I would just like to put this link out there for anyone that is tired of mainstream news coverage. It's independent and funded by donations only and is a refreshing look at world affairs not sensationalized by spin and corporate power. Check it out!

The Real News Network

Peace,
Grant

A lot of people have been asking me about the apparently low price of oil these days. Some have argued that we are not near peak oil after all, and that the huge price spike seen this year was not something to worry about. In June the price of oil spiked to $147/barrel and it didn't show any signs of letting up. Now, the price of oil is in the 50's, as it was in early 2005. So, we're off the hook right? I don't think so. Peak oil has everything to do with supply, not demand. It's about reaching a point where all the "good stuff" is gone and oil, thus becomes more expensive to extract and refine.

The recent drop in oil prices is due solely to demand destruction, or the fact that we are in a global recession. Let's face it. Germany even declared official recession today. So, bidders on oil futures tend to back off investing in oil when they expect demand to fall. Thus, as demand falls, so too does the price of oil. Oil futures have dropped so much, in fact, that OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries - whom are mostly comprised of Middle Eastern countries) has voted to decrease production, to help bring the price back up, to cover their interests. So far, it hasn't worked.

In any case, gas is cheaper now, and maybe it's a good time to fill up your oil heating furnace for the winter. Personally, I think we are at a crossroads of oil price stability/volatility, where extraneous economic conditions and geopolitical pressure, in addition to general supply and demand issues are thrusting us into a future of inestimable prices. So, what about peak oil? First of all, I maintain that we have passed global, all-time peak oil production. Although, I could be proven wrong. The local maximum in oil production rate occurred in May 2005 and it hasn't gone back that way since. Could that be the all-time peak? I think so. In principal, we could pump more than that again, but it doesn't seem likely. Economic conditions are giving OPEC a break (production-wise) in that they can safely decrease production, to affect the price of oil and bolster their profits somewhat.

So, the pressure is off OPEC to pump more, more, more, to bring the price down. Occidental economic conditions have taken care of this for them. But, ultimately, it's all relative. If global currencies are devalued, how much reprieve can depressed oil futures give us anyway? Time to go back to nature. Time to power down.

Having said all this, Spain is in recession as much as the rest of Europe, but there is still no sign of a slowdown. There are just as many cars on the roads, just as many plastic made-in-China products on the shelves but there are more people out of work and the price of food has not gone back down. I think it will take real, at-the-pump shortages and "out of gas" signs before people start to modify their behavior.

Peace,
Grant

One thing I really like about living in Catalonia is the concept of "The Village". It's certainly not a new concept, but it is one living arrangement that has stood the test of time. There are not many places I would classify as villages in North America. But, Wakefield, Quebec does come to mind. In the few years I have been living in Spain, I would define the Village as small, densely populated, surrounded by farmland, 100% walkable and with a central street containing the majority of businesses, which are for the most part, family owned and operated "Mom and Pop" type establishments. The main grocery store here in our village isn't referred to by its corporate name, but rather the name of the house where it has been for decades, Cal Salvador (equal I suppose to "Chez" Salvador, in French). The Village is, above all, community based, with an emphasis on publicly accessible squares, parks, sports locales and periodic fiestas!

This sense of community occurred to me poignantly the other day when I walked out of the house onto the narrow sidewalk separating us from the street. I heard one of the neighbours, a guy named Cairot (who is about 80 and has been living here for his whole life and loves to chat) mentioning to another man who was making some sort of inquiry, to "talk to that guy, he's the one"... meaning me of course. We started chatting and I soon realized that he was looking for work. But not just any work. Not work paid in cash. Work paid in fruits and vegetables.

You see, we have a slice of land in this old house that, much to my chagrin, I do not have time to maintain properly. I have managed to grow a few tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, brussel sprouts, scant types of beans and eggplant. The sense of accomplishment in growing your own food is unparalleled. But, I have been in a constant battle with the "malas hierbas" or "evil herbs", that is... weeds! This summer I put in an honest effort when I could, trimming and pulling weeds, hoeing and raking, fertilizing and even setting up a timed mini-irrigation system, but I just cannot keep those nasty weeds in check. Forget about herbicides (something a friend of mine here jokingly refers to as "inevitable chemical warfare"), it ain't gonna happen!

Anyway, so starting next week, Señor Julio will start working the land. He has plenty of tools, including even a rototiller so, I expect that together we will be able to start from a clean slate, weed-wise. I will keep you updated on the life of Me and Julio down in the backyard...

In our garden there is an orange tree (suitable only for marmalade or orange-ade due to the fact they are so sour). But the tree yields hundreds of fruit. Right now, as I look outside, they are still green. In a few months we shall start that harvest and begin bottling some marmalade. In the spring, the orange tree flowers and leaves a wonderful scent in the air, attracting a variety of pollen spreading insects. There are three other fruit bearing trees: the pomegranate, the persimmon and the palm tree. We haven't tried the dates from the palm tree yet. But the birds love them when they fall on our balcony, pecking them apart and leaving the seeds for us to sweep up. As far as the garden goes, there are still a few tomatoes left from the summer, but they don't ripen too fast now. The eggplant and peppers are still going strong though and the brussels sprouts (pictured) turned out nice and required little maintenance.
So, my main point of this blog is the sense of community that I feel here. The streets are small, so it's hard to pass someone you know without saying "hola", even if they are on the other side. The great thing about my new garden arrangement is that it's win-win. We will work the earth together and share the harvest. Stay tuned.

