~ Cruder and Cruder ~ ID 2822 June 18, 2008 ~ Chapter 16 ~ Oh 1 Digital Press

If you have seen the tenor change as this moves along, such as the lessening of disdain for the previous admin, I will tell you now that I have no intention of going back to make changes but I may!. This is dated and as such a learning experience for me and interest for you. You will also notice that it began as a discussion of consciousness and centered on three things namely Solipsism, Figmentalism/Idealism and Thought and somehow morphed into a diatribe on the environment and most recently an expose, of sorts, of big oil and what is in store for us in the future. This has been so incredibly a blue funk for me that I’ll be glad when it’s over. I hate reading or watching the degradation of humanity at an ever increasing level and I don’t think my depression level has ever been so low for such a long period but these things need to be said and as mentioned before we need to start using a bit of common sense. For those that are doing their part I am eternally grateful and I know that most people are good and have only the best intent but somehow we have screwed up and let the fouler drives take control of powerful people and they in turn have removed any wisp of intelligence from our practice.

My ability to predict has never been any good but I can give you a few things that you might want to think about and perhaps act upon. I have seen many very heroic acts by the less powerful people raging against the machine and I have seen their victories and I always remain an optimist but we collectively must do one thing. Quit putting up with (Expletive!). In a practical sense we must ask the tough questions. Is Canada and United States truly free? We must keep asking this again and again until the voting machine is back in order and we must stop allowing these wars and wholesale victimization but perhaps we need something to prompt us to actually accept the truth first.

We have reached the maximum supply of oil. Saudi Arabia Monday 16, June announced that they would be raising their output by 500,000 barrels a day to 9.7 million barrels per day and that places world consumption at a yearly rate of 80 to 90 million barrels per day or yearly the amount that would fill a tank a kilometer square by about 5 kilometers high. Next year regardless of new exploration there will less available and the price instead of remaining stable will skyrocket and it’s my opinion that this is already happening. All forms of transportation will be adversely affected as will all forms of manufacture. People have the mistaken opinion that we can make more efficient vehicles and save the environment but that just isn’t true. If we make a vehicle that is twice as efficient as the present ones then two vehicles will be manufactured and still use the same amount of gas. Since we have reached peak output it stands to reason that the half we have burned and put into our atmosphere in the last 100 years will be followed by the other half in very short order because we have also reached peak consumption. The good thing is that once we get rid of all the oil then perhaps we can settle down to some good stewardship of the atmosphere but who knows what will happen as we rapidly force that giant quantity of hydrocarbon into the air. We are already noticing what looks suspiciously like changes in our weather patterns and perhaps we are in for a bit of a shock.

Now here is where I tie up some loose ends and it really doesn’t matter what you have seen so far in this discussion or in any movie or in any of your wildest thoughts. Strap on your boots because I am going to remind you of something that has been here all along. The environment is only a product of our imagination. You have read this far and if you paid attention you know that there are only two possibilities. Either the entire universe is a product of our collective imagination or I’m just writing this for my own amusement because Solipsism rules. Either way it makes no difference whatever what we do to the environment. The only thing that counts is what we think will happen to us and what we think will happen to the environment. You can take that to the bank. There is no real world out there. You think there is and to that extent it is real but it’s composed of thought alone, mine or ours I will never know.

Obviously in the `Real World’ we have some work to do. Most of us are going to be running around experiencing the obvious. Grass cutting is going to get less popular and stats will show up on the huge amount of energy wasted on the ubiquitous lawn and legislators will be forced to drop the cutting regulations or alternative weapons of grass destruction will have to be invented. Sales of snowmobiles, ATVs and motor boats will go down while sales of bicycles, skis and sailboats will go up. People who drop their reliance on oil as quickly and conveniently as possible will survive much better than those who cling to it’s use. The usual clamor for governments to regulate the price of gas will go on as if there was really anything that could be done at this late stage. Someone will invent the electric car. Someone will invent the self sufficient electric household. Someone will develop the most ridiculous and dangerous substitutes for the auto like the hydrogen car for example and a few of them will explode and then that will be over. Eventually the perfection of the non-polluting no fuel bicycle will be duplicated in an automobile and augmented by an electric motor and charging system but then we could have done that years ago if we had any sense. Someone will realize that we don’t have to continually play this stupid daily monopoly game as if it were ordained in heaven as our only way. Someone will realize that the profit margin cannot be done in any way that is morally correct and that money should not be the standard by which we make all of our decisions. Profit at this point in time is deciding our environmental issues for us.

