ojcmn@hotmail.com

had a lot of clouds here through Oct. and my little PV panel (found in

a  marsh many years ago – it is probably off a navigation buoy) can’t

keep up with this ten year old Mac laptop which uses electricity three

times as fast as the PV panel produces it on a bright, sunny day. The panel is the only

electricty I have so sometimes this machine has to wait.

I don’t suppose Brandon wants these blogs used for private

correspondence but there were a lot of questions and ideas in your last post

here to respond to, so I’ll try to be brief.

Q.)  Your statement *It would require the concerted action of enough women

as to be inconceivable *… was pretty funny (unintentionally?)

A.)  Yep, unless I am unsuspectedly witty subconciously.

Idea.)  My own idea is to have secondary trains/train cars on parallel tracks,

which would accelerate passengers to match the speed of a never

stopping (more or less) train. The secondary one would lock on to the

primary one, passengers would do their boarding or exiting the train,

then the secondary train would stop, back up to the station, and wait

for the next train to come along.

Comment.)  It just goes to show that great minds run in the same rut. I sometimes imagine what sort of restraint devices would be effective but convenient to passengers experiencing some heavy accelerations in stop-&-go trains trying to maintain a high average speed (zero mph really knocks the bottom out of an average speed) or, from a standing start, trying to catch another which just flew by. Best, I think, if we start before the other arrives. It should be no problem, with todays sensors and computers, to exactly match speeds just as one draws alongside the other. We have such choices as aircraft carrier launching machinery (steam?) or rocketry or just powerful motors or magnets or ram-jets. I have no idea what means would be best.

Idea.) One other issue to consider with trains: they would have to travel

much faster than autos in order to get people from point a to point b

out here in the mountainous west, as they currently only pull a one

percent grade, I think, whereas autos can climb must steeper grades,

with freeways typically maxing out at 6%. Thus, a train must travel

six times as far to climb up to a ridgetop.

Of course, a passenger train could go up a grade much quicker than a

freght train, if given an adequate number of engines.

Comment.) Which is why I advocated ski lift type cable car gondolas every two city blocks in Seattle to get to the monorail track or channel which skirted the hills about a third or half way up the hills. There was to be no need to walk in Seattle’s rain or drizzle for more than a block before being able to step aboard a covered gondola. A train would never need, as a jet airliner does, to climb within minutes to 35,000-40,000 ft. altitude while accelerating to what? 500 plus mph? An airliner uses most of its fuel just accomplishing that feat. But engine power is obviously within our means. The fuel consumption is another consideration With the reduced air resistance at those altitudes and straight and level flight, the rest is almost coasting by comparison. A high speed train will try to obtain as comparable conditions to straight and level flight as possible as they always have. For as fast accelerations as possible, booster engines such as rockets or jets mentioned above would be used intermittantly when needed and then shut off with smaller engines better tuned for more efficient running at the constant cuising speed of maybe 300 mph. Mountain ranges that cannot be skirted would be tunneled through. Underground stations could be linked to towns above by high speed elevators (pneumatic?) or cable car lifts that would need a horizontal vector to its travel to the surface?

Idea.) Faster railroads would also need to have their own tracks.

Comment.) Or monorail channels or whatever they are called, or mag,-lev./ mag. induction runways or hovercraft troughs or, at least, high speed, banked, tracks on appropriate road beds, etc. etc. ???

Q.) I suspect that people came up with some sort of examples of why it

would not work, didn’t they, rather than just saying “no”? I assume

there would be expected and unexpected problems show up if it were

actually designed, wouldn’t it? Not that they would necessarily be

show stoppers, of course.

A.) Most seemed to have considered such things so little that they had no thought-out arguments and were discouraged to embark on such considerations because of the problems inherent in any pioneering or new (read as “untried”) concepts. Also, not myself being an engineer of any sort or, even more important, certainly not a salesman, having no credentials to spread out before them, the authorities and bureaucrats I ran into certainly didn’t want to take my word for anything and they weren’t interested in evaluating the ideas for themselves. I usually met an attitude that the whole idea was impractical. The most specific arguments I ever got was that hovercraft are noisy and the ride is bumpy. When people think of ferries or that sort of conveyance, they think of big, slow things resembling some sort of local cruise ship that they can stroll the decks of with a cocktail in their hand even though they think nothing of spending twice as long to get the same place in a cramped, slow bus where they should wear seat belts, but don’t, and certainly would not be out strolling the deck.

