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Energy Bulletin has a transcript of a speech by James Schlesinger at the recent ASPO USA conference - The peak oil debate is over.

May I start with a bromide: a resource which is finite is not inexhaustible. If you think that over, it should not be a revelation. That was a bromide… some people think a keynote should never rise above a bromide….

Some five years ago in Italy I concluded a talk by saying that like the inhabitants of Pompeii, who ignored the neighboring volcano, Vesuvius, until it detonated, the world ignores the possibility of peak oil at its peril.

Two years ago in addressing ASPO in Cork, Ireland, I argued that the peakists had won the intellectual argument, except for some minor details about precise timing, but that by and large everyone recognized that there were limits on our capacity to increase the production of crude oil as we have steadily since World War Two.

[I also argued] that peakists were no longer a beleaguered minority, that they had won, and that consequently they should be gracious in victory.

There’s an old spiritual that is relevant here. The walls of those who doubted the peak seemed to be impregnable. Nonetheless, you marched around the walls seven times and then blew the trumpets and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down.

But acceptance by knowledgeable people is not enough. The political order should respond. Nonetheless, our willingness, let alone our ability, to do anything serious about the impending inability to increase oil output is still a long way off.

The political order responds to what the public believes today, not to what it may come to believe tomorrow. It is also resistant to any action that inflicts pain or sacrifice on those who vote. The payoff in politics comes from reassurance, perhaps precluded by a rhetorical challenge.

Still, the challenge is clear in both logic and in the evidence. Let me start briefly with the logic,

If something cannot be sustained, it will eventually not be sustained… ultimately it will shrink.

Secondly, you cannot produce oil unless you first discover it (a contribution by Colin Campbell).

Third, a resource that is finite cannot continually have its production increased.

What is the evidence?

First, we remain heavily dependent on super-giant and giant oilfields discovered in the 50s and 60s of the last century… I might add, of the last millennium. Only rarely in recent decades have discoveries equaled production. Mostly, it’s been one barrel discovered for every three barrels produced.

Second, old super-giants like Burgan in Kuwait and [Cantarell] in Mexico have gone into decline earlier than had been anticipated… and going into decline have been Alaska, the North Sea, western Siberia and the like.

Third, while it is not yet “Twilight in the Desert” (as you may have read) still we are well into the afternoon, even in Saudi Arabia. Even the Ghawar oilfield is increasingly hard to sustain.

Fourth, in 2004 we experienced our first demand-driven price spike, as opposed to the previous price spikes driven by supply interruptions. We still operate at about the level of production capacity of 2004.

Next, given projected decline curves running from 4 to 6 percent, and the projected increase in demand during the next quarter century, we shall require the new capacity equivalence of five Saudi Arabias.

Even the International Energy Agency, which previously had been sanguine, now suggests that we can no longer increase production of conventional oil in the course of this decade.

Note that it is conventional oil: that is all that Hubbert talked about. Somewhat disingenuously, the debate has been turned on him by talking about fuel liquids in general, throwing in tar sands, heavy oil, coal liquids, oil shale and so on.

But clearly, large conventional oil production is increasingly no longer part of the future unless there is a technological breakthrough, which Mr. Gilbert talked about just a few moments ago, raising the ultimate recovery rate from existing fields, which at this moment we cannot expect.

Of course, there are uncertainties which make timing predictions with regard to the peak risky. Iraq, which has been held back for a variety of reasons, may come along as one of those five new needed Saudi Arabias.

Offshore Brazil and offshore oil elsewhere are promising. Shale gas, which is apparently coming in abundance (but is not, of course, oil) may somewhat alleviate the pressures on liquid fuels.

But in general we must expect to get along without what has been our critical energy source in expanding the world’s economy for more than half a century.

Can the political order face up to the challenge? There is no reason for optimism.

We are likely to see pseudo-solutions, misleading alternatives and sheer sloganeering: “energy independence,” “getting off foreign oil” and the like. All of that sheer sloganeering we have seen to this point.

The political order (which abhors political risk) tends to rely on the Biblical prescription, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

The NYT has an article on electric bike riding in Switzerland - Over the Alps on a Bike With a Boost. I had one of these things overtake me (startlingly quietly) as I was riding up a hill last week - they are looking quite sleek nowadays.

THE road east out of Sörenberg rears up into a series of steep turns that climb the Glaubenbielen Pass, the high point of a road the Swiss Army punched through the Alps more than 60 years ago. Though the occasional car and bus make the journey to the top, these days much of the road belongs to cyclists.

On a cool afternoon in mid-July I was one of them. I hadn’t ridden much all season, yet something primordial kicked in when I spied another biker just ahead. His calf muscles were swollen like Salamanca hams, and he was stooped over the bars, sweat dripping onto the pavement.

Easy pickings, I thought, as I tore after him. Within moments I’d reeled him in. He, gasping; me, hardly out of breath: I felt, well, guilty. “You’re cheating!” he panted in German as I sped by. “You’ll be out of power soon!”

