Back in Houma after three altogether too short weeks with Kate and Eva. Despite all the excitement and challenge of the summer's work in the Gulf, I also felt defeated at losing two months with my girls, up in the land of forests and lakes. They managed quite nicely without me, being with Kate's mother and her husband Dave, but among other things, nearly all of Kate's and my to-do list went undone. A few items on the list which we didn't get to:
1) Visit cousin Drew on Moosehead Lake;
2) Visit Uncle Jack and Pat again, and help him build his house addition;
3) Go dancing at the Silver Spur;
4) Play some pickup lacrosse one Sunday evening in Portland;
5) Check out a race or two at Oxford Plains Speedway.
I'm sure Kate could add several more, but those stick out in my mind.
Now I'd come home from the last voyage fairly fried mentally, and the low-key birthday celebration (I turned 40 this year, and I think I'm still in a kind of denial--at least, I still
want to be immature) was just fine for me. Only I didn't realize how devious Kate and her mother (not to mention Dave) can be.
They'd put together a surprise party, involving all the nearby family, and those of my friends who could make the trip up to Maine. But the leadup was even more impressive than the party for its level of deception.
Kate's mother needed me out of the way on Saturday, while she decorated and while people arrived. So they gave me a gift card to LL Bean, a surefire method to get rid of me...only they also needed to ensure that I'd go on Saturday and not before. (I suggested driving down Wednesday night, but allowed Kate to shoot that down.) So, to keep me there Thursday and Friday, Dave had ordered a delivery of cut & split firewood, which I was to haul and stack in the garage.
I EARNED that party, I tell you. I loaded two and a half cords of wood inside that stupid garage Thursday and Friday...well, not just I alone. I whined to Kate Friday morning that I wanted to go to Freeport then, and finish the wood on Saturday. In somewhat of a panic (though keeping outwardly cool), Kate offered to help me with the wood if I'd do it then.
And I'd thought Kate wasn't capable of lying. How foolish was I?
So we left Saturday, and bought some stuff, and came home around 4 PM (Kate had even learned the back-road way, so as to avoid the parked cars), and I got my big surprise. It was a great party, a fun way to end the summer, and I got nice & sloshed on cold duck. Cold duck! Cheap red spritzy wine, who'd'a guessed it tasted so good? Fortunately I only finished three bottles, so I have over a case left.
(Make that one bottle fewer, since Kate enjoyed a bottle last night while watching Kung Fu.)
We then moved back down to RI, and hauled most of our possessions to our new apartment (fortunately with a basement), and began post-condo life. I was bitter for a day or two, but once we'd arranged enough furniture and could live more or less normally in the new place, I settled down. Considering our desperate circumstances of last April, the progress we've made in five months to clear debt, lower our cost of living and clarify our longer-term plans, we've turned things around quite a bit. We arrested a freefall and are now stationed rather comfortably.
Of course, the most obvious constant this whole time has been Eva, our burbling little ball of fidget. She's not quite walking yet, though she's getting all the practice she can, hauling herself up on whatever's handy and sidling along. Kate and I have agreed many times that Eva's coming along so early in our relationship cut off a lot of the light-hearted play we might've had before getting married. But in times like these, when anxiety and tension have been such constants in Kate's and my lives, Eva has been our (mostly) placid relief, our happy little reminder that life is infinitely more than bills and plans and careers.
We say, not really joking at all, that Eva is now the head of the family. Her physical needs trump everything else, nearly all the time. (And, as conscientious parents, Kate and I do try to distinguish between Eva's needs and her moods--and the moods are becoming more prominent with time.) But throughout the winter and spring, when I had a job that I knew was going badly, my standard of measurement was Eva's behavior. If she stayed happy, and glad to see me and Kate, then I knew we were doing well.
The responsibility and joy of raising a daughter has provided Kate and me with continuity and satisfaction that might not have been possible otherwise. So now that we're here, on the verge of autumn (the little bengal's and my favorite season), Eva's state of mind and health remain our basic family measure. We have a home, we both have jobs, and we're steadily regaining financial health. But all the while, the baby's been growing and the coccoon we're trying to provide her seems to be intact.