Idea.) My wife had the idea of putting monorails, or “straddle cars” on top

of the concrete freeway dividers, thus adding mass transit to the

existing right of ways. Clever girl.

Comment.) Another great mind in a rut with the rest of us. For thirty years I have been trying to convince the Cape Cod Regional Transportation Authority or whatever they call themselves to put a monorail on pylons down the median strip (unused otherwise) of the present Rt. 6 (which highway goes from Provincetown on Cape Cod on an Atlantic beach to the Pacific Ocean in San Francisco and only has, or at least had, one end because this end is a loop)… as I was saying, Rt. 6, or the Mid-Cape Highway, which is a limited access highway at the upper half of the Cape. The median strip is not even used to prevent injuries from vehicles leaving the pavement. The Cape is covered with at least a dozen kinds of vines and more than that of shrubs that, if the car were rolling over or ploughing into it, would bend over, forcing the car to go over the mat of it while the vines were being ripped apart or ripped out at the roots by the hundreds, causing resistance and slowing the car, while the bent mass of brush gradually but quickly lifts the vehicle off the ground, bringing it to a gradual but quick stop even though the car is in gear and the engine racing, probably without a crushed top in a rollover. Such vegetation would, being higher, before being mashed down, than headlights, prevent any headlights ever to be visible from oncoming traffic going the opposite direction, thereby allowing any driver to keep his lights on high beam, if not so close as to hinder a car in front, which is important at today’s highway speeds. A car cannot stop within the visibility allowed by low beams at 60 plus m.p.h. At the lower half of the Cape, from Orleans down to Provincetown, the median strip doesn’t exist, so the monorail’s track would be attached to arches over the road. The commuters on their two hour trip by car to Boston would be on the train the next day after watching one after another train whiz by them at better than twice their speed.

Q.) Now that our traffic seems to have gotten even worse than in the late

’60′s, do you suppose any city planning types would more likely to

seriously consider your idea?

A.) Yes, I think there are probably lots of people working on such concepts, but how long it will take for the public and city fathers to start  realizing the benefits and start calculating ways to implement them is an open question. The concepts probably will get watered down and the results may well be farcical adulterations built strictly for show to benefit some politician (ala the Seattle monorail) rather than a really effective mass transit system for the benefit of the public.

Q.)  Another question: what do you think of the idea of elevating these

radial and circumferential thoroughfares, and utilizing the space

underneath for other things? That way, one could zip around and

through town without having to stop on them.

A.)  I have always stipulated that all train travel should be elevated, and where it isn’t, it should be underground, let’s say under an earth and vegetation covered arched tunnel (ferrocement probably) as also should all limited access highways/freeways. Thus there will be no impediment to cause congestion, the main cause of accidents, and no grade crossings. They will also not be barriers to any other traffic trying to cross to the other side, vehicular, pedestrian or WILDLIFE and stray cats and dogs, thereby allowing access to their rightful habitats and reducing road kill to the point that someone like me and the crows and vultures and other little scavangers will have to look elsewhere and not become victims ourselves. I believe the same is true for all so-called light rail and dedicated mass transit bus thoroughfares, etc. or they should be underground. I would think elevated would be less expensive. But the uncovered pavememt in this country results in an immense area absorbing heat and affecting local climate, as do cities as well, and being exposed to inclement weather causing accidents and costing huge sums of money to clear of snow and melt ice with SALT. When I think of high speed trains, I almost always think of monorail trains suspended from their track, but that’s just an esthetic quirk of mine. Of course, I think it’s preferable for magnetic levitation vehicles and such to ride on top!

Cheers.

First, a refutation of the “abiotic” myth.

