I’ve touched on peak oil a number of times over the years. I managed to depress myself recently by reading through James Howard Kunstler’s recent speech to the commonwealth club of California over on alternet. It’s scary ‘end of the world as we know it’ stuff. I desperately wish I could see through the fog to know just how accurate these kinds of predictions are. Peak oil is pretty much universally accepted at this point – all that’s left is the bickering over when exactly the world will reach it, and how precipitous the drop off the cliff on the other side of it is. I’ve spent the last several weeks reading up on this and it’s pretty depressing. Almost all of the proposed solutions to allow for a soft landing on the other side of peak oil range from unlikely to utter bilge. Biodiesel seems to be a pipe dream (with the lovely side effect of causing global starvation – we’re already seeing food riots in mexico over US corn crops going to produce ethanol rather than corn for tortillas, a wonderful harbinger of what’s to come), wind power won’t scale, solar costs more energy to produce the generation systems (silicon solar cells) than the generation systems produce over their lifetimes, and the whole hydrogen economy thing seems to be snake oil. My favorite quote about the hydrogen economy issue came from a CA university system physicist, the gist of which was to the effect of ‘even if you assume we can solve the generation issue to produce hydrogen on the scale we consume energy now, it would take us 30-50 years to get our distribution, production, transportation and other systems up to speed, and meanwhile peak oil leaves us between 10 and 20 years to get there.’

Fuckin yikes!

It’s not entirely doom and gloom. Despite the problems, solar and nuclear seem the most promising possibilities. With solar we need to attain significant advances in generation and storage. With Nuclear, it’s a little reported fact that there is an unknown total global supply of uranium, no one has been prospecting for it in decades, and we currently have no decent breeder reactor system to produce our own fuels. Plus there’s the whole ‘what to do with the waste’ issue. Also even with these possibilities, there seems to be a general consensus that achieving the same level of easy access to energy resources that we enjoy now doesn’t seem at all likely.

I encourage everyone to read (or listen, there is an mp3 link) to Kunstler’s speech. Even if he’s on the far end of the spectrum in terms of outcomes, it’s informative, sobering, and important for all of us to understand.

… use the orient point ferry. I’ve taken the Port Jeff ferry a bunch of times, and it’s great, but it drops you right on 91, and 91 is the major route into New England. It’s basically always traffic bound, sometimes badly so, and southbound they have this infuriating merge down to one lane to get onto 95 that is always congested. More generally, the Hartford ->New Haven stretch of 91 is just bad all around. If you’re willing to spend an extra hour or so in travel time in the service of a more relaxing trip, take the orient point ferry. You have to make your way off the north fork to 495 using the ~40mph route 25, which takes about an hour, but you pass through often picturesque wine country and long island coast, with beautiful old victorians, quaint old villages, and not much of the suburban sprawl that characterizes most of long island.

The CT portion of the trip is great too, compared to the 91 corridor – I used route 32, route 2 and route 395 from New London, and they were much less congested than the alternative. You end up deposited on 91 just south of Hartford, meaning you skip all the worst of the congestion because most all of the new england folks have skipped off to 84 and 90.

I’m not sure if I would be as pleased with this route if I was heading to my Mom’s place, since she’s another 45 minutes from where the Lords live (which is where I was recently, for Mike’s surprise 40th b-day bash), and I’m not sure how it will be in the summer when the city folk head out to wine country for the weekend, but I’m going to try it a few more times and see.

These technically aren’t podcasts, but check out Librivox, which has a large and quickly growing collection of fan spoken, public domain audiobooks. I grabbed an Andre Norton novel and a Jane Austen novel and added them to my ‘to listen’ pile, and there’s tons more to choose from. There’s also an RSS feed for new releases which is worth subscribing to.

How can you resist a sci fi short story delivered to your podcast client every week or so, some by renowned authors and others by authors on the make, and all generally entertaining on some level or another, bookended by often clever commentary by the host. Definitely worth checking out and one of my favorite podcasts – escapepod. They’ve become popular enough that they’re considering adding fantasy content or simply producing a second fantasy-themed podcast as well.

… but at least we’ll still be able to drive our SUV’s. Check out this yahoo news piece
which endeavors to look on the bright side of global warming and points out that with the melting of the polar ice caps ~25% of the world’s oil reserves will become available for exploitation, and there are expectations that a lot of additional mineral assets will become available. This is already leading to a land rush at the north pole as countries begin to claim previously inaccessible areas. No significant mention of the fact that many of the world’s major cities will have some serious issues with rising water levels. NYC 15′ underwater? No problem a dike can’t solve!

I bought my 40th birthday present today. I’ve been planning this for a while and the weather was finally good enough for me to go test a few models and then finally purchase a medium-end recumbant tadpole bicycle, a hpvelotechnick scorpion, to be precise. My plan is for this to become the primary way that I commute to work each day, as well as the way I’ll do my weekly grocery shopping and Saturday morning errands. I’m fortunate that there is a local bike trail which runs from my house to the Amherst campus which also passes right by two of the three main shopping plazas in the area, and the third one is also very close to my office. Here’s a high resolution photo of the bike from the manufacturer’s site. I’ll post pics of mine once it’s delivered – I had a few options added onto it (cargo tray, mirror, computer, better pedals, and a better seat material), and it will take them a couple of days to put it together. I also had them remove an option which adds 10″ or so to the length of the chain and makes it easy to adjust the thing for different riders. Less chain is better. The only downside is you have to be around my height to try the thing, and I’m sure everyone I know is going to want to take it for a spin.

I’m an avid reader of Roman history, from source material like Suetonius, to fictional interpretations like Robert Graves’ fabulous I, Claudius novels and the equally fantastic BBC dramatization of the first one, to more recent dramatizations like the Colleen McCullough Masters of Rome series of novels, and into the present with the current HBO series.

Unfortunately my knowledge of ancient history sort of stops with the sacking of Rome and the rise of the Eastern Empire, so I was pleased to run across this excellent series of lectures by Lars Brownworth, a historian working at Stonybrook School in NY. While no means deep, the lectures are wonderfully broad, cutting across a huge swath of history and giving one a sense of some of the people and lots of the politics at play in the Holy Roman Empire in the ages after the fall of Rome, taking time to digress along the way on matters of language, religion, writing, finance, and more. You can tell the speaker loves his material and his diction is clear and engaging. Definitely worth checking out. My only regret is that it’s finite instead of an ongoing series, but there are hours of material to listen to.

My buddy Tony from Skidmore College had his first child this week. There are pics and a video of the newborn over on his site. Congratulations to them for bringing a new Kowalick into the world.