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AND JESUS WENT OUT, and His disciples, to the towns of Caesarea Philippi; and He asked them: “Whom do men say that I am?” Nowadays, of course, Jesus would simply have checked the blogs to find the answer to that question. The blogs are scary. You go there for the lowdown on Kingsland or the split in the party only to find your name knocking dog and anonymous people discussing you like if you are somebody.

Lowdown’s Article

Our favourite Nation columnist Richard ‘Dick’ Hoad decided to join the crowd and ‘pic-pun’ the blogs today. He claims that the blogs ‘scandalizing’ his name. He went so far as to flirt with being blasphemous by suggesting that if Jesus Christ were alive he would check the blogs for feedback and ignore his trusted disciples.

Man Lowdown you too funny!

He seems to have a beef about anonymous people being able to visit the blogs and ‘air’ people business in the virtual world of the Internet. The BU household has a message for Lowdown. It takes ‘balls’ or should we say a ‘dick’ to use ones baptized name in a place like Bimshire. Of course because Lowdown is a ‘Dick’ he has the ‘balls’ to do his thing.

As always his article is thought provoking but represent a minority view in a Barbados which has become fixated to achieve developed status come hell or high water.

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88 responses to “Dick Got Balls”

  1. Bajan Avatar
    Bajan

    I agree with Lowdown. I would sacrifice alot of today to recover yesterday.

  2. Bimbro Avatar
    Bimbro

    We once had a sugar cane industry, too but, as I understand it, no one wants to work in the field these days! Does he propose to force, people to do so!

    I used to think Hoad had something important to say, until I read this article!

  3. xenophobe chick Avatar
    xenophobe chick

    Tragic old codger.

  4. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Mr. Hoad’s article has very little to do with blogs and he has only mentioned blogs, in passing, as an introduction to the main focus of his article which is to express that “living in the past” is not necessarily a bad thing.
    If there was a cataclysmic event that took place such as a nuclear event or a successful world wide terrorist event that left Barbados isolated and without oil and gas imports and therefore no electricity, no cars on the road and no food being brought in, how many of you would be ready? How many of you, would be able to step up to the plate and survive such a crisis through the means that Mr. Hoad has mentioned in his article? Does your government even have a “plan” should such an event take place?
    I agree totally with Mr. Hoad. The word “progress” is a word that has been embued with all sorts of positive connotations but progress comes at a far too hefty price when it enslaves humanity to the point where they no longer remember how to survive without it.

  5. Gabriel the Horn Blower Avatar
    Gabriel the Horn Blower

    Lowdown is not about the past. He is very much about the future. A future where the people of Barbados (and what they know and can do) really matter.

  6. David Avatar
    David

    Don’t for a minute don’t think that we don’t get where Dick is coming from. He is very concerned that as a developed country we have become a slave to the goal of being developed and in the process we have done what the late Errol Barrow warned us about repeatedly i.e.become mendicants. The problem with our people is that we have allowed ourselves to become indoctrinated in the ways of others.

    We doubt that Barbados has the capacity to drag itself away from its current path. But we will keep trying.

  7. JC Avatar
    JC

    We dont have a choice but than to try David our futurre depends on it;

  8. NO MORE MARINAS EVER AGAIN Avatar
    NO MORE MARINAS EVER AGAIN

    It’s not a question of being “developed” or not. Whatever that means. “Underdeveloped” countries have their own set of problems and let’s hope we never have to revert back to them.

    (Although that might kick some sense into us.)

    No, our problem is we’ve become totally ungovernable. As a result of the ruling class educating us. As long as we were all stupid they got away with the crap they’re doing today but we were too dumb to realise it. Or object.

    Put another way we’re too intelligent for our own good. There was a fleeting window of opportunity when our rulers considered reacting to our basic needs and desires.

    But since there are now so many diverse needs and desires and not all can be accommodated the plunderers plunder, the warmongers make war, the profiteers profit and the rulers do whatever it takes to get elected.

    Did you see Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama tonguing each other yesterday?

  9. John Avatar
    John

    Very often Lowdown speaks in parables and it takes time to come to a realisation of exactly what he is saying.

    Given his love for God’s creatures, I guess the goat in the Kingsland saga must have piqued his interest.

  10. anotherview Avatar
    anotherview

    Hoadie was featured in the newspaper sometime and it seems to me that if something bad were to happen say to the shipping or airline routes, we would all have to go to Hoadie’s farm and beg for some milk or use the computer.

  11. Technician Avatar
    Technician

    #

    Bimbro // June 28, 2008 at 3:47 am

    We once had a sugar cane industry, too but, as I understand it, no one wants to work in the field these days! Does he propose to force, people to do so!

    I used to think Hoad had something important to say, until I read this article!
    ———————————————————————————–
    If you used to think Hoad had something important to say until you read ‘this’ article…then you give the impression that you never read his articles before. In doing that, you would surely have missed his points. You claim to have Barbados at heart yet still you dont have a clue on the history of this island. To be dismissive of Hoad, shows your true ignorance of anything Bajan.

  12. Green Monkey Avatar
    Green Monkey

    A few years down the road as oil prices continue to skyrocket, Mr. Hoad and those of his ilk will be seen as visionaries. Hopefully, it will not be too late for us to heed their call.

    Mother Earth’s Triple Whammy
    Why North Korea Was a Global Crisis Canary

    By John Feffer

    SNIP

    In the 1990s, North Korea was the world’s canary. The famine that killed as much as 10% of the North Korean population in those years was, it turns out, a harbinger of the crisis that now grips the globe — though few saw it that way at the time.

    That small Northeast Asian land, one of the last putatively communist countries on the planet, faced the same three converging factors as we do now — escalating energy prices, a reduction in food supplies, and impending environmental catastrophe. At the time, of course, all the knowing analysts and pundits dismissed what was happening in that country as the inevitable breakdown of an archaic economic system presided over by a crackpot dictator.

