10%: Are You Able To Cut It? Huh? Punk?

So Eskom has laid down the law: 10% or else. Do you feel efficient? Punk? Well there is a very, very simple way to cut 10% or more. Easy. Want to know what it is? When you get home from work, do not turn on the TV, do not cook food, do not take a hot (or even cold) shower. Do not pass go, just go to bed.

Realistically though, with a little bit of consistent discipline, 10% ought to be a snip. We will probably realise just how inefficient (read: wasteful) we are. Ne.

All of us are lazy when it comes to leaving lights, computers and other gadgets on. The Times has a great headline which expresses this lack of efficiency quite ironically:
The Lights Are On But Nobody's Home. Excellent !-)

Oil: Slipping Its Way Back To $100 A Barrel?

Oil has been down more than $2 a barrel today, but some traders say the move to $100 is back in play. That trend became clear yesterday, when crude rose $4.37 to $94.39 per barrel, a 4.9 percent increase.

Joe Terranova, MBF Clearing director of trading, said he saw a a condition in crude futures today he hasn't seen in months. Terranova explained that the front month contract in oil futures, the January month, was trading at a slightly lower price than February.

Today's price move "is a modest correction based on the front month spread slipped into contango for the first time since earlier this summer," he said. February's contract was trading about 17 cents above January's this afternoon. "A contango market is not necessarily down but it doesn't trade with upward momentum," he said.

But Terranova says though the trend toward $100 is still in place. He said one sign of that is the call from Goldman Sachs for a $95 oil price in 2008. "When the New York Yankees say something, everyone listens," he said. Goldman apparently wears the pin stripes on Wall Street. "They bear a lot of weight in the marketplace. If I see them coming, I don't get in the way," he said.

M.F. Global senior vice president John Kilduff also says the move toward $100 per barrel is on. He has been predicting oil would hit $100 before the end of the year, and he said today's sell off is not surprising and the trend higher is still in tact.
By:Patti Domm from CNBC.com

Bullard: Selling Cars, Load Shedding, Illegal Speeding and 4 km Rat Runs (INTERVIEW 4)

“In Africa you win votes by driving something big and shiny.”

NVDL: What do you drive?
Bullard: [Laughs] I’m driving whatever they give me. At the moment I’m driving an 18 year old Toyota Hilux bakkie, which I own, because I’m trying to sell a Mazda MX5.
NVDL: They have that beautiful bubble shape don’t they, hey?
Bullard: The Mazda? Yeah. I’ve got the new one with the flared arches; very nice. The problem is I live 1.5km from here; I don’t do school runs, and I’ve put 7000km on the clock in 22 months. It won’t have a service at this race for another 2 years.
NVDL: You don’t really need it.
Bullard: No.
RP: For how much are planning on selling it?
Bullard: For you, special price. R242 000 new. I’ll give it to you for about R190.

RP: That’s a very good price. And this weekend on Car Torque you’ll be driving the 350Z?
Bullard: Yes; very good car, very nice car. Good value.

NVDL: [Rudely interrupting] So what’s your dream car?
Bullard: Porsche [he enunciates the word lovingly: Por-sha] Look if money was no object and overall – I mean I do like many other cars – but I’ve found that consistently Porsche is a car you can drive every day. It’s a fabulous performer; it’s superbly engineered. I’ve been over to a lot of launches, I’ve seen the engineers, talked to the engineers: it delivers on every level.
NVDL: What about…
RP: Do you think it’s actually worth it; I mean on South African roads?
Bullard: No, [but] that’s a different question isn’t it? We were out yesterday; we were driving the Audi R8 down in Worcester, last week – on very clear, rural roads – at illegal speeds. The policemen were presumably told to take the day off. You can’t drive like that; you’re going to get nicked. You’re going to go to prison. I mean if you’re driving at 240, and this car is capable of 300km/h, - and my frustration is you’re sitting in a car like a Porsche thinking: “Well, you know, I’m actually using 40% of the capacity.” Like the big Merc. So, practically, I would rather have something that’s not a gas guzzler, that takes a lot of people… My wife drives a Renault Scenic which I think is great, apart from the second hand value, and I quite like boring MPVs. You for going into the bush…
NVDL: What’s an MPV?
Bullard: Multi-Purpose Vehicle, traditionally the ‘Mom’s Taxi’s, but they’ve got 7 seats and…