I type this as we're steaming south through the bayou toward the open water, which is still hours away. I'll be asleep before we reach it, and awake again before we arrive at our first station to begin testing equipment.
This summer's work on the Deepwater spill has brought about a professional renaissance which I desperately needed. I'd stalled out almost completely at URI. This spring, when I began obsessively following the spill in the news, part of me sensed that I was partly trying to escape the doctorate, looking for any worthy distraction. Only, this blowout was far more than a distraction: it was an opportunity to learn about some new worlds to me, the engineering, economics and politics of energy.
I've begun to learn. I'm an environmentalist in general, not the fiercest but I do recycle, economize on fuel and electricity, and try to live simply. Questions of how global society obtains and consumes energy, and the physical toll this takes on the planet (an unsubstantiated bit of trivia: it requires three gallons of water to produce one gallon of gasoline--factoids like that earned me the nickname "Bankrupt Intellect" from my fourth-grade teacher), have become fascinating to me. You might say that I was more in tune with the act locally aspect of environmentalism; now I'm learning more about thinking globally.
It will be quite some time before I'm any kind of authority on the topic, whether in petroleum, nuclear, coal or renewables. I've learned about petroleum exploration, and some of the particulars of oil wells, and how oil reservoirs can be managed or mismanaged. I've learned some basics of the scale on which the global economy operates, and about the impacts of that scale economy on local production around the world. It really is a new world to my mind and I feel like a child exploring it.
Granted, when the topic involves concepts like peak oil, carbon emissions, economic warfare and political control, child's play might seem like a poor comparison. But when the complexity and depth and overall motion of a set of things is unfamiliar and mesmerizing, it can take on the brightness and fascination that comes over children with their toys. (And after all, even in major industries of global importance, we talk about "players.") I feel like a little kid who's walked into a gigantic toybox full of ideas and histories and consequences and it's all bright as sunshine--though oil itself is thick, dark and rather poisonous.
Enough about my foolish state of mind. The things I'm learning are at some levels quite frightening, and when I begin feeling that reaction, I have a few reminders for myself. First, I'm still new to it all. First impressions can be prophetic, but not always. Besides, I refuse to let myself be ruled by fear (for example, of sudden global economic and political collapse due to scarcity of oil). A measure of reassurance comes from an intellectual hero of mine, Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist. He set himself the task of identifying the biological causes for the various mythologies which humanity has created for itself--original biological causes growing later, of course, into historical trends all around the world, but still maintaining their biological and psychological significance. If the myths were to lose their contact with human psychology, then they would cease to be relevant. But that's a tangent I don't need to explore.
Campbell had a point concerning end-of-the-world doomsayers of all stripes, including environmentalists. Fear of impending disaster is one of the universal themes of myth. Whether by flood, or fire, or armies of locusts, some terrible judgment is generally coming down the turnpike toward us deserving infidels. You can seamlessly substitute modern science, with its fears of rising seas and warming air, for earlier mysticism. Campbell was on record as saying that in 10,000 years, humans then will have some other unavoidable catastrophe to worry themselves with. (This is where we venture into the psychological side of things, and I won't go further, knowing just about nothing about psychology.)
Anyhow, oil and water shortages fit this pattern perfectly. Except that complacency is an ignorant response. The science which has led us to the patterns of consumption we have now, also provides evidence of the consequences. The world, the universe, even our own bodies and minds are complex beyond the possibility of our imagining. But we can still measure aspects of the world around us, and try to act intelligently. (That is, after all, partly how we came to possess these brains in the first place.)
And when it comes to our consumption of fuel, every measure we have says that there isn't enough oil in the earth to support the amount we use now. The concept of "peak oil" isn't of a sudden drop of oil production to zero. It rather is the concept of a worldwide production maximum, after decades of increase, after which point production of oil must irreversibly decrease. Gradually, most likely, and over the course of decades, but still, oil production must become less as we deplete our best (and second-best, and third-best) resources. Common sense agrees: we as a race wouldn't be drilling for oil in a mile of water, and two miles further into the earth's crust beyond that, if there were still shallow oil fields to be found on dry land. We go way offshore, and extremely deep, because that's the easiest oil left. Kind of like scrabbling for change on the floor of your car because your pockets are empty.