Oil isn’t coming back anytime soon. In another 25 million years or so and the right conditions, yeah. But other than that, no.

The reality of petroleum is the depletion model, which explains the fact that the U.S. peaked as an oil province in the 1970 right on schedule with Dr. M. King Hubbert’s calculation. More and more nations are reaching peak capacity and terminally declining capacities of petroleum production, and the world as a whole is approaching peak capacity of petroleum production. When this happens (if it hasn’t already), this will mean the end of cheap oil, less availability, and outrageous fuel prices, amongst other things.

Unless someone believes that the oil fairy is going to come down and magically refill a trillion barrels worth of lightsweet surface crude on fields that have been depleted for several decades or something equally crazy, then abiotic oil theory isn’t a solution.

Abiotic oil theory predicts that oil is a renewable resource, which is demonstrably false, and it predicts that oil reserve wells will refill themselves, which they have shown no trend of doing so upon further inspection.

The Myth of “Renewable/Sustainable” Oil

http://www.durangobill.com/Rollover.html

Of late, there has been a widely circulated “urban myth” that oil may be a renewable resource. This myth is based on the hypothesis of the late Thomas Gold that oil has an abiotic (non biologic) origin. The myth frequently cites the “refilling” of the Eugene Island Field in the Gulf of Mexico.

In practice the Eugene Island Field is a complex of over 100 separate reservoirs – some of which are connected by faults. (See the very technical article at http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/documents/97015/eugene.htm) In the past, oil and gas have been pumped out of some of these reservoirs, thus reducing their internal pressure. Nearby reservoirs that had not been tapped yet still had their original pressure. Oil and gas subsequently flowed along the fault zones from the untapped high-pressure zones into these produced areas that now had a lower pressure. This “refilling” is the source of the myth about “renewable” oil. Jean Laherrère has a short analysis of the Eugene Island Field on page 14 of his Zurich presentation the “Future of oil Supplies” (http://www.oilcrisis.com/laherrere/zurich.pdf). His conclusion for the “abiotic renewal” of oil is: “It is really nonsense”.

In Sweden a well was drilled 4 miles deep in search of “abiotic” oil. It turned out to be one of the world’s deepest “Wild goose chases”. Dale Pfeiffer has concluded: “The proposed proofs of evidence of abiogenic origin in the Dnieper-Donets basin and in refilling fields are dismissed in front of real data.”(See: http://www.911-strike.com/pfeiffer.htm) Richard Heinberg (author of “The Party’s Overâ€?) has also debunked the abiotic oil myth. (http://www.energybulletin.net/2423.html)

Finally, let’s assume full credibility for “renewable oil” by assuming that the earth’s 2 trillion barrels of oil (total discoveries) had an abiotic origin and have accumulated over the 4 billion years that the earth has had its present crust. This yields an accumulation/renewal rate of 500 barrels per year. We are currently using oil at 80+ million barrels per day. The “renewal rate” wouldn’t be of much help.

Isotopic evidence provides a clear link to the organic origins. No one in the industry gives the slightest credence to these theories: after drilling for 150 years they know a bit about it. Another misleading idea is about oilfields being refilled. Some are, but the oil simply is leaking in from a deeper accumulation. (http://www.oilcrash.com/articles/ruppert.htm)

We’re consuming 4 barrels of oil for every 1 we find and more and more fields are in or approaching terminal decline rates. We have dropped way down to this from the days where oil was so plentiful it was cheaper than water, and it’s getting worse. The deficit of consumption/discovery is getting wider and wider.

http://www.geologie.tu-clausthal.de/Campbell/img/30.gif

Renewable commercially signifigant sums of oil are pipedreams at best, not a science. Oil is a finite resource formed in the geological past by ancient biomass. We’ve known this for over a hundred years, and now that reality is rearing it’s ugly head, people would like to rewrite the facts to allow them to believe in unlimited growth and infinite energy. Well reguardless, reality is not going to agree, and we will slam into the wall where the ideals that people like to believe goes against the unimpeachable facts of geological science. That will be in a time short compared to the previous era of big oil.

