More Voices Say Oil Production Not Sustainable

Over time, facts slowly but surely go mainstream. We're not quite there yet but a growing number of voices recognize that worldwide oil production is not sustainable in the short term, meaning any time between now and the next 15 years, depending on who's doing the talking.

Now it may happen that oil production could surpass the 2005 high mark or even the 2008 high mark in the next two to eight years. But no one knows if that will happen. But one thing is certain: the age of cheap oil is gone. It's history.

Oil prices will continue to vary. They may even collapse temporarily as they did in 2008, thanks to the worldwide economic meltdown. We're on a roller coaster ride that will last for decades and it's not certain how things will look on the other side of a new age, an age of shortages and shifting dynamics. Of course, the more the United States and other parts of the world have their head in the sand, the more difficult it will be.

A few years ago, the conventional wisdom was that there was still plenty of oil. In a trivial way, that's true, but what there is no longer a lot of is accessible oil. Nor is there enough easy to reach oil to produce in sufficient abundance to offset the declines of older oil fields. Here's an interview from Forbes Magazine using a word many people would like to ignore: peak oil:

Charles Maxwell: The use of petroleum in the world is now up to about 30 billion barrels per year. The rate at which we have found new supplies of petroleum over the last 10 years has fallen to an average, of only about 10 billion barrels per year.

Charles Maxwell is a mainstream energy analyst. He says what others have noticed simply by looking at the facts: for some years now, the world has been using far more oil each year than it is discovering. The current shortfall is about 20 billion barrels a year. If you think of oil as a bank account, it's clear that the account is being drained.

As Maxwell points out, greed and blunders by producers are creating even more problems:

What's happening is that the increase in the world's population and greater use of oil in transportation, particularly in the emerging countries, is working to lift oil demand, and that spurs us to drain a field more quickly, but not necessarily to get a higher proportion of oil out of it. So we have technology improving production capability, but actually taking the oil out faster rather than getting much more out.

What Maxwell is saying here is that we're making poor use of our technology in an effort to sustain business as usual. But we already know that such thinking is not sustainable.

In the past year, a majority of Democrats tried to pass an energy bill that would deal with climate change while also addressing America's growing need for alternative energy. But a minority of Democrats and almost all the Republicans opposed the legislation. In the meantime, according to CNNMoney, the alternative energy sector in China is creating jobs:

China has already surpassed the United States in the amount of wind turbines and solar panels that it makes. China is also gaining on the United States when it comes to how much of their energy comes from renewable energy sources.

The country that leads in the renewable energy industry, is opening the door to more home-grown jobs.

Whatever one may think of the Chinese, American conservatives are handing them the future. Keep in mind that oil will continue to be produced in the United States for many years to come. But we are continuing to buy more and more foreign oil. This is precisely where the lie of conservatives is so obvious: foreign oil does not create American jobs. But jobs in alternative energy in the U.S. would create tens of thousands of jobs. That is a simple fact. And we ignore that fact at our own peril.

Realities of the North Dakota Oil Boom

An oil boom is underway in the western part of North Dakota near Williston. If one takes the long view, eastern Montana and adjacent parts of Canada are considered parts of the same boom involving the Bakken Shale oilfield. No doubt a combination of factors make western North Dakota easy pickings for the moment. For one thing, oil rigs are hitting few dry wells. That is, as long as they use the fracking system developed in recent years by Halliburton. The consequence is that a lot of oil, money and jobs are available in these fields. From all over the country, young unemployed Americans are heading to the area to see if they can land a job. In a bad economy, a lot of people see the boom as a good thing. For many people, it is.

But there's a lot of hype and excess associated with what's going on in North Dakota. Here's an article by Tamsin Carlisle in, of all places, The National, an Abu Dhabi newspaper:

It contains hundreds of billions of barrels of light crude oil and thousands of wells and should be scaring the pants off any oil exporter needing high crude prices to balance its budget.

It is the Bakken Shale oilfield, which sprawls across two Canadian prairie provinces and two western US states including North Dakota, under 500,000 square kilometres of land.

Its US portion is described as the country’s largest oil deposit outside Alaska. With its biggest and most accessible part in Canada, the Bakken could prove to be one of the largest oilfields in the world.

That's a lot of oil and a lot of hype. The title of the article by the way is "A New US oil rush could rock OPEC." The article is worth reading and it's important not to dismiss everything that is said about the Bakken field. But we have here a newspaper in an OPEC country where things are not always what they seem. OPEC countries, ideally, want two things: they want the oil age to last as long as possible and they want high prices as long as possible. The theory is that the more the world switches to alternative energy, the faster the price of oil will drop and the more difficult it will be to fund expensive oil projects. So, it's supposedly in the interest of OPEC to convince their biggest customers (including the U.S. but also countries like China) that the world is still awash in oil. Of course, it isn't. At the very least, the age of cheap oil is largely over.

