-
08 October 2006
Sun, 08 Oct 2006 17:36:00 GMT Inside the Endangered Arctic Refugevia Kjell Olsen2054 days agoAlaska is probably top on my places to go list. Of anywhere, if I were to take off on a trip, I’d be Alaska. There’s the draw of it’s massive and almost mythical beauty and ruggedness, plus the impending fouling being forced upon it by today’s congress (none of whom are likely to have even been there to see the terrain from which they are trying to strip of it’s purity). This kind of thing just makes me sad.
Wild northern Alaska is one of the last places on earth where a human being can kneel down and drink from a wild stream without being measurably more poisoned or polluted than before; its heart and essence is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in the remote northeast corner of the state, the earth’s last sanctuary of the great Ice Age fauna that includes all three North American bears, gray wolves and wolverines, musk ox, moose, and, in the summer, the Porcupine River herd of caribou, 120,000 strong. Everywhere fly sandhill cranes and seabirds, myriad waterfowl and shorebirds, eagles, hawks, owls, shrikes and larks and longspurs, as well as a sprinkling of far-flung birds that migrate to the Arctic slope to breed and nest from every continent on earth. Yet we Americans, its caretakers, are still debating whether or not to destroy this precious place by turning it over to the oil industry for development.
I feel bad for stealing so much directly from the article, but I really think that this is an issue with an extreme amount of gravity – both in terms of those pulling at it from either side and in the meaning and implications of sullying arguably the last best place on earth. So bear with me.
Should the two chambers reconcile their differences in this congressional session, our rarest and most precious wilderness may be lost for good. Despite all the oil industry’s talk about “safe drilling” with environmental safeguards (less than credible at a time when, at corporate behest, a primitively pro-business administration is dismantling many decades’ worth of hard-won protections), mining fossil fuels from a fragile, treeless plain will permanently deface, contaminate, and gut it, while accomplishing almost nothing to offset the so-called oil crisis.
Insert politically meaningless barb directed towards the sheer sloth, willful incompetence, politicized greed, and horrific-ness of today’s american government. It’s too easy for me. But I will say: fuck every single thing about every one of them, if not for everything they do and have done, for just the fact that this is even a debatable issue. Their mothers too.
through a new indigenous activist organization called “Red Oil,” the Inupiat were making common cause with Indian communities all over Alaska in a desperate struggle against the disruption of habitat and the disappearance of sacred animals such as polar bears and seals, dangerous chemical contamination of their wild fish and game, and the fatal damage to their culture and their future that is already on the wind with the retreat of polar ice and the onset of global warming. Most biologists agree that the polar bear is doomed to vanish entirely in this century.
Does anyone else think about how horrible it is that we can’t drink ground water? Unless, of course, we boil it or mix it with chemicals. What are we doing to the world, consequently ourselves?
Our idea in June 2006 was to look at wild regions in the Petroleum Reserve that should be spared during its imminent transformation from our nation’s greatest roadless wilderness to a road-scarred, marred, gouged, and contaminated wasteland, stained by leaks and spills of petroleum and toxic drilling fluids and littered with rusted drums and pipe and gear.
Scarred, marred, gouged, contaminated, stained, littered. Shouldn’t we all be a bit scared with that word string coming at us? I sure am.
-
08 July 2006
Sat, 08 Jul 2006 21:53:00 GMT Hugo Chávez Interview | The Progressivevia Kjell Olsen2146 days agoSaudi Arabia gives us dollar for oil stability, we give them the 82nd airborne.
We are breaking with the neoliberal model. We do not believe in free trade. We believe in fair trade and exchange, not competition but cooperation. Hugo Chávez
-
10 May 2006
Wed, 10 May 2006 19:56:00 GMT More Hot Air Over the Arcticvia Kjell Olsen2205 days agoForget about Seals and Polar Bears. Even without taking the environment into account, drilling ANWR doesn’t make ONE OUNCE OF FUCKING SENSE. (à moins que vous êtes Halliburton, mais tant pis).
