peaknix
Living Peak Oil
As many of you know, I live in Massachusetts. The farmers almanac says that this winter season is going to be a doozy (colder, more snows, especially in Feb).
There is some rumblings amongst the MA state gov re: “warning” people that their oil heating bills are going to be “bad” this year but I have not heard of any solutions. I think congress just underfunded LIHEAP so don’t look for federal help. This is simply talk talk talk, where are the initiatives?
I need help envisioning how this all might play out.
There will be successive waves of people from low income to higher scale incomes that will hit a point this winter after which they can no longer afford to pay for the next tank of heating oil, let alone feed themselves. Our oil companies in this region stopped giving credit some time ago, how many people will have space on their CCs to take up the difference?
Many of our oil companies have gone out of business so our in-state oil stock piles have also been reduced. That increases the brittle nature of our situation.
Somebody help me here.
I am having a hard time envisioning what the state gov COULD do with 100,000s of people and families that have no money for heating oil and who cant just up and leave because their jobs are HERE. You cant ask all those people to sleep in school gyms (and who is going to pay to heat those school gyms? School budgets are already overshot by many many 1000s of $$ in all towns).
Massachusetts and the Northeast is wholly NOT resilient to this and I simply can not imagine how this breakdown will happen without serious societal upheaval (tho even that is hard to see, Americans really do NOT take to the street and it will be colder out there in the whipping winds than huddled inside a cold house).
What could the contingency plan be? My frustration stems from the obvious nature of the coming problem and how there really is no way to address this issue unless you bus 100,000s of bankrupt freezing people down to South Texas to warm climate refugee camps.
What then, after surviving winter? You are left with no money, HUGE debt, how can people eat? Pay mortgages? If I can imagine this part, I am sure others can too.
I am thinking, beyond the unthinkable nature of winter in the northeast this year, there will be a sea change in the way people view the northeast as inhabitable year round.
We, me and my family, have been living without oil all summer long and minimal oil for years (we use an in-house wood stove). This has been the summer of no showers - pure misery .. warm water splashes to get clean (I have three small kids and I work full time - clean has to happen).
We will be fine because of the great loving-kindness of a family member who has helped us get the money for a high efficiency wood fired boiler that will heat our house and our water. It uses half the amount of fuel and can take girnormous uncut logs as fuel.
Some people think that cheap pellet stoves will get them through but they will find the cost of pellets shooting through the roof very quickly and also that their efficiencies will be so low that they will go through tons of pellets like they are a few buckets.
Other people think they can fire up ancient coal fired stoves that have been lurking in their Victorian basements for many decades. I think we will hear too many stories about carbon monoxide this winter, too many to bear.
Once the Olympics are done, we will be back on the road to hell as China’s industries roar back to fossil fuel eating life. India’s productivity has been suppressed during this “quiet time” in China. India too will roar back to life. Soon that new Indian micro-car will hit the market and the Indian Car Parity Disaster will be well on its way.
So, no, those lose crude prices you see right now, they are VERY temporary.
Someone, anyone, can you imagine how this is going to play out this winter in the Northeast?
I would love to hear it.
As of this writing, light sweet crude is down $4.04 for the day to $124.38/barrel. I can not help but feel an infinitesimal loosening of stress in my body (mostly in the gut) when I hear the price ticking down. I expect it to go back up and keep going, in due course, but these few days of down-tick serve to help one integrate the experience versus feeling the nail-scratching slide over the edge.
Truly, it is mostly a moment to reflect on what yet needs to be done. We need to get the funds together to get that wood fired furnace/water heating system in place, for the 4 season greenhouse in the backyard so that our garden can feed us longer/better (see this link for those details - Humble Garden) so many things yet to do.
What little we save from a slight dip in gas prices should and will be pumped into these activities.
