Energy News

Energy Drives World Economy Off Cliffs

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Once again, the fuel for inflation is fuel itself. A Canadian reader of this news service sent me a story about Canada's evolving energy markets and how the strong Loonie is making problems. Another reader's son is interested enough in energy issues to spend a considerable amount of his own money on election ads. And a storm in the Gulf of Mexico threatens oil rigs. Also, readers sent me alternative energy proposals that are really dangerous and approach the idea that we should sacrifice this planet in amazing ways so we can consume energy.

From Bloomberg:

Crude oil climbed above $93 a barrel for the first time, extending this month's gain to 16 percent, after Mexico shut a fifth of its production and the dollar fell to a record low.

State-owned Petroleos Mexicanos, the third-largest supplier of crude to the U.S., halted about 600,000 barrels a day of output as a storm barreled through the Gulf of Mexico, spokesman Carlos Ramirez said in Mexico City. The dollar dropped to $1.4426 per euro, the weakest since the introduction of the 13- nation common currency in 1999.

There is now a lot of proof that dollars no longer are the basis for oil trading. Namely, every time oil is constricted in some way, the price shoots up more if paid in dollars than paid in euros. So inflation for anyone using or holding dollars is significantly higher than if they use euros. This dynamic is fairly recent. Ever since Greenspan dropped interest rates to 1%. The aftershocks of this stupid ploy to 'revive' the economy after the Dot Com collapse are still shaking world energy markets. The US itself is aggravating all this by dropping interest rates in the teeth of obvious inflation above 5% and threatening more wars in oil pumping regions.

From Today's Zaman:

The speaker of Iraq's Parliament has warned Turkey that his government would cut off the flow of oil from northern Iraq if Ankara followed through on its threat to level economic sanctions against the country.

The pipeline used to ship oil from Kirkuk in northern Iraq to Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan has been repeatedly targeted by insurgents.

Mahmoud al-Mashhadani's comments came on Thursday, a day after Turkey's top leadership agreed to recommend that the government take economic measures to force the cooperation of Iraqis against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has been staging cross-border attacks against Turkish troops.

The explosive mess in the oil-rich regions continues. The Europeans yelp if Russia uses oil as a political tool but everyone does this. It is natural and to be expected. Iraq still uses the dollar for oil sales. This is part of the reason why the US attacked in the first place. Saddam was decoupling oil from the dollar. When Iran threatened to do this, Europe reacted swiftly and begged Iran not to do this and then the US threatened Iran but now the cat has won and is out of the bag, so to speak: all the major oil pumping nations are no longer using the dollar as a peg but are holding euros, not dollars.

Turkey is trying to become part of the European Union but the US doesn't want this, we want Turkey to use the dollar, not the euro. The US wants the dollar to be weaker against manufacturing nations, not oil pumping nations. But the dynamics of international trade are flowing against us. So we get the reverse.

From the Globe and Mail in Canada:

Ms. Taylor takes pains to stress that no decisions have yet been made. But the mere fact that the Finance Minister is even talking aloud about a carbon tax sends two clear messages. First, the province is serious about tackling climate change, even if other parts of its environmental record are decidedly less green. Second, the government is not afraid to say what everyone knows: Consumers, not just businesses, will have to bear the costs of reducing greenhouse gases.

The straight talk is a marked contrast to Quebec and its faux carbon tax that came into effect earlier this month. It is an anemic effort, designed to generate just $200-million a year. More to the point, the Quebec government took the questionable position of reassuring voters that companies, not consumers, would pay the tax. That is impossible since added costs will flow through to the consumer, particularly in a commodity business such as retail fuels. The attempt to argue otherwise simply underscores how frightened most governments are of asking Canadians for even a minimal sacrifice - and highlights just how radical a path British Columbia is contemplating.

The other dynamics of our global energy systems is of course, how we are burning millions of years of stored carbon which is now reentering the climate, changing the atmosphere. All the by-products of using ancient solar energy trapped within organic dead matter are polluting the atmosphere. For example, sulfur. The early atmosphere of the planet was quite sulfurous. We incorporate this within our cells and the beginning of life meant using all the minerals and molecules abundant within the biosphere which was not anything like it is today. Unlike methane, for example, the biofuels we are burning have a very complex chemistry. Using this means releasing a lot of stuff taken out of the atmosphere and oceans and re-introducing it, RAPIDLY. Unlike burning trees that grew recently, when we heat houses with biofuels created by the earth crushing zillions of slimey, dead critters that lived millions of years ago, the number of cells being consumed is much more concentrated. For every 1,000 cells of wood we are seeing millions of cells which is why the BTUs from these compressed cells are far higher than wood, for example.

Since cells have so many different elements, the release of these are endangering our biosphere which is based on growing life forms capturing all these things and using them and taking them out of the atmosphere. For example, when I was young, going to LA was like going back to pre-Precabrian earth: the sky was yellow with sulfur dioxides, the air, virtually unbreathable. Plants tried desperately to filter out the sulfurous air and it was hard to breathe. The US pollutes the air badly and if we have stagnant conditions and can't send our sulfurous mess elsewhere, the air rapidly becomes primitive and we can't breathe. This is, needless to say, killing my trees. Acid rain is terrible for them as well as fishes, etc. We can't re-introduce these ancient elements in the quantity we are doing right now because it will obviously make our planet unihabitable in the long run.

But the 'carbon tax' is a fraud if the goal is to cut pollution. For the people wishing to pollute created this stupid scheme whereby they 'sell' their 'carbon tax' and so, may continue to pollute. This way, nothing real is changed except everyone can be happy, pretending we are solving a dire problem. Only this is as delusional as selling relics and pardons in Medieval Europe. Money is exchanged and everyone is happy but the sinners are still going to hell. This led eventually to the breakdown of the Church and the Reformation. Which ended up killing many people in raging wars, of course.

From 321 Energy:

Canada's petroleum industry is facing a perfect storm of ill effects. These are five in number: First, the Canadian dollar is at its highest level against the dollar in 30 years. Second, the natural gas industry is in the tank. Third, environmental issues are getting critical. Fourth, industrial inflation is rocketing out of sight. And finally, governments have become greedy - very greedy. Let’s look at these points one at a time.

1. Exchange Rates: Since 2001, the Canadian dollar has risen from just over 60 cents per US dollar, when our loonie was called the "northern peso", to $1.04 today. During the same period, oil (priced in US dollars) has tripled in value.

