“Since these numbers are unambiguous and readily available, why would Republicans continue to advocate for drilling?”

Because most folks can’t be bothered with facts (willful ignorance is so much more fun) and besides, along with facts come responsibilities, and most folks don’t like them either. Unfortunately the GOP caught on to this years ago and plays it for all it’s worth. That’s why they advocate drilling. They’re simply tickling receptive ears -- sound energy policy be damned.

This also fits with my argument that this is why wing nut radio is so successful. Easy solutions shilled with insult and derision will always trump tough explanations served straight up. And when political discourse becomes just one more commodity, this is what you get: political policies that pander to a largely ill informed society.

Debating where and when to drill for oil seems a bit like trying to address the drug "problem" by tightening law enforcement against the supply side. As long as unlimited demand is there, NOTHING else matters. If the US does not drill, foreign folks will be happy to supply our endless desire for gasoline at whatever price we gasoline addicts are willing to pay. We get poorer, they become obscenely rich and powerful.

How about a substantial federal gasoline tax increase ($1.50 per gallon to start, increased aggressively for ten or twenty years) for the express purpose of discouraging consumption, with the proceeds used to rebuild infrastructure and address other critical needs?

As demand drops, this talk of drilling on the beaches or in the wildlife refuges will disappear. Until demand drops, our junkie gasoline economy will go to any and every length to supply our craving. But adopting a consumption tax on gasoline would require an ENERGY POLICY, which causes both Dems and Repubs to run for the shadows like cockroaches on a sunny day.

The solutions will be painful. Just look at our local picture. One plant closed in Eugene, dumping over a thousand out of jobs. Another closure up here, going overseas. Another few hundred-plus. The line for Medicaid has again moved up, leaving more services than ever before below the line of what will be covered under any circumstances. And the roles are closed, no matter how poor you are or jobless. Closed. No room, nohow.

Meanwhile, we must build trains. We must build beautiful, attractive, enjoyable neighborhood solutions to the increasingly pressing transit problem. Huge costs. Aesthetically pleasing. NEEDED.

No bump in jobs noted, really. Existing workforce already PT or threatened with being out of work desperate for those jobs, contractors skating on a dime grabbing every extra quarter for now. We must suffer the pain of comparing where one dollar goes and where it does not go.

This is going to be incredibly painful and warlike to solve this problem, it will require huge amounts of commitment and high-touch communication skills.

Building your communication skills here, if that is what you are doing, robust discourse and an effort to understand alternate value-sets -- we might just get'er done here in OR, despite the fact that we have been in an Oregon-style recession since at least 2000.

Jeff,

I know your post was concentrated on oil, but you didn't mention a really important related subject: peak everything. Most of what has been easily available materials to keep a complex society operating are getting scarce and harder to obtain, and that is related to oil production. Everything is getting harder to get to because we have used it up and it takes more oil energy to get what is left. We simply do not have a never ending supply of the stuff and if we go on some kind of big change over in any form to substitute for oil, that means we have to have more of the stuff to make it possible. There is no such thing as free energy. There are severe problems with all of the schemes involved in the substitution that technology is not going to overcome despite the wistful thinking and the technologically based society.

There simply are problems for which there is no solution and the American "get er done" isn't going to solve them. Contrary to the "American way of life is non negotiable" theme, it is irreversibly going to change. If we developed a cheap car (under $15,000) with exceptional gas mileage (100m/g) we don't have the resources available to replace the ones we currently have. Sort of like declaring we will end starvation by having a refrigerator in every home in the world. That would manage to use up every bit of raw material on the earth.

Big changes on the way. Be interesting to see how it plays out.

Jeff Alworth: The evils of our "addiction to oil" are well-documented. JK: Can you at least admit that it is actually a free people choosing the best way to accomplish their goals? To deny that is to deny that people should be free to make their own choices, their own trade-offs between the expense of gas and the time and money saved by using it. (The simplistic goal of reducing oil consumption is, well simplistic.)

We pay for a gallon of gas because it is the cheapest and fastest way to travel 22 miles in the average car, or 40+ miles in a hybrid. (A hybrid even uses less energy than mass transit to move one person one mile.) This lets people reduce their housing expense (saving money for family vacations, books or a better school for the kids). It also lets people move from the drug infested, lousy inner city schools to first class schools in the burbs - where would you put your kids?

Its not about oil, its about prosperity. Its about comfort. Its about getting things done quickly. All of these add up to a high standard of living. Are you saying that everyone should give up their standard of living to satisfy your vision of how the world should be?

