of these guys are pretty well heeled. I am guessing they don't want to give it up and do what? And it is hard to find the experience some of these guys have in the new crop coming up.

Afraid they're gonna miss something maybe? Personally I can't imagine doing anything else and enjoying it this much.

I do think that a different kind of outlook on engineering is needed, which is why organizations like ASCE are pushing sustainability. It's odd but I kind of find it intriguing to think of the boundaries to be pushed and ultimately overcome in the future. Perhaps I'm focusing on the bright side.

It takes a lot of time to get the worm to turn. Think back to the 40's and 50's when the idea was to dig huge straight drainage channels and line them with concrete. Imagine the conniption fit the Army Corps would give you nowadays with such a proposal! It took 60 years but the paradigm did indeed change.

I dunno about the oil business, but in Civil Engineering I think we will need the freshness that the 'new crop' brings even though they don't have the wisdom of the gray heads. Life's not perfect enough to bring them together in a balanced mix, unfortunately. Maybe we're also running out of time, I don't know.

Speaking as an old fart, old farts need to retire and make way for the next generation. Most keep working because they can't face the challenge of retirement.
They are less technically savy certainly in computers than newer engineers and 'wisdom' just means standard practice.
Between the old farts, the phonies and the foreign engineers there's few career opportunities out there.

Those folks keep working because they are hoping to see their ideas developed. Oil and gss are found by ideas. Sure, "oil is where you find it." But it still took a man's mind to evaluate the information to decide exactly where to drill. Lots of dry holes but good rewards for good ideas. Who gives a Rats Ass about golf?

I don't believe the people in white pant suits that enter data into spreadsheets all day understand how the necessities arrive at the click of computer mouse. Tomatoes from Mexico in January take energy to deliver.

I am reminded of Duke Rudman, who said that he wanted to live to be 100 and then be shot by a jealous husband. He almost made it. I think that he passed away around age 95.

A body in motion stays in motion. Work till you drop dead, I say. Use the latter half of your career doing something of great value, like research related to your field, or become an educator.

My father was a maintaince Engineer, Not an accepted engineering field with lots of hard math and the like. But he could solve almost any problem in the Department store chain's stores, everything could he do, even unloading a truck with 200 70 lb boxes on it. He could do it faster than the 20 years old hired to help him one summer. He was in his late 60's then. After the new owners of the stores, through bad practices went belly up, he still works for the original owners at their one and only building. But he hates being retired. He has to go make work for himself to stay active.

I sometimes help him, but usually I leave him alone, he gets antsy when I start talking a lot about my ideas. I except that if God would let him, he'd work till 100, just to keep from being bored.

Right now we are planning on taking a chain link fence down, to access our true property line, on which the back neighbor built a 6 foot tall wooden fence. So it'll take a few weeks of hard work to clear out the vines, privets, westerias and all the roots, it'll be good for him.

My mom at times drives him crazy with her forgetfulness, and always needing to be under foot. He likes private times and silence. Me I like to live in the crowds and talk a lot, or just listen but hear a lot of other people talking.

Anyway, here is hoping for old engineers to have all they need to stay active and help us younger folks and the folks even younger than we are, they still have practical insight into things that are useful, and we students should not discount that.

Hugs to all the engineers out there, and those other folks,

Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed future.

I was going to comment on your earlier post which stated that you did NOT care about retirement, but wanted to leave something to the future generations. Solution is to make it certain that you don't spend their inheritance.

This post about working till the bitter end adresses the matter much better.
Who the heck came up with the idea that capable people were somehow entitled to "eat" and not produce anything? Who should they take the "food" from and where is that right established anywhere? This concept of living production free for 40 or 50 years cannot work.

Working longer is a double-edged sword as commented above. If the older workers don't retire and get out of the way, the younger ones don't have jobs (among other things). But yes, the idyllic notion that life is supposed to be easy is part of what got us here.

I have the feeling that a severe crisis will be the quickest way to change "business as usual". It might be possible to effect change gradually but it will be harder to do it without something to rattle people's cages. Perhaps this oil spill will be another straw for the camel's back.

Something else though. Post-Katrina I witnessed a good many everyday suburban people exhibiting a remarkable amount of common sense and ingenuity. Those who say the average person won't be able to handle the change are selling a lot of folks short. You'd be surprised what people can do when they have to do it.

You'd be surprised what people can do when they have to do it.

I remind myself of that every time a suggestion to walk or cycle is answered by "I have to drive because (yadayadayada)" How quickly technology renders us helpless, and becomes something we are owed.

I thought many, perhaps most, people retired in their 60s...and that American life expectancy was in the high seventies. If this is true, we are talking about ~ 20 years or less of 'eating and not producing', not 40-50 years as you said.

Maybe Logan's Run had the right idea? (Except, amend the movie so that the folks 'work till the bitter end'.)

You be forgetting birth through adolescence. That adds another 15+ years to the equation.

If collapse comes then the re-institution of child labor will eat 10 years out of that 15....

Sad but True.

If your concern with leaving them a 'little somthin' is about money then you will leave them very little of value.

Not money, no. In keeping with the topic at hand, I meant that us living folks shouldn't be burning through natural resources as if there were no tomorrow.

"the floor is being jerked out from under many who are nearing retirement age"
It's even a tad worse than that. One of the thrusts in the comments on recent threads is a desire to go back to some imagined better past. One thing that gets lost in that shuffle is that most people old enough to be "nearing retirement age" would be long-dead under such conditions, even if a very few might work past 80. Not a pretty picture no matter how you look at it or how fast you try to spin it. And a precipitate unplanned withdrawal from deepwater will only make it worse.

Hell, they owe it to us to die and leave us their bootle. With my Gawd earned Slice of the BPie and a big chunk of nationalized IRA money I'll be in good shape. We'll change the rules as necesary to make sure I live a long and happy life.

No doubt childhood disease killed many as did the flue epidemic of 1918. Pull those numbers out, and I'd bet, overall mortality was close to today's numbers. My Grandmother, born on the Idaho frontier in 1883, lived to age 67. My Great Grandfather, born in Utah in 1849 lived to 77. There were lots of old folks around when I was a kid. My old Aunt, a frontier herbalist, and born in the 1850's, died at 98. All anecdotal, I know, but, I suspect the American Medical Association has done quite a good job justifying $1,200 per day rooms at the hospital. Toss it in the bin labeled "THE MYTH OF PROGRESS". Best from the Fremont

The Spanish flu made a blip in the numbers, but by that point health care was developed enough that life expectancies were already going up, and anyways it could hardly have made a difference to the vast number of lives lived before or after its spread.

Now, childhood diseases is a more interesting topic. Indeed, you are correct, the high prevalence of childhood diseases was a major cause in low overall life expectancy. The life expectancy of those who made it into adulthood (usually defined as 18 or so nowadays, for statistical purposes), and even those who made it past their first birthday, tended to be much better, and those people who had a privileged relatively pleasurable life (access to the best healthcare, such as it was, better nutrition, and so on) tended to have very good life expectancies, on par with today's (especially if they were a class that could be largely sedentary, eg. scholars). However, those childhood diseases were largely eradicated by those same doctors you scorn...vaccines (creating a dearth of latent infections in the surrounding adults, as well as immunity in slightly older infants) and antibiotics hugely reduced infant mortality, though improved sanitation and other public health measures also played a significant role.

In any event, scientists cannot simply "ignore" some of the data to tell them what they want. And what that data tells us is that babies are very vulnerable to disease and tend to die often in a non-technological society, while adults tend to be more vulnerable to chronic illnesses and ailments, which are harder to treat but conversely often less lethal. Modern medicine has helped in both regards, even if the second remains difficult.

My uncle had a working aunt and uncle that he knew they were brother and sister. I have some of her college text books from the late 1890s-to-1930s, with her liner notes, and paper notes, in a neat hand. She recoreder her own records, much like Les Paul did. She was still driving at age 96, and her brother was still farming at age 104. He died at 106, and she died about 4 years later. My Uncle got tons of things from their house, one of them is an old pump organ that is in my brothers den. It is over 100 years old, I don't know how much older than that, but it is very old. The bellows have been replaced 3 times, the last set don't work so well now.

My mothers father lived to be 84 before some bad moonshine killed him, his wife lived to be over 80. My mom is 80, And few people can guess my real age. Good genes I guess. My dad's side of the family his grandparents and great uncles and aunts lived into their 80s as well.

There is an ad on Yahoo mail, talking about a new drug you can make yourself look like you are 30 when you are really 50. The picture is of a wrinkled guy then a younger face side by side. Laughs. I was told just recently that I had no wrinkles and she could not tell my age, so guessed me to be mid 30s.

47 this year dec 16th. I don't even have smile lines, and my concerned wrinkles I can relax away after I make that face.

I think we have only bits of the true information, dying young in wars, dying young at 0-10 yrs, pull down the old peoples ages to a medium, now we have less young dying and more old living longer than 90 oldest in the 110s plus. Really does something to the numbers.

Charles,
Hugs to those over 120, and all those under it too.

BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed future.

Maybe everyone is not living as comfortable as you are by the warm glow of LED lighting.

Some of us would just like to be able to go back to work before we have to retire permanently.
All the while trying to fix a 50 year old house while they are still physically able too.

You probably didn't read my other comment further down. BTW I'm 57.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6555#comment-641718

You probably didn't read my other comment further down. BTW I'm 57.

I am still a little older yet and one back operation up on you.
Still have a wife to take care of and still have some kids to think about also. who are struggling in this new world that is being left to them

Nope no healthcare here either never could afford. Let me tell you about the 2 weeks I spent in the hospital in Galveston some time. I am still paying for that one and will be for many years to come, if I outlive it.

Reduce caloric intake, walk, ride a bike, get online education.

2)WE, NOT BP, ARE RESPONSIBLE

WADR, the oil people have ridiculous amounts of influence in determining CAFE standards, government subsidies of petro industries, offshore drilling oversight, etc.

So, first approximation, the oil guys ARE responsible. This is their show. We are their captive audience.

On with the poll:

1) Further along than most
2) Different people experience wildly different levels of connection with the natural world. I can't answer this question without looking like some mystic (I'm not)
3) Seven + wells sounds about right.

Obama has done the right thing with moratorium. Any body wondering what happens if the region gets hit by an earthquake?

Garbage. Americans could purchase gas sippers, but they choose SUVs and cars with umph, like Mustangs and Chargers. Americans could voluntarily choose to conserve energy, but too many of them don't. I haven't yet run my A/C in my home this season, but my neighbor has been running theirs 24 and 7 for at least 2 weeks. BTW, in my area, electricity is primarily generated with natural gas.

If you look around you will notice more and more smaller, more economical vehicles.
Some are still waiting for the auto makers to respond with better choices.

Yes their are idiots still driving Chevy(built tough for softies) 4x4's with huge mudtires for driving those city streets. They will surely die off and not breed up more imbeciles to follow.

Better everyone was on roller skates. Or rolling a hoop to work.

Sarcasm switch: OFF

America's energy policy has not been determined by the consumer.

Americans could purchase gas sippers?

Go try to find a 2009 or 2010 diesel sedan. Not a single US company makes one. The only ones available in the US are made by the Germans.

! What he said !

+10(by the old rating system)

And let's keep this in mind:

http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2010/06/david-strahan-americans-should-be...

it could have been so much worse. Had BP suffered a similar accident while drilling for Tiber, a three-billion-barrel field it discovered in the Gulf of Mexico last year under two miles of water, reservoir pressures and oil volumes would have been far higher, and there would be many fewer remotely operated submarines capable of working at this depth.

This is being done on our behalf. If the Tiber fleld had blown out, what?

Based on other keyposts here in the last few days, it's starting to sound less like this blowout was "one in a million" and more like it would eventually become near-inevitable.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6543#comments_top "Lessons Left Unlearnt from 2003 Mexico near-spill" (highly recommended reading). A pull-quote:

But after reading through some MMS reports, it seems that near-misses happen a lot. Oops.

I for one would like to see the heavy real-world price reflected in what we spend. This is a "pearl harbor" type event, and should be. Not because the oil industry is bad, but because what we're paying them to do for us is arguably ill-advised from the point of view of inhabiting the planet.

It's good to bear in mind that burning oil in current volumes sustains the current human overshoot temporarily. We will have to do without these levels of oil soon, no matter what, for reasons well-laid-out in the TOD background links. Thus the possibility - probability - of permanently degrading ecosystems should be weighed heavily.

We will have to do without these levels of oil soon, no matter what, for reasons well-laid-out in the TOD background links. Thus the possibility - probability - of permanently degrading ecosystems should be weighed heavily.

Oh I'm all for growing hemp for the oil to make biodiesel now, but I don't think the government is going to cotton to the idea so much.

1) I'm not sure how much it would contribute, but (for example) I can certainly live without the large amount of plastic used in overpackaging things. Other items can be made of cloth, paper, cardboard which are a little more renewable. I think it'd be good to save the resource for needed things like medical uses. I try not to do any un-needed driving and consolidate trips. Hmmm. Maybe 10% at a time until I got down to 50%?

2 )I don't know how we could. It's the everything. This fragile earth, our island home, right?

3) I don't know if it's cost, I see multiple RWs as adding more risk. I thought 3 was a good number.

I don't know if it's cost, I see multiple RWs as adding more risk. I thought 3 was a good number.

The only opposition to adding relief wells seems to be stressing added risk. If it were truly a disproportionate risk, obviously it shouldn't be done. I'd love to see more discussion of this by oil-industry folks.

Having read most of the recent strings, seems like Rockman says he'd do 3 if it were under his control, and notes that the main reason not to do 4 or 5 wells is expense. (rock, correct me if I'm misquoting, thanks).

- seems like the logging of strata, pressures, etc from the blowout well would tend to make drilling less risky than would be the case for an exploration well going down the first time.

- seems that relief wells will not attempt to penetrate the reservoir, and thus run a lot lower chance of causing a blowout.

- seems that having "backup rigs" in place and drilling down does not pose a high danger of additional blowout until they gets near the bottom, other than the usual risks associated with any well.

- seems that additional wells will eventually probably be drilled anyhow for production, right?

- seems that the risk to the workers is significant, but standard for the industry and they'd know what they were getting into.

- seems that, indeed, if bottom-killing the well DOESN'T work, that per Euan Mearns' comment the other day it would be good to drill a bunch of production wells to help deplete pressures and do water injection or some such thing. So having rigs onsite may not be a bad idea, and wells will presumably be drilled here anyhow in the future for less-compelling reasons even if the gusher is killed.

In other words, it seems as though the probability of a blowout from additional relief wells would not be any higher than for business-as-usual wells at this depth, and possibly less due to the good log data available and the fact that it isn't necessary to enter the reservoir. And that this is balanced against an existing large leak which will take months to stop. We also may be racing hurricanes, the well's flow expanding itself and becoming harder to stop, etc. So it seems to me that more wells - say four, and certainly three minimum - are a good idea.

Experts, please shoot holes in my statements, that's why I've posted them here.

many thanks.

At least three or four wells seem to be justifiable based on Greenish's summary of the situation.

I have no expertise in these matters but obviously at some point things will begin to get crowded. I suspect that it might not be prudent to add more than two or three more large ships or drilling rigs to the two already working;the risk of a serious accident occuring between the various ships working in too close proximity might be greater than the risk of all the relief wells falling behind schedule.

I don't give a damn about the cost-I don't believe in privatized profits and socialized risks, although many SO CALLED or self described conservatives do.The proper name for this all to common sort of character is hypocrite.

If the value of BP stock declines to zero and all BP assets are sold at auction, I will be happy with this one aspect of the overall disaster.This would at least have a tremendous positive effect in terms of getting the attention of the oil industry management.

But instead of paying say for example six hundred million for six relief wells, it might be better to pay four hundred nillion for four and spend the other two hundred million on other measures, such as cleanup and restoration.

Rockman, who drills holes for a living, is an example of the saying "To a hammer everything looks like a nail".

More holes mean more chances of another blowout preventer failure, mathematically speaking.

The optimal number of additional holes is zero, unless you're
an oil man determined NOT to set a precedent of no more ultradeep GOM wells.

If you are an oil man then the more holes the better. Yee-haw!

Rockman, who drills holes for a living

No, Rockman finds oil for a living. If he just wanted to drill holes, he wouldn't do it offshore. And he normally doesn't drill holes if he knows for sure that oil won't follow.

Could you provide the math behind that statement? The reason I ask is because the argument for additional wells is precisely because some see that as bettering the odds that this entire disaster will come to and an end sooner rather than later. So the probability calculations are very important. Any math PhDs out there willing to pitch in here?

For pure success probabilities I wouldn't add time to the equation. These are just basic probability multiplications. If the probabilities are independent of each other, then they form a pattern. Say there are three tries for relief wells, each one having a value between 0 and 1. If all three fail then the whole attempt failed:
P(failure) = P1(failure)*P2(failure)*P3(failure)
and
P(success)=1-P(failure)

so if P1=P2=P3=1-0.7=0.3

then P(failure)=0.027
and P(success)=0.973

The problem with time is that you need to work from a deadline, i.e. no failures in a certain amount of time. Otherwise you end up using the fixed probabilities above because you have essentially infinite time to work with.

Apart from end-state failure analysis, you can also do a time-averaged effectiveness, where the rates help you do a trade-off analysis between how long before the leak is stopped and how much oil gets released in the meantime. Unfortunately, when you look at the optimization criteria, the only valid optimum in most people's minds is stopping the oil leak as quickly as possible. Otherwise we look like we are playing dictator god (at least IMO that is the political response I predict to get).

Given that political issue, you can create a set of criteria with weights on the probabilities of success, the cost, and on the amount of oil leaked (the first and third as Markov models as a function of time). When you combine the three and look for an optimum, you might get a result that gives you a number of relief wells somewhere between 1 and infinity. The hard part is establishing the weighting criteria. Place a lower weight on cost and you will definitely lower the number of wells. And that's where the politics plays in again, as many people will suggest that cost is not a limitation. There is also the possibility of a massive blow-out by adding a botched relief well, but I think this is worth the risk.

Below is a state diagram from a Markov model. With the Markov process premise you can specify rates of probability flow between various states and then execute it without having to resort to Monte Carlo.


This diagram is for 3 relief wells. The term B1 is the rate for a failure specified as 0.01 (or 1 in 100 days). B2 is a success rate of 0.02 (or 1 in 50 days). The start state is P1, the success state is P3, and the end failure state is P5.

When I execute this for 200 days, the probability of being in state P5 is 3.5% and it will rise to 3.7% after 1000 days. P3 is 95% after 200 days. The sanity check on this is that the success ratio is about 0.02/(0.01+0.02)=0.666 and from the formula from last night this gives a probability of failure at the end state of (1/3)^3 = 0.037 = 3.7%. This sanity checks with the output after 1000 days.