These parallel movements have had some curious effects. Oil prices for Americans have more than tripled, based on nominal, US dollar, prices. In Canada, however, they have "only" doubled. That's a big increase, of course, but it's more modest than in the rest of the world.

This is a long but very good article. A lot of research and care went into it and I learned a lot about Canada's energy politics and systems from it. During the cheap oil years which was when Russia was being looted of all its resources, Canada and Mexico struggled. Now that oil is expensive, both nations are raking in lots of money. Since everything is based on the dollar, the dying dollar coupled with rising fuel prices is causing all sorts of unintended changes. The dynamics of this monetarist/free trade system can't hold long if the basis of it, the dollar, becomes too destabilized and too weak. The dollar can't act like the Mexican peso all the time. For the last 35 years, we have peso-ized the dollar and this has led to the collapse of modern industrial systems here in the US. The transfer of money, power and industry to China is directly connected to our attempts at fixing our financial energy problems via weakening the dollar.

This is one of the many images in this article. It shows the wishful thinking of the guys who calculate future world oil production for the World Bank and other organizations. It doesn't take into account the reality of declining world oil produciton.

Of course, if Greenland and Antarctica are available for oil exploitation, this changes everything. But it won't increase world oil production, it will only make up for losses elsewhere.

Just like we fixed our energy consumption pollution by sending it to China. Via the transfer of factories to there. Our air is now cleaner but the planet's air isn't. The sulfur being released by burning oil and coal is increasing, not decreasing. The mercury content being released into the atmosphere and water is increasing in mass and volume, not decreasing. All the stuff within our cellular structure are benign if released slowly and organically. Burning many millions of years of organic chemistry is a catastrophe.

Canada, like Mexico, is trapped in a web of many past contracts which were written when oil was cheap. On top of this, the oil used in Eastern Canada must be imported while Western Canada sells it oil to the US directly, it being easier to send it south versus across Canada. Just like it is easier to sell oil from Alaska to Asia. Indeed, both the US and Canada sell oil to Asia. The taxes and royalties for all minerals and biofuels run the US and Canadian governments and are of course, not enough. Indeed, the tax boosts one gets from manufacturing always is better then from resources. This is because not only does the government tax the product and the business but also all those workers! Only countries with a very small population base and a large raw resource base can flourish using only the sale of commodities like oil or copper. And inflation is bad for manufacturing, not good. It is great if one is selling raw materials! Which is why we see depression of wages in manufacturing and inflation of all raw materials. This puts a double squeeze on the economic systems and leads to economic collapse. As we note here on our news service.

Canada has a large population compared to say, Dubai. So they must have manufacturing in order to flourish, they can't depend on selling energy to the US any more than the US can run an economy that imports much more than it exports.

From the Concord Monitor, Mass:

For the past two weeks, readers of the state's biggest newspapers may have noticed some unusual advertisements. The full-page ads, with their stripped-down design, lacking flair or photographs, deliver a blunt message: Support Mike Gravel, the former Alaska senator campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Wait a minute. How is Gravel, who's struggled to raise money and is waaaaay in back of the pack, able to afford full-page ads in the Union Leader, Nashua Telegraph and Concord Monitor day after day?

He can thank Gregory Chase.
*snip*
This is Chase's first foray into politics. A registered independent who grew up in Lexington, Mass., he describes himself as a numbers and data guy. He earned two physics degrees from Harvard and spent several years as an oil and foreign exchange trader in New York and London. He now lives in Nashua and runs a currency-trading hedge fund with his brother.

His time working in energy trading convinced Chase that America's dependence on foreign oil is misguided. He supports a sharp increase in the gas tax to encourage investment in alternate fuel sources. When he heard Gravel support a similar position in one televised debate this summer, Chase was smitten.

One of the readers here is the father of this ambitious young man. I am happy to see someone is taking active measures to support politicians in an election. Unlike lobbyists and big corporate givers who surround the top Presidential players, Mr. Chase isn't buying favors. He looked at someone's agenda and is now supporting them. Like myself, he wants taxes on the burning of biofuels raised so people migrate to alternative systems faster. This can hurt the poor so I support grants paying for alternative systems for the lower classes who can't afford $15,000 retrograde changes. Senator Gravel is from an oil pumping state. I have a brother-in-law who works for Alaska's government. It is the last frontier of the old Wild West.

And like that place and time, few people there understand the dynamics of value-added production! The US government has to set up an emergency Bureau of Alternative Energy Production that must shove businesses into alternative systems as much as possible. I would strongly suggest the manufacturing of these systems be here, not in China. It touches me greatly to see the enthusiasm of young people seeking solutions but the problem is, politicians are caught in this web. Just as Ross Perot correctly heard the giant sucking sound, so it is here: the solutions won't work if they are also endorsing the hollowing out of our industrial base and low taxes. The desire to spend money while not paying the piper is still very, very strong. We want to have our cakes and eat it and then throw up all over the planet.

There is no infinte energy nor infinite spending. We have to pay off a considerable mountain of debt run up by our government during the Wild West tax cutting mania. The GOP created too much debt to cut taxes. The Alaskans who think they can continue this was are insane. The entire GOP wants desperately to continue spending like there is no tomorrow. And tomorrow is not only knocking at our door, it is the Grim Reaper if we continue to cut taxes on the rich. After all, this can't be displaced onto the poor! And if the plan is to kill off the poor by freezing or staving them to death, all we have to do is read China and Russia's history: do this during a war and you get a revolution. Hell, look at the history of France! And better, the UNITED STATES! The taxes irked the colonists not because of the taxes but because of the laws outlawing industrial production. For example, it was illegal to produce glass or cast bells!

The Liberty Bell was cast in defiance of the King. The Corning glass works was launched with the Revolution. Industrial production is very much tied into our revolution as it is with all the other revolutions.

From Yahoo:

It's the biggest disconnect in the world's auto industry: Though government, scientists and consumers all call for cleaner, higher-mileage vehicles, that green chorus can still be drowned out by the roar of a V-8.

Hybrids and alternative fuels are gaining a foothold, but the early 21st century has also brought an unparalleled golden age for powerful internal combustion cars. The most potent muscle cars of the '60s look positively shriveled compared to today's high-tech machines that put out 600 horsepower or more.

Despite volatile gas prices and massive publicity for hybrids, fuel mileage is still not top-of-mind for most buyers. In a 2007 study by J.D. Power, nearly 100,000 car buyers ranked fuel economy as only their eighth-highest priority, trailing not only the leading issue of reliability, but also vehicle performance and image.

