HuJo - thanks for the recommended reading.  While I hold out great hopes for developments in alternative energy, I have no doubts life will change considerably even in your, and my, remaining years.  As it will be impossible to read your suggestions in the lifetime of this thread, can you expound on some of the "explicit suggestions [w/in those books] as to what can be done to preserve a reasonable life style in the face of declining and expensive fossil energy sources".  Living the traveling lifestyle I have had the last couple years I've wondered how it will be possible for our society to continue with the inane driving of suburbia (most all of us here remember walking uphill 2 miles and back to school or ::gasp:: walking to the store, instead of door to door service), not to mention the casual cross-country trips and inefficient errand running.

~ ~  ~

nite for now, see you tomorrow!

A couple of friends from Texas were up here in Seattle for a visit.  Jimmy and Tom are a wonderful couple.  Jimmy was always very democratic and Tom was a staunch Republican.  He was a bit different this time around and I couldn't quite figure it out.  I gave him one of my cards with jc's website on the back.  He asked about it and I gave him a brief history of JC commenting heavily on her amazing creative abilities.  He then admitted to me that when we had first met, he was Republican and now he has "seen the light" and is now a Democrat.  I gave him a big hug and said, "Sweetie, we always new that and loved you anyway."  I hope he gets one of the stickers that says "No Longer a Repubican".

 I ordered a couple more stickers for my truck.  I was deligted to see my truck still highlighted in jc's designs live.

personal note: trying to "find the line and then step over it yesterday" by chaneling a little Carlin humor in his memory had the perverse effect of lifting my spirits while I mulled a eulogy

mary vb has a kos link with the true picture here in Iowa on the last thread and the crest is still topping levees downstream

after picking up tornado debris and then wrestling items out of stinking muck, I took off and went fishing but that was a momentary escape

wrestling with the human condition( a comedian's task) puts stinking muck in perspective(insert Charlie Black joke here)

you gotta laugh folks, sing the "field songs"

but mostly share love, because all progress in this country has come from the vision that we are building (or rebuilding) something together

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7

Thankful wrote:

can you expound on some of the "explicit suggestions [w/in those books] as to what can be done to preserve a reasonable life style in the face of declining and expensive fossil energy sources"?

I'll try to put together another post on that soon--but not today.

Jim Kunstler published a good essay in Orion Magazine recently (see link).

Jim tends to be preachy and condescending, but if you can get past that, there are some nuggets in his writings.

Some pertinent snippets:

Still, the widespread wish persists that some combination of alternative fuels will rescue us from this oil and gas predicament and allow us to continue enjoying by some other means what Vice-President Cheney has called the “non-negotiable” American way of life. The truth is that no combination of alternative fuels or systems for using them will allow us to continue running America, or even a substantial fraction of it, the way we have been. We are not going to run Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World, Monsanto, and the Interstate Highway System on any combination of solar or wind energy, hydrogen, ethanol, tar sands, oil shale, methane hydrates, nuclear power, thermal depolymerization, “zero-point” energy, or anything else you can name. We will desperately use many of these things in many ways, but we are likely to be disappointed in what they can actually do for us.

If you really want to understand the U.S. public’s penchant for wishful thinking, consider this: We invested most of our late twentieth-century wealth in a living arrangement with no future. American suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The far-flung housing subdivisions, commercial highway strips, big-box stores, and all the other furnishings and accessories of extreme car dependence will function poorly, if at all, in an oil-scarce future. Period. This dilemma now entails a powerful psychology of previous investment, which is prompting us to defend our misinvestments desperately, or, at least, preventing us from letting go of our assumptions about their future value. Compounding the disaster is the unfortunate fact that the manic construction of ever more futureless suburbs (a.k.a. the “housing bubble") has insidiously replaced manufacturing as the basis of our economy.

Of course, the single worst impediment to clear thinking among most individuals and organizations in America today is the obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs. Even the environmental community is guilty of this. 