What the Markov model allows you to see is the time dependence. This is straightforward reliability prediction. Change the success probabilities and we only need three if we want to get to 87.5% for a 50% individual success rate. Contrast that to 97% average success rate with 3 wells, if on the optimistic side of 50%.

This model assumes a serial succcession of relief wells. You can also do these all in parallel. Or you can model the initial delay a little better. With this model, we have success rates that can occur earlier than perhaps expected. An exponential on the success rate per time provides a distribution where the standard deviation is equal to the mean, which is the most conservative estimator should you have no idea what the standard deviation is. To generate a model with about half the standard deviation, we can turn the exponential into a gamma. Each relief well spends about half its time in a "build" stage where it experiences neither success or failure. Then the next stage of its life-cycle is spent in testing for success. See the following chart:

The overall result isn't that much different but you do see a much diminished success rate early on. Which is getting closer to reality.

I'm sure some group of analysts somewhere is doing this kind of calculation. Whether it is worthwhile or not for a single case, can't really say. Just that this is the way that the probabilities work out.

BTW, this is the same math that goes into the Oil Shock Model which has been written up here on TOD.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2430
Both the reliability model and the Oil Shock model are probability-based data flow models which only a few people seem to appreciate. Most people consider models and analysis unimportant for some strange reason.

"Most people consider models and analysis unimportant for some strange reason."

Perhaps if they can't understand it, it can't be important. Great stuff Web. Thanks for that.

Eh..hem, WHT.

If three holes are drilled and the odds of success is 70% per hole per WHT, the chances of no leaks is 34.3%; (3!/3!0!) x .7^3 x (1-.7)^0=.343 according to
some guy named Bernoulli.

Since they already had a blowout the first time you could say it was a coin-toss so 3 heads in 3 flips is 12.5% probability of success;(3!/3!0!)*.5^3 x.5^0=.125

I just use logic. The only completely failed state is if all three fail independently. The probability of this is 0.3*0.3*0.3=0.027. That is just repeating what I had in my original comment.

Since they already had a blowout the first time you could say it was a coin-toss so 3 heads in 3 flips is 12.5% probability of success;(3!/3!0!)*.5^3 x.5^0=.125

By the same logic I used above, 0.5*0.5*0.5=0.125 which is also what you get. For some things you don't need to justify a binomial expansion of terms.

Nothing that I have said is logically incorrect. You used your own version of faulty logic which I don't care to reverse engineer at the moment.

You used your own version of faulty logic which I don't care to reverse engineer at the moment.

LOL!

Have it your way, WHT!

It looks like you can't figure it out either.

OK, I will try to figure out what you did wrong.

If three holes are drilled and the odds of success is 70% per hole per WHT, the chances of no leaks is 34.3%; (3!/3!0!) x .7^3 x (1-.7)^0=.343 according to
some guy named Bernoulli.

That number of 34.3 is only if they are all successful. Yet it only takes ONE to be successful so as to relieve the problematic well.

More LOL I presume?

More LOL I presume?

Absolutely WHT! :^D
I consider the operation to be a success only if no more gargantuan leaks occur as Deepwater Horizon is capped.

After all, the idea is to drill 3 non-leaking wells that reduce pressure so the Big Hole can get capped.

The way your math works, success is if the holes all leak!
.3 x .3 x .3 = .027!

ROFLMAO!

You never heard of Jacob Bernoulli, WHT?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Bernoulli

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BernoulliDistribution.html

The number of 0.027 is if they all fail. We only need one to work so the probability of success is 1-0.027 = 0.97.

You guys need to do less math, and more English. You would then realize that you have different definitions of "fail". WHT believes it means not stopping the flow from the original well, where as Maj believes it means a BOP blowout failure.

But don't let me stop you from criticizing each others math.

Thanks. That settles it and should be the end of discussion.

I'm sure some group of analysts somewhere is doing this kind of calculation. Whether it is worthwhile or not for a single case, can't really say. Just that this is the way that the probabilities work out.

Thanks WHT, unfortunately from what I've seen happen so far, I'm not sure the analysts are setting aside the cost calculus.

Anyways, best hopes that someone out there is doing the analysis based on what is the best outcome for the the Gulf ecosystem and the costs and politics be damned.

The Boots & Coots guy in this video:
http://bp.concerts.com/gom/reliefwell060210.htm

talked of constraints on the surface, like
* safety margin around ships
* distance to the oil slick (I presume it drifts with the usual current).

If one tries to drill more, then the horizontal portion gets longer, thus they
take more time, so what's the point?

One might fit one more in, but the Boots & Coots guy seems pretty confident,
and he's done 40 relief wells, hasn't missed one yet.

One might fit one more in, but the Boots & Coots guy seems pretty confident,
and he's done 40 relief wells, hasn't missed one yet.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results... just ask the folks at BP!

Great article and I'll bet this discussion gets interesting. You're absolutely right about shared responsibility: 2 kids are discovered with a broken cookie jar. One is holding the jar cap and and has the deer in the headlights look. The second is spewing cooking crumbs as he points to the first and mumbles "he did it". Want to guess who's the consumer and who's BP?

I've tried to give up reliance on activities based on oil consumption. Our house is xeriscaped to maximize shade and heat exchange. We bike when we can. We don't use air conditioning. If I can, I'll take it further willingly.

My reservations about more drilling more than the absolute number needed of relief wells is that I think the GoM may be in real danger of formation failure around the MC. Prove the area won't be negatively impacted by further invasions at this point and I won't have any feelings on that subject at all.

Remember that line from Star Wars "There has been a great disturbance in the Force"?

The consequences are just beginning to register: http://www.gulfshores.com/issues/
"...The Alabama Department of Public Health has issued a swimming advisory for waters off Gulf Shores, Orange Beach and Fort Morgan. A swimming advisory means individuals are discouraged from swimming in gulf waters or in bay waters immediately adjacent to Fort Morgan. The beaches are OPEN and visitors are still welcome to sunbathe and walk the beach, but we suggest they swim in a pool or enjoy our many off-beach activities. To read advisory information and frequently asked questions,
visit the Alabama Department of Public Health website..."

The ADPH links over to the CDC material for residents in affected areas. That is some scary sh*t, brothers.

When the levy breaks, mama you got to move

I live in Gulf Shores Alabama. The oil arrived in one spot yesterday, we were inundated today.

Photobucket

Here are the rest of the photos and two videos showing a nearly empty beach. It was around noon and the address is near the Hangout @ 101 East Beach Blvd 36542.

http://s892.photobucket.com/albums/ac126/tinfoilhatguy/Gulf%20Shores%206...

I'm very sorry to see that. :(

Look at my videos and wide shots. Not a single cleanup person within sight and I was at the main beach.

From the media reports you'd think they had an army ready to go.

No, the Army is in Afghanistan trying to convince an Afghan tribal leader not to grow poppies. Through an interpretor the tribal leader agrees and both laugh. Both know the leader has no intention of doing anything but taking the US money and hiding his crop better.

OMG, thanks for the pictures! Forwarding to a few friends, hope that's okay.

Maybe we should have a TOD special event, convene on a beach in Alabama, clean up oil and discuss this stuff irl. Directions, TinFoilHatGuy? :)

Hit the link below for a good approximation for the main beach in Gulf Shores.

View Larger Map

The photos and videos can be freely distributed. I took them myself on my equipment.

No, the Army is in Afghanistan trying to convince an Afghan tribal leader not to grow poppies.

Hadn't you heard? They gave up on that. Instead, they developed a very nasty new poppy fungus and introduced it to the fields. So now all the Afgan farmers and their wives and their children and probably even their goats get to starve to death in the name of imposing budget cuts on the (insert terrorist organization of your choice here).

And 200 years from now when there are no more fossil fuel synthetic drugs, one hopes they can come up with a poppy resistant to the fungus so terminal cancer patients can have some pain relief in their last days. Because the fungus will spread all over the world, they always do. And poppies are the only natural source of morphine for terminal cancer patients.

:(

You have the deepest sympathies of the rest of us who are farther away. We're so very sorry, sympathetic, and unfortunately powerless.

The rest of the country and beyond is sympathetic for the Gulf Coast for what it's worth. Best of wishes, best of luck and godspeed to you all. We're pulling for you.

If the rest of the country (or the world for that matter) were truly sorry and sympathetic they would notice that they were not powerless - at least not when it comes to avoiding a repeat of this situation.

1) Trade in your SUV for a highly efficient car (look around e.g. here if you like - I'll refrain from pointing out specific models) - you can get new cars with 50-60mpg - without any rocket science, batteries etc. US average mpg is around 22 and has basically been there for over a decade. Therefore, HALF the US gas consumption could be replaced with nothing but efficiency - that's roughly a QUARTER of the entire US oil consumption (someone here surely has better numbers) and MUCH MORE than what is being extracted from the gulf. It would seem like a no-brainer, but apparently it isn't.

2) Stop flying around. Could hurt a bit on a personal experience level, but if we want to be serious it is an extremely easy way to lower your oil footprint massively.

3) Insulate your home and/or extend you comfort levels slightly by lowering the thermostat in winter and raising it in summer (or lower the blinds instead of using AC). 1° C gives ~6% reduction in energy use (depends a bit on where you live, but as a rule of thumb it is fine)

4) Buy energy-efficient appliances (sorry only European countries listed, but you can look and get a feel for what an energy-efficient appliance would be). I recently saw a post here where one guy was proud to have bought a 350kWh/year fridge. You can do with 100kWh/year if you don't need a walk-in-fridge.

5) Forget about the rest. Unplugging your phone charger, re-using shopping bags, turning off the lights in earth hour and many, many other small things you can do are just that: small things which consequently have a small impact and give people the illusion that they are doing something when they're not. Little band-aids on a big wound. As long as you don't implement 1)-4), just don't bother. If you have implemented 1)-4), start thinking about the smaller things.

So next time you hear that someone says he is sorry, sympathetic etc etc, ask him about points 1)-4) above (before you ask, yes, I have done it myself). The big problem is that most people are innumerate and cannot differentiate between the (few) things that will make a difference and those (the many) that won't.

"Buy energy-efficient appliances......... You can do with 100kWh/year if you don't need a walk-in-fridge."

Or you can pay a little more and get one of these:
Photobucket

A PV direct fridge or freezer like this Sunfrost can use 0 Kwh/year from the grid, and they outlast most any other fridge you can buy.
http://www.sunfrost.com/

Put your money where your mouth (or stomach) is. As some here have pointed out, many folks are living paycheck to paycheck. But for many others it's about choices.

I have family members that always say they can't afford this or that, yet they seem to be able to afford the annual vacation, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Florida. Their vacation budget is non-negotiable. Their entertainment budget is non-negotiable.

We used to go to Orange Beach, AL ("A Quaint Little Drinking Village with a Fishing Problem"), just east of where TinFoil is, every year or two for a fishing trip. We gave it up years ago when we realized that one trip would pay for another Kw of PV, or a solar water heater. Choices. We found other ways to de-stress; fishing in a local trout stream, a local dog show, hiking in a nearby forest, local festivals.

Apologies to the people of Orange Beach....priorities change. Our hearts are with you guys during this oil spill. We know you folks have two main industries: beach tourism and fishing. Tough times!

I'm impressed, but does it come with a small boy? I don't need any more kids.

The EU and US testing programs must be radically different.

The Sunfrost RF-19 uses 390 kWh/year (for several thousand $) per gov't tests. My 19 cu ft. refrigerator-freezer uses 396 kWh for $599 (minus $250 gov't rebate).

Sunfrost no longer has an advantage.

More from a dealer that dropped them after 15 years.

http://www.windsun.com/General/Sunfrost.htm

Another view

http://www.refrigeratorefficiency.com/buying-guide/most-energy-efficient...

Alan

I was refering to running the Sunfrost PV direct (=zero grid Kwh, zero emissions). I know two people who have them (24vdc) running off of two 100 watt panels. They seem thrilled. I don't have one because of the cost and I found a Whirlpool Energy Star that is efficient and runs great off of the inverters. Better to put the money into more PV in my case.

The point is, I didn't spend the money on a fishing trip.

BTW, Alan, did you make it to the Oyster Festival? Looked like a lot of fun, made my stomach growl. Too bad the first Big Easy Oyster Festival had to happen while the beds are under assault.

No, just too consumed with this to truly enjoy life ATM.

Surely a several thousand dollar claim against BP >:-P

Alan

Er... I'm probably in the bottom 10% of resource users in the US, barring the homeless and destitute. Some readers might like to skip the detail below and hit the meat of my comment in the final sentence.

My first job out of college, and for several yrs, was as a researcher at a non-profit that was founded by Bucky Fuller. "DOING MORE WITH LESS!" being the mantra.

I'm 39 & have never owned a car. About 80% of my trips are on foot, 10% subway, I'll own up to the the odd cab ride.

I used to ride my bike a lot but after my last lay-off I lost health insurance for a few years and city bike riding is just too risky w/o insurance.

I went the previous two winters (I'm above the Mason-Dixon Line) w/o turning the (gas) heat on in my apt. a single time; got into the 40s (indoors) at some point. At first it was because I was unemployed and needed to save money when it got down to 60, then I realized I lived with that fine, so let it go to 55. Gradually I realized that if I layered in the day and got under a comforter in bed I really didn't need to use the heat at all. Probably saved a few thousand dollars too. And the laptop loved darn cold room!

Last owned a TV in 1996. Got married recently and now there's one in the house that came with my wife, so that's almost 14 years, no TV. Never missed it; I was only going to watch sporting events at a bar anyway. I'm more an internet (and reading) guy. Wife reads most nights too. I'm on my second computer in 11 years. I've had the same cell phone for several years (2nd since the late '90s), haven't had a landline in about 12. We generally use something until it dies.

About 80% of my clothing is from thrift stores. New socks and undies; call me a dandy. My wife buys most of her stuff at thrifts too, and she's so well put together it doesn't look it. I look like a slob, but I would in new clothing too. Not a fashion plate. Our housewares are vast majority second-hand. We're college educated folk who started out pretty working class and both of us realized pretty early on that consumerism wasn't a path to happiness, so these were patterns we established early that have carried over into life periods when we have done well financially. When I hit a few years of underemployment/unemployment recently these habits served me very well.

I buy a lot of used books and music as a primary form of entertainment. Resell a good deal as well. It's rather unusual for me to buy anything that I'm the first owner of. Even all of my bikes have been used.

We decided for a number of reasons not have children. One or more fewer humans as a choice is a huge savings for us and the planet.

We recycle regularly, and our trash pile looks to be a fraction of our neighbors' every week. Like most Americans I guess on the world scale we're still gluttons, but comapred to most Americans we're ecological saints. Foodwise we still "eat oil."

Of course I'm lucky that I live somewhere that has (not stellar but it's there) public transport, I've two good knees and arms, I'm generally healthy and fairly young, and well educated enough to navigate life when things don't go too smoothly. Not everyone has those advantages.

I've been voting for small party candidates who don't take money from the big lobbies (even ran once and got a thousand votes... meaning I got crushed!) since I was 18. I write myself in when no one who isn't on the take is running for whatever office is up for election. At any level.

Here's the kicker: when something like this ongoing crisis happens, I feel as if all of my careful attention to my footprint and those of all of my responsible friends who have biked in the rain and walked to the faremer's market to buy local veggies and etc etc has been counteracted 1000x over. And there isn't a darn thing I can do about it.

You have survivalist instincts and likely good genes.

You should breed children. The earth will need your kind in the future.

Darwin you know. Evolution. The smart will survive. You appear to be very well informed. You need to pass this along to offspring.

That's kind of you to say (even if just lookin' out for the species) and you're actually not the first to say it. A friend pf mine who adopted recently wants us to breed. Honestly neither of us have really string parental instincts I don't think. Doesn't stop most people though, does it!

Incidentally I'm self-employed "in the informal sector" in a couple of ways now, but since getting hitched I now have health coverage, which I keep forgetting, and posting this is reminding me that I need to get back on a bike. Been out of the habit for a few years & it'd cut a lot of my 15 min walks into, what, 5? No safer than before but at least now if I get hit by a truck I'll have hospitalization coverage.

In fairness too I should point out that we moved into a house recently (each of us had been in apts) & I don't think my wife is gonna go a whole winter w/o heat. In fact I had the advantage of renting the 2nd floor of a 3 story building before (each floor a separate apt.) and I no longer have the luxury of ambient heat my neighbors used to keep the place somewhat insulated. Here if we didn't run some heat the pipes would freeze. Coldest the old set-up got was about 45F.

I should add that my wife & I LOVE LOVE LOVE thrift stores & flea markets & the like. It's part of the reason we get along so well. We both picked up the habit years before meeting when we were starting out fairly poor & as each of us got more gainfully employed & could afford to buy new stuff, we both realized that it's 100% more fun to buy a shirt or a book or kitchen utensils plunging into the flotsam and jetsam of the past several decades of design etc than at the mall. We're not just keeping stuff out of a landfill, we're keeping COOL stuff out of a landfill! You get to cherry pick what you like out of decades of design and taste. Cooler than we could buy new, at a fraction of the cost, and with the energy to produce the items spent many years ago already (OK it was transported to the store, but it was otherwise being transported to a landfill anyway...)

Unlike some other habits this doesn't at all - not the tiniest bit - feel sacrificial.

We can't figure out, in fact, how families buying all new stuff hack it. Must be drowning in debt.

Other thing: I have the advantage of working from home, so I generally take 5-6 showers/week max. Saves on heat and water. If I didn't do any manual labor that day & I'm not leaving the house, I'll live and I'll not smell too bad if I go 26 hrs or what have you w/o a shower. When I have my weekly gigs where I interact w/ the public I clean up.

Quiz,

I don't take showers. I have no shower nor bathtub. What I do is just like my father did as a youth and me also. I use a basin and washrag.

I find with the right diet and food that no body odor exists. What sweat I produce is natural and necessary.

I have to add that I eat far different than others. Most is homegrown or purchased at the Amish store and a farm who sells me raw milk,range eggs and range meat (eat little meat). I also have cured bacon and eat of a lot of my own corn. I have a bushel(55lbs) of hard red spring wheat that I grind myself as needs be.

So I use nor by zero amounts of 'industrial food'. This creates a very healthy life and physical ability.

I might add I live alone on my smallish farm where I burn wood and raise my gardens and fruit/berry plants and trees.

This regime is an almost exact duplicate of how I was raised on the farm back in the era of WWII.

I interact with the public, my relatives and others. Go fishing a lot with friends. Cook out and fry fish often.

