We may very well have arrived at the historic peak of global oil production two weeks ago. On Tuesday, August 3, OPEC president Purnomo Yusgiantoro announced that the cartel would be unable to help relieve the pressure of increasing global oil prices. "The oil price is very high," he said. "It's crazy. There is no additional supply."

Though he disavowed himself the next day, most likely under pressure from Saudi Arabia which insists that it has 1.5 million barrels of spare daily production capacity, the president's statement is right in line with what peak oil theorists have been saying for quite some time: Humanity is using the planet's supply of light, sweet, crude oil as fast as we are capable of pumping it out of the ground and at a much faster rate than we are discovering new reserves.

The historic peak of American oil production was announced and confirmed in an equally understated way -- essentially as an encoded message, understandable only to insiders. In his book, Hubbert's Peak, Princeton geologist Ken Deffeyes recalls seeing a one sentence item in the San Francisco Chronicle in the spring of 1971. It read, "The Texas Railroad Commission announced a 100% allowable for the next month."

To understand what the message meant, you have to know that the Texas Railroad Commission was actually the world's first government-sanctioned oil cartel. During the years when the US was the world's foremost producer of oil, the Commission was assigned the task of regulating domestic oil production and controlling prices. The Commission told each oil well operator what percentage of their capacity they were allowed to produce in order to maintain the price and not flood the market. When in the spring of '71 the Texas Railroad Commission announced that every oil producer was allowed to pump at 100% capacity, that was, officially, the moment of US domestic peak production. It meant that the demand for oil had become greater than supply. When OPEC formed in 1960 to coordinate oil production and unify prices, it actually modeled itself on the Texas Railroad Commission.

So, this month's announcement by the president of OPEC that "there is no additional supply" may turn out to be just as significant as that little-noticed Texas Railroad Commission annoucement of "100% allowable," 33 years ago. It may very well be that 2004 is the year of global peak oil production -- a critical turning point in human history. Only time will tell.

A side note:

It looks like the New York Times is finally, in its slow, conservative and indirect way, finally beginning to cover this important story. A reporter named Jad Mouwad writing about the oil industry has been reporting regularly on how recent price increases are due in large part to the fact that suppliers are just barely keeping up with the rapidly increasing global demand for oil. Better late than never, I suppose. Peak Oil is easily one of the most important ongoing news stories of the decade and linked intimately to the other big stories of the day -- terrorism, environmental degradation, and Middle East conflict. Yet, so far the Peak Oil story remains mostly unreported in the big, corporate, mainstream media. This is clearly about to change.



12:21 PM | Link | (2) comments   

This movie is pretty funny. Right click this link and select "Save Target As..." to download it to your machine.

You know how it goes at the ranch... Laid back. Yo, here comes, Rummy....



5:40 PM | Link | (0) comments   

A troop-supporting SUV driver stopped at a Homeland
Security checkpoint on I-87 near Lake Placid, New York.

We went on a camping trip earlier this week. It's good to get out of New York City in the summer. When you visit a place like the Adirondacks you discover that the stuff you've been breathing here in the city is a mere facsimile of the gaseous substance commonly known as "air." You also discover that New York City isn't quite America. Out there in the vast, baking deserts of strip-mall asphalt, there's a whole culture underway that we New Yorkers are mostly separate from. If I haven't ventured to the mainland in a while, I almost always find something that surprises or amazes me a little bit.

This road trip, I found myself taken by the vast proliferation of "Support our Troops" and "God Bless the USA" stickers afixed to Americans' motor vehicles. They were all over the upstate highways and parking lots, at least as common as the ubiquitous pine tree airfreshner. There also seemed to be a direct correlation between the size of the vehicle and the likelihood that it sported one of these stickers. The more gigantic and grotesque the vehicle, the more likely it begged for your support and blessings.

If anything represents the deep disconnect in American life today, it's got to be a "support the troops" sticker plastered to the back of a single-passenger vehicle burning 7 miles to the gallon. Obviously, if these folks really supported their troops, one of the first things they'd do is get rid of their gas-guzzler. Americans live a sprawled-out, energy-intensive way of life that is made possible, almost completely, by a vast, steady flow of inexpensive oil. Sixty percent of our petroleum comes from foreign lands, and this supply is increasingly limited and contested. If we want to maintain our high-consumption way of life as is, without changing it one iota, then we are going to have to do things like the war in Iraq. It's actually pretty simple. Those gas guzzlers with the "support the troops" stickers on the back are one of the main reasons why we need troops stationed in the Middle East, alongside our most important global gas stations.

I want to know: Is it really worth it to you? If you understood the connection between your guzzler and the troops required to keep it rolling would you get rid of the guzzler? Would you start working to make your community and your lifestyle less automobile-dependent? I've got to think that if our national leadership and automobile ad-supported media started talking about the dangers and consequences of our oil dependence and the steps we need to take to begin to break out of our addiction, Americans would respond. I have to think this because the alternative is too bleak.

Seeing the bounty of ribbons stickered to these absurd, cartoonish vehicles it was hard not to think about the alternative: Perhaps, in fact, Americans do understand the connection between their SUV's and their troops perfectly clearly. And we've made a decision. We've decided that blood for oil is actually not such a bad deal. We support the troops because, look around -- the troops make all this possible. The troops enable us to continue to live our American way of life however we want, regardless of what our lifestyle means to the rest of the planet, our next door neighbor, or even our own personal health and happiness. Maybe we've decided that we're OK with that.

But even that's a little too cynical for me. I think you've got to have faith in the American people. Hopefully we just haven't been asked to think about these issues a whole lot up to now. Soon enough, we'll start to connect the dots.

4:06 PM | Link | (0) comments   

I just took a look at my Amazon Associates quarterly report. It shows how many people clicked-through from my honku.org web site to purchase a book on Amazon, and the titles that they ordered. This is a great way to get a sense of your readership. Here's a representative sample of the books that Honku fans are interested in...

Honku : The Zen Antidote to Road Rage
Redneck Haiku
The Little Book Of Farting
The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies
Walter the Farting Dog: Trouble at the Yard Sale
Who Cut the Cheese: A Cultural History of the Fart

Humorous haiku gift books, geopolitical chaos, and farting. That's my reader.


12:15 PM | Link | (0) comments