The most arrant case of collective cluelessness now on view is our failure to even begin a public discussion about fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system, which has become so decrepit that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of it. It’s the one thing we could do right away that would have a substantial impact on our oil use. The infrastructure is still out there, rusting in the rain, waiting to be fixed. The restoration of it would employ hundreds of thousands of Americans at all levels of meaningful work. The fact that we are hardly even talking about it—at any point along the political spectrum, left, right, or center—shows how fundamentally un-serious we are.

In general, the circumstances we face with energy and climate change will require us to live much more locally, probably profoundly and intensely so. We have to grow more of our food locally, on a smaller scale than we do now, with fewer artificial “inputs,” and probably with more human and animal labor. Farming may come closer to the center of our national economic life than it has been within the memory of anyone alive now. These changes are also likely to revive a menu of social and class conflicts that we also thought we had left behind.

We’ll have to reorganize retail trade by rebuilding networks of local economic interdependence. The rise of national chain retail business was an emergent, self-organizing response to the conditions of the late twentieth century. Those conditions are now coming to an end, and the Wal-Mart way of doing business will come to an end with them: the twelve-thousand-mile merchandise supply line to Asian factories; the “warehouse on wheels” made up of thousands of tractor-trailer trucks circulating endlessly between the container-ship ports and the big-box store loading docks. The damage to local economies that the “superstores” leave behind is massive. Not only have they destroyed multilayered local networks for making and selling things, they destroyed the middle classes that ran them, and in so doing they destroyed the cultural and economic fabric of the communities themselves. This is a lot to overcome. We will have to resume making some things for ourselves again, and moving them through smaller-scale trade networks. We may have fewer things to buy overall. The retail frenzy of recent decades will subside as we struggle to produce things of value and necessarily consume less.

We’ll have to make other arrangements for transporting people and goods. Not only do we desperately need to rebuild the railroad system, but electrifying it—as virtually all other advanced nations have done—will bring added advantages, since we will be able to run it on a range of things other than fossil fuels. We should anticipate a revival of maritime trade on the regional scale, with more use of boats on rivers, canals, and waterways within the U.S. Many of our derelict riverfronts and the dying ports of the Great Lakes may come back to life. If we use trucks at all to move things, it will be for the very last leg of the journey. The automobile will be a diminishing presence in our lives and, increasingly, a luxury that will be resented by those who can no longer afford to participate in the “happy motoring” utopia. The interstate highways themselves will require more resources to maintain than we will be able to muster. For many of us, the twenty-first century will be less about incessant mobility than about staying where we are.

We have to inhabit the terrain of North America differently, meaning a return to traditional cities, towns, neighborhoods, and a productive rural landscape that is more than just strictly scenic or recreational. We will probably see a reversal of the two-hundred-year-long trend of people moving from the country and small towns to the big cities. In fact, our big cities will probably contract substantially, even while they re-densify at their centers and along their waterfronts. The work of the New Urbanists will be crucial in rebuilding human habitats that have a future. Their achievement so far has been not so much in building “new towns” like Seaside, Florida, or Kentlands, Maryland, but in retrieving a body of knowledge, principle, and methodology for urban design that had been thrown away in our mad effort to build the drive-in suburbs.

http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080622/NEWS/806220336

Wind farm foes dealt legal blow

The presiding judge in a lawsuit against the state of Massachusetts and the company that wants to build 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound dismissed the bulk of the suit this week.

Barnstable Superior Court Judge Robert Kane ruled in favor of Cape Wind Associates on most of the company's requests to dismiss five complaints in the case, which challenged the adequacy and jurisdiction of the state's review of the project under the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act.

...

Last year, the state Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs approved the project in an environmental impact statement required under state environmental law. That approval set the stage for other state agencies to issue permits for Cape Wind.

...

http://www.alternet.org/story/89120/?ses=1525291e0318ba85226adc578b64119c

No one, not Obama, not Hillary Clinton and certainly not John McCain, caught the zeitgeist of the vanishing American dream so well as Carlin.

