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

To: Triffin who wrote (4040)	5/1/2006 10:25:08 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 24210

Principles for the post-peak oil job market by Kurt Cobb Many types of jobs will cease to exist: public relations executive, marketing directors, et cetera. I think work will be very hands-on, and a lot of it will revolve around food production. -- James Howard Kunstler, 2003 When I speak before college audiences about peak oil, I often ask if there are any engineers present. I suggest that they concentrate on jobs that will produce rather than consume energy, particularly energy that is renewable and doesn't create greenhouse gas emissions. While it is difficult to tell exactly what kinds of jobs will be available in the post-peak oil age, inklings of some broad principles are coming into view. To discern those principles I propose to contrast what is valued in today's job market with what will likely be valued in a post-peak oil job market. First, let's look at what has traditionally been valued in pre-peak industrial society. William Catton, Jr. explains in his book, Overshoot, that humans engage in two strategies to enlarge the carrying capacity of their habitat: takeover and drawdown. Takeover is essentially taking over habitat from another species. That takeover might take the form of farming which essentially appropriates habitat from other animals and plants and dedicates it to crops for feeding humans or their domestic livestock. Drawdown is the second major strategy. Drawdown is the drawing down of finite resources to provide increased carrying capacity temporarily. In this case, "temporarily" can mean more than a century. The prime example is the extraction of coal, oil and natural gas to produce the energy, fertilizers and myriad other products that allow more than 6 billion people to live on our planet. It is easy to see that drawdown is, by far, the more highly rewarded activity in pre-peak society. (After all, how many billionaire farmers have been celebrated in the business pages?) Huge fortunes have been made in the fossil fuel and mining industries. Today, those industries are thought to be the industries of the past, the old economy. But, in truth, they continue to provide the basis for the so-called new economy. Without our colossal extractive industries to produce the essentials of modern civilization such as oil, copper, zinc, platinum, and iron, the new economy wouldn't even exist. In fact, much of the new economy consists of manipulating information to increase our drawdown and takeover activities. (Admittedly, some of that technology creates more efficient use of resources; but to date it has failed to reduce overall demand for resources. For why this is so, see Jevons Paradox.) The new 3D seismic surveys of the deep ocean done in search of oil and the elaborate computer-controlled processes which extract oil from the Canadian oil sands are two excellent examples of how technology is used to abet drawdown. Countless other industrial processes are also aided by new economy technologies. Those technologies both increase demand for the products of drawdown and help accelerate that drawdown to meet that demand. The post-peak oil age will in all likelihood lack the essential ingredient for ever-accelerating drawdown, i.e. cheap energy. (While it is true that knowledge can also help humans increase drawdown, it is doubtful that knowledge can grow quickly enough to offset the somewhat imminent decline in the production of oil and other fossil fuels. Even if this were the case, it would only lead to another crisis later as other resource limits are reached.) Drawdown of oil and natural gas has enabled the creation of an industrial agriculture that erodes the soil and destroys its fertility. That agriculture then attempts to make up for the lost fertility with natural gas-derived nitrogen fertilizers and oil-based pesticides. So, the loss of cheap hydrocarbon fuels and feedstocks has large implications for agricultural productivity and for the type of agriculture we will be able to practice. The end of cheap fossil fuel also has implications for the availability of water, both for irrigation and drinking. Cheap energy has led to the drawdown of many sources of water much faster than they replenish. And, the pollution that industrial societies create has made water purfication one of the largest uses of energy worldwide. These illustrations suggest that in a post-peak oil world a premium will be placed on decreasing drawdown through increased efficiency and through the outright curtailment of certain activities such as industrial farming with its heavy reliance on petrochemicals and irrigation. Takeover may also have to be curtailed in order to preserve species, land and waters which perform essential eco-services for human populations such as pollination and water retention and purification. Perhaps now we can say with a little more confidence what principles should animate those entering the post-peak oil job market in comparison to the pre-peak one: Pre-Peak Post-Peak General Principles General Principles Increase drawdown Decrease or eliminate drawdown Increase takeover Decrease takeover Detailed Principles Detailed Principles Emphasize quantity Emphasize quality Emphasize competition Emphasize cooperation Emphasize power Emphasize efficiency Mine soil nutrients Increase soil fertility Deplete finite resources Build capacity of renewable resources Shift environmental costs to public Bear all environmental costs you can't eliminate Design linear product cycle Design closed product cycle (Recycling) Build in planned obsolescence Build in long life for products Ignore necessary eco-services such as water purification and pollination Safeguard and enhance needed eco-services Focus on financial profitability Focus on ecological sustainability I don't claim this list to be exhaustive. But I believe it offers a beginning for thinking about what mindsets and attitudes we need to inculcate in those who will be faced with working in a post-peak oil world. Right now most of what people learn in preparing themselves for work has little or no relationship to our ecological destiny. That needs to change and soon. Published on 30 Apr 2006 by Resource Insights. Archived on 1 May 2006. energybulletin.net