Other possibilities are the (deleted) could really hit the fan and a whole variety of things could happen. The Fed could retain it’s strangle hold on whoever gets elected and the Feds true nature could continue to go undetected or at least unchanged. The Americans could go on picking their collective noses and never even realize that Osama’s been dead for years and never even had thing one to do with any 911 towers. The ballot stuffing could get even more sophisticated and the new government could grab the rest of the middle east oil reserves so that the US is the only one with a decent gas price for a few more years. We could also reach a plateau whereby the oil sands and other marginal sources are quite feasible and auto manufacturing concentrate on efficiency so that three dollars a liter is sustainable for a few years. Those scenarios aren’t even the worst. This event is so cataclysmic and so difficult for us to deal with as monetary events change daily. One day suddenly you will find that it isn’t worth driving all the way to work in your truck because of the tremendous fuel cost. The next day you will find out that your truck, even though it’s brand new and not even paid for is virtually worthless and you can’t even give it away. The next day you will realize that you have to sell your house in the burbs and move closer to the city. It’s only Thursday and you are finding out that your mortgage is way over valued for what you can get on the market today. Suburbia is collapsing and the houses are worthless. By Friday your boss says that transportation of the product he sells is too expensive and he will be closing his doors. You may be a bit stressed out after a week like that.

And all the above is just so unnecessary. I mentioned that someone would invent an electric car and behold that has already occurred. In 2001 many EV’s were introduced into the California market, most notably the Chevy EV1 which could go 60 to 100 miles at highway speeds, looked beautiful and had zero pollution associated with it providing the electricity came from earth friendly sources. No emissions, no oil filter, no gas tank, pump, filter, air cleaner, muffler and no obsolete reciprocating engine. Toyota had a Rav4 conversion to electric, Honda and many other companies all displayed their completed vehicles or joined in with their plans for competing Electric Vehicles and everything was rosy. The larger cities in California as well as Vancouver had a horrible hanging pall of yellow gray smog for many years previously and it continues today around the world. It is caused primarily by the overuse of petroleum products being burnt and vented directly into the atmosphere. All persons consider this obvious pollution to be a vexation of the spirit and respiratory problems especially in the young are rampant in such cities. This is the picture of big business profit and the people do not matter as long as they are buying the oil using vehicles.

California realized that the Electric Car was not that hard to make and only required a few parts. It needed a rolling chassis with the comfort of a modern vehicle, a series of batteries, a speed control and an electric motor. It just made a wooshing sound.. no noise pollution and it could easily accelerate much faster than a gas powered vehicle. California legislators wanted to fix the ugly pollution problem as quickly as possible so they began with their famous legislation that car companies would have to produce about 2 percent non-polluting vehicles per year and this would increase at that rate until the gas guzzlers were gone. Meanwhile the only vehicles that were being used by the public were leased by Chevy and others and none had been sold as yet but there were probably about 200 being used regularly and all you had to do is plug them in at home or at work and bingo they would be ready to go another 60 or so miles. Right away it was recognized by many that the batteries were poor quality and these were changed several times until the potential was well over 100 miles and today would be at least 300 miles range if development had continued. So what went wrong?

