Congratulation,

did you avoid the word "tax" in your presentation ? ;-)

GTL:

some in Australia are thinking to build a GTL factory (gas to liquid) to convert gas into liquid petrol, it looks expensive but perfectly in the line of using our huge reserves of natural gas.

what do you think about this solution ?

Nice suit.  Nice graphs.  Nice you.  People missed this for Plame?  Insanity...

Seriously, though...  I have not seen An Inconvenient Truth yet, but has anyone on the Energize America team shown your plan to Al Gore?  If he's just decided to spend the rest of his life caring about the environment, it seems he'd be really interested in this issue.  If he's secretly running for President, I'm sure he could use a kick ass energy plan...

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire

Good post, Jerome. I'll be waiting to see the others.

Thanks for your work on this...it's taken a lot of your time and human energy.

It's important to get this out and for people like the good governor (and other presidential would be's) to see that there are intelligent people who are concerned about this and who can develop creative solutions.

In your presentation there is statement that high oil prices are long term fuelled by strong economic growth. I would agree on middle term high oil prices but about 10 years and thereafter I am not certain. Current level of oil prices already fuels inflation everywhere and porr stratas are most vulnerable especially in countries like India, Pakistan, Indonesia, China. From history we know inflation and massive poverty lead to political instability and some Asian states needed extra measures like State of Emergency in India 1975-1977.
Are you sure we will not see anything like that? Current Indian government of Mr Manmohan Singh starts looking insensitive to common man plight. Nepal undergone political revolution with yet unclear results. Pakistan and Sri Lanka are unstable too. In China there are internal giant pressures.  

I'll be reading the slides after my morning stretching & jog, but I'll start with this remark: the entire panel is wearing suit & tie, except the Governor who's in jeans and tee-shirt.

Jerome, did you get any kind of sense from Mr Richardson of what the thought of your plans so far? Is he willing to work to implement this? Curious...

Half the population is under the age of 18. Tanzania's future is NOW...join the 50% campaign!

I like it, Jerome. As always, good graphics, good impact (they interrelate) and good point.
When we spoke a week or so ago, you said Americans would cope with 6 dollar a gallon gas by just buying a twingo-esque car. I disagreed. I never got to explain why- there was no real discussion. Perhaps you are right- I should just post entertaining airplane stories.
But somehow I think I have a bit more to contribute, so I will try to play in a bigger pond than that.
I admit that I see no alternative to massive US action to break the addiction- it must happen, and soon. But I think we mostly fail to even discuss two essential points- transition points that must happen first, --or at least simultaneously with new energy policy, or it will all just recur.

1. In the US, success remains at least partly defined as the gargantuan heap of steaming metal in your driveway. Twingo = failure, for many. A fundamental change in the definition of success- in values- is therefore at the heart of the problem, and we have not even touched on how we will accomplish that.
   
2. The US sells snake oil better than anyone, and the brand we sell best is our seeming wealth. It aint necessarily so. The economic slack that would allow us to continue to commute long distances in cars with one person in them and pay for post-peak, post-Bush gas may very well not be there, --except for members of an elite of one sort or another. And we have no real mass transit.

Wages slip for most, surge for the tiny fraction at the top. The lie of the average. So look, at the modal data. Whip up one of your wonderful graphs that shows the curve of blue collar individual wages since 1973, and it would make a fair downhill ski run. Yet family income has slipped only a bit- because we now have 2.3 people working just to tread water. and yet we have been convinced that we are richer. Am I wrong? Come on, Churchill, politely deconstruct me. There is a plethora of spin available to do it with--- that's how we came to believe that crap to start with.

Perhaps it depends on whether you consider the Jet-ski, the weed-whip, the riding mower in your garage as wealth, and how many of the hours you could have spent with the kids you are willing to trade for them.

What if Life-Hours are the real currency of highest value? Man, are we donating them copiously to our bosses.
Just try to convince an American that the 35 hour work week is worth discussing.

Yet we silently take it, we allow union power to evaporate, we shop at Wall-Mart, and assist in cutting our own throats.
The real problem is not oil alternatives or energy policy, but an educational system that fails to teach kids to know "a hawk from a handsaw", --a long-term problem-- and a loss of the value that says "You can and must ACT!"
Enough.
I look forward to the rest of it.
And to a discussion of the value changes and the ACTION  that must happen if anything is to change, fundamentally.

"If someone has their foot on my neck, I will say once, please get off my neck. If you continue to stand on my neck and explain how you didn't know you were there and why you were there and how difficult it is to move, I cannot be nice about it any more. It's not about conversation; in the end it's about getting your foot off my neck.

(Author unknown, but nice. From a piece by Greg Palast.)