On NPR the other day, I heard news about how the meat industry is warning that meat prices will soon jump 25% and Kraft warning that their products will jump some 20 – 25%. I have been wondering when this would finally happen, its been like waiting for a shoe to drop. They admitted in the report that costs had not been passed on to consumers in recent times but that they can no longer afford to hold back (perhaps they were waiting for an unspoken consensus for an industry wide jump so that the consumer had no where to turn – “trust” issues?)
I am sure you know, there are oil related reasons for food prices to spike (Ammonia for fertilizers require petroleum for the haber-bosch process (WIKI LINK), diesel for machinery, transport, electricity for cooling etc), there are climate change reasons for the spike – midwest’s flooding problems (one predicted aspect of climate change is focalized storm excesses leading to flooding (LINK for a bit of a review) and also extended drought), there is the impact of biofuel subsidies driving farmers to pull marginal (flood protective) lands out of fallow/conservation into monoculture of corn/soybeans and also to convert any of their other fields that may have been growing non-corn into corn, and likely other dynamics I am not yet really in touch with.
Heck even the price of popcorn in the movie theater is being impacted (though I suspect that this venue – pure luxury and compulsive eating – is likely to spike somewhat artificially). NPR reported on this on July 14, 2008:
The cost of popcorn is up. Jim Boyd, a movie theater owner in Van Wert, Ohio, says he pays 50 percent more for a bag of popcorn than he did at the beginning of 2008.
School will soon be back in session and I do not know how our local elementary school (which is chronically underfunded, across the board) will feed the kids anything but the most depleted crap. NPR did a piece on this on June 24th, 2008 (LINK)
Lennon had a taste of sticker shock this year, when milk prices rose 21 percent — an added expense of almost $60,000 to her overall budget of $3 million a year. She handled that by raising the price of the a la carte items the school cafeterias offer — like individual cookies and juice drinks. But such patches only go so far.
…
So Chicopee (MA) is finding other ways to fill the gaps: extras like Jell-O and cake are out, and Fairview cook manager Susan Lacasse says one day’s leftover spaghetti goes into the next day’s soup.
From TIME:
Higher prices are also calling into question one of the staples of kiddie cafeterias. “Do we have to really offer milk with every breakfast and every lunch we serve?” Pavel Matustik, who runs nutrition programs for five school districts in southern California, asked during his testimony before Congress Wednesday. For every penny the price of milk goes up, he added, the cost of preparing school meals increases $54 million nationally.
This is, perhaps, before the most recent statements referenced above about the 25% increase. If so, there may come a point where school lunch collapses as a viable program. I can promise you it was already on the very edge before this oil shock. The VERY edge.
The only reason why our little school district can keep it’s buses running this year and heat the buildings is because they had negotiated the price of heating fuel and diesel BEFORE the shock.
Come time for those contracts to be up, I am not certain what our town will do. Our town of 1700 people usually has to choose between paying for salt and plowing in the winter and the school or for the senior center. Soon, I think town meetings will be even MORE contentious and depressing than they usually are.
“Clop clop clop” the noise droned her to a quiet meditation as she and the horse lurched ahead of the others, a bit of a trot into some shade both she and the animal appreciated. Their makeshift wagon carried baskets, covered by white cloths, filled with aged goats cheese and fresh bread. She had pulled these toothsome grainy loaves from their earthen bread oven that morning, ducking as the poof of hot moisture blasted past the broken clay seal on the door.
She loved days like this, market days, because it was a chance to meet up with neighbors who lived on the other side of town. It never really mattered that the news seemed to stay the same – someone gave birth, someone moved away, a newcomer had settled at the homestead they claimed they had inherited when their grandmother had passed on. No real new news was fine; she had her fill of news when she was a child, back during the transition.
Her meditation must have veered toward lethargy and sleep because she awoke to the singular smell of the town reclamation facilities. Her horse, which knew the way to market better than she did, was passing what had been a landfill in previous times. She covered her nose and mouth and, even though the smell was overwhelming, stopped a moment to marvel at the operation. Above her rose a hill, shining bright and glossy in the sunlight. She didn’t remember what it looked like before the facility had been built, she only knew it with the containment dome hovering over the site.