It seems like a perfect plan and this story is not some idle invention of a scare monger but actual historic fact. The car manufacturers came under pressure from the big oil companies like Mobil but that wasn’t the only problem. Car manufacturers realized that if the state of California could legislate clean cars and alter the percentage until the gas auto was gone then the rest of the country and indeed the world would follow suit just to get rid of the stinking pollution. At that time the developed EV’s were running about $100.000 apiece to produce and a very considerable number would have to be sold before this price could be brought down. This is where you and I begin to be part of this evil equation. The public seemed.. you guess it.. apathetic about the EV and the price of gas and the gas auto was so low that EV’s didn’t seem to be a real popular idea. At any rate the auto companies hooked up with big oil and fought the legislation on principle and wound up winning as is usually the case. They refused to extend the lease on any of the new EV’s and collected them up and sent them all off to the crusher and that was the end of this wonderful idea. Chevrolet bought up the right to the newly devised NiMh (nickel metal hydride) battery and then sold it to Mobil where it was mothballed and everyone went back to the old gassers. The (previoUS admin) got on the bandwagon for Hydrogen cars which are a type of hybrid that used water to create hydrogen through hydrolysis and again misinformed the public that the electrics were not a thing of the future but hydrogen fuel cells were. An HFC car uses 3.5 times as much energy to operate as an EV but it’s so incredible complex that it requires a lot of service and the car companies like that. There are five major stumbling blocks against the development of HFC cars, not the least of which is there are no gas stations available plus the fuel is very expensive and it’s dangerous to handle pressurized gas.

Jimmy Carter was the first president to spur the car manufacturers on to greater efficiency through legislation but that all ended when Reagan came to power and since then the American companies have continued to use completely obsolete pushrod engines that were invented in the 40’s and only the advent of computers and fuel injection has helped to get better gas mileage while making the auto even more user unfriendly and service dependant. The (previoUS admin) even subsidized the Hummer when it came out with tax breaks and continued to reside fully in the pocket of big business. Meanwhile in today’s news General Motors would be in good shape if it had continued to market with the future in mind but instead the shares sold for $14.93 US in New York yesterday the lowest since 1982. Ralph Nadir has always said that the car companies future analysis was about as faulty as it could get (not in those exact words). He said "General Motors tends to walk backwards into the future." which simply means that a ten year old would have made much better decisions than GM made and they wouldn’t be facing bankruptcy again. I was that ten year old and it was really obvious to me that the Chevrolet chassis or Ford, Chrysler or any American auto was carrying a lot of extra and very unnecessary weight around and spending gas mileage to do so. Most kids could have revamped the company into a progressive and successful company by just doing the obvious things but that never happened and now the odds are about 30 to 1 that the giant will succumb to continuing high oil prices and the feeble job market in the US.

Enter the Hybrid. What exactly is a hybrid auto? Well it’s a fancy name for a $50,000 pile of scrap metal that will depreciate faster then the payments can be made and boasts scandalous improvement over conventional vehicles. It has all the high tech service disadvantages of any gas model because it has that entire system plus it has the entire system of the electric car and the totally unnecessary interface between the two. This is a highly complex and overly expensive lie perpetrated on the public. It makes the Oil Companies happy because it is fuel dependant and needs all the filters, mufflers, catalytic converters and service that make the dealers happy whereas the electric car only needs the window washer fluid topped up, tires rotated and the batteries checked twice a year.

GM will probably get a bailout by the Fed but then I’m never good at predictions but I’m going to listen to Kurt and go with that. The announcement by the Saudi’s might cut back a bit of the recent speculations that is causing the pump gas prices and all associated material to keep climbing on a daily basis but I have heard the public say that $2.00 a liter by the end of this year is not that unlikely. Whatever happens we are hell bent on burning the remaining gigabarrels that are in the ground and the Canadian and Venezuela oil shales that reputedly contain more oil than the OPEC nations have or perhaps as much might all be extracted some day too. This shale or sand is not considered in the ’Peak Oil Production’ because it isn’t conventional so this problem could go on forever. The really big problem with the Canadian Oil from Fort McMurray is the pollution it causes to extract it. Overall the present methods of extraction are coming under scrutiny because that is the countries largest single polluter and is similar to creating three or four times the carbon footprint of ground oil.

Namron Soar

(Jan 29, 2009 editing) Again there is no facts associated to the quantity of oil left available in the world. Many are convinced that there is still plenty and peak oil is far off on the horizon while others choose 2006 as the date. Chevy was rescued by the Fed and they are using the advertising media to tell us that they are developing an electric car that might be available soon. The Nerve!

Chapter Seventeen      Chapter Seventeen Plain

INTS    http://www.namronsoar.com

General Interest Galleries    http://www.realrufus.com

Namron Soar    Nsoar@tbaytel.net

©