Homework 4 Week 3: Drilling

The issue today is tapping into the Marcellus Shale here in upstate New York. There is both strong support for and against drilling. While enslaving the energy in the shale my benefit us now, some argue that it won't in the near future. Those on the pro-drilling side argue that allowing companies to extract this fuel will stimulate local economies and allow for growth. But the opposition makes a valid retort, saying primarily that the methods used to extract the natural gas would be very harmful to us and the environment locally. The argument between the two is mainly focused on Hydrofracturing. It's a process in which water and chemicals are forced into the shale, cracking -fracturing- it in order to extract more natural gas. While this is beneficial because it allows us to make more out of the resources we already have, it comes at a heavy cost. Each well requires millions of gallons of water and chemicals to be pumped deep into the ground, possibly to stay there forever. This is concerning two fold. We are both squandering our limited fresh water by putting it in the earth, and we're polluting our planet with unknown consequences.

I don't really know where to stand on this issue as an immediate fuel source. Generally, I'm against drilling more wells than we already have, but natural gas is both cleaner to extract and less expensive. In the future it might be more prudent to tap into this resource, because it's safer and less damaging than it's competitors, and because it will stimulate the local economy. But, I don't think it's necessary to drill immediately.

Since the main concerns of anti-drilling groups were largely addressed and made moot points by the pro-drilling groups, leading me to support them. But, the concern by the anti-drilling groups is valid, and should not be overlooked.

Homework 3 Week Three: Cuba

This article discusses Cuba and its lack of oil. It also discusses how we can learn from Cuba, and potentially lead oil free lives. Since it was cut off rapidly from soviet oil, Cuba has managed to maintain its economy and grow more sustainable crops. They use bio-pesticides instead of petroleum based alternatives and oxen instead tractors. It's little changes like that that have the most prominent effect on Cuba's transformation, and are the very same changes that will be so crucial for us make soon.

In addition, Cuba has made fantastic headway on its medicine for being both a poor country, and one with little oil supply. It has a strong focus on preventative treatments and encouragement to lead healthy lives. Cubans have the same life expectancy as Americans, despite the economic difference. Cuba also boasts a strong educational system. All children attend school, something that can't even be said about the U.S. Cuba has also made big changes in their transportation. It's now illegal to remove cars from the island, and there are very few new cars. They use largely public transport, with large buses primarily.

The relocalization of resources is a vital step for the world to take if we're to ween ourselves off oil. Since it's local, hence relocalization, it can be done on both a large and small scale. Relocalizing would be very beneficial to farming in america. Relocalizing and diversifying our crops would allow us to greatly reduce our use of industrial fertilizers. If we implemented a system mimicking Cuba, we could revert to oxen or horses as the source for both our farming power and our fertilizer. a foreseeable isssue with this system is the variance of the U.S. landscape. What you can grow in one region, you can't necessarily grow 100 miles away. This would mean an abundance of crops in one place, and a possible shortage in others. This would also mean a lack of diversity of crops in the same vein. People in maine probably wouldn't be getting too many fresh kumquats from florida for example. Relocalizing crops would also mean a change in our social infrastructure. Smaller, more numerous communites would have to be formed, and huge populations would likely be unable to live as they had before.

Relocalization is a great, and relatively simple thing for small communities in our country. Would it be able to effectively handle larger communities?

The world seems aware of Cuba, why have we not followed logically in their footsteps?

Cuba is a working example of life with little oil. However, its culture and government are very different from our own. Would a similar system work in the U.S. because we're so different?

Homework 2 Week 3

Chapter 5, "The End of the Oil Age" discusses our newfound dependence upon oil and how we may be forcefully weened off of it soon. The prophetic geologist M. King Hubbert predicted our declining oil levels in the U.S. 20 years before it happened. He was ridiculed for his theory because the U.S. in the 50's, when he did his work, was at it's highest in number of producing oil wells. It was only in the 70's, when our pools of oil began to run out, and we became increasingly dependent upon OPEC countries, that it was realized the M. King Hubbert was correct. While the U.S. has largely reached it's peak levels, the world remains semi-oil abundant. Statistics on when we'll reach peak oil worldwide vary for numerous reasons, but the USGS survey says it won't be until around 2020. However, this survey was misleading and flawed, so peak oil may in fact occur much sooner. It seems we're facing a complicated and enigmatic future, with scientists divided among their groups as to what will happen. We may have to forgo past experience, and try something new.

Unfortunately, it seems the future isn't too bright for oil's best competitor, natural gas. It's production will likely soon fall, because it's difficult to find enough reservoirs to meet the supply. It's also concerning because natural gas is a more regional energy source than oil. It's more difficult to transport long distances, and loses it potency. The soon decline of natural gas production in concerning also because from it are derived all of our nitrogen fertilizers. Without a large supply of those, we'll either need to relearn how to farm, or starve.