The implication of much of the hype around Bakken is that it's a game changer that will help take care of America's oil needs for years to come. There are claims that the field holds up to 500 billion barrels of oil. However, even if the figure is accurate (probably not), the only figure that matters is the amount of recoverable oil. So what is recoverable? The USGS puts the amount at 4.3 billion barrels. That's enough to supply the oil needs of the United States for eight months. At the end of the day, that's not much of a game changer.

But let's say the Bakken oilfield is the same size as the greater Prudhoe Bay oilfield in Alaska. As of 2005, Prudhoe Bay had produced some 11 billion barrels of oil. Some estimates put the remaining amount of oil to be produced after 2005 at around 2 billion barrels of oil. That's 13 billion barrels for a field said to contain 25 billion barrels (it's a fact of life that not all oil can be economically recovered).

Production at Prudhoe Bay started in 1977. So it took almost 30 years to reach 11 billion barrels. How can we put that into context? Well, let's look at a graph of U.S. oil production (courtesy of the U.S. Energy Information Administration - EIA - click on it to enlarge):


In 1970, U.S. oil production reached an all-time average high of 9,637,000 barrels per day. In the graph, you can see how U.S. oil production then dips down until 1977, the year Prudhoe Bay started producing. After that, U.S. production began to rise for several years, but production never caught up to 1970. By 1986, even with the help of the production at Prudhoe Bay, U.S. production started dropping again. Ironically, from 1986 to 1998, oil production at Prudhoe Bay continued to grow until it reached 2 million barrels per day. Think of this for a moment: 2 million barrels a day was not enough to reverse declining American oil production.

So what's the oil production in North Dakota? According to this website (and other sources), production in North Dakota has grown, as of June 2010, to 315,282 barrels a day. Production at the Bakken field is expected to grow for some time, but for now 315,282 barrels a day is less than 16% of Prudhoe Bay's maximum production in 1998 and that 2 million barrels a day could not stop declining U.S. production.

Today, the U.S. is producing not 9,637,000 barrels a day, as it did in 1970, but only 5,361,000 barrels a day. That's a considerable drop that has to be made up by imports. Total consumption of crude oil by Americans is somewhere around 15 million barrels a day (total consumption of all petroleum products is around 18-20 million barrels a day, depending on what exactly one is measuring: if this sounds confusing, blame the oil companies and their lobbyists who want as much confusion for consumers as possible so that the reality is not that clear).

Clearly we import far more petroleum than we produce. Clearly, oil production continues to decline. Even if North Dakota and Montana combined were miraculously able to ramp up and produce 4,500,000 barrels of oil a day by the end of twenty years (it takes time to build up production), we would not pass the maximum oil production of 1970. Why? Because in those twenty years, production in older oilfields would still be declining, just as older oilfields were declining during the buildup of Prudhoe Bay's maximum production years.

In the meantime, during those twenty years, the population of the U.S. would also be growing and we would be importing more oil than ever.

One can argue that the Bakken oilfield is, for the most part, if we ignore certain issues, helping the American economy. If the Bakken oil field does nothing more than help sustain the American economy for just a few years more, then the extra time must be used to help transition an economy to something that isn't heavily dependent on oil or other fossil fuels. People will still be drilling oil for some time to come. But oil is no longer the future and no longer enough to sustain our economy.

The oil barons, whether they live in the Middle East, Texas or elsewhere, don't care much about the future or much about the world. They care about grabbing the maximum for themselves. It's no way to run a civilization.

Republicans Organize Grassroots for the Wealthy and Flirt with the 19th Century

The tea party mad hatters are threatening to take the United States back to the 19th century—but, the way things are going, these folks may be flirting with the 17th century when emperors, kings and various aristocrats forced average people into fighting for them so that the emperors, kings and various aristocrats could have a little more power and wealth for themselves and their heirs. In the Thirty Years War alone, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people died for the sake of a few hundred powerful people. It took ordinary people two or three generations just to get back to where their grandparents had been.

Timothy Egan has a post on the growing irrationality of a large number of Republicans (but is it irrationality or simply a stubborn refusal to do some homework?):

It’s not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.

Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.

Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions.

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, who are notorious for uttering facts more by accident than by design, are only partially responsible for the current state of affairs. Certainly people like Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove manage to time their utterances to add kindling to the fire of right-wing anger. Never mind for a moment the damage news outlets not owned by billionaires like Murdoch are doing by not pointing out the outright lies. The fact is that the tea party people are being organized and some curious people are paying the bills. Here's a post from The Mahablog:

Kate Zernike writes for the New York Times that the “tea party” movement is largely being organized and funded by FreedomWorks, which isn’t really news.

FreedomWorks staffers are going around the country training the teabaggers how to be useful political tools and get out the vote for FreedomWorks candidates. It is this organizing that is behind the several upsets in recent Republican primaries, in which “tea party” candidates upset long-entrenched Republican incumbents.

