Kunstler: Blowing Green Smoke

[Strelnikov_]

Sometimes off base. Always entertaining.

More than just the always enjoyable (for me anyway) Friedman bashing, what I feel is important is that Kunstler introduces the concept of the 'export crises phase' of oil production.

As a country that imports more than 60% of its petroleum fix, and consumes 30% of the worlds export capacity, I am afraid that the 'import crises is going to hit us faster and harder than most can imagine.


http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/


I'm fond of saying that if America could harness the power it wastes blowing smoke up its own ass, we could magically escape our energy-and-climate-change predicament. I say this repeatedly to counter the increasing volume of lies we tell ourselves in order to maintain the illusion that we can continue living the way we do. Like so many other commentators suffering from cranial-rectosis, Friedman believes that we can keep on running our Happy Motoring utopia if we just switch fuels.

. . .

The smoke Mr. Scott blew up Friedman's ass is leaking out of the columnist's pie-hole here. I've been to dozens of permitting battles over Wal-Mart in the planning boards of America, writing on suburban sprawl, and I can assure you that the the pro Wal-Mart factions in these fights uniformly couldn't give a fuck about anything except saving five bucks on a plastic salad shooter ("we want bargain shopping!!!"). Not to put too fine a point on it, but these are precisely the members of the American public who sold their own local economies down the river, who led their towns into destitution, and who believe with all their hearts that it is possible to get something for nothing (which is why this large cohort of citizens spends so much of its meager income on lottery tickets, trips to Las Vegas, and gets suckered into ruinous "miracle" mortgages).

Friedman's invocation of Wal-Mart here offers another layer of misunderstanding from the work he is best-known for, his best-selling book, The World is Flat, which asserts that globalism is now a permanent feature of the human condition. I demur from this view. I think we will discover (probably painfully) that globalism was a set of transient economic relations made possible by a half century of cheap oil and relative peace between the great powers, and that enterprises that rely on these transient mechanisms -- such Wal-Mart, with its 12,000-mile merchandise supply chain to China, and its "warehouse on wheels" of tractor-trailor trucks circulating incessantly on America's interstate highways -- will be on their knees in a few years as we enter the export crisis phase of post-peak terminal oil depletion and the great powers of the world act with increasing desperation to compete over the remaining supplies.

For someone operating at the top of journalism's food chain, Friedman is astoundingly ignorant. He asserts at another point in this article that climate change will require us to "eplace 1,400 large coal-fired plants with gas-fired plants." Earth to Tom: America's natural gas supply is arguably more tenuous and problematic than its oil supply. To put it bluntly, over the next five years, we will fall off a cliff with natural gas. Apparently Friedman hasn't heard. Nor are we going to make up for this loss by importing liquid natural gas from distant lands. Nor would it make any sense to burn expensive imported methane gas to run power generation turbines. So, you see, there is no chance whatsoever that we will do what Friedman suggests. In fact, the 17 percent of all electric power that we currently get from gas will be lost to us in the near future, which could leave us with Third World style electric service. (Incidentally, the terminal decline of our natural gas supply also means we will lose control of the crucial resource used for making nitrogenous fertilizers, with self-evident further implications for our crop yields and our ability to feed ourselves or manufacture alternative motor fuels.)


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http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/oiltrade.html

All in Mbbl/dy

Top World Oil Net Exporters, 2005

Saudi Arabia 9.1
Russia 6.7
Norway 2.7
Iran 2.6
United Arab Emirates 2.4
Nigeria 2.3
Kuwait 2.3
Venezuela 2.2
Algeria 1.8
Mexico 1.7
Libya 1.5
Iraq 1.3
Angola 1.2
Kazakhstan 1.1
Qatar 1.0

=====

Above represents 39.9 Mbbl/dy of 42 Mbbl/dy world export market
18.7 Mbbl/dy of above in Persian Gulf region


Top World Oil Net Importers, 2005

United States 12.4
Japan 5.2
China 3.1
Germany 2.4
South Korea 2.2
France 1.9
India 1.7
Italy 1.6
Spain 1.6
Taiwan 1.0


Top World Oil Consumers, 2005 (Domestic production in parans.)