Incidentally, I don’t see any of these advocates of abiotic oil scrambling to buy up these long-depleted oil fields.

It’s pretty damned obvious that consuming more than you find by a 4:1 ratio will ultimately catch up to you.

So those that want to believe in endless, inexhaustible supplies of oil are welcome to do so, but I think they’ll have a hard time convincing the professionals in the petroleum sector who have been cutting their losses in light of the facts.

When oil companies are cutting and consolidating like they’re living on borrowed time, it’s a big sign of things to come.

The oil that powers economic activity is the lightsweet surface crude. This is what runs the global market. As this stuff diminishes, we will be facing issues.

Unless one can refute the laws of thermodynamics, which some economists seem to think (as demand increases, entropy will decrease to meet market demands), then oil will deplete.

Next there’s the shared misconception by both Mr. Kunstler and Mr. Lynch that nuclear will be the fuel of the future.

Check out these two articles which go into explaining a lot about uranium production and consumption.

Uranium production is nearing the halfway point

http://www.worldenergy.org/wec-geis/publications/reports/ser/uranium/uranium.asp

Current uranium demand almost twice production

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/powers/2004/0601.html

The following chart sums up the the problem:

http://www.uic.com.au/graphics/UprodWorld.gif

Check out the reactor requirements line and then the production levels.

Notice a disturbing trend there?

Peak uranium.

It’s like Jim succinctly stated. There are no combination of so-called “alternative” fuels that are going to allow this perpetual growth racket to continue.

We need to become a sustainable society, and the first law of sustainability is that growth in populations and/or consumption of resources cannot be sustained.

There was also a generic appeal to the “massive” coal reserves in the U.S.. Yes, we do have a lot of coal, but a lot compared to what? If we were to liquify it and use it as a source of fuel for the car culture, we would use up those “massive” supplies in a time short, providing we could even extract and liquify it at an appreciable rate since it has a whole host of issues unexperienced by petroleum.

That’s the unsustainable exponential consumption trend that Dr. Bartlett warned us about in his lecture on energy:

http://edison.ncssm.edu/programs/colloquia/bartlett.rm

Your statement *It would require the concerted action of enough women as to be inconceivable *… was pretty funny (unintentionally?)

You are likely correct that changes in birth rates are mostly driven by government policy. We’re a bunch of sheep, or ewes, as the case may be.

I think we’re pretty much on the same track, as it were, re trains. Your idea of rapid loading and unloading of passengers and baggage is a good one. Sort of like the shuttle trains at airports, which require only a few seconds to unload.

My own idea is to have secondary trains/train cars on parallel tracks, which would accelerate passengers to match the speed of a never stopping (more or less) train. The secondary one would lock on to the primary one, passengers would do their boarding or exiting the train, then the secondary train would stop, back up to the station, and wait for the next train to come along.

your idea is certainly simple than mine, and might be almost as effective, if multiple through rails were installed at each station, so that a train which did not need to pick up/drop off passengers could zip on through.

One other issue to consider with trains: they would have to travel much faster than autos in order to get people from point a to point b out here in the mountainous west, as they currently only pull a one percent grade, I think, whereas autos can climb must steeper grades, with freeways typically maxing out at 6%. Thus, a train must travel six times as far to climb up to a ridgetop.

When the train pulls up a nearby grade here in s. Oregon, I can actually ride my mountain bike faster than the train, for a short distance anyway.

Of course, a passenger train could go up a grade much quicker than a freght train, if given an adequate number of engines.

One big problem with trains, at least Amtrak. The Coast Starlight adds approximately 3 hours extra time between Eugene Oregon and San Luis Obispo, Calif just for delays caused by the owner of the rails, Union Pacific (maybe Southern Pacific, I forget) This freight service only railroad seems to take pleasure in causing delays for Amtrak. Faster railroads would also need to have their own tracks.

What you are talking about, JC, with your fast trains, and lots of them, is pretty much what at least one type of Personal Rapid Transit is, by the way, though there are many other ways to design PRT.