(snip)

FreedomWorks itself evolved from another organization, Citizens for a Sound Economy, created in 1984 by the Koch Foundation with help from Big Tobacco. Joshua Holland of AlterNet has called FreedomWorks a “Wall Street front group,”, although I think it’s probably more accurate to call it “astroturf for hire.” FreedomWorks works with a number of PR firms to manipulate public opinion for a number of right-wing special interests.

According to SourceWatch, its funders in 2007 included –

Armstrong Foundation, $20,000
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, $80,000
Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, $100,000
Sarah Scaife Foundation, $200,000
Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation, $20,000

In other words — grassroots, my ass. What’s behind the “tea parties” are the same mega-wealthy familiy trusts that bankroll everything else that’s right wing in America.

The New Yorker has an article on a particular pair of right-wing billionaires who are behind the tea party folks, the Koch brothers:

[The Koch brothers own] virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars. ... Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill....

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups.

Many Republicans, when they aren't complaining about immigrant and Muslims, continue to believe that the biggest danger to America is big government rather than big business. The Koch brothers show how unproductive that belief can be. Keep in mind that if the United States takes global warming seriously and turns to alternative energy in a major way, the oil giants will still be pumping oil and the coal giants will still be mining coal for many years to come. Switching to alternative energy is going to take time. There is still a lot of money that big coal and big oil can make, and a lot of work for those in those industries (however, very rapidly, there will also be many workers needed in alternative energy and the infrastructure projects). Rationally, the billionaires and other big investors who own coal and oil ought to know all this. Business is supposed to be rational, right? But greed and power do funny things to people. It seems people like that can never have enough. It's clear that right-wing billionaires have an itch to throw their weight around.

In the meantime, people who deal with facts are getting uneasy. I live in Northern California and I learned something new about global warming this month. All over the world, we have been seeing record heat this year. Russia, still an important breadbasket for various nations, had record heat and drought that has drastically affected its agricultural output (I know, the Republican with his head in the sand is complaining that this has nothing to do with him).

But we have also been seeing other things. We have seen record floods in Pakistan and China. And yet, despite the record heat around the world, a very few places like the western counties of Northern California have experienced a very cool summer. Cool? Yes, and there's a reason for it. And it does not contradict the climate scientists. The interior counties to the east are experiencing long periods of record high temperatures and when the conditions are just right, the heat rising in the interior areas is allowing the marine layers to flow farther inland.

There is a reason the scientists prefer the term climate change to global warming. Most of the effects in the years to come will be rising temperatures but there will be any number of weird side effects around the world. We are seeing these things far earlier than we thought we would and it's only 2010.

Climate scientists are doing a lot of modeling trying to understand what is happening. The science is powerful but it is not exact. An example of powerful science was the development of the atomic bomb. In the beginning, no one knew exactly how much the first nuclear weapons would yield. Before the first explosion at White Sands, the scientists did their calculations and came up with a range. A few calculations suggested nothing might happen. One or two calculations suggested the Earth's atmosphere might catch on fire. The great bulk of the calculations were somewhere in between. But even the calculations near the actual power of the bomb had quite a range. It turns out the actual explosion was a little bigger than most thought it would be. We know nuclear weapons are real. Only a fool would say they're not.

Climate science is a less accurate science than physics but not by as much as one might think. Still, the calculations the climate scientists have made so far have not been entirely correct. So far, they have been underestimating the effect and speed of global warming. Some scientists are trying to get ahead of the curve and taking more seriously the possibility of worst case scenarios. For an article on the growing odds of worst case scenarios, check out this post at Early Warning on the probability distribution of various temperature scenarios.

In the Guardian, Bill McKibben has some thoughts on the record summer heat:

But this is no longer an environmental battle. As this summer demonstrates, if you're concerned about development, climate change is issue No 1 (how much development is going to go on in Pakistan, now that its bridges are all gone?). If you're concerned about war and peace, climate change is issue No 1 (when Russia stops sending grain to Egypt and Nigeria, and when wheat prices start to rise, what do you think comes next?). If you're concerned about the future, then climate change is issue No 1 – because this summer is a tiny taste of what the future is all about. So far we've barely raised the earth's temperature a degree, and that's caused all that we've seen so far. But climatologists assure us there's four or five degrees more by the century's end unless we work with incredible speed to end the fossil fuel era.

The Tea Party crowd is determined to turn the Republican Party into the American Taliban. If by Taliban we are talking about fundamentalism, xenophobia, self-righteousness, a turning away from rationalism toward authoritarianism and an inward turn toward the past, there can be no doubt the United States has a problem. The question this fall is whether enough Americans will join right-wing Republicans to form a majority or whether Americans will turn away from the kind of nonsense that has never done our nation any good.