The roundness of the dome was broken only by a smokestack, steaming from the middle. It was actually more correct to call it a steam-stack because this facility was allowed to release only water vapor. It still smelled. The smell, which must have come from something in the steam and perhaps around the pipes that emerged from the dome or when the double air-locked doors were opened, it was a heavy stench that seemed to be unique to this particular place.
At her home, garbage was really not an issue. All waste was organic and went into the compost. Ever since people began growing their own food and had to package their own products if they were going to barter them (no one sold things anymore, or very rarely), the packaging was made from things on hand like baskets or sacks. Plastics had long since been appropriated by the reclamation company.
She knew a little about what went on inside the dome. She had learned as a kid that old landfills, which had previously been liabilities (rightfully so in terms of the poisons seeping from them) were now profit centers. The impossibly large hills had been enclosed by the white domes, the overfill dirt had been peeled back and the contents sifted and then fed into the maw of the Fischer-Tropsch conversion furnaces. There, plastics and organics were transformed into SynGas. Large barrel-bellied tanker trucks would lumber up to the facility on occasion, belching acrid biodiesel haze, and cart the gas away to Boston or Worcester where it would be sold to the highest bidder. Supposedly, the state of Massachusetts used those monies for second generation transition projects but she never saw any evidence of that.
She wasn’t terribly interested in the whole thing other than to wonder how long it would take for the site to be depleted and for the whole thing to be dismantled and taken away.
She nudged her horse because the day had worn on and the market would soon open. She wanted to barter her cheeses and breads for some open pollinated barely and wheat seed and perhaps get a chance to catch the noontime concert on the green, acoustic Spanish guitar and some traveling dancers.
As I eat homegrown boiled eggs and some salad from the cafeteria, I surf the web here in the company canteen on free wireless..
As I surf sites like:
I also sit bathed in the outflow from a flatscreen TV floating from the ceiling above me, spewing CNN’s lunch hour panic.. talk of “Issue #1″ and oil prices and the fed and ads for “Clean Coal” and “Clean Air Nuclear Power” sheets down over me as I try to find some balance and resilience.
It is easy to feel overwhelmed with the normal MSM non-reporting on peak oil but the drum beat now is growing more intense by the day.
Its like this self-perpetuating feedback loop between CNN hyper-real reporting on oil shock, peak oil, the Dervae’s growing their own self sufficient world and then the greenwashing ads that are so cynical in the extreme. (Clean Coal has fallen on VERY tough times, you do not hear about this in the news, just the green washing ads).
Pre-awakened people must be experiencing an acceleration of the process, perhaps prematurely because they may not be able to reflect on what is “really” going on and perhaps they will just melt-down into a subconscious driven generalized anxiety attack.
I can not imagine a worse way to prepare the public!
As they say, failing to plan is planning for failure.
(This was cross-posted to Humble Garden and Nika’s Culinaria)
We are enjoying our independence from the food chain. We get our eggs and our milk (and now cheese) from our backyard. We eat our salads from our backyard.
If you don’t now, what are you waiting for?!
If you think food prices are high now, you will be pale with shock soon enough. Think oil-based fertilizers, oil-based pesticides, oil-run tractors and trucks, think floods, think drought, think 2008.
The seed companies are reporting a 40% rise in seed sales this year (they were shocked, didn’t see it coming, these people need to get on the web more often).
Now that the baby goats are not such babies and are fully weaned, we have more goat milk to work with. We go through less than 1 gallon of fluid goat milk a day for Baby O (who adores goat milk and is sensitive to lactose in pasteurized cow milk).
Our milking doe, Torte, gives us about one and 1/2 gallons of milk a day. Over two days, we then have one extra gallon of milk, works out nicely.
