The motorcycles of tomorrow

Wired Magazine brings us some motorcycles of tomorrow, which combine “badass” design with alternative fuels.

Moon and Stars watermelons

Have you ever seen watermelons like these before? No, never! Me neither! They are beautiful, and I can only imagine that they taste as sweet as they look. These are moon and stars watermelons, according to the NY Times.

The image is incredible, because I have never seen anything like it. And that’s just the problem:

[Gary Paul Nabhan] has spent most of the past four years compiling a list of endangered plants and animals that were once fairly commonplace in American kitchens but are now threatened, endangered or essentially extinct in the marketplace. He has set out to save them, which often involves urging people to eat them.

Mr. Nabhan’s list, 1,080 items and growing, forms the basis of his new book, an engaging journey through the nooks and crannies of American culinary history titled “Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods” (Chelsea Green Publishing, $35).

The book tells the stories of 93 ingredients both obscure (Ny’pa, a type of salt grass) and beloved (the Black Sphinx date), along with recipes that range from the accessible (Centennial pecan pie) to the challenging (whole pit-roasted Plains pronghorn antelope).

I don’t know about eating a pronghorn antelope, but I would at least like to taste some moon and stars watermelons.

The oil fueled party may soon be over

High oil prices may be a permanent condition from here out; a fact that, as I previously mentioned, will come at a much higher cost than what most of us can imagine.

However, even with the current price of $120 dollars for a barrel of oil, we simply cannot get enough and, instead, continue marching straight towards the precipice that’s at the end of our “Long Emergency.”

As the NY Times reports, given oil prices, one would expect increased supply or diminished demand to bring things into balance, however:

[A]s prices flirt with $120 a barrel, many energy specialists are becoming worried that neither seems to be happening. Higher prices have done little to attract new production or to suppress global demand, and the resulting mismatch has sent oil prices spiraling upward.

“According to normal economic theory, and the history of oil, rising prices have two major effects,” said Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency, which advises industrialized countries. “They reduce demand and they induce oil supplies. Not this time.”

A key reason that supply is not rising to meet demand is that producers outside of the OPEC cartel — countries like Russia, Mexico and Norway — have been showing troubling signs of sluggishness.

That’s right, the key phrase that one needs to pay close attention to comes at the end: swing oil producers cannot meet demand, due to troubling signs of sluggishness.

The article continues:

At the same time, oil consumption keeps expanding at a faster clip than production. Demand is forecast to increase this year by 1.2 million barrels a day, to 87.2 million barrels a day. In the United States, the world’s most oil-thirsty nation, consumption has actually fallen a bit because of the economic slowdown.

But that drop is being offset by growth in other countries. World consumption is projected to rise 35 percent, to around 115 million barrels a day, in the next two decades. Most of the growth will come from China, India and oil-producing countries in the Middle East, where retail fuel prices are subsidized, encouraging wasteful consumption.

That’s right, at present, it looks like we’re headed towards cliff: “sluggish” oil production and increased global demand. Remember, we’re talking about the world’s most precious commodity, which makes this a situation ripe for conflicts, er, wars on a global scale.

Peak oil?

Some regions are simply running out of reserves. Norway’s production has slumped by 25 percent since its peak in 2001. In Britain, oil production has plummeted 43 percent in eight years. The North Sea is now considered a dying oil basin. Alaska’s giant field at Prudhoe Bay has declined 65 percent since its peak 20 years ago.

[…]

[T]he case that has attracted the most attention is Mexico, the second-biggest exporter to the United States, which seems increasingly helpless to stem the collapse of its largest oil field, Cantarell. Last week, the country’s state-owned oil company, Pemex, said that production had fallen 300,000 barrels a day so far this year to 2.9 million barrels a day, a stunning drop from its peak production of 3.4 million in 2004.

[…]

Further clouding the picture, Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, signaled last week that it might have trouble increasing its production.

As one would expect to read in such an objective and balanced article, solutions that are just over the horizon receive their proper due. The over the horizon solutions usually involve throwing more dollars at tech innovations, so that we can drill for more oil. However, as the article concludes, throwing more dollars at this may not be enough:

The International Energy Agency estimates that current investments will be insufficient to replace declining oil production, let alone increase overall output. The energy agency said it would take $5.4 trillion by 2030 to increase global output, a level of investment that is unlikely to be met. It said a crisis “involving an abrupt run-up in prices” could not be ruled out before 2015.

There you go, kiddies. A preview of upcoming events in The Long Emergency.

The Long Emergency

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler, which has given me a darkly colored lens by which I now see our dependence on oil, our planet’s changing climate, and the heavy psychological and infrastructural investment we, humans, have made in our modern way of life. The point is, as the title of the book suggests, we’re already in a prolonged decline that the pubic doesn’t much appreciate, nor does it have the benefit of visionary leadership to confront head-on the steep challenge before us.

At any rate, thanks to Mr. Kunstler’s book I can now read something like this, and read in between the lines:

CIVITAVECCHIA, Italy — At a time when the world’s top climate experts agree that carbon emissions must be rapidly reduced to hold down global warming, Italy’s major electricity producer, Enel, is converting its massive power plant here from oil to coal, generally the dirtiest fuel on earth.

Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50 percent.

And Italy is not alone in its return to coal. Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are expected to put into operation about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades.

Read through lens by which I now digest items like the one quoted above, the matter of energy extraction becomes a lot more layered; and, in fact, the fundamental question becomes more pronounced, that is, How will we power the cities of tomorrow as we deplete our planet of the one reliable source of energy we’ve counted on for the past one hundred or so years?

The short-hand for summarizing the question, and the many challenging implications packed in it, is by labeling the problem simply “Peak Oil.” As I previously wrote, this is a subject that I’ve recently become interested in; which, I think, will serve me to digest the bits of information that chronicle our search for the next reliable energy source.

Moreover, as The Long Emergency details, the challenges will be enormous, especially given our heavy investment in our petroleum based infrastructure, which has allowed for “just in time supply chains,” for example, and the many comforts of modern living that we take for granted.

Clearly, I’m recommending that you read The Long Emergency. However, if you’d like to get a taste of the author and his material before adding the book to your Amazon shopping cart, here’s an interview with Mr. Kunstler:

Just what do you call it? “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”

There’s no other way of putting it, What the fuck are we doing to our planet? This is pretty astonishing, just what a drastic impact our consumption and waste have on our planet:

A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “trash vortex”, believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: “The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States.”