Category Archives: Environmental journalism

World oil reserve comparison USGS vs US DOE proven reserves.

By Bill Kovarik

One of the more painful lessons of recent  history involves the way money and  politics can slant  scientific information.

Take the curiously sudden abundance of fossil fuels.  Not long ago we had looming shortages, certain oil scarcity, and the supposed need to go to war to protect the lifeblood of the world’s economy.

But now, seemingly out of the blue, we have an abundance of natural gas from fracking, heavy oil from Venezuela and unconventional oil from Canada’s tar sands. And much more conventional to come from the Dakotas, the Arctic, Latin America and the coasts of Africa.

What if the world didn’t need Saudi Arabia any more?  What if one of the world’s most brutal and bloodthirsty tyrannies were surplus to modern energy needs?

This is not about replacing oil with solar or wind, although that’s not a bad idea either. This is about replacing Saudi oil with oil from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Canada.

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When the Metro subway system opened in Washington DC in 1977, commuters like me were thrilled — until we actually started riding the thing.

During that first week, as the platforms filled to capacity at the height of rush hour, the trains simply would not go. They sat in the stations, doors opening and closing and making that damned “ding dong” sound, and then opening and closing again.

It was amazing. Ding dong. Ding dong. Then the train conductors would ask a few people to get off because the train was overloaded, but that didn’t make any sense. Of course the train was crowded. It was rush hour. “Please, please, will some of the people get off the train.”

I remember the operators pleading, the cops trying to shove people off the trains with their nightsticks. Isn’t it great to have lived in extraordinary times?

Anyway, it turned out that the doors were not closing because they used “fail safe” optical sensors that were not lining up when the car was overloaded. That was happening because the extra weight was causing the floors to sag. Had the floors been made of cold-rolled steel, instead of some high-tech titanium alloys, and had the doors not been built with over 2,000 moving parts, the trains would have kept running.

It was a great example of “overtech,” the tendency to overbuild systems that Continue reading →