Your radial/circumferential scheme is brilliant! I think it would be an excellent system, at least until such time (I’m not holding my breath) as PRT could be installed, and perhaps instead of PRT.

I suspect that people came up with some sort of examples of why it would not work, didn’t they, rather than just saying “no”? I assume there would be expected and unexpected problems show up if it were actually designed, wouldn’t it? Not that they would necessarily be show stoppers, of course.

My wife had the idea of putting monorails, or “straddle cars” on top of the concrete freeway dividers, thus adding mass transit to the existing right of ways. Clever girl.

Now that our traffic seems to have gotten even worse than in the late ’60′s, do you suppose any city planning types would more likely to seriously consider your idea?

Another question: what do you think of the idea of elevating these radial and circumferential thoroughfares, and utilizing the space underneath for other things? That way, one could zip around and through town without having to stop on them.

Cheers.

Cheers.

The most devastating assaults on the numbers of people on this earth, whether the actions of man as in wars or those natural disasters of pestilence or physical forces such as we have witnessed in varied demonstrations of nature recently, seem inevitably to fail to make significant reductions of the numbers of people inhabiting this earth, but seem to actually accelerate their growth. Although during both World Wars, the bubonic plague and some times of famine, the populations of the affected areas diminished somewhat, afterwards there occurred an upward spike of population such that, after the spike dropped back to a lesser, more normal rate of growth the result was more people than had the reductions never occurred and the curve of rate of growth been extrapolated to the time following the growth spike which occurred. Such a spike within memory of some was enough to warrant the name of Baby Boom. As with the American Indians decimated by disease introduced by invaders of their home territories and to which they had no immunities as well as the invader’s conscious efforts of their extermination, it may not be the decimated people who ultimately peopled the area in greater numbers, but others who moved in exploit the area. I’m afraid it would take a singleness of purpose and resolve unprecedented in human history to accomplish the reduction I proposed.

I don’t believe any management or special precautions need be prescribed. Life would merely go on in similar proportions but with fewer participants. There are those who worry that customers would decrease; true, but not relative to providers. Some lament that towns would become too small to function. Perhaps so, but moving to another town which now has a larger area to serve and can afford some help obviates that concern. The result is merely fewer towns and cities with more land between them. I believe no change in the modus operandi would be necessary.

Yes, live on what is left of Cape Cod. I see nothing attractive here any more, but it still appeals to people. I went to Seattle in the late ’50s to see whether Oceanography ala U. of W. seemed attractive. It did and didn’t. I worked both as part of the scientific staff and as part of the ship’s company, depending who was needed most at the time we went to sea. I captained chartered vessels for the U.W. when additional ships were needed for occasional projects. I was captain of a vessel working in offshore oil exploration. I also did some tugboating in S.E. Alaska hauling cargo on barges where there were no facilities for freighters. I worked up and down the coast with these various ships from Santa Barbara to Yakutat, the Gulf of Alaska to Prince William Sound, the North Pacific to Dutch Harbor on Unalaska, the Bering Sea, the Chuckchi Sea and the Arctic Ocean north to the arctic ice cap.

A train system, including the attendant complementary local conveyances, in order to entice people out of their cars, will have to be more convenient, faster and cheaper than an automobile. Being convenient means being available whenever wanted within a reasonable waiting period till the next train, having just missed one. I don’t think people using trains, streetcars, buses, or 2 person vehicles often throughout the day will tolerate a wait for each or any of them for more than 10 minutes on a regjlar basis. This standard should be for 24 hours a day. To keep the time interval between trains short, they will have to be fast. When passengers are few, trains need few cars and without stopping where no one is waiting, they can cover more distance at high speed and maintain the short wait interval. Automatic distance regulators will prevent one train getting too close to the one ahead. When more passengers need the service, additional cars are added as needed. To keep load/unload times short the entire side of the car should slide up onto the roof to allow people to enter or exit the car wherever they are in the car or on the platform, or the car should have doors the whole length of the car, as in England at least in the past. Loading and unloading should be only a matter of a few seconds. Baggage should be placed where it is loaded and unloaded just as quickly automatically or by attendants. Radio ID tags for the destination are attached to bags so they can be found instantly by scanners on telescoping booms in the baggage section of the train which will pick up the appropriate freight and deposit it on the platform. If the service is good enough to keep the cars essentially well filled, the cost should be far less than that of automobiles.