Chapter 6, "The Collapse of Agriculture" discusses how agriculture has declined in the past 50 years, and how agribusiness has thrived. As it stands, we've farmed almost all the land we can on this planet. We've been depleting the planet's soils, and grown crops hundreds of times faster than normally. We've created such a surplus of food that the population has boomed. This is an issue because the world's filling up, and we're running out of fuel. Without oil and natural gas, we wouldn't be able to grow our crops, and transport the resulting products worldwide. Our fossil fuels aren't as abundant as they once were, and we'll need to figure out a new way to farm soon. U.S. population is estimated to double by 2050, meaning that we'd no longer have enough acreage to crop the crops we'd need to sustain our population. It's estimated that the U.S. will need to lose a third of it's population if it's to be able to survive sustainably. Hopefully this doesn't result in another black plague...

Agriculture faces many problems in the near future. Firstly, diesel is becoming increasingly scarce as we make more and more tractors and other diesel powered heavy farm equipment. This is making us increasingly vulnerable. The more we rely upon oil now, the harder the transition off of it will be. We need to start changing asap in hopes that consequences won't be dire.

The U.S., and the world should learn from North Korea that running out of oil has very real consequences. Not only do oil prices go up when your supply is limited, but you know that there's going to be less and less supply. It also showed us that without natural gas, we're also basically out of luck. Coal makes an ok substitute for some aspects of oil, like supplying electricity, but it fails in others, like powering automobiles. Furthermore, we're entirely reliant upon natural gas for nitrogen fertilizers, and without that not even coal can make up the difference.

Was there enough coverage of the damage done to North Korea that it was taken seriously? Have there been changes made since that?

Is it plausible that we'll convert our existing crops into smaller amounts of more varied crops, or reform smaller farms?

Homework 1 Week Three: The Joyride

The article "The Joyride" discussed the automobiles history and rise to prominence in the U.S. It starts by discussing various competitors the car had along the way, and how the automobile led to their demise. General motors played a significant role in the shift from electric motors and trolley cars to internal combustion engines and buses. GM bought about 100 trolley companies, and with each, they they tore up the track and replaced it with buses. Private transportation, i.e. the car, has played a pivotal role in the formation of our country, our attitudes, and our culture. Switching from largely public transport to private transport was a change with more influence behind it than we could have imagined. Since our country's inception, independence has been of utmost importance. The automobile made possible an individual revolution in our country that has become a focal point of our culture. Cars granted most of country to just up and leave, whenever, going wherever. This kind of transportation is liberating, so it's understandable why it took off so quickly and is now so omnipresent.

The advent of the automoblie also had an unexpeted and harmul effect on U.S. farms. Rural farmers pre-Model T had little access to -at the time- modern american culture, books, education, and medical care. The model T, first introduced in 1908, quickly became loyal customers. Cars allowed them not only increased cultural access, but also the ability to do many tasks around the farm much more simply. But, given a taste of city life, many farm boys abandoned their rural lifestyle for something new in the city, causing a huge hit to rural farms, which accounted for about 1/3 of Americas population.

Post WWII, the energy produced by oil, and after a little while, fission, contributed greatly to the formation of society and the babyboomer generation. The abundance of cheap oil caused the U.S.'s economy to soar, creating a housing and production boom. These new suburban neighborhoods we shaped by the automobile. The houses are neatly arranged around a road running through the middle of the neighborhood. This created a new cultural phenomena, suburbia.

The article mentioned an interesting tycoon named Robert Moses. Have there been any laws since to prevent that situation from happening again?

The cars rise to fame represents a greedy and shameful history of a few individuals. How did corporations become organized to encourage greed and dishonesty?

Was there a rebirth of the electric car in during the Oil embargo in the 70's?

Homework 4 Week 2

The first of the two articles discusses Jevon's Law, in which a new, more efficient type of machinery is created in order to reduce fuel consumption. This is paradoxical however, because it has led many times in the past to increased fuel consumption overall because the new technology is more applicable than the last. It can be more wide spread and implemented in new situations, which is why more fuel is consumed. This paradox can be seen very clearly in the production of jet engines, computers, and coal-fired power plants. In all three, production became much cheaper, which in turn allowed much more of the given item to be produced. Jevon predicted eventual economic instability, possibly even collapse as we become increasingly dependent upon coal and other resources that will run out. He stated that the easier and more efficiently we can extract work from a resource, the more profit can be made off it, and the useful it becomes to us. He also stated the reverse, that the more work be put into obtaining a resource, the less it's actually useful to us. His theory can be applied today, with oil. We may not ever run out of oil, because it will be so expensive and unprofitable to extract, transport, and distribute it after a certain point. The article mentions that we may have already reached the turning point, and oil may no longer a worthwhile resource for the world. True, the world can't reasonably sustain $100 a barrel oil prices, but on the other hand, it's hard to break an addiction. Junkies will go to great lengths for a fix.