After 75 Years, Social Security Still Threatened by Republicans

The Democrats are celebrating the 75th anniversary of Social Security. At a time when Republicans are doing their best to kill pensions for workers, social security is more important than ever for widows, the elderly and the disabled. These are the hidden citizens of America, most of whom have worked hard all their lives. These are the people Republicans would like to forget. Democrats know better. Here's the story from The Boston Globe:

“Social security was something that my grandfather viewed as a key part of his legacy, just as universal health care is going to be a key part of President Obama’s legacy,” said [James] Roosevelt in a conference call Friday afternoon with reporters and DNC Chairman Tim Kaine.

Roosevelt and Kaine pledged to protect Social Security as a public program, especially in light of cries for privatization this election season from Republicans like Sharron Angle of Nevada and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

As far as I can tell, the primary reason Republican politicians are pushing for the privatization of social security is that they want campaign contributions from conservative stock brokers who would obviously have a piece of the action. This, of course, is not about helping the American people. This is about raw politics, power and greed. Nothing more.

I have no idea what to make of people like Sharon Angle. Here's an AP article where she's peddling Republican talking points:

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle says the nation's Social Security system needs to be privatized, and that it was done before in the South American country of Chile.

What does Sharon Angle know about Social Security? Does she know the history of workers in our country? How do people like Sharon Angle get nominated? She has repeatedly said things in the past few months that reveal a lack of knowledge across a wide area of subjects. So obviously, after a series of blunders, she's now being stage-managed by her Republican advisers at this point. Who's advising her? At two or three removes, I suspect sociopaths like Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich are peddling this stuff. If the word, 'sociopath,' seems strong, note that Gingrich's ex-wife quotes Gingrich's staff as saying "he's a sociopath, but he's our sociopath" (It's not the only time the word has been tied to Gingrich). Is that what people want? Republican puppets who spew all the talking points without having the foggiest idea what they're talking about?

I hate to be harsh but I recently had to read a paper by a young person who got bamboozled by a lot of nonsense being posted on the Internet. This person has no stake in the social security 'debate' and simply used the Internet for research. If one simply Googles the words, 'is social security bankrupt,' the problem quickly becomes apparent. The sky is falling crowd of Republicans has dozens of papers attempting to scare people into believing that social security will go bankrupt in 2010, 2012 or 2016. Again, I would prefer to take a more thoughtful approach, but when you read the stuff, it's just fraud, lies and nonsense.

One could argue that the Great Recession that was brought to us by George W. Bush might have been deep enough to damage Social Security. But in fact Social Security has weathered the crisis fairly well. Here's a story from the Los Angeles Times about the recently released annual report of the Social Security Trustees:

In recent years, during which conservatives have intensified their efforts to destroy one of the few U.S. government programs that actually works as intended, the report's publication has become an occasion for hand-wringing and crocodile tears over the (supposedly) parlous state of the system's finances.

This year's report, which came out Thursday, is no exception. Within minutes of its release, some analysts were claiming that it projected a "shortfall" for Social Security this year of $41 billion.

(snip)

Before we get to the bogus math behind that statement — which doesn't actually appear in the report — let's look at the encouraging findings by the agency's trustees, who include the secretaries of Labor, the Treasury, and Health and Human Services.

The trustees indicated that the program has made it through the worst economic downturn in its life span essentially unscathed. In fact, by at least one measure it's fiscally stronger than a year ago: Its projected actuarial deficit over the next 75 years (a measurement required by law) is smaller now than a year ago.

When one sees crocodile tears from Republicans, be sure to look closely for the dollar signs in their eyes. They keep thinking of the hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of dollars that might flow in from those stock brokers wanting to cash in on the privatization of social security.

Now these guys won't set up those private accounts for free (why do you think they're salivating?). But they were certainly ready to charge their fees back in 2005—except that Bush wasn't able to pass social security privatization. Too bad. Think of all that money investors might have made between late 2007 and early 2009 during the worst economic slump since the Great Depression. Those are funny folks who run the Republican Party these days.

Republicans Are Trying to Kill Me

Sorry about the snarky title to this post. Unfortunately, it's true. I don't mean that the average everyday Republican is trying to kill me. On the other hand, many very conservative Republicans who go to the polls every election aren't paying too much attention to facts these days. Nor do these same voters recognize how few good ideas their leaders have had for many years now.

Let's begin with a fact that came close to killing me: health care is broken and has been for twenty years. Republicans leaders in Congress could care less about this simple fact. For one thing, they have too many wealthy campaign contributors who work for the insurance companies and those contributors don't want their cash cow disturbed.

