Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Within the fields of harvest and fisheries management catch per unit effort (CPUE) is one method that is used to determine the health of a biological resource. The underlying assumption is that as a population declines it becomes harder to catch and therefore CPUE decreases.
To begin with, it’s important to recognize that no fixed rule sets apart those changes that get called “progress” from the ones that don’t.
Lurking behind the cover story of terrorism and modern unease is an even more troubling development: the endgame of fossil-fueled civilization, and hence, the end of space travel.
We have a race between peak oil and global warming. Symptoms of these complex processes pop up every now and then.
So here is the dirty little secret of our civilization: It runs…energy per unit time…In other words, having one billion dollars in your checking account does not help you with purchasing a Rolls Royce with cash if your daily withdrawal limit is 100 dollars.
I’ve stayed away from politics pointedly in posts, because voting for either party is still just voting for growth, with different labels applied. I do not believe that the current corporate giveaway that we call a political system is fixable unless we elect a leader who is ecologically and energetically literate. I doubt that will happen. That said, here is an earth day wish for real servant leadership which would fix our problems. The post is directed at a specific leader, Obama, since the United States is the worst offender in terms of extreme behavior and unsustainability.
A weekly review including: Oil and the Global Economy, The Middle East & North Africa, China, Quote of the Week, The Briefs
•Interview: Energy Investor Bill Powers Discusses Looming Shale Gas Bubble •Availability of oil in the long term is dubious, as oil prices could in fact retreat, helping the tanker market •Shale Oil And Gas: The Contrarian View
As I wrote in my post about the Pulse, “Howard Odum was of the opinion that all systems on all scales pulse. Storages gradually accumulate, consumers consume and develop, and eventually decline, and then dispersing materials that will be used in the next pulse.” And if “energy flows, storages, transformations, feedbacks, and sinks” are central to any system, man-made or otherwise, we can see that the peaking of world oil production is going to have a huge effect. So, how does the idea of pulsing change one’s approach to design?
•Peak oil isn’t dead: An interview with Chris Nelder •What If We Never Run Out of Oil? •‘Peak Fossil Fuels’ Is Closer Than You Think: BNEF
In this post I present the results from dynamic simulations using the typical tight oil well for the Bakken as recently presented by the North Dakota Industrial Commission (NDIC), together with the “2011 average” well as defined from actual production data from around 240 wells that were reported to have started producing from June through December 2011.
Nearly everyone is failing to take into account the role of geology, oil and energy limits in their predictions – and we’re racing towards disaster.