Its a simple life and full of enjoyment for me.

I do use a washing machine but rarely at that.

I had the strong feeling that the 5-6 showers/week was going to be a lot to someone on here!

Yeah, there are better ways of doing this I'm sure. Thanks for the thoughts.

I have to say I'm a fairly hairy guy living in a city rowhome (which is how I grew up), and some pretty regular shower regimen is the path of least resistance. I should add that my wife and I look rather more like yuppies than hippies (her more usually and me only on those days when I have to look more presentable), which is entirely possible to do with hippie-level inputs of time, energy and expense.

We just moved here & we'll have to do something about the washing machine here, which is likely on its last legs. It's been 90F the past few days so my shirts have gone into the hamper after a day of use, but on the whole a person can wear, say, a pair of jeans for a variable, decently long number of days before a washing is in order. One thing that helps is a lot of the time I don't even wear an outer layer of clothing if I'm just kicking around the house. How long can a pair of pants go without a washing if you wear them an hour/day? Pretty darn long!

I have to say pants/jeans that fit are the hardest thing to find in a thift store if you're in the middle of the bell curve size-wise.

Quiz,

I don't take showers. I have no shower nor bathtub. What I do is just like my father did as a youth and me also. I use a basin and washrag.

I find with the right diet and food that no body odor exists. What sweat I produce is natural and necessary.

I have to add that I eat far different than others. Most is homegrown or purchased at the Amish store and a farm who sells me raw milk,range eggs and range meat (eat little meat). I also have cured bacon and eat of a lot of my own corn. I have a bushel(55lbs) of hard red spring wheat that I grind myself as needs be.

So I use nor by zero amounts of 'industrial food'. This creates a very healthy life and physical ability.

I might add I live alone on my smallish farm where I burn wood and raise my gardens and fruit/berry plants and trees.

This regime is an almost exact duplicate of how I was raised on the farm back in the era of WWII.

I interact with the public, my relatives and others. Go fishing a lot with friends. Cook out and fry fish often.

Its a simple life and full of enjoyment for me.

I do use a washing machine but rarely at that and have a few other modern vices as well, but I am working on those.

Luck to you and best wishes, you are truly making a difference.

1) Trading in your SUV means someone else keeps using it. Torch that SUV to prevent its future use by someone else and eat the financial loss yourself instead of collecting any insurance payment.
2) What are we going to do with all those laid-off airline employees many of who have 6 figure incomes. You gonna pay off all their debts and pay their rent?
3)Can't afford insulation for my 140 year old house.
4)The majority of folks are stuck with old appliances they got second hand. After that laid off airline employee gets his last unemployment check how's he gonna pay for new stuff.
5) Cutting electricity use will have almost zero impact on the use of oil since very little electricity is fueled by oil. The overwhelming use for oil is transportation.

Are the state and local governments and community citizens/charitable/volunteer/service organizations organizing folks and equipping them with plastics bags, shovels, rakes, drinking water, sunscreen, and hats?

This is not snark...but when we saw flooding in the Red River Valley at Fargo, ND,we saw citizens out there up to their knees in muddy water and in the rain busting their rear ends to fill sand bags and such. I have done this kind of back-breaking volunteer work myself. Same for disasters in other times and places.

Perhaps helping clean up the muck will help convince those people who live along the Gulf and are still championing offshore oil drilling and clamoring about ending the just-started 6-month moratorium to understand the risks and consequences of this activity.

Heck, I heard some of the mayors from tourist beaches in AL and FL lose their minds and desperately tell the media that there was NO oil on their white beaches, that the wacky, evil media and environmentalists were scaring the tourists away, and that people should come on down...that was Friday afternoon/evening...Come Saturday the oil globs started appearing here and there. Even then many local officials were desperately trying to save their tourism industries by telling the media that there were just a few tar balls and blobs widely scattered and that tourists would still have a good time sunbathing on the beach...just be sure to swim in the hotel pools.

So...there are some conflicted local officials and citizens out there...

I saw two lifeguards and lots of oil. I did not see a single cleanup person, volunteer or otherwise. Look at my video when I ask the two lifeguards where are all the cleanup folks. The problem is not lack of local 'volunteers' to deal with this tragedy or the local city officials downplaying the oil trying to keep cancellations down. The problem is this the beach should have 20 times as many folks this time of year. They might not come back for a decade. This problem is huge. Dust Bowl huge.

I am truly sorry about all of this, and about your particular local situation.

As one Tod denizen posted days (I think weeks) ago, we all own this disaster.

I hope that the oil leak is stopped in the very near future and that the oil can be cleaned up or dispersed and degraded by nature quickly.

But what I really want to see is much better policies and procedures for conducting offshore drilling, and some enlightened policies to decrease our use of the stuff without all reverting to living in caves after a massive die-off.

Enlightened new drilling policies and practices are fine. Job training and relocation support would be more pragmatic and effective for the short term, and benefits society in the long run as well.

I fully support this idea, and will write my Congress Critters and the President...the power of the pen (however tiny) is what I have to offer.

I traded posts with Gail on another thread about this very idea.

The U.S. government needs to implement this now, and get BP to reimburse as much of the costs as possible. A higher fuel tax would do the trick as well (and in addition to)...after all, since all of us who use oil have responsibility for this, then we all should share in paying the true costs of oil use.

Somehow I don't think my ideas would pass muster with the Tea Party folks, including Rand Paul, or anyone on Rupurt Murdoch's media outlets...in some folks minds the idea would be for there to be no government intervention or play in this situation and to let 'the free market' straighten everything out.

"Look at my videos"

I couldn't get the AOL ad to shut up. I navigated away.

Interesting. I have gone in without logging in and I never got an audible ad, but I know Photobucket rotates them. Still, you missed a good minute look at the situation. Good luck.

If you're on Firefox use Adblocker. I rarely see an ad.

That's terrible. People don't want their hat anymore, so they just chuck it anywhere. Maybe they were ashamed because the hat represented machines that run on oil.

Seriously, though, the tar on the beach is much less to worry about as thick slicks on the ocean. The petroleum on the beach will very quickly degrade in the hot sun.

You're a liar, BTW. That hat's made of cotton, not tinfoil.

Who said the hat was mine? It also could be lined on the underside so as to remain incognito :)

TinFoilHatGuy, how bad is the odor?

When the oil came in on Friday I likened the smell to starting a charcoal fire with starter (kerosene). I have either become accustomed to it or it has dissipated. Perhaps a little of both. In any case the smell, oil, dead animals, my health, and community's physical health is not of major worry, but I have to be honest. Those are not my primary concerns right now. The empty beaches are a sign of economic Armageddon. Maybe it is what I deserve for thinking about my own wallet and not the well being of my fellow man. At least I try to be honest.

I have often wondered, when a society generates enough wealth to create groups or even a few individuals who can specialize in lamenting the very means, costs and systems which made their existence possible, if (A) these people act as a conscience or record keepers for all those engaged in the actual productive activities which make their existence possible or (B) need to justify their inability to be productive in the traditional sense?

Certainly entire classes of scientists could be included in this group, and might be as easily dismissed if they weren't so handy to have around if anyone is seriously interested in negating the consequences of how humanity has applied their knowledge.

As a scientist who started his career with more than a decade on the productive side of society, it is perhaps natural that I have feelings of ambivalence on this topic.

Doesn't have to be A or B only. "Problem-finding" is a cognitive skill. Not everyone has it. Maybe it takes a certain amount of leisure time to notice and ponder problems.

If I happen to notice a hole in the dike but lack the skills to fix it, that does not make me "unproductive", nor does it necessarily make me some kind of social conscience. We need people to pull the fire alarm, just as we need people to fight them.

The question, to my mind, is this one: Do we put our leisure at least partly at the service of society? Do we exercise our problem-finding for the good of the many? Or just keep it secret and use it for ourselves alone?

(B) need to justify their inability to be productive in the traditional sense?

Would that include people who consider f**king up the entire GOM ecosystem to be a less than productive pursuit? I get the impression that your idea of being productive doesn't quite jive with that one.

Just curious would you consider scientific research that allows someone to blow the whistle on a corporation for causing damage to the environment to be productive or non productive?

Are you in the camp that considers climate scientists to be unproductive?

Does your productive scientific work perchance have anything to do with petrochemicals and their derivatives?

Would that include people who consider f**king up the entire GOM ecosystem to be a less than productive pursuit? I get the impression that your idea of being productive doesn't quite jive with that one.

Ixtoc was apparently a much larger spill. How has the GOM ecosystem been doing since then? Amazing that there is anything even left considering the size of that one, um?

Does your productive scientific work perchance have anything to do with petrochemicals and their derivatives?

What do you mean "have anything to do with"? I study many problems related to oil and gas wells, performance and productivity, sizes and shapes, economics and projections of supply versus cost, stochastic modeling of same, etc etc.

Does scientific work stop being science when its done on a particular topic?

I am not sure anyone really knows how the GOM ecosystem has been doing since IXTOC, nor now. I don't think we spend nearly enough taxpayer money to fund research scientists to conduct such an unproductive sampling and analysis.

I suppose the idea of cumulative damage and progressive degradation has escaped your consideration?

I suppose the idea of cumulative damage and progressive degradation has escaped your consideration?

Not in the least. But it is obvious that the GOM has been a dumping ground for more than just oil for quite a long period of time, and those who assume that this smaller leak is itself capable of doing the job of "destruction" seem more than a little overwrought.

The GOM has been a dumping ground for everything that runs into the Mississippi and other tributory river for decades. If you're out spreading fertilizer on your lawn in Ohio this morning, you care killing fish in the Gulf not because of the petrochemical inputs, mind you, but because of the run off. The price of your perfectly green lawn is a large and growing (pre-spill) dead zone.

Does scientific work stop being science when its done on a particular topic?

Of course not, science is just a truth seeking tool. Some people don't like the truth or worse have an agenda. "It's hard to convince someone of the truth if their salary depends on their not seeing it."

Ixtoc was apparently a much larger spill. How has the GOM ecosystem been doing since then? Amazing that there is anything even left considering the size of that one, um?

You're right the Gulf apparently recovered from that, though I'd certainly like to see an in depth analysis of the data that compare what happened at that time to a base line of pre and then post spill ecosystem health and what the long term consequences were. Unfortunately we didn't fund the studies to find out, probably wasn't considered productive.

So let's do a few more large scale experiments like the one we are conducting with this spill, eventually we might find out how many it will take to actually make sure that the Gulf won't recover.

Someone posted this audio file of a talk by an unproductive scientist the other day, he happens to be a biologist. I don't supposed you'd be willing to be unproductive for the 50 or so minutes it would take to listen to it...

http://www.ecoshock.net/eshock10/ES_100528_Show_LoFi.mp3

I see what you are getting at but some of us use the excuse to hammer on BAU only as a motivating factor to think outside the box (to use a cliche). I only lament the stuff that has gone on in science and technology because there are better ways to do things and to think smarter. Some would consider this an "us against them" mentality but I look at it as more of a competitiveness streak.

I have often wondered, when a society generates enough wealth to create groups or even a few individuals who can specialize in lamenting the very means, costs and systems which made their existence possible, if (A) these people act as a conscience or record keepers for all those engaged in the actual productive activities which make their existence possible or (B) need to justify their inability to be productive in the traditional sense?

The answer is so obviously (B)...the people who isolated the cause of Black lung disease, associated Asbestos inhalation with mesothelioma, who campaigned to have the tailpipe emissions of cars reduced, who had warning labels put on cigarettes...those pikers should just have shut up and let those productive businesses go on, and found something useful to do...perhaps by building an unregulated Uranium Smelter beside your house.

I think I find your post grating because you know you have loaded the question towards your biases and have even gone to the trouble of answering part of it yourself to try and look balanced.

The idea that there is a "class" class of people who critique and regulate business because they "need to justify their inability to be productive in the traditional sense" is specious. The doctors and scientists involved in stopping the things mentioned above were not looking to blame big business; they were just doing their jobs. Being productive. It was merely business's bad luck to be found to have it's hand in the cookie jar.

The real question (which you pointedly ignore) is whether the guilt from those destructive activities you refer to as "productive" can ever be assuaged.

We are all guilty, of course. We were only following orders (er, placing orders)...

The Gulf was altered by it, and the multitude of other chemical assaults that have made upon it. Recovered? It will never recover.

Next up, sea level rise.

Great article. I wholeheartedly agree.
I'm willing to bet that if gas suddenly increased by $5+ /gallon - everyone would be able to find a way to get by with less.
Unfortunately, the REAL costs of petroleum use is not built into the price.

Great article. I wholeheartedly agree.
I'm willing to bet that if gas suddenly increased by $5+ /gallon - everyone would be able to find a way to get by with less.
Unfortunately, the REAL costs of petroleum use is not built into the price.

Try it when you aren't working. My truck has barely moved in the last 3 weeks. I filled it up with diesel that ran me almost $3/gal. I checked the odometer and it was showing only 30 trip miles since that last fillup.

now we are using the wife's van a lot more, but it does better around town than the truck does and the fuel is cheaper as well, but it still isn't getting the miles put on it we used to either.

There is a store not too far from where I live that I can easily walk to. But there is also a road to cross getting to get to it that is 5 lanes across, traffic is pretty heavy most of the time on it. Then that 40 mph speed limit is a joke most are doing 45 to 50 and sometimes more if they think they can get away with it. It is a lot like taking your life in your on hands to try and cross. No redlights close to help facilitate a crossing either. My running days are long past after that back operation, so I have to plan my steps carefully.

wireline,

Maybe I am mis-reading your post...you drove your truck for 30 miles since your last fillup?

If you have a 10-gallon tank, that would mean you get 3 mpg?

That sounds too low...one of the tractor trailer guys who moved my furniture cross country told me his rig could make 7 mpg on flat interstates in the optimum gear without a natural headwind...

The poster did not say the tank was empty again after only 30 miles.

Excellent post Nate! I think our real and only hope is Drill Baby Drill, before anyone gets upset with that:) We will not change as TheraP has pointed out in previous comments we will not change unless forced to. Our and the planets only hope may be to use the crude and coal as fast as possible while we can still survive. Then being forced to change (change we are forced to believe in ha) the planet and ourselves will stil have time to recover. With all the talk of alternatives there really isn't any cheap and high BTU content energy yet. Trying to live on even 50% our peak energy use will most likely force billions into starvation (very scary thought).I would love to build a new reactor design of a muon Thorium catalyzed reactor. With Uranium also in doubtful quantities for the world to use thorium is for now a plentiful supply. If the world had to rely on uranium fuel for fission we would have roughly ten years supply. Most at this point bark about Breeder reactors and I respond with the Iranians want to build a uranium reactor and we say NO, your telling me we would let countries build plutonium reactors ha!
Solar is wonderful as long as it is close(Ohms law)equatorial placed, with water for cooling (I live in the Midwest ha no sun). Wind with an EROI of 29 years and a 20 year life time becomes very expensive and Ohms law bites us again. Algae please ha! We need to save our remaining crude for food crops and reinvent our society as Kunstler has described in his book World Made By Hand.

I would love to build a new reactor design of a muon Thorium catalyzed reactor.

Cool. Where do the muons come from? Just curious.

Hopefully we build a muon collider and have the ability to go a little physics along with the reactor feed. This is a Carlo Rubia idea and many of his are great ideas like the anti-proton stroage ring and the proton anti-proton collider. I think this is only one way to find out and that is to build it. We need to know now instead of a have to know now.

Well, best hopes for affordable muons, I guess. My own past research into it convinced me that it was unlikely.

I fear I have been slightly misquoted (but you're forgiven landrew). Some people may choose to change, though change is difficult. For others it may take a crisis, such as this one - to literally help them "open their eyes" and "see differently". Mandates are hard to enforce actually. Often breed resentment as well. Finding incentives at times like this may foster powerful changes. (nutshell version)

I think I mentioned this the other day, about using the energy of crisis.

I think that there will be a window of time during and after this disaster in which some positive change can be effected. After you get society turned in the right direction, and a little energy put behind the effort, then maybe, maybe things will change. It's very tricky.

It reminds me of the aftermath of flood. If a community has a mitigation plan waiting in the wings, often the aftermath of flood creates an opportunity to effect postitive change - to fix the historic flooding problems of the community - at a time when people are emotionally invested in changing and "to hell with the expense". If you wait too long, sentiments have cooled off and politicians shut the door on funding.

The reaction to the blowout is starting to sound like the HydroILlogic Cycle:

1 Apathy
2 Flooding
3 Finger-Pointing
4 Funding
5 Apathy

If lucky or connected, otherwise phase 4 is ignored.

Yes, #4 is the chink in the armor as it were. I've had Aldermen ask "what do we do now?" and then when directed to the Mitigation Plan (which required funding of flood mitigation efforts) just kept repeating "yeah but what do we do now ?!". We were sucessful in getting ONE of about a dozen projects authorized.

I offer my apologies, I am sorry about that;)

Not to worry. I appreciate that you've taken time to read things I've written. That speaks volumes of you! :)

Algae please ha! We need to save our remaining crude for food crops and reinvent our society as Kunstler has described in his book World Made By Hand.

I would like to think there is a future for algae if they can develop the right strain to make it economical for a productive oil crop.

The government hates hemp, but oil can be made from hemp which is basically just weed anyway and requires very little in the way of water or care of any kind. It is very fast growing depending on locale,it is possible to get as much as 3 to 4 crops a year. The oil would be great for burning in tractors to grow food crops with. All of that just from the seed, the rest of it can be used to make clothes, paper, even parts for automobiles. Just think, they wouldn't have to chop down the trees for paper which have to all be chemically treated to turn it white in the first place. The hemp paper is naturally white. The original documents that the founders of this nation wrote, were written on hemp paper. The cloth from hemp is very durable.

I agree, what could it hurt? A crop with so much upside energy storage! Of course what if someone smoked it, oh no how terrible to have a drug that was not from a pharmacy!

I agree, what could it hurt? A crop with so much upside energy storage! Of course what if someone smoked it, oh no how terrible to have a drug that was not from a pharmacy!

They say that typically,the industrial hemp contains below 0.3% THC, while Cannabis grown for marijuana can contain anywhere from 6 to over 20%. I have read that to get a high off the stuff you would have to smoke somewheres around an acre or so of it. That's a lot of smoke.

What it could hurt is the soil. Arable land is a finite resource, just like oil. All of mankind's resources are finite, for that matter. Mother earth has a solution for any species that outgrows its niche in their environment. Starvation, disease, and population decimation. There is only one way1 that homo sapiens could escape this, but that isn't going to happen.

1Pretty much the whole planet stops having babies for a generation or two. Problem solved.

