by Dana Dwinell-Yardley

Do you know where you are? Do you know where you're going? Do you know how to get there?

These are good questions, often asked when examining one's life goals or larger purpose. But today I'm asking them in the most literal, physical sense: do you know where you are, right now? If you wanted to go somewhere else — somewhere you hadn't been before, perhaps — how would you figure out which way to go?

Okay, now turn off your electronic devices and answer again.

Thanksgiving Day is a special day for those following the peak oil news. Geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, author of Hubbert's Peak, predicted that Thanksgiving Day 2005 would mark the peak in world oil production. After that, oil production would decline, irreversibly. And he may have been right. Crude oil production figures have been removed from the most widely influential official statistics, so it's not easy to check. Even if crude production numbers were easily available, the numbers are so uncertain that it's hard to see anything other than the biggest trends.

When Deffeyes made the prediction, almost two years before Thanksgiving 2005, his tongue was only slightly in his cheek. Oil production data are not nearly precise enough to establish a peak day.

Was Deffeyes at least right about the year of peak oil?

I looked for the answer in the official figures from the US Department of Energy and the International Energy Agency in Paris. The main tables on world oil production no longer report what's called crude oil and condensate. Condensate is a byproduct of natural gas production. What they call “oil production” now includes all manner of liquid fuels, including ethanol and synfuels, synthetic fuels. Peak oil is about, well, oil. Not how much alcohol is produced.  

Probably if I dug down into the web sites, or made some phone calls, I could find the crude oil data again. But when the two primary public energy reporting agencies in the world change the most prominent way they report oil production, and they do it in a way that could hide peak oil, I'm suspicious.

Second, even if I found the crude oil and condensate numbers, it requires a leap of faith to believe them. Matthew Simmons is an investment banker with decades of experience in the oil industry. The way he tells it, the unaudited oil production figures sound suspiciously like the finance industry's CDOs, collateralized debt obligations. The ones that played a big role in bringing down the world economy last year, when they turned out to be worth a lot less than people thought. Like CDOs, no one really knows what's in the oil production figures from each country. Incredibly enough, there's no outside auditor to check them out.

Simmons thinks that 2005 was the peak year for oil production. If so, Deffeyes might even have been right about oil production peaking on Thanksgiving that year.

Deffeyes' prediction looks pretty good even if we look at the unreliable and misleading data on total liquids, including ethanol and synfuels. There was a rapid run-up in price from 2005 to 2008, which you'd think would lead to greater production. But no, production stagnated in 2006 and 2007, and only increased slightly in 2008. Since then, economic collapse has reduced demand, so production in 2009 is down again, below 2005 levels. According to the official figures.

Regardless of the actual date of peak oil, we can give thanks for oil's blessings. As Deffeyes put it: "Thanks for the services of the first half of recoverable world oil. Thanks for the automobile, the airplane, diesel trains and ships, two-lane blacktop, warm houses, plastics, and a huge range of petrochemicals. [The Thanksgiving dinner itself] was produced with fertilizers, tractor fuel, pesticides, and transportation provided by oil and natural gas."

Of course, oil has been a mixed blessing. The age of oil has also brought the age of World Wars, poisonings from pollution on an unprecedented scale, destruction of cities for parking lots and ugly suburbs, and habitat destruction, climate change, and other pressures that threaten most species on the planet, including ours.

As we give thanks for the blessings of oil, let us keep in mind the curses of oil, and let us ask for the wisdom to use the remaining half of the world's oil reserves more for useful, durable products than throw-away plastic cutlery, more for insulating homes and constructing wind turbines than for heating drafty homes and generating electricity, and more for medicines and food production than for guns and warplanes.

Happy Thanksgiving!

[This is an updated version of a post from 2007.]

Carl Etnier conducts two fine EQUAL TIME RADIO interviews here.

A Waterbury-based bicycle messaging service that will deliver inebriated individuals home for a reasonable price.

Just posted today in our FREE VERMONT RADIO link.

This morning's inspirational eMail from filmmaker Michael Moore floored me.  Had almost added him to my junk mail filtre... then this.

I was wrong about Moore, and can only hope he comes to Vermont to make a film about the Independence movement...

• Each of the 50 states must create a state-owned public bank like they have in North Dakota.

Then congress MUST reinstate all the strict pre-Reagan regulations on all commercial banks, investment firms, insurance companies -- and all the other industries that have been savaged by deregulation... The question must always be asked -- "Is this for the common good?" (Click here for some info about the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.)

• Save this fragile planet and declare that all the energy resources above and beneath the ground are owned collectively by all of us.

Just like they do it in Sarah Palin's socialist Alaska. We only have a few decades of oil left. The public must be the owners and landlords of the natural resources and energy that exists within our borders or we will descend further into corporate anarchy. And when it comes to burning fossil fuels to transport ourselves, we must cease using the internal combustion engine and instruct our auto/transportation companies to rehire our skilled workforce and build mass transit (clean buses, light rail, subways, bullet trains, etc.) and new cars that don't contribute to climate change.