    They were wrong. The collapse of North Korean agriculture in the 1990s was not the result of backwardness. In fact, North Korea boasted one of the most mechanized agricultures in Asia. Despite claims of self-sufficiency, the North Koreans were actually heavily dependent on cheap fuel imports. (Does that already ring a bell?) In their case, the heavily subsidized energy came from Russia and China, and it helped keep North Korea’s battalion of tractors operating. It also meant that North Korea was able to go through fertilizer, a petroleum product, at one of the world’s highest rates. When the Soviets and Chinese stopped subsidizing those energy imports in the late 1980s and international energy rates became the norm for them, too, the North Koreans had a rude awakening.

    Like the globe as a whole, North Korea does not have a great deal of arable land — it can grow food on only about 14% of its territory. (The comparable global figure for arable land is about 13%.) With heavy applications of fertilizer and pesticides, North Koreans coaxed a lot of food out of a little land. By the 1980s, however, the soil was exhausted, and agricultural production was declining. So spiking energy prices hit an economy already in crisis. Desperate to grow more food, the North Korean government instructed farmers to cut down trees, stripping hillsides to bring more land into cultivation.

    Big mistake. When heavy rains hit in 1995, this dragooning of marginal lands into agricultural production only amplified the national disaster. The resulting flooding damaged more than 40% of the country’s rice paddy fields. Torrential rains washed away topsoil, while rocks and sand, dislodged from hillsides, ruined low-lying fields. The rigid economic structures in North Korea were unable to cope with the triple assault of bad weather, soaring energy, and declining food production. Nor did dictator Kim Jong Il’s political decisions make things any better.

    But the peculiarities of North Korea’s political economy did not cause the devastating famine that followed. Highly centralized planning and pretensions to self-reliance only made the country prematurely vulnerable to trends now affecting the rest of the planet.

    As with the North Koreans, our dependency on relatively cheap energy to run our industrialized agriculture and our smokestack industries is now mixing lethally with food shortages and the beginnings of climate overload, pushing us all toward the precipice. In the short term, we face a food crisis and an energy crisis. Over the longer term, this is certain to expand into a much larger climate crisis. No magic wand, whether biofuels, genetically modified organisms (GMO), or geoengineering, can make the ogres disappear.

    http://tomdispatch.com/post/174945/john_feffer_are_we_all_north_koreans_now_

    See also “How not to be the next North Korea” at: http://energybulletin.net/node/45482

    Eating Fossil Fuels
    By Dale Allen Pfeiffer

    SNIP

    The Green Revolution

    In the 1950s and 1960s, agriculture underwent a drastic transformation commonly referred to as the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution resulted in the industrialization of agriculture. Part of the advance resulted from new hybrid food plants, leading to more productive food crops. Between 1950 and 1984, as the Green Revolution transformed agriculture around the globe, world grain production increased by 250%.4 That is a tremendous increase in the amount of food energy available for human consumption. This additional energy did not come from an increase in incipient sunlight, nor did it result from introducing agriculture to new vistas of land. The energy for the Green Revolution was provided by fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers (natural gas), pesticides (oil), and hydrocarbon fueled irrigation.

    The Green Revolution increased the energy flow to agriculture by an average of 50 times the energy input of traditional agriculture.5 In the most extreme cases, energy consumption by agriculture has increased 100 fold or more.6

    In the United States, 400 gallons of oil equivalents are expended annually to feed each American (as of data provided in 1994).7 Agricultural energy consumption is broken down as follows:

    · 31% for the manufacture of inorganic fertilizer

    · 19% for the operation of field machinery

    · 16% for transportation

    · 13% for irrigation

    · 08% for raising livestock (not including livestock feed)

    · 05% for crop drying

    · 05% for pesticide production

    · 08% miscellaneous8

    Energy costs for packaging, refrigeration, transportation to retail outlets, and household cooking are not considered in these figures.

    To give the reader an idea of the energy intensiveness of modern agriculture, production of one kilogram of nitrogen for fertilizer requires the energy equivalent of from 1.4 to 1.8 liters of diesel fuel. This is not considering the natural gas feedstock.9 According to The Fertilizer Institute (http://www.tfi.org), in the year from June 30 2001 until June 30 2002 the United States used 12,009,300 short tons of nitrogen fertilizer.10 Using the low figure of 1.4 liters diesel equivalent per kilogram of nitrogen, this equates to the energy content of 15.3 billion liters of diesel fuel, or 96.2 million barrels.

    Of course, this is only a rough comparison to aid comprehension of the energy requirements for modern agriculture.

    In a very real sense, we are literally eating fossil fuels. However, due to the laws of thermodynamics, there is not a direct correspondence between energy inflow and outflow in agriculture. Along the way, there is a marked energy loss. Between 1945 and 1994, energy input to agriculture increased 4-fold while crop yields only increased 3-fold.11 Since then, energy input has continued to increase without a corresponding increase in crop yield. We have reached the point of marginal returns. Yet, due to soil degradation, increased demands of pest management and increasing energy costs for irrigation (all of which is examined below), modern agriculture must continue increasing its energy expenditures simply to maintain current crop yields. The Green Revolution is becoming bankrupt.

    http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html

    For some encouraging reports on how well organic farming without large scale fossil fuel input can work go to http://www.i-sis.org.uk/susag.php

  13. Bimbro Avatar
    Bimbro

    If you used to think Hoad had something important to say until you read ‘this’ article…then you give the impression that you never read his articles before.

    ****************

    Only to u, Tech! I’ve been aware of the farmer for years!

    How’s ur daughter? And be mindful of my warning about smoking around er!!!! 🙂

  14. Bimbro Avatar
    Bimbro

    Is it hot in Bim, today!!

    Laaaaaaaaaddddddddddddddddd!!!! 🙂

  15. David Avatar
    David

    We are aware that Hoad in all of his humility, and he is a humble man is a Barbados Scholar and a man of great intellect. Yet when we read his columns in comparison to others one can never tell as he manipulates the complicated language of English to communicate with all and sundry.

  16. Negroman Avatar
    Negroman

    Hoad loves to write tongue in cheek and plays the devils advocate.Very few of his articles are of nationl interest.I really do not get much informtion from Hoad’s columns.