Our local Malcolm here in Brewster, MA is retired and no longer available for designing, engineering or consulting, but one can get an idea of his interests by visiting his website which is maintained so people can order any of his past books if there is any interest. His website is: http://www.malcolmwells.com/

Cheers.

You say, *These silly people insist on believing in things that must expand in order to exist, which is obviously inane in a finite system.*. I would agree with you; however, there are those who believe that **all we have to do** when we’ve overpopulated this planet (like, we haven’t already?) is to start emigrating to other planets/solar systems.* Since the universe is, in fact (according to some theories) infinite, this gives these folks peace of mind, knowing we will never have to be accountable to constraints considered normal by those of us with less farsighted visions.

To them I say, *Why wait until you’ve finished screwing up this planet to emigrate? Get the hell outta here, so the rest of us can live sustainably*

I love where I live, but unfortunately it is a logging, or former logging, community. There have been bumper stickers appearing from time to time which say, *Earth First! We’ll log the other planets later.* I believe they are meant to be humorous…

Re large populations equating to large work forces, I would add that a large work force equals low wages, all else being equal, so of course the greedy folks want a large population. Perhaps I’m oversimplifying things, but basically, I see society as being composed of two types of individuals. One type wants things. Things for himself, e.g. security, power, things, etc. The other type wants to live in a civilized society, one in which we work together, where satisfaction can come from giving a helping hand to those less fortunate than ourselves.

The first type can also be called, inho, sociopaths, and are found at all levels of society, and in all political parties, though there appear to be more in the Repubs and Libertarians than others I’m familiar with.

JC, I think that having a population reduction of 75% sounds like very good idea, were it to happen with good planning, good design, and with great creativity. It would certainly require serious changes to our current modus operandi. I cannot see this happening sooner than several generations, though, short of an enormous natural or not so natural disaster. Perhaps Mama Nature will present us with this condition with a well placed asteroid or avian flu. This would be very bad for very many people, though, and I can’t support it, even if my support meant squat, which it does not.

I agree that, with the 75% population reduction you are suggesting, housing would become mroe or less free. But with smaller reductions, prices would drop drastically, but not to zero.

I am impressed with your efforts to get a train going in Seattle. Is that where you live now, or Cape Cod?

I love trains, and never, never drive to see my inlaws in So Cal anymore, since becoming hooked on the Coast Starlite. But the only way, as far as I can tell, for trains to make a big difference in the number of cars on the road would be to have trains passing by any given point every two or three minutes, and only stopping at the ends of the line, perhaps at the Canadian and Mexican Borders, where they would not actually stop, but swing around a loop to immediately begin the return trip

Here’s why I say that. A four lane freeway, two lanes in each direction, at about 70 mph, or 100 feet per second, will have a space in front of, and behind, each car of approximately 200 feet, following the so-called two second rule. In case you are unaware of this rule of thumb, it’s the idea that you should maintain enough space behind your car and the one in front of you so that two seconds time elapses between the time the car in front of you passes a point and the time you pass the same point.

So, assuming your car is fifteen feet long, that means you’ve got a car in-each lane-passing a given point every 2.15 seconds. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll assume that the cars are driving SLIGHTLY aggressively, and use the figure 2.00 seconds instead of 2.15 seconds.

Thus, since my hypothetical freeway has two lanes going in each direction, we have TWO cars going past any given point every 2.00 seconds, or one car per second.

Let’s be generous, and assume two people per car. Like we should be so lucky! This means we have two people per second passing our point along the edge of the highway.

Now, for the Amtrack train I ride so often: the Coast Starlight. It carries approximately 350 people, and happens to be about 800 feet long. I don’t remember how exactly how many cars, or how long the cars are, even though I did count the cars (10?) and lenght of cars (80-90 feet?). REgardless, I believe I’m close enough for what I’m trying to prove.

