LifeItself

I am on a short vacation with my wife.  We are staying in my daughter boyfriend's family summer house in Casadero, 9 miles west from Guerneville, CA.  It is a very nice house in the middle of a majestic redwood forest, separated by a long forest driveway from the road. In the house, I find five white document boxes that hold an archive of old LA Times newspapers.  I open the first box and pick up at random the business section for LA Times dated May 21, 1992.  In it, my eyes lock immediately on a report bemoaning President Bush's handling of the Savings and Loans debacle, and how the government loan pools favor big S&Ls relative to ordinary people.  Then I see an article stating that people will never again look the same at investing into houses. (In May 1992, we were in the second year of a major housing slump.)   Does this sound familiar, or what?   Why have we forgotten?  I take it back: Why have most people forgotten? I have no...

Yesterday I gave a presentation to a group of distinguished business leaders.  In my presentation, I tried to show that the global rate of production of petroleum and the associated lease condensate is at an all-time high or a "peak" that at a greatly expanded scale looks like a "plateau."  I used my published, peer-reviewed extensions of King Hubbert's approach to support my arguments. Figure 22 in King Hubbert's report "Nuclear Energy and Fossil Fuels," Publication No. 95, Shell Development Company, Exploration and Production Research, Houston, TX, June 1956. I received a significant push back from several members of the audience.  Their arguments were as follows: King Hubbert tried to address the question of finite resources and today we know he was wrong. Even though Hubbert cycles emerge for individual oil provinces, they cannot emerge for the world.  We have been predicting the peak of global oil production for a long time and it ne...