You may or may not know that it is hard to make cream or butter from goat milk because the fat doesn’t separate out (because the fat globules are smaller and stay spread out, like its been homogenized). We could make it if we bought a $400.00 cream separator but thats not going to happen! I love goat cheese just fine.
We will be getting a jersey cow/calf to have super high quality milk, cream, and butter. I can wait for that.
Back to the topic for today.
It is VERY easy to make chevre but it takes a few days, you simply have to be patient.
We are using milk we pasteurized for this batch, we may go raw with he next batch.
We used a chevre starter from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, I can not recommend them highly enough.
This little packet is enough for one gallon of milk. This could not be easier, you just bring your milk up to (or down to as the case may be) to 86 F and sprinkle the starter in. Mix well and let culture at room temperature for 12-20 hours.
The curd sets up and excludes the whey.
You then slice it up a bit so that the mass of curd is broken up and more whey is excluded.
Remember that all of the equipment being used must be sterilized.
We bought the plastic chevre molds from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company which I cleaned very well.
These are well worth the cost and will last a long time.
Using a sterilized slotted spoon, you scoop out the curds and begin to fill the molds.
One gallon of milk yielded three molds worth of cheese.
Once they are filled they go on a wire rack over a pan or bucket to catch the dripping whey, cover the tops and let sit at room temperature or in the fridge for 2 days. They will shrink a lot.
After the two days, the cups were no longer dripping and the cheese was quite firm and much dryer.
This cheese tastes unbelievably fresh and, I think, uniquely ours. Its a fantastic feeling to sit down to a salad that we grew topped with chevre we made from our own goat. I watched Torte munching on tree bark in our backyard as I nibbled on the cheese.
Resources:
The inefficiencies in the oil market could strike you dumb, honestly. I am just scratching the surface in terms of understanding the complexities and the various moving chokepoints and my brain hurts much.
One might sift through the vast quantities of fact, theory, and speculation (all of which becomes the same sickly shade of grey when you consider that none of this is a science but rather about mob rule and some of the basest of human nature) only to come up for a breath, lost in a turmoil of confusion.
Is it better to skim the top level news outlets (we know its not) or to dive deep into the technical trading deep-end where the majority of everything becomes arbitrary nothingness to even the most diligent of students.
I fear one needs a sort of economic genome project with extensive annotations and a whole new petrochemical informatics to wade through this turbulent ocean.
By way of example, not all oil is the same, as you might expect. Just as black truffles cost more than white and Matsutake mushrooms cost more than button mushrooms (like 100 to 0.01), so too does the value of oil vary from well to well.
Each well has its own special geological conditions that give rise to different oil qualities. Things like water, dirt, and sulphur contamination are considered in the grade of oil. See this link for a better understanding of Petroleum.
A barrel of Saudi Heavy crude (2.8% sulfur, 27 API gravity) is intrinsically worth less than a barrel of Nigerian Bonny Light (0.14% sulfur, 34 API), because the former will yield less high-value gasoline, diesel and jet fuel than the latter without intensive refining. But how much more a barrel of Bonny Light commands in the market depends on the relative prices of all the various petroleum products when it is sold, along with the location and availability of spare capacity in the complex refineries that have the hardware to overcome those intrinsic quality differences. SOURCE
Now, to extend this sort of analysis, the “price” for a barrel of oil from one exchange to the next is not the same either!
There is the price as it is trading on any particular day and there are “future” spot prices (as you would find on other commodities like corn or wheat or pork bellies).
I will not pretend to understand this (this is where that informatics would come in handy but what can you do!).
Today’s prices and the future price can be very different.
Now, when it comes to what a refinery pays for a barrel of crude coming in it’s doors for processing, you would think the price they pay is the going rate THAT DAY. It SEEMS that this is intuitive.
Intuition fails here though.
See below for an explanation on why the actual cost of oil going into refineries is different from what you might think (as in what you see on NYMEX, etc).
The growth of the futures exchanges over the last two decades has fundamentally changed oil trading. Most oil is now bought and sold on price formulas pegged to the futures prices, or to published market reports strongly influenced by the futures. What traders are agreeing to when they do a deal is not a fixed price, but a fixed differential above or below a particular futures contract during a set period, usually aligned with the time when the shipment will be loaded or delivered. So while these differentials fluctuate due to a variety of factors, the price that refiners pay for crude oil remains directly tied to the futures price. That means that anything that drives up the futures market, whether a disruption in supply, higher demand, or speculation by a new class of commodity investors, has a direct impact on what we all pay for the products that refineries make. SOURCE
This is an unhappy phenomenon because futures seem to be exquisitely vulnerable to the vagaries of mob action and rumor and that basest human behavior thing again (greed and panic being just two of very many).
Reminds me of Popeye’s Whimpy when he says “I’d gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today“.
That Tuesday? Its rushing right at us.
This week may be an interesting one; will we see $150/barrel this week?
Last week was a quiet one in terms of daily price extremes – a sort of psychological integration period, cooling off a bit.
This Monday AM (6-16-08), crude jumped $5.00 to a new high before the open.
LONDON, June 16, 2008 (Reuters) — Oil surged to a new record high on Monday of nearly $140 a barrel, propelled by weakness in the U.S. dollar which offset the bearish impact of plans by Saudi Arabia to boost output.
U.S. light, sweet crude for July delivery was up $3.74 at $138.60 a barrel by 1317 GMT, after falling as much as $1.40 a barrel, or about 1 percent, earlier in the session.
U.S. crude set a record high of $139.89 a barrel.
London Brent crude was up $3.05 at $138.16.
Prices leapt as the dollar fell after publication of data from the New York Federal Reserve that showed manufacturing in the state of New York contracted in June for the fourth time in five months.
“Prices rose sharply in three minutes. U.S. manufacturing data was weak, so it is pressuring the dollar down,” said Mike Wittner, energy analyst at Societe General. SOURCE
News effecting today’s price jump include:
Gasoline imports reached 338,572 metric tons in May, the highest in at least 29 months, while exports were 160,000 tons, the Customs General Administration of China in Beijing said in an e-mailed statement today. SOURCE
Oil contracts are up this Friday and there is an oil summit in Jeddah (LINK), this weekend to hash out the next set of terms.
Saudi Arabia’s invitation to producers and consumers to meet in Jeddah this weekend is in response to the growing protests from consumers over record oil prices that could threaten the health of the global economy.
…..
Saudi Arabia is the only member of OPEC with the spare capacity to boost supplies quickly and significantly. It could pump around 2 million bpd more than it does. SOURCE
In advance of this, the Saudis are releasing conflicting statements that they will raise output by either 200,000 or 500,000 bpd (barrels per day).
Just last month, the Saudis raised their output by 300,000 bpd with little fanfare (not sure how that played into the whole Bush begging visit).
It seems, not really surprisingly, that OPEC and more particularly the Saudis are allowing what looks like internal disarray to leak into the media as there are various reports that OPEC may be splintering on some level.
While they are reaping record profits, the Saudis are concerned that today’s record prices might eventually damp economic growth and lead to lower oil demand, as is already happening in the United States and other developed countries. The current prices are also making alternative fuels more viable, threatening the long-term prospects of the oil-based economy. SOURCE http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/business/worldbusiness/17oil.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin
I do not get the whole meme that the Saudis are increasing output because they are worried about a degradation in demand over the long term.
It seems intuitive, especially for a group like the Saudis who must have pondered this for some time, that demand destruction will be the norm as supply lessens, demand increases, and prices increase. Do they actually think that the world will be able to get it’s act together to switch away from fossil fuels? I think this is a false flag crafted for the average American.
The scenario for oil depletion must, on most levels and estimations, include the chaos of the destabilizing of countries over high fuel prices.
