This article is prompted by the October 5th 2005 New York conference we announced on www.SustainabiliTank.info in the article of September 29, 2005. Because of the multitude of information that was made available that day, we delayed our reporting in order to be able to analyze the subject further.

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“Is the World Running Out of Oil?” is a question that also the Wall Street Journal has asked in its October 8-9, 2005 issue. Actually everyone is now asking this question, and everyone understands that this is a loaded question, in the sense that the answer suggested by the various interests seems to be always misleading - our problem is that everyone tries to mislead us in a different direction and we are thus obligated to look through the dust in search of the truth. www.SustainabiliTank.info feels that there is indeed a truth hidden in all of this.

Lauren Etter writes in the WSJ: “The big question is whether the current imbalance is a temporary disruption or an indication that oil output has peaked and is no longer sufficient to meet global demand. Pessimists argue there’s simply not enough oil to meet the booming demands coming from developing countries like China and India and still satisfy the voracious appetites of US consumers. Optimists point out that some experts have been predicting a scarcity of oil for nearly a century - and yet the oil keeps coming.” Then Etter shows signs of remorse for what was just said: ” To be sure, oil is a finite resource. The US Geological Society estimates there is only enough oil from traditional sources to last between 30 and 40 years, based on current rates of consumption and world reserves estimates. But that doesn’t take into account the wealth of nonconventional resources, such as oil shale or sand oil, which lie largely untapped because of cost”. Etter, among a listing of “Points of View Over the Years” also mentions - “World oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s. You can’t pump what you haven’t found. Where will additional oil production come from and at what price?” quoted from Republican House Member from Maryland - Rep. Roscoe Bartlett. Then Etter mentions among her “facts” that the Alaska Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWAR) contains 10.4 billion barrels of oil which could meet US energy demand for 1.4 years - is that a good reason for all this noise? - Astonishing! Etter then recognizes the possibility of consumers becoming cost conscious and moving to conservation of energy, i.e., sport-utility vehicles sales have fallen off sharply last year; but the problem with her “optimistic” view when she mentions the shale oil and sand oil is that her half page article does not mention even once costs to the environment.

Etter’s article is just the prelude, or excuse if you wish, to the WSJ editorial of the same day - “The Oil Bubble”: “We keep hearing the word ‘bubble’ to describe industries with rapid and unsustainable rising prices. Hence, the Internet bubble, the telecom bubble, stock market bubble, housing bubble, yet for some mysterious reason no one speaks of the oil bubble - though prices have tripled in two years to as high as $70 a barrel”. The WSJ believes that we are now in such a bubble and prices will fall dramatically. The WSJ, as expected, believes that the free-market mechanism will keep the pumps running forever - technology will be the savior. The point the WSJ wants to make is that the constraints on our ability to find and extract new oil are not geologic or scientific but the barriers created by government. WSJ quotes the Competitive Enterprise Institute as saying that “roughly 90% of the oil on the planet rests under government-owned land and these resources are abysmally managed” - in the US the enemy are environmentalists (finally I found here the first reference to environment - and it was all negative!). The editorial ends by warning that it is not through with us, and another time they will assess the ideas of price controls and “windfall profit” taxes.

We wrote rather at length about the WSJ position because we seemed to learn from these articles several important points.

a. Those that purport to speak for the free-enterprise through channels like the Wall Street Journal are untrustworthy because they are devoid of any consideration for the environment. They advocate the rape of the land for profit of the few.

b. Even drilling in environmentally fragile parts of the globe will not provide us substantial quantities of petroleum (the ANWAR case).

c. Without dipping into shale oil and sand oil, and perhaps liquids and gases from coal, we have indeed no additional oil-like alternatives to petroleum to allow the extension of the “oil age”.

d. Those speaking for free enterprise want actually big government that favors them. We know that the price of oil is not the figure quoted because we know that the government is spending more then that in safeguarding the availability of this oil. What about the additional losses caused by environmental destruction?

e. Creating the feel that there is a shortage of supplies increases the price of the commodity, and knowing that the actual figures of availability of oil are the secret of the produces, how can we actually know where we stand? Talking of shortages increases the profits of the oil companies.

