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"This report: "Global Energy Crunch: How different parts of the world would react to a peak oil scenario" by Joerg Friedrichs is a must read for all investors and Obama administration. We guess that actually Obama knows better than many others that there is NO More Cheap Oil Left. With Oil Spill in the headlines and late realisation about the scale of this catastrophe all dreams about cheap oil will vanish, but question remains open: what Obama will be able to chose? Are we grown up enough to push him to endorse new technologies and get off from the Oil addiction or we will witness the Crash of Empire fighting wars which will benefit only few and destroy lives of billions?
"Joint Operating Environment 2010: Oil Supply Concerns (review) Please pay attention, this report is written by those who knows the Real Price of Oil. If you account all military needed to protect Oil supply lines and cost of wars to get more oil, price will be well above 150 USD/barrel already. Now we all have another problem: there is simply no more oil enough for all. Will future wars for oil be the only answer?"
There is a technology to avoid wars for oil which is available today: Electric Cars. We guess that in front of these Apocalypse scenarios Range Anxiety will be finally out of discussion. We still have time to embrace it, but it is going out day by day with every oil drop...
"Electric Cars is the only commercially viable technology today to sustain mobility world wide with rising Oil prices. Lithium is at the heart of Green Mobility revolution - it is an industry adopted standard for batteries and billions of dollars are invested into battery technology and upcoming by the end of this year Electric Cars on a mass market scale. This Bull market is still very young - only a year or so from the beginning after the crash of 2008. More"
TomDispatch.com:
Posted by Bill McKibben at 8:48am, June 6, 2010.
How many times in recent weeks have you read a headline like this: “Oil Nears Florida as Effort to Contain Well Hits Snag”?
Yet another "snag" in the Gulf of Mexico. Remember that 100-ton, four-story “containment box” which developed a nasty case of hydrates, or that snaggable “riser insertion tube,” which was supposed to siphon off so much of the escaping oil from the busted well, but didn’t? No? Little wonder, because we moved on so quickly to “top kill,” “junk shot,” and now “top hat” -- with both a snaggable diamond saw and shears that don't cut that cleanly. Strangely, while all of this represents a repetitive tale of failure 5,000 feet down, the headline narrative remains oddly hopeful. The next techno-fix, or the one after, will finally do the trick. (I suspect that oil industry insiders must be joking sardonically about rubes who will believe anything.)
The final hope lies, of course, in those “relief wells” now being drilled diagonally thousands of feet under the waters to intersect with the original well and cement it shut. As White House energy adviser Carol Browner said last Sunday, “I think what the American people need to know [is] that it is possible we will have oil leaking from this well until August when the relief wells will be finished." Mid-August may be a long time to wait, even if those wells are now declared “ahead of schedule,” but at least -- we are regularly assured -- they will do the trick. Think about it a moment, though: if a relief well is such a slam dunk, why is BP drilling two of them (one ordered by federal officials), and muttering about a third.
Here, then, is a tip of the old top hat to grim reality. On those relief wells, listen to David Rensink, president-elect of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists and a veteran of oil industry offshore exploration: "If they get it on the first three or four shots, they'd be very lucky." That’s not exactly surprising given that the process has been “compared to hitting a target the size of a dinner plate with a drill more than two miles into the earth.” Rensink also suggests that the odds of a first-time success are about the same as winning the lottery. What, then, can be learned from the historical record? The last time such a well was drilled in the Timor Sea off Western Australia, it took five tries over 10 weeks to succeed (and in the process, the well’s rig went up in flames) -- and that was in only 250 feet of water.
As with the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran, Americans are already counting the days to “relief” in a drama implicitly titled, as then, “America held hostage.” “Disaster in the Gulf: Day XX,” as NBC News’ logo typically has it. Well, keep counting if you want, but don’t count on it. (There are even reports that a relief well could make the spill worse.) Whatever the solution, if any, to the gushing well, only one of 4,000 in the northern Gulf of Mexico, the problem is, of course, oil itself. We humans, like BP, are increasingly out of our depth when it comes to fossil fuels. AsTomDispatch regular Bill McKibben, author of the remarkable new book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (reviewed by Rebecca Solnit at this site) makes clear, this could be themoment to turn this country around on the subject of its energy future and begin real planning for life after both BP and deepwater drilling. If only. Tom
If There Was Ever a Moment to Seize
Will Obama Stand Up to Big Energy in Deeds as Well as Words?
By Bill McKibben
Here's the president on March 31st, announcing his plan to lift a longstanding moratorium on offshore drilling: "Given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth and produce jobs, and keep our businesses competitive, we are going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new sources of renewable, homegrown energy."
Here he is on May 26th, as political pressure starts to really build over the hole in the bottom of the sea that BP somehow seems unable to plug: "We're not going to be able to sustain this kind of fossil fuel use. The planet can't sustain it." Still, he added quickly, there's no need for any dramatics: “We’re not going to transition out of oil next year or 10 years from now.”
And here is the president last Wednesday, after yet another gimcrack solution at 5,000 feet under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico had gone awry, and real anger at the administration's lackluster performance crested: "[T]he time has come to aggressively accelerate [the transition from fossil fuels.] The time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future."
The question is: which one is the real Obama? Has he really been transformed by the oil spill in the Gulf, or is he merely trying to ride out the public reaction with stronger words? I think the answer is as murky as the water off Mobile. We don't know because so far it's all words -- the closest he's come to specifics is that pledge that we won't be off oil in a decade.
Which, of course, is true. Ten years from now, we’ll still be using oil -- many of the people who bought new Fords this year will still be driving them in 2020. Exxon will still be in business. But this realism didn’t necessarily preclude him from saying so much more than he did. Had he chosen to, he could have declared: “Ten years from now, America will be using half the oil we do today and producing ten times as much solar power.” That would have been stirring. That would have put something on the line.
He could, in other words, have done what President John F. Kennedy did, when he found himself with a 10-year timetable. In a special address to Congress in May 1961, JFK urged that America commit itself to the goal, “before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” He demanded of Congress “a firm commitment to a new course of action, a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy costs.”
A year later, at roughly the same stage in his presidency as Obama is in his, Kennedy took to the stage at Rice University, having just toured nearby NASA labs. There, he gave a great speech. (If you think Obama has a masterful speechwriting team, compare his flabby remarks in California to Kennedy’s slightly shorter gem.) Its core went like this:
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone.”
Now, let’s catalogue the differences: Kennedy had the Cold War to help him, along with an accelerating economy and a strong congressional majority. Obama presides over a fragile economy, a fractious Congress, and must deal with a lunatic right that, at the last Republican convention, came together around the slogan “Drill, Baby, Drill.”
Not only that, but the challenge he faces is so much tougher. The Apollo mission was technically complex, but in a sense the very opposite of our energy challenge: a moon shot meant focusing all our energy on three guys and a rocket, while an energy revolution would mean, in essence, landing all of us on a different planet, one where we no longer need the fossil fuels that are currently the engine for our economy. So, advantage Kennedy. In addition, no organized interest was fighting the space shot -- if anything, big corporations were lining up for a piece of the action.
Still, as Andy Revkin recently pointed out in the New York Times, there is “every reason to think a contemporary president could articulate how this remarkable juncture in human history, as infinite aspirations butt up against planetary limits, can be met with a grand, sustained effort.”
Especially because Kennedy was taking a flier, there was no one demanding he go to the moon, and no real penalty for not even trying. (Lots of people thought we could have spent the money better close to home.) Obama, however, has no choice. The planet’s future (and his legacy) will, in the long run, be defined by his response to global warming, which is clearly the greatest problem humans have ever faced.
Forget the Cold War. Last week, new satellite data showed that this summer’s melt of the Arctic is already ahead of 2007’s record pace. We’re in the middle of a Heat War, and we’re losing badly. Globally, we’ve just come through the warmest winter on record, and it seems all but certain that 2010 will set a new record for the hottest calendar year. Every week we seem to see record deluges somewhere: May began with crazy flooding in Nashville and ended with inundation in Guatemala. Last week saw the warmest temperatures ever recorded in Asia and Southeast Asia.
So far, Obama’s barely broken a sweat on climate change: a few paragraphs in a few speeches. Now, the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf offers him the best chance he’s ever going to get to go to work. The president could stand on the Louisiana shore and say: “Bad as this is, it’s only a small and visible symbol of the greater damage we do each day simply by burning coal and gas and oil. If that black gunk now washing up here had ended up safely in the gas tanks of our cars, it would nonetheless have done great damage. It’s all dirty, every last drop and lump.”
The president already has the podium he needs to start turning history, which means more than merely pushing for the climate and energy bill introduced last month by senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman -- a prime example of baby-step politics. As with his health care bill, on energy matters, too, the administration and its envoys sought out in advance the industries most likely to raise a fuss and cut the deals those cartels wanted. Just as big pharma knew it wouldn’t face negotiated drug prices, so big oil and big electricity have been assured that there will be no serious opposition to their business model.
The bottom line: if you neglect all the offsets and loopholes, we’re aiming for a 4% reduction in carbon emissions from 1990 levels by 2020. Make your blood stir? Obama’s not proposing real solutions to real problems; he’s ticking off items on a list. He got a health care bill, and just maybe he’ll get an energy bill (though that’s an increasingly slim "maybe"). But we don’t need the bill, we need the thing.
I’m putting this all on Obama, even though it’s clear that he can’t do it by himself. He’d need a movement to make real progress. That’s the tragedy, though: he’s already got a movement. He was elected with millions of us sending him money, knocking on doors, standing in snow banks with signs. He commands a standing army (albeit one that’s growing rusty from disuse and a little demoralized).
And it’s not just here. Across the world, we at 350.org were able to organize giant demonstrations last year -- 5,200 of them in 181 countries, what Foreign Policy called “the largest ever coordinated global rally of any kind." We did it the way Kennedy did, by rallying people around a hard goal instead of an easy one: 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide which, according to NASA scientists, is the most we can safely have in the atmosphere. Since we’re already past that point -- at 390 ppm -- we need to work harder than we could ever have imagined. We really do need to get off oil in the coming decade.
But to have a chance we need a leader. We need someone to stand up and tell it the way it is, and in language so compelling and dramatic it sets us on a new path. On this planet of nearly seven billion, at this moment in history, there’s exactly one person who could play that role. And so far he hasn't decided.
Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is the founder of 350.org and the author most recently of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.
Copyright 2010 Bill McKibben"
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