Monday, June 18, 2007

the sweet(corn) little lie, part one: oil



MP3: The Last Poets - White Man's Got A God Complex

Ever since September of 2001, the North American mediasphere has been continually repeating a mantra about reducing our collective dependence on oil imported from the Middle East. There are a variety of reasons for this desire. First and foremost, there is a security concern regarding Persian Gulf oil. Due to a complex web of colonialism, resource exploitation, and a
religious/cultural reaction to modernity, the Middle East is a violent and dangerous place to do business. Furthermore, there is the issue of sustainability. Logic dictates three courses of action: either North Americans get used to consuming about 70% of the oil that they currently enjoy using, or instead find new local sources of combustible fuel. The third option is that which the Bush White House refers to as apocalyptic, namely the termination of the American way of life.

The first option is perhaps more logically sound. By investing hundreds of billions of dollars into mass transportation infrastructure and currently-available high-efficiency technologies, per capita oil consumption will decrease. Further reductions in consumption can be realized by regulatory changes made possible by effective governance, such as a mandatory improvement of vehicular gas mileage (as a better first step, the production of non-hybrid consumer vehicles could be banned) and the termination of taxation subsidies to unsustainable residential development (suburbia, urban sprawl). Basically, the age of the single-occupant, low-efficiency vehicle must end. Traffic sprawl leading to road rage and long commutes spent away from families, as well as the fact that automobiles amount to about 30% of carbon emissions leading to climate change, should signal to most logical people that this most inefficient and unsustainable use of oil is the result of myopic and short-sighted planning and development rather than “the way things just are”.

The current generation of technology is perfectly adequate to handle this challenge. Any politician who delays current legislative action to promote a more sustainable energy infrastructure, and instead promotes the research and development of future clean-technologies over the application of current clean-technologies, is being entirely disingenuous to their electorate. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that such politicians are spineless bastards who are in the back pocket of corporate interests and can't see the future beyond their own pointless careers.

Let us turn to the second method of reducing North American dependency on Middle Eastern oil. To this end, a little history of the business of oil is required. When Americans first began to utilize oil, America itself was the gold-standard for oil production in the world. No other nation on Earth had either the oil resources or the technological infrastructure to realize the amount of oil which America brought to world markets. The U.S. became exceptionally rich, as the cheapest oil on the planet fuelled most of the economic progress of the 20th century.

Then came 1970. Although the debate certainly did not happen in the 1970s, at this point America came to understand the reality of peak oil by experiencing an energy crisis. American oil production has been in drastic decline ever since, with only the discovery of a few small oilfields to offset the monumental loss in production capacity in the existing ones.

As a quick primer, peak oil refers to oil production models. Unlike other natural resources such as metals or timber, substances, such as oil, which are confined under high pressure under the Earth’s crust typically follow a bell curve of resource extraction: after an initial high investment, oil flows ever more cheaply until production peaks. At the point of peaking, oil production is at its highest and oil prices (under the whims of market capitalism) are at their lowest. However, the remaining half of the oil reserves that remain underground require an increasing amount of energy to extract, which results in an irreversible and exponential increase in cost. There comes a point before the depletion of oil reserves where it takes more energy to extract the oil than you actually get from burning it. Perhaps this last fact explains why oil companies are on sound footing when they claim that we will never run out of oil.

Of course, as anyone who lived through the 1970s can attest, along with high costs come resource scarcity and social unrest. North America witnessed gas stations which closed due to the unavailability of oil, a major spike in the price of domestic goods, and the first major economic recession since the end of the Second World War. (On a progressive tangent, the 1970s also saw the rise of higher-efficiency vehicles and the environmental movement.) Suddenly the Middle East, which contained the world’s only other large source of cheaply-recoverable oil, entered into American consciousness. For the sake of simplicity, let us ignore the geopolical problems, and the resultant rise in terrorism, which have plagued the Middle East since the late 1970s. Focussing on what North Americans actually care about, oil prices fell to “normal” levels over the 1980s and 90s, bottoming out around $12 per barrel just before 2000.

Fast forward to 2007. The Middle East is increasingly shrouded in flames and misery, gas prices are the highest they have ever been, and America is in the fourth year of its military occupation of Iraq. While we will have to wait about a decade or so to state conclusively, many experts have calculated that global oil production will peak sometime between 2002 and 2010; the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, for example, believes that the peak happened in 2004. And yet, it seems that ex-President Bush Sr’s 1992 prognostication that “the American way of life is non-negotiable” has come to pass. Vehicular fuel-efficiency standards have bottomed out, suburban sprawl continues unabated, and the energy-dependent North American lifestyle is increasingly under attack from all corners, including Europe, while it is simultaneously increasing its energy footprint. Most North Americans are blissfully living their lives as though there are no limits to resource consumption, and that there should be no plan for our future other than “business as usual”.

Apparently, North Americans will not alter their oil-dependent lifestyles; the freedom to drive 300 kms back and forth from work everyday supercedes any rational distribution of what is an increasingly scarce resource. So where is North America looking for its oil if not from the Persian Gulf? It should come as no surprise that the Alberta oilsands figure most prominently in the discussion. These oil deposits, discovered many decades ago, are only now coming into use. To answer the question as to why Canada was not the oil powerhouse of the 20th century that it will be for the 21st, we must understand the nature of this resource. To be brief, the oilsands require a certain oil price to be reached before they can economically be brought to market. When America invaded Iraq in 2003 and oil jumped to $35-40 dollars per barrel, oil prices reached the point at which development in the oilsands was economically feasible.

With prices currently between $60-70 per barrel, North American oil companies are making hundreds of billions of dollars from the 175 billion barrels of oil available in the oilsands. As prices climb towards $100 per barrel, suddenly another 150 billion barrels are “economically recoverable”. As the price of oil continues to increase, the majority of Alberta’s 2.5 trillion barrels of hydrocarbon deposits will come to market. All of a sudden, America will have the world's largest forseeable energy reserve within reach of an easily defendable pipepline.

This reality seems to provide a degree of logic to American foreign policy: destabilizing oil-producing regions increases the price of oil, which allows the oil in Alberta’s oilsands to suddenly be “economically recoverable”. To this end, it is my fear that for the sake of economic development Canada will increasingly ignore certain geopolitical realities as America continues the hostile practise of oil market inflation. In fact, in regards to the 21st century’s most important energy resource, the oilsands have the potential to allow the United States to finally realize its latent philosophical dream of manifest destiny, as Canadian resources become the principle concern in maintaining the American way of life.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

fuck it. photographs.

sometimes words are fickle poneys lost in wide fields, with almost two months of frantic pursuit providing little but nostalgia and inclination. in such times, my forehead is likely to be bruised red by frustration and anxiety about a degree of impotence realized through worry. with small trickles of blood clouding my vision, it can be dificult to view the world properly. i stop trusting my capacity for judgement (or more appropriately, the legitimacy of my capacity for judgment), and i consequently allow technological mediation.

this last statement is only true if we consider language (words) to be an ancient technology. if such is the case, then i might need to rediscover fire in order to progress beyond painting on cave walls. oh well...

fuck it. photographs.


Nora Hutchinson, 2005


Water Only, 2006


Indeterminacy, 2004


lonely_fixed, 2005


inside is outside, 2005


under the weight of judgement, 2004


in case there's extra, 2006


untitled but female, 2005


untitled, 2004


butterfly wings can change the Earth's
climate
, 2004


butterfly wings can change the Earth's climate (easily understood remix), 2004

[note: click image for larger resolution version]