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/alerts/384

There's still time, Barack........................

When asked what he thought about Republicans and many Democrats willing to sign the bill, Feingold expressed deep disappointment and frustration.

"This legislation gets it totally wrong," he said. He acknowledged that the primary source of media attention has been immunity for the telecommunications companies, something he calls a "farce."

He feels the rest of the bill, however, is equally if not more reprehensible.

"The president ran an illegal program -- equivalent to an impeachable offense," he said, later adding, "I'm blue in the face already trying to tell people this has happened to you."

Feingold continued to express his contempt for the bill, and his aggravation with many "rank and file" Democrats who approved it. He wouldn't speak directly to the possibility of a filibuster, but said he and Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) planned on spending a lot of time on the Senate floor talking about the problems with FISA and are "not going to let it quickly pass."

In response to a question that addressed statements that claim this FISA deal is in fact a compromise and an improvement in many areas, Feingold responded: "Anybody who says this is an okay bill, I question if they've even read it."

http://www.louisianaweekly.com/weekly/news/articlegate.pl?20080623h

Nomination bounces Obama ahead of McCain

By Ron Walters, NNPA Columnist
June 23, 2008 

...

For instance, while the battle for the Democratic nomination was still going on, Obama led McCain by one or two percentage points in national polls, but the latest Wall Street Journal/ABC New poll has him widening the gap by 47-41 percent.

...

Moreover in this same poll, McCain predictably leads among all men and older adults who make up the strength of the Republican Party, but Obama leads by a striking margin among women (52-35 percent). This result, confirmed by both Gallup and Rassmusen polls, is vitally important, not just because women constitute the majority of the electorate, but it suggests that the split between Hillary's forces and Barack's forces among women is on the way to being substantially mended.

A positive reason for this is that women are now thinking about who will appoint the next judge to the Supreme Court that will decide Roe v. Wade and keep abortion rights, or bring their sons home from Iraq, or deal with the economic problems facing their families in a sensitive way.

...

In any case, the guessing has been how many women would defect to McCain and the polling suggests the number may be so marginal it might not make much difference in the General election.

Another surprising result finds Obama with a big lead among Hispanics (62-28 percent).

...

This is supported by the fact that 61 percent of former Clinton voters right now are choosing Barack Obama, 19 percent chose McCain; hopefully the Obama number will grow over time as several savvy analysts suggests.

Finally, all of a sudden pollsters are focusing on "suburban" adults which appears to be a synonym for largely white voters which Mc Cain now wins 48-38 percent. They suggest that Obama has "work to do" with them since Whites support McCain (they did not include Blacks in their analysis) 47-41 percent and suburban voters by 48-38 percent This has been the case for Democratic presidential candidates since the 1970s and tells us that Obama has far less work in convincing some parts of the electorate to vote for him than proposed.

...

by California Democratic Party [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

Sen. John McCain will be appearing tomorrow morning with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at an "environmental roundtable" in Santa Barbara.  Yes, that would be the same Santa Barbara where a 1969 ecological disaster shocked the nation, leading to the birth of the environmental movement.

That's right.  Sen. McCain is either so tone-deaf or just astonishingly arrogant that he thinks he can come to the scene of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, demand an end to the federal moratorium on offshore drilling, and simultaneously paint himself as a champion of the environment. ... read more: http://californiafordemocracy.net/john-mccain-has-some-nerve

Bring It On battle cry ?:

http://cbs13.com/national/john.mccain.adviser.2.755168.html

Jun 23, 2008 6:42 pm US/Pacific

McCain Adviser Regrets Terror Attack Comment

Charlie Black Said Attack On U.S. Soil Would Benefit Republican Candidate

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) ― John McCain distanced himself Monday from a top adviser who said another terrorist attack on U.S. soil this election year would benefit the Republican presidential candidate. Barack Obama's campaign called the comment a "complete disgrace."

