First of all, thanks to everyone who helped me get here. It's been a really great event. I'm utterly exhausted, but totally energized! I liveblogged this in the AM, but didn't have time to cross post 'til now. Enjoy!...
(note: all is paraphrased. Please pardon typos, I can't type that fast! It's really, really long, much more after the fold.)
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Adam Siegel
My name is A Siegel, and I'm a carboholic...
[intros Jerome]
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Jerome a Paris: [Several charts of oil prices over the last few years] Mentioned that it was up to $130 3 weeks ago. It's down to 130 again, so the problem is over, bubble is popped! [laughter]
The price of oil has moved from non-noticeable to noticeable, and is now heading to painful. As you can see prices have gone up, but in actual terms, it's not EXPENSIVE yet. If you're just grumbling about it, it's not high enough yet to cause demand destruction.
Markets do not know where the price is going. [more charts] They were saying for a long time, that no matter what, the price is going to be at $20. ... and now the assumption is that the price is going to be wherever it is right now. So they're staying close to the pack and not going anywhere.
We should have known for a long time that there is a problem brewing. Since 1984, every single year, we've been burning more oil than we've been finding. The graph shows we are not going in the right direction with consumption.
Why are prices so high now? Production has been catching up with production capacity. We no longer have spare capacity. As you know anything that reduces production has to go with hand in hand demand destruction, and when China and others increase consumption, we must decrease ours more to keep overall consumption even. Otherwise the price rises.
Oil producing regions are peaking and declining really fast. You have countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran in an economic boom, buying cars, burning more and more oil, the volume available for export has been declining for several years, even more than the production capacity.
Reducing consumption means demand destruction.
It's not just oil, coal is not going to be the solution. The energy value of coal peaked in 1998. Gas is not going to be a solution either. We are going to move away from oil whether we want to or not. We still have a choice of solutions right now, if we start solving it now. Famine is the market solution if we let prices make the choice. It's our choice now, it won't be later.
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Mark Sumner:
Photos of Thomas Jefferson, Donald Rumsfeld, Thomas Gold.
These people are believers.
Jefferson:
Expected to find the mastodon in Louisiana. People then did not believe it possible for an animal to become extinct.
Rumsfeld:
Will find weapons of mass destruction. Why? It made no sense, in light of inspection reports that said they aren't there, and our own intelligence that said they weren't there.
Thomas Gold:
[pulsars astronomer]
Claims oil coal, natural gas not really fossil fuels, but bubble up from the middle of the earth due to some mysterious process. Claims it can be found in places we would not look. On the face it's a little ludicrous, but after research, really ludicrous.
BUT we're behaving like there's endless oil. US oil production is falling no matter the incentives, the price, and so on. Anyone pretending that any drilling anywhere in the US will fix our problems doesn't know what they're talking about.
Anyone that thinks we can find, hiding mysteriously, some oil source that will reverse this trend is looking for mastodons. 98 countries produce petroleum, 68 are past peak, 60 are in permanent decline.
Clean air act: the industry's estimated cost of the clean air act was off by 3 orders of magnitude (too high). It really cost far, far less. Electric bills went down despite claims that they would increase by 50%.
You cannot trust the industry when they tell you what these programs will cost to implement. They will be off by orders of magnitude. They will not factor in gains from all the new infrastructure we'll build.
Important point: what Gore talked about yesterday doesn't do anything about oil.
Transportation doesn't run on electricity, it runs on oil. We need to entangle the systems. If we electrify transportation THEN electrical generation can solve the problem.
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Adam Siegel:
Principles:
- Improve capacity for broader change
- 50 state impact, tangible, near term
- Public private, federal state local partnerships
- Not a comprehensive solution, but part of the solution
- Establish freshman class leadership.
Concepts:
- Energy smart communities
- Energysmart rail (reduce 10% in a decade)
- Energy smart mail
- Green the schools
energy smart education (make a profit while improving performance)
- Plugin hybrid electric school buses. (one of these sitting outside today)
Plugin Hybrid buses
- 6 - 10 mpg
reduce diesel pollution
reduce health risk
Emergency services - mobile backup power generatior
- Cost to buy is higher, but lower cost to own.
$60 million/yr, 5 yr, changes equation.
There are a lot of solver BBs that will help slay the dragon.
Make the right choice the preferred and easy choice.
Join the effort
- ideas?
- comments?
- Suggestions?
- Resources?
skills
time
enthusiasm
Hope to work with a bunch of freshmen to develop a freshman package for energy.
Engage with us.
UPDATE [The other half of the presentation]:
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Debbie Cook:
Crossroads between bliss and dead end. I think there's definitely some middle ground.
In Ireland, James Schlesinger said: "Conceptually the battle is over, the peakists have won. ... Americans have to be hit over the head with a 2 x 4."
We can drill another 1.5 million wells in TX. We can blow off every top of every mountain in the country. We can starve two billion people who can't afford food [photo of corn ethanol]. We can dig and drill more. We can consume all the water and natural gas to unconventional oil, just so we can hang on to our "quality of life." [collage of photos of stuff that adds no real value to our lives.]