So what does this have to do with me? Simple. I work as a free lance writer and editor. It's never been easy to get health insurance even in the best of times. Sometimes I have lucked out simply because sometimes I have gotten health insurance through my wife's employer. She's in a profession where it's common to change employers from time to time. For technical reasons I can no longer get health insurance from her latest employer. So I tried to apply for health insurance through a company that had a deal with the AARP. I thought it was a straightforward application. Little did I know. A few weeks after I got the application, I got a letter from the insurance company that said I had to call such and such a person. The person was a nurse working for the insurance company. She asked some detailed questions about my health history. Two weeks later I received a letter denying me health insurance because of a preexisting condition that has now existed for over 30 years. That condition has probably cost me less than $3,000 over the 30 year span and most of the money was spent on periodic blood tests. I kept thinking back on the nurse and how little regard she seemed to have for her profession. She was working for bean counters instead of people who believe in providing a good service for their clients.

Nearly two years later—last month—my wife and I decided to move to a little larger rental. We decided to hire movers this time but there was still a lot of work to do. Being a writer, for example, it's natural that I have a lot of books. Boxes of books can get in the way during a move, so I rented a small storage space to store the books until after the move. Our last place has stairs and I found myself getting a bit winded after taking down a load to my car and going back up the stairs. Sometimes my left shoulder started getting sore. If I simply stopped, the shoulder pain went away. I tried to be more careful and started taking my time. I thought maybe I was beginning to show my age, but otherwise I was fine. Or so I thought. I was wrong.

At one in the morning, I finished an editing job and got ready for bed. I'm a night owl but normally I finish my jobs around midnight. But it had been a long day and I had been a bit sluggish. I got ready for bed and a bunch of acid suddenly erupted up my esophagus. I get acid reflux sometimes, though an over-the-counter medication I take usually does a good job of controlling the problem. My shoulder also started hurting a lot, particularly around the chest.

I couldn't sleep, so I went in the living room to sit in a chair, thinking that might help. It began to occur to me that maybe I had a bigger problem, that maybe more than acid reflux and a sore shoulder was going on. I didn't want to think about it. It was early Saturday morning and no place I could think of was going to be cheap. And besides, that pain I felt when I went up the stairs always went away. And I thought a glass of water and some Tums and a little patience is all I needed and I would be fine.

But after a couple of hours the chair grew uncomfortable. I went back to bed, lay there awhile, and broke out in a sweat. I threw off the blankets, sat up and finally my wife asked if something was wrong. I explained about the pain. She trusted my explanation since I usually know my body pretty well. But I wasn't being honest with myself. For one thing, I hate false alarms. For another, I couldn't even think where to go. I couldn't afford to go anywhere. I simply couldn't afford to have a problem. So I waited.

If Republicans had not stalled and played games on health care, if a few Democrats—behaving like Republicans— had not waffled for so long, I might have had insurance by now. I would be paying several thousands dollar a year for it, just like everybody else. Health care should have been passed a year ago. Insurance for preexisting conditions might have become available by this past January. Republicans literally might not have been trying to kill me on the night I had a heart attack and waited and waited because I had no insurance.

My wife finally drove me to the emergency room. Luckily, it was less than a mile away. Luckily, they have a first-rate heart clinic. Luckily, they got to me in time, pumped me with heparin and wheeled me into the heart clinic where I received a stent. I stayed in the hospital for three days. I was lucky, my new doctor thinks I'll heal, though it's not exactly going to happen in a hurry. But the bill? I don't want to even talk about the bill. It's big. I try to watch my money. I try to save. But I've never seen a bill like that. Actually, there are several bills and they haven't stopped coming.

I don't want to hear from Republicans that I'm fussing about nothing, that I just have to know how to manipulate the system. That's bullcrap. It's a full admission that health care in our nation is broken. Will the new health care program work? Maybe. It needs to be stronger than it is but Republicans and the few Democrats who behave like Republicans watered it down too much. They lied to the public too much. They are still lying to the public too much. These days Republican leaders are paid to lie. The theme of Republicans this year is that our country is failing. It's an insulting proposition, particularly given the games that have been played in the last thirty years. Think of it: they want President Obama to fail. They want our president to fail. That is tantamount to wanting our nation to fail.

I have Republican friends who are horrified by what happened to me. I have one friend who worried that an argument we had back in June might have contributed to my heart attack. I had to assure him that it didn't. But I don't know what to think. You can't keep sending jobs overseas, you can't keep buying oil from foreign companies, you can't keep letting American economic sectors run amok (think oil and coal), you can't ignore the paramount importance of developing renewable energy sources, you can't play one group off another, you can't shovel buckets of money into the hands of people who are already wealthy and expect a majority of Americans to do well. It isn't going to happen. But that's where we're headed if Republicans get back into power. They have no ideas except old ideas that have not worked.

A few days ago, I put my name on an email list to receive an application for insurance for those people with preexisting conditions. I guess I have two preexisting conditions now. Needless to say, I need the insurance. And today's Republican leaders have done nothing to assure me that they're not trying to kill me the next time I have a serious health issue.

I'll say it one last time: I know I was lucky. But I keep thinking of the ones who waited too long, the mothers and fathers, the hardworking people who had no insurance. This is not the way our country should be. We need to start moving forward again, not backwards.

