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Peak Oil Theorists are enthused that a front page story at the Wall Street Journal has endorsed a near-term peak for oil production. They ruffle a few feathers at the same time, calling Peak Oil theory “debased.”

On that word, “debased”:

This is a muddy area and it’s always hard to say what is conventional and what is an outlier in any movement. The Journal seems to say that conventional Peak Oil theory calls for a single peak in production, and then a steady, irreversible, decline. I’ve certainly heard from many Peak Oil followers who believe that. They will argue that the production curve will follow a symmetrical bell-curve. They often name high (4-8%) declines in production as the immediate consequence of “the peak.”

The Journal is backing the idea of a Plateau – a period of somewhat flat production before a later decline. That’s actually a semi-conventional idea in the Peak OIl world as well, but I think they might be right that it isn’t what the typical Peak Oil Theorist has to sell.

Peak Oiler’s, especially the ones with theories of economic or social collapse, are all about the sudden, steep, and irreversible decline in oil production following Peak. Let’s hope that doesn’t prove to be what we get. That’s the form of Peak Oil that would be toughest to deal with. On the other hand, a Plateau could almost be a convenient wake-up call. It might be the signal that Hybrid Tahoes are really a pretty stupid idea, & etc.

Anyway, the WSJ piece begins:

A growing number of oil-industry chieftains are endorsing an idea long deemed fringe: The world is approaching a practical limit to the number of barrels of crude oil that can be pumped every day.

Some predict that, despite the world’s fast-growing thirst for oil, producers could hit that ceiling as soon as 2012. This rough limit — which two senior industry officials recently pegged at about 100 million barrels a day — is well short of global demand projections over the next few decades. Current production is about 85 million barrels a day.

The world certainly won’t run out of oil any time soon. And plenty of energy experts expect sky-high prices to hasten the development of alternative fuels and improve energy efficiency. But evidence is mounting that crude-oil production may plateau before those innovations arrive on a large scale. That could set the stage for a period marked by energy shortages, high prices and bare-knuckled competition for fuel.

For me the issue is pretty simple. If we want to reduce greenhouse gases by a significant amount, then we must increase fleet mpg by a significant amount.

Average fuel economy in the US is now 19.8 mpg (combined 2005 fleet: cars, SUVs, pick-ups). That’s actually a drop from 20.1 in 2001.

So what does the Tahoe Hybrid bring to the party? A claimed (and not yet tested) 21 mpg.

I’d be merely unimpressed if this thing had not won a freakin’ Green Car of the Year award. Give me a break. We should be moving to a fleet mpg 30+ as soon as possible. Another car that gets 21 mpg moves us … precisely nowhere.

Lisa Stiffler at SeattlePi.com has some disdain for this:

I’m not sure how you can cheer the crowning of “green car of the year” on an SUV that gets 21 miles per gallon in the city (I can’t find highway stats, but assume they’re worse). [...]

I hope that is just the beginning of ‘public education’ on this issue. I hope we can get the idea across that “green cars” start at 30 mpg and go up from there.

In my rueful moments (when I feel cynicism tinged with optimism), I call us monkeys. Or I call all us Internet folk “a billion monkeys at a billion keyboards.”

I was amused therefore to see this common sense investment advice end with:

I warned the editor that most people won’t do these things. They are like diet and exercise — we know we should, but most of us just don’t.

Such is the fate of us slightly cleverer, pants wearing monkeys . . .

Yup.

Speaking of that nasty corn ethanol, Geoff at Energy Outlook has a fine proposal:

1. Freezing the federal RFS at the current level of 7.5 billion gallons per year.

2. Phasing out all subsidies for ethanol derived from food sources within five years.

3. Phasing out the tariff on imported ethanol within two years.

4. Shifting the point of subsidy from the blender to the ethanol plant, to ensure that future subsidies go to US producers, rather than offshore.

5. Increasing the subsidy on cellulosic ethanol to $1.00/gallon until 2010, falling by 10 cents per gallon per year thereafter.