And what are all the rich people wanting tax cuts doing? Why, they are buying very expensive cars and zooming about, merrily! And the majority of Americans imitate them. Everyone is quite addicted to the joys of being King of the Road even if this means destroying the entire planet earth. We just want to go fast, go far and go nuts. Raw power is quite addictive. Indeed, the more 'efficient' something becomes, the more dangerous since we like to exploit efficiency and power.

From Xinhua:

An innovative football helmet was developed to protect football players from concussions, media reported Sunday.

Vin Ferrara, a former Harvard quarterback, got the idea when he happened to notice the construction of a ribbed, plastic bottle that squirted a saline solution into the sinuses. He started pounding the bottle and found it absorbed blows from all directions and different forces with equal effectiveness.

"This is it," Ferrara declared. Three years later, his squirt bottle has led to a promising new technology to protect football players from concussions.

This is a fine example of how this principal works: back in the Stone Age of football, no one wore any protection so if one banged into each other, it HURT. So there was elementary caution. To protect players, all sorts of things were added: shoulder pads and leather helmets in the 1920's, for example. With each layer of protection, the violence grew. The Four Horsemen rampaged when they got their new gear, for example.

As the game evolved, the deadly level rose with each innovation. When hard helmets were used, the players used them to ram into each other directly, so the padding grew until they are all padded up and increasingly, like warriors in the Middle Ages, are moving towards full body armor. When I see football on TV, I have not only winced watching the mayhem but I also call it 'Males Only General Hospital'. The wounded are removed by stretchers as the carnage continues.

So it is with all systems: safety systems usually are used as a means for upping the ante. This is why limits are imposed by Nature and not Man. We can't help it: we want to forwards and upwards forever. Like Icarus.

From Vortex Engine:

Mechanical energy is produced when heat is carried upward by convection in the atmosphere. A process for producing a tornado-like vortex and concentrating mechanical energy where it can be captured is proposed. The existence of tornadoes proves that low intensity solar radiation can produce concentrated mechanical energy. It should be possible to control a naturally occurring process. Controlling where mechanical energy is produced in the atmosphere offers the possibility of harnessing solar energy without having to use solar collectors.

The Atmospheric Vortex Engine (AVE) is a process for capturing the energy produced when heat is carried upward by convection in the atmosphere. The process is protected by patent applications and could become a major source of electrical energy. The unit cost of electrical energy produced with an AVE could be half the cost of the next most economical alternative.

A reader sent me this web site. I was totally horrified. The drawings and diagrams look EXACTLY like black holes! The astonishing similarity reminds me of this frightful fact: humans, seeking power will end up creating a black hole here on earth. More than one SF writer has speculated about this. The dangers of such systems are obvious to me: their very open-endedness is their tragic weakness! Reconfiguring nature in this fashion has so many potential side effects, most of them just as subtle as the releasing of a billion years of mercury storage and sulfur containment, it is just so hard to foresee yet is also obvious at the same time.

When biofuels was first launched, I and others knew that this is simply going to lead to the enslavement of millions, we see this already in sugar fields in Brazil, for example, and the starvation of billions. Biofuels will cruelly destroy many lives but the drivers of fast muscle cars won't care. They are on display every bit as much as the cruel chivalry of Medieval Europe trotting about Europe, breaking spears while the peasants toiled in the fields and paid crushing taxes.

I remember when nuclear energy was proposed. The proponents claimed energy would be so cheap, it would be nearly free. All the warnings of the downsides were brushed aside. We can clearly see these downsides now. France and Japan have huge nuclear energy systems up and running and they haven't collapsed...yet. But are like a dragon curled in its cave, we fear it and in Japan, when the earth shakes, the dragon awakes and becomes vicious.

Tapping into the energy of the atmosphere by creating basically a tornado will muck with the basic weather systems in ways we cannot forsee. I would suggest this will definitely change the rain patterns. Worse, it could become, when a front arrives, the equivelent of a hurricane! For if you add the energy of a powerful storm system to a vortex you get...hurricanes! If the hurricane is nailed to one spot and winds rise to 300 mph, even this facility may be destroyed, god willing.

From Vortex Engine:

In the early 2000's, the Australian company EnviroMission proposed building a 200 MW capacity solar chimney in Mildura south west Australia. The chimney was planned to have a height of 1 km and a diameter of 130 m. The solar collector would have a diameter of 7 km. The estimated cost of the Australian solar chimney is $800 million.

The power output of the proposed Enviromission solar tower would be 4000 times the power output of the Manzanares solar chimney for several reasons: the tower is five times higher than Manzanares chimney, the area of the collector is 700 times larger, and because exit kinetic energy losses are a smaller portion of the ideal work.

I am a huge fan of people producing their own energy. We don't need huge energy systems in residential communities. Instead, people can be their own generators of energy. Cities are hotter than vegative countryside so soaking up solar energy via the rooftops isn't going to change the city's climate any worse than it is already. It certainly won't create mega-storms. The tower idea is for ONLY value-added manufacturing, I would imagine. Doing this so we can live in our present environmental envelopes is pure madness. We want to be comfortable but if we can't do this via solar panels on roofs then we should do without this, ie, live like humans have lived for eons.

The thermodynamic basis of the AVE (Atmospheric Vortex Engine) and a solar chimney is virtually identical. However, the AVE has some significant advantages

1) A tall chimney is not required. The atmospheric vortex engine replaces the chimney with centrifugal force of a vortex to generate a "virtual" chimney. The construction of an extremely tall chimney (1 km as in the Enviromission proposal) is not required.

2) The height of a virtual "vortex chimney" could extend much higher into the atmosphere compared to a physical chimney structure. As the height of the vortex increases, the temperature of the cold source drops which increases the overall Carnot efficiency of the process.

3) A large solar collector is not required. Waste heat can be obtained from various sources such as from thermal power plants, waste heat from various industrial processes, or simply ground level heat from solar radiation received at the earth's surface in its unaltered state.

As someone who has been hit by lightning and who has lived through a number of hurricanes and who has had tornadoes bounce over the roof more than once in my life, I am VERY leery of any system that involves the sort of dynamics this system proposes. And of course, this solves nothing if all we do is abuse the energy as we are doing today.

Culture of Life News Main Page

US Engineer & Inventor, John Howe's 'The End of Fossil Energy'

October 24, 2007

Elaine Meinel Supkis

One of the readers of this news service is the Howe Engineering Company run by John G. Howe, an inventor/developer of an array of interesting products and systems. He kindly sent me a copy of one of his books, 'The End of Fossil Energy', 3rd edition. This book is a great reference source for information concerning the Hubbert Oil Peak in a digestable, easy to use form. I highly recommend this book. John and I talked on the phone last night and I would like to share this conversation with everyone.