Oil can be made from peanuts.

Henry Ford liked it.

There are many countries in this world where growing hemp and producing oil or paper from it would be perfectly legal. If it is so darned fantastic, those places should be wildly prosperous. Where is the evidence of that prosperity?

Up in smoke?

I would like to think there is a future for algae if they can develop the right strain to make it economical for a productive oil crop.

Developing a strain is the easy part, finding infinite supplies of water and nutrients to grow and process the crop is where the rubber hits the road.

Non-cyclic phosphorylation (the Z scheme)

Both adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and NADPH are produced.

In the first photosystem (Photosystem II, PSII):

* photoionisation of chlorophyll transfers excited electrons to an electron acceptor
* photolysis of water (an electron donor) produces oxygen molecules, hydrogen ions and electrons, and the latter are transferred to the positively-charged chlorophyll
* the electron acceptor passes the electrons to the electron transport chain; the final acceptor is photosystem PSI
* further absorbed light energy increases the energy of the electrons, sufficient for the reduction of NADP+ to NADPH

.

The oxidised form of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADP+)

No NPK, no photosynthesis...

No NPK, NO PHOTOSYNTHESISS says it all.

It is simply unreal how many comments here and articles in the MSM indicate that the authors lack ANY understanding of biology.

I have hopes for sewage supplying the NPK,eventually, when and if algae farming for energy is commercialized.

Finding the water in places with the necessary sunshine and open spaces will probably be the killer.

Taking 'anything' , even hemp off the land it was grown on and sending it elsewhere means you are reducing the fertility of that land. Soil nutrients are not free.

So then you are required to buy and transport and spread replacement nutrients to replace those lost and so once more enter down the 'rabbit hole' of soil resource depletion.

A real loser. The best and wisest method is to return to zero loss farming by using all products on the land it was grown on.

The world is running out of replacement resources. Oil being king in that area.

Keep what can be kept in place AND develop a strategy to improve the soil.

GOd is not making any more dirt. What we have is all of it. What washes into the sea is lost. What leaves your land lessens your reserve.

This was understood back in the early 1900 eras. I have school textbooks from then that explained it very clearly. It was well understood then but somehow was lost in the future as I suspect when the 'scientists' sold out to the corporations and big business.

Currently our corn products and soybean products are slowly killing us. Industry food is the culprit. For the farmlands the cry regrading natures woodlands is 'burn,baby burn' which precedes 'plow,baby plow' as the sodbuster rules are cast aside and new lands come into production with the fences and woods cut down and burnt.

You keep mentioning Ohm Law. I think you are confused as to its meaning.
I=E/R to put it simply. Or you can state it by algebraic permutations. It is a simple law and has almost nothing to do with your statements.

I am an electronics technician. I do not understand what you are trying to state.

What has this to do with your conjecture? This law simply shows the relationship between current(I), Electric potential(E) and resistance (R).

Nothing I can see. What are you smoking anyway?
Wind with an EROI of 29 years? What the heck are you talking about?

The only thing I can think of is that for any given conductor the resistance increases with distance
so the voltage must increase for a desired amperage. I don't see why it is any different than any other source though.
The grid has line loss no matter what is generating.

One of the great things about solar is the far less complicated infrastructure since it is all self contained on site. FREEDOM!!!!

I think the distance and line losses is what he is getting at as well. Wind power is dissed because of its distance from population centers, yet no one wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard either.

HV DC has significantly lower line losses than the same size HV AC line. Transmits power at peak voltage ALL the time instead of varying 60 times/second.

Losses on the order of 5%/1000 miles.

Alan

First some research (link below):

'Green' exercise quickly 'boosts mental health'

Just five minutes of exercise in a "green space" such as a park can boost mental health, researchers claim.

There is growing evidence that combining activities such as walking or cycling with nature boosts well-being.

Read the rest: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8654350.stm

How can one put a price on pristine nature? On mental health? On physical well-being?

I am certainly willing to do my part - in conserving resources. And I think money for multiple back-up relief wells is well... a relief!

When it comes to these relief wells, I also would not stint on paying for safety. For the workers. For the environment. So I would ask, not how few relief wells can we do on the cheap or what (safety) features are too expensive. Instead, I would like to know - REALLY:

What exactly are the features that we, as caring society, believe are necessary for drilling sufficient, safe relief wells?

If, as you say, Nate: "The situation in the Gulf is a signpost of our moment in history," then what steps are necessary and sufficient to enable safe drilling of multiple (3+) relief wells?

How can we assure ourselves that we've done the best for ourselves and those who come after us? How can we best serve this moment in history? How can we turn tragedy into a more hopeful future?

Yours is a beautiful, moving post. May we live up to the ideals you have set forth!

Not everything that counts can be counted,and not everything that can be counted counts.
Albert Einstein
If you value intangible wealth more than tangible wealth,you will likely reduce your oil consumption.

Interesting the stated thought of intangible wealth valued and a lifestyle by that like minded person?

1) I am willing to give up far more than 50% of my oil energy consumption. I've made many steps to reduce my carbon footprint and am always looking for more. This year I've been a lot more products locally than I used to--the food is generally healthier and the carbon footprint is definitely lower. I see the issues of peak oil and AGW as inextricably related. I don't think peak oil is not going to save us from AGW's worst effects--there's already way too much GHG in the atmosphere--but either way there are major societal changes ahead and I want to help figure out how to get ready for that.

2) Economists will say that government intervention through taxes or other schemes (cap and trade) are necessary to price negative externalities. When I can, I make the choice to pay extra for positive externalities. That's how I demonstrate my personal values. I support organizations like the Nature Conservancy that make science-based free market purchases of land (and conservation easements) to protect ecosystem health. If my utility made it available, I'd gladly pay extra for green power.

I also think it is important to actively work on changing public policies to spend less money on activities that damage ecosystem health (like poorly regulated extraction industries and war) and instead invest in a more positive vision of the future.

3) I don't feel like I have enough information to know what the right number of relief wells is. From what I've read at this site, I'd feel more comfortable with 3 than 1 (or are they back to 2?). What I'd feel even more comfortable with is starting to implement the backup plan just in case the first relief well that makes contact with the blown-out well also blows out. If that means drilling 2 or 3 more wells (for a total of 3-4) than by all means up the number.

Back when I was in my early 20s, I drove a pickup truck to Argentina to go climbing.

Of course, there are plenty of mountains closer to Colorado than that.

Some I can walk to. But still I'll drive to fish in Wyoming or ski
in California.

Forget shipping and agriculture for a moment, the travel component of oil consumption seems nearly hard-wired to me.

People absolutely love (maybe even crave) motion, novelty, and new experiences.

So we are not so much addicted to oil, as addicted to novelty and stimulation.

I know so many many people that are heartfelt concerned about climate change and oil depletion and biodiversity and yet almost none that
have scaled back their travel to a substantial extent.

On the relief well question: the directional drillers I know seem to believe that 2 wells will suffice. If the initial approach is off a bit, then can come back up and sidetrack in, again and again if need be.

But this is second-hand, and surely someone on this list can provide a
reasoned estimate of how much a third (or fourth) relief well would add to our comfort level that this well will be killed this summer.

Amongst the handwringing, the irony of course is what we are really lamenting is that we didn't get to burn this oil in our cars first, depositing the pollution invisibly in the sky, instead of on brown pelicans.

We burn 4,000x the spill volume everyday, generally without much complaint, it seems.

R

The reality is that "people" can't stand the truth. To put it more bluntly, they don't have the "balls" to make a serious change.

Nate left the financial industry for his own reasons and gave up a lot of money. I left the chemical industry forty years ago because I had an epiphany and in the process gave up well over $3M in income (which was a big deal then when a VP made $25K a year) over the ensuing years.

First there was a plant disaster that killed 15 workers and burned down my process development building. I was in another state at the time but we were told it was my facility. I spent 3+ hours believing I had killed people because I was negligent somehow as we drove to the plant. It turned out I was off the hook but it rotted in my brain that maybe, some day, I would be responsible for something like this. But, I was on the outside of top management at that time.

Later another engineer and I were a corporate "death team" to determine why an employee died in a tank in another plant. We reported to the board and they didn't care about the death but rather whether the company could be sued or get an OSHA fine.

This set in motion a series of serious changes in my life. One of which was to ultimately quit the industry and move to the boondocks and a different reality.

Coming back to this Campfire, the vast majority of people aren't going to do crap. They might talk the talk but that will be it. I have no faith in people except those who I know personally who are actually doing it.

Todd

PS...and yes, I've been doing it. See "A trip To Todd's" http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4979

Todd, many of us, I suspect, are busy doing it and this is a big reason that cruising and commenting on TOD takes a low priority. Stuff to plant, fence to build, firewood to cut, chicken flock to cull.....

Todd, posts by you, Nate, and many other TODers over the past few years helped the proverbial scales fall from our eyes. In our early 50s, we've retired (or are about to, in my case), sold our house in urban CA, and will be moving next week to a 4-acre plot with three times the rainfall, 10x the cloud cover (sigh), 1/100th the county population.... trying to re-connect with what makes us really human, i.e., not the tech-heavy consumer pap we're fed and so willingly lap up. No doubt we'll screw up a bunch at the outset as we grow and raise our own food and figure out how to get by without depending on external supports, but we have good neighbors.

Not a complete slashing of our energy and "stuff" footprint (internet, if only for TOD), but we are already at about 30% below our urban neighbors, and expect to be below 50% of our current consumption within a year.

It a great article, it is truly a hell of our own making. If yeast were as smart as us, they too would wring their hands as their nice sugary malt turned to beer and they died. But, if they stopped we wouldn't have beer ! Seriously, what is the difference ? We are yeast that like flashy cars and complaining. I said something similar to my brother-in-law and he was indignant "NO, We are different! We will change things, not kill ourselves!" - Oh, really ? I'm from Missouri...

"...give up 1%?, 10%?, 20%?, 50%? ... to assure ecosystem health?"

Well, contemplating these numbers, is a large spill (say) every 30 years instead of every 15 (50%) "good enough"?

A more honest question might ask about giving up X% because Professor Y says it might or would assure ecosystem health. But then again we can always find a more emotional or strident Professor Z who says X% is not enough, we need X'. And in turn, a Professor A who says X' is not enough either - and so on until we reach X'' = 100, which is required to attain the absolute zero of risk.

So how does one even grapple with such a question? Just propose to roll over and die as some of our back-to-the-past commenters give the appearance of advocating? Would the soulless self-feeding stomach that is the entirety of what a pelican is do the same for us? Really? Should that sort of thinking draw us and maybe all of life into some sort of mutual self-annihilation club, for the good of … one knows not what?

If I may, we are at a point where we must fully realize that teh answers to our current crisis will not and can not come from within the bounds of our current paradigm.

The current industrial paradigm has to shatter. That pelican photograph is worth a million words and emblematic of where we are today, oil soaked.

My vision (www.squareandc.net) has a way out of this mess. It is deep, comprehensive, touches every part of our lives and has not Answers the way we like them handed to us (easy) but vision and insights that can help us back to our core, individually and collectively. From there we find surprisingly elegant ways, that stress neither us or nature, to make things that are good to and for us and allow us our fullest expression.

Please visit and read. It is THE way (Do) out.

I understand. I hope you all gain understanding too.

Regards.

A bit amused here. In order to receive your help I need to be "an individual" (ok, no problem) of very substantial means. Well... that's good for you, of course, but that rules me out!

Thera, not trying to be exclusive at all.

In the best way I could, I have tried to enunciate the fact that I have a really sweeping, encompassing vision/mission. As you can imagine, to bring it to fruition will be a huge task and require substantial means. The substantial means individual was for the investors. Not sure how many small investors will have the perceived risk appetite.

But if you notice, I'm also inviting people of high skill, passion, something extraordinary to bring to the table given the scope of what we have before us at AND C.

Please feel free to initiate a dialouge through the e-mail on the site.

Look forward to it.

Regards,

VivekAnand

Organic gardening and urban gardening could reduce oil consumption.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organoponicos
http://www.growingpower.org/

There is a price for Necromancy, and that is what this is. The remains of life offered as a chemical gift to the cleverest of claimants. This viscous offering; enlightening, seducing, flattering, encircling and finally enslaving the receiver. A way of being civilized birthed into possibility by the magnitude of the residue of that pulse of living and dieing, left behind in the deep count of the lives of planets. Possible then to turn away from the awesome power of accumulated carrion than to be subsumed by Necromancer which sustains your purposeless perception as the cost to its own perpetuation? From this Necromancer no thing will escape its taint and all will be returned to its cauldron till the end of sunshine.

Back when I was in my early 20s, I drove a pickup truck to Argentina to go climbing.

Of course, there are plenty of mountains closer to Colorado than that.

Some I can walk to. But still I'll drive to fish in Wyoming or ski
in California.

Forget shipping and agriculture for a moment, the travel component of oil consumption seems nearly hard-wired to me.

People absolutely love (maybe even crave) motion, novelty, and new experiences.

So we are not so much addicted to oil, as addicted to novelty and stimulation.

I know so many many people that are heartfelt concerned about climate change and oil depletion and biodiversity and yet almost none that
have scaled back their travel to a substantial extent.

On the relief well question: the directional drillers I know seem to believe that 2 wells will suffice. If the initial approach is off a bit, then can come back up and sidetrack in, again and again if need be.

But this is second-hand, and surely someone on this list can provide a
reasoned estimate of how much a third (or fourth) relief well would add to our comfort level that this well will be killed this summer.

Amongst the handwringing, the irony of course is what we are really lamenting is that we didn't get to burn this oil in our cars first, depositing the pollution invisibly in the sky, instead of on brown pelicans.

We burn 4,000x the spill volume everyday, generally without much complaint, it seems.

my responses to CAMPFIRE QUESTIONS

1) At first glance, i think any moral person would have to give up 100% of their oil consumption if that's what took to ensure ecosystem health. The ecosystem is more important than any of our human activities. We're a subset of nature, not the other way around.

That said, what any of us would hypothetically be willing to do and what we actually can do are very, very different beasts: i have to work, and my work requires a vehicle. Earning enough to do something different long-term is definitely a goal, but i talk to a lot of people who would like to do more with less, and everything from the way our cities are designed to our unrealistic expectations of the 'good life' make it impossible.

So i think each of us personally needs to work on efficiency and having reasonable expectations, and on the city/county/state level city planning & green jobs needs to be addressed, and at the national level a Manhattan-style research project should go into energy (production, they're already spending a lot on efficiency), as well as heightened standards.

So to actually answer the question, i'll go 20%, no more food not from my county/surrounding areas, but most other things i know of that i can do i've already done. i think the internet needs to stay up (information/communication), the postal service needs to stay (ditto), and... well, the big one after transport, heat. The upper midwest can be pretty cold. But even if i did find a job i could walk to, i'd still drive to visit family (hour+ away)... classic dissonance between my beliefs and actions, i know.

2 ) We shouldn't have to a put a monetary value on aspects of our lives outside the market system, we all know that time with friends, doing a favorite hobby, etc., are the most valuable use of time for most people... except of course those lucky enough to work in a field they truly love. i think we need to recognize that the market is in place to give us goods, and goods only: and in America most of us are fed, housed, and clothed, and beyond that most of what we consume we don't actually need.

3) However many it takes to intercept the current well. Different companies could race! (...j/k)

-----------------------------

And what price pelican? Well, Venter created life for $40 million, and if we assume bacteria's... uh, 100 times simpler than a bird, $4 billion for a bird. Clearly not a perfect analogy, but i both don't know enough bio to really attempt a good comparison, and i feel a little dirty even trying to. But clearly "making" new, healthy birds wouldn't be cheap, whatever it is...!

I've been waiting for the observations above - particularly the obvious (but never observed by "our" media) - shared responsibility. Thank you, Nate.
Is there a possibility of a political outcome of this tragedy that could rally us to powerdown -
voluntarily? Here is Obama's moment to explain our collective predicament - or is he too afraid of "spooking the markets"? The Gulf will be a double tragedy if he fails to explain the core meaning of the spill.

Three of us peakists sat with our congressional rep for 1 1/2 hrs to discuss
the Gulf, and some latest info on expected production (with thanks to Glen Sweetnam) and some
great info gleaned from TOD on the spill.
He was very generous with his time - we were only scheduled for 30 minutes.
This wasn't the first time we discussed PO, but now the warning signs are just too obvious -
many more people will be waking up. It was a good meeting.

As Chris Nelder wrote last week. This is a "teachable moment" for us - to expand the awareness of
peak oil (one aspect of limits) to others, and to find out, and adjust our own lifestyle in anticipation of
having less.

I find it alarming that the Peak Oil people do not recognize that there is an entirely new zone of oil in the GOM to be produced. Combined with the shale gas development, the hydrocarbon era will be extended several hundred years.

Drilling technologies developed in the GOM have been extended to other parts of the globe. Evaluations of other Possible productive basins based upon the GOM drilling could result in huge resourse discoveries. Peak Oil is a brain disease similar to Alzheimers.

I am fascinated by your assertions.

Please present citations for expert research and analysis which supports your assertions.

If your assertions are well-supported and many experts have a high degree of confidence then the people of the World have the right to know the truth so that logical plans can be made.

I also would like to see citations.

Of course it could be that those citations are buried inside intellectual property or in corporate proprietary documents. In that case we are in good shape since corporations have our best interests at heart.

By the way, the MMS does no simulations and the USGS is made up primarily by field geologists who have limited analytical skills, based on my readings of the work they have done. Their work on reserve growth is quite misguided IMO.

Cool.
So we cook the planet.
Or is that more Alzheimers?

Thank you for your thoughtful conclusion drawn from your critical analysis of the last several years of posts here at The Oil Drum. I am sorry that you have stumbled upon a web site peopled mostly by folks with Alzheimers.

Fortunately, you have apprised us of an entirely new source of GOM oil. Super! I doubt anyone here ever heard of it. [Um, will that be more complicated than the darn Macondo field?] Plus (if you act now) other Possible productive basins that could result in huge resourse (sic) discoveries?! Whew. Back to BAU. Thank you for the reprieve from reality.

I do agree, though, that it is much easier to wallow in cornucopian fantasies that ignore net energy and other constraints, to ignore the impacts of FF use on the biosphere, and to assume that some FF-intensive tech will preserve your energy-intensive footprint on the planet.

Been a member for a whole week and a day, eh?
Read and digested everything here no doubt.

Sorry, I must have missed your comment on my posting several times over the last year
of the MMS resource estimates for the Offshore Continental Shelf.
http://www.mms.gov/revaldiv/Maps/National.pdf

I'm sure you followed the posted link, and studied it in detail.
What did you say about the central GOM having just one whole year's supply for the world?
Of the whole US OCS having 2 years and change?