United States 20.7 (8.3 - 40%)
China 6.9 (3.8 - 55%)
Japan 5.4 (0.2 - 4%)
Russia 2.8
Germany 2.6
India 2.6
Canada 2.3
Brazil 2.2
Korea, South 2.2
Mexico 2.1
France 2.0
Saudi Arabia 2.0

[depakid]

1. Friedman is astoundingly ignorant.

As they say, the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree.

[ramapo]

2. Not sure if I should laugh or cry

I'm not sure which is worse, Friedman's sometimes astoundingly ignorant article or the popular acclaim that I'm reading about it. I guess I should be happy that somebody has written a somewhat serious article addressing the environmental and energy problems facing us. But reading this piece makes me wonder if I'm in some kind of time warp or something.

First he writes, "We need the first environmental president. We don’t just need a president who has been toughened by years as a prisoner of war but a president who is tough enough to level with the American people about the profound economic, geopolitical and climate threats posed by our addiction to oil — and to offer a real plan to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels."

Now I seem to remember a President Carter who leveled with the American people nearly 30 years ago. Carter was thrown under the bus in favor of happy talk Reagan who promptly dismantled the meager beginnings that Carter had made towards breaking our addiction to oil. We've spent the time since racing in the wrong direction.

Then he talks about how we screwed up with the massive move from rails to highways and sprawl. No argument there. But then he writes, "I am not proposing that we radically alter our lifestyles. We are who we are — including a car culture. "

So first Friedman wants a President who will level with the American people and then he writes that we are who we are and forget about changing. How about a reality check? It is precisely this delusional thinking that is our biggest problem. Somehow it will be possible to eliminate all the problems caused by our culture by sticking with it? I contend that profound threats require profound actions.

If I believed for a second that Americans would give up their SUVs and other gas guzzling vehicles in favor of small, electric or hybrid cars, then I might put some stock in Friedman's assertions. But we've already proved that isn't going to happen, not without a radical change in costs or attitudes.

Friedman does manage to mention one inconvenient truth when he writes, "But here’s the really inconvenient truth: We have not even begun to be serious about the costs, the effort and the scale of change that will be required to shift our country, and eventually the world, to a largely emissions-free energy infrastructure over the next 50 years." Yeah he gets it but then he babbles on about how Americans think we're already the "Green" generation. Perhaps he's being gentle but we're more like the generation that squandered an opportunity to avoid this huge mess that we're in today, a mess that gets deeper by the second. Our culture thinks that holding some concerts in arenas across the world is a serious start towards addressing our problems. Great, be sure to take your SUV.

Then he talks about the seven wedges. He almost gets something going here but he seems to buy into the ethanol fantasy and hasn't heard that natural gas isn't exactly a sustainable resource.
At least he acknowledges that conservation is an important wedge, although that would mean we actually might have to temper our lifestyles.

Thankfully he does address the fact that we need a President who has the guts to actually ask Americans to do something difficult, something he rightly says is lacking in not only GW Bush but all the current contenders for his job.

He concludes by writing that we need to become the greatest generation by becoming the greenest generation. I hate to be pessimistic but my generation was there for the first Earth Days. Great fun but not as nice as the SUV that you can use to drive to the grocery store four blocks away while the kids watch a DVD in the backseat. We are who we are. That is a big part of the problem and now the rest of the world is trying to emulate us.

I think I've been watching the world for too many years. So much time has been squandered, so many opportunities wasted. I'd love to believe that we're in a time of a new beginning. A time in which something might actually get accomplished. Sorry to say I have a deep sense of hopelessness. There will be lots of talk, competing arguments, and little to no action. One day action will be forced upon us and things will change but not by our choice.