Peak Peak Oil?

No, that's not a typo, I really did mean to type "Peak Peak Oil". For a while it seemed that the media chatter about "Peak Oil" theory had calmed down a bit (or maybe I wasn't pay as much attention). Anyway, I recently came across this rather level headed Australian documentary called Four Corners that is a good primer for all those who have not already got their head around this concept.

One consequence of Peak Oil that I haven't heard in a while is what happens when every nation starts ramping up home grown, often synthetic alternatives to oil as mentioned in Four Corners - like synthetic bio-oil, coal liquefaction etc. etc. and selling that on the world market, if they have any to spare that is. Are those countries really going to want to keep selling it priced in US dollars, an increasingly weak and poorly managed currency?

They day they decide "No" will be the day the US gets a double whammy from the Peak Oil effect that will have even more impact on our country than dry gas pumps - it'll be dry greenback pumps as foreign investors pull out their massive and cheap supply of investment capital. Spiraling interest rates will follow as the country futilely tries to maintain the flow of dollar investment and that ain't gonna be pretty at home. As Four Corners points out, a 1930s depression, or worse could easily be just around the corner as the entire global economy takes a "correction" for its last 50 years or so of massive over extension.

Finally, the other thing I didn't hear was that oil is used for far more than for driving and flying our fat globe-trotting asses all over the shop. No, actually a huge amount of that oil is turned into plastic, fertilizers, and any number of chemical products that our entire society has become dependent on, even more so than oil. Switching our cars to electric or electric-hydrogen systems is a no brainer, but we should really be doing RIGHT NOW regardless of whether there is oil still left in the ground because when there isn't, synthesizing all those plastics, and other petro-products from corn and cow poop is going to be a darn sight harder and expensive than using an electric motor to power our cars right now. Of course you could just argue we can ditch plastic all together and go back to wood which would be rather nice for our little carbon-dioxide problem.

Maybe in 50 years time everyone will be rushing to replant the Amazon Rainforests to make a quick buck? One thing is for sure, as we rush to push land back into natural production of materials powered by that big-ole free energy source in the sky known as the sun there will be quite the rush on real estate and squeeze to pillage our national parks to make a buck. Lets hope sanity will win the day and people will finally figure out the way to solve the supply and demand problem is not more supply but less demand. Yes folks, less growth, even decline can be a good thing. For once economists have to learn to start fearing increases in demand, increases in output, increases in consumption and lets face it, increases in population. Remember folks - being child free is patriotic - we're saving the world one less consumer at a time!

And finally finally (again intentional because I already had a "finally...") if you want a bit of balance from someone who thinks there is no impending doom you can read Confessions of an ex-doomer at Peak-Oil Debunked. Actually I never said there is going to be an impending doom, a long hard recession is hardly doom, even global war over resources is hardly the end of the world (in an extreme peak-oil scenario do we even have the cheap oil to afford anything other than lobbing missiles around?), but lets face it, just like with global warming without some vision of impending doom to galvanize the population, the switch to alternative and more energy efficient technologies will take a lot, lot longer. Some people will argue its all market driven - ie. no matter how much doom mongering people will just follow the dollar and buy everything while its cheap. I'm sure that's partly, even mostly true - high prices have certainly kicked off all kinds of expensive oil production schemes, but I happen to believe that doom mongering has helped create a market too as Bush has shown more than adequately in their selling of fear and loathing via the never ending fight against doom also known as "war on terrorism" (because lets face it, the "war on drugs" just didn't cut it for oppressing an entire nation, only 2% of it). For once its nice to think a story of doom might be working for the good of the country...

Remember kids, as I mentioned already: "Sovle the oil crisis - reduce demand - wear a condom", its the ultimate act of patriotism.

Six degrees of separation debunked?

The latest reports flying round seem to be saying that "six degrees of separation" theory has been "debunked". When I read the original BBC story I have to say I was less than convinced. Basically the new chatter is based on the fact that theory was tested by getting people to try and communicate to a distance person via a chain of mailed letters, and that very few of those letters (less than 10%) ever reached their target.

Big deal.

I'm going to call Foul! on this supposed debunking because the test of the theory was a pretty lame one and prone to errors. For instance what if the person just doesn't bother to send the letter? My high-school statistics seems to indicate that if just 1/3 of people receiving a letter didn't bother to mail it on then with a chain of six that would yield only a probability that only 8% of letters actually reached their target.

More important, think about if someone was connected to another by one and only one chain of six people - the test presupposes that each person in the chain knows the ideal person at each step to contact. The likelihood of that being true is unimaginable. What actually happened, I expect was people just forward to someone in another city closer to the target person and by chance the connection was found - there was certainly no rigorous exploration of connections. All things considered a success rate of 10% or even less seems very high to me and I would actually guess that the results point to people being even more connected, on average, than one might imagine - maybe only three or four degrees in many cases.

