Update on Energy News, and What’s Going on With Iran?

John Rawlins has a B.S. in physics and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. He retired in 1995 from the Westinghouse Hanford Co. at the Hanford site in Eastern Washington. He recently retired from teaching physics and astronomy at Whatcom Community College.

I was scanning headlines in the online Bellingham Herald today and, under the heading “Econews” saw the following: “Energy Tsunami Coming, Ex-Policy Makers Warn.” (http://www.bellinghamherald.com/550/story/468191.html)

The article describes a letter sent to both current major presidential candidates as well all members of Congress and all 50 state governors. The authors are 27 elder statesmen whose names any casual reader of the news will remember. The wording is exceptionally strong and includes the following statement: “The next president is going to have to put energy right at the top of his agenda.”

One commenter noted, “Both candidates are still embryonic in their thinking about this.” That certainly squares with what little I’ve heard from the two major candidates. The Green Party candidate comes across as light-years ahead of the two major candidates on energy policy.

Following are the conclusions noted in the Associated Press article by H. Josef Hebert (see a copy of the letter at: http://www.energyxxi.org/xxi/open_letter.html))

“The letter includes 13 broad recommendations. They include aggressively promoting energy efficiency and reducing energy consumption, increased commitments to both nuclear energy and renewable energy sources, making coal more environmentally acceptable and moving transportation away from oil as a fuel.”

The only problem: it’s 30 years too late. Where were these guys when Carter tried to do all these things (except promote nuclear)? Most of them were there; they are mostly even older than I am, and some are old enough to be my father.

So gird yourselves for the next phase of our belated recognition of our energy plight, whatever it is. We are still in the silliness season phase with trying to punish oil producers for charging so much for oil, or looking for villains in the oil futures purchasing arena (speculators), or pinning high hopes on drilling off both coasts and in Alaska for oil that may or may not be there and in any case won’t be produced for at least 10 years.

Side note: I found no mention of this letter in the July 16 issue of The New York Times, even though they list AP reports. And what were some of the headlines in The Bellingham Herald that had much higher visibility? Here’s the list from the “nation and world” category:

• Brother of man suspected in 8 slayings is charged

• Jury finds Ky. man guilty of killing police chief

• Miss. mayor pleads not guilty to home attack

• Birmingham votes to rename airport for King aide

• Prosecutor: Accused leader of DC fraud shared cash

• Wayward N.J. dolphins move to different river

Just what part of “energy tsunami” and “energy at the top of the next president’s agenda” does the media not get?

Meanwhile, the effects of growing energy scarcity on U.S. and world citizens continues to ramp up in severity. In the standard economic model of “letting the markets work,” scarcity of course translates to increased cost as we’ve seen in the oil, natural gas and coal markets — but especially in natural gas and oil in the U.S. Since about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity comes from natural gas, even the cost of regulated electricity is increasing somewhat.

For example, consider a report from the Denver area: http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_9892241.

The electricity and natural gas utility Xcel is planning to cut off services to over 47,000 customers for lack of payment. This represents an increase over the 2005 figure of more 140 percent, more than a factor- of-two increase! It’s not at all clear what it takes to get service restored other than payment of all past costs, so it’s possible that lots of homes will be without electricity or heat next winter. This represents about 8 percent of the customer base.

Another example comes from John Leland writing for The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/us/05elderly.html?_r=2&pagewanted=2&hp&oref=slogin. This article notes that rising gasoline prices has begun to affect aid to elderly people such as food, transportation and medicines. Many of the aid workers are either volunteers or low-paid workers and can no longer to pay for the gasoline required to provide services. This is especially acute in rural areas involving many driving miles.

One aspect of energy scarcity that has received relatively little attention is health care. In the U.S., of course, health care has problems already that go far beyond future energy worries, so we face enormous problems in medical care and at present only see the increasing cost face of things. Dan Bednarz has been writing for Energy Bulletin over the past few years about the impact of peak oil on medicine, and now Stuart Jeffery has written an article focusing on medicine in the U.K.: http://www.energybulletin.net/node/45750.

Jeffery points out some of the same issues as Bednarz has noted for the U.S. The development and distribution of drugs is hugely oil/energy intensive. Getting to centralized doctors’ offices and hospitals will increasingly become problematic for people who can no longer afford cars. Hospitals themselves are highly energy intensive.

He calls for a complete redesign of the U.K. health care system, and reviews the shift in system design that took place in Cuba during the 1990s for some ideas. Primarily, that shift resulted in decentralization of services and more emphasis on healthy living.

Health care in Bellingham and Whatcom County has indeed become highly centralized (for efficiency, what else?), and the newly forming peak oil task force needs to recruit some medical providers to assess the impacts on their business of energy decline and to provide suggestions for redesigning the entire system over time.

From Korea comes more news as “companies raise the white flag of surrender” to rising oil prices: http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2891956. Businesses heavily dependent on oil that are scaling back and/or shutting down include the petrochemical industry, travel (airlines) and automobile manufacturers.