  17. David Avatar
    David

    Negroman you are entitled to your opinion of course but you should remember that the ‘national interest’ must be embodied in the personal goals and ideals of John Citizen.

    PS. There is a reason why Hoad’s column is the most emailed on the Nation Website by the way.

  18. Bush tea Avatar
    Bush tea

    The thing is that most seem not to realize how fragile our ‘development’ is.

    What we call development is layers of technology siting on top of each other… and we have configured our lifestyles and our very existence on top of this pyramid.

    … for example – let us look only at one that we take for granted -WATER.

    Barbados’s water is scarce, UNDERGROUND for the most part, and very EXPENSIVE to pump and distribute….
    But since it has worked for the last 60 years we take it for granted. There are hundreds of actions that could disastrously disrupt this aspect of our lives – including scarce oil supplies.
    Many day to day aspects of our lives are similarly exposed….

    Hoad questions the wisdom of allowing ourselves to become hostage to such risks, when true happiness seems not to be derived from such development anyway. …and in fact, he argues, can be more readily found in the simple secure lifestyle…

    Hoad has been consistent and clear in this position…..

    Negroman, you understand immigration issues well, so which part of this you did not get?

  19. Green Monkey Avatar
    Green Monkey

    Keep on preaching Reverend Hoad. Don’t let the naysayers silence your message.

    Civilization’s golden era is teetering on collapse
    New millennium has brought a turning point in history, yet we ignore meltdown

    Hans Tammemagi, Special to the Sun
    Published: Saturday, June 28, 2008

    The period from 1950 to 2000 will be remembered as the Golden Era of modern civilization, the pinnacle reached by humans after a million years of evolution. This brilliant half-century was sponsored largely by fossil fuels, especially oil, which brought unprecedented economic growth, plentiful transportation and a rich and diverse lifestyle.

    But the new millennium has brought the end of cheap oil, and civilization is suddenly teetering on the edge of collapse. Even if we manage to scrape through (and it would require heroic efforts), life will change. We’re at one of the most important turning points in history, yet we persistently ignore the coming meltdown and just want to party on. Nero would be proud.

    So, why is civilization teetering?

    First, peak oil has arrived. There is no better signal than the price of oil, which has skyrocketed past $130 and shows no sign of slowing. Some shrug and claim there’s still a lot left, technology will find it and extract it. Others, as represented by the editors of Maclean’s magazine, feel that we have grappled with costly oil before and by applying determined conservation and new efficiencies, we will cope.

    Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Peak oil, this two-syllable piece of jargon, is another way of saying we are on the threshold of a major crisis. From now on the supply of oil will diminish each year, but population and demand will continue to grow. This is truly frightening because our modern industrial society is built on and totally dependent on this versatile fuel. It is the foundation for transportation, industry, agriculture, fishing and much more. As the gap between what economies and nations need and what they can get widens, bidding wars will erupt (they already have) and then shooting wars (one already has).

    SNIP

    Second, the world is facing a major food shortage. It took two centuries but the Malthusian Devil is finally banging on the door. For seven of the past eight years global production of cereal grains has not met consumption. The price of cereal crops such as rice, corn and wheat has doubled in the past year. Poor countries are hardest hit and food riots have broken out in more than 10 countries including Egypt, Cameroon, Morocco and Indonesia.

    SNIP

    Major changes are in the wind. At the very least it will mean paring back our lifestyles including, for example, less flying and driving, which will drive a stake into the heart of tourism, one of the world’s largest industries. Tourism-dependent places such as Phoenix that are located in a desert with obscenely sprawling suburbs are particularly vulnerable, and violence and societal breakdown are likely.

    James Kunstler, in his book, The Long Emergency, predicts that the United States will degenerate into a set of autonomous regions, with major urban centers replaced by numerous villages.

    Societal breakdown won’t happen quickly nor everywhere, but be sure of this: Change is coming and although poor nations will be hardest hit, North America will not be spared.

    We clearly need to think smaller eco-footprint with hybrid cars, smaller homes, diets with less meat, more bicycling and better recycling. If we all pitch in, these changes will buy us time-but only a little.

    While oil brought good times, it also allowed human numbers to soar well beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. We cannot continue to ignore this basic underlying problem. It will yield not one millimeter of progress if we decrease our environmental footprint by, say, 20 per cent but the population increases by 20 per cent over the same period.

    http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=2eeece50-285f-4c4b-bb37-2d053d04d4e8&p=2

  20. Technician Avatar
    Technician

    #

    Negroman // June 28, 2008 at 11:26 am

    Hoad loves to write tongue in cheek and plays the devils advocate.Very few of his articles are of nationl interest.I really do not get much informtion from Hoad’s columns.
    ————————————————————————————
    I beg to differ on this issue with you for once Negroman.
    From as long as I can remember reading his articles, all of his contributions have been of National interest.
    What I do find however, is that we as a people have become so dependent and indoctrinated on the materialistic ways of life that we find it hard and most difficult to relate to the simplistic way in which his message is put across.
    Maybe if he wore a suit, drove a BMW or chose a 18 oz. steak from Sandy Lane rather than one of Hammies’s or Riley’s hamcutters, just maybe others would relate and listen.

  21. reluctant nonbeliever Avatar
    reluctant nonbeliever

    Hoad’s a stuck record. How many times have we heard this sentimental back-to-the land stuff from him?

    I have nothing against the dude (he’s a decent-enough columnist) but think his so-called wit and erudition wildly overrated. He’s mildly amusing, sure. But nothing to get excited about.

    His great virtue is that he’s a reassuring, familiar voice in a world of change, as familiar (and predictable) as pudding and souse on Saturdays.

    But I’m with xenophobe chick:

    He’s basically an old codger (though I’d omit the tragic part) whose only appeal is to other old codgers.

    Sorry, old timers!

  22. Bimbro Avatar
    Bimbro

    That’s extremely, prfound Tech. This is n’t of national interst on the same basis as Hoad’s column, I don’t suppose, but how much is a hamcutter from Riley’s place, these days?