I hope someone else is able to point this out - I doubt if anyone will notice my protests. But perhaps by the theory of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things mine will reach someone with enough clout to quash the debunking theory. As far as I'm concerned there are people out there like Google, Friendster, Yahoo and others (even phone companies) who, by using their databases to analyze social networks and patterns of communication could easily measure with much greater accuracy the n-degrees of separation. In fact I would be willing to guess that the CIA and others have already done this - they just aren't telling us about it yet.

Dance

You know I knew there was a reason for me to run into John O again... a little dance therapy does wonders for the soul.

Tea

Here's an entertaining tea-time rap courtesy of a couple of lads from the UK... Narnia

PS. Jack and Chicken, you guys are so busted!

Another faux-steak in the wall

There's another article about lab grown meat in Alternet today, this time its a little fish fillet they breaded up and did a smell test on. For whatever reason they didn't actually eat it, but I'm sure someone has done. I don't know where all the characterisations of this as ghoulish and nightmarish come from, sounds like a bad place to start marketing this.

Is it because they are culturing cells in the lab? Well if its plant cells being cultured then no one blinks an eye.

Is it because they are cells someone might eat? Well if its bacteria in yoghurt, or for other macro-biotic brews then no one blinks and eye.

Is it because its actual animal cells being cultured? Well if its a skin graft then no one blinks an eye.

So what is it? Beats me - shut up your whining and eat your meat!

Seriously though, the only qualm I have about this is just how much energy it might take vs. pasturing an animal out on the range, and just what the unknown consequences of giant mono-culture meat labs could be. Could they end up causing a virtual extinction of the domesticated animals we currently eat - like sheep, pigs and cows? Could they also be the perfect host for some new super virus that, because there is no genetic variety in the food system any more, will wipe out all the meat cells in no time at all?

El Predicto strikes again

Reading the Wired news this morning I spotted a story on manufacturing meat in a laboratory. Three years ago I wrote about this and now I guess some Dutch guys are working on it for real. There will be no steak for a while, but manufactured ground meat may not be too far off.

Double blogginess

Once apon at time some friends of mine announced to me they had started a blog. I was pretty curious about blogs - I'd heard of them but hadn't actually become a regular blog reader, actually mostly I was interested in becoming a blog writer. Fresh into my anti-coporate personhood jag I think I thought I had something to tell the world. Anyway, suffice to say that The Long Dark Tea-Time was born shortly afterwards.

Although this blog is barely sipping at the tea these days its still ticking along after three years. I think I even have a few regular subscribers out there - although writing about the stuff I do I get a ton of hits purely from search engines. For a while my Iraqi Flag image was the number one Iraqi Flag image on Google.

Then one day because Blogger doesn't have post categories and because I was trying to remain mostly anonymous but wanted to blog about mainstream tech stuff, I started another tech focused blog. For obvious reasons I wont give its name or a link here, but it wouldn't be hard to guess, so now I had two blogs. For a while I was even contributing to a group blog called Johnnytheo (either Johnny Theo or Johnny The O, I can't remember which).

But today I'd like to give special mention to the blogopshere's newest recruit, someone who I've said always should be blogging about her day to day experiences. Yes my partner and packing and shipping savant (also refered to as "Agent J") has finally got her own blog. Unfortunately I'm not going to give you the link here since being in retail if all my friends end up knowing about it someday soon so will some of her customers. Then one day someone will come along and notice that their bad behavior at the store has been publicised and will bring a big fat lawyer to the party. So if you happen to know "Agent J" in person I'll let you bug her in person for the link, or wish that her blog will become so famous that you will get to read it anyway. Until then good luck finding it and welcome to the Blogosphere Agent J!

The History of Oil

Thanks to Tree Hugger I came across a great potted history of oil by comic Robert Newman. A video of his performance is available for free from Google Video. When he started talking about the coincide of Iraq and Iran switching to trading oil in Euros and its impact on US deficit spending I could have wept since I blogged about this theory way back in 2003 before the US even stepped foot in Iraq. I believe this theory then and I still believe it now. I don't think it was the only reason the USA went in, but I think it was definitely contributing factor. Believe me, with China alone holding 1 trillion in US dollars imagine what would happen if everyone stopped needing greenbacks to buy oil. It would be like switching from gold to leaves as the backing for currencies - good bye bullion hello deforestation!

9/11 Conspiracy doing the rounds again

I just received an email from someone who doesn't normally circulate me anything spam or urban myth flavored. However this one was about the #1 movie on Google Video - apparently its 911 Loose Change which is yet another 9/11 conspiracy theory. Actually when I checked now its only at #13, with the number one spot held firmly by a Japanese commercial for a seemingly translucent bra (followed closely by a promotional spot for The Naked News).