From Bloomberg:

Oil rose above $92 a barrel for the first time in New York after the U.S. accused Iran's military of supporting terrorism and stepped up pressure on foreign companies to cut ties with the Middle East oil producer.

If the US hasn't already slid into a recession, this news certainly will push it there. Like clockwork, for the last 40 years, war and sudden oil price hikes have marched hand in hand. When the wars recede, oil prices drop and all seems well yet again. Every time there is war and oil is either rationed or shoots up in price when there is no rationing, people are shaken out of their slumber and begin to worry about the Hubbert Oil Peak.

The latest threats aimed at the Iranians has now caused oil to climb to new heights. Disruptions of Iranian and or Iraqi oil caused the last two big spikes in inflation. Each time this happens, we see renewed interest in the concept of the Hubbert Oil Peak. As soon as these wars and threats end, interest in peak oil collapses. Mr. Howe, a 72 year old engineer in Maine, decided in 2002, as we rushed to war with Iraq, to educate himself about peak oil and he produced the first edition of 'The End of Fossil Energy' just in time for us to go into another war/oil spasm.

This book is only 163 pages long but inside the covers, he covers a tremendous amount of ground swiftly and cleanly. It is designed to be more a text book than a rant. It doesn't focus on the politics or cultural aspects of oil pricing and oil use. It is mostly reams of hard data and a clear assesment of hard facts. When arguing about peak oil or discussing alternative fuels, this book is an excellent reference tool. I could open it up and flip to any chapter or any page and find lots of good information, easy to locate, easy to read and quite understandable for non-experts while not simplistic.

Mr. Howe doesn't try to debunk everything or explain everything simply because that would make for a 600 page telephone book-sized tome. This book was designed and published by his daughter who runs McIntire Publishing. She made it a good size for carrying in a briefcase and the typeface is fairly large which I greatly appreciated since my eyes are getting old. I could read it easily without glasses. This also makes it easy to use as a reference book, one can glance at a page and locate information swiftly.

The layout of the text and the inclusion of specific boxes of information in bold type also makes it easy to leaf through the book and locate important information. I appreciated this feature and wish to commend the editor/publisher who did a good, professional job. Indeed, part of this book review is my feeling of awe at the capability of a family to produce such work which led me to make a phone call last night.

The Howes are a classic example of the 'Can-do Yankee' ethos. The hills and valleys of the mountains that run between the Atlantic and the Hudson Valley are the cradle of the US industrial revolution. The first power source used by the first factories here was the running water from mountain streams. Small towns became industrial cradles as farmers harnessed water power to pulleys and belts and began to use the rotational powers to move weaving machines and other equipment they created. The inventor took off, everyone wanted to be an inventor and a wild array of inventions, schemes and systems were created by former hard-scrabble farmers.

Part of the process for inventing things is to have time to tinker with stuff, the freedome to control and profit from one's tinkering and to have the tools that encourage tinkering. Namely, in the Northeast, we have grim winters that shut down everything even today with snowplows working sometimes nonstop, all commerce and activity can come to a total halt!

Back 200 years ago, winter was the time to work on new projects, messing around with things inside while Jack Frost painted the landscape white. When I called Mr. Howe to ask him about his own activities, this was because he sent me his web links that showed a wide variety of solar-powered farm and travel devices he created and now uses...in the far north! Not in California or Arizona, in Maine!

Click here to visit the web site where he has pictures of his solar powered tractors and cars at Solarcarandtractor.com.

Like myself, Mr. Howe and his wife both are devotees of using solar energy. The sports car is a harbinger of things to come: vehicles will drastically shrink in size over the next 30 years. But aside from using a car that has batteries the runs from charge to charge, having it collect energy as it sits or is used is a tremendously good idea. Of course, all his vehicles are retrofits but they show how this system is easily workable, not a dream but a clear future reality.

The tractor amuses me no end. I use tractors a great deal and I laughed when I saw his tractor.

From Solarcarandtractor.com:

This concept vehicle is an easy way to venture into a post-petro-fuel sustainable future. Like the other projects on this website, it represents a viable, convenient path to transportation independence from centralized, commercial power sources and petro-fuels.

The 15 mph top speed is incompatible with petro-fueled vehicles but fun, clean, and far better than walking, riding a bike, or keeping a horse, especially for transporting two or three people plus a small load.

The on-board, 2500-watt,120 VAC inverter makes this vehicle a mobile power plant. Any number of conventional tools, appliances, and residential or farming needs from pumps to lights to a chain saw can be powered on-the-spot.

My husband and I use chainsaws a lot and I loved this picture and asked him about these vehicles and the auxilary electrical generators. 'Do you have to set the solar panels on top of the tractor to different angles?' I asked Mr. Howe.

'No', he said. 'After experimenting with this, I decided it was easier to simply move the tractor into a position where it would get the most sun.' He said the increase in sun amps was only slightly better if one got the ideal angle and position for the panels so it simply was a matter of turning left or right rather than angles. He also said his farm is rather flat so it made no difference in the long run.

We live on a mountainside and driving my tractor back and forth to hay the fields means it is always tilted towards the sun. Mr. Howe told me he has a You Tube movie up showing him using his tractor doing farm work.

The first thing I noticed was how the solar panels were a real cool shade! I wear big hats while mowing and the sun beats down on my head. Not to mention working in the rain! So the panels are multi-tasking! I enjoyed seeing him hay his fields: we do this only in the hot summer days when it is very dry. I am very concerned, as Mr. Howe is, about how we can harvest or hay fields using equipment in the far future. This tractor prototype shows how this can be done.

Mr. Howe also told me about his winter inventions and told me quite mysteriously to go visit You Tube and see his other inventions.

My husband used to be a fanatical downhill skier. In the Northeast, we seldom have powder like in the Rockies, we have this hard surface of freeze/thaw snow that is very slippery and hard to grip. I don't ski myself but used to sled down the mountain here as my son did, also, to go shopping or to school and the sleds would fly down the mountain on this glass-like surface!

So we watched with great interest as Mr. Howe explained how he engineered a new type of skis. He is very technical about his approach, using physics as well as an intimate knowledge of his materials, to make custom skis in the barn attached to his house. This movie shows the process quite well. The Howe family loves to ski and in the classic New Englander-inventor style, they have started a good, capitalist business using their intelligence and skills and now have two men working to produce these skis. Bravo! This is the American Spirit and I hope we all understand, all we must do is be able to think, tinker and do things if we want to succeed. There is no cause to despair or to think Americans can't do this anymore.