Useful talking follows experience, the more experience the better. Talking that precedes experience is known as bullshit.

Excellent presentation, Jérôme, congratulations. I think you very rightly left (relatively) the supply side (Peak Oil etc) in favour of the demand side, and brought out clearly the oil/cheap energy link to growth and incomes (or debt...).

I think there's a mistake in your diary text: "Previous oil crises were linked to temporary demand shocks" should surely read "temporary supply shocks" (?)

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

Demand will, without question, become the most serious part of the price equation, if we assume demand will rise faster than production will fall, as I think is likely.  The bottom line is that demand is rising too fast for the supply to meet it, and that means inflation kicks in.  It's so basic and common-sensical an idea that I can't believe so many people, especially in the press, do not understand it.  The good news is that demand breeds supply.  The world needs energy in order to function well, and the market will inevitably move to other sources when the price becomes too painful.

That is assuming we do nothing to make the transition easier on individuals and businesses.  And there is, obviously, a nearly-infinite amount we can do.  The transition is made difficult, I think, partly because of the difficulty in coordinating all of the factors for a renewable-source market.  E85 and hydrogen stations need to be opened, but they won't open until there are drivers who use E85 or hydrogen.  Well, the drivers won't buy cars that use one of the two until there is a solid source selling at a competitive price.

Without some direction from -- wait for it -- the government, I think we're left for the moment at a really shitty Nash Equilibrium.  So there needs to be a coordination -- again, I think it will have to be through the government if we are to get it done as quickly as possible -- using, for example, tax credits and/or penalties to, first, get the stations online (perhaps temporarily guaranteeing a profit of x%), and to, second, push consumers and manufacturing into those sources by (say) giving tax credits to consumers that are sufficient to make the renewable-source cars irresistible.

Some areas of the US already have access to E85, thanks to legal requirements pushed through by state legislatures years ago.  My state does not have it, despite the fact that Florida produces sugar, which, as I understand it, is more efficient than corn for producing ethanol -- hence the American government's protection of our corn growers who don't want to compete with Brazilian sugar.

Anyway, I've rambled enough.  Loved the slides, Jerome.

Where's your motherf*%&ing flag pin?

Excellent presentation, Jerome. I'm looking forward to the next batch of slides.

How was it received?

"Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease." - Kurt Vonnegut

Thank you for a lucid presentation.

You have shown that demand for energy, and particularly transport fuels is quickly rising and the prospects for oil production look bleak.  Therefore substitutes are being found and pressed into service to satisfy the demands for liquid transportation fuels as well as energy.  Coal is a resource that can and is being quickly exploited toward this end, especially in the expanding industries of the East.  Using coal locks us into even more rapid increases in CO2 emissions, leading to faster and more severe climate change.

Ways to reduce CO2 emission might be higher efficiency or carbon sequestration.  However I doubt that either will help on the scale required.  As shown in the presentation, energy demand is set to increase by 37% over the next decade and a half.  Today, five parts in six of our total energy production comes today from fossil fuel.  I am afraid this fraction will increase.   And I see no realistic prospect that efficiencies will increase by anywhere near enough to balance out the increasing use of coal.  Carbon sequestration has been mentioned as a solution to the CO2 problem, but I am unimpressed.  The proponents of carbon sequestration seem to have very little idea of the enormous volumes of CO2 that would have to be captured and stored.  As a crude estimate, consider that every mole (12 grams) of carbon produces a mole (44 gi, 22.4 liter at room temperature and pressure) of CO2.  We burn approximately 10 petagrams of coal a year, which turns into 37 petagram of CO2 (18 petaliters of CO2).  Capture of any appreciable fraction of this CO2 is not economically or energetically feasible today, and perhaps not ever.  We understand thermodynamics and carbon chemistry rather well, so I do not think that there will be any technical breakthroughs in this matter.

I do not think the global economy will grind to a halt due to lack of liquid transport fuels.  Rather, we will  mine coal, burn it and turn it into gasoline, for another thirty years, until this warming earth passes to our children.

I do not really see a way for the world out of this trap.  As has been pointed out by others, any large scale program of CO2 control will require a change in attitudes of a large fraction of the peoples of the world.  I see no such change occurring in this generation.  The next generations may be wiser than we, but they will pay for our profligacy  for centuries.

I have some other thoughts on the situation, but this comment is already too long.  I would welcome any ideas that might show ways out of this timeline. In particular, how can we break attitudes bred through a century and a half of dependence on fossil fuel, in less than a generation?

sidd

Where can one get a copy of the YKos presentation and the Energy plan?

There is a non-zero chance I can get it into the hands of Gov. Richardson fairly soon.

Och nu den svenska kocken bakar en Alaskan älg jägare. Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!