Anyway, I did watch "Loose Change" and I have to say my mind has not changed since I last dug through all the conjecture at sites like 911review.com and its ilk. Basically I think Bush and Cheney could only dream of pulling off such an elaborate stunt but they simply couldn't. And if they really did need and want to risk such a major hoax and an excuse for empire building they could and I believe would have choosen a much simpler plan - just fly one or two planes into buildings, or simply blow them up and blame the terrorists.

When "Loose Change" starts delving into notions that it was all done to claim a few billion in insurance and gold, well its just beyond belief. There are far easier and legitimate was to cream off a few billion from the economy. The bigger deal here is that Bush actually got away with all the crap he did and got himself (re)elected in 2004. That required no conspiracy, no drone planes, no pre-planted charges - just a ready and will nation of dumb and dumber voters who think happiness can be delivered by killing terrorists.

Clownification

Right on the heels of my "Bread and circuses" post comes an Alternet story on the Clownification of America. Listen up bozos!

"Bread and Circuses"

I'm guilty of many of the circus distractions Tony Long lists in his rant What If They Gave a War...? but I know how he feels. I marched my ass off protesting Bush's calls to war, didn't make a damn bit of difference, now I'm feeling pretty apathetic about the whole shebang - they didn't have to ignore me for long to grind down my spirit. I expect many people are far easier victory.

My theory has always been most people will take pizza, cheap beer and Monday night football without so much of a thought before having to make much a sacrifice to keep it. Now most of the people out there making sacrifices never really had much of a choice about it - pretty much like those drafted for Vietnam - as is witnessed by the ever more frantic efforts to get people to sign up voluntarily for service (which recently included free iPods, messages on pizza boxes and more).

I gave up trying to read all the responses (mostly negative) responses it caused but clearly an awful lot of people have fallen for the circus act hook line and sinker.

Transhuman Olympics

Today I heard someone on the radio concuring with my idea that there should be a completely drug free olympics and then a separate event for those that have "augmented" their capabilities. In particualr the radio guest was talking about "trashuman" athletes which might include those with not just drug based therapies but also genetic or even physical (think "bionic") ones too.

While I doubt I was the first person to suggest such a thing it was good to hear it come out of someone elses mouth. However, as I heard it I realised there was a big problem... If sports people were given free run at drug or physical augmentation that event would quickly fragment into many factions depending on which particular line of augmentation they had persued. Would genetically engineered athelets then want to compete with steroid or other drug enhanced ones? Should "bionic" atheletes (think Tour-de-France type "blood boosting" and mechanically reinforced bones and muscles) be allowed to compete together? Or is it just a free-for-all of anything goes?

Ultimately I would say the only thing that is meaninful is an athelete that has been drug and therapy free from day one. Anything else will quickly go to the lowest common denominator and become just a showcase for the drug companies.

The Real World - Star Wars

Couldn't resist posting this Robot Chicken episode - reality based Star Wars if George Lucas had a sense of humor.

The Florida no-go zone

With AllState and other insurance companies cancelling insurance policies up and down the Atlantic Coast and refusing to write new ones in other states I wonder what effect this will have on Florida and others who are due to get whacked by hurricanes with increasing frequency. Is there a chance that people will start to leave those areas for safer places? But where can you go in the US that isn't subject to hurricanes, tornados, winter storms or earthquakes?

If nothing else this just goes to show that insurance companies never write a policy they think they might actually lose money on. It brings to mind the idea of communities self insuring - a policy (no pun intended) that might actually encourage greater honesty in claims. It could also avoid the problem of greedy insurance companies that dump their filty lucure into investments that loose when the economy crashes and then pass back to their customers.

I think it is only a matter of time before someone figures out how to use the Internet to collectively write insurance policies for the lowest possible premium. The big problem would seem to be who polices the claims?

GPS is Darwin's friend

This article of people driving over bridges that aren't there just goes to show that in the absence of natural foes, technology can steep right in to be Darwin's friend. I can see the bumper sticker now - "When you drive with GPS you ride with Darwin". I don't suppose this would be a good time to suggest if someone really wanted to do some damage to the US all it would have to do would be to hack all the GPS network and start sending more than cars off bridges.

All quiet on the tea-time front

Yes I know its been over a month since I last posted here - I'm not entirely sure why - partly apathy and partly an overload of things to post led me to the conclusion there just wasn't time to post any of them. Beside's I'm way behind on a million little tasks, and just rescued a cat that had been hit by a car. All I can say is thank goodness for tax filing extensions...

Do androids dream of.... electric carp???

