Energy News

Looting Wind Farms Of Copper And The Hubbert Oil Peak

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Looting the earth of nearly everything is going on all over the place. When the loot runs out of non-renewable resources, this becomes a Hubbert Peak, namely, it is increasingly hard to find whatever it is we are extracting or exploiting. Gold, silver, oil, gas, copper, all these sorts of one-time mineral or organic fossil wealth are limited by reality and will not reappear once we dig them up so looting of these materials rises as extracting them declines.

The USA is frantically extracting oil from Iraq and Iraqi fighters are frantically blowing up our pipes that remove this oil from Iraq.

By Ibrahim Boazi

Azzaman, November 18, 2006

The twin pipeline which once used to carry more than 1 million barrels of Iraqi crude oil to terminals in Turkey is no longer of any use, according to Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani.

Repeated rebel attacks and lack of repairs have rendered the pipeline useless, he said.

The pipeline used to carry crude from oil fields of Kirkuk to Turkish ports on the Mediterranean.

But it was also linked to a strategic pipeline which gave the country the flexibility of shipping oil from the northern fields to southern terminals on the Gulf and from southern oil fields to terminals in Turkey via the twin pipeline.

People little understand how a peak works. All peaks of all curves don't smoothly rise and then smoothly fall, they occillate when they reach the peak which is a time of instability. Ever since the world's largest oil consuming entity, the American Empire, reached its own oil production peak, the instability caused by Americans consuming ever-greater amounts of oil has caused the price of oil to rise and fall in ever greater waves. During much of my childhood, the price of oil was pretty stable. Then, when the peak hit and the decline here began, oil exporting nations exploited our need for oil to periodically drive up the price of oil. Thus, the birth of OPEC.

Oil pumping communities seldom benefit from oil production because the oil pumping corporations want to extract and sell this oil with as little interference as possible and they spend a lot of money corrupting the leaders of various oil pumping areas to do this. If this fails, the USA empire invades and imposes oil contracts on captive nations like we just did to Iraq, that allows corporations to pump oil with impunity.

At the peak, small fluctuations in use or political instabilities will cause the price to rise suddenly and then excess pumping to take advantage of these instabilities will flood the market and the price will drop like a rock and this will continue until the gross aggragate of potential oil declines sufficiently that there is no need for outside instability to raise prices, it will go up all the time til the end of time.

Copper prices go up and down in shadow tandem with oil prices.

Wind company operators, as well as the Alameda County Sheriff"s Office both say that within the past six months to a year, trespassing and burglaries have increased at the wind farms, with thieves cutting and stealing the copper electrical cables used to operate the 5,400 windmills east of Livermore.

Metal thieves are stripping Europe, too.

By Ian Simpson

MILAN (Reuters) - Copper thieves are stripping Italy in a "red gold" rush that has snarled train service, denuded tombs and caused at least one blackout as worldwide demand for the metal has sent prices soaring, officials say.

Thieves have torn copper facing from a city bridge, and toxic smoke from the clandestine burning of insulation off cables is filling the night sky of some Rome neighbourhoods.

During the first Hubbert Oil crisis in the early 70's, we used to go into the mountains where abandoned towns and copper mines were and the members of a certain fraternity of mining engineers would strip the telephone polls of copper wire and then sell it. They had no job prospects except to emigrate to Chile, for example, which some of them did. So they made money this way.

Now, as wages collapse as they always do when the price of oil goes up, people all over are stripping everything and stealing anything that isn't guarded. This is how ancient Rome was dismantled: everyone simply took or broke everything and it wasn't Vandals who did this, it was the locals.

Many American states have laws allowing miners to strip resources right out from under the feet of property owners!

By BILL POOVEY, Associated Press Writer Sat Nov 18, 2:14 PM ET

DUNLAP, Tenn. - When Ed Lewis and some of his neighbors bought property on a scenic Tennessee mountain, they knew they didn't own the mineral rights to the land, but they assumed a coal mining revival was unlikely.

They never imagined anyone would try to claim ownership of all the ordinary mountain rocks on their land.