A Reuters article by Alistair Sharp (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080704/ts_nm/oil_price_dc_1;_ylt=AiGxa906819lzFf55eLM9z2AsnsA) points out the basic problem that oil supply has changed very little for the past four years, while demand in developing countries continues to explode in spite of high prices. Just try to imagine the situation when supply begins to decline several percent per year!

One particularly acute comment caught my eye, as it’s something I’ve noted many times but is easy to forget: “It (record oil) is constraining what policy makers can do.” Translated to the local scene, don’t expect oil-intensive job creation responses by state and local governments during these hard times — which means construction projects of all kinds.

But fear not, the U.S. government appears totally oblivious to the idea of job creation for its big oil and oil services buddies around the globe. A recent reminder of this comes from Afghanistan in an article from The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/335023. The title just about says it all: “The Afghan Pipeline You Don’t Know About.”

This Afghan story is surreal. Back “in the day” (1999) Unocal sponsored (paid for) a tour of Taliban officials around the U.S. in an attempt to convince them that a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan and finally India would be a great idea.

The general idea was to avoid routing a pipeline through Iran — which as everyone knows has been quite naughty since it threw out the U.S.-supported shah and elected its own government three decades ago. The Taliban thoroughly annoyed all concerned U.S. people involved by vetoing the pipeline idea.

So now up rises a revived pipeline proposal from a consortium of countries called TAPI — Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India — to build a U.S.-backed pipeline worth $7.6 billion. There is just the minor problem that the proposed route through Afghanistan (straight through Kandahar) goes right into the heart of Taliban country.

One has to wonder which oil services company might get this sweet contract (just who in their right mind would want to work there?). But not to worry, the Afghan president promises to get rid of the Taliban and the millions of land mines in TAPI’s route, all in time for a 2010 start of construction.

Still, the most worrisome adventures in the Middle East continue to involve Iran. There has been lots of mainstream media ‘chatter’ about Israel taking some action, the U.S. having “all options on the table,” and worries that Iran still has not leveled with the United Nations about its former nuclear weapons program and may still have ambitions to develop a highly enriched uranium capability.

Iran now claims to have no interest in a weapons program, and asserts its right under international law to establish a completely functioning nuclear power program — including low-enriched uranium, fuel fabrication, reactors, and (eventually) spent fuel reprocessing with plutonium/uranium recycle.

The problem for international onlookers is that the same equipment — only lots more of it — that provides low-enriched uranium can also provide high-enriched uranium for weapons. The enrichment devices (called centrifuges) are amenable to being sited deep underground and might therefore be extremely difficult to detect and disrupt (with bombing) in the absence of excellent inside intelligence (which has been notoriously hard to come by).

Some informative references on this subject are:

• http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/US/story?id=5281043&page=1 (possibility of an Israeli air attack late this year),

• http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gziKuiEPYqF0T3uzxiFm5_NqqRLQ (how the U.S. will prevent Iran from closing the Persian Gulf to oil shipments), and

• http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174953/why_cheney_won_t_take_down_iran (why the U.S. will not attack Iran by Tom Englehardt).

Suffice it to say that this is an extremely complicated situation, given that Iran has never been de-militarized (as Iraq had been), has a huge army, and has been purchasing weapons as fast as it can from China and Russia to try to prevent an attack. The threats and counterthreats are too numerous now to keep up with.

Amidst all this complexity arose another article on the subject by revered journalist Seymour Hersh in a New Yorker magazine article July 7, 2008 (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/07/080707fa_fact_hersch.) He first reveals that (a Democratic) Congress in late 2007 agreed to a presidential request to provide $400 million to fund a major increase in covert operations in Iran’s southern oil-producing region. The general idea is to use dissident groups in the region to de-stabilize Iran’s religious leadership as well as attempt to gather intelligence about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

This is a very long article with the usual number of highly revealing findings, based on Hersh’s legendary contacts throughout the U.S. military (including the Pentagon). There are some future political problems for Senator Barack Obama in that he has advocated direct talks with Iranian leaders, while members of his party have colluded with the administration in actions designed to effect regime change in Iran.

In my opinion, this article is a must-read for every voting U.S. citizen. For several years I’ve been hearing that war-game scenarios involving conflict with Iran all turned out badly — with some really expensive potential outcomes that could make Iraq seem like a small event sequence. World oil supply and U.S. military assets (ships) are at stake, and if you think $4/gallon gasoline is bad you really need to inform yourself about who’s up to what relative to Iran.

From Hersh’s article, it does seem that the usual split within the White House must play itself out — the neocons (headed by Dick Cheney) vs. the others (headed by Secretary of Defense Gates and just about all the military leaders). The slightest miscalculation by either the U.S. or Iran at this point could have inconceivable consequences. As one of Hersh’s sources said concerning the authorization for increased covert operations, “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.” §