    I’ve forgotten!

  23. Bimbro Avatar
    Bimbro

    I gine home for Xmas an need to ensure having sufficient foreign currency.

  24. Tony Hall Avatar
    Tony Hall

    Anybody who says that Hoad’s articles are nonsense is woefully out of touch. I look forward to his column every Friday, and if one understands his use and and manipulation of the English language one would realise that he is discussing serious issues affecting or likely to affect Barbados. You see some of us Barbadians take ourselves too seriously.We are stuck in a straight jacket.

  25. Bimbro Avatar
    Bimbro

    I look forward to his column every Friday,

    ***********************

    Tony, it’s conceivable that you don’t lead as exciting a life as myself and Tech! Had u thought of that!

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    We are stuck in a straight jacket.

    **********************

    And the weather in Britain’s so warm these days that I hardly, ever find the need to wear a jacket at all!

  26. Yardbroom Avatar
    Yardbroom

    It is easy to look at bye gone days, as beautiful days of yore. When pleasant people did wonderful things. I am of an age to remember them well and at times delighted to have been there.

    Who can forget drives along the West Coast with beautiful vistas to the sea, so regular they seemed a continuous panorama.

    Buses laden with produce from the country, old ladies being helped with their bountiful loads. The bus stand at night, women balancing trays with sugar cakes, nuts, comforts and a plethora of sweet delights. Accents of people from Grenada, St Vincent, St Kitts, St Lucia mingling with deep Bajan in the city.

    A drive in the country meant just that, acres of sugar cane, stalks shimmering in the sun, they seemed to go on for ever.

    To offend in an area meant your parents would be responsible and your family called to account.

    They were nice days and in my innocence of life and its true meaning…I enjoyed them all. However, there was another side, almost all the shops in Broad Street, Bridgetown employed either white or fair skinned people. A very black face behind a counter was the exception… in a country with a…large majority of blacks.

    The Yacht Club – the main sailing club of an island people – was open to whites, a few blacks only a few could darken their doors. The Aquatic Club to a lesser degree was the same. My mother once told me of a professional black Barbadian, who had married a white woman abroad. On his return to Barbados he had to wait in the car park if his wife wanted to visit the Aquatic Club.

    St Winifreds school was peopled by mostly whites, there was always the odd black face, but it was odd indeed.

    Many households used kerosene lamps for their means of lighting. Hundreds of poor black boys in fading light, so studied. In the morning the poor had to catch water from the stand pipe to decant into barrels, before setting off for work.

    To those who could not afford a kerosene stove – and there were many – three stones in the back yard supported a cast iron pot heated by twigs, bits of wood and the ubiquitous dried nuts of the mahogany tree. Picturesque it might be but when the rain fell or was falling, picturesque it was not.

    Long tracks muddy and wetleading to houses almost in the middle of fields. People traversed them to go to church. It was not unusual to take ones shoes off before you reached…the front road.

    The majority were in charge…but they were not in charge.

    In seeking the halcyon days of yore you cannot have the pleasure without the pain, they go in tandem.

    I long for yesterday, but yesterday brings with it yesterday’s joy as well as yesterday’s pain.

    They were “some” who never felt the pain, they were cushioned from such. It is not perfect now – never will be – but the wind that blew away the pass also brought problems as well as benefits.

    The pass will”never” come again it is how we as a people, manage the “present” that matters.

    Dare I suggest, the depletion of fossil fuels is a separate issue.

  27. Technician Avatar
    Technician

    Yardbroom as usual on a Sunday morning…..You need your own column sir. It makes for good reading.

  28. John Avatar
    John

    Yardbroom

    Of course you may dare to suggest such a thing about fossil fuel.

    But shouldn’t you also explain why?

    The last line seems to be unsupported by the body of your contribution which lists the pains of the past we don’t want. You have not in my view connected the two.

    The inescapable conclusion is that we are living beyond our means.

    One of these days we will be forced to have our suits cut to the cloth we can afford ….. so why not accept the reality of our situation and make the choice while we can.

    We have come so far from the land that sustained our ancestors for centuries that many no longer even know that there is a diference and even worse, we don’t respect it.

    It is only old codgers like many of us bloggers who can appreciate the difference.

    Me, I think I would rather be poor and happy than poor and miserable.

    …. and if by management you mean the crap that has gone on in the past 50 years and built up billions(?) of dollars in debt, … no thanks.

    The pains you list from the past pale to insignificance when compared with the corruption, bribe taking and general mediocrity that persists today.

  29. Georgie Porgie Avatar
    Georgie Porgie

    Beautiful piece of prose Yardbroom. My English Teacher at HC would have been proud of you!

  30. Bimbro Avatar
    Bimbro

    Tech, it’s not very mannerly, when ur asked a question and don’t reply. I still need to arrange my currency!

  31. Green Monkey Avatar
    Green Monkey

    Author Richard Heinberg on “Peak Everything”:

    Petroleum is not the only important resource quickly depleting. Readers already acquainted with the Peak Oil literature know that regional production peaks for natural gas have already occurred, and that, over the short term, the economic consequences of gas shortages are likely to be even worse for Europeans and North Americans than those for oil. And while coal is often referred to as being an abundant fossil fuel, with reserves capable of supplying the world at current rates of usage for two hundred years into the future, a recent study updating global reserves and production forecasts concludes that global coal production will peak and begin to decline in ten to twenty years.4 Because fossil fuels supply about 85 percent of the world’s total energy, peaks in these fuels virtually ensure that the world’s energy supply will begin to shrink within a few years regardless of any efforts that are made to develop other energy sources.

