The Best Tool We Have

"The oil rig rumbles to life, breaking the early morning quiet in this neighborhood of urban townhouses and big box stores with a deafening screech and roar."

So reads the lead in a story by Gillian Flaccus for Newsweek. Because the price of oil is so high, many wells previously deemed empty enough are being revisited with new and better technology to drain every last drop.

There are some concerns, according to the article, that some of the wells have been in disrepair for a long time, that some of the new ways of drilling and extracting could prove unstable, and that unforeseen environmental effects could be big.

I am intrigued by this.
What do we revisit when the stakes are raised -- when time passes...
The crumbs we leave behind during prosperity may be nourishment later.

Then I came across a great website. The website for the Union of Concerned Scientists. They have all sorts of great information there!

And look at this:

"Increasing fuel economy is by far the best tool we have for cutting our oil dependence. It will deliver fast results. It has been proven to work from experience—we roughly doubled the fuel economy of our cars between the 1970s and the late 1980s. We can do this right now. The technology needed to increase the average fuel economy of our cars and trucks to 40 miles per gallon (mpg) has already been developed, but for the most part is collecting dust on automakers' shelves.

If we increased fuel economy to 40 mpg over 10 years, then within 15 years we would have saved more oil than we would ever get out of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge over its entire 40-50 year life. And the savings from better fuel economy would keep on growing indefinitely, while the oil wells would dry up."

I'm not exactly sure what these two things have in common -- but I know I was relieved for the second -- and desperately needed a story that sounded not quite so desperate.

Energyville

Well, I started out writing about a court case -- Environmental groups and local officials up in Alaska are suing to block the development up there -- and it looks like Shell has to wait for the court case to begin exploration on its lease of some 29 million acres of land... I may get back to this tomorrow -- in the meantime I've been playing a game...

Energyville.

I clicked on a paid advertising link on the New York Times article page and came across a very elaborate web site of the Chevron Corporation.

Energyville is a game where you (I) make energy decisions for the future of an imaginary city -- I didn't realize it was imaginary at first though; you put your own town's name in and it calls your city that name. I was really impressed until I noticed the plan and stats are the same for Cambridge and Dallas and Afdser. Energy levels, the site asserts for each city (2007-2015) are based on projected production patterns and lifestyles of prosperous countries in North America, Europe and Asia. There, factories consume/will consume 41.59 percent of the energy consumed; vehicles 19.83%; trucking and freight 9.05% airplanes 2.7%; single family homes 9.09%; apartment buildings 6.53% and commercial buildings 8.48%.

Anyway -- you go through the city and you substitute different energy sources for the current usages -- wind, solar, nuclear, coal hydro and bio fuels -- there are buttons for a few emerging energy sources -- but those options are unavailable because they haven't been discovered yet. The game supposedly tracks cost, environmental ramifications and security risks.

Not surprisingly, this game is an advertisement. After a few substitutions it tells you you need petroleum, and it makes sure to mention the problems with each alternative energy source along the way. I had never thought, for instance, of the issue of sea storms with off shore wind farms -- seem like black outs could conceivably go on for a little longer than usual... If you only load your city up with petroleum, on the other hand, it tells you that you need to work on diversification. Man cannot live on oil alone.

But what alarmed me most about inside of the game was the down play of the environmental effects of coal and nuclear power. The lead story in the Times today is about languishing nuclear waste sites -- waste hasn't been buried -- "The federal government is at least 20 years behind schedule on its obligation to bury nuclear waste." The addressing of our current state solely as a production and energy issue, and not as an environmental one seems to me the most damaging issue before us presently.

The other disheartening thing on this site was a link to the Kyoto Protocol. I spent some time reading some of the text of that agreement. I like the fact that I now have a PDF of the entire thing on my computer...

Elsewhere on the site, Chevron had a set of e-cards that was a print advertising campaign in the New Yorker:







Well, while I would certainly support us all going out and getting tandem bikes, driving a little slower, and downsizing out need for more more more, it seems to me that by offering this focus to consumers Chevron is saying one thing -- the need for larger changes are out of our control -- focus on what YOU can change and trust us to take care of the rest...

Since beginning this project I have made a lot of changes to my life - I've been quite happy about them, and keeping up with them to varying degrees. But I certainly don't think they are going to save the polar bears.

(As an aside I think someone needs to take a look at the health effects of florescent lights.)

Well -- I feel a little badly, but I'm not going to link the Chevron site here. If you really want to play it should be easy enough to find...

They also have a cool little counter on the front of the front of the page ala MacDonalds:
4.57 million gallons of oil were consumed during the writing of this post.

Happy Birthday, Darwin

Today is Charles Darwin's 199th birthday. Thanks to Wired for this celebratory tid-bit.

Well, nearly two centuries later the Origin of Species is still in contention -- but not survival of the fittest...

''The Pacific walrus is an early victim of our failure to address global warming."
Said Shaye Wolf, a Biologist for the Center of Biological Diversiy which filed a petition last week to have the Pacific Walrus listed endangered. Read the Times article here.
''As the sea ice recedes, so does the future of the Pacific walrus.''








Uncredited NASA photo

Without ice the walrus are driven to land -- out of their usual habitat -- and into the habitat of others...

As many as 6,000 walruses in late summer and fall abandoned ice over deep water and congregated on Alaska's northwest shore. Herds were larger on the Russian side, one group reached up to 40,000 animals. Russian observers estimated 3,000 to 4,000 mostly young walruses died in stampedes when herds rushed into the water at the sight of a polar bear, hunter or low-flying aircraft.