NVDL: I like that you said: -“not a gas guzzler”-
Bullard: Yeah.
NVDL: Because in the reality of what’s happening; I mean oil is now at $74 whatever-
Bullard: Heading towards 100.
NVDL: With the amount of cars that are just growing all of the world…
Bullard: Two nights ago I went to a dinner party in Sanddown, from Rosebank. Took me an hour and a half to get there. Because the robots were out. So because we’re having load shedding, it was gridlock cars, all the way through, all burning fuel…
NVDL: Mmm.
Bullard: Into the atmosphere, which must have been, which must be [in my estimation] worse than not having the robots working. Get the robots working, get the people home, then cut the electricity. Instead of which, there were hundreds of cars down every possible rat run. You do four kilometers in an hour and a half. And have all that frustration. And most of them were three litres. One guy was sitting in his car, on the cell phone..

NVDL: But do you see the cycle of what’s happening? We’re getting strange weather, which causes power outages, which causes traffic jams, and the traffic leads to weather…in a way…
Bullard: Sure. It’s a knock-on effect. Let’s manage it. Surely people can have flexi-hours at their offices. Surely more people can work from home. We’re talking executive’s cars moving in and out, at the same time every day, with one person in[side].
But we don’t have a good public transport system. When I lived in London I didn’t have a car; there was no point. I hired a car [for the] weekend.
NVDL: Yeah.
Bullard: I was on the bus, or a train or an Underground.
NVDL: I think part of the problem is suburbia.
Bullard: Yeah.
NVDL: We need a city and suburbia that’s one, which is basically what Europe is.
Bullard: Yes.
NVDL: We need that…How do you go into the future with suburbia still being developed, and now we’ve got this problem. Now you’ve got property markets the way they are, and so everything’s based on, you know, this project that doesn’t really have a future. So how do you un-engineer or re-engineer it?
Bullard: That’s right.
NVDL: There’s a movement call New Urbanism. They design walkable communities, and communities that are connected to organic systems. But I mean that’s still – that’s so on the fringe it’s not funny…
Bullard: Mmmm.
NVDL: But that basically needs to come in.
RP: On a lighter note…
Bullard: Indeed…I thought that was a light bit actually [Everyone laughs].
For the other interview click on the tag below: The Bullard Tapes.

Kunstler: Peak Universe (ENERGY COLUMN)

The big Peak Oil conference of the year took place in Houston last week – but before we get to the substance of that, a few words about where we were. It is hard to imagine a more horrifying urban construct than this anti-city in the malarial swamps just off the Gulf of Mexico. And it is hard to conceive of a more desolate and depressing urban district, even of such an anti-city, than the utter wasteland around Houston’s convention center.

Luckily, we didn’t have to enter the convention center itself across the street -- a baleful megastructure the size of three aircraft carriers, adorned with massive air-conditioning ducts to counter Houston’s gym-sock-like climate. And when I say “street” you understand we are talking about four or six-laners, with no curbside parking, which is the norm for this town. The effect is that every street behaves like an extension of the freeway at the expense of pedestrians – but pedestrians have been eliminated anyway because in ninety percent of Houston’s so-called downtown of glass towers there are no shops or restaurants at the ground-floor level, only blank walls, air-conditioning vents, parking ramps, and landscaping fantasias.

We were informed that in parts of downtown there existed a network of air-conditioned underground corridors with shopping, but that everything in it closed at 7 p.m. when the last office workers straggled home. Anyway, none of it extended as far as the convention center. The rest of district was devoted to surface parking.

It has often been stated that Houston’s ghastly development pattern comes from having no official zoning laws. But all it really proves is that you can achieve the same miserable results of typical American boneheaded zoning with no zoning – as long as your don’t give a shit how people feel in their daily environments.

The convention center itself, though, demonstrated something beyond even that degree of thoughtlessness. Its pharaonic hugeness was a metaphor for the fatal grandiosity at the heart of contemporary life in American today, the utter disregard for a scale of human activity consistent with what the planet has to offer within its ecological limits – and of course the oil issue was at the center of that story.

Oh, one final thing about Houston life per se. Judging by the local items in the daily newspaper, the so-called city enjoys a level of mayhem that makes Baghdad look like a Sussex garden party. Sample headlines: “10 Charged in Burglary Spree,” “Pit Bull Shot Dead After Pony Attack,” “Jury Gives Man Life in Carjacking Death,” “Two Killed in Home Invasion.” One particularly insane story told of a man who shot and stabbed a visiting friend who “dissed” his dog. We didn’t see any of that action around the convention center's Hilton Americas, where the ASPO conference actually took place, but the news didn’t exactly make you want to venture out beyond the lobby. Anyway, you couldn’t buy a stick of gum within a mile walk of the place, and the thought of traipsing past all those surface parking lots in 90-degree heat was like an invitation to reenact the Bataan Death March.