Mr. Howe's book isn't a vanity publishing project, by the way. He is quite serious about this and has worked hard to make connections and spread the information. For example, he gave a large number of books for free to Representative Bartlett, a Republican who is the first Congressperson to talk about Peak Oil on the Congressional Record. This Representative then had his aides pass it out to all of Congress.

'I didn't hear back from any of them, ' sighed the intrepid engineer from Maine. I laughed and said, 'They all know about Peak Oil, we discussed this outside of Congress back under Jimmy Carter.'

He agreed that they didn't want to talk about it for political reasons: this would rile voters. But that was yesterday. Today, oil is shooting up in price so suddenly, everyone is worried for the amount of oil being pumped this year, for the first time, is now dropping. Saudi Arabia has assured Bush that he would increase production but instead, it has been dropping. This is highly significant. A number of scientists and people like Mr. Howe and myself feel we are at or very near the Hubbert Oil Peak.

Here is a good video of Rep. Bartlett's Peak Oil Presentation to the US Congress by Roscoe Bartlett

Rep. Bartlett will be giving another Peak Oil related presentation to the US Congress this month. The most likely times are in the evening of Monday April 11th or Thursday April 14th. The exact time may be known on Friday. The speech will be more solutions orientated.

The last speech was held in a special night session of Congress with very little attendance. The speech received almost no mainstream media coverage. However US residents can now approach their congressperson and ask them what they think we should do about the matters raised in the Congressional record, March 14, Items 54 and 55.

The fact that Congress will gleefully show up in full and give big, bloated speeches about all sorts of trivia, then run away when anyone needs to address pressing, dangerous issues, irritates me. Congress has taken precious time to debate Rush Limbaugh's stupid radio show, MoveOn ads or who killed whom 100 years ago but not to discuss our budget deficits, our wars that are bankrupting us or Peak Oil. Ignoring the important things is easy if one is distracted by silly things.

Then there is California: land of disasters. It is the reverse image of the Northeast. There, the people have sudden freak outs and disasters that hit with little or, in the case of earthquakes, no warning. In between, life is ridiculously easy. So there is a 'what me worry?' ethos there. In the NE, we have to plan for winter and work hard in summer to prepare for winter, those of us who don't live in climate-controlled environments. I lived in a tent here for 10 years. Winters were a gigantic challenge and I had to scramble to survive for many months of the year. Nothing was easy.

But this also the goad to invent, to create and to plan ahead! Easy energy has sapped our willpower and our ability to cope with things. Having lived with virtually no modern energy systems for many years, I know that it isn't impossible, nay, it can be FUN, coping with harsh conditions using all sorts of ingenius methods or tools! People fear the end of cheap energy. But is simply means we must use our brains a bit more and be more creative.

And change the way we live. After speaking to the Howes, I have full faith that we can do this. With a lot of 'can-do' energy replacing cheap oil.

Mr. Howe is available for not only press conferences or lectures but also one can buy his book for only $10. His email address is Or readers can order this book from Amazon.com. And John would love to hear from any readers. He is a very interesting person to talk to.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Kurds Can't Sell Oil To Neighbors

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The politics of oil exporting and the needs of the US/UK empire to divide and conquer are illuminated by the story of the Kurds and their attempt at slicing out of Turkey and Iraq as well as other neighbors, a nation that will be supported by oil exports. Also, the degradation of the workers toiling in Brazil's sugar cane fields, producing biofuels, is visited by Bloomberg news. Time to talk about energy and slavery, a thing of greatest antiquity and which looms ever greater in our futures if oil begins to run lower and lower in volume due to the Hubbert Oil Peak. And US ethanol producers are suffering a loss of profitability and this is a curious matter worth discussing.

From CBS News:

Energy companies that make deals with the Kurdish government may strike oil, but they’ll have trouble selling it, warns Iraq’s Oil Minister.

“Iraq’s neighbors - Syria, Iran and even Turkey - have said they will only allow oil over the border to market that is being exported by the federal government,” Dr. Hussein al Shahristani told CBS News.

The US invasion to control OPEC and to dominate world oil markets expost facto has placed us in the middle of the still-disintigrating Ottoman Empire. During the long reign of the descendents of the Mongloid steppes horsemen, the Kurds were pretty much left alone. They were mainly tribal herdsmen that migrated up and down the mountains in the wild countryside deep inside the heart of the Ottoman Empire. Over the previous 5,000 years, governments paid little attention to these nomads who were disorganized and mobile.

From the University of Edinburgh UK:

This map shows how the Kurds spread out across the mountains surrounding the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains. When the Ottoman Empire was broken up by the European empires, this collapse had important political divisions that were the trigger for WWI. Germany supported the Turkish empire while the British contested with both the German and the Russian empires for control of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The British method such as the one used by Lawrence of Arabia, was to go into and live with various wild nomadic tribes and get them to work as terrorists, attacking the govenment of Istanbul. This guerrila warfare was an important part of WWI and the British were very focused on justifying and assisting ethnic minorities in resisting imperial rule even though Britian was battling the Irish Celts for the exact same reasons: they had to stop ethnic groups from gaining political power at home!

To this day, the ethnic and religious differences in the United Kingdom constantly threaten to rip the last bits of that former empire to shreds! After WWI, the plan to kill off the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires revolved around slicing them all apart along ethnic/linguistic lines. Since the planet has been swept by waves of nomads and since many nomadic cultures were still pretty footloose inside of empires, drawing up language/ethnic lines was nearly impossible and indeed, a very bloody affair that is tremendously bloody as time goes by.

A paradox of all this is wrenching: ethnic minorities can move about freely within empires and actually can grow in strength and numbers and indeed, become quite powerful under the peaceful systems set up by centralized imperial rule. But once they decide to divide up an empire and establish their own countries out of the remains of an empire, then not only do all the ethnic members living spread all over the place become targets of warfare by other rival groups, they also have to try to drive our their neighbors in order to keep their own homes and this is very nasty stuff.