The second article is less prophetic, and more metaphorical. It compares the economy we as humans have created to the static ebb and flow of the earth. It argues that in order to remain function as a species, we must maintain steady-state economy. This doesn't mean a stagnant economy, but instead one focused on improvement of its existing parts, not the creation of new parts. We've lived in a growth economy for the past 200 years, so making this shift is likely to be rather jolting. The approach to assisting the poor and needy in this plan is "the rich should reduce their throughput growth to free up resources and ecological space for use by the poor, while focusing their domestic efforts on development, technical and social improvements, that can be freely shared with poor countries." This seems a thoughtful and well formed solution that would in fact help. The author alludes the differences between a growth economy and steady-state economy to the differences between a helicopter and an airplane. An airplane, a growth economy, cannot hover, it would crash. It can only blindly go forward. A helicopter, a steady-state economy, on the other hand, can hover up and down, or fly backwards and forwards. His clever metaphor serves to show that a steady-state economy is an entirely different thing than a growth economy, and that we should focus more on improving what we already have, instead of making new things.

Both articles are rather prophetic in a way. They're saying, "look, here's the solution, dangling in front of you" and we just do nothing. I've seen this in other things too, it just seems to be part of human nature. Why aren't these theories gaining more notoriety?

I agree with the first article that we've past the point of no return. It seems we've hooked on oil and the only way to cure the addiction will be coming clean the hard way. Can you conceive a sort of oil rehab that would ween us all off oil and onto more usable resources?

What's likely to be the next cheap, economic resource we can burn through if we've already used up oil?

Chapter 6: Homework 3 Week 2

This chapter in Energies discussed the various innovations society has made since the advent of the industrial age. The chapter mentioned everything from the first airplane to steam engine and how those inventions have effected our society. These inventions, like better transportation, have helped our society become much more streamlined and efficient that we ever could have dreamed only a few hundred years ago. Today, anyone in the U.S. can order almost anything they want, and have it arrive in their house within a week, even within a few days. This is largely due to the strides we've made in human transportation. the invention of the internal combustion engine, the bicycle, and the jet engine are the three most prominent improvements in my mind for land transport. Aquatic transportation has become much faster as well, with the advent first of the steam engine, then the propeller-driving engine, then with nuclear fission. All these new technologies together make it possible to get almost any good anywhere in the world in just a day. This is very efficient, and beneficial to society, but it also comes with a price. The spread of infectious disease has increased greatly since the advent of the passenger jet.

Better communications, in combination with more efficient transportation can help us become more environmentally friendly. By communicating incredibly quickly via the internet and worldwide phone service we can effectively transport the exact right amount of goods, so no fuel is being wasted in transport.

Bicycles today play a tremendous role in eastern countries. Why hasn't the bicycle gained more notoriety in our society?

In a similar vein, nuclear fission powers the most advanced and environmentally friendly submarines today. why hasn't this same technology been employed on ships, especially large ships?

While it may sound trite, we live in a truly unique time in history. Never before have we had such complete control over our world, and the most important changes we've made have all happened in the last 70 or so years. A combination of things came together to make this possible, but there's never been anything like this before. I see this as a new renaissance, which would mean some stagnation after this point. Do you think that technology will continue to grow at such an exponential rate, or do you think we'll reach a point soon where we can't really expand anymore?

Homework 2 Week 2

Chapter 5 was about man's rise into the industrial age. It discusses various sources of fuel and their impacts on the environment and our world. It mentions Hyrdo turbines and nuclear fission because both of these are common alternatives to fossil fuel. They are both primary producers of electricity and very valuable to us still. Nitrogen fertilizers were developed as a result of the abundance of electricity and energy created in the last century by both fossil fuels and their alternatives. Even in the best of systems, thermal efficiency decreases over time. This means that whatever system you're using to harvest energy from will become less efficient slowly over time.

Is it feasible that there could be another oil crisis like the one in the 70's?

If so, I think that instead of continuing the way we are, that an oil crisis would be the catalyst that would force us to change. Thoughts?

It's known that ancient societies used fossil fuels as a resource in some cases. Could it be possible that we've lost some form of fuel along the way that would be beneficial at this point in history?