-
29 April 2006
Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:54:19 GMT Oil Postervia Kjell Olsen2216 days agoPeak Oil, illustrated:
As this poster makes abundantly clear, we
-
02 April 2006
Sun, 02 Apr 2006 11:18:36 GMT How the GOP Became God's Own Partyvia Kjell Olsen2243 days agoNo leading world power in modern memory has become a captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science. The last parallel was in the early 17th century, when the papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain, disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system.
-
13 February 2006
Mon, 13 Feb 2006 19:29:38 GMT Petrodollars and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation: Understanding the Planned Assault on Iranvia Kjell Olsen2291 days agoThe ironies are glaring. The U.S. government is contemplating an unprovoked attack upon Iran that will involve “pre-emptive” use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear-weapons-holding state. Although the pretext is that this is necessary to forestall nuclear weapons proliferation, there is evidence to suggest that planning for the attack has involved, very precisely, nuclear weapons proliferation by the United States.
Great look at why the US might just be gearing up for it’s invasion of Iran. Please, no.
-
01 February 2006
Wed, 01 Feb 2006 23:25:06 GMT Administration backs off Bush's vow to reduce Mideast oil importsvia Kjell Olsen2303 days agoWASHINGTON – One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn’t mean it literally.
I can just see the Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal: WHAT DID THAT FRIGGING IDIOT SAY??? And oh, yeah, the white house has been destroying emails likely related to the Plame affair.
-
22 January 2006
Sun, 22 Jan 2006 11:22:00 GMT Troops Return From Iraq With Money to Burnvia Kjell Olsen2313 days agoHe’s been home from Iraq a little over 30 hours and already he’s trading in his little 2001 Dodge Neon for a muscle car
-
21 January 2006
Sat, 21 Jan 2006 20:54:29 GMT What they don't want you to know about the coming oil crisisKjell Olsen2314 days agoOur society is in a state of collective denial that has no precedent in history, in terms of its scale and implications.
It’s debatable how much oil is left, as to the fact that none of the OPEC countries keep accurate books. But the most optimistic speculators assume no more then 3 trillion barrels remain on earth.
If 2 trillion barrels of oil or more indeed remain, the topping point lies far away in the 2030s. The “growing” and “cheap” parts of the oil-supply equation are feasible until then, at least in principle, and we have enough time to bring in the alternatives to oil. If only 1 trillion barrels remain, however, the topping point will arrive some time soon, and certainly before this decade is out. The “growing” and “cheap” parts of the oil-supply equation become impossible, and there probably isn’t even enough time to make a sustainable transition to alternatives.
Half the world’s oil lies in its 100 largest fields, and all of these hold 2 billion barrels or more, and almost all of them were discovered more than a quarter of a century ago. Consider the recent record of discoveries of giant oil- and gas-fields of over 500 million barrels of oil or oil equivalent. Half a billion barrels – the definition of a “giant” field – sounds a lot. But since the world is eating up more than 80 million barrels of oil a day at the moment, it is in fact less than a week’s global supply. In 2000 there were 16 discoveries of 500 million barrels of oil equivalent or bigger. In 2001 there were nine. In 2002 there were just two. In 2003 there were none.
But in 1985, they [OPEC nations] began to – how shall I put it? – massage the data. Kuwait was the first to give in to temptation. They found that their reserves had gone up overnight from 64 to 90 billion barrels. In 1988, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Iran and Iraq all played the same card. Abu Dhabi had been so needlessly conservative that their reserves went up from 31 to 92 billion barrels. They surely must have employed some incompetent geologists. How could they have overlooked 60 billion barrels? Finally, in 1990, Saudi Arabia decided it too had been conservative, hiking its total from 170 to 258 billion barrels.
Is there any chance that the early topping point of oil production is somehow wrong, all just a bad dream? I am sorry to say that I think not. It is important to realise that the early toppers are not advocates or agitators by choice. They tend to have high residual affection for the industry they have spent their lives in.
The peak of oil discovery was 1965. 41 years ago.