Hitler didn't come out of nowhere. He is the product of the ethos of ethnic identity and the push to chop up previous empires or politcal maps drawn up by marriages and conquests of the top royal families of Europe ever since the break up of the Roman Empire. These new, radical maps, tried to divide up lands according to language, religion, etc. The previous attempt at this during the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants killed off tremendous numbers of people in Middle Europe. So when the victors of WWI, all empires that would not tolerate the slightest moves towards ethnic-identity separations, imposed this regime upon the defeated Germanic empires, this meant anyone speaking German who had lived for many generations across these empires were suddenly being forced to use a new language and follow discriminatory laws aimed at driving them from their ancestral homes.

So Hitler decided that if he killed all other ethnic and religious groups, these scattered and often quite big populations of Germanic speaking people could then live in peace. The logic of ethnic cleansing is very strict: you kill or drive out anyone and everyone who is of any rival groups. The US is an empire, since day one. And the revolutionaries who founded our nation worried about all this and they tried to make this impossible by having universal laws that covered all religions and ethnic groups with two notable exceptions, of course: Africans and the natives of the Americas were ruthlessly excluded. Which seriously weakened our own empire and still troubles it to this day even after they gained full civil rights.

The ethos of large political unions uniting many different ethnic groups and religions of the United States has been stood upon its head by the US/UK imperial alliance. For the Brits practiced divide and conquer politics for many years...when attacking other empires! So here we are, presiding over more than one very bloody rending apart of the Ottoman Empire as well as supporting this deep within the Russian and Chinese empires, both of whom greatly resent this.

Within the heart of all this cruel ethnic cleansing lies Israel: a total colonial effort launched from Russia's Jewish minority who were artfully exploited by the British Crown to attack the central Mediterranean flank of the Ottoman Empire. It was no coincidence that London published the Balfour Declarations at the end of WWI.

The cockeyed, bizarro world of ethnic cleansing at its worst is embodied in the Israeli ethnic cleansing process going on today in the Middle East. I was horrified to read this article in the BBC:

Situated on a peak on the Carmel mountain range, the 77-acre village is an oasis of tranquillity, a vital ingredient in the healing of children scarred by years of conflict and abuse.

Named after Orde Charles Wingate, the controversial British army officer who trained Jewish underground forces in the 1930s, the centre provides a safe refuge, education and life skills for destitute children from the age of five, through adolescence and up to the age of 19, and, in some cases, beyond.

"We don't expel kids from here. Period," says Dr Peri. "While only one in 10 graduates stay on, those who leave know that we're always here for them, like a normal family."

Of course, the friendly interview with the insane people running this camp points out that there is no intention of harboring, helping or allowing to live within Israel, any Palestinian children. They are being killed or starved in the name of ethnic identity. I wanted to note how this project was named after a man who was working hard to undermine the last bits of Ottoman control in that region for it was still part of Turkey back then. It is rather frightful to see how the very same people, motivated by the same urges as Hitler had, are bringing in refugees who are not Jewish, not because they are kindly but to deflect critics from calling the Zionists 'Nazis'. 'See? We are nice to one or two disconnected Muslims out of distant lands who are no threat to our own ethnic cleansing actions within this land!' they disingenuously say.

Back to the Kurds: this is part of that same British project hatched 100 years ago and it is for the same reason: to prevent any empire from forming in this vital region. The political map of the mountains in this part of the world is a twisted, shattered mess just like the former lands where the Ottoman empire and the Austro-Hungarian empire used to meet. Yugoslavia is no more, it is a host of bitter, hate-filled little sub-kingdoms poised between the UK/US empire and the Russian empire.

The subdivision of this sector of the Ottoman empire is particularily complex, trememdously bloody and at the bottom of this lies oil. The UK/US empires hope they can control the oil if they fracture apart the region and make alliances with various groups so they can be kept on as 'protectors' which in empire-speak are called 'Protectorates.' The desire to do this is hitting Turkey very hard indeed and the Turks are very upset already over the ruthless dismemberment of their empire.

So the news about the Kurd's inability to sell their newly seized oil resources to their angry neighbors is no surprize to me. It is easy for Americans to ignore history while artfully trying to expoit it at the urging of our British allies. But we are on a fool's mission. Not only are we triggering bloody, retalitory ethnic wars, we are also being slowly dragged into endorsing this sort of garbage and it is now eating away at our own home base just as it boomeranged on England and is still gnawing away at England's home base!

The US, so anxious to rule the world using this divide and conquer method is now troubled by elements at home who no longer swear fealty to the concept of a united federation that honors the Constitution. Instead, everyone is now being allowed to be dual citizens and to wave the flags of one's ethnic identity homeland. Whether it be Ireland or Israel, Mexico or Mauritania, everyone is now cleaving towards their 'ancestral' homes and the hyper-flag waving post-9/11 has eroded into a lunge for more ethnic cleansing across the entire planet, sponsored by and militarily supported by the United States.

And people anxious to win these bloody, internecine battles are now twisting apart our joint needs and using our nation in ways that weaken our entire nation while benefitting their ethnic desires. This isn't just Jewish Zionists doing this though they are one of the most powerful of these groups, it is a problem for nearly everything involving our foreign relations which is being used for non-United States purposes but for only whoever has the most influence such as the Cuban Americans in Miami controlling a lot of our Caribbean relations or even endangering important alliances just because they want to embargo Cuba!

From the Pakistani News:

The government of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region expressed its anger on Saturday at being kept in the dark about an agreement between Baghdad and Ankara to crack down on rebel Turkish Kurds.

The accord was signed on Friday in Turkey’s capital by Iraqi Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani and his Turkish counterpart Besir Atalay. “It would have been better if someone had told us what was going to be in the agreement,” Falah Mustafa Bakir, head of the Kurdish Regional Government’s foreign affairs department, said in a statement posted on the KRG’s website.
“We are talking about a new democratic, federal Iraq not the Iraq of dictatorship and one-party rule,” he said. Turkey says the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) enjoys free movement in northern Iraq, where it has long taken refuge, and obtains weapons and explosives there for attacks across the border.

The US/UK imperial war machine unleashed the Kurds but now they have to curb them due to geo-political realities outside of the Middle East. The US/UK empire can't attack Iran while Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia, for example, are very angry about the division of Iraq. If we look at the ethnic map above, we can see that that entire region will impossibly fracture apart if we encourage ethnic cleansing but we can't help but pick up that dangerous tool. It makes empire building so easy, at first! But then gaining control over contending ethnic groups whose hatred have redoubled due to the empire encouraging ethnic cleansing is a whole different matter.

We can't reconcile the dream of the Kurds of taking over and dominating their neighbors, driving out all rivals and setting up their own kingdom with the idea that everyone there has to be peaceful and obey our imperial rule and give us money and power and in return, we protect from each other due to the hatred we fostered so cleverly, previously. Like Britain tried to keep both India and Pakistan as part of their Common Wealth: impossible, totally impossible.