It was a sublime coincidence of fate and history that throughout the ASPO conference, the price of a barrel of oil surged up through the high eighty-dollars range and briefly touched $90-a-barrel on Friday (just as the stock market was tanking by 360-odd points). It was also interesting that as all this action was unfolding, MSNBC was running an interview with Senator Larry Craig (R. Idaho), lately accused of soliciting sex from a policeman in an airport toilet. Apparently what the nation really wants to know about is the Senator’s self-described “wide stance” in bathroom technique. Perhaps when Craig is finally forced from his senate seat, he can get a job as a “personal toilet coach,” and become the pioneer in a whole new realm of self-improvement science, teaching others how to assume the manly “wide stance” and become more effective leaders.

So, while the price of oil ratcheted up hour by hour, the ASPO conference members heard from an impressive range of experts who have been leading the public conversation on the Peak Oil story – with no help from the mainstream media or the political sector. Among them were Robert Hirsch, co-author of the now-famous 2005 Hirsch Report, commissioned by the US Department of Energy, which, much to the consternation of its sponsor, first told the nation in no uncertain terms that it was heading for a catastrophic set of disruptions in “normal” American life if we heedlessly continued energy business-as-usual. Hirsch went a little further now, two years on, than he had in his famous report, predicting a future of “oil export withholding,” panicked markets, and allocation disturbances that would make the 1973 OPEC embargo look like a golden age.

Matt Simmons, the leading investment banker to the oil industry, who has worked tirelessly to lift public awareness of Peak Oil, also raised the specter of shortages, telling the audience that market allocation problems in the near future would almost certainly induce “hoarding behavior” among the public that would cripple the economy, lead to enforced rationing, and shock the nation. Simmons compared the current public mood over energy issues to a “fog of war.” He also repeated his oft-stated opinion that the drilling rigs and other equipment used around the world to pump oil out of the ground are so uniformly old and decrepit that they pose a problem every bit as dire as peak oil itself. In the meantime, he said, to offset climbing prices, the developed nations have lately dipped so deeply into their accumulated stocks of crude and “refined product” that some countries may breach what is called their “minimum operating levels.”

Offstage, he told me, “We’re too preoccupied trying to figure out the exact date of the peak. Meanwhile, we’ll drain the gasoline pool and it will be gone forever.”

The other most significant contribution came from Texas geologist Jeffrey Brown who presented a full-blown version of his theory that world export rates from the countries with oil to sell are liable to decline so much more sharply than their actual production decline rates that the world would be thrust into an oil export crisis within the next five years – and that this export crisis would turn out to be the defining condition of the Peak Oil story.

There were plenty of other fruitful contributions on subjects ranging from the future of the airline industry to reviving passenger rail service, to the question of nuclear power. And there was one real clunker presentation by a shill from the Toyota corporation, designed to blow green smoke up the audience’s ass about the future of happy motoring (Toyota’s products will save it from Peak Oil).

For coverage of the particulars, visit TheOilDrum.com, the nation's best energy discussion website. If there were reporters from the mainstream media present at this event, I didn’t run into of them. They are apparently uninterested in the fate of industrial economies, at least as long as Senator Larry Craig is out there on the frontiers of toilet coaching science, and Britney Spears is still sparring with K-Fed, and Diddy is beating people up in nightclubs, and others are murdering their friends for dissing their dogs.
From Kunstler.com

NVDL: Once again, I can't top the urgency implicit in Jim's message here. GROOT KAK is a certainty, and within 5 years. Happy motoring until then.

The Walls Move In

Gold is at a 28 year high. Oil prices are in constant flux; nudging all time records. The JSE has blasted through the 30 000 level, food prices are on the march - some of them doubling since last year. Car sales in South Africa have shrunk year on year for the sixth consecutive month. Banks are issuing alerts. Did you ever stop to think: could something be awry*?


Remember the clamour of voices a long time ago about oil prices? Now we're seeing oil remain comfortably in the $70 range. It's a matter of time before that mad dog goes yelping beyond $100. Some of us thought it would be last year or this year. Every month this doesn't happen, means an even sharper crash. People who say this sort of thing are typically called 'doomsayers'.