(If I had my way, I’d still go the “no subsidies” route, but … that’s not going to happen politically. The moderate proposal above faces long enough odds.)

Nice graph …

There has been a pretty amazing surge in “cleantech” investment. I’m sure there are many causes. One might be higher energy prices. One might be global warming. And one might be the desire by baby boomers to do something good with OPM (”other people’s money” … though to be fair many of these folks are coming off dot-com wins with some money of their own).

This story at CNN/Money/Fortune tells the story of David Blood, Al Gore, John Doerr, and Bill Joy, as they head for the cleantech mountain.

I think it is good positive stuff, and the kind of adaptation we are supposed to see in a dynamic market economy … I just hope that that big spike on the graph above is not all corn ethanol. I mean, some of our investments can be stupid. That is part of a dynamic market economy. We just don’t want all of them to be stupid.

(found at Fat Knowledge)

Marginal Revolution points to an interesting new book:

Anyone interested in the human reaction to gasoline prices should read (at least) the first excerpt here

It talks about gasoline directly for much of that section.

Page nine talks about price unfairness – as perceived by capuchin monkeys. It seems to me that when I’ve wanted to talk about price fairness having deep rooted or biological origins, I’ve been the odd man out.

I think defenders of a particular price or practice have a tendency to say people who argue from “unfairness” are just wrong or just irrational.

Sorry, that’s like an engineer blaming his materials. If you operate in a social environment, you can’t do it by ignoring the social rules (the nature of the material).

P.S. – that is not to say that all “price critics” are within the social norms ;-), some might be further around the bend.

You’d think, that as a technologist, I’d be a NASA fan. Not really. I’ve thought for decades that NASA should be scaled back, should be doing more unmanned and remote-sensing work (’mission to planet earth’), and that a lot of the bright people should be farmed back to state universities.

Case in point:

“NASA spends between $400,000 and $1.3 million on a party at every shuttle launch, according to CBS. Select personnel are treated to 5 days at a 4 star hotel. This year alone, they’ve spent $4 million on parties. NASA asked for, and was given, $1 billion more from the Senate this year”

I think we’ve had an even more unfortunate alignment recently, as the fly-boy set enjoys their manned missions, and the current administration tries to collect data from anyplace but ‘planet earth.’

You see … planet earth has a global warming bias.

When you hang with environmentals, and peak oilers, you get this idea that exponential curves are bad. They maintain that the curves describe unsustainable growth. They are the metaphorical train-track leading to gully where the bridge is out. It is kind of a shock to flip back to the computer and electronics domains where exponentials can be good. In those fields they can describe why we can get so many songs on an iPod … and why we might put every (good) movie ever made on an iPod in a decade or two.

Check out this excellent presentation for more.

The thing to consider is how this kind of exponential might mitigate and compensate for some of the others. Personal transportation might become more difficult or expensive, but the range of culture you experience in one place might explode. You may not visit the Library of Congress, but you might have that much in your pocket.

Though our Governator told me in a letter that I should be patient …

It’s been a long time coming, but Ballard Power is finally reading the tea leaves and realizing that the dream of a fuel-cell car powered by hydrogen is a dream that only a million-dollar prototype can occupy. The Vancouver-based fuel cell company, an industry pioneer and leader, confirmed today that it was in talks with part owners Daimler AG and Ford Motor Co. about, well, it didn’t say exactly. But we know it’s generally about “strategic alternatives,” and it’s likely about selling off the auto unit so that Ballard can focus on forklifts and power generation. I guess the market has been wishing for this for a long time, because the confirmation sent Ballard’s stock up 13 per cent today.

from clean break.

Oh my gosh, watch the video on this page. It is for History Channel’s Mega Disasters series.

I’ve got to capture that script before the video changes … a basso profundo announcer is speaking:

What would you do … if the ice caps melted?

would you go to the airport?
rely on the government?
what if they no longer existed?

would we survive?

Mega Disasters, Glacier Meltdown, Tuesdays at 10, only on the History Channel

There is definitely something weird about the human need for fear.