Thanks JK

Holy Cow! I agree with JK. Could the apocalypse be far behind?

JK: Can you at least admit that it is actually a free people choosing the best way to accomplish their goals?

A free people being fed a line of horse shit by the corporate propaganda organs and Madison Avenue ad agencies whose sole purpose is to steer you away from the truth and lead you through the looking glass into a wonderland, where if you drink the right beer you get the girl of your dreams. A wonderland where a pill solves every problem or a new car puts you on the road of happiness. A wonderland of facades and shallowness built on the premise that money can buy you love. Added and abetted by their Quislings in Congress.

"What's good for General Motors is good for America." -Charles Erwin Wilson GM CEO 1941-1953 (A misquote from his confirmation hearing for Sec. Def.. He answered when asked if as secretary of defense he could make a decision adverse to the interests of General Motors, Wilson answered affirmatively but added that he could not conceive of such a situation "because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.")

He also told the Army Ordinance Board that in order to prevent a return to the Great Depression, the United States needed "a permanent war economy." Wiki link.

The game is rigged and we happily go along with it like good little drones. They don't care. Whoever said "Uncontrolled growth is the philosophy of a cancer cell", got it right.

Since the first amphibians crawled out of the slime We've been struggling in an unrelenting climb We were hardly up and walking before money started talking And it's said that failure is an awful crime Well it's been that way for a millennium or two But now it seems that there's a different point of view If you're a corporate titanic and your failure is gigantic Down to congress there's a safety net for you - I'm Changing My Name to Chrysler by Tom Paxton

We're fucked.

During the 1974 embargo residing in Connecticut it was an established fact that tankers filled with oil were waiting off-shore. Lined up and anchored. There was no shortage. How many billions of dollars worth of arms have been sold to the middle east and elsewhere since? Today, there are numerous floating storage vessels. Last year the US was able to export 250 million barrels. At the present time an effort is being made to strong arm a huge land grab; to his discredit Obama seems to be willing to make a deal. If the report is true that there are 100 billion barrels off Prudoe Bay why can't we give the hairshirt crowd a nice round of applause and thank them for ethanol and the rest of the ecofraud bilge and move on? Peak oil is a myth. But the end of the Republic is a reality.

Trying to shake off the doom and gloom that pervades this discussion is aided if one reminds oneself that Project Better Place is under contract to replace gas powered cars in Denmarck and Israel in four years. The batteries to be used are lithium ion and the plant to build them opens in January 2009, Japan. Nissan and Renault in a joint ven- ture will produce the cars. On batteries it should be of interest that Exxon owns the nickle hydride patent and no battery more than ten watts will be licensed. It seems a reasonable suggestion that instead of negotiating for off shore leases that the oil industry's one trillion dollars annual direct and indirect susidies could be bargained if we had effective representation. Instead of course they trot out wind fall profits. Hooey. But look at this site to see how much enjoyment results from knowing that people are suffering. Those bad people trying to get to work or take the ill to the hospital or produce food. Lying and torture are official policy. But you don't have to like it.

Re: "(Obama's on the [oil bribery] list, too, but he's received only a third as much as McCain.)"

He's also supporting a militarist foreign policy that allows for the domination of the "debate" by the oilagarchy. (Marcy Winograd warned us that the "leadership" of both major parties wanted the 2007 war supplemental to be tied to the privatization of Iraqi oil.)

So, he comes cheap to the oil elites. Sure, they'd prefer McCain, but Obama's also their man.

Interesting that on this thread talking about oil, reserves, peak or no peak, there is not one mention of whether oil is a finite resource. Regardless of whether we are at peak oil or not, if it is a finite resource, how are we going to deal with expanded and wasteful usage? If it is an infinite resource, please inform me. The abiotic oil advocates have not been able to prove their case yet, and further have yet to deal with the rate of replenishment issue.

Who but the fringe doubters (of which I am one)has bothered to look at the cost of extracting oil form a sea bed 1 mile deep and another mile into the sea bed, and in the deep ocean on top of that. Just how expensive does crude have to become for that kind of investment to look viable? We do seem to be coming close to the end of the easily extracted oil. Is that peak or not? From the articles I have read, the wildlife areas to drill in simply don't contain a large enough reserve to hardly count, not to mention the time it takes to develop a new field.

I have been looking at a bunch of information concerning oil substitutes. All of them appear to me to have serious and fatal flaws upon examination, including the panacea of ethanol.

Looks to me that as a society we have ignored the equation of too many people using too much energy sources. No one wants to tackle that on any level of political discussion. In the words of the Magumbo Guru, we are doomed.