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The New York Sun of October 11, 2005 in “What’s Next for Bush?” by Cal Thomas, writes: “Nothing would fire up the country more (short of winning the war in Iraq and finding Osama bin Laden) than a crusade to liberate us from the grip of those oil-producing nations that hate us and use our money to spread terrorism.

Surely we have the technology to find alternative energy sources. The President should provide leadership. It is not only about conservation; it’s about a new path toward energy independence. If President Kennedy could put astronauts on the moon in less than a decade, President Bush could at least begin the process of freeing us from a dependency on Saudi Arabian and other foreign oil. His brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, has reversed himself and now favors offshore drilling near the Florida coastline. That may help ease our dependence on foreign oil in the short term, but as Kennedy said we can do better.” We bring this here not because we believe in drilling of Florida but because of the WE CAN DO BETTER!. These last words show the real direction of an Apollo project. We can move to establish an infrastructure for allowing us supplies of energy that are not dependent on drilling for oil - how about this for an introductory remark to the real topic of our paper?

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The October 5th, 2005, Petrocollapse Conference in New York City was called for by Jenna Orkin and Jan Lundberg - both environmentalists of long standing.

Jan is a son to the founder of the Lundberg Newsletter, the morning reading of oil industry personnel, a firm that predicted the Second Oil Shock in 1979 from data revealing that a nine percent shortfall of gasoline would hit in March of that year.

Jan was an active petroleum analyst till 1988 and became an active environmentalist since. He is the founder of Auto-Free Times and the Culture Change Network that includes Culture Change Media (www.CultureChange.org).

Jenna, is a co-Founder of the World Trade Center Environmental Organization. She opened by explaining what is meant and what is not meant by peak oil.

Peak Oil is the theory developed by geologist M. King Hubbert in 1956, based on his observation of individual oil fields, that oil discovery and production follow a bell-shaped curve. Extrapolating from this he predicted that the US sum total oil production will peak around 1971, and the world in the 1990’s. He was right in his first prediction and we saw the 1972 production peak in US oil production. Jenna thinks that events in the Middle East extended the life of worldwide oil production by about ten years, so we start seeing now Hubbert’s second prediction coming true.

Peak Oil does not mean we’ve run out of oil completely and suddenly, but that we are using up more oil then is being discovered! Jenna points out that understanding this we should start to take seriously the transition to alternate sources of energy - specifically renewables!

Furthermore, it is not just enough to look for alternate supplies but we must start to learn to use less energy - i.e., grow vegetables locally, use bikes, and use our brains.

She continued with questions: “What are we really talking about when we talk about Peak Oil? Long gas lines? A bad depression? Or some third thing, the likes of which have never been seen except perhaps in the wake of Hurricane Katrina?”

Not just cars eat oil. Oil is also used for pesticides and fertilizer we need to feed a world population of 6.5 billion people.

Jan followed explaining that about 12 oil-exporting nations have reported to be in decline and past their peak. The US, for decades the top exporter, peaked in extraction in 1970 about 40 years after its peak of discoveries. Now the world uses about four barrels of oil per each barrel of new discovery. There is a lower and lower production rate of new wells, and more dry holes per successful drilling. This shows that we have rather thoroughly exploited the fields and we get increased costs of production. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had their petroleum considerations. The government did not show any other leadership besides the military actions. With the US gobbling now up one fourth of the world’s 80-plus million barrels a day oil demand, and no sensible policy-change in sight, the Conference is thus an attempt to explore the post-peak options for individuals and communities.