Seriously, do you know how oil and gas are formed?
Can you tell us, right now, without looking it up, what the "oil window" is?

If you can stand to sit still long enough, may I recommend a short and informative book: Hubbert's Peak by Kenneth Deffeyes.

Do you think that geologists who've studied oil formation/abundance are fatuously ignorant? That their estimates of oil resources are just guesses, or attempts to scare people?
Do you think the deepwater GOM is a brand new discovery?
Do you think plate tectonics is a silly dream?
Have you ever seen a map of the ages of sea floor?
Are you aware of the history of the offshore Brazil oil deposits, and their counterparts off the coast of Africa?
Your ignorant idea that other places "could" be "evaluated" by GOM drilling is shown as false - they are being developed by deep drilling - now, see Transocean's rig locator:
http://www.deepwater.com/fw/main/Our-Rigs-14.html
There are several sister ships to the Deepwater Horizon that have been working Brazil for years.

You're living in a fantasy of desperate dreams, too ignorant to know you're ignorant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Study the graph of production here:
http://graphoilogy.blogspot.com/

Overlay in your mind the price rise from 2005.
Do you think you could convince me we're NOT at peak oil.

I find it alarming that the Peak Oil people do not recognize that there is an entirely new zone of oil in the GOM to be produced. Combined with the shale gas development, the hydrocarbon era will be extended several hundred years.

That's not what the market sez.

The market sez that oil has become too expensive to waste. It's so expensive that the users all over the globe are going broke.

If there was a new pay zone someplace that would bring production in line with demand, the amount of credit in the economy would expand. It would expand because all the new petroleum would be a form of collateral. The market would discount the value of the oil. What it doing instead is disoounting the production that results from using oil.

Production requires oil and credit. Here is the money supply growth which is a measure of credit expansion (all money being a form of credit):

Watch the blue line which is the amount of deposits in the banking system. This didn't start yesterday, btw. Discounting production is something the major independent energy companies have been doing for tha past several years:

2007:

Oct. 1 (Bloomberg) -- If Chevron Corp. keeps buying back its stock at the current rate, the company will have liquidated all its shares by about 2023.

Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company after Exxon Mobil Corp., last week announced a plan to repurchase as much as $15 billion of its stock over three years. At today's prices, the buyback would retire about 7.5 percent of Chevron's outstanding shares. You can do the arithmetic from there.

Buybacks are the rage in the cash-laden oil industry. Exxon Mobil is buying back about $30 billion of its shares each year. If that continues, Exxon will have repurchased all its stock by about 2024.

2009:

In the S&P 500, 83 firms stopped buying back stock entirely from the fourth quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2009, Silverblatt notes. And more than a quarter of all buybacks in the first quarter came from one company, ExxonMobil (XOM), which bought back $7.85 billion in shares.

Just yesterday:

BP last night gave its strongest signal yet that it will not cut its dividend in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil leak.

In a conference call to shareholders and analysts, Carl-Henric Svanberg, BP’s chairman, and Tony Hayward, its chief executive, stopped short of giving an undertaking that the payout would be maintained

Your argument makes two false assumptions. One is that the market will only produce market information. The second is that any increase in fuel production will be dumped on the fuel market to cause a return to waste- based commerce.

The actions that the major oil companies are taking - to cash out rather than invest in the new zone of oil indicates the producers themselves are not sanguine about the future of oil production either in the new zone or elsewhere. Cashing out is what most finance insiders are doing right now, not investing in the future.

Producers are not going to dump crude onto the market any longer even if they have it to dump. It is far more profitable to hold onto the oil - by doing so the oil becomes more valuable that what used is derived from burning the oil.

Wake up!

This is a living spaceship we are on.
There are 1.1 billion uncomfortable berths.
The jejo party is about finished.
See the sun rising?
Thats dawn, Monday morning.

If people would prefer to opt out of reality with drugs, should we stop them?
Mr Darwin is calling for volunteers.
After the volunteering stops, other feedback loops will come into play.

Perhaps a gamechanger will change the future. But..

We are yeast in a bottle. Infinite growth cannot happen on a finite world.

If we manage to retain our brain on the other side of the bottleneck then we have to go off-planet in order to keep growing.


Wikipaedia, O'Neill

This spaceship needs an executive captain.

This spaceship needs an executive captain.

God?

God is confusing..
But..
Intelligence is fractal.
(Self-similar at different scales)
If "I" am executive of this brain then the Web can generate an executive "We".

"We" is emerging.

Issac Asimov calculated that humanity would, given not having to worry with 'real-world' constraints, convert every Carbon atom in the known universe to human flesh by the year 11,000 C.E., I believe given a postulated 2% population growth rate...maybe even less...I would have to find my copy of the book with his essay 'Fecundity Unlimited' to check.

So...even given a 'Star Trek' technology, even the known Universe is not enough to sate Humanity unless we were to adopt a strict population control policy.

Since we will not develop a 'Star Trek' suite of technologies, and we refuse to control our population at a sustainable steady state level, then we will degrade the Earth and its life and humanity will live a miserable existence. But...if there are other habitable planets out there, at least they would be spared from our destruction...

and we refuse to control our population at a sustainable steady state level,

My branch of humanity is in control of their birth rate.
(Haplogroup I2a(P37.2)

2a-P37.2*-Western.
This subclade was discovered in 2004 by Kari Hauhio of Finland. It is very young with an TMRCA age of less than 3000 years. Found more in Western Europe, and particularly in a swath across Germany, Baltic and North Sea costal areas and then into the British Isles. It has no defining SNP except L233 which is being researched. It is therefore defined by the absence of certain SNPs, being M26- M423- M161- P41.2=M359.2- L69.2=S163.2-.

Northhampton, Nottingham, Lancashire & Worcester counties may be locations of I2a-Western haplotypes in England.
Source: I2a-Western in UK

http://www.familytreedna.com/public/I2aHapGroup/default.aspx?section=res...

The Google is powerful...I like your references...they make me work a little and keep my search skills up to snuff...

ISTR that its every atom not just carbon. can't remember the growth rate.

.think its the global growth rate in 1960 summit?

mididoctors,

I still have the book with the collection of essays which includes 'Fecundity Unlimited'.

I just need to find it...

If I remember correctly, Asimov stated that P was the rate limiting element to produce human flesh, but that he would be generous in his thought experiment and use Carbon. He understood that Humans are composed of other elements than C, but C is a major, easily understood constituent.

I think the essay was originally published in 1957.

The growth rate he used is for all practical purposes irrelevant. Given the exponential function, any non zero growth rate snowballs a given population in a surprisingly short time, speaking in geologic terms.

The problem is that most people don't care about these things, since they realize they personally will be dead inside of 100 years, and the rest is someone Else's problem.

So much for the 'spending their childrens' inheritance' sob story.

Of course the other huge roadblock is that many if not most people believe in magic.

WE ARE RESPONSIBLE ?

Actually Nate we are irresponsible, I assume that's a typo.

Consider this:

Small group of highly skilled predator hommes hyjack governance, finance and media using force, extortion and mass hypnosis respectively to achieve a set of myopic materialistic goals.

The vast majority of the population do not have the genetic, social and intellectual gifts that the vast majority of us folk here at TOD do. They are dumb and afraid, they've been brainwashed and you want to BLAME them. ROFL.

Campfire question #2; How do we put a dollar value on aspects of our lives outside the market system?

In adroitly observing that each one of us shares in the responsibility for the state of affairs we now face, Nate Hagens has posed an excellent question that gets to the very heart of so many crucial issues facing our “modern” society. I believe a major part of the answer is wrapped up in a necessary redefinition of our “market system”.

I heard it reported not long ago that a market economist of the Chicago school asserted that, even if the worst predictions about climate disruption came to pass, the impact on our economy would be minimal because agricultural industries make up only about 3% of our economy. His conclusion seems oddly ignorant of the obvious fact that this 3% is the part we eat to survive.

I’m reminded of a prophecy ascribed to the Cree Nation, “Only after the last tree has been cut down, only after the last river has been poisoned, only after the last fish has been caught – only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.”

This also seems to me to be closely related to a personal conclusion I’ve drawn about the two dominant ideologies in this country: people who are predisposed to one ideology feel that they have a duty to the survival of only themselves alone, or perhaps of their immediate family, while people who are inclined toward the other ideology feel they have a duty to prosperity of the whole human race, and even to all life. One side tends to externalize the undesirable impacts of their actions and focus on short-term personal gains, and the other feels bound to a more holistic and ethical approach.

Imagine a tribe where the traditional sharing of goods and tasks amongst each member as the natural way of life has been entirely replaced by shortsighted selfishness, and where each individual grasps blindly at its own surplus, ignoring the plight of its brothers and sisters, and that of the crops in the fields and the game in the forests. No, wait, we don’t have to imagine – we’re living with that tribe today. Some of us still feel drawn to the ancient ways.

Holistic accounting is the only wise and sustainable approach. A sustainable market system cannot be constructed as an artificial bubble containing a discrete set if desirable factors and ignoring those that are undesirable but crucial, but that is precisely what we’ve done in every “advanced” economy.

From sterilizing the soil and loading it with an incomplete set of artificial nutrients and then watching the food value of our crops fade… to eliminating all insect life with pesticides and then struggling against resistant pests when their predators heave been wiped out… to breeding out and marketing away the diversity of our food crops and then leaving ourselves vulnerable to monocrop blights and plagues such as occurred with the potato famine in Ireland… we continually set up the potential for crises that would never develop if we merely worked within and not against the natural network and cycles that sustain all life.

We also see this phenomenon in our “medical industry” where pill-a-day palliatives are pursued over permanent cures while the genuine root causes of disease go largely unresearched and unaddressed, and where a detailed understanding of nutrition remains an infant science while treatments for cancer, heart disease and diabetes swell into burgeoning leviathans.

If the actual cost of gasoline to the global biosphere and to human health were accurately calculated and reflected in monetary terms at the pump, we’d all be driving electric cars within five years.

Add up the true price of every single oil spill, and every tailpipe and smokestack emission, and the value of every dead and wounded soldier and civilian on every side in every war for oil. Add together all the lost production and missing innovation and absent contribution caused by every resulting case of asthma and cancer. Than heap onto that great pile the worth that’s bound up in the difference between where we are today and where we’d be if we’d begun back in the 1970’s to wean ourselves off of oil and to devote some serious time and money and brainpower to increasing energy efficiency and developing sustainable energy alternatives.

The answer to Campfire Question #2, ultimately, is in looking outside of our current frames of reference and in broadening our concept of economics into a multidisciplinary field that includes ecology, nutrition science, sustainable agriculture, and every other applicable aspect of sustaining all life – not just human life.

Economics (management of home) and ecology (study of home) both begin with the same root, and what’s needed is a field that looks honestly and wisely at all the facets of that jewel we call “eco”: home.

Craig Shields, Editor, 2Greenenergy.com

#2; How do we put a dollar value on aspects of our lives outside the market system?

This question is an example of False Framing.

George Lakoff is famous for introducing us to the trickery of framing.

The mind is fooled into activating a set of models that simply do not and rationally cannot apply and yet it all feels as if it is nonetheless perfectly rational.

Let's try a more concrete example of a Falsely Framed question that invokes the "Economic Mind":

What dollar amount of bribe ($$$) must you give your local church official so that God doesn't notice you committed a sin and sends you to Hell instead of to Heaven?

The more spiritual amongst us will right away realize this is a trick question. It is falsely framed on many levels.

First of all, God can't be fooled (or at least according to some people's beliefs God is all seeing and can't be fooled).

And coincidentally, Mother Nature similarly cannot be fooled.

Yet if you look back at history and at the practice of church indulgences, you see that the human mind can easily be fooled.

All you have to do is flash the money ($$$) concept once or twice and right away the mind flips into "economic thinking" mode.

What is the price ($0.00001) of a single bumble bee?
If close to zero, then obviously we can discard all bees.

Mother Nature is not fooled by economic thinking mode.
Get rid of the bees.
And you eliminate the whole human equation.

Talking of bees.. they provide an essential ecosystem service through pollination. Humans try to enhance this process and interfere with the bees nature (unatural shaped hives, larger cells to produce more honey, movement of hives to improve pollination etc). And what is the result? There is a clear indicator that bees used on a commercial scale suffer from CCD far more than those kept on a small scale by hobbyists.

Grauter,

Thanks.

I was trying to make several points by implicitly referring to Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

The first point is that the whole of the system IS NOT equal to the sum of the economically allocated valuations.

In other words, it may be correct to say that a single bee is worth $0.0001.

However the next deduced, accounting conclusion, namely, that all 1 trillion bees of the world are therefore "worth" a couple of million dollars is absolutely wrong.

Mother Nature is not moved by our human-created 'economic' valuations.

And that is why asking a question like:

#2; How do we put a dollar value on aspects of our lives outside the market system?

is false framing.

Some ignorant economist might put a dollar valuation on loss (extinction) of animal species X and/or Y, say due to the oil spill. But that valuation is wholly unscientific and probably misses the next step in the equations:

New value of human species after extinction of the Bees = $0.0001

that a market economist of the Chicago school asserted that, even if the worst predictions about climate disruption came to pass, the impact on our economy would be minimal because agricultural industries make up only about 3% of our economy.

Lots of Laughter.

I prescribe bedrest and Meggadoses of omega3 fatty acids.
Draw the blinds and try not disturb the tranquil dark pool of his mind. Something evil lurks down there.

June 5th, Pensacola Beach:

David Lucas of Jonesville, La., and a group of friends abruptly cut their visit short after wading into oily water. "It was sticky brown globs out there," Lucas said after he and the others cleaned their feet and left.

Health officials said that people should stay away from the mess but that swallowing a little oil-tainted water or getting slimed by a tarball is no reason for alarm.

Escambia County Commission Chairman Grover Robinson said there are no plans to close the beach.

"For the most part if you went and walked on the sand that was not right there on the shoreline, you were in no danger of engaging tar balls," he said Friday.

http://www.pnj.com/article/20100605/NEWS01/100605001

Lying to potential tourists will not engender a sense of trust and increase the probability of future tourism...one might think that these local officials were in the employ of BP!

Then there is this older couple from Gran Isle LA on May 23 2010 gazing upon the oily water and beaches and hoping that oil drilling will NOT stop:

The next day, cops drive up and down Grand Isle beach explicitly telling tourists it is still open, just stay out of the water.

There are pools of oil on the beach; dolphins crest just offshore. A fifty-something couple, Southern Louisianians, tell me this kind of thing happened all the time when they were kids; they swam in rubber suits when it got bad, and it was no big deal.

They just hope this doesn't mean we'll stop drilling.

http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/05/oil-spill-bp-grand-isle-beach

I'm guessing that they never read Silent Spring...

I'm guessing that they never read Silent Spring...

I'm guessing they never read anything. Pretty much applies to a very large segment of Americans. I love the blank look I usually get when I ask someone "have you read any good books lately?".

Sorry, haven't read other comments. I'd like to see TOD do a post on the Niger delta during this period of high traffic, something to put the Gulf mess into global perspective. Wouldn't necessarily require a lot of content, just a few photos with some links.

As to how much of my oil consumption I'd be willing to give up, well I have no idea what my consumption is and what form it takes so that's tough to say. I'd be happy if the US instituted a policy that gasoline and diesel fuel would rise smoothly to a minimum of $8/gallon by 2015. I'd be happy if the tax system were reformed to the detriment of fossil fuels and debt, and to the favor of renewables and equity. (I'd be happy too if a herd of unicorns ate up all the oil floating in the GOM and farted rainbows.)

I'm glad to see that Nate is only surfacing on weekends; busy getting his ticket punched. Thanks for focusing on the big picture.

In the field of ecological economics, scientists attempt to put a price-tag on the ecosystem service flows that mother nature provides. A recent, rough estimate of global ecosystem services is around $50 trillion per year - in the neighborhood of Global GDP. Acknowledging and integrating ecology into a market system is necessary and important. But there are obvious problems. What happens in a currency crisis where abstract wealth disappears - what are our ecosystems 'worth' then? Or, in a system of cost-benefit tradeoffs, what happens if we increase our financial wealth by 20% and lose 19% of our ecosystem services in the process - is this a good trade? How much is a sea turtle's suffering worth? A sea turtles life? The sea turtle species? Etc

There's not much point in measuring value in dollars at this point; it's all changing too rapidly since we can just add zeros electronically. But a whale was $2.6 million in emdollars back in the mid-90s:

http://books.google.com/books?id=j1PHFoVb7rYC&pg=PA115&lpg=PA115&dq=the+...

Coastal residents are about to discover the real value of their resource base as it goes kablooie, even as they clamor to stop the drilling moratorium to save their economy. And I agree that we are all BP now. If you drive a car of heat/air condition your house, or fly, you are party to this. The cognitive dissonance at this point is screaming.

1) Would you be willing to give up 1%?, 10%?, 20%?, 50%? of your oil consumption, both that you use directly and use indirectly in the products you buy to assure ecosystem health? Why or why not? I've asked people who should know better if they would push the button to stop the flow of fossil fuels tomorrow, and it's amazing how most would not push the button. I would. It would have stopped this. We are on the verge of destroying our resource base, area by area, city by city.

2 )How do we put a $ value on aspects of our lives outside the market system? There's no point in using dollars. It's all 1s and 0s at this point. Try something more fundamental for valuation . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergy
(new Wiki)
I cringed to see economic speakese in the title. The use of their terminology ("externalities") gives them (bankers' sycophants) power, and implies that the environment is not necessary to economic operation. Call it something else, please.

3) If the main real reason not to add more relief wells is cost, is two the optimum number? That is, what would the prudent number of relief wells/rigs be if money was de-emphasized as a factor? The XOM Valdez spill was clear cut, with an American-based corporation. Even then, 20 years later, payouts in damages were a fraction of original $numbers. This is a much different situation, with the entire GOM economy impacted, millions of people have just lost their resource base for their economy. Corporations have much more power, and this corporation is based in a foreign country which is completely bankrupt. Does it matter what they should be doing? They won't do it. FEMA will take over the clean-up, the Navy? will take over the spill site, and BP will drill 2 relief wells. And we will continue to drill off shore, and eventually to drill in polar waters. Because we will drill until there is no longer net gain. Again, would I push the button? Yes. !00% reduction, tomorrow. Got a bike?