Is it a cynical assumption on my part that the Saudis will remain relatively secure (until some tipping point where the US and other players decide to appropriate their remaining oil stocks) and that the rising price of oil will compensate the lowered demand/lowered supplies?
If you feel this is not the case, please drop a comment and share your thoughts.
It is hard to miss what is happening in Spain these days.
With $10.00/gallon gas the following is happening right now:
Long lines of traffic formed at Spanish-French border crossings and television stations showed pictures of abandoned lorries with broken windscreens, lights ripped out and tyres punctured after they were attacked for attempting to defy the strike. SOURCE
By Thursday June 13, 2008:
Spain promised “zero tolerance” for violence by striking truckers after a string of incidents including an arson attack on a strike-breaking truck that left the driver with burns to 25 percent of his body.
…
The government said it had arrested 71 picketers for offences including intimidating non-striking drivers since the stoppage by 75,000 truckers began on Sunday night to call for government help to cope with high fuel prices. SOURCE
Is even harder to stem the small thread of panic that you might feel if you see their troubles as an early harbinger of what collapse looks like in the western world. It really mirrors the doomer projections in so many peak oil collapse scenarios.
Humans are so predictable aren’t we?
Some people will wonder if it will remain in the Spanish context, there are signs that this contagion is spreading with similar strikes across the globe:
As I sit in my peaceful and quiet spot on the eastern seaboard of the US, far from these worries, its hard to conceptualize the upheaval that people are experiencing across the world. We, so far, are very insulated from this vibe. I can complain about having to take ice cold showers and wash clothes and dishes with the same frigid water due to our inability to buy oil for our water heater system or our utter inability to find assistance to replace this aging and inefficient system with a better alternative.
At least I can go to the gas station to buy my small stop-gap fillups for my very inefficient gas consuming vehicle without the threat of violence. I am certainly grateful for this!
I do recognize though that this is a gift of a democracy and government that works very hard to maintain our status quo. Would not do to allow the consumers to become afraid of consuming.
By that I mean that shopping is the opiate of the masses and this stupor must be maintained at all costs. We are accustomed to a smooth one-click, express lane, fully stocked shopping experience. Its practically a pillar of the American Way ™. Any degradation of that high-maintenance experience WILL be noticed.
Not that Americans would strike.
At the moment, I am tending toward the notion that we will be the frogs in the beaker, not jumping out, even when the water comes near to a boil.
Its a false “we” though. Of course, there really is no monolithic “we”. There are many different types of communities (transition towns, bolt hole communes, etc) that are gaining popularity even as many many more people go on shopping as usual.
UPDATE:
I am updating this diary because (1) there is new news (as always) and (2) DailyKos commentors contributed so much in the comments! I am going to put some of it here. I recommend anyone visiting this diary for the first time to read the comments at the DailyKos cross posting of this post for sure.
It seems the strike is not ACTUALLY over…
SPAIN: Truck Strike Continues, Despite Deal
“MADRID, Jun 12 (IPS) - Although the Spanish government reached an agreement with the main truckers’ unions, around 10 percent of drivers continued blocking roads Thursday on the fourth day of a strike over soaring oil prices.”
…
“But truckers who rejected the agreement with the government continue blocking important access routes to cities like Madrid and Barcelona, and attacking non-striking drivers, mainly keeping them from delivering goods and supplying large supermarket chains. “
…
“
Trade ties with Latin America have enabled the government to get around some of the effects caused by the truckers’ stoppage and by a partial fishermen’s strike.Planes from Chile have brought in frozen hake, for instance. And the rate of deliveries from that country has not slowed down, since Madrid has 200 storage chambers capable of holding 200 tons of frozen fish each.
But the roadblocks have not only affected food supplies. The pharmaceutical industry has warned that the transport strike could affect distribution of medicines to pharmacies around the country.
