On September 13, 2008, this article appeared in the NYTimes online.  I find it very terrifying that any person who is so grossly un-informed could be one step away from the presidency of the USA.  I don't have any TV feeds here at the house, so I didn't see the interview.  (Look for a future post in my LJ account about our conscious choice to live without TV.)

She’s Not Ready

While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson Thursday night, and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail.

How is it that this woman could have been selected to be the vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket? How is it that so much of the mainstream media has dropped all pretense of seriousness to hop aboard the bandwagon and go along for the giddy ride?

For those who haven’t noticed, we’re electing a president and vice president, not selecting a winner on “American Idol.”

Ms. Palin may be a perfectly competent and reasonably intelligent woman (however troubling her views on evolution and global warming may be), but she is not ready to be vice president.

With most candidates for high public office, the question is whether one agrees with them on the major issues of the day. With Ms. Palin, it’s not about agreeing or disagreeing. She doesn’t appear to understand some of the most important issues.

“Do you believe in the Bush doctrine?” Mr. Gibson asked during the interview. Ms. Palin looked like an unprepared student who wanted nothing so much as to escape this encounter with the school principal.

Clueless, she asked, “In what respect, Charlie?”

“Well, what do you interpret it to be?” said Mr. Gibson.

“His worldview?” asked Ms. Palin.

Later, in the spin zones of cable TV, commentators repeatedly made the point that there are probably very few voters — some specifically mentioned “hockey moms” — who could explain the Bush doctrine. But that’s exactly the reason we have such long and intense campaigns. You want to find the individuals who best understand these issues, who will address them in sophisticated and creative ways that enhance the well-being of the nation.

The Bush doctrine, which flung open the doors to the catastrophe in Iraq, was such a fundamental aspect of the administration’s foreign policy that it staggers the imagination that we could have someone no further than a whisper away from the White House who doesn’t even know what it is.

You can’t imagine that John McCain or Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or Joe Lieberman would not know what the Bush doctrine is. But Sarah Palin? Absolutely clueless.

Ms. Palin’s problem is not that she was mayor of a small town or has only been in the Alaska governor’s office a short while. Her problem (and now ours) is that she is not well versed on the critical matters confronting the country at one of the most crucial turning points in its history.

The economy is in a tailspin. The financial sector is lurching about on rubbery legs. We’re mired in self-defeating energy policies. We’re at war. And we are still vulnerable to the very real threat of international terrorism.

With all of that and more being the case, how can it be a good idea to set in motion the possibility that Americans might wake up one morning to find that Sarah Palin is president?

I feel for Ms. Palin’s son who has been shipped off to the war in Iraq. But at his deployment ceremony, which was on the same day as the Charlie Gibson interview, Sept. 11, she told the audience of soldiers that they would be fighting “the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.”

Was she deliberately falsifying history, or does she still not know that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks?

To burnish the foreign policy credentials of a vice presidential candidate who never even had a passport until last year, the Republicans have been touting Alaska’s proximity to Russia. (Imagine the derisive laughter in conservative circles if the Democrats had tried such nonsense.) So Mr. Gibson asked Ms. Palin, “What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?”

She said, “They’re our next-door neighbors. And you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska. From an island in Alaska.”

Mr. Gibson tried again. “But what insight does that give you,” he asked, “into what they’re doing in Georgia?”

John McCain, who is shameless about promoting himself as America’s ultimate patriot, put the best interests of the nation aside in making his incredibly reckless choice of a running mate. But there is a profound double standard in this country. The likes of John McCain and George W. Bush can do the craziest, most irresponsible things imaginable, and it only seems to help them politically.

Talk about writer's block!  I can't think of what to say for my first post.  To put it more clearly, I've got lots to say, I'm just struggling with the lead-in, the introduction to these topics.  There are so many topics I've got opinions on.  The most prevalent topic is Peak Oil.  Wow! What a doozy of a topic!

I remember when I first learned of peak oil.  Thanks for nothing James Howard Kunstler! ;)  (Just kidding)  As painful as it was to read that book, I'm sure I'm better off for having done so. 