Any such vision will compete with a cultural mythology that American abundance is due to some special combination of hard work, creativity and divine decree instead of privileged access to concentrated once-and-done resources. Whether we drill or not, oil is depleting globally and its scale won't be replaced by flow-based energy sources. Thus to me, what's happening in the Gulf is a clarion call to our societal value systems more than any words or analysis could ever be. If we don't look at our own consumption and its wide boundary environmental impacts and instead continue to translate the problems of the Gulf into cost/benefit terms denominated in $, we will have lost this opportunity for change.

There's a quotable quote, thanks.

Hi Iaato,

"I cringed to see economic speakese in the title. The use of their terminology ("externalities") gives them (bankers' sycophants) power, and implies that the environment is not necessary to economic operation. Call it something else, please."

what would you call it then? a positive or negative (mostly) side effect of economic activity. If you change the meaning to something incomprehensible to economists they might ignore it completly though.

GDuP

Gross Domestic unProduct

equals (=)

sum of
all bads and disservices

produced by the domestic economy

(note: this includes all "externalities")

If your going to use an acronym then BUC for Brushed Under Carpet is more appropriate. If you atempt to bring GDP into disrepute they will take you out the back and shoot you in the head.

I'm a noob here, but I'm an old-b at this question. My thesis advisor in grad school (in the '70s!) used to ask whether the economic activity of locksmiths should be added to the GDP or subtracted from it. If added, should the economic activities of burglars be added too? If subtracted, why not subtract the economic activities of lawyers as well? You can quickly see that GDP is a pretty poor tool for measuring "goods and services" even if you limit it to the "internalities," because GDP includes plenty of bads and disservices, as stepback calls them, and its not very obvious what's a good and what's a bad. Once you start trying to measure the externalities it just gets harder.

Of course the fact that something is hard to measure is no reason not to try to .... There's a huge academic literature on how to value externalities, and not just direct ones like lost income to beach towns or indirect ones like the water treatment providing by marshes, but quality of life ones like the good feeling you get just from knowing something is there even if you don't personally interact with it (most of the economic value of whales, at least in this century, presumably falls in that category; the direct economic value of whale-watching expeditions is miniscule).

Social measurement is a value-laden endeavor. GDP is no different in this regard. There is little point in attempting a measure until priorities have been determined. Once those priorities have been identified, measures are really only useful if they result in better policy. The problem with most of the issues that are discussed on TOD is that there is little consensus on what the priorities should be. In regards to the original post, the question is whether attempts to quantify the value of environmental services will actually result in better policy. My guess is that the causality is questionable --- my guess is that governments will only make a serious effort at such quantification when environmental issues receive greater weight from policy-makers.

I tend to think that many exaggerate the role that GDP plays in policy formation. Government collect thousands of statistics, most of which are not needed for estimating national accounts. These measures are used to shape policy. Arguments for replacing GDP with measures like a General Progress Indicators or a happiness measure are really attempts to commit government to a particular set of values. However, my guess is that the measures themselves would be reformulated at least as frequently as governments change. There is little reason to believe that the GPI constructed by a social democratic party would resemble the well-being index constructed by a market fundamentalist party. And the findings in the happiness literature are neither sufficiently precise nor robust enough to form the basis of a measure of national well-being.

We as a society have made some bad choices and continue to make bad choices. Like promoting gas hogging vehicles when we could promote hybrids. I see people driving new Explorers and other behemoths with paper plates. The farthest they explore is usually the local WallMart. Even in this economy! Its an arms race out on the highways. Some feel they need all that metal to protect them. Maybe from the inevitable roll-overs.

Our bloated military used a huge share of oil - to what end? We were brought to our knees by a group of men with only box cutter knives. This was used as an excuse to bloat the military even more, using more fuel and requiring more into the future. How much oil was spent invading Iraq? Afghanistan? I thought most of the terrorists were Saudis.

Our society ignores the fact that this is a finite resource, and even some listen to and believe in crackpots promoting such wild theories as "abiotic oil" or denying global warming, despite overwhelming peer-reviewed evidence proving global warming and no evidence at all about "abiotic oil" formed deep in the mantle.

The simple fact is that we will run out, just when is another matter. This was known years ago by King Hubbert. In the 70s Amory Lovins warned that we needed then to convert to "Soft Energy Paths" (the title of his book popular back then) before scarcity rose its ugly head. Instead, Reagan had the solar panels removed which was a symbolic gesture away from such sanity. So much for the Great Communicator. Had we pursued soft energy paths back when we had the workforce, the raw materials and the energy resources needed to build a new infrastructure, we wouldn't be drilling wells in deep water and putting the ecosystem at such risk.

We can probably survive if one species such as the Pelican goes - this happens daily. But wiping out a whole ecosystem is another matter! Those closest are feeling it the worst - but eventually we'll all suffer in one way or another. Death by a thousand cuts. Just so we can fight wars where we have no business fighting such wars, or so we can drive 6 ton behemoths of steel to the next NASCAR event. What kind of planet do we plan to leave to our grandchildren? To me that is a more relevant question!

If you are a vegetarian, off the gridder who walks everywhere and doesn’t buy anything via corporations, then YOU have the ability/right to complain

Another eco-guilt-tripper post that reeks of never-suffered-a-day-in-their-life nonsense. Vegetarianism has nothing to do with the probability of oil disasters occurring. My rabbit used orders of magnitude less fossil fuels than your store bought tofu, thank you very much.

As for the off-gridder bit, I'm not allowed to go off grid. I tell you what, you get rid of all the laws that say I have to get permits and use Professional Installers and get everything inspected at a cost of thousands and thousands of dollars for any kind of alternative energy source. You get rid of all the laws that flat out prohibit the use of certain alternative energy options. Make it financially possible for the POOR, which means making it not one cent more expensive than what they're doing now. THEN you can yap at me about me being part of the problem.

You reactivate the Homestead Act, and I promise never to buy anything from a corporation again. No? Well, how about you double my Social Security check, and I promise never to buy anything from WalMart again. No? Then shut up.

And I can't walk everywhere. I'm a cripple, see? That's why I'm on Social Security. The world doesn't fit in your neat little pigeonholes.

As for the questions. On number 1, I'm planning that I will give up 100% of my oil consumption. But not "to assure ecosystem health"; that boat left the dock decades ago, ne'er to return. And I shall give you a rare Honesty: I ain't giving up what little standard of living I still have just so some Chinaman can have it. And that is how almost everyone, in their deepest darkest, REALLY feels. They just won't admit it because it isn't the pc view. Now I would LOVE to keep my standard of living using as much clean/green/alternative means as there are in existence. See above comments about prohibitive levels of regulation. The clean/green/alternative means has been building-coded into a rich man's playground. 'Nuf said.

Question 2- dollar value of aspects of life outside the market system. This one is easy. Said value is directly proportional to the annual income of the affected person. If I am struggling to feed my family, my children are hungry and my livestock are starving before my eyes, I don't give a rat's ass about the last elephant in the world. If that elephant comes anywhere near my garden, I'm gonna kill it. (As happened not long ago in India.) Bill Gates, on the other hand, would undoubtedly be willing to spend Billions to save that last elephant. Rabid environmentalism is a spoiled bored rich kid's paradise. Regular old vanilla environmentalism is a rich man's pastime. Poor people have more important things to worry about- like staying alive, getting food, getting water. The rest is just not part of the equation for poor folk.

Question 3 is similarly, ah, I can't think of a polite word. We live in a real world, come back to it. If two is all they can afford, two is all they can afford. Want more? You going to pay for it? No? Then I would gently suggest some reading on the phenomena known as magical thinking.

I'm not normally a git, but I get SO tired of the holier-than-thou attitude and the blatant guilt tripping, passive-aggressive manner of these people, having the gall to tell below-poverty-level me how I must do this or that. Guilt tripping doesn't work on me, nor wailing and gnashing of teeth. Make it doable, and I will gladly do it, with great relief. But 'doable' means less than $100 a month.

I'm not gonna hold my breath waiting for it to happen. In the meantime, I do whatever I can for CC/PO within my very limited means.

The way I see it you agree with the OP argument by explaining how your local self interest will trump any larger concern.. just because life is unfair and you have the shitty end of the stick doesn't mean your off the hook in point of fact you go out of your way to demonstrate that you take that culpable end and wave it around for everybody to see.

kinda weird and harsh I know...

but even you don't really object to making the effort.. I think you are not the wholly self interested individual who rants at the start of that post

Victorian Tech dares to speak the UNVARNISHED truth as it applies to him-truth being a commodity that is defined by the possessor of it, or the seeker of it;not many are willing to do so except in the privacy of their homes in the company of very old friends.

I salute him for his honesty and willingness to expose himself to posssible derogatory and belittling comments.

This is about as open and honest a forum as exists, to the best of my knowledge, and it is peopled mostly with folks of far above average intelligence.

But there are still a great many comments indicative of extraordinarily shallow thinking.

I suppose the folks who make them feel nice and superior when they preen and flaunt thier superior morality;personally I feel really sorry for somebody so ignorant he doesn't even KNOW he is ignorant.

About a third of the proposed 'SOLUTIONS" proposed here by various nincompoops would (-if somebody(tptb) tried seriously to impose them- ) result in a situation that would immediately morph into something orders of magnitude worse than the status quo-which is quite desperate enough!

Personally I live in, or have lived in, several levels of our society, and have passed through several various subcultures within our culture.I can spend a month with a bunch of hillbillies or high school dropout laborers and noboby will ever bat an eye at anything I say;they will all think I'm a great guy, one of them.I can hang out with rednreck rabid conservatives just as easily.

I can clean up my farmers hands and vocabulary and move back into an apartment the Fan District near VCU and hang out with the arts and politics crowd and date super liberal women.I even married one of them once upon a time.

I still have a few friends and a number of acquaintances who are doctrinnaire liberals, and I admire their idealism for the most part.I think they are great people on the individual level, or I would not remain in contact with them.

But not more than one or two out of a hundred of them are any better than selfrighteous hypocrites when it comes to a lot of thier politics.A single example will suffice to illustrate my point:

They like to call people politely phrased dirty names and enjoy feeling nice and superior when they do so, one of the names being xenophobe.The thing is that they down to the last individual without exception have no reason to fear any personal hardship as a result of hundreds or thousands of illegal immigrants pouring into the local economy.

Illegal immigrants cannot pass the extensive background checks associated with getting a good job;they don't have teachers or lawyers or accountants professional liscenses, or the personal skills and intellectual capital necessary to take away the livelihoods of any of my liberal acquaintances.Illegal immigrants can't afford to live in thier nieghborhoods.

QUITE a few people I know very well, including some relatives, DO have VERY GOOD and VERY REAL reasons to hate and fear immigrants-because they take the only jobs they can reasonably hope to get.They also depress the wages employers must necessarily pay to all holders of such jobs.

It is virtually impossible to get any one of these acquaintances to seriously discuss the truth of this matter as I have just outlined it-until such a time arrives as they lose thier own job.One guy I know used to make serious money programming, close to a hundred grand with great bennies;but he is out of work because Indian programmers happily work for ten or of American professional salaries.

You can bet the rent he sees things altogether differently in respect to immigration than he did when he had Mc Govern stickers on his car.

The world is a Darwinian place, and soon the blood is already thick in the water.

An empty stomach trumps principles every time.

I fear those of us still living comfortable lives are mostly blind to a coming political storm fueled by anger, fear, and suffering of the dispossessed working class of this country,not to mention the rest of the world.

It might be prudent to take the concerns of the dispossessed seriously instead of treating them like children.Otherwise somebody with no scruples and just the right combination of charisma and luck might draw them together into a political party all thier own.

Jeez, Mac. As someone who used to ride a bike thousands of miles a year and as a founding member of one of the oldest/largest bike clubs in the Southeast, with surgery I may be able to do a few miles a day. I have no hope of ever commuting to my main source of income on pedal power. When folks here espouse pedal power as an important form of transportation in our future, there's no point in my going into a rant about all of the people that have no hope of biking to the store or a job. We'll either figure something out, or we won't.

Whether it's adopting alternative energy, gardening, buying a bugout property, or an EV, etc., I think most of the posters here understand that these ideas won't apply to everyone. We just offer things up to the collective for what they're worth.

I feel that many contributors and readers here are truly feeling powerless about what we may face. The best advice I can give them is to continue to form relationships and try to develop something to offer the group, even if it's only a warm smile or teaching a child to read. We have to accept certain things about ourselves and our situations. In my example above, if it gets to the point when I need to ride a bike to work, that job likely won't exist anyway.

My goal is to encourage folks who have choices to make responsible ones. Hopefully the choices they make will include the welfare of those who's choices are limited.

Hi Ghung, I wasn't thinking about bikes at all, and especially not bikes in particular, and my rant was not directed at you, or any regular visitor.

You are well up on my list of cyber playmates.;)

I simply felt like unloading about schemes that are being proposed which have no chance whatsoever of being implemented, or schemes proposed by people who expect to continue to live thier same basic lifestyle even though the schemes are obviously such that they would immediately put tens of millions of people in the poorhouse and crash what's left of the economy.

All ideas and schemes and philosophies need to be followed to thier rational conclusions.

I admire your own accomplishments in respect to becoming self sufficient and wish I had the necessary computer and electronic skills to do the same;but so far as solar goes, I will have to take a chance on the prices continueing to come down,and buy later on.For now I can make better use of such modest amounts money as I have available spending it on other conservation and self sufficiency projects.

The one absolutely critical thing other than food is water, and we have gravity powered spring water, so if the grid goes down, we will not have to move in order to live.But it sure would be nice to have enough solar and backup to keep the food freezers running for an extended period.

I can run them off of a generator from the fuel kept on hand for a couple of months if absolutely necessary, which would be long enough to either eat the contents or can the same.

Our ff footprint is getting smaller soon as I expect to have our solar hot water system finished before too long.

from my vision of 2034

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3140

Electric assisted tricycles have become the icon of aging baby boomers, and the constant butt of jokes on late night TV talk shows. They are the ULTIMATE un-cool means of transportation and NO self-respecting teenager would EVER be caught on one !

A tricycle has the capacity for a much larger battery (and payload as well) on the rear axle between the 2 tires than does a bicycle.

Best Hopes for eTrikes being cool, before they are not :-)

Alan

VictorianTech:

You are right of course, but you're wasting time with such a lengthy post responding to one of these econazis. I've learned since joining TOD not to engage with them.

Usually we engage in quantitative discussions and arguments. I thought econazis were a product of Limbaugh's brain.

"In the field of ecological economics, scientists attempt to put a price-tag on the ecosystem service flows that mother nature provides. A recent, rough estimate of global ecosystem services is around $50 trillion per year - in the neighborhood of Global GDP. Acknowledging and integrating ecology into a market system is necessary and important."

This is not going to work. Corporations dont care about ecosystem services because they cant be transformed into profit and money in the bank. If you take an area of rainforest for example, it is only useful for the timber cut and transported to market and ,once the land is cleared, its agricultural production value. MSYs, for the most part are so low, 1% or less for most tree species, that no company is going to work with them. Cut the entire forrest down and sell the land to a farmer provides the best profit.

That profit in the bank now is all that counts. Corporations will discount the future because it is the accepted belief among mainstream economists that everything can be substituted. We wont be able to substitute ecosystem services though because they are too complex and we're not even sure how they all work.

The answer is for government to provide legislation protecting ecosystem services outright, forcing quotas incorporating MSY harvesting on corporations and a distribution system based on rationing. But with the corporate subsystem having its fingers in all the pies from the top of the heirachy (political control) to the bottom (brainwashing kids through TV advertising) I wouldnt hold my breath on anything being done.

"We have met the enemy and he is us"

1) Would you be willing to give up 1%?, 10%?, 20%?, 50%? of your oil consumption, both that you use directly and use indirectly in the products you buy to assure ecosystem health? ...

We'd better be willing to give up whatever it takes to reasonably ensure ecosystem health, or in the shorter run than we'd like, we're dead or wishing we were.

So, what level is that?
* we're at peak conventional oil, so the issue will solve itself sooner or later.
* unconventional oil seems insane from an ecological standpoint, so we have to replace the fall of conventional oil with electrified transportation/conservation/changing the way things are done.
* biofuels, modulo breakthroughs in algae, etc. (unlikely IMHO) are semi-insane, so should only be used if truly necessary.
* higher oil/natural gas prices will reduce excess plastics/petro-chemicals use
* regulation/right to be free of toxins will also reduce excess plastics/petro-chemicals use

eventually that works out to about 98 pct or so.

2 )How do we put a $ value on aspects of our lives outside the market system?

First step is to be conscious that the national-->world religion is worship of the almighty dollar/money. Then to realize that many things are not able to have monetary value assigned so easily. As arbitrary as prices are for goods and services (we bow to the market), what is the "price" for enlightenment about certain things, for the return of a loved one, for inner peace, for clean air, etc.?

In the U.S. in particular, we've betrayed rights-based rule to such a degree that non-monetary valuations are often considered valueless, and loose to money valued interests in legislation/jurisprudence.

Then I have to ask, why do we want to put a money value on things outside the market system? That's devaluing those things and their domains meta-value (how the domains establish value within that domain), and giving a monopoly to the market system over all values - seems like tyranny, and lies.

3) If the main real reason not to add more relief wells is cost...

As I posted above:
http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/6565#comment-642189

I think there are other constraints than money: safety zone, proximity to spill (workers' health and safety).
And remember that money has non-obvious costs, one has to manage its disbursement.
I'm happy with 2 relief wells, would be ok with 3, 1 is too risky/cheap considering the effect on other people.

There's also the CO2, waste generated, etc. aspect of drilling - with 2 RWs,
the last one can be converted to a production well, so the waste of 1 extra isn't wasted. With 3 so close, is the 2nd "last one" being converted a waste? (closer to the other well than needed?)

1) We (my spouse and I) have started and further plan to cut our power consumption to a bare minimum. (We won't know the percentage until we measure it in about 12 months). We are not doing it to be heroes and save the environment or oil supplies, we are doing this because it seems "sensible" and more conducive to a harmonious life really, purely selfish motivations. Once when we were totally broke we had to have the power cut off for 6 months. They were very peacefull months in the heart of a big city.

We have already got the most fuel efficient car we could find (public transport not suitable for night shift workers).

We already have solar hot water and are in the process of getting solar power on our house, double glazing and double roof insulation, hothouse / shadehouse on equatorial side of house for temperature control at extremes of season. We've been saving and liquidating for 18 months to aquire the financial capital to pursue these options.

Changes in lifestyle and house use to minimise energy use - eg move living/entertainment room from large open room with big windows and openings that allow airflow and put living room in small, easily enclosed, tiny window room. (current task)

Going without, learning to get pleasure from the pursuit of minimalism and personal interaction, learning that materialistic consumption was just another form of religious heroin.

Water Harvesting and Organic Gardening also reduce our ongoing energy footprint.