    Nor does the matter end with natural gas and coal. Once one lifts one’s eyes from the narrow path of daily survival activities and starts scanning the horizon, a frightening array of peaks comes into view. In the course of the present century we will see an end to growth and a commencement of decline in all of these parameters:

    * Population
    * Grain production (total and per capita)
    * Uranium production
    * Climate stability
    * Fresh water availability per capita
    * Arable land in agricultural production
    * Wild fish harvests
    * Yearly extraction of some metals and minerals (including copper, platinum, silver, gold, and zinc)

    The point of this book is not systematically to go through these peak-and-decline scenarios one by one, offering evidence and pointing out the consequences – though that is a worthwhile exercise. Some of these peaks are more speculative than others: fish harvests are already in decline, so this one is hardly arguable; however, projecting extraction peaks and declines for some metals requires extrapolating current rising rates of usage many decades into the future.5 The problem of uranium supply beyond mid-century is well attested by studies, but has not received sufficient public attention.6

    Nevertheless, the general picture is inescapable; it is one of mutually interacting instances of over-consumption and emerging scarcity.

    Our starting point, then, is the realization that we are today living at the end of the period of greatest material abundance in human history – an abundance based on temporary sources of cheap energy that made all else possible. Now that the most important of those sources are entering their inevitable sunset phase, we are at the beginning of a period of overall societal contraction.

    This realization is strengthened as we come to understand that it is no happenstance that so many peaks are occurring together. All are causally related by way of the historic reality that, for the past 200 years, cheap, abundant energy from fossil fuels has driven technological invention, increases in total and per-capita resource extraction and consumption (including food production), and population growth. We are enmeshed in a classic self-reinforcing feedback loop:

    Fossil fuel extraction

    –> more available energy

    —-> increased extraction of other resources, and production of food and other goods

    ——> population growth

    ——–> higher energy demand

    ———-> more fossil fuel extraction (and so on)

    http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/185

    If you have a high speed internet connection you can watch Heinberg discussing Peak Everything on these 6 Youtube videos.

    Part 1

    Part 2

    Part 3

    Part 4

    Part 5

    Part 6

  32. John Avatar
    John

    In between working on the computer(s) and watching cricket I am also keeping an eye on the blogs.

    A hard drive is making threatening noises and I need to backup!!

    Nothing on the computer can be done in less than 5 minutes.

    While watching cricket on the TV I saw that the elecronic scoreboard is not working and the commentators are saying that neither the crowd nor the players know what the score is.

    There is also no manually operated scoreboard at the ground. I am pretty sure some of the cricketers don’t need the scoreboard but most of the crowd do.

    This is an example of the way of doing things in the olde time days of yore being replaced by millions of dollars in modern technology which apparently removes that pain ……. but which alas has unfortunately broken down.

    The question I think is did we get value for the money we owe in debt which we incurred supposedly to remove our pains from the olde time days of yore?

    Do we need to keep things, or ways of doing things from the days of yore to ensure that we can keep score effectively?

    I think we do!!

    It sure beats buying a second scoreboard as a backup.

    … of course some will argue that some kinds of pain are good, … the mind keeps active finding ways to overcome it.

  33. Hopi Avatar
    Hopi

    Hoad is so right. The mindset of the Bajan is deplorable. They’ve never led always followed, allowing others to define them. There is absolutely no PEAK OIL nor GLOBAL WARMING. This is the mother of all scams. Had the greasy oil companies gotten their grimy hands on Iraq, Iran, the Caspian Sea and Venezuelan oil everything would be fine. This scam is just another method of control. Just like the US, the bajans have fallen for this scam, simply because they’ve allowed others to define their development. Instead of cushioning their arses against inevitable they sit around waiting for the inflated price of oil/gas to fall. Do not wait for the penstriped prostitutes to pass a law telling you what to do, prepare yourselves for the coming cataclysm. This present system cannot sustain itself.

  34. Green Monkey Avatar
    Green Monkey

    If anyone thinks Peak Oil is a scam and we can continue operations as normal and fuel a perpetual worldwide economic growth by pumping oil out of the ground in endless quantities, I advise them to watch the lecture by physics professor Albert Bartlett on exponential growth. Professor Bartlett shows with very simple mathematics the very large cumulative effect that even quite small rates of continuous exponential growth in consumption has on resource depletion.

    http://globalpublicmedia.com/dr_albert_bartlett_arithmetic_population_and_energy

    Here’s another useful video “Are Humans Smarter Than Yeast?” that explains exponential growth and doubling times and shows how the problems inherent in exponential growth patterns (e.g. resource depletion) don’t generally become plainly evident until it is too late to take effective action.

    Remember: to think there is no limit to growth on a finite planet is precisely, mathematically equivalent to thinking that you may have a stabilized, steady state economy on a perpetually shrinking planet. Both claims are precisely, equally ludicrous!

    http://www.steadystate.org/CASSEFAQs.html

  35. Green Monkey Avatar
    Green Monkey

    For those who don’t like the Real Player format,
    Professor Bartlett’s lecture on exponential growth mentioned in my post above is now on Youtube as well:

  36. Hopi Avatar
    Hopi

    Green Monkey…..

    Yes I do think that Peak oil is a scam. Yet I will be the first to agree with Hoad that we should change our way of life. Dr. Albert A. Bartlett is from the same school of thought as Rockefeller i.e. Eugenics. Bartlett’s theory on exponential function leads to one conclusion and that is Population Control. One of his arguments is that people in the “underdeveloped” countries want to increase their material standard of living to his level i.e. western level, thus material consumption on their part will increase. As I mentioned in a previous post that it was ok for the US, UK and other western nations to develop and guzzle up as much of the earth’s resources as they wanted but now that the tables are turned and China, India and other are doing the same the west has a problem with that, therefore they hire people like Bartlett with a few letters in front of their names to try and use figures to confound the masses. You do not need to be in his field of “study” to know that Peak Oil and Global Warming just like the bogus War on Terror is fraudulent. The “brotherhood” has an agenda and high up on their list is the extinction of about 80-90% of humanity and one subtle and effective way to do this is by using people like Bartlett to convince you that you nothing but a useless eater to be eradicated.

  37. John Avatar
    John

    Hopi

    Check out the Social and Economic report 2005 for BArbados … Government Printery.

    Appendix 28 will show you that since 1996 the Barbados Water Authority has reached a peak volume of water.

    I suspect it cannot go any higher because the water resource is finite and thats all there is in the currently exploited coral area.