One of the leading voices of peak oil (his term is twilight) over the past several years has been
investment banker Matt Simmons. He specialized in energy investments, and over several decades had been quite successful. Matt's single largest contribution to thinking on energy was his 2006 book, "Twilight in the Desert", which profiles Saudi Arabian oil production, in the effort to determine how much oil that nation produces, and how much it has left. Saudi Arabia, like the other members of OPEC, doesn't publish any detailed production information, and even its yearly national statistics are dismissed as falsehoods. As the title "Twilight" implies, Matt's assessment is that Saudi Arabian oilfields are in decline after nearly 50 years of heavy production.
I first heard of Matt this year, of course, as a result of the Deepwater accident, but not in a complimentary way. He was apparently making the rounds of talk shows, spreading fantasy and malicious lies about the situation in the Gulf. I'd become a devoted reader of an expert energy website, The Oil Drum, run by a group of energy professionals, and through that site learned about many of Matt's most ridiculous statements. Not knowing who this person was--a longtime, respected authority on petroleum markets--I imagined an ignorant commentator in his 20s, armed with intensity but no knowledge, inventing things he thought were real.
A list of some of the falsehoods attributed to Simmons (I haven't tried to YouTube any clips, but these statements were corroborated by many different people posting to the website):
1) The so-called blown-out well was actually a second blowout. The first blowout had occurred six miles northeast, and was still flowing freely and was unattended to, as late as mid-June;
2) The blowout preventer (BOP) at the so-called blown-out well, had been ejected by an explosion from the real, first blowout six miles northeast, and had flown the six miles through the air and landed at the site of the second well;
3) The oil gusher would result in a gigantic crater in the northern part of the Gulf, and billions of barrels of oil would come flooding out at once when it collapsed;
4) There were giant bubbles of methane gas in the Gulf, which would float to the surface and then float ashore and likely explode over land, or at least poison everybody there;
5) The federal government was actively evacuating 20 million people from the Gulf coast as a result of the methane explosion threat;
6) The oil was gushing out of the well at the rate of 150,000 barrels per day;
7) There was a subsurface lake of oil in the Gulf, as big as Montana and 75 feet thick, resulting from the blowout.
Now all seven of these are ridiculous statements, and again, I didn't hear them come from Matt's mouth, but read repeated attributions to him. In perhaps related news, Matt Simmons died in the hot tub at his home in Maine this summer. In addition to his finance firm based in Houston, Matt led an ocean energy think tank and venture capital group, based in Maine and hoping to turn that state into a global center for renewable energy. He was clearly a leader, a forward-thinking person who could motivate people. How optimistic he sincerely was seems to be in doubt in light of his behavior this spring and summer.
Why the idiotic statements? Anyone with common sense, and a bit of geological and engineering knowledge, could easily dismiss those seven items above. I'll do so right now:
1) If there were a second blowout, there would have been a second sheen on the ocean surface, but there was none. At some point it would have become clear that there was a second oil source.
2) An explosion powerful enough to send a 45-foot-tall steel machine (the blowout preventer) up through 5,000 feet of water, and then six miles away through the air, would have (a) completely destroyed the machine first, (b) have generated some pretty big waves which people would have noticed along shore. (Not to mention what would have happened to what was left of the BOP once it hit the water again after flying six miles in the air.)
3) Oil doesn't exist in gigantic, cavernous pools underground. It exists in networks of tiny pore spaces within rock. Once the oil is gone, the rock might subside somewhat, especially if the oil has gushed out quickly. The ground over a big reservoir, like the Wilmington oil field in California, might sink by 20 feet or so, but that's fairly rare. They certainly don't collapse like sinkholes.
4) There were no giant methane bubbles. There was (and is) a lot of methane, but it's dissolved throughout the water, not lurking as one gigantic bubble (and if it were, since methane is far lighter than water, it'd come to the surface in a big hurry). Gases spread out and diffuse, they don't float along like giant water balloons. Furthermore, methane isn't a poison. It can asphyxiate you by crowding out the oxygen, but it's not an active poison the way hydrogen sulfide or chlorine are. The exploding/poisonous-methane lie--and Simmons knew enough about gas to understand it was a lie--might be the most malicious of them all, as it left many thousands of people along the coast in real panic.
