Wind power has a few problems, but I tend to think of Solar Power as the Holy Grail of sustainable energy. But Robert Glennon tells us that some solar plants use a great deal of water, that is super-heated to run turbines - not unlike nuclear plants.

Is Solar Power Dead in the Water?

In contrast, most large solar power projects use a system called concentrating solar power, or CSP, that heats a fluid that boils water to turn a turbine. CSP, just like any thermal power plant, produces waste heat as a byproduct. In most cases, cooling towers release the heat to the atmosphere through evaporation, a process that uses gobs of water. In fact, CSP uses four times as much water as a natural gas plant and twice as much as a coal or nuclear plant.

Where are the easy choices?

Sharon Astyk, author of Depletion and Abundance, co-author of A Nation of Farmers, subsistence farmer and mother of four looks at health care from the perspective of those growing our food:

Why National Health Care Is Necessary for a Viable Food System

Among younger small farmers getting started, I've watched many of them struggle with the insurance conundrum - they start out young and healthy, and often are willing to forgo health insurance because they truly and honestly want to do something good. But farming pays poorly, and the first serious injury can be a disaster - and working outside all day, you get hurt sometimes. Or perhaps they have a child - even those able to take on a homebirth find that the cost of having a child is a few thousand dollars or more - on a small household income. Those who must have a hospital birth or more interventions can find themselves rapidly indebted. Soon, finding a job with health care coverage starts to look awfully good - and there goes the farm, or it goes down to a part-time venture.

Farmers who experience a major injury or illness risk losing their land to bankruptcy - while losing your home is always traumatic, there's a big difference between losing the house you love but that mostly provides shelter and a good school district, and losing the land you use to make your living. Up to 10% of all agricultural bankruptcies are linked to illness and injuries - mostly among the uninsured. Once the land is lost, it is gone - most farmers once out of agriculture, are out for good.

Few of us think of the debate on health care in terms of food security and our agriculture - but we are on the cusp of a great shift in our food system, mostly driven by demographics. The average age of US farmers is approaching 60 years old, and there are not enough young farmers to follow them. If we do not make it possible to go into farming a profession - if we make it only the province of the young, the healthy, the childless, we risk facing a national food crisis far more acute that the one shadowing us due to other causes. The reality is that all of us have a real investment in our country's continuing to produce sufficient food, and the right kind of food - and that investment requires that it be possible to become a farmer without sacrificing your health.

That's all well and good, but what struck me from her article is something I've been mulling for quite a while.

Read more »

A troubling short film, called Chicken a la Carte. There are some other good shorts there as well.

Writing for ASPO, Tom Whipple reports:

Oil prices opened and closed the week around $68 a barrel. At one point they fell below $65 on news of a build in US crude stocks and later touched a high of over $70 on hopes that US unemployment was bottoming out. Oil's connection to the dollar, equity markets, and hopes for an economic recovery remains strong.

Demand for oil remains weak, with US consumption of petroleum products falling to 17.7 million b/d, the lowest since May 1999. While gasoline demand this year has been relatively strong, distillate consumption, which is largely used for industrial purposes in the summer months, is down by nearly nine percent. Distillate stocks continue to grow and are now 34 percent higher than last year. In the meantime, OPEC production continues to creep back up as exporters take advantage of higher prices to ease their recent financial problems.

An oversupply of distillates in the US can be reduced through exports, provided world demand holds up, or they can be stored provided there is enough space. In the last two months, oil stored on tankers has jumped by 71 percent. Some distillate is now being held aboard newly built tankers that have not yet been used for crude.

As the article notes, demand for oil is weak, while demand for gasoline is strong. So why doesn't strong demand for gasoline create just as strong a demand for oil?

Because in normal refining, a given ratio of several products must come out of a barrel of oil: gasoline and perhaps diesel, heating oil, kerosene, aviation fuel, lpg or even asphalt are produced. Gasoline is a blend of distillates and non-distillates, so oil guys tend to say "distillates" to mean heating oil and diesel. If demand for the distillates is low, then refiners must either refine less oil or find storage for heating oil and diesel they can't sell. Cutting back on refining will make gasoline scarcer, hence more expensive.

Update 1: Matt Savinar raised an interesting point on LATOC:

Also, many of your friends ... are probably asking "if the oil inventories are high then why are the prices soaring." Keep in mind there is a bottleneck in many of the refineries ... An increasing amount of the oil in "inventory" is heavy oil. Most of the currently operating refineries were built to handle the light sweet varieties and retrofitting them to handle the heavier varieties of oil is extremely capital intensive. With the credit markets locked up at a time when oil prices have plunged in the last year, companies can't get the loans needed to overhaul their refineries to handle the heavy stuff.

Hard to believe oil refiners can't get credit.

Update 2: Wall Street Journal June 10 2009

Although gasoline demand may be rising, refiners cut back on production of other fuels last week, operating at 85.9% of capacity, down 0.4 percentage point. Gasoline inventories fell by 1.6 million barrels, compared with a forecast for an 800,000-barrel increase. Distillate stocks, including heating oil and diesel, fell 300,000 barrels, where analysts had expected a 1.5-million-barrel gain.

Another pundit tells us what the future holds:

The Next Big Thing: Neomedievalism By Parag Khanna

... as countries stumble to right the wrongs of the corporate masters of the universe, they are driving us right back to a future that looks like nothing more than a new Middle Ages, that centuries-long period of amorphous conflict from the fifth to the 15th century when city-states mattered as much as countries.

...

This diffuse, fractured world will be run more by cities and city-states than countries. ... Today, just 40 city-regions account for two thirds of the world economy and 90 percent of its innovation. The mighty Hanseatic League, ... will be reborn as cities such as Hamburg and Dubai form commercial alliances and operate "free zones" across Africa like the ones Dubai Ports World is building. Add in sovereign wealth funds and private military contractors, and you have the agile geopolitical units of a neomedieval world.

Again, I think many things could happen, and this makes as much sense as a lot of other predictions. What seems clear to me is that there will be a growing exodus of those having steady work, reliable energy, healthy food, clean water and security into the class of those not always having those things. The haves, aided by the press, will dehumanize the have-nots, blaming them, as they do now, for their predicament. Who will end up among the haves is less clear, but I think a lot of folk who assume that they have reserved spots at the "haves" table will be disappointed.