Jan Lundberg picks a bone with peak-oil researchers Matthew Simmons and Robert Hirsch who want to see the present industrial society continue by using alternate resources. Jan wants rather to see a transformation of society because he looks at petrocollapse as an outcome of the peak-oil situation. He contends that without cheap oil, fossil fuel intensive societies may be ten times beyond their ecological carrying capacity as per William Catton in “Overshoot”. The way out would be a return to nature and abdication of Western Civilization ways of life. He continued: “individually, all of us are suffering the same fate as nature. We hope, in our immersion in high-tech plastic convenience and pesticide residues, that the epidemics of, for example, breast cancer and prostate cancer don’t get us… chemicals such as plastics - petroleum - and their additives amount to the unlearned lesson of “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson”.

Rather than just a geological phenomenon, peak oil and its effects will bring also petrocollapse which is a socio-economic phenomenon. As he thinks real alternatives to petroleum do not quite exist, there will be nowhere for petrosociety to go but down and out. There will be hoarding of fuel - but the trucks will not be rolling into Safeway and Walmart. The real question is thus - will there be social isolation or society solidarity?

Civilization is the threat. Civilization is what brought about nuclear bombs and the commodification of nature. There is no such thing as biodegrability of petroleum plastic - plastic, like diamonds, are for ever. Culture change is the cure. The meeting will provide models of sustainability such as urban gardens and farms and more. Cuba has gone through its own petrocollapse, when the Russians stopped supplying oil, like Cuba, we need Citizen Petroleum Councils, to survey the problems and possible solutions — to develop a common sense approach to energy and land use. The idea of our country may be redefined back to love of the land.

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John Darnell, Energy and Environment Coordinator for Maryland Republican Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, spoke on “Challenges of Transition to Sustainability - parallels with Apollo 13,” (www.bartlett.house.gov).

He also started by showing the oil depletion curve covering the time span 1940 to 2060 with the Bell shaped curve having peeked at 2000, then he proposed a Republican track in time for action: It starts with Voluntary Conservation, then moves to Organized Voluntary Conservation and further Monetary Incentives/Policies for Voluntary Conservation; Next step is Efficient Technology Retrofits and eventually Monetary Incentives/Policies for Efficient Technologies.

Further he suggested talking of Short Term Private Interest and Long Term Public Interest. Basically all policies should be viewed in progressive stages like, as an example dealing with light energy conservation: first moving from the incandescent lamps to fluorescent lamps and eventually to light emitting diodes that reduce energy use to nearly zero.

He wants to promote the introduction of vehicles like the VW with a fuel efficiency of the equivalent of 300 mpg. He suggests to go backwards - to set a goal for the introduction of renewables and to work backwards to obtain sustainable systems.

He suggested design competition for sustainable efficient housing with PV using solar energy breeding. In short, his presentation was all about how to change policies with the help of eventual government organizing help. Answering to a question he added that he wants to see focus moved away from profit to service. Then we will, like the utilities today, want just to recoup the expenses, and for organization, we will have to move the industries to where the wind is. To my surprise, this republican does not seem to buy the WSJ.

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James Howard Kunstler, author “The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century”, sees that we have a permanent world wide energy crisis that leads to a financial crisis.

The infrastructure of suburbia will become expensive to run - unusable. The creation of suburbia was our greatest mistake in reallocation of wealth and we cannot imagine now getting away from it. We turned citizens into consumers that have the duty to eat more cheese-doodles and drink beer. We managed a “Las Vegasization” of American life by teaching that if you wish on a star your dreams come true. There is a general belief that you can get something for nothing with a casino in every corner of our life. We got a psychology of dubious investments and we must safeguard ourselves now from the illusion that renewables, solar, etc., will solve our problems. We will have a lot of losers in the middle class and we must be careful they do not turn into political maniacs in order to maintain their privileges.