From Bloomberg:

Brazilian ethanol production will jump 22 percent in 2007 from a year earlier, to a record 5.6 billion gallons (21.3 billion liters), the Agriculture Ministry predicts.

Brazil will sell at least 818 million gallons of ethanol this year to Japan, the Netherlands and the U.S., according to Uniao da Industria de Cana-de-Acucar, or Unica, Brazil's biggest ethanol trade association.
*snip*
Sugar cane provides at least 300,000 jobs in Sao Paulo state alone, paying twice as much as other low-skilled rural work, former Agriculture Minister Roberto Rodrigues says. Ethanol is not only good for Brazil, Lula says in speeches; it's also good for the world.

Back to the energy issue: from the very first, I was sceptical about the promises of bio-fuels. As someone who has farmed in the past and who has lots of biological fuel items we call 'trees' and pasturage, I also know the limitations of Mother Nature. We can't get more than there is out of the living tissue of this earth without paying a steep price. Already, the agricultural revolution is proving very problematic as the chemicals and genetic engineering wonders fade in the teeth of the iron laws of Evolution and Mother Nature's rule. We have evolved a very energy-intense civilization and we may end up retreating from it simply because it will become increasingly impossible. Already, in Africa, the stresses of population and the decline in living standards are stark. The bounty of nature for the traditional hunter-gatherers of ancient, very ancient lineage are now under tremendous pressure. The Darfur mess is all about this. It can't be easily fixed since it is biological as well as ethnic cleansing.

The history of sugar cane and the history of slavery are one and the same. From the very start when the Europeans, who used mostly honey for sweetners, discovered sugar grasses, they fell in love with this cheap, easy to digest form of energy. Indeed, it was an addiction equal to opium or other nostrums such as tobacco. To this day, the effects of sugar and corn sugar (both are grasses, by the way) is sweeping the planet, causing obesity and other health problems. But the people who slave away in the sugar plantations are never obese. Not since day one, in the early 1600's. The long enslavement of black tribal members of Central and Western Africa began instantly since nearly all the natives of the Caribbean Islands were worked to death on the indigo and sugar plantations started by the colonial powers. This was before cotton was brought in from India and Egypt. These three crops, by the way, are quite cruel and due to their dark melanin skin, the slaves from Africa could toil in the tropical sun, painfully harvesting these crops.

And so it continues today. The Cuban revolution was launched on behalf of easing the dire conditions of the sugar cane workers there!

From Bloomberg:

Behind the rhetoric lies a harsher reality for the cane cutters of Brazil. Most are migrants, who leave their families in search of jobs that pay about $1.35 an hour. How much they make depends on how much they cut.

Companies sometimes cheat their employees by undercounting, a government study released earlier this year shows. The work is backbreaking and dangerous.

From 2002 to 2005, the most recent years for which complete statistics are available, 312 sugar and ethanol workers died on the job, and 82,995 suffered accidents while working in cane fields and ethanol plants, according to Brazil's Social Security Administration.

Labor prosecutors are investigating the cases of 21 people who have dropped dead since 2004 while cutting cane. Most were from 25 to 35 years old. ``There's strong evidence that workers die of exhaustion,'' Gomes says.

As always, human labor can be cheaper than using machines to do work because one can literally exploit other humans to death. Working people to death has a long history. Generally speaking, one does this to an ethnic group that is outside the identity of the exploiters. For example, in the US, we worked Chinese labor to death and exported the survivors. This was done all over the empire. The Panama Canal was mostly built by Asian labor that had a ferocious death rate. The cruel system I see evolving towards using human labor to create fuel for rich people to zoom about in muscular vehicles is gradually growing ever stronger. Right now, energy is still a cheap resource so we use lots of machinery to farm products used to make fuel for our lifestyles.

But in 100 years, this will devolve back into slavery because this makes more economic sense unless we take measures today to improve our energy systems. For example, the more we extend solar energy creation by encouraging this for all roof surfaces, this means we can electrify our vehicles which must all evolve together as lighter and smaller objects...this can't be done individually since anyone venturing out in any light vehicle will be massacred when hit by the behmoths that dominate the roads.

Planning ahead means we can override the worst aspects of the Hubbert Oil Peak without sliding into depravity like the Roman Empire, based on slavery and cruelty.

From Bloomberg:

The largest overseas market for Brazilian ethanol is the U.S. Last year, the U.S. imported 433.7 million gallons of ethanol from Brazil, up fourfold from 2004, according to the Washington-based Renewable Fuels Association. U.S. fuel importers buy about a dozen shipments of ethanol from Brazil per month.

They include the U.S. unit of BP Plc; Chevron Corp.; the U.S. unit of Citgo Petroleum Corp.; ConocoPhillips, the second- biggest U.S. fuel refiner; Northville Industries Corp.; the U.S. unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc; and Valero Energy Corp., according to U.S. Energy Department monthly fuel import data.

We use the sweat and tears and deaths of these semi-slaves already. The ethical challenge here is the same as England had when she used slaves to grow tobacco, sugar for rum and then cotton for the cotton mills of the English Industrial Revolution: there is blood on our hands. We can't get all soppy and sorry for Darfur while merrily drinking the ethanol produced by slave-like working conditions in Brazil. We can't chide China over labor conditions or pollution while we merrily consume the products of this business!

There is research going on in biofuels that are a concern, too. From the Economist:

The result, according to Codexis's boss, Alan Shaw, is enzymes that can perform chemical transformations unknown in nature.

Dr Shaw, however, is no longer so interested in octanol as a biofuel. Like two other, nearby firms, he is now focusing Codexis's attention on molecules even more chemically similar to petrol. The twist that Codexis brings is that unlike petrol, of which each batch from the refinery is chemically different from the others (because the crude oil from which it is derived is an arbitrary mixture of hydrocarbon molecules), biopetrol could be turned out exactly the same, again and again, and thus designed to have the optimal mixture of properties required of a motor fuel.

Exactly which molecules Codexis is most interested in these days, Dr Shaw is not yet willing to say. But Amyris Biotechnologies, which is also based in California, in Emeryville, and which also started by dabbling in drugs (in its case an antimalarial medicine called artemisinin), is slightly more forthcoming. Under the guidance of its founder Jay Keasling, it has been working on a type of isoprenoid (a class of chemicals that include rubber).

