Praying for lower Gas Prices...

There was a story heading around about groups praying to lower gas prices. I scoffed. You can't really lower the gas prices the amount you can pump depends on the sources you have and even pumping as hard as we can we only get less than what we pumped back in 2006 and the rate has started to decrease. With increasing demand the price of gasoline and oil more directly is going to continue to go higher and higher without fail or end in sight.

But, the Lord works in mysterous ways. They started praying as national gas prices were at $3.53/gallon. It was near 4 dollars when the story was being picked up nationwide. Today the national gas prices have fallen below $1.80/gallon.

Wow. How did God do it?




That's the DOW Jones from May 2008 until today. Crashing the world's economy reduces demand. If you don't have a job, you don't have to drive there.

I was clearly wrong. I lacked imagination as to how gas prices could ever be lowered given increasing demand and stalled output. I figured that peak oil would crush us under the mighty and clear implications that we were wanted more of a limited resource than could be produced. I simply didn't consider crashing the world's economy.

"When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers." - Oscar Wilde.

Wind blew down my internet for a day.

I nearly went insane.

I think there is some issue with internet addiction, if being unconnected causes such utter turmoil. For example, a good solid 40% of my thoughts ended with "but I can't do that because I don't have internet." -- I don't think this is healthy. I pride myself on being ready if I ever fall into some kind of timewarp and being ready for transport into the past. I even kind-of-sort-of want a smallpox vaccine just so that I'd be safe from the disease without needing to find a dairy maid with cow pox. However, if transported into the past, I'd go crazy without internet then I certainly don't want to fall into a scientifically impossible reordering of the universe.

I am unprepared for this course of (impossible) events.

I probably couldn't even manage to live through 1998 internet. What good are secret keywords (they've been the same for a decade or so now/no I'll never tell you them), that only I know so that I can identify time-travelers from the future, (including myself) if timetraveling leads to saninternetsanity?

Sure, I never bother to prepare for depression era financial collapse or post-peak breakdown of a world unable to dig energy out of the ground, or even a global warming run away world where climate change kicks off a chain reaction of accelerated heating and leads to a post apocalyptic world of subterranean existence as actual and real possibilities... but time travel? I thought I was prepared for and it seems that I would be utterly time-shocked.

Germination of Oil Age

Plant sprouting like all processes of work requires energy. The energy comes stored in the seed which has a bit of fat (oil) which helps the seed to grow to the surface at which point it starts photosynthesizing light which allows it to grow into a large mature plant.

This is a great metaphor for the oil age. We exploited energy from coal, oil, natural gas, which was simply trapped under ground and created initially by photosynthesis millions of years ago. Whereas at some point that bit of cheap no-work-to-get energy goes away and we really need to start making our own.

-- Great metaphor, crappy point, worse post.

Forecast sites seem to agree... the presidential race is boring right now.

I'm a big fan of Electoral-Vote.com and okay with fivethirtyeight.com both of which have Obama holding strong in polling at 300-330 ish range. The predictions hasn't changed much and as far as McCain goes he doesn't seem to have much of a message as of yet.



I watched this Republican Spot like three times and I'm still confused as to how stupid I'm suppose to be. Zounds, alternative energy and drilling, caring about climate change and drilling, an ineffective suggestion of a gas tax and drilling... and Obama... that bastard opposes drilling. We might find 20 million barrels of oil or something! That could have zero impact on the price of gasoline for a decade... and massive impact on our shores for a long time.

With the price of oil at present. It's going to start being cost effective to slant drill ANWR soon. 7 billion barrels of oil at 200 a barrel is 1.4 trillion dollars.

We might be a bit more screwed than you think

Droughts - from Spain to the south-east US to northern Africa are suffering drought. Mostly because last year was the hottest year on record and the year before that was the hottest year on record. This year is shaping up to be the hottest year on record and on a global scale that means global problems as the crops fail and lead food shortages.

Food riots - It turns out that people like to eat food and when they can't eat food they break stuff. Why don't they just sit there and die like good little people. Just because you ate last week doesn't mean you get food this week. Sure, you barely made enough to buy a bowl of rice and since the price of rice has tripled you can afford three times as much rice (I took a lot of math in college).