BOHICA: A free people being fed a line of horse shit by the corporate propaganda organs and Madison Avenue ad agencies whose sole purpose is to steer you away from the truth and lead you through the looking glass into a wonderland, where if you drink the right beer you get the girl of your dreams. A wonderland where a pill solves every problem or a new car puts you on the road of happiness. A wonderland of facades and shallowness built on the premise that money can buy you love. Added and abetted by their Quislings in Congress. JK: How is that different than the horse-shit that the anti-car, smart growth lobby feeds you? High density DOES NOT reduce congestion - it increases it. High density DOES NOT save money - it costs more. Transit DOES NOT save energy today, in the future it will use much more than driving Tranist DOES NOT save money - it costs much more Gas would have to get to $7/gal with our present car fleet - $15-20 with the future fleet.

BOHICA: The game is rigged and we happily go along with it like good little drones. They don't care. JK: Yep, the anti-car, smart growth profiteers have a solid lock on Oregon through spreading their horse shit far and wide.

BOHICA: Whoever said "Uncontrolled growth is the philosophy of a cancer cell", got it right. JK: I hope that means that you think Portland has enough people & we should locate new people on, vacant land in the burbs.

BOHICA: Since the first amphibians crawled out of the slime We've been struggling in an unrelenting climb We were hardly up and walking before money started talking And it's said that failure is an awful crime Well it's been that way for a millennium or two But now it seems that there's a different point of view If you're a corporate titanic and your failure is gigantic Down to congress there's a safety net for you - I'm Changing My Name to Chrysler by Tom Paxton

We're fucked. JK: Well stated defeatist viewpoint - you sound defeated before you even start. Like saying we shouldn’t even try to find oil, since the pessimists say there isn’t enough. That is how you destroy your life, the lives of others and the county. Can I assume that you DID NOT work your butt off for four to eight years in college to get educated in a field that actually needs good people?

Thanks JK

It is certainly interesting how much the progressives have embraced the death cult mentality of the current leaders.

marv wrote:

Peak oil is a myth.

What's your evidence, marv? I've seen much to the contrary.

Hydrocarbons on the planet Mercury are estimated by NASA to be the equivalent of nine trillion barrels of oil. Do you remember when there was an opportunity for flora and fauna to flourish there? Peak oil is a myth in the sense that it has been used to create fear; I recommend, once again, Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. Western Iraq has more oil than has been accessed in that country to date. Just as Mercury is too close to the sun to have sustained the life forms that are the ostensive source of crude oil we are too much in the dark about how much oil is still here. The price of energy has been manipulated. Do you think that the folks who have manipulated it are telling the truth about how much oil there really is?

Jeff Alworth: I think your own analysis is a little simplistic, JK. We are "free" to travel in gas-powered cars because a century of infrastructure has been put in place to facilitate it. JK: In response to demand of people who wanted the convenience of private cars, instead slow, inconvenient mass transit. Mass transit essentially lost the competitiveness battle in the 1920 & 30s as people choose something better - the car.

Think of it as Betamax vs. VHS. The elite say the inferior VHS won. The realists recognize that VHS WAS actually BETTER than Betamax. The difference is the matter of what people want - they wanted low cost and long taping times which only VHS delivered. The intelectuals usually completely miss the importance of what the people actually want. That is also the case with transportation. History has shown time after time, in country after country, people dump mass transit for private transport as soom as they can afford it. First bikes, then motor bikes, the cheap used cars. Why do Portland’s elite refuse to recognize this (even as most of them drive everywhere?)

Jeff Alworth: We built roads, gave gas and car companies trillions of dollars in subsidies, JK: You forgot one little detail: most of the road nuilding money came from road users. When did Oregon get its gas tax? 1910 or so?

Jeff Alworth: and oriented our country around the internal-combustion engine. JK: You mean like runs buses, trains and aircraft? Would you prefer external combustion engines? Tried those - internal is cheaper overall that is why we switched to internal combustion.

Jeff Alworth: Furthermore, we created incentives to burn more oil by refusing to raise CAFE standards, JK: We DID NOT CREATE INCENTIVES by not imposing a law. The incentive was always there - what people prove they want by where they put their own money (as opposed to politicians spending other people’s money on things that politicians claim people want and all to often don’t.)

