Peak Oil is a theory that is increasingly relevant as the price of oil and gasoline continue to skyrocket. It was first proposed in the 1950's by an American geoscientist named M. King Hubbert who worked for Shell in Texas and correctly predicted that the supplies of oil were limited in the United States and extraction would peak at some point in the late 1960's then fall afterwards.
This theory was later applied to world supplies of oil with the prediction for when peak oil would occur worldwide ranging anywhere from 2010 to “never” depending on which study you read. (The “never” people are the ones who claim that oil is produced continually by internal earth processes and are sort of like the folks who still deny climate change in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.) MetaFilter recently had a thread about an International Agency study of 400 oil fields that found that, barring a substantial decrease in demand, the world would face an oil
supply shortfall of 12.5 million barrels a day by 2015 or 15% of current
production.
On the contrary, even people who agree with the idea of peak oil and don't think it'll bubble from the ground forever, point out that improvements in technology and/or the rising price of oil will lead to more finds or re-approaching fields that were previously unfeasible or thought to be tapped.
The other related issue is, of course, climate change. Even if the earth did have unlimited supplies of oil, there has to be consideration of what the burning of so many fossil fuels are doing to our environment.
(A digression – “fossil fuels” is a bit of a misnomer and many people think that oil fields are like the dinosaur version of elephant graveyards. The reality is that oil fields were likely produced, not by dinosaurs but ancient micro-organisms and foliage. A great way to understand this that I read somewhere: the weight of all the ants on earth is more than the weight of all elephants.)
Ethanol isn't the solution because, although it is renewable since it is fuel made from crops such as sugar cane and maize, it still involves burning which harms the environment plus it drives up the cost of those basic food crops. (Mexico recently capped the prices for tortillas.)
The role of speculators, both in driving up the prices of food crops (see the last linked article) and of oil itself, can't be ignored either. In fact, there are some that think the huge increase in oil prices in the last year doesn't have anything to do with peak oil and is completely based on self-fulfilling speculator prophecies (if you bet millions that the price of oil will go up, that will push the price up which leads other speculators to do the same and it becomes a vicious cycle which only end with a massive crash which will make 1929 look like a 16-year old learning to drive versus the coming crash which would be more like Evil Kinevil jumping over a canyon and not quite making it.)
Why am I writing this now? I've always been interested in the idea of Peak Oil for all the different areas it brings into contact – economics, environmentalism, politics, geology, etc. – but now that the Saskatchewan economy is booming due to our oil and other natural resources, and having spent the last year living in the epicentre of the Saskatchewan oil & gas industry (Weyburn-Estevan), it's hitting especially close to homebi-. (out of curiosity, I even went to the bi-annual Saskatchewan Oil & Gas Show in Weyburn last year – a place I never thought I'd find myself!)
Recent studies have declared that there is a “Saudi Arabia of oil” under Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North and South Dakota and Montana in the Bakken and Torquay formations (the blogger who posted the image below has downsized his initial estimate but it's still apparently the largest find in Canada since 1957).
I drove out to Shea's farm with her family a few months ago and we didn't recognize the area. The landscape now looks like the moon – instead of the never-ending greens, yellows and browns of the farm fields, there is just endless, flattened, black earth covered in rows of pumpjacks.
I've got a lot more that I could say but I hear a baby crying so I might come back to this topic later. I do hope this has given you an introduction if you didn't know about peak oil and maybe some more info if you do!
I think I first heard about “The Last Lecture” via a book request we got at the library. The Amazon page for the book has more info including a couple video clips explaining the background and significance of this particular Last Lecture.
A bit more searching revealed that the full video of the original Last Lecture presentation at Carnegie-Mellon University is on YouTube (of course).
It's an hour long clip but if you watch the first couple minutes, there's a good chance you'll want to watch the whole thing.
Having recently sustained fairly serious knee lacerations due to some new “smaller than Mega-Blocks but not as small as regular Lego” Legos that Pace got for this birthday, this story has a particular resonance for me right now in terms of the danger potential of Lego and its myriad affiliated products.
Shea's got a few photos from our Calgary trip up on Flickr if you're interested. If not, this MetaFilter thread about the new M. Night Shamaladingdong movie, “The Happening”, is pretty entertaining.