Peace,
Grant

A great article by James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and Geography of Nowhere. This is from his weekly blog.

Peace,
Grant

November 3, 2008
A Nervous Nation

This is a nervous nation. Though I'm usually allergic to paranoia, something makes me think that there's a back office in the US Treasury that is buying the entire Dow Jones Industrial Index at opportune moments -- like fifteen minutes before the closing bell -- at the direction of Mr. Paulson. He seems to easily spend $50 billion a day on other dubious hand-outs. At that scale, buying the whole Dow would just take his walking-around money. The idea behind it, my paranoid fugue goes, is to jack up the stock market enough around election day to give the dimmer members of the voting public the idea that the financial fiasco is over and happy days are here again. You can't put this past the Republican party, despite John McCain's friendly turn on Saturday Night Live, consorting with "the enemy" for laughs.
Apart from that, McCain has run the flat-out most scurrilous campaign I've ever seen, despite his reputation as a war hero and a sterling fellow among the senators. He's run a campaign of malicious innuendo and slander, seemingly aimed at voters who would have trouble qualifying for the Special Olympics. And you have to wonder whether he actually requested Vice-president Dick Cheney to lay that "kiss-of-death" endorsement on him at the last moment. It could only have been better if Mr. Cheney borrowed some trick-or-treater's Darth Vadar costume for the grand occasion.
What many people are nervous about, of course, is the chance of shenanigans with the voting tally. Just one minor feature of the general paralysis gripping this society has been our inability to get rid of those mischievous Diebold computerized voting machines that leave no paper trail. By the way, these touchscreen voting units are an example of the diminishing returns of technology. There was nothing wrong with the old mechanical units, but by making over-investments in complexity we've just created more problems for ourselves. This ought to be a warning to those in the thrall of techno-triumphalism.
People are nervous not just because Mr. Obama might be swindled out of a victory, but because John McCain might get elected. Credibility in his judgment dissolved about eleven minutes after he picked the Bombshell from Wasilla to be a heartbeat away from the oval office. Anyway, the Republican Party needs to crawl off to a dark hole somewhere and either pupate into something better or die -- as the Whigs did in 1856. The Republican Party is not through wrecking America. They have three more months to destroy the US dollar and the economy that runs on it. And with Mr. Paulson shoving out pallet-loads of bundled dollars to the likes of JP Morgan, so they can continue doing the very thing that provoked this financial fiasco -- lending money recklessly to anyone with a pulse-- they might just "get her done!"
Other people are afraid that Mr. Obama will hand out bales of money, too, only to a different class of people. I suppose he will. I hope he will show restraint and apply it to public works that benefit all Americans -- such as my pet project of restoring passenger railroad service so people don't have to drive, for instance, from Atlanta to Louisville or Cleveland to Columbus. Even so, the new President will face not only a tide of woes created by his predecessor, but very likely, too, an obese and ineffectual federal bureaucracy unable to carry out even well-intentioned programs.
He will take office in what may be the darkest economic year this country has ever faced. 2009 shows every sign of being worse than this one, with house foreclosures and car re-pos accelerating, companies hemorrhaging jobs, oil prices heading back up (with shortages possible), and a large new group of the formerly middle class growing restive and sore in the background. It will be an historic act of governance if he can keep the lid on all this. Many people will be worrying, of course, whether he will even survive. The ghost of JFK and the dashed hopes he represented (however real or illusory) still haunt this nation.
Apart from the awful debt deflation and probable rebound hyper-inflation that will whipsaw the nation cross-eyed, the new president will face the energy question. I hope he learns the fundamental lesson: that the only way we can hope to become "energy independent" is to severely reform our car-dependent living arrangements and live more locally. Anybody who believes we're going to run the interstate highways and WalMart on solar, wind, tar sands (which belong to Canada, by the way), oil shale, methane gas, algae-diesel, or used fry-max® is going to be disappointed. We'll have to inhabit the terrain of North America differently -- in traditional towns, villages, cities (scaled smaller, to a lower energy diet), as well as a productive agricultural landscape that will require more attention from live human beings (and maybe help from our friends, the animals).
Much of the real work of the next president will be guiding a transition out of obsolete habits, practices, and expectations that we must shed whether we like it or not. The painful downscaling of the financial sector, from a bloated 20+ percent of the US economy back to something more in the 5 percent range, is only the first of these agonies. The transition away from suburbia -- our tragic misallocation of resources in an infrastructure for daily life with no future -- will be even more harrowing because of the psychology of previous investment, which will provoke a misguided effort to sustain the unsustainable, and squander our dwindling resources in the process.
I reject the label "gloom-and-doomer" where these difficult transitions are concerned. There's a lot about the way we live now that is disgusting, degrading, demoralizing, and socially toxic -- from our suicidal diet of processed fat, salt, and corn syrup byproducts to the spiritually punishing everyday realm of the highway strip to the fantastic loneliness and alienation of a people made hostage to a TV-consumer nexus of corporate colonialism. Were done with that. We just don't know it yet. Mr. Obama may not know it, either, but he is a trustworthy soul to hold our hands as we enter this unknown territory.