Jeff Alworth: precipitating this doomed love affair with 5000-pound vehicles designed to carry 150-pound humans from the exurbs to their jobs in downtown offices. JK: Actually few jobs are downtown anymore most jobs are in the burbs where most people are. Suburbanites drive about the same and city dwellers (see Dumphy & Fisher). It is only when you get to New York densities that driving per capita goes down and that appears to be because grid lock makes added driving impossible. BTW commute times are very long and living costs very high in those areas. See: nysun.com/opinion/houston-new-york-has-a-problem/81989

Jeff Alworth: I would prefer to drive a plug-in hybrid those 22 miles, JK: So would I. It is the best of both worlds, and has the real potential to tell OPEC to shove it.

Jeff Alworth: because the carbon footprint for doing so is far lower, but somehow my "freedom" to do this has been limited because the US government has done so much to ensure my choices are limited to internal-combustion cars. JK: Actually California government delayed the hybrid for years by mandating a technically impossible goal - pure electric. That delayed the real step forwards - the hybrid and its successor, the plug in hybrid. Some wrongly claim that those few pure electrics were a success. They weren’t - limited range, very expensive. Even today, pure electrics are very expensive because we simply do not have good low cost batteries.

Jeff Alworth: It's sort of like what Henry Ford used to say: you can have any car you want, so long as it burns oil. JK: He actually started to build electric cars, created the nickle-iron battery, but realized that liquid fuel was better. I think you will find it WAS NOT OIL BASED.

Thanks

JK

For all of those who do want civilization to continue and after consuming the negativity here wonder how, I think a good news story is in order. I submit this because my point is that there is sufficient oil to transition away from it without destroying the Republic. Inform yourself by reading in the July Science or the July 31 MIT News of the breakthrough discovery made at MIT using photosynthesis principles affordably to separate hydrogen and oxygen. There is a future for clean stand alone in- dependent energy production. This is one story that merits attention. A healthy outlook has more than the choice of either deprivtion or doom.

Oops. I meant deprivation.

Tom Civiletti: marv wrote: Peak oil is a myth.

What's your evidence, marv? I've seen much to the contrary. JK: Actually it is your duty to come up with the evidence, since you are making the claim that peak oil exists.

Please keep it to peer-reviewed papers as Al Gore advises.

While you’re at it, also come up with a few papers that prove that CO2 can cause dangerous global warming.

Thanks JK

An early assumption stated the benefit if .4 percent per annum increase in mileage were achieved. Math yields the answer in millions of barrels over the time span stated. Nice and neat. Standards were not raised. Wages have been stagnant since 1973. How would the fleet have been replaced if vehicles could not affordable? Another absurd suggestion is high prices forcing conservation. For more than thirty years high prices in Europe dedicated revenue to constructing mass transit. Artificially high prices today are the consequence of deregulation which has also caused the crisis in housing, banking, pension stability and much more. Milton Friedman's deady destructive theory in full force is destroying America. When the full impact has been achieved there will not be a solution through a democratic process because the vote count has also been privatized. Welcome to the jungle.

It is past due time party bickering be set aside. Whether just reading a script or in her own words, Paris Hilton finally said something other that makes total sense and should be listened too. She suggested a hybrid of developing new energy alternatives and drilling. Now that’s hot!

Lee Coleman: The important facts are that the product has become too expensive, too much of an influence on our foreign and domestic policies, JK: That is why we need to drill here, drill now and encourage coal conversion, shale etc. I would even advocate considering an oil wall around the US to keep the price high enough that we can produce our own as long as we really try to explore and produce.

Lee Coleman: and too dangerous to planetary health. JK: As each day passes, we are discovering new facts about the global watming debate. Few of them support your view. For instance, AL Gore has taught all of the imortance of peer reviewed papers, yet there does not appear to be even one that proves that CO2 can cause dangerous warming. As far as I can tell it is pure conjecture from a lab beaker full of CO2.

Lee Coleman: Oil should be, and will in the future, be reserved for lubrication of machinery moving parts, the production of fertilizers and medicines, and other very limited uses. JK: Why waste money on more expensive alternatives? All that does is force people to sacrafice things like clothes for the kids, food and shelter.

Lee Coleman: A free people will prosper when freed from dependence on the stuff to run their machinery and furnaces by governments freed from dependence on oil money to fuel politics. JK: Not if it ends up costing more, That is a sure way to reduce people’s standard of living. Is that what you want?

It will end up being another, in a long line, of progressive mistakes that screw the poor.

Thanks JK

Re the global warming and peak oil conspiracy theories:

Lunar rockism is no longer just a theory about the moon; it has become a belief system so rigid that it can no longer be challenged. Scientists say the time for debate is over, that any criticism of rockism, however rigorous, is illegitimate, even dangerous. But my film will show that the evidence does not support the theory that the moon is made of rock. The rock theory is dressed up as science. But it’s not science. It’s propaganda. You are being told lies, and I can redraw the graphs to prove it.