The Gulf Oil Spill: A Social Fiasco

Some of the best analysis I've seen on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill has taken place on The Oil Drum. One of the main bloggers is Gail the Actuary and she recently wrote a post on a subsidiary of the site called The Oil Drum: Campfire. Here's the opening section with four questions:

It seems to me with the BP Horizon Blowout, we may be hitting a turning point in belief systems, in more than one way:

• Can businesses really be expected to regulate themselves, with minimal oversight?

• Can technology solve all our problems?

• If there are technological solutions, can they be expected immediately?

• Can we really depend on the oil supply that everyone has told us is here?

Let's take a quick look at these questions in light of recent events, including the growing size of the spill. The spill is so large that everyone is having trouble figuring out the exact size. But it is clearly far larger than the first estimates made to the public. It appears the larger estimates are not that far off from what BP said in its own internal estimates within the first few days of the accident. BP also had a range of the possible size and the high end of that range was around 2.5 million gallons a day. Surprise. All we can say for sure is that this is the largest oil spill in our nation's history and is now one of the largest in recorded history—and it is still growing. Tens of millions of gallons have poured into the gulf because BP decided to take shortcuts and had no backup plan if things went wrong.

Now Gail the Actuary asks: 1. Can businesses really be expected to regulate themselves, with minimal oversight?

I'm not being cynical when I write that this is the wrong question. The right question in the year 2010 is simply this: can large corporations be trusted, period?

When 10,000 people in Bhopal, India died back in the 1980s because of a chemical accident/blunder at a Union Carbide plant in India, the chairman of Union Carbide accepted full responsibility—for about a week. It took the chairman that long to learn what it meant to accept responsibility and to receive dozens of calls from angry major stockholders who were themselves unwilling to accept responsibility for what had happened. The chairman went into public relations mode mixed with a large dose of stonewalling.

In some respects, Congress should also include major stockholders in their hearings. Of course, some major stockholders include pension funds, retirees and foundations. Responsibility has a way of being deferred rather effectively down the road with the help of an army of lawyers and public relations flacks.

Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP, has perhaps taken the procedure a step further as we see in this Houston Chronicle article:

In response to question after question, Hayward calmly insisted that he did not know what motivated key decisions about the blown-out well's design, frustrating House members who complained that his answers were evasive and overly legalistic - as if drafted by lawyers mindful of the flood of negligence lawsuits facing the company.

Tensions spilled over less than 20 minutes into the hearing.

"You're not taking responsibility," said Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "You're kicking the can down the road and acting as if you had nothing to do with these decisions."

"I'm not stonewalling," Hayward responded, over the clicking of cameras documenting his inaugural Capitol Hill testimony. "I simply was not involved in the decision-making process."

I can guarantee that every executive in America is taking notes. It doesn't matter one bit that BP is a British corporation. Most corporations around the world are in the same racket: maximizing profits, socializing losses and denying responsibility.

Without getting into a long history, the answer to the question is this: no, corporations cannot be trusted unless they are regulated, held to a high standard and clearly see that cheaters and lawbreakers are punished no matter how many lawyers they have.

2. Can technology solve all our problems? This is a sad question, particularly given the optimism around 1960 or so. In real time, given the real conditions of the world, the answer is a pathetic and resounding no. Most technology problems are usually social problems. This means that if a technological solution exists, it is only temporary because the social problems begin to intrude again. The green revolution, for example, increased world food supplies but it also led to a large increase in the number of humans in the world and meant diminished resources per person in the world.

The more pertinent question, perhaps, is this: can science solve all our problems? Maybe, but only in conjunction with a profound understanding of human nature that we are far short of achieving to this date. In fact, what we have achieved so far leaves far too much out of the "equation," though if we survive this century, we may develop tools that begin to give us some of the insights that we need. But the vision of science will have to grow much larger than it is now. What we need is a bit more wisdom and science does not have an abundance of that.

But back to the question. We are running out of cheap oil and it is beginning to have a major impact on the world. There are solutions, and maybe eventually there will be cheap solutions, but there are no cheap, quick technological solutions and it would be a disaster to continue with business as usual. We are either heading for major change that will allow a large majority of humans to survive, or we are heading for a disaster too large to imagine if we continue on our present course, as if we have no choice or better visions. Alternatives exist, but we are running out of time if we think leaving things to companies like Exxon, Enron, Halliburton and BP is somehow a viable option.

3. If there are technological solutions, can they be expected immediately?

Not give today's business standards and the Republican laissez faire deregulatory philosophy that has existed since Reagan took office. We are destroying our resilience and reserves for the sake of a few extra bucks. If there is an emergency, we have no backups. This is a national security issue where right wing Republicans have dramatically failed. Right wing Republicans are the kind of people who cut a fire fighting budget by $50,000 and then are nowhere to be found when there is a $500 million fire. We allow too much of our critical military equipment, our infrastructure, our technology and our business tools to be made outside the United States. We allow insurance companies to sell policies without the cash to pay off those policies. We allow banks to operate who do not have the resources to handle bizarre financial instruments when those instruments collapse. We do not have the equivalent of a fire house and equipment when a truly major oil spill occurs. We have taken our comfortable way of life so utterly for granted that we do not realize the danger we have put ourselves in.