Demand for the rocks has surged across the country as stone has become more popular in houses, commercial buildings and landscaping. Now, the former owner of Lewis' property who retained the mineral rights wants to harvest the rocks.

Lewis and his neighbors in Sequatchie County — located in southeast Tennessee just north of Chattanooga — say if the mineral rights owners are allowed to take the rocks, their scenic bluffs and mountain land covered with hardwoods and evergreens will be ruined by blasting and bulldozers.

According to my deed, I own 23 acres of mountain and this extends all the way to the core of the earth. So there! HAHA! I rule! Out West, I didn't own anything even if I owned it, the city took away one of my homes, presto-chango! They want, they take! And no one in Tucson owns more than 6" deep in the topsoil. All else is owned by the government who can and does, give it away for a pittance to anyone who finds any wealth lurking there.

A total disregard for the environment, other humans or anything characterizes this Gold Rush mentality. Our treatment of limited, one-time natural resources is very short sighted. We can't mine the asteroids yet and doing this will require tremendous resources so it is, so far, not a likely possibility. But the need for mineral wealth is openended while the minerals themselves are strictly tied to the Hubbert Peak model: eventually, it will all be disappated or consumed and the only route left would be to loot civilization and consume what is left, leaving ruins in its wake.

Of course, we could have religious wars....that will fix our wagon for sure.

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Europe's Electrical Grid Nearly Collapsed

Elaine Meinel Supkis

High demand for electricity to heat homes causes nearly an entire collapse of the power grid in Europe. This, on top of last winter's shut down of natural gas from Russia sends a shiver through all of Europe which is already facing many dire consequences of the Hubbert Oil Peak and attendant energy crisis.

Energy needs exceed capacity during a minor coldwave!

Power cuts have struck several countries in Western Europe, leaving millions of people without electricity.
Power companies said the outage started in Germany with a surge in demand prompted by cold weather, and then spread to other parts of Europe.

Some five million people in France lost power, mainly in the east of the country and including parts of Paris.

"We weren't very far from a European blackout," a senior director with French power company RTE said.

Pierre Bornard told the French news agency AFP that two German high-voltage transmission lines failed, causing problems across western Europe.

This triggered a "house of cards" style system breakdown, he said.

As the price of oil and gas shoot up, people use more and more electricity to heat their homes both in Europe and America. All these attempts at forming a bubble around ourselves to keep the temperature comfortable is not only very expensive in its use of energy, it is rapidly destroying the entire ecosystem. I begged everyone to begin government programs to put solar energy units on all new housing and to retrofit it on older houses way back in the seventies.

As recently as just four years ago, ABC news told me quite curtly that no one is interested in any schemes to dilute the concentration of generation of energy this way. So shut up, Elaine.

Now things are infinitely worse and getting worse by the day. The American solution is to increase pollution and burn all the coal. The energy grid that transmits this bonanza is in bad shape so it always is on the verge of collapse. The collapse in Europe which only affected large swaths but not everyone is yet another warning for Western Civilization.

After the greatest blackout to hit America, one would think we would be doing something about this but nope. Nothing has changed or rather, the privatization piracy has only accelerated, making the future much darker. Indeed, funds to develop alternative methods has collapsed.

The relentless logic of energy+labor=manufacturing profits means the USA and Europe must outsource all production to China in order to avoid bankruptcy from costs of importing fossil fuels.

In the 1950s M. King Hubbert found that as the years went by, U.S. domestic oil production was decreasing, mainly because new discoveries became fewer and smaller. The changes in production could be plotted on a graph, forming the left side of that familiar shape known as a bell curve. Looking at the graph, Hubbert could see that the peak of American oil production would be about 1970; after that, there would be a permanent decline. When he announced this, most people laughed at him. But he was right: after 1970, U.S. oil never recovered.

For thirty years, therefore, the U.S. trade deficit has been heavily effected by dependence on foreign oil. Thomas D. Kraemer, in his report for the U.S. Army, states that "fully one-quarter of the U.S. trade deficit is associated with oil imports." Lauren Poole, a writer and editor for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, adds that "the United States had a trade deficit of $449 billion dollars in 2000; $90.2 billion (approximately 20% of the total) was the value of imported oil. . . . It is projected that petroleum imports will account for 60-70% of the U.S. trade deficit in the next 10 to 20 years."