2) Putting a dollar value on things ? It's strikes me as being a wierd question almost anti-koan, like " give me the dimensions of this brick in hours, minutes and seconds". Why is this abstract concept invented by the human mind - MONEY - so central to our thinking. Why are we making a god out of false idols. Considering an illusion to be reality, most strange.

3)Well, I'd need some data and statistics to even have a WAG at that. BUT, let's take a figure I've seen on the blogs - 90% chance of success with one well very roughly could be 99% chance with two wells and 99.9% chance with 3 wells. Then consider there may be weakness of the sea floor in that area. TWO IS PLENTY to start with, if the first one fails it may be prudent to "get set up for" a third well. I know that is not statistics folks, but good enough for me.

If you take ROCKMAN's rather humorous 50% chance (discrete - It works OR It don't) then you'd need about 6 wells for 99% success rate.

There is probably also the cataclysmic fail option - first relief well does not work and reveals a situation which is beyond management. This scenario is too dreadfull to even think about.

"Putting a dollar value on things ? It's strikes me as being a wierd question almost anti-koan, like " give me the dimensions of this brick in hours, minutes and seconds"."

Absolutly.

I'm in Australia and am not getting any sense of how extensive and severe the ecological impact could be from the media. I'm assuming it's quite bad from the size, location and prevailing weather patterns.

Some blogs are going into the "death of the worlds oceans" tunell, are there any links to sites with environmental impact statements based on "reasonably objective" assesments.

Could folks on TOD that live on the GOM shoreline perhaps help give me (non USA readers) some feel for the magnitude and extent of damage likely to occur.

How did Mexican shorelines fare after Ixtoc ? What state of recovery are they in now ?

Have seen lot's of those pelican photos over at the automatic earth. They kinda give me a "numb horror" in some deep recess of my soul. FUBAR.

Not looking forward to August. Back to lurking.

We have a reasonable chance of repeated oil "washings" killing the marsh grass and cypress trees. Without live vegetation, the sea reclaims, via wave action, what was marsh and turns it into open sea. A nursery for fisheries is lost forever and productivity is forever lower.

Hurricanes can wash oil far inland with their storm surge. Perhaps Hurricane A washes away the outer marshes and kills the inner marshes. Hurricane B then washes away the inner marshes.

The western population of Atlantic blue fin tuna (the half that breed in the Gulf) may *JUST* lose a year or two of spawn (already stressed population) or the adults may die as well, leaving only a few juveniles.

Best Hopes for the "new" artificial islands !

Alan

Alan thx

oil spills long term bad, this on Exxon Val 15 years later

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0322-04.htm

What about the heavy rains that come with hurricanes washing that oil farther out to sea?

Rain has little or no impact on storm surge. Hurricanes will drive oil inland.

Alan

Been struggling with search engines to get some sort of "intuitive grasp" of the damage potential of this spill. Allowing for current ecological stressors and the state of our financial systems
I am advising myself, on the opposite side of the planet, to

Prepare for total systemic lockup within months.

The oil slick along its greatest length is roughly 500 km and about half that wide.

I reject, in a large part, this argument. First, I did not make the decisions to NOT install a relief well or implement additional "fail-safe" mechanisms. I didn't make the financial decisions to essentially "cheapen" my drilling operations - not change batteries on the BOP, pull drilling mud out too fast out of the well, etc. There are more than enough evidence of corporate negligence on the part of BP. Our political and corporate "leaders" are failing us. I can't and haven't been able to buy a solar car or buy a house in a subdivision that is powered by alternative sources of energy. I want to! I drive an oil-miserly car and really think about my purchases and their impacts on the environment. I vote for environmentally-conscience candidates in the hopes of shifting the dead-end legacy of oil. The last decade in American has been about deregulating corporate rules and laws, thus lowering the "price", if you will, of pelicans and worms and oil-free sunsets on the beach. This is the cost of "drill, baby, drill". And if the American people are to blame, then it is from the mind-bending propaganda that bombards us from the 'Beyond Petroleum' tv commercials to the politicians that ridicule environmentalism. So, we the people do have some blame, but not to the extent the author is suggesting. Get off of the corporate love affair and start expecting more from out leaders!

1) Would you be willing to give up 1%?, 10%?, 20%?, 50%? of your oil consumption, both that you use directly and use indirectly in the products you buy to assure ecosystem health? Why or why not?

***************************************************************************************
I have already given up more than my once norm. I am willing to give up all ties to the grid and live by solar power(PV and nonPV) as close to my ancestors lifestyle as possible. I am very close to that now.
***************************************************************************************

2 )How do we put a $ value on aspects of our lives outside the market system?

***************************************************************************************
You don't use $signs as a rating system. You use personal and spiritual values. You should try to live with nature and not attempt to destroy it with drilling huge holes in the ocean floor. Dollars were intended as a bartering tool. Not really needed in a true barter system.
***************************************************************************************

3) If the main real reason not to add more relief wells is cost, is two the optimum number? That is, what would the prudent number of relief wells/rigs be if money was de-emphasized as a factor?

***************************************************************************************
Do what it takes to stop this well flow. Cap it off and all the others and learn to live without oil. We will adapt or die off. Those who die off will be those who contributed nothing anyway. Those who can adapt will strengthen the gene pool and bear offspring who can do a far better job of living within the confines of nature.

Sounds tough you say. Yes and it will be but in the end it will happen anyway. One is with the earth plundered and barren. The other is an earth with enough natural resouces to come back from the abyss. We need to start 'sooner rather than later'.
***************************************************************************************

My answers will be controversial judging from the others posts in this Campfire.
Many new members on this site apparently work in the oil industry and will have opposing views.

Thanks for this Campfire post.Kudos to the author.

It is very timely in my opinion. We are at a crossroads with respect to our environment. Tough questions need to be asked. Tougher decisions need to be made. This will test the values of our country and way of life.

Its time to do that. Later may be too late.

1) Would you be willing to give up 1%?, 10%?, 20%?, 50%? of your oil consumption, both that you use directly and use indirectly in the products you buy to assure ecosystem health? Why or why not?

I downsized my life by more than 50% in 2003. That was partly due to a layoff, partly due to the desire to get out of the corporate way of life - I was a "road warrior" for a software company, amongst other things.

I now run a local business. I cut my income by 60%, but, I'd say, my quality of life has increased several-fold. It has certainly been tough at times - where I could easily have afforded to do home-maintenance projects, like roof repair, now I have to budget really hard, or find a way to do them myself, if possible.

In terms of making more cuts, the less energy one uses, the harder it becomes to find places to make more cuts. The first 50% was pretty painless, in retrospect. Another 50% would be more difficult, but not impossible. I'd say 20% for the next round. Then, possibly, another 5% after that.

Hopefully, I can keep making cuts in line with depletion rates, and still keep head above water.

2 )How do we put a $ value on aspects of our lives outside the market system?

I could estimate the dollar value of the food I grow for myself, including the honey my bees make.

I could estimate the things I have learned about home maintenance, gardening, ecology, community project management as the cost of a 5-year advanced degree - let's say I just got my doctorate in urban agriculture ;) $100,000 ? More ?

Then, here are the relationships built with neighbors - what's the value of having someone watch one's house when one isn't home ? Or caring for the dog ? Or keeping a house key in case of emergency ? Bringing in newspapers when one is away ?

Estimating at an average hourly rate for hiring the appropriate professional :- :-

Handyman services - $80
Private Security - $75
Landscaping - $50
Project Management - $100
Painting contractor - $50
Farming - ???
Dog boarding - $25 per day
Mail pickup - $10 per day
Wildlife supported by my urban homestead - priceless ;)

Of course, my contribution to the formal economy has been drastically cut, as I would have been spending on services that now I provide for myself.

Also, I no longer provide revenue to other corporations - I no longer require new shoes every 6 months, (since I stopped running through airports) , or the corporate wardrobe, or the sample-sized products smaller than 3 oz for airplane travel, etc etc etc. I no longer live in a "hip" neighborhood or eat out at the latest hotspots.

Economically-speaking, I have 60% less value to the world-at-large, measured by today's standards of income and status.

3) If the main real reason not to add more relief wells is cost, is two the optimum number? That is, what would the prudent number of relief wells/rigs be if money was de-emphasized as a factor?

I'd say the optimum number of wells is the number which has the highest probability of success.

We can't put price-tag on the ecosystem because the mother nature is priceless!

1) My direct personal consumption of crude oil derivatives has dropped to near zero when I purchased the compressed natural gas (CNG) powered Honda Civic GX in Nov, 2009. Why did I buy it? See my blog at burnUSgas dot com for more detail, but in short, the car was cheaper than a gasoline Civic after federal and Oklahoma income tax credits and the fuel is half as cheap as gasoline.

I have now ordered a Nissan Leaf that will supposedly be delivered in Feb, 2011 at a cost of somewhere between $15k and $20k after federal and Oklahoma income tax credits. The Leaf will replace my wife's around town commuting; the Honda Pilot will only be used for long trips. Refueling will be even easier, however, the range is severely limited compared to the CNG Civic. Check cngprices dot com to see why I say this.

It seems to me that the federal and Oklahoma governments have already priced in the oil negative externalities - without the social engineering via the income tax code, I would not have made the switch. My primary driver for CNG and battery use vs gasoline is to save money.

The economy won't support that kind of car buying , so what is the point ?

I don't blame BP alone. I blame every state with coastal oil reserves of any significance who let Louisiana take the bullet. Again, as we did with the flooding of 1927 and by providing a navigable river to the central U.S.

You want your goddamn oil but you want us to provide it for you. And you cheerfully vote in right wing nutcakes who have stripped government of the power to regulate safety of operations.

And you have left us standing in oil up for our f---ing ankles.

I am listening to Ozzy, drinking Mimosa's, dreaming of what was. 'Revelation Mother Earth'. He paraphrases Jesus. "Mother, please forgive them for they know not what they do." "..I had a vision, I saw the world burn and the seas turn red..""..please let my Mother live"
How damn appropriate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ESCyNlkrw

Lucky us, it is NOT required to give up our living standards, the energy consumption of the western countries can be drastically reduced by technologies on an affordable price.

The European Union is just on to force new building standards: only zero energy new buildings will be allowed from 2020 (2018 for public buildings). Energy consumption of buildings is about 40% of the total energy need of Europe, this part will be reduced near to zero for the second half of the century. You say it is unrealistic? Tens of thousands of passive houses are already built in Europe (mostly in Germany and Austria), using about 10% energy (15kWh/m2/year) compared to average houses for heating and cooling. It requires no space technology, even in less developed Eastern European countries (like mine) anyone can build such houses for similar (or sometimes even lower) prices than a conventional house.

Striving for off-grid capability, heat entirely with wood in Western Massachusetts hills, including domestic hot water with wood-gasification boiler w/heat-storage. Haven't used propane for heat or hot water for 4 years. We have a Prius for non-work vehicle and I regularly get upwards of 50 mpg in summer and 45+ in winter. I have a van for work in my chimney sweeping business (so I earn my living helping people stay safe with their woodheat systems, more than 30 years) and my wife has a van for her organic gardening business. We grow almost all of our produce in an outside garden as well as a geodesic dome greenhouse (heated with wood) for greens all winter. We have organically fed chickens for eggs and manure (on the fruit trees and bushes).
The hang-ups are distance to clients in a rural New England setting. I have thought about a mule or horse drawn wagon and doing a weekly circuit with my chimney sweeping, but that is not happening yet. Another is being dependent on a supplier for our cordwood. We don't have a woodlot (yet), however if push came to shove I would cut trees out back in the woods owned by an out-of-stater. By that time I don't guess they would be traveling up from NJ anymore. The dome is not carbon neutral in its construction materials, but gas saved by eliminated grocery trips may well make up for that. I rarely fly anywhere, but do maybe once year or less.

At any rate, since I first read "The Party's Over" and discovered TOD several years ago we have tried to significantly reduce our use of fossil fuels. Included are the little things in the way of conservation which I do not think should be minimized but rather encouraged. The usual like CFLs and turning lights out and bringing a bag, reducing packaging, recycling, composting, etc., etc.

As for #2 putting a dollar value on aspects of life outside the market system seems like a self-defeating, maybe destructive exercise.

For #3, if cost is the only factor I am with those here who advocate 3 RWs.

EDIT: Oh, yeah, I think it is just weird to say that we are responsible not BP. Say rather we are responsible as well as BP. The situation is so labyrinthine that in some ways it is a chicken-and-egg thing to say who is responsible for the current societal milieu we all swim in. I think Industrial civilization is toast, anyway, and the foundations of our demise were laid long before fossil fuels juiced up the workings. It is a very complicated issue with a "simple" solution, as the Archdruid has said: Failure is the only option.

An excellent post!

1) Would you be willing to give up 1%?, 10%?, 20%?, 50%? of your oil consumption, both that you use directly and use indirectly in the products you buy to assure ecosystem health? Why or why not?

Simplistically, whatever it takes... but the decision is largely out of our hands anyway. Some recent estimates of remaining global oil reserves range from 850-900 billion barrels to roughly 1150 to 1350 billion barrels, perhaps 1.5 trillion at the outside. We began producing oil in the late 1800s, and over a short period of 135 years we have consumed just over 1.1 trillion barrels, and of that, 1.0 trillion has been consumed in just the past 50 years! And this was the easily extracted oil.

As we move forward, the bulk of the oil that will be needed to meet global demand will continue to be become more technically challenging to produce, increasingly expensive, and environmentally unsustainable to extract. If you do the math, and assuming it would be technically feasible, we have about 50-75 years worth of oil left - assuming of course that the global population stops growing, the level of current consumption does not increase, and production continues to be sustained at current levels until the last drop is out of the ground. Of course that can't happen. Much has been written on the impact this is going to have on the developed world, and assuming that viable alternatives will not be developed in lockstep with declining oil production... well, I would say that we are in for a rude awakening in short order.

2) Can we put a $ value on aspects of our lives outside the market system? If so how?

In very limited ways I suppose, but on the whole, how can we even begin to monetize the fundamental mechanisms that sustain life on this planet. The modern market system is largely an aberation given that it provides us with the means to live and survive very comfortably, while at the same time failing to ensure that the good life will be sustainable for future generations.

3) If the main real reason not to add more relief wells is cost, is two the optimum number? That is, what would the prudent number of relief wells/rigs be if money was de-emphasized as a factor?

Again, whatever it takes to ensure that accidents of this magnitude will not happen again in the future. Of course, this approach would be considered impractical, and so we are left with an assessment of what level of risk we are willing to accept. We are not going to stop deep water drilling, that is a certainty. What worries me, is that the next blowout could happen in even more extreme conditions, with the possibility that the BP disaster may pale in comparison. This is way beyond my realm of expertise, but perhaps other aspects of the drilling technology could be improved as well, such as the BOPs (built to withstand higher pressures, additional fail-safe mechanisms, etc.)... this in addition to a requisite number of relief wells.

The DeepSeaNews.com blog has all sorts of articles about the marine biological effects of the oil spill. See

This is a particularly good article:http://deepseanews.com/2010/05/should-we-even-bother-with-offshore-oil-a-look-at-the-numbers/

Nate, you continue to underestimate social class as a force in all this. You know that 80 percent of US oil burn comes from cars-first transportation, if one counts asphalt and car/truck-building. The general population is existentially trapped into using cars, regardless of what they might otherwise want. The corporate overclass are intractably, militantly addicted to selling us millions of new cars every year. They are not going to tolerate questions about changing directions.

It's neither good science nor good political strategy to bury all this under a tired old green harangue about "all of us."

We need to attack the people who have their hands on the levers of power, including Mr. Obama, who has already announced the resumption of deep-water drilling:

http://www.deathbycar.info/2010/06/here-comes-the-poses/

The environmentalists have to explain to the American people how they are going to earn a living and provide for families in a minimalist fossil-fuel burning economy. Living in a shed with used clothing and food scavenged off the land is not going to cut it.

So I will try again. The vast majority of us, regardless of our IQs, should be field hands who walk to work in the fields. Now run out there and hoe for a living!

We will also need more sailors. As everybody knows, the 1300 ships working on the BP spill are all either sail or oar-powered, right? That takes a big crew of laborers.

But the basics is this, if fossil fuels are not doing our work for us, a great many of us will have to do the work ourselves. Use an axe. Swing a sledge. Use a wheel barrow. Become a teamster. Not much need for millions of college professors in that world. Here's a harness, Doc - unless you are like Arnold and believe in a hydrogen future, or some other unachievable high-tech solution.

So it's either business as usual or Pol Pot? You don't see anything in between there..?

I don't see how people are going to take care of their families if we continue on the road we're on (no pun intended).

It makes zero sense for people to heating a house 3-4x the size the family could live comfortably in, and need to drive from developments of those houses 6 miles roundtrip in the equivalent of a small tank to fetch the nearest quart of milk. Yet that is TYPICAL of American suburbia. Changing that lifestyle is a far cry from agricultural communes.

The funny thing is I think if we plan how we live better then people could remove the yoke of having to pay for unnecessary energy and material. I think I've lived a far more fulfilling life not having had to figure out how, for example, to make car payments, buy gas, insurance etc etc. I've never had to heat or clean a cavernous living space. I've been able to tell a few bad employers to go ---- themselves because I wasn't yoked to so much of this sort of thing and therefore yoked to X Y and Z payments. The car drives you sometimes. How many people drive long commutes to a job in large part to pay for a car which gets you to a job which pays for the car which... it's like a hamster on a treadmill.

And tell him not to let that government owned GM produce any more of those gas guzzlers.

So true. If you want to give up your car and live a normal life, you will have to emigrate out of the US. I did. Saved thousands of dollars already, too, and maybe my life, since the US has a huge number of auto fatalities every year (number one in the world).

But I have to say that I have paid quite a price for this because the family I left back there is quite sad I left, especially my mother. That is hard for me too.

Anyway, now for 14 years NO CAR and it`s great---total freedom. Husband also has no car. I love commuting by bike, around 6km each way to work. It`s the best part of my day. I mightily want to leave the shopping world behind (I still use lots of plastic and all my family`s food is from shops and therefore oil) but am still trying to convince my husband that we should leave this huge city area (we live on the outskirts so we do have some green here, but not enough) and go somewhere more rural, local, natural. That is the next step. Then we can lower the footprint even more. I would love to do that. That is my goal. I think eventually we`ll manage to get to somewhere we can have more of a local economy, a sustainable place. But for now we have to make do here.