We happened to be downtown on the Sunday of the Gay Pride Parade in Calgary so spent some time at Olympic Plaza enjoying the music, the vendors and the atmosphere in general.
In a completely unrelated story, Pace was later photographed wearing this hat…
And the answer is…Ontario-only and specifically SW Ontario and even more specifically rural SW Ontario for the most part.
I first heard the term in London but thought it was like the joint stag/stagettes that have become increasingly popular here (and elsewhere?) for couples who don't want to do their last pre-marriage party apart.
But apparently I didn't glean the full uniqueness of stag & does which are more like pre-wedding fundraisers for the couple with games and drinks at a local hall or whatever. (The similarity to Manitoba's “socials” is pointed out in the thread a couple times but again, I don't think we use that term in Saskatchewan – at least as a reference to parties for engaged couples.)
Anyhow, it was fun seeing a topic on AskMF that never would've caught my eye if I hadn't lived in SW Ontario!
Firefox 3.0, the latest version of the popular open source web browser, is attempting to set a world record for software downloads in a single day.
On Tuesday June 17, over 1.3 million people (as of this writing) have pledged to download the new version of the software. I've been using a beta release of the software for a month or so and have to say it's a massive improvement over the current release.
More info (including a very cool map showing how many people have pledged per country) is available here: Spread Firefox | Download Day 2008
My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not
thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m
reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be
easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the
argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of
prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often
starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the
thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always
dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used
to come naturally has become a struggle.
Check out this great article from The Atlantic Online which talks about how people read, how they do research and how that's changing in the age of the Internet among many other related topics that are covered.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected
in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves.
When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their
brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we
have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the
changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to
our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological
level.
Where does Google fit in all of this?
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing
machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the
network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across
the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more
opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information
about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the
commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of
data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the
better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely
reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest
to drive us to distraction.
Well, we're back from Calgary and it was a great trip!
Pace was an amazing traveler, we saw lots of friends, family and old familiar sights. In many ways, it felt like we were trying to cram three and a half years of memories from when we lived there into just under a week of visiting. But even with that constraint, we managed to hit many of the spots we wanted to see – the Calgary Zoo, the Wave Pool, Shea's old unit at the Foothills, my old office at the Old Y Centre for Community Organizations plus lots of shopping and good eating. Oh, and the obligatory pilgrimage to IKEA that all Saskies must make when visiting Cowtown.
I haven't downloaded our pictures or video yet but was looking for something to sum up the trip and found the clip below.
If asked to name my single fondest memory of the three and a half years I spent in Calgary, it was when a dozen people (including the couple we stayed with while visiting on this trip) rented a 10 man dingy (yeah, I know I said it was a dozen people involved – but there were always two or more in the river at pretty much anytime so it wasn't *completely* illegal) spent a beautiful +30 day floating lazily down the Bow River that runs through the centre of Calgary.
The day had it all – beautiful hot weather, tons of other rafters to visit with, lots of chances to jump in and swim in the swift moving river or just hold on to the edge of the dinghy, a picnic lunch, getting ambushed by kids with water guns at one beach along the ride, a chance to drink directly from the river via one survivalist participant's new water filtration gizmo, a spot check by the river patrol (conveniently happening after our portage spot where we dumped a lot of empty cans!) and even a lost engagement ring swept away by the strength of the current (luckily not Shea's ring!)
We only did this once during the entire 3.5 years we lived in Calgary because I think we realised that doing it again might bring disappointment when it wasn't as magical as that first time.
I had the same worry going back to visit Calgary after so many years away and with so many good memories of our time living there. But except for a couple small pangs throughout the week (okay, and one big one when Shea and I spent a couple hours strolling 17th Ave aka “The Red Mile” where we'd spent so much time while we lived in Calgary), I realised I don't miss Calgary as much as I thought I would. It was a great city to spend a few years in during my 20's but I would argue that Regina's an equally great city to be a young parent in. (Comparing notes with a cousin who does a 2+-hour round trip to take her daughter to soccer three nights a week is all the proof I needed on this point! )
Anyhow, I found this video which doesn't quite do justice to how peaceful and wonderful and amazing our own day floating the Bow River was. But it may give you a bit of a taste…
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