Whatever the short-term price oscillations are, ultimately, the price will keep rising until global demand is seriously destroyed.
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Now that so many people are being crushed by gasoline prices, I hope we can all agree what a deadly one-two punch peak oil and global warming are. Peak oil will make virtually everything we do, policy wise and often individually, much more difficult and expensive, and global warming is an extremely serious threat that we have to start addressing long before we experience its disastrous consequences. (Kind of like what we should have done with oil, but we waited. That sure worked out just peachy, didn’t it?)
This is a point I’ve been hammering on for some time over on my own site, yet I seem to have made very little progress getting people to see how horrible the timing is between these two enormous challenges. Perhaps it was just a case of people not believing that the mule would kick them until it actually inflicted some damage. Of course, this is far from our first oil-related pain; as the saying goes, no one ever learned anything from a second mule kick.
Has any one recalculated the cost of combating climate change with oil prices heading for and above $200! Its going to be a lot more expensive than we all think to fight this CC…
things could start falling apart round about now!
I informed the engineers at GM how to formulate methanol for low temperature service. I ain’t saying how this is done but it is a no brainer.
They are elvaluating my proposal.
Imagine methanol that works just like gasoline but only costs 40 cents/ liter or &1.50/gal!
paulm:
You were making a joke, right?
If not, you’ve got it exactly backwards. In reality, the more expensive fossil fuels get, the less it “costs” to mitigate global warming (I use quotes, because it’s meaningless to talk about the cost of mitigating GW without also talking about the cost of not addressing it).
Here’s why.
One of the biggest componenets of the “cost” of mitigating global warming comes from replacing relatively cheap fossil fuel with relatively more expensive renewable energy — as well as the cost of installing efficiency measures.
The more expensive fossil fuel is, the less that differential is … so expensive fossil fuels makes it cheaper to fight global warming.
In fact, if you look at what happenned when ISO NEW England ran their first Foward Capacty Auction (which pits new generation against efficiency on a cost basis when figuring out how to meet demand for energy) efficiency beat new generation hands down. In short, it cost less to displace demand than to create new generation capacity.
Am I not joking! Go to the Methanex website and ckeck the price for methanol, which is made form nat gas. There are humongous amounts of it in the ocean off Qatar and Dubai And huge amounts in northern Canada!
The Japonese have pilot projects underway to recover methane from permafrost. The procedure is simple: inject low-temp dry steam into permafrost then recover the methane and CO2 from collection wells. The CO2 is seperated from the raw nat gas, then injected back into the reservior to improve recovery effieceny.
If the clever engineers at Wesport can figure out how to burn methane in Diesel engines, they can certaintly figure out how to burn methanol. A few buses in Metro Vancouver are using Wesport-Cummins Diesel engines which use nat. We have oodles of nat gas in BC! The Chinese ordered about 100 buses and will have these in service for the Olympics.
I also infromed the GM guys about using methanol for Diesel engines.
Attn John!
What global warming?
[JR: Rest of comment irrelevant or nonfactual.]
Locally gasoline is $4.05.9 for regular.
Hey Joe!
If you can’t stand the Heat, then get the Hell out of the Kitchen!
BTW: I made a copy and I will post it on Anthony’s and Steve’s blogs and you know who I mean. You are Toast! You are just like Gavin the Grinch who keeps stealing my comments and putting them in his closet.
Here what you should know: All senior climatologists are well aware of the significance of the temperature-time plots from arid and desert region, and what they mean. James “Jimmy the Enforcer” Hansen and his soldiers makes sure there is no dissent from the white-coated welfare queens on global warming.
I have cleaned, oiled, and loaded my 44′s. I will be waiting for you at the CO2 corral in Tombstone.
Joe,
You have to put a stop to Harold Pierce.
He offers nothing and this blog has the right to exercise sensorship of the likes of him.
John McCormick
Hey John!
You ever heard of Free Speech? By training, Joe is a scientist with very respectable and impressive academic credentials, has set up this blog and has invited the public to express their opinions. What I have to say is based upon my own personal research and upon my examination of the literature and my evaluation of it. I have been in this science business for over 45 years, and I have come to a much different conclusion re global warming and climate change than the mainstream scientists. Read on.
I have lots of data from several remote weather stations and these data clearly show that global warming has stopped for sure in 2000 at least in the Pacific Northwest.
At the remote weather station at Quatsino BC (Lat 50 deg N), the mean Tmax for Sept 21 for 2001-2007 is about 5.9 deg lower than for 1990-2000.
