Are you ready for prices (of everything) to rise?

If you were looking for a quick, 4-paragraph introduction on the subject of Peak Oil, Bloomberg News has you covered:

Exxon Mobil Corp., BP Plc and Total SA are investing in assets that previously weren’t worth their time or money after oil-rich nations reduced access to reserves and exploration drilling faltered. Efforts to find new sources of crude and natural gas are failing more often, with San Ramon, California-based Chevron Corp.’s exploration failure rate jumping to 35 percent last year from 10 percent in 2008. Countries such as Venezuela are making it more expensive for companies to develop their resources, if they’re allowed in at all. And previously developed fields are drying up, reducing oil companies’ future supplies, or reserves. “Their No. 1 problem is reserves replacement,” said Nansen Saleri, chief executive officer at Quantum Reservoir Impact in Houston and former reservoir-management chief at Saudi Arabia’s state oil company. “That’s the elephant in the room, so that’s what they have to address.” To compensate, major producers are investing in projects they once eschewed, including geologically complex oil and gas fields, called “unconventional” by the industry to distinguish them from the easy-to-get oil and gas of earlier years.
And that is Peak Oil in a nutshell. It is real, it is here. All the cheap, easily accessible oil has been used up; the low-hanging fruit is gone. The remainder of the planet's oil, of which we still have plenty, is going to cost a great deal more to extract and refine, leading to higher prices at the pump, at the grocery store, or anywhere else that requires oil to function.

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Dumpster diving adventure

A few weeks ago, my daughters (aged 9 and 11) convinced me to go dumpster diving out in the alley behind our house in the City of St. Louis. We've gone dumpster diving a few times over the years. Based on the prior expeditions, my daughters fully expect that if they look through a few dozen dumpsters, they'll find something valuable. You see, this is America, where people through away perfectly usable toys and games, as well as furniture, appliances and clothing. And even when you don't find usable merchandise, you'll see literally tons of single-use paper and plastic being thrown out. When you see the incredible piles of discarded usable things with your own eyes, it is all-the-more astounding. Even more surprising, if you're looking the highest ratio of usable stuff, look in the dumpsters behind apartment-dwellers rather than the dumpsters behind expensive single-family homes. Perhaps it sounds disgusting to go dumpster diving. If so, get over it, because it can be far more than an anthropological field trip--it can be like winning a mini-lottery. My kids and I have found several extremely nice coats, for instance (we washed them and gave them away to friends). We once found a working DVD player. We've taken home shelves and other items of furniture. We've found dozens of toys, which merely need to be cleaned up to become usable. As I'm finding these sorts of things, I keep thinking "Why wouldn't someone take the time to donate this to Good Will of Salvation Army?" When people throw a valuable thing into the landfill, it's gone forever--what were they thinking?yard-waste Here's what we found on our recent expedition. First of all, I must digress. The City of St. Louis provides special separate dumpsters for Yard Waste Only and other dumpsters for general rubbish. On our recent expedition, I looked into 20 of of those yard-waste-only dumpsters. About half of them contained non-yard waste. This astounds me too. Why would someone screw up this incredibly sensible system for recycling vegetation by throwing plastic, food and paper into a yard waste dumpster? And here's a typical example of what you often find in a yard-waste-only dumpster: [caption id="attachment_11660" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Contents found in a yard-waste only dumpster"]Contents found in a yard-waste only dumpster[/caption] As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, people throw away massive amounts of single-use paper and plastic. Probably the biggest single category is cardboard pizza boxes. In our one-hour expedition, I probably saw 500 used pizza boxes. pizza-boxesBut we also saw huge amounts of clearly recyclable goods that were not being recycled. Hundreds of glass jars, metal cans and plastics and immense amounts of paper, all of it headed for the landfill. We also saw hundreds of pounds of colorfully-inked food packaging. All of it carefully designed to catch your eye at the store, and then you toss it into the landfill. But, it's not like you really toss it in--instead, a huge fleet of city trucks carts this packaging far away from the city in order to dump it into the landfill. It makes me wonder how many toxic chemicals were released into the environment in order to produce all of this food packaging. recycle-materialWe found several toys and many items of clothing that had been saturated in pasta sauce, meat grease or who-knows what kind of fluid. We decided to keep looking. What my girls ended up taking home for a quick clean-up was a little toy dog that they found inside of a woman's big purse. You'll see his photo below. My girls named him "Oscar" (after Sesame Street's Oscar), and he now lives with us . [caption id="attachment_11661" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Oscar"]Oscar[/caption]

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Our precious thin atmosphere

Click on this link to see a beautiful photo of the Earth by the Goddard Space Flight Center. What is stunning to me is the thin-ness of the Earth's precious atmosphere. Click on the image for a much-enlarged version. earth-blue-marble How was this photo taken?

This spectacular “blue marble” image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet. These images are freely available to educators, scientists, museums, and the public. This record includes preview images and links to full resolution versions up to 21,600 pixels across. Much of the information contained in this image came from a single remote-sensing device-NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. Flying over 700 km above the Earth onboard the Terra satellite, MODIS provides an integrated tool for observing a variety of terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric features of the Earth. The land and coastal ocean portions of these images are based on surface observations collected from June through September 2001 and combined, or composited, every eight days to compensate for clouds that might block the sensor’s view of the surface on any single day. Two different types of ocean data were used in these images: shallow water true color data, and global ocean color (or chlorophyll) data.

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Climate: OJ and the Haystack

Why Climate Change Denial Is Like the O.J. Trial is an interesting article. The essence is that the climate denialists are using the same techniques as the OJ defense team: Find anything resembling a needle in a vast haystack of data, then claim that the presence of the needle casts doubt on the character of the haystack itself. Because there is an overwhelming pile of evidence in support of anthropogenic global warming, there are bound to be occasional pieces of data that can appear to contradict the mass of affirmative information. The pile is overwhelming, especially to non-scientists. Therefore few have the patience to understand the whole thing. Those who want to spin the counter argument claim that, because the two sides are both represented, therefore the issue is in doubt. And, as in the OJ trial, if there is cause for doubt, then no action is to be taken.

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Plants that scrub the air in your house

This post from Eartheasy lists ten indoor plants that can help to clean up the air in your house.

Common indoor plants may provide a valuable weapon in the fight against rising levels of indoor air pollution. NASA scientists are finding them to be surprisingly useful in absorbing potentially harmful gases and cleaning the air inside homes, indoor public spaces and office buildings.

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