Daily Socotra

03 May 2006

Peak Oil

I did not have the energy to leap out of bed this morning. I crawled to the kitchen to put on the coffee, and then crawled down the hallway and slithered back up into the bed. It is nice there, under the eiderdown, with the windows open and the fresh breath of spring curling around me.

The BBC was talking about the perils of reconstruction in Iraq, and what it is like to be a public servant of the Palestine Authority. They haven't been paid since Hamas won the election, and things are getting thin.

There are crises, and there are crises. When I finally was topped off on the misery of the morning, I stumbled to the shower and immersed myself in scalding hot water. I felt a lot better, and as I left, I dropped a bag down the chute in the trash room. The Community Manager is a pal of mine, and he has been posting signs in the rooms on all the floors informing us of the amount of money the utilities cost to keep the building heated and cooled.

The amount for the last six months is over a half million dollars, way up, and mostly attributable to Big Pink's single-pane windows. They are one of the nice features of the building, since they are tall and bath each room with light. It was the thing that attracted me the most when I washed up here. All the other places in Arlington I could afford were dark and old and smelled of cat urine in the halls.

Big Pink was built in 1964, not long after JFK was shot, and went condo in 1981. Its start as an apartment building is why we have common utilities, and no individual water or power bills. The structure is built like a brick shit house, and I'm confident the building will survive whatever they will use to blow up Downtown.

But the windows are a problem, all original, and really inefficient. If we replaced all the windows in the 249 units with double-glazed glass we would save a ton in heating and cooling costs. There was near rioting at the community meeting when the proposal for replacement was presented. Someone thried to throw their walker at the windows sub-committee chariman.

We have a lot of people on fixed incomes, and some young owners without much perspective, and some people like me hurtling through the trajectory between the two. The proposal came at a time when the economy was hurting, and the contractors were eager for work. Interest rates were at historically low levels.

There was never a better time to invest in the future, and the windows would have paid for themselves in deferred fuel costs over three years.

Of course the membership turned it down.

Short term cost, versus an uncertain future. Some of the owners were transient, and others figured they wouldn't live long enough to recoup the investment. So now it is too expensive to contemplate, and we are going to pay through the nose for the oil to heat the place, and the condo fees are bad enough, but the fuel crunch is going to put them through the roof.

It is going to be so bad that the pinch on the fixed income folks is going to put them in debt, and they won't be getting a damn thing for it, except what they always have.

I was looking around for technology that would provide a step toward fixing the problem. I ran into a new extremist group. They are the Peak Oil people, who seem to be convinced that we have hit the maximum production possible from the world's oil reserves.

I am prepared to agree with them, and the consumption rate will not provide a graceful downward Bell curve. With demand rising, there will simply be a rapid acceleration toward complete depletion, and the end of Life As We Know It.

Oil is an interesting commodity, since it is so integral to everything we build and wear. It is vital to our health care. It makes you wonder why we funnel such a precious thing into our fuel injectors.

But that is where I part company with them. The web is filled with the Peak Oil people. They have a common vision. The end of the peak of oil will, in short order, result in a Mad Max society, eveery person for themselves, and soon. Some of them darkly murmur that we will be living in the technological equivalent of 1850 within the decade, and begin hurtling backward in time.

They have taken that peculiar trait in the American messianic soul, incorporating the dark underbelly of the Hippies and the Militia and the Surivalists and manufacturing a plausible if one dimensional view of the Gotterdamerung to come.

I suspect they have wild eyes. In another generation would have put on sandwich boards reading: “The end is near!” Now they just blog.

Not that the end- or at least a big change- might not be near. I just think there is still time to modify how bad it is going to be. This is serious, and if we do not do something, we may indeed be doomed.

But I also remember the cold warnings of Paul Ehlrich's book “The Population Bomb” of a quarter-century ago. According to the good Doctor, if trends continued, we would be stacking people atop one another by now, starving and salivating.

As it turned out, there are more of us today, to be sure, but it did not work out that way. Ehrlich assumed that trends would continue, unmodified by the complex interaction of events.

China stopped its population growth, because it decided to do so. National will can achieve marvels, if invoked and enforced. Of course, it now stands ready to reap the consequences of a looming generational retirement that will make the exit of the Baby Boomers in the United States look like a picnic.

We have had our heads in the sand, and the end might indeed be near

Big Pink's residents are the perfect microcosm to the Congress. Chasing the past, financed by tomorrow's benefits. There is a prospect for success.

But I certainly can't blame them. They are just acting like toady's Americans. They are old enough that i would think they would remember what their parents told them. My father was admonished to pick up loose chucks of coal by the tracks. It was not that they really needed it.

It was just that every bit helped.

That might just be the lesson we need to re-learn.