The mean Tmax for 1990-2000 was 20.4 deg C and the mean Tmax was 14.5 for 2001-2007. By using Sept 21 for data analysis, the amount of sunlight stays constant and the photoperiod is 12L:12D. I did this analysis from 1895-2007. I also have data for other months. Read on.
At this station the mean Tmax and Tmin temperatures for March, June, Sept, and Dec for the years 1900-07 are the same as that for 2000-2007. That is, the ocean has “turned over”. Climatologist estimate the Pacific ocean “turns over” once a century. Well it just did, and the PDO has just shifted into a cold phase. This is why temperatures have dropped so much in the Pacific Northwest.
In metro Vancover, we are tying all time low temps for June. The last time we had temperatures this low was the early 1950′s when the PDO shifted into a cold phase in 1940. The PDO shifted into a warm phase about 1970 and this resulted in the last 30 years being relatively warm. The PDO has a period of 30 years.
The next 30 years are going to be cold here in the Pacific Northwest. I live in Burnaby, and it is 11 deg C in the carport, a temperature that is typical of early winter. And there is an ominous chill in the air coming from the northwest. Google “PDO index” and go check Don Easterbrook’s blog. Go to NOAA’s website, click on NOAA Watch, and check the El Nino/La Nina Index Meter. It should be about 0 for theis time of the year, but it isn’t.
Go to the Canadian pairies and ask the wheat farmers about global warming. They will say, “Yeah, right”. And they will tell you the recent winter was darn cold just like normal.
John McCormick,
Don’t worry, Herald is harmless…, among other things.
He’s just pissed that Gavin won’t let him urinate in public on RealClimate.
Herald considers that ‘free speech.”
Harold Pierce Jr — Europe experienced one of the mildest winters on record. Just now Norway is waving a heat wave.
More ominous, the southern Urkraine has another failed crop year due to drought.
And, oh yes, there is Australia…
On the topic: As the US dollar continues to depreciate, for that reason alone the price of crude oil in US dollars will continue to rise, even with stable demand. But the demand for transportation fuels is rather inelastic; the price has to rise even further before the demand goes down.
Putting those two parts together, while there may be some ups and downs due to speculation, I’ll suggest that a suitably long moving average of the price has nowhere to go but up and up.
Reason: Peak Oil.
Peak Oil itself is not an “urgent” problem. What is a major, major problem is the flow of capital from consuming countries to producing countries (at least if you live in one of the former).
The UK is toast. North Sea oil is going fast and we have no plan B.
PeaK Oil refers only to convential oil. There are about 15 trillion barrels of oil equiv in unconvential oil. Not cheap, but it is there. We can always convert coal to liquid hydrocarbons. South Africa gees 40% of its liquid hydrocarbons from coal.
As I metioned Shell R&D has pilot projects using in situ resistive heating for direct recovery of a crude oil from oil shale.
As I mentioned before, shut down the diamond and gold mines and the military-industrial complex, and a lot of energy would be freed up.
[UN]Conventional oil is limited by the speed with which it can be brought online and, of course, its higher climate impact, which will prove fatal once the world gets serious about global warming probably around 2020.
Joe — I am sure you meant to write “unconventional”.
ATTN: David and Exusian!
Why I am steamed and hot-under-the collar? Because we in BC are about to be whacked with a CARBON SIN TAX on those evil fossil fuels and nobody gets a FREE PASS. Sin taxes never worked on booze, cigs, and luxury stuff, and they ain’t ever going to work on fossil fuels.
This Carbon Sin Tax is the brainchild of SFU econ Prof Marc Jaccard, who advises the BC gov on climate change policy. Making about 100 G’s /yr, this guy sets up an off-campus enviromental consulting firm and charges the gov BIG BUCKS for his firm’s services. Bam! A double Carbon Sin Tax.
Who does he hire as one fo his scientific consultants? His pal Andy Weaver. a top Prof at UVic. Bam! Triple Carbon Sin Tax! Who do these prof’s use for basic research? Donkeys, aka grad student and post docs.
Bam! Quadruple Carbon Sin Tax!
Who is this Prof. Jaccard? He is one of the radical socialist SFU profs wearing are a green jacket! He and pals believe that we peasants are, ignorant, stupid, and uneducated, and only they, the Elite, should be allowed to run the gov and society. They only book these guys ever read is Plato’s “Republic”!
Sniff! Sniff! I smell smoke. Yikes! There is smoke coming out my Northgate OmniKey Plus. I think I’d better it cool down for awhile!