Charlie Black, an adviser already in the spotlight for his past lobbying work, is quoted in the upcoming July 7 edition of Fortune magazine as saying such an attack "certainly would be a big advantage to him." Black said Monday he regretted the comment.

Black is also quoted as saying the "unfortunate event" of the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto earlier this year "helped us."

... 

I could only remember 4 off the top...................

http://www.truthdig.com/images/eartothegrounduploads/Fish_Carlin5.jpg

There's a new thread.

http://www.kunstler.com/

The telling moment last week was Robert Hirsch's appearance on the CNBC morning "Squawkbox" financial show in which he proposed the probability of $500-a-barrel oil within "a three-to-five-year time-frame." Squawkhead Becky Quick was clearly nonplussed by the stolid Mr. Hirsch, author of a (then)-startling 2005 US Dept of Energy report (since referred to as the Hirsch Report and buried by the Secretary of Energy) that warned of dire effects on the American way of life as the Peak Oil predicament gained traction.

Perhaps more reality-challenged was the uber-idiot Larry Kudlow on CNBC's night-time money show, who kept repeating the mantra "drill, drill drill" when presented with signs that something other than "oil speculators" was driving up the price and creating global scarcity. These idiots always return to the shibboleth that "there's plenty of oil out there." What they don't get is that even while the world is enjoying the all time peak of production (somewhere around 85-million barrels-a-day), that same world is demanding at least 86-million barrels -- so even though there's more oil than ever, there's not enough. And the gap is only bound to get bigger.

The difference between what's available and what's demanded is being felt by poor countries and poor people in richer countries. Third world nations lacking their own oil are simply dropping out of the bidding, and the lower classes in the US are having to choose between buying gasoline and velveeta.

Meanwhile the notion that drilling drilling drilling offshore the US and up in Alaska will solve this problem shows how incredibly misinformed the news media itself is. The probability is next to zero that anything found off California or Florida would even fractionally offset ongoing depletion in the handful of old, established super-giant fields that the world gets most of it oil from. By the way, I support the idea of drilling in Alaska's ANWAR reserve because I think it can be done in a sanitary way and, more importantly, it would get the idiot cornucopian right-wing assholes to finally shut up about it -- before they discover that it contains less than half a year's oil supply for the US at current rates of use.

We probably reached peak oil several years ago, around 2003 or 2004.  The reason it doesn't actually look like a peak, and also the reason why the effects of a "peak" are different than what it would at first appear, is that oil supply is partly price-dependent.

For example, imagine a large supply of hard-to-get oil (tar sand, shale, whatever) that costs about $50/barrel to extract.  Imagine that it's 2002, and oil has been $20-$30/barrel for just about ever, and everyone's planning to keep it that way.  What point is there in extracting that oil?  It's not part of the "supply" until some technological advance at an unknown time in the future makes it viable.

Wham, you're in 2008, and even if the oil price bubble bursts precipitously, there's no way it's ever going under $50/barrel again.  Your previously unextractable oil is now part of the world's oil supply.

That's why this peak isn't a hard peak.  As soon as world demand reached just below world production capacity, price started going up and up.  As price goes up, more and more sources of oil are opened up - because people understand that this isn't just a temporary fluctuation.  World production capacity will never again significantly exceed world oil demand.  Hence, oil prices will continue to trend upward.  They may fluctuate but there's a certain base trend of up up up, and it makes more expensive oil viable, so supply increases as price increases.

Peak oil isn't going to send us into sudden shock.  Instead, it's sending us into prolonged price rises, forcing us gradually off oil.  The two big dangers are:

1. Because we're being *forced* off oil by price rises, since we're unprepared, economies will hurt, and the poor will be hurt even more, during the transition.

2. The environment is collateral damage.  Staying on oil for an extra decade or two won't make a huge difference to where we end up as far as our energy supply goes, but during those two decades some companies will get very very rich stripping every last bit of oil out of the earth.  Imagine oil at $300/barrell - what sort of oil sources will be economically viable then?