Rubber reminds me of rubber plantations and this reminds me of Brazil where great fortunes were made, growing rubber and also of Asia where the European empires conquered Malaysia and Indonesia so they could grow rubber plants and during WWII, due to shortage of rubber due to ships being sunk all over the world, both Germany and the US did intensive research in artificial compounds and subsitutes for silk, rubber, oil, etc. Hydrocarbon complexes are based on some of the most common elements. And we can see how the combinations of water---hydrogen and oxygen and join up with carbon atoms to form an amazing array of complex pseudo or real life forms that can even be self-replicating! Which we call 'life'. The problem of this is, of course, anything we artifically create will enter into the life-stream of our environment and all of this has consequences which are hard for us to foresee and we can see with our past forays in this field.

Certainly, this is bearing watching. I don't expect any nostrum of any sort to arise that will allow us to consume infinite energy or resources due to the fact that our appetites are infinite but the universe has limits.

From the NYT:

Only last year, farmers here spoke of a biofuel gold rush, and they rejoiced as prices for ethanol and the corn used to produce it set records.

But companies and farm cooperatives have built so many distilleries so quickly that the ethanol market is suddenly plagued by a glut, in part because the means to distribute it have not kept pace. The average national ethanol price on the spot market has plunged 30 percent since May, with the decline escalating sharply in the last few weeks.
*snip*
While generous government support is expected to keep the output of ethanol fuel growing, the poorly planned overexpansion of the industry raises questions about its ability to fulfill the hopes of President Bush and other policy makers to serve as a serious antidote to the nation’s heavy reliance on foreign oil.

Unlike government-run situations we have a government-subsidized situation that leads to the Chinese/Maoist 'let a thousand distilleries bloom' crisis. This is a very wasteful way of creating 'competition' when our energy systems all tend towards mega-systems in the first place. Note how all the oil companies are now a very few. Building lots of distilleries all over the place certainly has driven down the price of the distilled product but this doesn't do us much good since most of this is costing our government money in the end so this simply ads on to our budget deficit.

From the NYT:

The falling price of ethanol comes in sharp contrast to the rise in crude oil prices. Lower ethanol prices help reduce gasoline prices at the pump, where ethanol is available, but because it constitutes 10 percent or less in most blends, the impact for the consumer is marginal.

This is so bizarre and shows how government funding warps economics. It takes increasingly expensive fossil fuels from overseas to create the ethanol products that are dropping in price! Why is this?

Well, we look back at world trade: ethanol from Brazil has a tariff tacked onto it to protect the ethanol producers here who get outright government subsidies on top of this boon that has also caused the Doha rounds for 'free trade' to collapse! And these two things encourage over-production at home even as we import this stuff because of distribution problems as well as geo-political problems. We don't want Brazil to make energy for China, for example, exclusively. We want to keep a toe in that bathtub.

From the NYT:

Since construction crews broke ground on the Lincolnway plant in 2005, the price of ethanol on the local market has fallen to $1.55 a gallon from about $2, Mr. Brehm said. Over the same period, the price of corn, representing 70 percent of production costs, has risen to $3.27 a bushel from $1.60. “We’re trapped between two commodities,” he said.

The price of corn rises due to world trade, we sell a lot of corn to others and since the US has decided to cease being a value-added exporter and is now increasingly a commodity export nation, we must sell corn overseas because of our huge trade deficit with Asia and the Middle East. We can't export ethanol to the Middle East. We could export it to Asia only it is more expensive than Brazilian ethanol which uses near-slavery rather than machines using oil to grow and harvest its crops. And since the dollar is dying against most currencies and is rapidly ceasing to be the world's reserve currency (I suspect in the last 3 months, this has pretty much been true), the price of oil climbs faster than the value of our exports which is why we are seeing our trade deficit worsen over time, bit by bit.

I watched with rising alarm as nearly all farming and industries in the town of Berlin, New York, vanish in less than 10 years due to the logic and forces of 'free trade' and the dying dollar. There is virtually no commerce left here. This process is hammering all our countryside and the frantic efforts to jump this gate by turning food into fuel will not stop it...yet. Only after we go bankrupt, will commerce slowly re-emerge in the hinterlands. One would hope. And this would be reasonable to suggest, actually.

From the History Learning Site:

The Great Leap Forward planned to develop agriculture and industry. Mao believed that both had to grow to allow the other to grow. Industry could only prosper if the work force was well fed, while the agricultural workers needed industry to produce the modern tools needed for modernisation. To allow for this, China was reformed into a series of communes.

I thought of the Great Leap Forward when writing about the various government programs to spread ethanol all over the Midwest. They share some common elements.

The Great Leap Forward also encouraged communes to set up "back-yard" production plants. The most famous were 600,000backyard furnaces which produced steel for the communes. When all of these furnaces were working, they added a considerable amount of steel to China’s annual total – 11 million tonnes.

There are backyard diesel production enterprises going on right now. Using oils from the fast food places that dot America's roadsides and shopping centers, these enterprising individuals then cook the oil while adding chemicals and produce a useful diesel byproduct. We saw this sort of thing during the earlier oil rationing periods. There is no rationing now, it is monetary rationing. Namely, prices are simply rising and people are looking for angles to exploit. The ethanol subsidies are more like the Chinese Central Planning like the Great Leap mess.

The excellent growing weather of 1958 was followed by a very poor growing year in 1959. Some parts of China were hit by floods. In other growing areas, drought was a major problem. The harvest for 1959 was 170 million tons of grain – well below what China needed at the most basic level. In parts of China, starvation occurred.

1960 had even worse weather than 1959. The harvest of 1960 was 144 million tons. 9 million people are thought to have starved to death in 1960 alone; many millions were left desperately ill as a result of a lack of food. The government had to introduce rationing. This put people on the most minimal of food and between 1959 and 1962, it is thought that 20 million people died of starvation or diseases related to starvation.

The backyard furnaces also used too much coal and China’s rail system, which depended on coal driven trains, suffered accordingly.

Alas, I fear this might be in our future, too. During the 1970's oil price hikes we had an agricultural collapse as the cold, wet weather of a long and deep La Nina episode caused crop failures that increased food inflation at the same time we had a sudden jump in oil inflation. This is why a dependence on ethanol from food products is so hazardous: unlike oil wells that pump nearly uniformly until drying out, crops vaccilate greatly from year to year. The profits also gyrate wildly and frequently. Already, world stores of grains is dropping and there is no agricultural crisis big enough to cause mass starvation. But this is a future possibility. We may find ourselves in a bidding war with China over food for fuel reserves.

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