To: Triffin who wrote (4040)	5/1/2006 10:29:56 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24210

"Taken as a group, these countries were expected by CERA to contribute 4.1 mbd of extra production by 2006, and so far they are providing 1.6, not too far from the halfway mark." Another look at near-term oil supplies by James D. Hamilton Now that the Energy Information Administration has published oil production figures for the full year 2005, I was curious to take a look at how the predictions of Cambridge Energy Research Associates are faring thus far. Source: Cambridge Energy Research Associates CERA performed a detailed field-by-field analysis of each of the major oil projects that will be coming into development over the next few years, on the basis of which CERA Chairman Daniel Yergin concluded: There will be a large, unprecedented buildup of oil supply in the next few years. Between 2004 and 2010, capacity to produce oil (not actual production) could grow by 16 million barrels a day-- from 85 million barrels per day to 101 million barrels a day-- a 20 percent increase. Such growth over the next few years would relieve the current pressure on supply and demand. Although CERA did not publicly distribute numerical values for these field-by-field assessments, I carefully eyeballed the graph on the right to come up with rough estimates of the numbers that CERA was apparently proposing for the increase in oil producing capacity between 2004 and 2006 from the eleven countries CERA believed would contribute the most. I then compared these predictions with the increase in the actual oil production for each country between 2004 and 2005 as reported by the EIA [1] [2]. Two of these important countries (Iraq and Canada) actually experienced production declines rather than increases, and Venezuela delivered essentially no increase. For the others, however, CERA does not seem to be doing too badly at this midterm review. Taken as a group, these countries were expected by CERA to contribute 4.1 mbd of extra production by 2006, and so far they are providing 1.6, not too far from the halfway mark. On the other hand, when you look at the worldwide total, the discrepancies are more significant. Worldwide, CERA said production capacity would increase by 5.5 mbd, whereas in the event, world oil production was only 1 mbd higher in 2005 compared with 2004. The latter statistic also confirms that although strong demand was the principal factor that drove oil prices higher in 2004, supply constraints were the big story in 2005. If production in these 11 countries alone was 1.6 mbd higher in 2005 than in 2004, why was production worldwide only 1 mbd higher? Basically production increases in these and other countries were offset by production declines in two key regions: output from the U.S. and the North Sea both fell by over 400,000 barrels a day in 2005 compared with 2004. One can get slightly different numbers if one interpreted CERA to have been predicting the change between, say, 2004:Q4 and 2005:Q4. In this case, Canada would indeed be judged to be up, not down, while both Saudi Arabia and world total production were essentially flat. For the U.S., the biggest story is the hurricanes, which MMS reported had resulted in a cumulative drop in production of 111.6 million barrels by January 5, 2006. If you put this on a per day basis for the entire year (111.6/365), that would explain a drop of 0.3 mbd (compared with the actual observed U.S. production decline of 0.4 mbd for 2005 as a whole). Source: Cambridge Energy Research Associates energybulletin.net