5) Contrary to Glenn Beck's lies about FEMA concentration camps, there were no mass forced evacuations.
6) Historically, the very largest wells have produced up to 100,000 barrels a day--a very select group. Generally speaking, 65,000 barrels a day is tremendous. (I think wells in the US average 1,300 barrels a day.) 150K barrels per day is a stupidly high estimate.
7) Even if the well were gushing at 150,000 barrels per day, it would take over a hundred years to produce a lake the size of Montana and 75 feet thick.
So the question is: what was Matt up to? Had he just cracked and gone nuts? Did he decide to act like a carnival barker and just spew inaccuracies in order to scare people? Or perhaps something in between? Maybe years of crusading for more moderate energy use and increasing development of renewables, had made him so hopelessly frustrated that he did honestly lose his mind just a bit at the news of this accident.
I've read a Powerpoint presentation he gave on May 6 of this year, more than two weeks after the initial explosion, and it was as intelligent and lucid as his book. It certainly doesn't seem to be the work of a raving idiot. So I'm leaning toward the cynical, lying manipulator theory, but I really don't know, and probably never will.
In some ways, despite his spectacular meltdown at the end of his career, Matt Simmons is an intellectual hero of mine. His natural curiosity, fed by a series of offhand observations and growing suspicion, led him to conduct a large-scale research project on a very important, and largely ignored question: does the reality of Saudi Arabia's oilfield production match the Saudi Arabian government's claims, and if not, what does that imply for the world economy?
Simmons' book hit like a bombshell, and the shock has reverberated throughout the energy industry ever since. He has ripped the veil off the face of mideast oil production.
In some ways, Matt Simmons' descent into utter irrationality this summer, and the confusion it produced in many observers, reminds me of another, much more famous conversion, which has also left people mystified. Though the more famous conversion wasn't into a bizarre pack of lies, but rather into a new religion. Still, the man's own testimony hasn't helped anyone to clear up what exactly went on inside him.
I mean Paul, the apostle, who converted from Judaism to Christianity on the Damascus road. The question people (even my hero Joseph Campbell) ask is, Why? What happened? How could such a strong personality and forceful thinker as Paul suddenly change his philosophy so completely? Was it a cynical story, one he crafted in order to gain favor with the Christians he had decided to cultivate?
I say no. I think it was sincere, and it was longer in the coming than anyone, especially Paul himself, realized.
The clue is in one of Paul's letters (I forget to whom), when he describes his days as Saul, one of the Jewish priests who was trying to re-convert Christians back to Judaism. In the letter, Paul admits to disputing with the Christians, trying logically to convince them of the error of their ways, and to return to the true faith within the house of Yahweh.
In other words, it sounds a lot like what Paul was later doing to gentiles, Jews and believers of other religions, trying to convince them that Christianity was the true path. Whether as the Jewish Saul, or as the Christian Paul, this man was trying to argue and dispute and convince people into accepting his religion.
Only, I think the Christians really got to the Jewish Saul. I think their faith, their emotional need to believe in a god who died and was resurrected in order to relieve them of their guilt, touched a similar, deep, and desperate need in the proud, argumentative Saul. I think Saul's own self-doubt and uncertainty blossomed over the years--years, he writes in his letter--which he spent trying to re-convert Christians. Eventually, Saul's own heart told him that Christianity was the truer religion, and his brain finally realized what his heart had long felt, as Saul traveled on the road to Damascus, and then became Paul.
I think the Damascus light was the sudden decision of Paul's conscious brain to believe what its subconscious had been convinced of for quite a while. It was a divided and unhealthy man who set out to Damascus that day, and it was a restored and whole one who completed the journey.
The application of this idea to Matt Simmons isn't very kind. It makes Simmons look like a petty fool, though a bit tragic. The mounting frustration and despair he felt at not effecting enough change might simply have overwhelmed him. Possibly he made a deliberate, cold-blooded decision to play an on-air buffoon and spout falsehoods meant to terrify the ignorant. (There is a network which uses this as a business model, and Simmons was a very astute businessman.) I don't know.
I do grieve the loss of a fine thinker and visionary. In some measure, I will devote my career to solving the energy crisis. And here as elsewhere, questions will never cease to appear.