He is not all prediction of doom. He rather wants us to start with some doable project and even makes suggestions. His suggestion is to start by rebuilding the railroad system. The fact that we do not talk about this shows we are not yet serious — where are the Democrats on this issue while grandstanding on Katrina? Rebuild the public transportation in the city — where are we going to take the fuel for the yellow bus?

He sees food production moving back to the center of our life and people moving back to the countryside. He suggests forgetting the word “growth” and substitute for it “activity.”

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A panel, in two stages, dealt with Government response to Peak Oil: “How they have responded to disasters in the past; how they should respond in the future, and how they actually will respond,” included Jason Meggs, Jenna Orkin, and Michael Ruppert.

A second panel on Local Solutions, included Jan Lundberg, Aresh Javadi, Dan Miner, Aaron Naparstek and David Room.

Michael Ruppert, author - “Crossing the Rubicon: the Decline of the American Empire and the Age of Oil” and founder of www.FromtheWilderness.com, dealt with “Government/Financial awareness of and Response to Peak Oil”.

He sees in 9/11 a transformative event like Pearl Harbor - in order to get the support for the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Katrina is the start of a terrible collapse of our times, like 1929 was the beginning of the events of the 30s and 40s. Asked where he sees brighter future he said that in places that have water and wood like Panama and Costa Rica.

In the summer of 2003 there was the ASPO conference in Paris dealt with peak oil, the future of energy supply and Ruppert contends that the CIA has already sat up at the time a list of ten priorities which he thinks are being implemented now by proposed legislation. These include such items as suspending environmental restrictions for drilling for oil, developing further nuclear technology, and Fisher Tropsch Chemistry liquid fuels based on coal, up to relaxing labor/wage laws and suspending bankruptcy laws. In 2005 Michael Ruppert writes on the Torrance, California Oil Crisis Simulation on “Oil Shockwave” called for by Jane Harman, the Democratic Member of Congress that is on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and whose district has more then a third of all California refining capacity. Others there included James Woolsey, the former Director of the CIA, Robert E. Grady, Managing Partner of Carlyle Group, Rand Beers, President of the Coalition for American Leadership and Security and others.

Above group seems to be worried indeed and seemingly most of above named have already bought hybrid cars and some, even President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Al Gore, have homes that are energy self sufficient and not dependent on the grid anymore. Ruppert asks if they know something the rest of us do not know?

From above level of comments, it was interesting to see comments that dealt with Ecovillages (Jan Room from Post Carbon Inst., Albert Bates), Urban Gardens (Aresh Javadi from www.moregardens.org), and Bike Carts (Aaron Naparstek from www.Naparstek.com).

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One further topic, which I left to the end because I feel it was not presented correctly, was the topic of Renewable sources of energy in general and biomass/biofuels in particular.

Despite the general favorable atmosphere to the subject, a main speaker was Professor David Pimentel, Professor of Ecology and Agricultural Sciences, Cornell University, who gave a very negative presentation under the topic on the program that said ETHANOL. A further Panel had the presentation title on the program as RENEWABLE ENERGY. The two speakers at the second session were myself, Pincas Jawetz, and Michael Kane, a reporter from www.FromtheWilderness.com

Professor Pimentel contributed to the media package of the Petrocollapse Conference an official Cornell University News Service two pages Press Release - “Biomass for biofuel isn’t worth it - Cornell ecologist’s study finds that producing ethanol and biodiesel from corn and other crops is not worth the energy”.

Professor Pimentel also included a 10 page paper co-authored with Tad W. Patzek from the Department of Civil and Environmental Enginering, University of California at Berkeley, but marked that correspondence should be addressed to  dp18 at cornell.edu. The paper was published in Natural Resources Research, Vol 14, No1, March 2005. The title is: “Ethanol production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel production Using Soybean and Sunflower”. The conclusion of the paper are for ethanol production using corn grain requires 29% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced, for switchgrass the allegation is for a negative 50%, for wood biomass the allegation is for a negative 57%. For the production of biodiesel the allegations are similarly a negative 27% when using soybeans, and a negative 118% when using sunflowers.