    The difference between water and oil is that water is renewable resource, it is part of a cycle, but oil is more than likely not. Some argue it is, some differ.

    Then go to the Public Library when it reopens and ask to see the Stanley Resources Study on Water done back in 1978.

    You will find that the behaviour you see in the economic report matches the projection made in the study.

    …. then think a bit more on how oil occurs.

    Water is a big problem too!! It snuck up on the politicians even though the studies were there to show how and when it would occur.

  38. Micro Mock Engineer Avatar
    Micro Mock Engineer

    Green Monkey,
    Peak Oil will be characterized by a fall in demand and/or efficiency improvements in our production and use of oil, rather than a fall in resource availability… as was the case for Peak Stone, Peak Iron, Peak Whale Oil, Peak Coal, Peak Agriculture etc. etc.
    The process will be driven by the development of alternatives – alternative energy sources as well as alternative energy conversion systems.
    Peak oil advocates fail to recognize that humans “create” natural resources by identifying useful applications (read: creating value) for naturally occurring substances. In the overall scheme of things the only natural resource of import and consequence is the human mind.
    Modern “Peak” theories originate with Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus in his “Essay on the Principle of Population” in which he concludes that human population increases at an exponential rate while food supplies increase at an arithmetic rate, and therefore population would inevitably exceed food supply leading to widespread famine. It should be quite obvious to anyone who examines global population and food supply growth over the past couple centuries that this is flawed thinking… indeed, not only has food production also been exponential but it has increased faster than population growth… using significantly less land per ton of food produced… hunger and malnutrition while still with us, is far less prevalent in the world today than in 1798 when Malthus wrote his essay, and in many cases is related to poor governance rather than genuine food shortages. Furthermore, population growth rates are actually NOT exponential – just check the statistics in developed countries and even right here in Barbados. Interestingly, empirical evidence suggests that the more affluent a country or society becomes the slower its population grows and in fact it often plateaus or declines.
    Despite being proven wrong time and time again, it seems one more resource we will never run short on is “Peakers” and “Preachers” spouting doom and gloom. Undoubtedly, one day your civilization collapse/end of world scenarios will be correct, but so far your failure rate is 100%.
    Trust me, BBE will return like a thief in the night. You (and many others here) are wasting valuable time and energy trying to predict it.

    As for BU’s favorite columnist, I think that he is often mistakingly accused of living in the past. Living in the past is just plain silly. We should cherish the past, particularly the good aspects, but not to the extent that we become nostalgia freaks. Living only for the present is equally silly, and demonstrates immaturity i.e. the inability to delay gratification. We should live IN the present while cherishing the past and planning for the future. In planning for the future we should direct or energy and ingenuity to making the most of the resources over which we have dominion, until His return. We were given just enough to last until then… no more and no less. Stop worrying and start problem solving.

  39. Hopi Avatar
    Hopi

    John….

    Can I access that report on the net. However, I do find you to be contradictory. In one sentence you say that “water resource is finite” and then you say that “water is renewable.” Which one is it?

  40. John Avatar
    John

    It is both!!

    The finite nature is determined by the quantity of rainfall and the area on which it falls.

    Barbados isn’t growing (well at least not significantly) and there is 20-40 inches of rainfall in an average year.

    Quantity available for extraction determined by the lower rainfall figure and is estimated to be 44 million gallons per day from the coral area.

    The Scotland District is not yet exploited except for a few springs, Newcastle and Codrington. Greenland was once zoned as 1, a water catchment area for the public water supply.

    The renewable nature is determined by the hydrologic cycle. Google Hydrologic Cycle.

    Please note that renewable does not mean infinite.

    A water well will never run dry so long as the extraction does not exceed what nature puts back through rainfall.

    An oil well … that is different. There is no oil which falls from the sky. I don’t know what process produces the oil under ground or whether the process is eternal/infinite/renewable but I doubt it. I won’t argue the point because I don’t know.

    Will search and see if the report is available on line.

  41. John Avatar
    John

    PS

    … water is magic!!

  42. David Avatar
    David

    With the imminent threat of Bush examining the prospect of invading Iran because of its suspected nuclear capability this has the possibility of plunging the world into more economic turbulence.

    Let’s hope and pray the old codger don’t have the last laugh.

  43. John Avatar
    John

    John // June 30, 2008 at 1:06 am

    It is both!!

    The finite nature is determined by the quantity of rainfall and the area on which it falls.

    Barbados isn’t growing (well at least not significantly) and there is 20-40 inches of rainfall in an average year.

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    Sorry, it is 40-60 inches rainfall per year that BIM gets.

    Also, another natural resource which is renewable is Timber. However, it is a finite resource as the removal rain forests by logging shows.

  44. Inkwell Avatar
    Inkwell

    John, your argument on the finite nature of water is sound…as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. The quantity of rainfall is relevant only when it occurs in the world’s deserts or the interiors of large land masses that are not blessed with fresh water lakes or rivers.

    What it (your argument) does not take into consideration is the other major method of water recovery… desalination. As a result of the hydrologic cycle, the great majority of the world’s water is deposited in its oceans, where it can be readily recovered.

    Also, the great majority of the 20% to 40% of Barbados’ annual rainfall runs into the sea and we would do well, instead of griping about the low levels in our wells, to make greater efforts to capture some of the rainwater before it runs into the sea or failing that, recover it after it does.

  45. John Avatar
    John

    Inkwell

    The sea is finite!!

    Its big, but it is finite.

    The energy which drives the Hydologic cycle is “free” and natural.

    The energy to desalinate the water comes in most instances from oil and is expensive. Thus the Oil states have large desalination facilities, Singapore likewise.

    The estimates I have seen for Barbados gives 10% runoff, 10% percolation to the underground aquifer and 80% Evapotranspiration!!

    Plants, trees, ….Nature, consumes much of the water that falls and puts it back into the atmosphere through transpiration, like our perspiration.

    We perspire/sweat and that too goes back into the atmosphere by evaporation.