4. Can we really depend on the oil supply that everyone has told us is available?

The answer is no. It's been no since the 1970s. It has always been no. It will remain no. It will become increasingly obvious that the answer is no. When we start burning a lot more coal in the cities, we will be reminded why we turned to oil and natural gas in the first place. Question four is stupid. It requires a large number of ignorant people to even exist. And they do exist. Oil companies are heavily dependent on the ignorance of a majority of Americans. If a large enough majority of Americans truly understood what we're facing, there would be change. There should have been change 30 years ago.

Oil Spill: It's Bigger Than the Exxon Valdez

It's not official but there can be no doubt at this point that the oil spill from Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico exceeds what happened in 1989 with the Exxon Valdez. And the oil is still leaking.

No one knows exactly how much oil is flowing into the ocean but it far exceeds the 210,000 gallons a day that has been estimated so far. Here's the first story by way of the Los Angeles Times:

BP's success at drawing oil from a leaking pipe has proved that official estimates of the size of the Gulf of Mexico spill have been too low.

The company effectively admitted as much Thursday when it said that a tube inserted into the broken pipe connected to its blown-out well is collecting as much as 5,000 barrels of oil and 15 million cubic feet of gas a day, even as a live video feed shows large volumes continuing to billow into gulf waters.

The government has underestimated the size of the spill. Then again, BP has done almost nothing to help gauge the size of the disaster it caused. I have personally seen NOAA do a terrific job of handling a small oil spill but that was back in the 1990s, before President George W. Bush watered down some of NOAA's effectiveness (I once sat through a boring speech by a Bush appointee who prattled on about Ronald Reagan who was not exactly a friend of NOAA). Like many agencies, NOAA suffers the same problems as many corporations: people who are competent are overseen by people with an agenda. Maybe this disaster will make it clear to President Obama that real reform cannot occur while bending over backwards to please Republicans who are not interested in reform—or reality.

Here's another story, this one from the Houston Chronicle, which has done a reasonably good job of reporting:

BP said on Thursday it is capturing 5,000 barrels of oil a day from a leaking pipe in the Gulf of Mexico — a double-edged progress report that showed that the company and government have been understating the scope of the spill for more than a month.

(snip)

BP would not estimate how much oil is still evading a collection tube inserted into the larger of two breaks on the riser pipe that once connected the Macondo well to the Deepwater Horizon rig a mile above.

BP has said the larger break is believed to be gushing 85 percent of the oil escaping from the ruptured well 40 miles off the Louisiana coast.

The oil spill in the gulf has not happened in a vacuum. Less than two years ago, Republicans like Sarah Palin were shouting: "Drill, baby, drill."

In recent years, there have been three kinds of Republicans: opportunists, pragmatists and know-nothing right-wingers like Sarah Palin. Republican pragmatists used to arrive in Washington in larger numbers but they are having a hard time staying in office because they are under assault by the know-nothings and the opportunists.

The Republicans, of course, have no monopoly on opportunists since Democrats have them too. However, in Congress, Democratic pragmatists far outnumber Republican pragmatists, who seem a bit shy about asserting themselves these days. For once, a little progress in Washington is being made, but not fast enough.

The big problem in Washington and the country is the coalition of Republican opportunists and know-nothings who try every trick in the book—don't hold your breath—to make sure Congress and anyone else in government does as little as possible. Why would they do that? Because they receive a lot of money from companies like BP as well as other oil companies, coal companies, chemical companies and anyone else looking for a favor or an administration willing to look the other way. This, of course, has to change or we will have even more oil spills like the one at Deepwater Horizon. Why? Because oil has become expensive and there are certain people in the world who, despite the risks, cut corners. The bigger the risks and the bigger the profits, the more chance there is that someone will cut corners on a project like Deepwater Horizon. Keep in mind that deep sea oil drilling is high technology. It is expensive and there is little margin for error.

I don't know precisely what kind of Republican Bobby Jindal is. Maybe he's the opportunistic kind. Maybe not. Maybe he's just doing his job. Here's a New York Times article on the oil now coming ashore:

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said Wednesday that sheets of heavy crude oil from the offshore spill had seeped deep into the delicate marshes around the mouth of the Mississippi River. He called on the federal government to approve a plan to build sand berms to protect the bayou country.

“These are not tar balls, this is not sheen, this is heavy oil,” Mr. Jindal told reporters on a pier here, holding up a plastic bag full of sticky brownish liquid, after taking a helicopter and boat tour of the area. “What we are seeing yesterday and today is literally this heavy oil coming into our wetlands.”