Prime Minister Zapatero said Thursday that everything was under control, and that timely measures had been taken. But Mariano Rajoy, the leader of the centre-right Popular Party — the main opposition force — retorted that the country was in total chaos.” SOURCE
“Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said she hoped the “12 percent” still on strike would come on board.” SOURCE
A quick look at El Mundo today and you can see that things are not all sweetness and light. After all, the news at the end of the week was that SOME truckers (it seems not the ones actually striking) got some consessions. Sounds like a bait and switch of some oddness.
See this article about the looming trucker protest in Madrid:
I am not finding a whole lot more via googling at this time, might get more in the AM.
Various commentors claimed that the action was all over, siting Spanish news from within Spain (en espanol):
Article 1
Read another post on The Oil Drum: Europe on their take on the Spanish “situation” - Post Peak Iberia
Read about how Paris is being impacted these days by high oil prices. This link is posted up before the onset of potential French trucker strikes - LINK
calipygian shared his/her experience that is illustrative of recent changes in the Spanish economy
“prices have inflated in Spain over the last decade, when I was stationed at the Navy Base in Rota in 2001, I was getting appx 500 plus dollars/month for overseas housing allowance, rent plus utilities, and that got me a three bedroom apartment on the beach with underground parking.
Now a single E-6 gets $2,630/month rent and utilities. That a %500 increase in seven years.
I didn’t get a cost of living allowance, or maybe a hundred or two dollars a month, I cant remember, but if I got COLA, it wasn’t significant.
Now the COLA is $28/a day. $850/month.”
TigerMom shared a vignette of how things are going in South America:
“Truckers were on strike here in Chile for several days because of rising petrol prices. It looked like it would go on for some time until President Bachelet announced a USD $1 billion subsidy to help offset the rising costs of fuel and the accompanying fuel taxes.
Same thing was going on in Bolivia. I’m not sure if it is continuing, though.
The rising fuel costs, and subsequent rising costs to food, are being felt down here, albeit not as urgently as in other parts of the world. However, the inflationary costs are becoming quite clear, as Chile just reported the inflation rate over the past year was 8.9%! Combine that with a declining dollar here, and we are a bit screwed. My husband estimates we have lost approximately 10% in income due to these factors.
I think we have only seen the tip of the iceberg.”
Cliss added an excellent synopsis of the State of Affairs in Spain:
“Spain has some enormous problems which come as hugs blows. I was there a few years, ago, and I was struck by the horrific desertification they are going through.
Here are the worst issues:1. Spain has had a real estate bubble. They’ve been overbuilding for years. They are dealing with the same subprime housing meltdown that’s happening in the U.S. It’s expected to devastate real estate prices, and ultimately the economy.
2. Spain is dealing with desertification. Due to global weather changes, Spain is drying up. Their precious vineyards are shriveling. They are trying to cope, by moving their vines to higher elevations and hoping
3. Spain’s crops are all at risk: olive groves, cork trees, vineyards, other produce. They are trying to introduce drought-resistant plants, but so far the desert is moving in faster than they can run from it.
4. Spain along with Europe is dealing with higher gas prices. It’s affecting their fishing industry, the trucking industry which is really vulnerable right now.
It’s just a tough situation with not many solutions in sight.
And Yeah they are the harbinger for what’s to come for the rest of Europe. And here.”
Peak Oil Resources (info and action, take your pick):
World Without Oil
Relocalize
Transition Towns
People, Americans, actually DO get peak oil, they know it on some level. Today, Sunday June 8th 2008, CNN ran a poll asking if we think gas prices will back off or “get worse”.
Looks like 95% are getting it
Its not news that this past week, especially this last Friday, was a watershed moment. Perhaps people spent this weekend actually thinking beyond their next fillup of gas. Perhaps not.
If you have begun thinking about peak oil, it will get depressing, I promise.
Your human after all right?
I have pasted an interested and relevant youtube video below that might be of some help in beginning to process the concept of peak oil and dealing with the natural state of despair that may follow.
Whats that frequent painful burning sensation you feel? Is it keeping you up at night, does it make you go more often? Are you self-medicating more now?
