LifeItself

First the good news. Lacking leadership, guidance and resources, most of my fellow Americans are stepping in, wearing those masks and practicing social distancing. Here in Texas, Governor Abbot abandoned pretending that he is a blind fool, and ordered mandatory masks, $250 fines for not wearing them (including a text message on my phone from the Texas disaster warning system), and bar closures. The Houston Medical Center, where I recently went, looked like a ghost town. We need to think a lot harder about reopening schools, rather than bars. In my Hayes county, practically everyone wears masks in stores, even in Home Depot, whose pro-Trump CEO does not seem to get this simple message: if you care about the economy, wear a bloody mask and make sure that together we will not be overwhelmed by the fear of the virus, and will resume sending our children to school, visiting doctors and dentists, start flying, visit hotels and  frequent outdoor restaurants. Right now, this broad attitude...

Where are you going, Great Britain? The ongoing vigorous discussion of Brexit seems to be vacuous on both sides of the argument, because it misses the most important physical realities of staying alive in Great Britain, not merely of who gets to stay there. The British Isles consist of some 6000 specs of land with the total area of 315,000 square kilometers (the area of Poland or Arizona). They are inhabited by over 70 million people (roughly twice the population of Poland and over ten times the population of Arizona). My own calculations of Great Britain’s carrying capacity pointed more towards 3 million people, who could be sustained by the local environment. This means that to stay alive the Brits must be a part of a global community; otherwise they will perish. And that’s that. Let me rephrase now: The United Kingdom is a small, overpopulated and rather insignificant country, which thought otherwise and consequently made a rather suicidal choice that would expose its terri...

My Dear Western Friends, Many of you have read my previous letter , dated May 4, 2015, and responded by email. Thank you. I think we still have a little problem: Your replies have been much too U.S.-centric.  Unfortunately,  the world today is far too interlinked, in good part because of the U.S. policies over the last 35 years, and all problems are global.  Please parse the last sentence again and try to understand that you can no longer get away with being over there and ignoring what is happening here and everywhere else.  The cheap clothing and industrial products you buy in the U.S. come at a very high price to all other parts of the world.  High price means environmental and social deterioration. Since hardly anyone cares about the environment until they can't breath, have no water to drink, food to eat, drown in floods or mudslides; or alternatively fall sick with cancer, Ebola, cholera, AIDS or Hepatitis, let's focus on the social deterioration an...

My Dear Western Friends, As one of the old classics said, and I paraphrase, "Where you look, defines your outlook."  By email, you asked me several questions. Below are some of my answers. As links in green, I picked two of my old blogs and kept on adding several articles from the New York Times that were published in the last few days.  I am not the only person who is morally troubled. On the fracking revolution It used to be that massive environmental destruction happened in the God forsaken foreign countries or the poor empty parts of our motherlands.  Not anymore.  Now heavy industrial activities come to where we live and work, and environmental damage happens in the ecosystems we actually care about.  That's the reality of resource exhaustion paired with the ever-growing appetite for these resources from us, the Bubble People. Take "shale revolution" as an example: 10,000 tons of clean, round, well-sorted fracking sand per well, or one hundred 100 t...

To my relief, Dr. Paul Krugman has published yet another sermon, When Prophecy Fails .  For months, I have been fascinated by Dr. Krugman's blithe, unwavering insistence on the superiority of his arguments over those of differently clueless economists.  Today, I decided to compose my reply. Back in the old days, in Poland, I often listened to a lovely satirical radio program on an FM station with a short range and not much attention from censors.  Among others, each week brought an installment of a philosophical discourse, entitled "On the Superiority of Easter over Christmas." The author, Jan Tadeusz Stanisławski, a self-proclaimed Professor of Applied Presumptology, would explain in short, exquisitely absurd monologs the utter stupidity of the various pseudo-scientific arguments about economics and society. This episode, " Greed for Gold ," is as good as any.  It ends with the following summary: Why are we talking about gold, someone might ask? They also a...

...As sheep, that step from forth their fold, by one, Or pairs, or three at once; meanwhile the rest Stand fearfully, bending the eye and nose To ground, and what the foremost does, that do The others, gath'ring round her, if she stops... Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio , Canto 14 Most economists make it all too easy to bash them. When I think of how eerily detached from reality the main stream of economics is, I also recall the situation with corn ethanol in 2005.  Only two U.S. faculty, Dr. David Pimentel and I, went public against the nonsense that was being propagated throughout the society by the ill-informed greens, scientists, lobbyists, economists, venture-capitalists, lawmakers, and almost everyone in the media.  We were both savaged at the time and for a few more years.  Now everybody shrugs their arms and says pretty much what we were saying all along.  Today, Chapter 2 of the same nonsense, or the "second generation biofuels," is being closed at a g...

In the summer of 1858, Edwin Drake punched 33 ft of cast iron pipe into the earth to prevent near surface water from collapsing the hole. He then lowered drilling equipment into the cased hole and used a steam engine to drill a successful, 69 ft deep well. On August 27th, shallow oil flowed almost to the surface and was recovered with a sump pump. Within 10 years more than 5,500 wells had been drilled, and 1,200 were producing oil. Edwin Drake made absolutely no money on developing modern drilling technology and died a poor man. The North American oil industry four years after Drake's well. The Phillips well is on the right, and the Woodford well on the left. Located in the middle of Oil Creek Valley (note the river at the right of the photograph), these two wells showed the early promise of the Oil Regions. The Phillips well was the most productive ever drilled to date, flowing initially at 4,000 barrels per day in October 1861. The ...

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...