Professor Pimentel, in the introduction to the article, writes that this work is based on two USDOE panel studies - ERAB 1980 and ERAB 1981 (ERAB stands for Energy Research Advisory Board to the US Department of Energy) and alleges that these reports were reviewed by 26 expert US scientists independent of the USDOE. He forgets to mention that back at that time, it was Professor Pimentel himself who was chairman of the group that developed the ERAB recommendations to the USDOE, and he was instrumental in making up the membership of the advisory board. That Board included, upon his recommendation, scientists from Mobil Oil - the greatest adversary at the time to the development of ethanol as an ingredient to be used in mixtures with gasoline. Further, Professor Pimentel also forgot to mention to DOE at that time that he himself was a paid consultant for Mobil Oil. Above facts are all in the public domain and come from a booklet called “ALCOHOL FUELS POLICY” - Hearings before the Subcommittee on Energy of the JOINT ECONOMIC COMMITTEE, CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES, Ninety-Sixth Congress, Second Session, Part 2 - Potential for Renewable Resource Alcohol Fuels, June 25, 1980.

Senator George McGovern and Representative Virginia Smith, have brought up at the time the subject of Professor Pimentel’s credibility, and I have no intention here to suggest anything that does not come right out from that official document from 1980, and I submit as an attachment to my paper the relevant scanned in pages from that document. I expect the reader to make up his own mind on the credibility of Professor Pimentel’s presentation at the Petrocollapse Conference of 2005. Even though there have passed 25 years since, I wonder if Professor Pimentel has indeed taken a fresh look at the subject of his paper.

The present paper has indeed more recent references, but they are mainly of a political and subsidy nature, not technical as his paper implies. The paper is mainly about ethanol and has very little in it about biodiesel which is a subject that is much more recent and thus was not covered under the ERAB in the 1980 period. Also, the Official document of the hearings contained a complete rewrite of the report submitted by Prof. Pimentel’s group and even an analysis of the make up of that group - none favorable to Professor Pimentel. I happen to have been involved with the issue at that time and was quite familiar with the subject.

My own planned presentation at the Petrocollapse conference appeared on October 4, 2005, on www.SustainabilyTank.info “SUSTAINABILITY IMPLIES THE USE OF RENEWABLES”. Because of Professor Pimentel’s presentation, I had to digress somewhat when I started mentioning my example of a very successful “niche” market for renewables that involves the use of small percentages of ethanol as an octane boosting additive to gasoline. Professor Pimentel, having left the place immediately after he dropped his anti-biofuel diatribe, could not benefit from my presentation. Other members of the audience, I expect from what they said to me afterwards, were quite happy to hear a different point of view of this all important subject if we want to be intent of distancing our future from the will of old time oil industry interests. The introduction of biofuels is a main component of our future energy systems and some members of the audience were quite taken back by what they heard from Professor Pimentel. For one very important up to date remark regarding the overruling effects of greenhouse gasses, Professor Pimentel did not have a single word on the fact that biomass recycles CO2. Energy inputs in the production of ethanol should come from biomass, and this changes much of what he presented as energy balances in the production of the ethanol.

The Epoch Times of October 10, 2005, yesterday, writes that a hybrid grass, Giant Miscanthus, as per a recent study at the University of Illinois, with very little need for water or fertilizer, if 10% of the land area of Illinois was dedicated to that plant, it could provide 50% of the state’s present electricity needs. I mention this here as an example of what positive intentions by agricultural scientists can do for renewable energy supplies from biomass.

Because I think highly of the rest of what went on that day at the conference, I am compelled therefore to say flatly that Professor Pimentel’s presentation was no less then misleading and a disgrace - seemingly perhaps intended this way.

Please find attached thirty-six pages of the relevant material from the Alcohol Fuels Policy Congressional hearings of June 25, 1980.