Finally, here's a link to pictures of the oil spill and reactions in other places courtesy of The Huffington Post. I have no doubt we will be seeing many more pictures.

If the reader notices that some of these sites seem progressive or at least not conservative, they're right. A number of conservative news outlets are still in denial about what is happening or engage in silly theories as the oil rolls ashore and spreads deeper and deeper into the Gulf of Mexico. Such conservative news outlets are useless as a source of reliable information.

I want to say it one more time: this is not a 'tiny' spill as BP CEO Tony Hayward suggested a few days ago. No one knows how much the oil spill will cost us. But we now know that the oil spill is much larger that we thought just a couple of days ago. For now, it is still growing.

Size of Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

This is a quick look based on combining two NOAA graphics (click on the map to get a larger view):


If this looks like a patch job, it is. It's a combination of this NOAA file near Louisiana and this NOAA file covering a larger area of the Gulf. The total picture is a forecast for Thursday, May 20, 2010.

The blue represents the mapped areas of the oil spill and the larger area enclosed by the dark line represents possible areas currently affected by the oil spill but it's not known for certain where else the oil may be, either on the surface in thin patches or below in thicker plumes.

Regardless of what BP says, this is a large spill and although there are signs that the spill is no longer growing at the pace it has been, it is in fact still growing for now.

Here's an updated map that was not available earlier.

Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Continues

No one knows for sure how much oil is spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. But pictures of the size of the spill show the impacted area growing every day. If 210,000 gallons a day are leaking from the well at Deepwater Horizon as BP says, we already have a spill of over 5,000,000 gallons. Keep in mind that a number of scientists believe the spill may be much larger.

No one knows when the leaking oil will be capped. But the oil executives—who seem to get to the top based on their public relations skills—are getting egg on their faces as they point fingers at one another and trip over their feet as more and more mistakes, blunders and misguided shortcuts are revealed. And then there's Tony Hayward, CEO of BP who told us the other day than fighting the oil spill is a bit like landing at Normandy. But now, according to The Guardian, he's telling a little different story:

Tony Hayward, the beleaguered chief executive of BP, has claimed its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is "relatively tiny" compared with the "very big ocean".

In an bullish interview with the Guardian at BP's crisis centre in Houston, Hayward insisted that the leaked oil and the estimated 400,000 gallons of dispersant that BP has pumped into the sea to try to tackle the slick should be put in context.

"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume," he said.

Hayward is apparently an idiot who receives a very large paycheck every year. One has to be amazed at these things. Here's a graphic from NOAA that shows the size of the oil spill (bigger maps are available on NOAA's webpage):


That's a spill that potentially stretches along half the Louisiana coast, all of Mississippi's coast and as far east as Mobile, Alabama. The blue areas, the core of the spill, just continue to grow every hour.

Now Tony Hayward says that the gulf is very big and the spill is rather tiny. Let's take a look at the Gulf of Mexico:


The first thing I notice is that the water of the Gulf of Mexico is surrounded by land—lots of it. Along the shore are beaches, marshes, shipping, breeding grounds, hatcheries, fishing marinas, industry and lots and lots of wildlife and habitat. Hayward is a fool and doesn't know what he's talking about.

Unfortunately, the longer the oil spill goes on, the more potential there is for enormous damage. As a news story from Reuters reminds us, hurricane season is approaching:

Meteorologists say that climate conditions are ripe for an unusually destructive hurricane season, the storm-prone period that runs from June 1 to the end of November in the Gulf. Oceanographers say that could hurt the clean-up.

"If a storm comes into this situation it could vastly complicate everything," said Florida State University oceanography professor Ian MacDonald.

"All efforts on the shoreline and at sea, the booms and structures and rigs involved in clean-up and containment, could stop working."

One doesn't have to be a scientist to see the potential problems. If nothing else, a hurricane can shove oil ashore. But no doubt the public relations departments of the oil companies—as well as their Washington lobbyists—will continue to be 'bullish' about the clean-up and the future of offshore drilling.

In reality, though, it doesn't take much homework to discover that the big oil companies know truths that many Americans would rather not know. The simplest truth is that oil is no longer cheap. The second truth is that beyond the next ten to twenty years, the oil companies have no business plan to maintain worldwide oil production and they have no solution to the diminishing reserves of oil throughout the world. The third truth is that it will take ten to twenty years to develop a robust infrastructure for renewable green energy. The fourth truth is that the American taxpayer is paying to subsidize the obscene profits of the oil companies when those tax dollars should be spent protecting our future with a huge investment in green technology.

Admittedly, some oil companies are slowly getting into alternative energy. But I would not be comfortable letting the Tony Haywards of the world be involved in the new economy we need to build. In fact, that would be a mistake. In the last three years, Wall Street, the big banks and big oil have shown us how not to do business. We need change. Maybe Obama is finally understanding that change is not a political slogan but a necessity.