Unfortunately, the message has been lost in noise and hysteria. The message (once again) is this: We are at a Peak, a global peak, the likes of which we will never see again. Never before and never again will so many people - so many individuals - enjoy so much lavish and luxurious wealth and power as they are now. This exceptional period of surplus and abundance has been unleashed courtesy of the legacy of fossil fuels. These fuels take millions of years of sunlight bathed forests to shore up. We've pissed half of it into the atmosphere in less than 100 years.


Until now, this fantastic We should say cheap and abundant, because from here on out, with the human population of this planet having absorbed all the capacity that such artificial energy abundance created - we are now moving towards scarcity.


The implications of this are scary. Try not to panic. I spoke recently to a wealthy private game farm owner, an intelligent doctor. He was saying that ecosystems that are out of balance don't correct themselves neatly and seamlessly. They do so in chronic and destabilising crashes. So if a certain species breaches capacity, it doesn't just slowly reduce itself until it fits into a newer and better and more balanced efficiency. Instead, it crashes.


Logic indicates that the same fate awaits us. By us I mean you and all the human beings around you, and every human being you have ever met. I know it sounds dramatic. In fact, it's impossible to overdrammatize. In our lifetimes we are going to see Big Shit. We'll see the human population crash from over 6 billion, and if we're lucky, we'll have 1 billion left over. The doctor I spoke to reckoned on less - a few hundred million perhaps.


I'm sorry if that sounds pessimistic. It's really just a logical and realistic assessment. Meanwhile, the newspapers are starting to notice that something - they're not sure what - is awry. Meanwhile, while the stock exchanges celebrate and crash through new records, so too does worldwide weather, reducing crops to debris and dust. The walls move in on a world that thinks it can continue moving on towards happily ever after. I wish it was a happy ending folks, but unfortunately, it isn't.


The major challenge in the future will be agriculture. Translation: the jobs of the future will be farming, as we attempt to feed ourselves. It's a grim and austere future that right now seems impossible. That is the extent of our common delusion.


Awry: Adj. 1. awry - turned or twisted toward one side; "a...youth with a gorgeous red necktie all awry"- G.K.Chesterton; "his wig was, as the British say, skew-whiff"
askew, cockeyed, skew-whiff, wonky, lopsided
crooked - having or marked by bends or angles; not straight or aligned; "crooked country roads"; "crooked teeth"
2. awry - not functioning properly; "something is amiss"; "has gone completely haywire"; "something is wrong with the engine"
amiss, haywire, wrong
malfunctioning, nonfunctional - not performing or able to perform its regular function; "a malfunctioning valve"
Adv. 1. awry - away from the correct or expected course; "something has gone awry in our plans"; "something went badly amiss in the preparations"
amiss
2. awry - turned or twisted to one side; "rugs lying askew"; "with his necktie twisted awry"
askew, skew-whiff

Friedman On Energy Efficiency - Walmart Style

NVDL: I enjoyed The World Is Flat, but I have to agree with James Howard Kunstler. Friedman may be the golden boy of the New York Times, but sometimes it's patently obvious that a substantial fraction of logic just isn't there. The same of course is true for the majority of Earth's human population.

Take this article on Energy Efficiency. Is Wal-Mart a poster child for energy efficiency? Not on this planet? On which planet are you Mr Friedman?

You see to even start talking about Energy Efficiency, the last company you want to give a badge is WalMart. Why? Because it's entire substrate is based on wasting energy. The Walmart's and Pick 'n Pay's may be the darlings of suburbia, but if you remember, it was these supermarkets that put local producers out of business in the first place. The bakers, the butchers and the candlestick makers all disappeared. In their place we got everything we wanted at low low prices - but shipped from far away. Canned goods, fishing rods and toilet seats from China, maize flower from the USA, wool from Australia and eletronics from Japan and Korea. Try get those things made locally. Try to find the local expertise. It's gone.

So all these things have to get packed and insulated - there's an energy input in itself - and then conveyed in massive metal crates on ships. These horizontal skyscrapers then lug all this stuff to harbors around the world, and then this stuff is trucked around to cities and stores. Who carries the cost? The planet. Cheap and abundant Oil runs these warehouses on wheels. So what happens when oil is no longer cheap, and no longer abundant? Answer: no more warehouses on wheels. Simple.

In fact far more efficient in the scheme of things is local farming doing its thing well and selling at local markets. It's healthier, and in the grand scheme of things, the overall costs - and YES THIS INCLUDES ENERGY COST! - is lower.