Peak Oil is a real simple concept.  So simple, in fact, I'm surprised I didn't notice it myself.  In a nutshell, Peak Oil is the depletion of fossil fuel resources.  The main misconception is that Peak Oil is NOT about running out of oil.  In fact, the world will never run out of oil.  Instead, Peak Oil is about the rate of extraction of oil.  Why is this important?  Well let's zoom out our view of the world for a moment....

Think about all the "modern day" conveniences that we enjoy today.  Driving a car is a big one.  Heating our homes, cooling our homes, anything plastic, anything that runs on electricity, and food.  Woah!  There's another doozy!  Yes, food.  In fact, if you live in the first world, you are hard pressed to live any kind of life that is not touched by fossil fuels.  Even a reduction in personal fossil fuel use is a challenge.  Now imagine for a moment, how will you maintain your lifestyle without fossil fuels?  That's a scary mental image.  Perhaps, more terrifying than any horror story or movie you've ever seen.

The world was given a one time endowment of oil and other fossil fuels.  For any meaningful time scale, all fossil fuels are non-renewable resources.  We can only deplete them by using them.  We can never increase their amounts.  As far as managing our endowment of fossil fuels, the best we can do is treat it like a savings account, an inheritance.  Once it's gone, it's gone.

For sake of argument, I'll use rough numbers.  At the beginning of this Oil Age, the total amount of "recoverable oil" (oil that can be extracted from the ground) was approximately 2 trillion barrels.  From the day that oil was first discovered in Pennsylvania until today, we've extracted and burned up about 1 trillion barrels of oil.  We've effectively used up half of all the oil that the world will ever have.  So why worry?  We've got half left, right?  It's important to realize that the concept of Peak Oil is not about amounts of oil used or remaining, it's about their rate of extraction.  Today the world extracts about 85-86 million barrels of oil per day.  This rate of 86 MB/day is the highest rate that the world has ever achieved.  The problem arises when the demand for oil, which is increasing dramatically due to the forces of China and India, exceeds the global ability to extract that oil.  In other words, if the world demands 90 MB/day and we can only extract 85 MB/day, then we've got a shortfall of 5 MB/day.  When there is a shortfall, the price for oil rises until the demand matches the supply.  This is why we've seen such huge price fluctuations in the oil markets.

Due to the nature of our economy, we must keep growing in order to have a "healthy" economy.  The only way to keep the growth imperative well fed, is to keep the energy inputs increasing.  Since the other economies around the world have the same growth imperatives, we have a global increase in demand for energy.  Therefore, when we can't extract energy in the form of oil, our global economies will stagnate and eventually collapse.  We're seeing all the signs today of this phenomenon.  When economies falter, corporations shed expenses (read cut jobs).  As unemployment rises, bankruptcies increase and people begin to struggle to make ends meet.  Even those that are lucky enough to retain their jobs, have challenges of managing gas prices for their daily commutes.  It's a real mess.

So I'll just leave you with one more thought and then I'll close this first journal entry.  Economists are often explaining that as prices for oil rise, this will spur more discovery efforts and make the harder oil areas more economically feasible to produce.  What they don't recognize is that we can't view this problem in terms of money.  Money is a man-made concept that has numerous flaws and limited utility in understanding the Peak Oil concept.  The core problem with the economists argument is the failure to understand that the limits to oil production are NOT financially driven.  These limits to extraction and production are GEOLOGICALLY driven.  The second half of oil that remains for extraction is going to be harder to get to, deeper, and harder to bring up to the surface.  It's also distributed around the world in many smaller fields rather than several large ones.  Ultimately, we'll reach a point where it takes more than a barrel's worth of energy to extract a barrel of oil from the ground.  At that point, it absolutely won't matter how much money you can get for that barrel of oil.  Today's economics is what created the problem.  Our economic system must change if we are to make a graceful transition to a post petroleum world.  In fact, our economic system must necessarily change even if we make an albatross landing in the post oil era.  The current economy is an insatiable  monster that feeds on ever increasing energy inputs.  When that energy input is exhausted, the monster will die.  Our problem is that we've grown to be 100% dependent on that monster for our very survival.


--TS