The pelicans are just one of the suffering billions of animals who have paid the ultimate price for our oil gorging!! Factory farmed animals, millions of (overdone, wasteful) laboratory experiments on animals, all the habitat lost to development, the overfishing, the pets bred and cruelly euthanized when the owners can`t be bothered anymore. All you can do when you behold the suffering is say a prayer and know that when the oil goes, finally, the suffering of these animals will also decline in some way. Because their numbers will decline, for one thing. We won`t have the power and the energy to keep causing all this animal suffering. That will be better for the animals. And that will be better for us. We are truly tormented by their suffering and we want to stop but oil is sort of forcing us to do it, part of the competitive economy. When the oil is gone, we will be able to stop causing them to suffer so much. Because our power will be reduced. Just cutting down a tree will take a week. Going 10 miles might take 3 days. Our machines, our oil rigs, our factory whaling ships, giant laboratories, etc.....sayonara!!

Pi, I hope you get what you want as far as moving out to the countryside.

But cutting down a tree by hand, even if you have to saw at it, takes less than 30 minutes. A Big tree chopped with a sharp axe takes at most an hour. Though any number is based on the size of the tree. I have an eight inch oak tree I want to chop down. It should take me about 30 minutes with a hand axe, if I did it that way, likely it'll be my dad's electric or gas chainsaw. As it is in close quarters and I don't want to mash other plants in the area. It has a scale disease that I don't want spreading to another oak I want to keep. Also it shades the area that I now garden in.

Walking takes about 2 miles an hour strolling, 3 miles an hour at a faster clip. I have cross country, up and down, hiked at high elevation at 3.5 miles an hour. So a 10 mile trip takes less than 5 hours. The most I have walked in one day was 28 miles in 2008. A back re-injury makes it hard for me to walk more than 2 miles now, but I can do it, just pay the price the next day.

We can in some quarters get by without cars. While in others a car is needed, or at least a horse and buggy system. If it came to that my mom and lots of old folks I know would stop traveling. That would be sad, because I still like to see them and give them hugs.

Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed future, with horses or bikes or somthing even if it is cars, a limited number of them.

If you are a vegetarian, off the gridder who walks everywhere and doesn’t buy anything via corporations, then YOU have the ability/right to complain about your share of the commons that is being impacted by this tragedy. Everyone else, and some more than others, bears responsiblity for this situation and as such shouldn't only be casting stones at BP.

I do not agree with this part.

If I order a pizza for home delivery and the driver runs over someone on the way, is it my fault ?

Yes, I do consume oil and buy stuff via corporations (even though I'm vegetarian, buy local food etc). That doesn't mean I gave a blank check to Bush to go to a wars or to BP to drill where they want or take all kinds of risks.

I'd be perfectly happy with reduced oil availability and a rationing system. Happy to ride in a slow moving electric vehicle (or bike) if needed.

ps : I don't eat pizza, let alone order one home.

I thought Nate's point was about collective guilt and logically the only way you can avoid that is by existing outside the system.

The horrific pelican pictures posted at The Automatic Earth and the resulting discussion prompted me to post thusly.-------------------------------------------------------------------

The pictures are indeed sad. However sadness is and has always been a part of nature. Read The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins, my favorite scientific book of the 21st Century. In the chapter Arms Races and Evolutionary Theodicy Dawkins quotes Darwin: "Nature is neither kind or unkind. She is neither against suffering or for it..."
and "...The total amount of suffering per year is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease..." and
"If there is ever a time of plenty this very fact will lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored."

I've always thought that this Dawkins quote is a bunch of emotional hyperbole, in spite of Dawkins' pretense at being the dispassionate, scientific observer. How does one define 'natural state'? It seems to be somewhat analogous to a statistical norm of sorts. If one accepts that the 'natural state of starvation and misery' means basically that most creatures most of the time are starving and miserable, then they simply would be unable to reproduce except perhaps at some minimal level, leading to their extinction. I doubt that the 'natural state' of creatures normally leads to their extinction.

I've lived most of my life in areas close to wilderness areas of one kind or another and have never to my recollection encountered wild creaturse that appeared to be starving and miserable. I'm sure they are often hungry, but for all appearances they seem to be rather healthy, and reproductive. The well-balanced ecosystem probably seldom sees 'starving and miserable' creatures as the balance of the ecosystem keeps population under control. You might argue that a deer being killed by a cougar is miserable, but it is probably more like stark fear, and for a very short few moments. Otherwise, for most of the deer's life, it carries on its normal business of living, a business that normally includes little misery and starvation.

Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but I maintain that Dawkins is, as I said before, emotionally hyperbolic and not very scientific at least in this instance.

"If there is ever a time of plenty this very fact will lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored."

It seems Darwin, Dawkins and I see the world through different eyes. I see balance, not misery, when I look out my back door. The calm after this evening's storm:
Photobucket

Nothing much starves here.

Eh?

What's "natural" about any of this? Growing old and dying is natural, this is like being run over by a drunk driver... negligent and preventable! I'd add this misery isn't supplanting or rearranging the world's misery, it's adding to it. Just as the spill is adding to - not supplanting - natural oil seeps in the Gulf.

Nate, you say:

The most unacknowledged point in our debt-laden, over-consumptive culture of entitlement is that our consumption relative to what is sustainable is too high not by 10 or 15% but by a factor of 4 or 5.

Where do you get the factor of 4 or 5?

It seems to me that before we had fossil fuels, the world's population was perhaps one-tenth of today's. The people lived with a living standard perhaps one-tenth of today's. And even at that point, people were doing harm to the ecosystems. For example, most of the large mammals had been killed for food.

Using the technology people had before fossil fuel, this comparison would seem to imply that the world's current standard of living is perhaps 100 times what is sustainable. If the standard of living in the US is higher than the world average, the factor would be even higher than 100.

The factor could perhaps be adjusted because some land areas were not at capacity at that time (Notrh America, in particular). And maybe we are a little more clever now. But still, it seems like the overshoot factor would have to be much greater than 4 or 5.

Thanks for that, Gail. I was just getting relaxed.

He probably got it from the oft-repeated assertion that the US consumes so many resources that if the whole world adopted our practices, we would need five Earths to make do. I believe that is derived wholly from the biological needs, though, and considers the sum total of biological outputs, including flows we could not practically disrupt or divert.

EDIT: I would add that there are probably certain significant improvements in our standard of living which consume very few resources (compared to most elements). Eg., the introduction of vaccines has saved a huge number of lives and by any measure has had an important impact on our standard of living, but the production of vaccines itself consumes very few resources (though of course the distribution systems may do much more). So the difference between a future 1/10th society and our present society might not actually be a factor of 1:10 in quality of life (though you do acknowledge this in your comments), provided these low cost/high impact technologies and procedures can be retained (which of course is the tricky part).

The problem Gail, is this. We trully don't know the max. Carry capacity of earth. I know we use a lot of buzz words around here, and we see a lot of distruction in how our current way of life is going and using. But we don't know what is sustainable in a lower use climate.

We see trends and think we know the real world, but we only see the world through grey colored glasses.

Ghung above posted a picture. What if on that same hillside. A bunch of people lived in earth shelter huts/cave like dwellings. Gardened the land to produce a lot of food crops, more than they themselves could eat, and let the rest fall to the animals around them, and planted in such a way that a disease could take out all of one species of food plants, but not distroy their whole supply of food bearing plants.

No Mono-culture farming. Just diversity and harmony to a point where the greed to have a bigger house was pushed out of the social mindset, where sharing is the norm, where crime is punished so that people don't want to go there. No cushy prisons with all you can eat nice warm beds etc, etc.

I mean think about it, we have had several dozen people in history push peace on earth, live in harmony and such, and we still have greed in the banks and businesses and gov't and even families. Yet we crave a better world, want a better world but don't seem willing to change our part of it, to get the results we want, and even think we all need. How whacked is that?

Right now our system is such that, I can make some changes, and feel good about them, but I can't fight the Gov't, even though I could try harder to run for Prez in 2012, I doubt I'd get far because I can't do all the work myself. We voted for the Change guy and some are wondering why they did not vote for someone else.

Sure the whole world is screwed up, and we are going to be running in much the same direction that we are going now, the crowds are big and standing still you still get moved along in them, but as the crowd thins, standing still gets easier.

My yard is full of life. Birds drinking out of a fish tank I am water testing, birds eating bugs, and seeds the plants I let grow provide. I don't water the lawn , but I do water the garden. Sadly I had to start using city water, as it has been dry here of late, and we are about 4 inches of rainfall below normal. My capacity for water storage is up to several hundred gallons though.

The standard of living should be thusly, imho. Air, water, food, house, and friends enough that you can still have the first 4 even if the storms wash them all away. Everything else is just window dressing, Laying up treasures for some future that when you get there you can't take it with you, no matter what the ancients said.

That we have found ourselves in the greatest time on the vast time scale of life, is not our doing. What we make of where we are is.

chalres,
Hugs,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed future.

You have made some unreasonable assumptions. Most manufactured goods are produced in factories that run on electricity. A very small percentage of electrical generation uses oil as fuel and with a smarter grid we could easily eliminate that small percentage. Oil is transportation fuel and a substantial fraction of that could be replaced with electrified rail. We have more than enough surplus biomass to produce enough aircraft fuel via gasification processes. It would cost the taxpayers very little to eliminate all public transit fares which would give a big incentive to leave the car at home more often. I'm all in favor of others cutting their oil use but cannot afford the alternatives to oil use myself. It is a fact of life in rural America that the alternate transportation choices available to urban America are not practical out here.

Of what value is there to wildlife outside the market? Hunting and fishing are things my urban brothers spend a significant amount of money on. Wild areas are worth hundreds if not thousands of dollars per year each to have available to them. That means our wildlife habitats are worth several tens of billion dollars per year collectively just based on recreational uses. An individual pelican is not worth that much but his habitat is very valuable. There really is a market value on the pelican's habitat. Watch how much less the State of Louisiana will lose this year from the drop in hunting and fishing license sales.

The optimum number of relief wells is zero. If the first well is done carefully then there wouldn't have been an explosion. No explosion means the rig doesn't sink. If the rig hadn't sunk there wouldn't have been a leaking gusher at the bottom of the Gulf.

Since I stopped consuming gas to move my body, I feel much better.

Of course my electric bicycle uses some fossil fuel resources, but only a small fraction of what a conventional vehicle would. The most odious single factor defining a conventional vehicle is tare weight.

robert wilson says,
"The total amount of suffering per year is beyond all decent contemplation."

As is the total amount of joy, or satisfaction. Every second there are creatures blissfully breeding, eating, cubs pups playing...

Darwin got this one right, "nature neither kind nor unkind", and so it is neither suffering or bliss but a constant interplay of both.

Only humans, with out sometimes pretentious overuse of the frontal cortex and our always faulty use of language (and this is not a criticism, language by its nature is a faulty and incomplete tool) think or say we can somehow "technology" our way out of the interplay of suffering and joy, and only the radical ascetic thinks and says we can somehow "minimalize" our way out. The problem with both of these purely human reactions to the problem is that if they are carried to their final conclusion they arrive at the same place: Nihilism, the reduction of the human to nothingness. Tom Wolfe, in his brilliant little book on the art of painting, "The Painted Word", once described the problem of minimalism...if only a few brush strokes are good and fewer still are better, then none are best! So the perfect painting is a blank white canvas! The artist who paints least paints best, and the artist who paints none paints perfect, no errors, PURITY!

Such is life...will we make the argument that the person who consumes less is better, the person who consumes least better, and the person who consumes none is PERFECT, because the person is DEAD. Nihilism carried to it's Platonic perfection. The great painting "The School of Athens" captures it perfectly, Plato with hand pointed to the rarified "perfect" sky, Aristotle with hand gesturing down to the earth, down to the real muck, unperfected, humans and living beings must dwell in. Al Gore used the painting for just this illustration in his book "Earth In The Balance".
http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~demo5337/Group4/Athens.jpg
Sorry folks, we are all stuck down here in the muck, like it or not, until we stop consuming, i.e., stop eating, and stop breathing.

RC

By definition, these decisions will not be financial in origin, but based on intuiting probabilities between 'bad disaster' and 'terrible disaster' as defined by our built in neural algorithms. That some people are thinking along these holistic lines is itself hopeful, because such thoughts make sense only when we entertain non-market impacts which is where we are headed sooner or later.

Erm. I believe the word you are looking for is, "philosophical." And it has everything to do with a sustained critique of late capitalism and fundamentalist "free" market ideology.

To say that one can only criticize what one of the first commentators correctly identifies as "systemic problems" from a position of hard-earned self-purity is an absolute fallacy, albeit one which many people on this site seem content to remain rather hung up on, or fall back upon, when a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the way institutional power and ideology function, a more thorough and historical self-criticism with regard to the realm of the 'political' is what's called for.

The first stages of awareness may involve a certain cynicism, as manifests itself in the sort of reactionary new age "lifestyle activism" or "pure soul" gesturing–itself so easily co-opted by big business or the larger political powers-at-play the second it becomes fashionable enough to risk having any meaningful impact, whether "organic" and "fair trade" corporations, or libertarian survivalists burying guns in their front yards under their solar panels and pretending their lives won't be just as controlled under whatever new world order is established while they wait and smirk. But such gestures by themselves often smack of an even greater hypocrisy than those who simply don't have any knowledge, motivation, ethical maturity or will power to do anything. Which is not to begrudge anyone for growing their own food, obviously (it's irrelevant to the larger point but for ad hominem's sake I happen to, largely, and also work building permaculture farms with solar power), but insofar as it remains a will-to-isolation any such work remains a self-satisfying luxury and cynicism only, when uncoupled with a larger political vision, that also implicates oneself in relation to all the other relations that made such luxury possible in the first place.

We are all interdependent, contaminated and compromised by the contradictions of our era, the mystifications of ideology, the limitations of a political economy that fails to imagine what David Harvey calls "The Limits to Capital"; there is no pure 'outside' world in which to live, or from which to be qualified to imagine alternatives.

Social movements do start in all kinds of ways, though. Some remain more connected with reality, fighting for institutional change, and relentlessly self-critical. Some just fizzle out or remain contentedly impotent, mimicking elitism of the system they claim to despise. With regard to the latter, hippies and libertarians have more in common than either will admit; both share the same operational delusional.

BP is criminally responsible for this atrocity, and so is President Dick Cheney and his car salesman butt-boy Bush. So are 30+ years of corporate lobbying and corruption of our political system by large corporations-become internationals (beginning with that other car salesman for the banks, Reagan) and a bloated financial industry, the system that renders the knowledge and brilliance of engineers and physicists secondary to market-driven calculations. In the sense that we are all inevitably contaminated by this demise of the promise of democracy, of the enlightenment, and of an emancipatory ideal, yes we are all implicated in it. But there isn't any meaningful sense that begins to compare in which every individual American is "responsible" for this; while emotionally satisfying on some level, to say so is to misunderstand the way *power* functions almost entirely.

As a consultant with the NRDC, the following video sums it up for me. Robert Redford speaks into the NRDC camera on the need to shift to a clean energy economy.

http://bit.ly/redford


- Sanjeev

Have not had time to surf this whole site, but so far, have not seen much on the following subject.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Gulf-Spill-SOLUTION-Oil-Eating-Microbes/127853517238239

http://spillfighters.com/

www.SpillFighters.com - The Texas Land Office and Texas Water Commission successfully used 'oil eating' microbes to clean up large oil spills in just weeks. Microbes hunt down and eat the toxic oil and leave only a biodegradable waste that is non-toxic to humans and marine life. Marshland and beaches were pristine again in just weeks---not years like the Exxon Valdez spill. This is the answer to save the seafood industry and all the precious creatures we are about to kill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VfypUzx1tI&feature=player_embedded#!

For all links above that don't show up as links, copy and paste the whole string into browser's address bar, some links are not recognized as such.

Although I see where you're coming from with the "we're all to blame" mentality, I cannot agree that we are all equally to blame. Some people (and organisations) must take on a large amount of the blame for bringing us to this point in 2010. This does include the oil companies, various governments (you just need to think of Reagan's removal of the solar panels on the whitehouse for a symbol of this), and others who have put a lot of effort over the last several decades into ensuring that our economies remain "addicted" to oil.

So although we are all to some extent implicated in humanity's oil addiction disaster, I think it is fair to say that some were acting as the pushers and others were (unwitting) victims.

“Officials seem most intent on retrieving the rig’s blowout preventer, a 325-ton stack of pipes and valves that failed to seal off the well when the explosion occurred on April 20. It is designed to be raised and lowered multiple times, for use on many wells.”

Please someone here who knows the oil drilling business I need some clarification. People are saying that it is too dangerous to cap the well at the well head because the bore hole may rupture at some point down the well bore hole spewing oil out in different directions causing an even larger disaster.

If this is true then what is the blow out preventer designed to do except to just plug the well at the well head--? What I am trying to say it that I believe BP is just throwing a smoke screen trying to get us to believe that they cannot “plug” the well because of the reasons stated above and if we believe this then they can continue to harvest the oil.

Is it true that plugging the well at the well head could cause ruptures down the well hole and if so then the blow out preventer would have done the same thing had it worked correctly-?

Мне кажется очень хорошо

Thank you all for an incredible amount of information. This site is INVALUABLE.
When DWH leakage started, Ixtoc 1 was the first thing I reviewed to get some perspective.
Yes, it has been totally ignored by the press (imagine that).

An earlier comment stated there had been no definitive studies of Ixtoc 1. Hmmmmm. Try Google "Ixtoc 1" look beyond the first page.

From this little gem: http://invertebrates.si.edu/mms/reports/IXTOC_exec.pdf , we find:

5 .1 IXTOC I Assessment
“…In spite of a massive intrusion of petroleum hydrocarbon pollutants from the Ixtoc I event into the study region of the South Texas Outer Continental Shelf during 1979-1980, no definitive damage can be associated with this or other known spillage events (e .g ., Burmah Agate ) on either the epibenthic commercial shrimp population (based on chemical evidence) or the benthic infaunal community. …”

“… The biological analyses conducted on the 1979 (mid-spill) and 1980 (post-spill) samples documented areawide changes in the benthic community compared with pre-spill (STOCS) data, decreases which most likely fell into the range of natural variability . No causal mechanisms for these changes are apparent from any of the data, but several possible environmental scenarios, including changes in bottom water characteristics (e .g . dissolved oxygen, salinity, or temperature) due to storm-induced changes or hypoxic conditions associated with elevated organic matter inputs from the Mississippi River, might serve as contributing factors. …”

And if you'd like to read the economic impact:

http://www.gomr.mms.gov/PI/PDFImages/ESPIS/3/3929.pdf EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
http://www.gomr.mms.gov/PI/PDFImages/ESPIS/3/3931.pdf

There's more, but you get the idea.