And it’s not just that we’re running out of oil, we can no longer extract and process what oil there is into economically viable forms at the rate of demand.
Slowly but surely the US military is being converted into a global oil-protection service Michael Klare
-
05 January 2006
Thu, 05 Jan 2006 22:53:13 GMT Americans, War Is the Answervia Kjell Olsen2330 days agoI don
-
04 January 2006
Wed, 04 Jan 2006 16:05:00 GMT Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler : Oh Sixvia Kjell Olsen2331 days agoWe’re fucked. And yet could Kunstler be any less optimistic?
-
21 December 2005
Wed, 21 Dec 2005 11:08:00 GMTMark Dayton and Norm Coleman, hear me out
A few hours after having written this: Looks like the drilling bit didn’t pass.
I just wanted to let you know that I think it’s despicable that your fellow senator, Ted Stevens, has shown the disdain for congressional procedure and our troops fighting valiantly (in a pointless and unlawful war none the less) halfway across the world to hijack a defense appropriations bill with a provision to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The scumbags in congress today disgust me. Is it not completely inappropriate to force your personal agenda (as he has done) upon an entire nation while there are phenomenally more important issues at hand?
First thing, ANWR will provide a windfall for the multinational oil corporations, but tear up a national treasure (the eighth wonder of the world?). I don’t care how small a percentage of the full reserve will be opened to actual surface penetration by drilling apparatus, the entire area will have forever lost it’s pure, unique air.
Second, the actual volume of oil cached within ANWR is pitifully insufficient for it to be at all worth it. I’ll admit I’m on the environmental side of the issue, but at peak production (20 years from now), the subsidy provided to the american people by the surplus oil will be just 1 penny per gallon, and that’s the most it will ever do [1]. One penny per gallon. People will be saving 10 cents per tank, and who knows if they will even need or want it? You cannot tell me it’s worth such an enormous sacrifice (once it’s opened, cut through with highways to transport oil and pumps to extract it and all the necessary infrastructure, ANWR would hardly pass muster as a national park, and will never return to it’s former state) for such a trivial [2] benefit to America and it’s people.
I’m a freshman in college at the University of Minnesota, Morris. My family was never rich, but well off. We had three cars at times during my life. That does not mean we struggled with gas costs. There are smarter and better ways to get around. For two years, fall/winter/spring, I biked the Midtown greenway to school every day. I attended 4 years at South High. 5 miles each way, I was fitter then ever and loved it. If it was too cold I could hop on the bryant avenue bus to lake street and be at school in no time, and I’ll admit to driving myself or catching rides occasionally. The metro transit system could use improvements, but it’s just as good as driving. Also cheaper, more social, and less stressful. Biking triply so.
Please don’t cave into Bush and (Ted) Stevens hollow agenda to repay the multinational and ethically challenged corporations that financed their election campaigns. After the death of Paul Wellstone, who was the only elected official I’ve ever genuinely trusted and looked up to, I don’t see much good at all coming from any avenue of government. That isn’t how it’s supposed to work.
Now with talks of Bush finally being held accountable for the crimes he’s committed since becoming president [3], I’m just starting to regain the naive confidence I held in government as a kid. Please don’t let me down: do what you know is right for your constituents (not big oil, but minnesotans) and shoot down this corrupt and anti-american drilling provision. If you’re not quite sure how to do it without holding up the Defense Appropriations bill (which, as much as I’m against the Iraq war, still must go through), see the third paragraph in the blog post at the bottom of my letter [4].
Sincerely,
Kjell Olsen1. http://www.alaskaaction.org/the-penny/
2. http://www.answers.com/trivial
3. his impeachment, his discredit, his dishonor and shame
3. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/flavia-colgan/arctic-refuge-in-the-bala_b_12673.html -
20 December 2005
Tue, 20 Dec 2005 11:15:00 GMT Alaska Action for ANWR - The Arctic National Wildlife Refugevia Kjell Olsen2346 days agoThe most money that drilling the Arctic Refuge would ever save American consumers is one penny per gallon, and that would be almost 20 years from now when oil production out of the Refuge would peak.
-
10 November 2005
Thu, 10 Nov 2005 08:56:52 GMT Arctic drilling dropped from House bill - Environment - MSNBC.comvia Kjell Olsen2386 days agoProvisions for drilling are still in the Senate’s version of the bill, but yesterday the House dropped them from theirs! If the House passes the bill today it goes into committee to reconcile differences between the two versions, where hopefully it won’t get back in.
-
09 November 2005
Wed, 09 Nov 2005 22:03:00 GMT Arctic Refuge Seriesvia Kjell Olsen2387 days agoPhotoset of the soon to be desecrated ANWR. A great eulogy.
This is the value of this piece of wilderness
-
04 November 2005
Fri, 04 Nov 2005 11:18:26 GMTSenate votes to begin drilling Alaskan oil
What the fuck is wrong with my country?
The idea of drilling in ANWR has the wisdom of an overweight diabetic eating the last 8 chocolate cake pieces at the buffet, just to succumb to his insulin shock. No offense to people who suffer from diabetes. threehundredandsixty
-
02 November 2005
Wed, 02 Nov 2005 18:10:58 GMT Confronting The American Lifestylevia Kjell Olsen2394 days agoAmericans basically want peace and prosperity. But right now, our economy is driving the opposite. In order to secure the oil we need, we’re trapped in a major war in Iraq. The commuting, shopping and activities that comprise our day-to-day lives are draining our pocketbooks and keeping families apart. Again, it’s not Jane Q. Public’s fault, it’s not the market’s fault. It’s the government’s fault for laying out the rules so poorly.
-
27 October 2005
Thu, 27 Oct 2005 15:20:36 GMT Exxon Mobil posts largest quarterly profit evervia Kjell Olsen2400 days agoOil companies earn windfall profit, thanks to bush.
-
11 October 2005
Tue, 11 Oct 2005 15:39:11 GMT Dems Urge Aid to Offset High Heating Billsvia Kjell Olsen2416 days agoCost of heating homes predicted to rise by 47%.
-
07 October 2005
Fri, 07 Oct 2005 19:31:00 GMT Right-Wing House Twists Arms, Thwarts Democracy To Pass Oil Industy Windfallvia Kjell Olsen2420 days agoShame, shame, shame. Chanted by senators in opposition to today’s Gasoline for America’s Security Act.
But the bill is essentially a giveback to the oil industry
-
Fri, 07 Oct 2005 14:57:20 GMT
AlterNet: EnviroHealth: Making a Mockery of ConservationKjell Olsen2420 days ago
The real target of the refinery bill is the Clean Air Act’s New Source Review (NSR). The NSR program requires owners of aging power plants and industrial facilities to modernize pollution controls whenever they expand their facilities and increase emissions. But the refinery bill doesn’t just exempt refineries from New Source Review requirements. It exempts ALL energy industry facilities—approximately 20,000 large industrial facilities and power plants across the country—not just on the Gulf Coast.
And next up: drilling ANWR. Fuck.
-
24 June 2005
Fri, 24 Jun 2005 23:19:40 GMT The Oil We Eat (Harpers.org)via Kjell Olsen2525 days agoEvery single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1.
David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.
Green growing things normally offset global warming by sucking up carbon dioxide, but nitrogen on farm fields plus methane from decomposing vegetation make every farmed acre, like every acre of Los Angeles freeway, a net contributor to global warming.
Stunning column on how fucked the planet is getting. And society. Are we doing anything right these days?
The Mississippi River’s heavily fertilized effluvia has created a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey.
A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.
It’s interesting that eating a fruit or vegetable is more efficient then eating something higher up the food chain, because the higher up you go in the food chain the more energy is wasted. Say Chickens eat carrots, a great percentage of the energy from the carrots is wasted by the chicken daily, unrecoverable to us humans.