This is a terrible trap, a horns of dilemma we can't escape. We have avoided running up our energy bills to the Middle East and Venezuela by removing our factories and making other countries import energy but the downside is, our trade deficit is even worse now because we export little and import a lot in order to keep up the pretense we are a first world nation and not the new 'Africa'.

Japan has chosen to make the people pay the price of manufacturing by having them save energy even if it means suffering a lot.

Every time the price of fossil fuels jump, the Japanese people respond to government commands they cut back by ruthlessly cutting down energy use, for example, not heating buildings at all. Meanwhile, America can't even throttle back gas guzzling vehicles.

KAMIITA, Japan -- When the Japanese government issued a national battle cry against soaring global energy prices this winter, no one heeded the call to arms more than this farming town in the misty mountains of western Japan.

To save on energy, local officials shut off the heating system in the town hall, leaving themselves and 100 workers no respite from near-freezing temperatures. On a recent frosty morning, rows of desks were brimming with employees bundled in coats and wool blankets while nursing thermoses of hot tea. To cut back on gasoline use, officials say, most of the town's 13,000 citizens are strictly obeying a nationwide call to turn off car engines while idling, particularly when stopped at traffic lights.

This is from an article I wrote last winter. The Japanese have a giant trade surplus with the USA and this pays for the energy for their factories and the workers there have jobs while here they don't have jobs but we live better because all this is via IOUs that won't come due...yet.

But if we attack North Korea and irritate China, the bills will come due, rapidly. And the Japanese can't foot the bills for us alone anymore! And so it goes: trade, energy, diplomacy, war and peace and religion are all part of the same machine and that machine is the Earth and the ecosystem and how we use it and interact with it.

The USA consumes 24% of all world resources and we are about 6% of the population. We can't afford this boon anymore. The differential between our consumption and our output is totally unsustainable in this present set-up.

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Desperate Homeowners Destroy Air Quailty Trying To Heat Homes With Smokey Boilers

Thick smoke from outdoor wood burning heating system polluting the air in New York valley.
Elaine Meinel Supkis

Due to the high cost of fossil fuels, increasing numbers of Americans are installing tremendously smoky outdoor wood-burning heating devices. This is degrading the air quality very rapidly in my own community, for example. Bolivia just nationalized all energy reserves, and got new contracts which upped the amount of money paid to the state from a miserable $200 million a year to a more reasonable $4 billion a year. Also, Russia used energy as a diplomatic tool with Georgia.

These new boiler systems are springing up rapidly all over the place as desperate Americans struggle to make ends meet.

The Classic can be located up to 500 feet away from the home or building being heated.
Heated water from the Classic is pumped to the home or building through insulated, underground ThermoPEX piping - the most efficient way to move heat over distances.
The Classic is designed to work with any existing heating system. A heat exchanger or direct circulation conveys the heat into a forced-air furnace, radiant baseboard, or radiant floor heating system. This gives you normal thermostatic temperature control.
The Classic can provide heat for all your domestic hot water by adding a water-to-water heat exchanger. You can turn off your hot water heater and save $30 to $80 or more per month!

Here is what this system looks like. One fills the stove with wood and it burns off and on all day. It goes full-blast when heating up the water or air and burns fairly cleanly. But once the water is heated up, the thermostat shuts off the air intake and the wood then smolders until the water cools or more hot air is needed to heat up the building and then the vents open and the oxygen causes the fire to shoot up in temperature and the smoke decreases as the burning is more efficient.

Click on images to enlarge
In reality, the minute these noxious machines cut the oxygen to the wood pile burning inside, it immediately begins to smoke like crazy. As one can see from this photo, the smoke is quite obvious.

When we had only a very few of these horrible systems in the narrow valley, it was already from day one, quite noticable, the deterioration in air quality. As each family installs these systems, they are springing like toadstools after a storm, the air quality has taken a nose dive. The whole village of Berlin smells of smoldering wood, every morning, when we get the nighttime air inversions when colder air settles down by the streams, it is very hazy.

