Renewable Revolution

Coal Trains have joined the oil trains going north for export.  I have seen 3 coal trains passing through Seattle in the last week.   I saw the first one only two weeks ago.  It had three engines pulling and was a mile long easy.

I do not want to criticize or disrespect anybody here who cares about their carbon footprint but when I see megatons of coal and oil leaving the country to keep the fat cat gravy train going and nobody caring I wonder what is the point of it all. 

We import, so we export.  I get that.  I also know that our fracked oil is best blended with other stock because refineries just for fracked oil don't exist.  I get that.  Stop using the stuff tomorrow and we are all dead.  I get that.  It is not a black and white issue.  I get that.  Nobody cares about changing the equations so we survive.  I don't get that.

As too how much is left I'll make the observation that the conservative element of suit wearing forked tongued devils in American have digested peak oil dogma as well as we have here but from a completely different perspective.  The point of peak oil was only ever to show that the oil supply is finite.  The M. King Hubbert classic depletion curve is from a single field with a simple development and extraction profile.  All it was ever meant to do is tell everybody, see kiddies if you eat all your candy it will be all gone. 

The world was never going to follow that simple curve and even we advocates of understanding have been distracted by the 'theory' aspect of it all, as if the ragged edge of the real depletion curve disproved something.  The ragged edge reflects real world complexity.  Humans have wars and kill each other.  Economies crash.  People want to make America great again.  These things throw more variables in the picture than a single field has and the fact that the peak is ragged does not change what remains in the ground in any way.  Yet some are quick to say peak oil is dead and the theory wrong.

Ugo Bardi has pointed out that collapse can, most likely will, resemble Seneca's cliff.  In that scenario significant oil will be in the ground but it won't be easy to get to and it won't matter because we will be in a new stone age.  Fact is if we were not fracking now we would all be fu cked.  A minor detail it seems everybody has overlooked.  We found some more borrowed time.  That is all that has happened or America would already have crashed so hard that 2008 would be looking like a summer picnic right now.

That is what we have done again.  Technology which in modern times is mostly the hundreds of ways in which we use hydrocarbons has enabled us to innovate our way out of a corner to get more hydrocarbons to use up.  The can has been kicked down the road. But it can't last.  Our ditch awaits.