One day before the petition was filed, during a lag in ruling on the listing of the Polar Bear in the arctic, The Shell Corp. was the high bidder on oil exploration leases on some 2.76 million arctic acres. They bid $18,497 an acre, according to the article in the Times.

Shell’s vice president for exploration for the Americas, Annell Bay, said the lease sale was an opportunity to move into an undeveloped region that could help meet an increasing demand for energy. “There’s not many areas like this in the United States,” Ms. Bay said.

There are not many areas like this in the world.

"In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment." -- Charles Darwin

Mud, Salt Crystals, Rock, Water

It's always a relief when art comes to me in this project. It's only happened a few times, but always, it seems, serving the purpose art ought to -- giving room for breath and reflection on beauty and some piece of human condition...



Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water...

The Spiral Jetty was created by Robert Smithson the year before I was born. An article was written in the times in 2002, when the sculpture began to emerge from water --

The most famous work of American art that almost nobody has ever seen in the flesh is Robert Smithson's ''Spiral Jetty'': 6,650 tons of black basalt and earth in the shape of a gigantic coil, 1,500 feet long, projecting into the remote shallows of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, where the water is rosé red from algae.

I studied the work in college.
I was surprised to see it in the Times yesterday.

It seems that oil drillers want to drill nearby. Art lovers are concerned that this will disrupt the 38 year old masterpiece.

Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, issued a statement calling the jetty “a significant cultural site” and saying that the trust was “deeply concerned about the potential harm that energy development could bring” to it.

Sometime we feel things completely out of kilter with what we think we are going to...
I'm annoyed. I wonder if there were 900 letters written in Brooklyn -- I wonder if there were 900 letters written in Alaska...

Traveling cross-country in 1992 - not long after studying the Spiral Jetty in Art History -- I went to Utah. I hadn't really planned to go to Utah -- actually it was a trip created to plan much of nothing; I was traveling alone with my dog, camping and doing whatever I felt like from one day to the next. I ate a lot of spicy cheddar cheese, I remember -- I took a lot of pictures. Anyway -- I'd spent about three weeks in the four corners, and I was overcome with land-lock. I figured any where named after a lake must be wetter than where I was. So I drove up to Utah. When I got there, all there was was a huge valley of salt. It might have been beautiful if I hadn't have been so disappointed.

When Smithson built the Spiral Jetty there were deserted oil rigs in his landscape. They have since disintegrated -- but they were there. Anywhere people gave up, they will go back to now. Now we go back in desperation...

The idea that people would make a choice against oil drilling for art -- well,
I'm not sure if I think they should --
but in the scope of the dangers we are ignoring -- I'm quite sure they won't.

Environmental art is supposed to interact with nature, with time, with people and what goes on around it. It is not supposed to be in a museum. Not that I'm for oil drilling at all -- but somehow this preservation movement seems contra-intent to me.

And in a way, disrespectful for all the real death and sickness we are causing. So typically human and narcissistic that we should be concerned with the preserving of what we have put atop the earth -- in this time when we are so damaging the earth itself... damaging the very course of nature...

I'm teaching Frankenstein right now -- butchering it, perhaps -- people keep telling me what a mediocre novel it is. I don't think so -- I think that Shelly is talking about creating and exploration and refusal of responsibility in a way that is entirely important.

White on Washington

Sometimes, it's very hard to get the straight story.

This from the International Herald Tribune:

The directors of two Interior Department agencies said Thursday they're confident oil and gas exploration in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska can proceed without threatening polar bears that depend on the sea ice.

The officials appeared before a House special committee on global warming that is examining why the department is postponing a decision on whether to further protect the bear, at the same time it is proceeding with oil lease sales in the Alaska sea.

Just to repeat; a house committee hearing examining why the department is postponing a decision on whether or not to deem the polar bear endangered. It's kind of amazing -- a whole hearing on Capitol Hill examining delay...

The reason for the timing question is that the oil lease is up for market February 6. One would have to imagine that if the polar bear is deemed endangered, you have to be really careful not to kill them. This would be an important thing to avoid if you were going to drill for oil up in Alaska... if drilling for oil endangers polar bears...

A bunch of protesters went to the meeting dressed in polar bear suits.


image from a video clip on MNBC.

I want a polar bear suit!
I always wanted a polar bear suit -- I really wanted to be like Nastassia Kinsky in Hotel New Hampshire, when she walks around in a bear suit all the time. In fact, there's a really big writers meeting in New York in two weeks -- I'm feeling a little nauseous about the whole thing, and would feel MUCH better surrounding in white fur...

Sorry, I was talking about the polar bears --
I wrote about this before -- a week or so ago. But now it's a different thing -- I'm intrigued by the pressure of this.

An editorial in the San Jose Mercury news says:

Conveniently for the oil-centric Bush administration, the postponement allowed just enough time to go ahead with the Feb. 6 sale of oil leases in the Chukchi Sea northwest of Alaska, a prime polar bear habitat. But oil drilling could put further stress on a polar bear population whose future is already in doubt.

The reason there is this strange house committee meeting -- the reason I'm thinking about all of this today -- it has to do with communication. Who stays silent when and why are of enormous importance to how things get done.

The issues of oil are so thick and crude in Washington it is impossible to believe that any decision could get made to change our direction...