  46. Inkwell Avatar
    Inkwell

    For the purposes of this argument, the sea has to be considered infinite since water, whether it is drunk, transpired, evaporated or used to wash cars is not lost, it is not “consumed”, it is simply recycled. If that is not the quality of infinity, I don’t know what is.

    I’d be interested in knowing the source of your data that claim only 10% rainfall runoff in Barbados. I seriously doubt that. In any event, we should be making sure that runoff is minimized, by employing dams or other water catchment methods.

    Who says that desalination has to be oil driven. The technology is available. Why can’t Barbados have the world’s first solar powered desalination plant? Let’s think outside the box.

  47. Green Monkey Avatar
    Green Monkey

    Micro Mock Engineer // June 29, 2008 at 10:38 pm said:

    Green Monkey,
    Peak Oil will be characterized by a fall in demand and/or efficiency improvements in our production and use of oil, rather than a fall in resource availability… as was the case for Peak Stone, Peak Iron, Peak Whale Oil, Peak Coal, Peak Agriculture etc. etc.

    The process will be driven by the development of alternatives – alternative energy sources as well as alternative energy conversion systems.

    So far you are staking our future on pie in the sky. Just because we want desperately to find alternative sources of energy to replace oil and hydrocarbons and allow us to continue our energy extravagant lifestyles is no guarantee that these alternative sources will be found, or that they will be found in time to allow us a smooth transition to these sources and away from hydrocarbons.

    There is no law of nature that says civilizations must always progress onwards and upwards. In fact if you look through history, we can see civilizations have always risen and fallen in cyclical patterns, and frequently the decline is associated with the degradation of natural resources that fueled the growth of the civilization in the first place.

    I also think you are underestimating the difficulty we will have to implement these new energy sources if oil is in decline and we are attempting to create new infrastructures to support and use the new forms of energy while the oil based infrastructure we rely on for our day to day activities is in decline.

    [b]The Paradox of Production[/b]
    By John Michael Greer

    One of the things that makes the challenge of peak oil so insidious, and so resistant to quick fixes, is the way in which many things that seem like ingredients of a solution are actually part of the problem. Petroleum provides so much of the energy and so many of the raw materials we take for granted today that the impacts of declining oil production extend much further than a first glance would suggest.

    Read through discussions of the energy future of industrial society from a few years back, for example, and you’ll find that many of them treat the price of coal and the price of oil as independent variables, linked only by the market forces that turn price increases in one into an excuse for bidding up the price of the other. What these analyses missed, of course, is that the machinery used to mine coal and the trains used to transport it are powered by diesel oil. When the price of diesel goes up, the cost of coal mining goes up; when supplies of diesel run short in coal-producing countries – as they have in China in recent months – the supply of coal runs into unexpected hiccups as well.

    I’ve pointed out in previous posts here that every other energy source currently used in modern societies gets a substantial “energy subsidy” from oil. Thus, to continue the example, oil contains about three times as much useful energy per unit weight as coal does, and oil also takes a lot less energy to extract from the ground, process, and transport to the end user than coal does. Modern coal production benefits from these efficiencies. If coal had to be mined, processed, and shipped using coal-burning equipment, those efficiencies would be lost, and a sizeable fraction of total coal production would have to go to meet the energy costs of the coal industry.

    The same thing, of course, is true of every other alternative energy source to a greater or lesser degree: the energy used in uranium mining and reactor construction, for example, comes from diesel rather than nuclear power, just as sunlight doesn’t make solar panels. What rarely seems to have been noticed, however, is the way these “energy subsidies” intersect with the challenges of declining petroleum production to boobytrap the future of energy production in industrial societies. The boobytrap in question is an effect I’ve named the paradox of production.

    It’s crucial to understand that the problem with our society’s reliance on petroleum is not simply that petroleum will become scarce in the future, and will have to be replaced by less concentrated or less abundant fuels. It’s that a huge proportion of industrial society’s capital plant – the collection of tools, artifacts, trained personnel, social structures, information resources, and human geography that provide the productive basis for society – was designed and built to use petroleum-derived fuels, and only petroleum-derived fuels. Converting that capital plant to anything else involves much more than just providing another energy source.

    Consider the difficulties that would be involved in building the sort of hydrogen economy so often touted as the solution to our approaching energy crisis. We’ll grant for the moment that the massive amounts of electricity needed to turn seawater into hydrogen gas in sufficient volume to matter turn out to be available somehow, despite the severe challenges facing every option proposed so far. Getting the electricity to make the hydrogen, though, is only the first of a series of tasks with huge price tags in money, energy, raw materials, labor, and time.

    Hydrogen, after all, can’t be poured into the gas tank of a gasoline-powered car. For that matter, it can’t be dispensed from today’s gas pumps, or stored in the tanks at today’s filling stations, or shipped there by the pipelines and tanker trucks currently used to get gasoline and diesel fuel to the point of sale. Every motor vehicle on the roads, along with the vast infrastructure built up over a century to fuel them with petroleum products, would have to be replaced in order to use hydrogen as a transport fuel.

    The same challenge, in one form or another, faces nearly every other energy source proposed as a replacement for petroleum. It’s not enough to come up with a new source of energy. Unless that new source can be used just like petroleum, the petroleum-powered machines we use today will have to be replaced by machines using the new energy source. Furthermore, unless the new energy source can be distributed through existing channels – whether that amounts to the pipelines and tanker trucks used to transport petroleum fuels today, or some other established infrastructure, such as the electric power grid – a new distribution infrastructure will have to be built. Either task would add massive costs to the price tag for a new energy source; put both of them together – as in the case of hydrogen – and the costs of the new infrastructure could easily dwarf the cost of bringing the new energy source online in the first place.

    Factor the impact of declining oil production into this equation and the true scale of the challenge before us becomes a little clearer. Building a hydrogen infrastructure – from power plants and hydrogen generation facilities, through pipelines and distribution systems, to hydrogen filling stations and hundreds of millions of hydrogen-powered cars and trucks – will, among many other things, take a very large amount of oil. Some of the oil will be used directly, by construction equipment, trucks hauling parts to the new plants, and the like; much more will be used indirectly, since nearly every commodity and service for sale in the industrial world today relies on petroleum in one way or another. Until a substantial portion of the hydrogen system is in place, it won’t be possible to use hydrogen to supplement dwindling petroleum production, which is already coming under worldwide strain as demand pushes up against the limits of supply. Instead, the fuel costs of building the hydrogen economy add an additional source of demand, pushing fuel prices higher and making scarce fuel even less available for other uses.

