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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (2722)	10/20/2005 8:09:50 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 24231

Purpose of this document This document is intended to interest a few researchers in a project to create an emergency relocalization plan for Tompkins County, New York. The Editor, who has experience in the development of collaborative large-scale research and publication efforts, proposes to lead the volunteer participants in an initiative named the Tompkins County Relocalization Project. The purpose of the Project is to research and document an emergency plan for relocalizing the production and distribution of essential goods and services in Tompkins County in response to an economic crisis precipitated by an irreversible, perpetually increasing rise in the price of oil, a crisis that now appears to many of us to be inevitable and not much longer in coming. A basic assumption of the Project is that the County, like other governmental bodies and the American people generally, will not be willing to undertake realistic measures to deal with the problems caused by the end of cheap oil until an emergency economic situation is already upon us. In other words, the TCRP does not assume that any of the sensible measures that could now be taken to ameliorate the coming crisis will, in fact, be implemented, but rather acknowledges that we will probably arrive at the day of reckoning unprepared and looking for a plan. The purpose of the Project is to be able to produce that plan without further delay. Perhaps the reader remembering recent events can compare this to preparations for a hurricane; prevention of the hurricane is not within the scope of the plan to deal with it. Another basic assumption of this paper is that the reader is already familiar with most facts of the current situation and just needs a quick overview of the direction adopted here to set the stage for the work ahead, which begins with the outline of research questions in Section 2. Therefore no attempt has been made in this paper to cite specific sources. All that’s intended here is a fair summary, not an authoritative reference. Properly annotating an introduction for the TCRP itself is considered a task for the Project. Readers skeptical of any of the assertions made in this overview are strongly urged to follow up with the sources cited at the end of Section 1. ===================================================== The problem of peak oil The phrase “peak oil” refers to the point at which the rate of worldwide oil production begins to decrease. Many independent petroleum experts predict that we will reach this point by the end of the decade — perhaps as soon as 2007. This doesn’t mean that we’re about to run out of oil. But it does mean that we’re about to run out of cheap oil — an event with enormous consequences to our way of living that could prove catastrophic if measures are not taken at the local level to prepare for them. Most thinking people already know two essential facts about oil: first, that there is a finite amount of it, and second, that we’re using it up. But most of them don’t understand how oil depletion actually works. They look at the “known reserves,” estimate the current rate of consumption, divide one number by the other, and get the usual answer: about 40 years before the oil runs out. In fact, consumption is not constant, and if conservative estimates of demand growth are figured in, the real number would be closer to 25 years. Fortunately — at least for anyone under the age of 50 — this is not what’s actually going to happen. Oil is not something that comes out of the ground at a constant rate till one day it’s suddenly gone, like gas running out from a gas tank. It’s more like a sponge full of water. Getting the first bit of water out requires only very slight pressure. Then you have to squeeze harder and harder to keep up the flow. Finally, you give up, but there’s still plenty of moisture left in the sponge. At the worldwide level, we’re at the point where we’ve gotten about half of the “water” out of the sponge — about one trillion barrels out of a worldwide total of two trillion that will ever be in existence. That first half was the easy part, and what we got was the best stuff. From here on, it’s going to get harder and harder to extract usable oil — or to put it in economic terms, more and more expensive. In physical (as opposed to economic) terms, oil depletion can best be understood in terms of something called EROEI — Energy Return On Energy Invested. For something to be a source of energy, you have to get more energy out of it than it took to obtain it. (This is why, contrary to popular belief, hydrogen is in practice not a source of energy; it always takes more energy to obtain hydrogen than you can ever get out of it.) Oil used to have an EROEI of about 30; that is, the energy of one barrel of oil was sufficient to extract, refine, and distribute the energy of 30 barrels of oil. That ratio is now down to about 4, and falling. Eventually we’ll reach the point where it will take more energy to get the oil out of the ground (and refined and transported) than the energy we actually get out of the oil. At that point, oil will cease to be a source of energy. There will still be plenty left from which to make chemicals and plastics, but it will be enormously expensive. ibiblio.org