The future by the way portends the end of WalMart. When energy costs reach a certain critical level, globalisation will shift gears until it hits reverse. Then we return to local industries, and we turn to organic systems around us. Let's hope by then the planet's weather systems are still benign enough to allow us to try the local route. Given the neverending belching of exhaust fumes, and the temptation to turn to coal after oil, it's probable that we will attempt to farm the whirlwind.

Lead, Follow or Move Aside
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

China today is entering a really delicate phase on the climate-energy issue — the phase I like to call “The Wal-Mart environmental moment.” I wish the same could be said of America and President Bush.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
Go to Columnist Page »
The “Wal-Mart environmental moment” starts with the C.E.O. adopting a green branding strategy as a purely defensive, public relations, marketing move. Then an accident happens — someone in the shipping department takes it seriously and comes up with a new way to package the latest product and saves $100,000. This gets the attention of the C.E.O., who turns to his P.R. adviser and says, “Well, isn’t that interesting? Get me a sustainability expert. Let’s do this some more.”
The company then hires a sustainability officer, and he starts showing how green design, manufacturing and materials can save money in other areas. Then the really smart C.E.O.’s realize they have to become their own C.E.O. — chief energy officer — and they start demanding that energy efficiency become core to everything the company does, from how its employees travel to how its products are manufactured.
That is the transition that Lee Scott, Wal-Mart’s C.E.O., has presided over in the past few years.

Last July, Mr. Scott was visiting a Wal-Mart in Las Vegas on a day when the temperature was more than 100 degrees. He happened to notice that a Wal-Mart staple — inexpensive Styrofoam coolers — were not being promoted by the store’s associates. As Andrew Ruben, Wal-Mart’s vice president for sustainability, told me: “Lee walked into the store and said, ‘It’s 105 degrees. Why aren’t we selling any coolers?’ The associates said, ‘We don’t want to sell Styrofoam coolers because of their impact on the environment.’ So Lee called us afterwards and said: ‘We’re going to have to figure this out.’ By that he meant innovation of a different kind of cooler” that doesn’t come from petroleum-based Styrofoam, which is not biodegradable and usually not recycled.

Wal-Mart on Monday also announced a partnership with the Carbon Disclosure Project (C.D.P.) to measure the amount of energy used to create products throughout its supply chain — many of which come from China.

Said C.D.P. Chief Executive Paul Dickinson: “Wal-Mart will encourage its suppliers to measure and manage their greenhouse gas emissions, and ultimately reduce the total carbon footprint of Wal-Mart’s indirect emissions. We look forward to other global corporations following Wal-Mart’s lead.”

China’s leadership is not where Lee Scott is yet. Chinese officials still put their highest priority on growing G.D.P. — their bottom line. But for the first time, the costs of this breakneck growth are becoming so obvious on China’s air, glaciers and rivers that the leadership asked for briefings on global warming. Many Chinese mayors are looking to get clean-technology industries — like wind turbines and solar — started in their cities.

At such a key time, if the U.S. government adopted a real carbon-reducing strategy, as California and Wal-Mart have, rather than the obfuscations of the Bush team, it would have a huge impact on China and only trigger more innovation in America.

Mr. Bush will be convening his climate photo op — oops, I mean “conference” — in Washington tomorrow, which will include Chinese and Indian officials. But, as Rob Watson, the C.E.O. of EcoTech International, which works on environmental issues in China put it: “The Chinese are not going to take anything we say seriously if we don’t set an example ourselves.”

David Moskovitz, who directs the Regulatory Assistance Project, a nonprofit that helps promote green policies in China, was even more blunt: “The most frequent and difficult question we get in China with every policy initiative we put forward is: ‘If it is so good, why aren’t you doing it?’ It’s hard to answer — and somewhat embarrassing. So we point to good examples that some American states, or cities, or companies are implementing — but not to the federal government. We can’t point to America.”

Too bad. “It was America which put environmentalism on the world’s agenda in the 1970s and ’80s,” recalled Glenn Prickett, a senior vice president for Conservation International. “But since then, somehow, the wealthiest and most powerful country on the planet has gone to the back of the line.”

Leadership is about “follow me” not “after you.” Getting our national climate regulations in order is necessary, but it will not be sufficient to move China. We have to show them what Wal-Mart is showing its competitors — that green is not just right for the world, it is better, more profitable, more healthy, more innovative, more efficient, more successful. If Wal-Mart can lead, and California can lead, why can’t America?

NVDL: Because the thinking there is faulty. The thinking is based on previous investment, when everything must be overhauled. Lifestyles must change, and naturally, Americans don't know how to do that. Not many do.