    SNIP

    If the new energy source turns out to be more abundant, more concentrated, and more easily extracted than the source that it’s replacing, this effect is temporary; if the new source can be distributed and used, at least at first, via old technology, the effect is minimized; if the new source is introduced a little at a time, in an economy reliant on many other sources of energy, the effect can easily be lost in the static of ordinary price fluctuations. All three of these were true of petroleum in its early days. It started as a replacement for whale oil in lamps, and was distributed and consumed in existing technology; decades later, it found a niche as a transportation fuel, and relied on the old lamp-oil distribution system until a new one could be constructed on the basis of existing revenues; its other uses evolved gradually from there over more than half a century, until by 1950 it was the world’s dominant energy source

    None of the proposed replacements for petroleum, though, have those advantages. None of them yield as much net energy as crude oil under natural pressure, and none combine petroleum’s unique mix of abundance, concentration, ease of production and distribution, and fitness for a world of machinery designed and built for petroleum-based fuels. The fuel they need to replace remains by far the most important energy source in the world today. Nor do we have half a century to ramp up a new energy system for the industrial economy; conventional petroleum production is already declining steadily, and the most reasonable projections of future production show it dropping off a cliff within the next decade or so.

    http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/03/milestone-in-dust.html

    There are three take home messages.

    The first:

    1. We are close to, or at, both of these inflection points now:
    peak oil production
    oil demand/production crossover

    But what about transitioning to renewable energy sources?

    That would be a good idea. But we should have started 30 years ago to avoid a very difficult transition period.

    Ready for the second take home message? Be sure you are sitting down, because the first time this sinks in, it is rather like taking a 2×4 to the stomach:

    2. We have, as of now, no renewable energy source, nor combination of sources, that can scale up quickly enough, or provide anywhere
    near to the energy equivalent of oil, to avoid a severe, worldwide energy shortage.

    Sorry to break the news.
    Let’s take a moment to re-read and digest that last take home message (and its implications).

    [b]”There is no quickly scalable and energy-equivalent substitute for oil” …in terms of its energy density, EROEI (energy returned on energy invested), transportability, safety, range, infrastructure, and cost.

    The third take home message:

    3. Even if we had renewable energy sources to provide the equivalent energy of oil at the same cost, our entire economic infrastructure is oil, not electron or hydrogen, based. The economy might not be able to run on non-oil based energy. For example, could airplanes, or large mining trucks, be run on batteries?

    There are very grave economic and social risks starting now, and exacerbating over the next several decades.

    For the past century, oil has been an essentially free source of extremely dense and useful energy. Poke a hole in the ground in the right location, and you get an unparalleled source of energy. And, it can also be used to make
    a variety of products such as plastics, tires, asphalt for roads, medicines, etc. That is, when we are not burning it.

    I was a firm believer in solar, wind, and geothermal energy until a few years ago, and I still believe they will help individuals. But no combination of these “renewable” technologies will make a notable difference at the level of 300 million Americans, much less the 6.5 billion people in the world.

    …No alternatives scale, and we’re out of time. We made the important decision about energy policy at two critical junctures in American history:
    (1) shortly after WWII, when we created the interstate highway system and the suburbs to build a way of life that had no future because it relied completely on ready supplies of a finite resource, and (2) in 1980, when we dismissed conservation at irrelevant…”
    — Professor Guy McPherson
    http://www.azcentral.com/news/aztalk/forum/articles/0409forum_livetalk-CR.html

    http://drmillslmu.com/peakoil.htm

  48. Hopi Avatar
    Hopi

    John….

    Water is a renewable resource.
    When water and the “sea” becomes finite and non-renewable according to you then human also becomes non-renewable. I have taken temporary steps to prepare myself, in the event that Barbados is “blessed” with a drought. Should “push come to shove” I’d have to gather sea water and desalinise it the tedious way.

  49. John Avatar
    John

    Inkwell // June 30, 2008 at 8:02 am

    For the purposes of this argument, the sea has to be considered infinite since water, whether it is drunk, transpired, evaporated or used to wash cars is not lost, it is not “consumed”, it is simply recycled. If that is not the quality of infinity, I don’t know what is.
    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    Timber is renewable.

    Most trees once cut will grow back. …. but timber is not an infinite resource otherwise the rain forest would not be disappearing … or is it!!?

    Remember, the fish need the sea, as do the many other forms of life living in it.

    Just to understand the scale of Nature, if only 10 % of the rain that falls gets underground and only 44 million gallos per day are available, then Nature delivers upward of 440 million gallons per day of rain from the sea.

    Singapore has one of the largest desal plants and that produces about 30 million gallons per day.

    Overall, Singapore consumes about 350 million gallons per day, most of it coming from Malaysia by pipeline to be treated, the rest from its own catchment areas.

    Man’s efforts are puny. The natural processes while renewable and with an extent at which we can only wonder are finite.

    Water is finite. …. well I heard another theory about ice falling to earth in meteors which I think is possible. That would make it infinite …. but then again ….

    So to my mind water is finite.

    We just tap into a huge cycle and it seems infinite.

    Guess it isn’t much point arguing if we start out with such disparate positions.

  50. John Avatar
    John

    Inkwell // June 30, 2008 at 8:02 am

    I’d be interested in knowing the source of your data that claim only 10% rainfall runoff in Barbados. I seriously doubt that. In any event, we should be making sure that runoff is minimized, by employing dams or other water catchment methods.
    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    Check the Senn Report of 1946. It is in the Public Library.

    I’ll check and excerpt the relevant words when I get a chance a little later. Maybe I am wrong as it is a long time since I read it but if I am wrong, I’ll say so.

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