This is the end result of a factory-farm system that appears as a living, continental-scale monument to Rube Goldberg, a black-mass remake of the loaves-and-fishes miracle. Prairie’s productivity is lost for grain, grain’s productivity is lost in livestock, livestock’s protein is lost to human fat—all federally subsidized for about $15 billion a year, two thirds of which goes directly to only two crops, corn and wheat.
On hunting for meat, an all too viable idea:
I used a rifle to opt out of an insane system. I killed, but then so did you when you bought that package of burger, even when you bought that package of tofu burger. I killed, then the rest of those elk went on, as did the grasses, the birds, the trees, the coyotes, mountain lions, and bugs, the fundamental productivity of an intact natural system, all of it went on.
-
19 June 2005
Sun, 19 Jun 2005 09:42:42 GMT Brazilians buck rising gas prices with innovative fuelvia Kjell Olsen2530 days agoLike tens of thousands of her countrymen, she is running her zippy red Fiat on pure ethanol extracted from Brazilian sugar cane. On a recent morning in Brazil’s largest city, the clear liquid was selling for less than half the price of gasoline.
Minnesota just ok’d a bill that called for higher ethanol content in gas, but running your entire car off the stuff sounds like fun.
Today about 40 percent of all the fuel that Brazilians pump into their vehicles is ethanol, known here as alcohol, compared with about 3 percent in the United States. No other nation is using ethanol on such a vast scale. The change wasn’t easy or cheap. But 30 years later, Brazil is reaping the return on its investment in energy security while the United States writes checks for $50-a-barrel foreign oil.
Flex Fuel vehicles use an engine that can run off either gas or ethanol, or any mix of the two.
-
06 June 2005
Mon, 06 Jun 2005 14:38:00 GMT Hubbert peak - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediavia Kjell Olsen2543 days agoExcellent wikipedia page on the idea of peak oil. For a nice look at the consequences that peak oil could bring upon us, have a loot at The Long Emergency, just published last month. Man do people write good stuff on wikipedia.
-
26 May 2005
Thu, 26 May 2005 00:43:00 GMTThe Long Emergency
James Howard Kunstler
Our world as it stands these days is on it’s way down, just as the production of the oil it’s leveraged begins to tank. The way the world reorganizes itself will be spectacularly different – more local, more sustainable, and yes harder – resembling somewhat the world of earlier epochs.
-
07 April 2005
Thu, 07 Apr 2005 19:54:08 GMT RollingStone.com:The Long Emergency: PoliticsKjell Olsen2603 days agoThe United States passed its own oil peak—about 11 million barrels a day—in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen.
Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.
It will change everything about how we live.No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.
We’re screwed, doomsday is coming, and this is an entirely plausible – if pessimistic – account.
bq The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world’s richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict. Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world’s remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq’s oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.
So with china and india exploding in both population and consumerism/consumption, how do we expect to ration the worlds quickly evaporating pool of oil?
We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. [...] In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that “the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary.”
Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.
The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.
The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. [...] These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.
The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the “level of service” (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.
We shouldn’t fuck the nat’l rail systems:
Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than our highway network.
-
16 March 2005
Wed, 16 Mar 2005 14:19:26 GMT The New York Times > Washington > Senate Votes to Allow Arctic Drillingvia Kjell Olsen2625 days agoWhile this afternoon’s vote is not the final word on the issue, it nevertheless made drilling in the wilds of Alaska – an idea favored by the oil industry and fiercely opposed by environmental groups – far more likely than before.
The closeness of this afternoon’s vote could be a prelude to bitter debate ahead. President Bush and many Republicans say drilling in the refuge would help make the United States less dependent on foreign sources of oil.
Good – looks like the deal isn’t sealed, but how could we go about doing something like this to ourselves? And what is there that one can do to fight it?
Maybe waltz on over to the senate and tell your representatives what you think – you are pissed, right?
-
15 March 2005
Tue, 15 Mar 2005 13:45:00 GMT Profit at any cost | MetaFiltervia Kjell Olsen2626 days agoStuff like this just ought to break everyones heart – but I guess it doesn’t, and looks ready to pass and become reality. Fuck.
-
Also somewhat recently