He was right: I was cheating. With the mash of a button on my handlebars, a 250-watt electric motor had spun to life and increased the power of my pedal strokes by 150 percent. Suddenly I had my own domestique, a 26-volt brute that seemed to grab the saddle and shove me onward every time I pedaled. In a few minutes, I had reached the summit, taken a short walk and realized that cycling big Alpine passes with some breath to spare might not be such a bad way to cheat.

Here in the United States electric bikes are slowly becoming more popular — you can, for instance, take e-bike tours in San Francisco and Napa Valley. In Europe, the trend is more developed with robust rental schemes in places like Britain’s Lake District, Versailles and Amsterdam. But it is the Swiss who have embraced the concept with the most imagination.

For 50 Swiss francs a day, about $62 at $1.25 to the franc (with discounts for multiple days), you can rent an electric bike from one of 400 rental stations around the country and then set out on some 5,600 miles of well-marked bike paths. With hundreds of places along the way to obtain fresh batteries free, you don’t need to be a whippet-thin racer to roll for days through the spectacular Swiss hinterlands — up steep mountain passes and past soft meadows, burbling creeks and curious cows. You’re free from unforgiving train schedules and away from the tourist hordes but still have access to all the traditional Swissness you can take at inns and restaurants along the way. And since sweating is cheap, a famously expensive country just became a little more affordable.

I watched the second episode of "All watched over by machines of loving grace" today and found it interesting but mildly annoying.

Id noted the parallels in the first episode to Fred Turners book "From Counterculture To Cyberculture", so I wasnt particularly surprised to see Turner make an appearance in this episode, along with Stewart Brand, and the tracing of these ideas back to Bucky Fuller.

What was new about this episode was the repeating of common misconceptions about "The Limits To Growth" and the strange line of reasoning that seemed to argue that the search for "equilibrium" (ie. a scenario where our overall impact on the environment is trimmed to the point where we dont end up having the population crash as we overwhelm the planets carrying capacity) that "Limits" undertakes is really arguing for a form of political stasis where no radical change is to be contemplated.

While this may have been a goal of the Technocrats that preceded them, it doesnt ring true for the systems theorists.

Curtis even notes that Jay Forrester and the "Limits" crew explicitly said they werent considering politics, but discounts this as a form of dishonesty rather than accepting that the book is just outlining scenarios around resource consumption, population and pollution rather than being a political manifesto (which would have been entirely counterproductive).

Where is does veer towards politics (in the section entitled "Transitions to a sustainable system", where it prescribes the changes required to make our global economy sustainable), the practices recommended are both positive and a change from the general status quo today - it doesnt read like a manual for perpetuating elite control and forbidding political change, with the non-technical recommendations including :

* poverty reduction
* nonviolent conflict resolution
* accurate/unbiased media
* “decentralisation of economic power, political influence and scientific expertise”
* “stable populations” and “low birth rates” by “individual choice”

Curtis main point (like Turners before him) - that the counterculture / hippie / cyberculture ideal of a world without politics is a fantasy - is valid, but he really goes off the rails trying to blame the systems theorists and ecologists for the problems of the world today.

The section about the colour revolutions in eastern europe, in particular, seemed wildly off base - he assumes that this genuinely was a case of leaderless uprising spontaneously organised via network culture - when instead they were orchestrated from the US to expand western influence at the expense of the Russians - and naturally enough faltered once the population realised that their interests werent really being advanced at all by the changes (just as well most likely see with the current "Arab Spring" equivalent).

Earth2Tech reports Tesla CEO Elon Musk is looking forward to a breakthrough in energy storage using capacitors - Tesla CEO: I’d Bet On Capacitors Over Batteries.

Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk says he bets that it could be capacitors — rather than batteries — that deliver an important breakthrough for electric transportation. “If I were to make a prediction, I’d think there’s a good chance that it is not batteries. But capacitors,” said Musk at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Capacitors, or ultracapacitors, are energy storage devices that can deliver quick bursts of intense power and can withstand more charge and discharge cycles than batteries. They’re like batteries, and can be used in complement with batteries.

But it’s interesting that the CEO of a company that bases its technology around standardized, small format, lithium-ion batteries would make such a comment. Perhaps Tesla is doing some R&D on capacitor storage deep in its Palo Alto, Calif. labs?

The original reason Musk came out to California years ago was to do research on advanced, high energy density capacitors at Stanford, and to try to leverage what Musk said was tens of billions of dollars of R&D that’s been applied to capacitors for advanced ship making. But then, that whole Internet thing and PayPal happened. And then Tesla (and SolarCity and SpaceX).

Musk says he’s optimistic there will be a solution found by one or another companies in the capacitor space that “will supercede,” batteries. The capacitor companies I’ve written about include Ioxus, which makes ultracapacitors for transportation in complement with batteries; EEstor, which seems like it’s not ever going to deliver anything; Recapping, which is backed by Khosla Ventures and won an ARPA-E grant; and EnerG2, which makes materials for ultracapacitor makers.