Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

Five years ago, the idea that oil production would soon peak world-wide and then go into decline was limited to the margins–a web page here and there and a few old oil goeologists who had retired and didn’t have to worry about what their employers thought.

A year or so ago, the idea started to make it into mainstream periodicals–but in a watered down form–something that might happen in 20 or 30 years.

Now the darker version is starting to show up in financial news sites. A recent piece on “Financial Sense Online” puts the situation in stark terms;

The oil crisis has arrived in the United States. This summer’s storm season exposed the Achilles heel of the U.S. economy: OIL. We have reached what system analysts refer to as ”a single point of failure.” It is the one item that if it breaks down, it brings the entire system down with it. Like it or not the U.S. economy runs on oil—cheap oil—and we are running out of it. Oil powers our economy in manufacturing, transportation, and agriculture. Without it, our economy would cease to function. There is no other commodity other than water that can have such an effect on how and what we do. Oil is the lifeblood of our economy.

For three decades the energy infrastructure in the U.S. has been neglected and allowed to decay. Now those chickens are coming home to roost. Politicians can bluster and pontificate all they want, but this will not solve the predicament that we now find ourselves in. The plain fact is we are running out of oil and natural gas. Oil production in the U.S. peaked in 1970. Since then, the United States has not been able to supply its own oil needs. As a result of this failure, it lost control in its ability to influence the world price of oil. This has led to a loss of control over an important part of its economic destiny.

The worldwide picture is equally stark.

Oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s and most of the oil we consume today comes from giant Middle Eastern oil fields that were discovered and put into production over 40 years ago. Most of the world’s key oil producers have already experienced peak oil. According to Richard Duncan, director of the Institute on Energy & Man, 25 out of the top 45 oil producers are past their peak. These 45 producers account for 98.7% of the world’s oil production. Another study done by Washington energy consultants, PFC Energy, found that 33 out of the 48 major oil-producing countries have either peaked or plateaued. Moreover many of today’s large oil producers such as Russia and Mexico have failed to replace their production over the last decade. Mexico’s oil production is expected to peak this year with the peaking of its largest oil field, Cantarell. Even worse, we find Saudi Arabia may also be close to peaking as Matt Simmons posits in his book “Twilight in the Desert.”

As this graph shows, non OPEC oil production has already peaked:

OPEC is producing very close to full capacity and has only limited ability to grow. Indonesia became a net oil importer last year and may drop out of OPEC altogether. Iraq’s major fields may have been damaged by poor policies under Sadam and by constant sabotage since. In Russia, recent rapid growth came to a screaching halt when the government decided to take back the oil fields and throw a few oil tycoons in jail.

Now a million barrels a day of production from the Gulf has gone offline and is not coming back very quickly.

And the natural gas situation is even worse.

Oh, and a major rail line that transports coal from Wyoming washed out this summer causing some power plants to switch to natural gas due to a coal shortage.

But that was before Katrina and Rita…..

Hope it doesn’t get too cold this winter.

Money Woes Undercut Hopes for Clean Water

From the algae blooms in Lake Erie to the invading zebra mussels in Lake Michigan, threats to the Great Lakes ecology stretch from A to Z. That would include B for bacteria, M for mercury and T for toxic spills.

Chicago beaches close routinely because of E. coli contamination. Advisories are in place about eating fish contaminated with dangerous chemicals. Environmental advocates warn about sewage overflows, water diversion and the increasing demands of a thirsty population.

After many years of haphazard government stewardship, a broad study effort convened by the administration discovered much agreement on the vast water system’s troubles. The problem is the cost. A draft report released in July suggested spending $20 billion in the coming years — several times more than current expenditures, and more than influential members of the Bush administration consider affordable.

Click here for link.

A few weeks ago, Neil French, a well-known advertising executive, told 300 people that women “don’t make it to the top because they don’t deserve to.” He elaborated, saying that women are apt to “wimp out and go suckle something.”

Just about the same time, a new survey announced that gender stereotypes still exist in the workplace.

Click here for link.

Americans should drink three cups of milk a day, the government says. Kiesha Diggs ignores that advice. Diggs, who is black, is lactose-intolerant, meaning she can’t easily digest dairy products. Three cups of milk would wreak havoc on her intestines.

“Bloating, gas, diarrhea. The whole thing,” said Diggs, 36, of Atlanta.

Her sons Denzell and Armonni have the same problem. So do as many as 75 percent of African-Americans and 90 percent of Asian-Americans, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Government dietary guidelines include advice for people with lactose intolerance that note other calcium-containing foods like fish, broccoli and fortified orange juice. But critics say information on milk alternatives is sometimes buried.

The debate was raised a notch this past month when a vegetarian advocacy group filed a lawsuit aimed at getting milk producers to label their products with a warning that milk may cause digestive problems in lactose-intolerant people.

Milk industry officials called the lawsuit frivolous, and said scaring people away from milk is not good health policy.
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People on both sides agree that it’s a public health problem, because many people who cut milk out of their diet don’t replace it with other sources of calcium and nutrients.