To continue, the train in question, if it’s able to maintain 70 mph-a very unlikely scenario, alas-will be carrying 350 people 800 feet in 8 seconds, or 44 people per second passing our spot along the side of the railroad.

Sounds good, eh? 44 people per second on the train, compared to 2 people per second by car on two lanes. HOWEVER, the Coast Starlight only runs once per day. We’d need LOTS of trains following each other to equal the number of passengers carried by a two lane freeway at capacity. I’m running short of time, here, so I’m not going to figure out how far apart-or how close together-the trains would have to be to carry as many people per unit of time as a freeway would carry. Suffice to say, they’d have to run a helluva lot more frequently than once per day!

And there’s the benefit of most of the PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) systems. They generally have small, electric, cars whizzing along at at least seventy mph, and generally faster intercity, with only one foot between them, instead of 200 feet, like cars on the freeway. So they can carry 215ft/16ft or 13 times as many people as a freeway can, in the same amount of space, and can do so safely, without the *driver* having to pay attention to traffic!

gotta go; sorry I was so wordy. I’d have had to be even wordier to make it clear enough for most folks to understand. sorry.

Last August, journalist Peter Maass wrote in the Times Magazine that essentially, the Saudis are the ballgame when it comes to oil. Saudi Arabia has by far the biggest known reserves in the world with about 25% of known oil. He says that the Saudis themselves think they can move from their current production of 10 million barrels a day up to about 12.5 million barrels/day. The US has them slotted up to 20 million barrels. Privately, the Saudis say “Uh-uh.” Moreover, Maass writes that we’ll run into supply problems, well before we start to run out of oil, because the geology of oil wells means you can only pump out so much, so fast. Moreover, he says that those Saudi production estimates to which Michael Lynch referred during the show may be overly optimistic because Saudi officials don’t want to see alternative energy sources developed, which would kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

On the other hand, Daniel Yergin, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning history of oil, The Prize, says that his firm’s analysis indicates an additional 60 million barrels of oil/day coming online in the future. He says that the tar sands in Canada will be a major source of petroleum, as will the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Russia, West Africa (offshore), Brazil (offshore) and Libya. It will be more costly and difficult to get the oil out, but the issue isn’t a lack of oil under the ground. He notes that, in the 1920s, the US geological service estimated that the supply of oil would run out in just over nine years, and that this current discussion of peak oil is about the fifth time in the last century that we’ve worried the gas would run out. He says that additional capacity along with greater efficiency in the use of oil will preclude the sort of “long emergency” James Kunstler predicts.

So… who to believe?

After listening to Kunstler and Lynch, I found myself unpersuaded by either side. Chris was right on in sussing out Kunstler’s agenda: he hates the ‘burbs. Kunstler’s argument was based on external events he thinks indicate that oil is running out: price spikes, wars in the Middle East, etc… I think Yergin would say that Kunstler is responding to the geopolitics of oil, rather than the geology.

I got no comfort from Lynch, though. Chris summed up the most common sense argument for peak oil: they’re not making any more of it, and we’ve got over 2 billion people in India and China singing “zoom, zoom, zoom.” Lynch’s response, “China has been coming online for 20 years now and production keeps going up,” was absurd. We haven’t scratched the surface with India and China. It seems ridiculous to think that there won’t be enormous repercussions. Lynch’s perspective basically adds up to “Well, things have always worked out before…”

This debate reminds me of the show Chris did on the housing market. Some people think it’s a bubble. Some don’t. What I wrote then about housing applies, I think, to oil: it doesn’t have to be a bubble (or a peak), before it’s really bad news. Yergin’s analysis seems fairly solid. We probably will get oil from the tar sands and develop hybrids, yadda, yadda. But it’s going to cost more and more to get that oil out of the ground. And anybody checked out the cost of a Prius lately? Increased demand for a limited natural resource will have a huge impact on geopolitics and, more practically, how we live on a day-to-day basis.

Personally, if it means no more aircraft carrier sized SUVs on my ass when I’m trying to bike someplace, I’m okay with it.