Aid workers are worried... at least they are when they aren't sexually abusing children.

"They offered us 100 Haitian gourdes ($2.80) and some chocolate if we would suck them. I said, 'No,' but some of the girls did it and got the money."

It doesn't help at all that the US is turning our food (we eat corn, everything is corn) into ethanol to augment our gasoline in what might be a break even process to fuel our cars. This is useful in several ways.
1) It doesn't work. It takes as much energy as we get out to get it in.
2) It exacerbates the food shortages and price spikes by limiting the supply of food.
3) It takes a massive amount of water, which as we see above, we don't have very much of.

In the US we pump a lot of ground water from underground lakes. We use about a gallon of water to make a teaspoon of ethanol.

Which brings us back to price of gasoline which is closely tied to the price of oil. We are running out of light crude. So we need to use the dirtier sources. For now that means pumping the gunk out of the bottom of rigs we stopped using and exploiting the tar sands. Soon it will mean getting massive amounts of oil from the oil shale. Ironically at $150 a barrel we actually are set to become energy independent. The US has so much oil shale that we could effectively gas up our Hummers for decades. The gas is going to cost $15 a gallon, but it'll be American gas! We should, as a result of our policies allow farmers to sell their products at a premium (the reason there are so many advocates for ethanol) and become energy independence. Be careful what you wish for.


Oil Use->Global Warming
Coal Use->Global Warming
Global Warming->Drought
Drought->Water Use
Drought->Crop Failure
Crop Failure->Food Shortage
Food Shortage->Food Riots
Oil Use->Peak Oil
Peak Oil->Oil Prices
Oil Prices->Food Prices
Food Prices->Food Shortage
Food Shortage->Sexual Abuse
Ethanol->Food Prices
Ethanol->Drought

From hummers to hummers, we're a little bit fucked.

Prediction, by Jan-2009: $200 a barrel for Oil

Just putting it on the record.

By the way, look at the link for this article and you can tell if I edited.

Predictions of the Past.

http://deepbutter.blogspot.com/2006/06/after-al-gore-bill-clinton-takes.html

Bill Clinton, half-way through 2006, made the prediction that: “I don’t know if they’re overstating their reserves,” Clinton replied. He added that he expects oil prices will reach US$100 per barrel “in five years or less”.

-- Hm. One and a half years. That's kind of spooky.


PEAK OIL! PEAK OIL! PEAK OIL! PEAK OIL! PEAK OIL!
EEEEEEEEEECK.

Seriously though, we're kind of screwed on that front.

World Oil Officially Peaked.

It's about time. World oil peaked and now we are all dooomed!

Really it means that oil prices will slowly increase from now until when oil isn't economical to pump. More and more as the price goes up we will get more and more from the oil sands, which is massive though dirty and a pain to get. If anything touches supply oil prices will skyrocket. Oil prices are currently at 90+ dollars a barrel.

This may already sound familiar... that's because it peaked in 2006. It just takes a while to confirm.

Three bucks a gallon is letting us down easy...

For years people have known that there would be a point when the supply would be unable to meet the demand for oil products and it would be be long before we run completely out of the stuff. Though, the run away prices would be a little hard to deal with. A couple years back after Oil first hit $45 dollars a barrel I predicted that it would never fall back below $35 dollars again. I daresay that claim seems a little tame now.

Thankfully the dire predictions of peak oil seem to fizzle a bit and Canada is letting us down easily. The tar sands give us plenty of oil, though it's dirtier and more expensive. Peak Oil isn't the end of oil, rather the end of cheap oil. And the more we get from the tar sands, the more that become apparent.

A lot was made concerning that recent finds in the Gulf of Mexico, usually along the lines of see there's still oil to be found. Though the supporters of Peak Oil are right to point out that that isn't cheap oil. It's quite telling that the oil companies are going back to the old spots they gave up on, and drilling them again.

Don't get cozy with three dollars a gallon, it will continue upwards. Though, slower than it would otherwise, and rather fast after Hurricane Dean messes up the Gulf.