Asthma is going to shoot way up here. Instead of living in the idyllic countryside, most families will be living in the equivelent of a forest fire 24/7. On very windy days, the smoke is carried off before it can sicken anyone but we have many still nights where it builds up in the valleys.

For 30 years, we had the Clean Air Act and when everyone rushed to install woodstoves during the first energy crisis, the EPA passed strong laws improving the technology of woodstoves. Each year, until the last three years, they got better and better. My newest wood stove is very good indeed. It burns very efficiently and even when I start it, it produces nearly no smoke and when I bank it down at night, it produces very little smoke.

But now we have allowed Bush and his gang to throw aside these laws and in order to allow huge energy burning systems to pollute the planet, they have allowed homeowners to do the same. If 50% of the people in Berlin end up using these high-pollution systems, it will become nearly uninhabitable in the valley. I live above the valley on the mountainside, above the cold air zone so none of this smoke reaches my house. But if I go to the bottom of my driveway, the air is distinctly worse. I can't imagine anyone living next to these things but there seems to be no protest in them polluting the air.

It is a matter of time. Relentlessly, these will proliferate. And children will begin to die, the elderly will gasp for air and everyone will stay inside, hoping their windows and doors keeps out the bad air and so it goes: trying to find an easy way to be comforatable degrades the environment for everyone.

Bolivia is showing Americans how to do things.

LA PAZ (AFP) -- In a victory for leftist President Evo Morales, the Bolivian government has reached agreements with all foreign oil and gas companies operating in the country on ways to nationalize the gas industry.

"With these contracts, we will resolve the problem of social injustices and will avoid public unrest in the future," an elated Morales said in a speech on Saturday. "We will assert out rights to our natural resources without expelling anybody or expropriating any property."

The deals will allow the left-wing government to move ahead with its nationalization plans for the gas industry that is expected to bring in additional revenue to fight poverty.

Bolivia's share of the profits from natural gas exploration will increase from $200 million a year to about $4 billion, according the president.

Instead of getting control of our energy systems, we have given up our own power increasingly to mega-corporations that won't even pay feeble amounts of money for the energy. Just recently, the government gave up going to court to enforce contracts with oil giants. So they get away with pumping billions of dollars of oil and gas without paying the government hardly anything at all. This is the way they do business: they take over governments and then exploit the people for vast profits for themselves. Why Americans tolerate this baffles me. It is beyond stupid.

The minute Russia nationalized their energy systems, they began to pull out of bankruptcy and failing social services and life is rapidly improving there, too.

By ALEX NICHOLSON, AP Business Writer 35 minutes ago
MOSCOW - Russia's state-controlled natural gas monopoly said Thursday that it would more than double the price it charges Georgia, further heightening tensions between the ex-Soviet neighbors.

The Georgian foreign minister said the price hike was the cost of his nation's turning away from Moscow and toward the West.

OAO Gazprom said in a statement that it will charge $230 per 35,314 cubic feet of gas, compared with the $110 that it charges now. The announcement signaled Russia's continued recalcitrant stance even as Georgian Foreign Minister Gela Bezhuashvili visited Moscow in the hope of easing relations between Moscow and Tbilisi.

Not only are the Russian people benefitting from nationalization, they can now use energy as a diplomatic tool. Right now, it is the other way around: we are used by energy companies and they dictate to us, what our diplomacy will do and what our plans are for war and the energy companies wanted control of the profits of Iraqi oil which is sold to Europe and Asia. So they got richer and more powerful and America is much weaker and poorer since we are footing the insanely high bill for all this: $350 billion and shooting for the moon!

So we lose on every front. We can't afford the oil we are pumping here at home so homeowners are now polluting the air, trying to stay warm, and the energy companies get all the profits from this and all the expensive wars we are waging on their behalf and the bills haven't even begun to be due. All of this is in the form of IOUs and the oil companies are determined to never pay taxes for all this, either.

We better learn from Russia, Venezuela and Boliva! Before it is too late.

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