Yeah, I thought so.
So am I.
I too am guilty of only filling my gas tank half full because the financial and emotional violence of paying for a full tank of gas is too much to bear.
It makes no sense. It’s a pre-peak and peri-peak oil full-on-consumptionist cognitive dissonance.
Its one of those stupid riddles wrapped in an enigma stuffed under your car seat, getting stinkier and stinkier every day.
When I pump, I pay cash only, I pay first, and then I literally look somewhere else and not at the very slow moving gauge that is telling me how little gas I am buying for how much.
If I make the mistake of looking at the pump I get the shakes and blank out into flashbacks to the early to mid-90s when I pumped gas in Druid Hills, Atlanta for like 74 cents a gallon (and THAT felt like robbery then, honest).
If I am getting more than $20.00 my pumping lasts longer and so do my flashbacks.
As I clutch the pump-grip, grimacing, my flashback takes me deeper to the days when I only had a scooter and I would wait in line at the gas station to pay the cashier a whole quarter for my full tank. I enjoyed the nasty looks from the motorists.
When the pump jumps as it is killed, I come too. I now have half a tank. Whew, I will live to drive another few miles so I can get to work.
Toward the end of my pay period, I drive home white-knuckled as I stare riveted at the gas gauge. I fear that what I look like is someone watching the wolves in the distance, baying, circling, waiting for my carcass to drop, still warm.
I have YET to get to the point where I run out of gas on my commute.
This is not because I didn’t push it to the edge. I have had a few drives home where I had literally 40 cents in the bank account, one dollar 10 cents in my purse for toll and the gas gauge was pegging UNDER empty.
The only way I got home that day was because I was on the cell with my husband who had to reassure me that those gauges are built so that you actually have SOME gas left. It was like he had to talk me down from the edge. It felt like it.
It seems like I have not been the only fool with such silly cognitive dissonance (and at times, literally the inability to cope with the two realities of no money for gas and having to get to work so I can afford has).
The other day on CNN.com, they ran a story “Running on empty: With less in tank, more get stranded” where AAA is reporting that more and more motorists are driving with less and less fuel.
Research from The Nielsen Co. shows that drivers have been making more frequent trips to the pump but limiting how much they put in the tank.
Convenience stores, which sell about 80 percent of the nation’s gas, are seeing fewer fill-ups, said industry spokesman Jeff Lenard.
“When the pump hits a certain dollar amount now, you’re seeing more customers stop,” said Lenard, with the National Association of Convenience Stores. “They’re purchasing fewer gallons.”
And that means playing Russian roulette with the gas gauge.
In Dallas, Courtesy Patrol — a roadside assistance program operated by the sheriff’s department — reports a doubling in the number of daily fuel calls from stranded motorists in recent months. Sheriff Lupe Valdez herself recently came to the aid of a mother and her two children who had run out of gas along an interstate.
In some cases, motorists have gotten stuck in the middle of the highway, creating a dangerous situation, said Lonnie Lankford, a Courtesy Patrol shift leader. “It’s just breaking the backs of the people, these gas prices,” he said.
and ..
“We’re seeing a lot of frustrated motorists who are trying to cut corners, and this is one way they’re doing it,” said AAA Mid-Atlantic spokeswoman Catherine Rossi. “But they’re shooting themselves in the foot, or the wallet, in the long run.”
That’s because perpetually running on fumes can damage a car’s fuel pump — requiring repairs that make a full tank of $4 gas seem like a bargain.
So, their painful frequent burning sensations are so bad that they find themselves brought to a complete halt, brought back to the here-and-now where gas is not a vague vaporous entity but a real thing that has vaporized completely, leaving them at the mercy of strangers.
Yeah, that pain.. it won’t go away today or tomorrow. I self-medicate by oblivious daydreams at the pump and then ignoring the gas gauge.
I really do not want to be one of those people at the side of the road.
I can’t even afford AAA.