This post originally appeared last month in my column, "Interesting Times," in The World, a weekly newspaper in Washington County, Vermont. I've found the real-world mileage for the scooter is about 90 mpg, the way I drive it. I'm still not sure whether it's saving me gas overall.

Can a scooter that gets 80 mpg help me save fuel? That’s a question I’ll be researching over the next months, while riding my first-ever motorcycle.

A scooter is a type of motorcycle with a step-through frame, like the famous Italian Vespa. Mine has a 125 cc engine—bigger and faster than a moped, but not by much. The EPA rated mileage is 96 mpg, so I’m hoping that in the real, hilly world of central Vermont, I’ll get at least 80.

No question that the scooter is more fuel efficient than the cars I have access to—one gets 30 to 35 mpg, the other 50 to 60. But a lot of my local transportation is by bicycle, or by carpooling.

Envion Facility

http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/09/16/new-envion-facility-turns-plastic-waste-into-10barrel-fuel/#

Have a look; in San Francisco they are beginning to turn waste plastic into fuel.

According to Envion, 'The process removes hydrocarbons without the use of a catalyst, resulting in a net gain of captured energy–82% of all material that goes in is transformed into fuel.'  Unlike subsidised and highly lobbied corn/soy/canola farming, in which there's a net loss of energy.

An exciting week-long event for biking enthusiasts!

On Saturday, Montpelier's first Village Building Convergence opens. Here's what to expect:

The last week in August, Montpelier will come alive with a community-wide celebration of sustainable living, practical homesteading skills, and visions of a more resilient local community.  The VBC is 9-day event filled with hands-on education in permaculture design and construction, ecological building, and public art that will extend and celebrate the Great Reskilling of our communities embodied in these projects.  All projects are built through collaboration and the commitment of a neighborhood to strengthen itself.

The VBC is a volunteer run grassroots organization.  Most events are free and open to the public.

The schedule includes dances and other celebrations, workshops in things from raising backyard gourmet mushrooms to fruit and nut tree propagation to renewable energy. There'll be a chance to help install an edible landscape with Mark Krawczyk. I'll be hosting one workshop, which the organizers have given the Zen-like title of "The Way of Two Wheels."

The event is modeled on an annual convergence in Portland, Oregon which now attracts hundreds of people to a week of building projects, learning, and celebration.

I interviewed event organizer Ben Graham and workshop leader Alyssa White on Equal Time Radio on WDEV on Monday (1-2 pm); check out the podcast for their comments.

The week sounds like a blast. Organizers plan to make it an annual series, and they're already starting to plan next year's. Come on down and make this one a big success, so they'll have momentum going into next year.

Being a student in a generally urban, and nearly criminally overpriced region of Pennsylvania I have hardly had occasion to drive a car in the last two years. Furthermore, the expense of and reliability of the South East Pennsylvania Transit Authority (or SEPTA) led me to start biking far more than I even had before.

A Federal "Cash for Clunkers" program was promoted as something that would help the environment, stimulate the economy, and reduce income equality. According to Gordon Dritschilo in today's Rutland Herald, apparently the first Vermonter to participate walked away with $3,500 of our tax dollars to subsidize his purchase of an 18 mpg Ford Ranger. Maybe the purchase helped stimulate the economy, but the money probably would have done more for the environment (and energy security) and reducing income inequality if it had been distributed to low-income people to buy scooters. 

The article says a Poultney man traded in a 1991 For Ranger for a 2009 model, going from a 16 mpg vehicle to 18 mpg. Big deal! How is this worth $3,500 to us taxpayers?

One of the ideas behind cash for clunkers is that older cars pollute more. Economist Alan Blinder's article in the New York Times popularized the idea of a Federal Cash for Clunkers program, citing an estimate from Texas that older cars pollute 10-30 times more than newer cars.  Clearly they're not referring to carbon dioxide emissions, but something else in the lethal cocktail that cars and trucks spew out their exhaust pipes.

The CO2 emissions from a new 18 mpg guzzler are marginally smaller than those from a 16 mpg clunker. And in rural Poultney, the health and environmental benefits of reducing emissions other than CO2 are likely small, compared to, say, in a Texan mega-city.

Meanwhile, Tom Whipple argues persuasively that the present fleet of vehicles in the US will outlive the gasoline available to run them all, and the US should stop manufacturing two-axle vehicles that get under 30 mpg.

Instead, we get $3,500 subsidies for trucks and SUVs that get as little as 15 mpg, with $4,500 available if the fuel economy of the new vehicle is 10 mpg or more above that of the trade-in. What's the benefit even to individuals of taking on loans for new, fuel-guzzling trucks and SUVs that they won't be able to afford when gas is $5 or $10 a gallon?

If the Feds are going to offer incentives to get old, polluting vehicles off the road, they ought to either require that the new vehicles get at least 30 mpg or follow Blinder's suggestion that the incentive be in cash. Then people could choose to spend the money on bicycles, quadracycles, scooters, a car-share membership, bus or cab fare, or (like AIG) just pay off their debts.