I can bring together a group of the world’s leading astronomers who, through creative editing, will confirm that the moon is made of blue cheese, probably stilton or possibly gorgonzola. I have also lined up Piers Corbyn, Philip Stott, Nigel Calder and others who, though they know nothing about this subject, are prepared to talk about it. They will say that lunar rockism is the result of scientific fraud cooked up by terrestrial cheese monopolists. Big Cheese has such a tight grip on science funding that astronomers who question the theory are terrified of stepping out of line, in case they have their stipends cut off.

George Monbiot: Re the global warming and peak oil conspiracy theories: JK: Would you, by any chance, know where to find proof of the foundation of the warmers’ belief: a peer-reviewed paper proving that CO2 can actually cause dangerous warming?

Thanks JK

Marv sounds pretty silly. What do hydrocarbons on Mercury have do do with peak oil being a myth? He repeats the kind of "gee whiz" factoids that media scam artists use to titillate and mislead the marginally educated.

There are hydrocarbons all over the solar system as well as the rest of the universe. Saturn's moon Titan has lakes and dunes of hydrocarbons, which rain from the sky. In elementary school I learned that the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune contain an abundance of methane. Earth once had a methane rich atmosphere. None of this detracts from the argument that earth's petroleum is the product of anaerobic breakdown of organic material, or that we cannot substantially increase the worldwide rate at which that petroleum can be pumped out of the ground.

Naomi Klein has some interesting ideas about the manipulation of emergencies as profit generators. Like many authors, she tries to explain more with those ideas than is warranted, but I digress. There is more than one way that oil interests could manipulate public opinion and government policy in order to maximize profits. Here's an alternative conspiracy theory to the one marv offers:

Oil companies have known for decades that US oil production is in sharp decline and that world production is close to peak. By retarding the development of alternative energy sources as well as movement toward less energy intensive economy, those who profit from oil keep us dependent on large amounts of something they control. As prices skyrocket, profits do also. By the time the oil is tapped out or alternatives are in place, the oil folks will own just about everything worth owning.

Jeff keeps squawking about peer reviewed research, but he rejects offhand the most authoritative review of the literature on global warming, the results of which are summarized in the most recent IPCC Summary for Policymakers. You can read The Physical Science Basis for the recommendations on dealing with global warming. It's full of reference to published studies.

The presumption that crude oil is the consequence of decay from organic material is silly. Organic material never is known or presumed to have existed on Mercury. When the US Government orders you to suspend production placing a concrete cap on that well as is the case for my sister in law following the first phony shortage in 1974 I guess it is just silly. Tom dislikes Naomi Klein but loves the disaster capitalism which has destroyed the dollar and it follows that he is a big free market supply side advocate as well. What possible joy is there in knowing that an arbitrary change in regulation has destroyed the protections which were developed following the crash of 1929?

Google George Monbiot and read what he contributes as a journalist for the Guardian on August 5, 2008. Then ask if using his name in a post on this site is what you would expect from republican trolls. Whomever you may be do us a favor and find another handle. Tom, if US oil pro- duction is in sharp decline how is it that we exported 250 million barrels last year? How silly of me to ask.

Tom Civiletti: There are hydrocarbons all over the solar system as well as the rest of the universe. Saturn's moon Titan has lakes and dunes of hydrocarbons, which rain from the sky. In elementary school I learned that the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune contain an abundance of methane. Earth once had a methane rich atmosphere. JK: If all of those places have non-biological hydrocarbons, isn’t it plausible that the Earth also has them? (Don’t make too much of this, I am just showing that one cannot just assume that all Earth hydrocarbons are biological.)

Tom Civiletti: Jeff keeps squawking about peer reviewed research, but he rejects offhand the most authoritative review of the literature on global warming, the results of which are summarized in the most recent IPCC Summary for Policymakers. JK: Which is written by political hacks.

Tom Civiletti: You can read The Physical Science Basis for the recommendations on dealing with global warming. It's full of reference to published studies JK: And, as far as I know, not one reference to proof that CO2 can actually cause dangerous warming. No proof - no case for making AL & his cronies rich on the backs of the poor.

(Prove me wrong - find that elusive paper.)

Thanks JK

Here is an interesting take on peak oil:

The great oil bubble has burst telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/08/08/do0801.xml

Then there is this peer-reviewed paper showing that CO2 does not cause warming:

Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics: arxiv.org/pdf/0707.1161v3

Thanks JK