Is it just me, or has the world suddenly developed and unhealthy obsession with electric animals? Be it robo-dogs from Sony that go "wrrr, wrrr, wrrrr", robot sharks that keeps aquarium visitors enthralled, or now, robot carp. I thought it was bad enough to work in an office where they don't even have real plants - there's something decidedly creepy about recycling dead trees, in the form of oil, back into plastic trees. But now I have to contemplate the true reality that the fantasy portrayed in Phil K. Dick's novel "Do androids dream of electric sheep?" might actualy come to pass.

Be cool, be very cool!

So I read this article on how air conditioned seats could result in a 7.5% saving in car air condition fuel usage which is 522 million gallons of gas a year. Say what! Five hundred and fify-two million gallons? That means Americans are wasting almost 7 billion gallons of gas a year just air conditioning their ride, let alone actually driving it. How about we all just crack the window open instead of cranking the A/C ???

Fungibility of Oil

A while back I found an article about how hybrid car buying consumers were delluding themselves about what impact their purchase was making on the world. The argument went something like "when you buy a hybrid the associated drop in oil demand has no real effect on the world's oil buying habits because the cheapest gas always sells first so the oil you don't buy will just get bought by someone somewhere else". So, the argument goes, just because you personally have bought one less gallon of gas from, say Saudi Arabia (insert your evil oil selling empire here), just means there will one more gallon of oil for them to sell (cheaply) to, say, China. In effect you have increased the availability of cheap gas to the rest of the world.

To further compound the problem, because countries like Saudia Arabi produce the cheapest gas - as I've pointed out before, so cheap that it's still pint for pint cheaper than buying clean water - you've effectively prolonged the amount of time those countries will be in business making money from selling oil cheaper than the good guys like Canada and Venezuela.

That was, how shall I say it, a bit of a blow to my Hybrid lusting ego. It turns out it was basically a restatement of the fact that oil is a fungible commoditiy - one barrel of oil is pretty much (except for issues of "sweetness" and "lightness") the same as any other and can be traded on the open market as such. Of course it overlooks the fact that regardless of reduce oil consumption's impact on short term oil sales by the likes of Saudi Arabi, it does mean that, in the long run oil supplies will last longer, that there will be fewer carbon emissions and that the US, as a whole, can, in theory, reduce its consumption of oil. I say "in theory" because following the above argument, one could argue that it will just help keep gas prices low and as we should all know, low prices fuel increased demand demand and consumption.

Interestingly the article I read suggested that what environmentalists should be doing is promoting, buying and driving the most gas guzzling behemoths they can afford. In so doing they would help decrease the supply of cheap gas, drive up prices and hasten the switch to more fuel efficient cars and energy generation globally. If you want to wean the world off cheap gas just put your money where your mouth is burn it up, burn it all up!

I never got around to writing about that article until today - in fact I even lost the original reference so I can supply a link to it. The reason I decided to write about it today was that not only did The Economist have an article on the issue of fungibility of oil, but also today's Dilbert cartoon was also about it, specifically the futility of buying a hybrid.

Personally I don't care, I'll still lust after a hybrid or the cleanest, leanest fuel burning car I can buy next time I'm putting dollars down for a car. My purchase will just be a personal investment in encouraging car manufacturers to build more fuel efficient technology - technology that can be used the world over. If Americans can help Toyota get the bugs out of systems to use 50% less gas then that same technology can be sold to countries like China where their reduced consumption will have an even greated effect.

So my next car could be a hybrid, it could be an electric car, or it could be just a clean diesel using all that cleaner low-sulphur fuel that will be coming out in 2007. Yes did you know that in 2007 the US will switch the European standard for diesel fuel which has much less sulphur in it and hence can run with much lower emissions. Lower emissions means less emission control equipment which means higher efficiency. It also means that suddenly there will be a flood of small efficient European diesel cars available for sale in the USA. The only fly in that ointment is that the dollar is globally weak especially in Europe so importing anything from the Euro-zone wont be a cheap proposition and I don't see anything changing by 2007.

New bumper sticker

After today's news about Cheney's little hunting accident I can see the new bumper sticker already:

GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE, VICE PRESIDENTS DO

Except of course the guy didn't actually die, but having been shot in the face he might easily have done, especially if there hadn't been secret service all around and an ambulance on call.

I'm sure that the gun control lobby is having a field day right now, given that the Vice President just handed some of the sweetest ammunition they ever got. After all if a gun accident can happen to the second most protected man in the world it can happen to anyone, and its not just drunk-off-your-ass hunters that do dumb things like this. Unless of course he was... in which case you might be telling yourself "too bad he wasn't out hunting with Bush"

Hmmm, maybe Cheney is actually a sleeper agent and was just practicing for "accidentally" shooting #1. Anyone want to bet that Bushie just cancelled all his hunting trips with Cheney?