However, they don’t agree on how to deal with it.
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“There is no real understanding that there’s a substitute (for milk),” said [Joyce] Guinyard.
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“Since nutritionists are not ready to give up recommending milk as a nourishing food, I guess the message is to help people who see themselves as lactose-intolerant to take a cup of milk,” said David Schardt, nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Click here for link.

A young bride lived long enough to tell authorities that her husband and in-laws had set her on fire for not meeting their dowry demands.

Notwithstanding the gold jewelry, color television set and other finery that served as the price of admission to her husband’s middle-class Sikh household, Charanpreet’s new relations were not satisfied with the bounty and kept demanding more, according to Charanpreet’s relatives and the statement she gave investigators before she died.

“Even before this incident my father-in-law used to put pressure on me to get more money,” said the statement by the young woman, who was three months pregnant.

Unusual only because Charanpreet lived long enough to point a finger at her alleged attackers, who claimed the fire was accidental, the case underscores the deeply entrenched nature of dowry — and its grim corollary, the murder of young brides whose families fail to ante up — even in the face of rising levels of income and education linked to India’s fast-growing economy.

In particular, the death of the young newlywed — a shy, deeply religious schoolteacher’s daughter whose husband had a college degree and worked in computer graphics — shows that the age-old practice endures even, and perhaps especially, among the educated urban middle-class.

Click here for link.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) released an analysis on Friday that showed that 38.2 million Americans live in “food insecure” households, meaning that they have to cut back on food requirements because of lack of money. This represents an increase of 7 million since 1999. The number of people suffering from hunger increased by 43% since 1999, from 7.7 million to 10.6 million.

The number of people suffering from hunger and food insecurity has grown for five straight years, after declining in the 1990s.

Dr. J. Larry Brown, a leading scholarly authority on domestic hunger commented that;

This is an unexpected and even stunning outcome. This chronic level of hunger so long after the recession ended means that it is a man-made problem. Congress and the White House urgently need to address growing income inequality and the weakening of the safety net in order to get this epidemic under control.” According to the Center on Hunger and Poverty, food insecurity increased by nearly a million households from 2003 to 2004. Rates of hunger increased in almost every single category of household during the same time, with single mothers and those living in or near poverty continuing to suffer from severely high rates of both food insecurity and hunger.

Meanwhile Congress gets ready to consider cutting the fod stamp program to help pay for the war in Iraq, tax cuts, hurricane relief, and the ballooning budget deficits that have resulted.

Where are the champions of the poor?

Plz note that the below is satire
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First draft of Miers withdrawal letter:
Dear Mr. President-
I’m out. Thanks for allowing me the opportunity to be publicly dissected while still alive.
At least I know what my own funeral’s going to be like.
Good luck to you and Turd Blossom on finding another patsy to run the Supreme Gantlet.
I want to turn this country back to the way it was 50 or 100 years as badly as you do, but I just can’t take this anymore.
I think we need to be apart for awhile, so I?m going to my Mother’s house to think about things for awhile.
The flowers were very nice of you, but I don’t want you to call, email, or message me anymore. Yes, we’re done. You remember the line from the Led Zeppelin song, When I whispered in her ear, I lost another friend.? Well, you did.
You won’t hear me say, It’s not you, it’s me., because that’s not true.
It IS you, not me.
Good luck with the rest of this week, the rest of your term, and the rest of your life.
Sincerely,
Harriet
PS. I want my records back.

Scientists say they still don’t know how to protect the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon without disrupting water and power production upstream.

Despite a decade of trying, few attempts have succeeded in trying to mimic the natural conditions erased by construction of Glen Canyon Dam, which supplies water and electricity to millions of people.

Endangered fish continue to disappear, habitat erodes almost as fast as it is rebuilt and interloping fish and plants find new ways to thrive.

Click here for link.

A bitter debate about how to teach evolution in U.S. high schools is prompting a crisis of confidence among scientists, and some senior academics warn that science itself is under assault.
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In the past five years, the scientific community has often seemed at odds with the Bush administration over issues as diverse as global warming, stem cell research and environmental protection. Prominent scientists have also charged the administration with politicizing science by seeking to shape data to its own needs while ignoring other research.

Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians have built a powerful position within the Republican Party and no Republican, including Bush, can afford to ignore their views.
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Polls for many years have shown that a majority of Americans are at odds with key scientific theory. For example, as CBS poll this month found that 51 percent of respondents believed humans were created in their present form by God. A further 30 percent said their creation was guided by God. Only 15 percent thought humans evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years.

Other polls show that only around a third of American adults accept the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, even though the concept is virtually uncontested by scientists worldwide.

Click here for link.

The FBI may not track the locations of cell phone users without showing evidence that a crime occurred or is in progress, two federal judges ruled, saying that to do so would violate long-established privacy protections.

In separate rulings over the past two weeks, judges in Texas and New York denied FBI requests for court orders that would have forced wireless carriers to continuously reveal the location of a suspect’s cell phone as part of an ongoing investigation. Other judges have allowed the practice in other jurisdictions, but the recent rulings could change that.

Click here for link.