The expected reserves from new discovery (big jack) are insufficient. [slide with dramatic contrast of the gap between the amount it would theoretically produce and the amount of oil demand.]
We're pumping 8 times as much oil now than we were when I was born, but are we eight times happier? Are we happier than my grandmother? They had roads, coffee houses, transportation (rail), police on bicycles, santa clause, baseball, and lovers. Our grandparents missed out on so much stuff! [photo of family with more plastic junk in their yard than you can imagine.]
We're still in search of the Emerald city. But it was there all along. We go to Europe to see all these quaint villages, but we can't seem to build it in America. We're going to need more community gardens. The French have small farms interspersed with small villages. You don't have to do everything large.
[missed most of this: Ithaca is going to have a "podcar city" meeting for transit planning. Very interesting.]
Communities are always in transition. What will we be in 50 years?
- Energy smart america campaign
- Develop a process for creating policy
- Conservation in a hurry
- Remove barriers to renewables
- localize food , services, jobs
- Eliminate biofuels subsidies
- Zero energy buildings
- Electrify transport
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Mark Begich, Anchorage mayor:
In Alaska, I have seen forests in my community where we never worried about spruce bark beetles, and now they're drying out due to the beetles and there are fires like I've never seen.
In one storm, 75 feet of a village's land disappeared. 75 feet DEEP (back from the shore). Now roads are like driving on a roller coaster in the interior because the permafrost is melting.
Rarely will you see me talk about emissions. Most people are concerned about what it's going to cost. We try to present in terms of economic benefit down the road. We have implemented a $1/ton extra refuse site charge. We hired a renewable resource coordinator with the money.
Now we're working on 20 - 30 projects with university interns. We put the resources in to make these programs successful. If you short 'em out in terms of dollars, you won't succeed. What people want to see are practical real events. We changed all the Christmas lights to LED lights in Anchorage. When preparing to set it all up, the electrical guys said "We won't have enough power to run all those lights." They didn't understand how much less power they use. Once we tapped 'em in, we saved 80% on our electrical and had more lights. So people saw this and went to the store and wanted some of those lights for themselves. They went to the store, but there was only one little shelf with some lights. This year, people went to the store and there were all sorts of LED lights.
Small business people didn't know what to do with their waste. Their business focus doesn't allow them the time to figure out how to deal with it. An intern in this program decided to change the cardboard receptacles to have a flatter opening, which causes people to flatten their boxes, and now business are saving tons of money because the cardboard is being put in there but trash isn't and thus it isn't being contaminated. As a result, the cardboard can all be recycled, saving tons of waste (and the associated disposal fees) from the landfill.
In Sitka, there are few roads, with a 35 mph max. I rode in a Zen there, but the owner had to modify it to drive 25 mph, because the old laws don't understand the new technology [contextual comment by Liane: since it's an electric car, it's classified like those other electric vehicles we see more commonly: golf carts, and thus regulations require the max speed be reduced]. [typical speed limit on the island is 35 mph, min is 25, in rare places max is 45.]
In Anchorage, we're now retrofitting all the city lights. We have 18 hours of night in winter. Lighting costs us millions and millions of dollars. There are 16,000 lights. When we replace them, we will save $1.6 million a year, cost only $5 million to install.
There's a TON of low hanging fruit in government buildings.
Create $200 billion bond bank, our policy is retrofit every single government building in the country (small communities and large), do it with the savings on energy. Take the difference to seed new ideas and fund R & D. Can do it without ONE new tax dollar. Big ideas create new ideas.
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Adam Siegel:
Doing the public buildings will help people learn about it. If you put a green roof on a school, parents and inspectors will learn about it.
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Congressman Jeff Merkley
We're talking about energy smart schools, energy smart rail, and energy smart mail. We need an Energy Smart Congress and Energy Smart Senate!
Do you remember in the movie "The Graduate" the famous line about the future? "The future is..." [audience reply "plastics!"].
The future today is Energy.
We see so many changes in our environment due to one degree temperature change, if we don't act now as congress, by the time a small child is my age, the temp will go up 5 - 9 degrees. Let's take on those issues together.
We redrafted a bill that valued property rights AND land use. I'd like to say we had the best energy smart legislation and legislature. We need to do the same with a new energy smart US congress and senate. If you see a plug-in school bus, you realize you can plug in everything. We need completely plug-in car system in America. We need a strategy to take on the efficiency of our existing and new buildings.
Conservation is often the way to take on the alternative energy investment and alternative fuels. If we're out front, then what's good for the planet will be good for the economy. Some ideas will be dead ends. Some will work out very well.
We need to think in terms of a distributed grid. We need to make every house a contributor. We need that leadership with the next president and the next senate. A cap & trade without loopholes can create a transition. What we did for sulfur dioxide, we need to do with global arming gases. We in this room can be a huge factor in making it happen. What you do on blogs is telling people what the mainstream media doesn't get to. Energy's at the heart of our national security, foreign policy, economic policy.
UPDATE:
After typing all this, I got to prove that when appropriately sleep deprived, I can give our President a run for his money in a race for "blithering idiot." Enjoy my 1 minute, 57 seconds of rambling captured for posterity:
