Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 307 - 2 650 words
Columns :: Things look up for me; but oil problems for everybody in the long term

Ourense, Spain, December 5, 2010 -- Comments:   Ratings:

Financial crisis causing changes for me in Spain
Druzhka moving back to Russia
I'll play local guide to London this summer?
Computer finally getting hooked up – maybe
I don't have $ to bring Misha here now; but maybe soon?
Worst yet energy, money crises, looming



Ourense, Spain, December 5, 2010 -- Since declaring in my last column that Spain was home – sort of – I have been presented with some sobering news:

Druzhka told me that the world economic downturn seems to be being felt in this godforsaken neck of the Spanish woods. We have almost no new students this year, he said, despite the fact that our announcements remain on bulletin boards in key spots – universities, etc.

This didn’t come as exactly shocking news, because Cesar (pronounced The-SAR in Castillian), a hard-working, young (30s), and rather handsome lawyer; Bouzo (pronounced not like Bozo the clown, but rather BO-oo-tho, a fairly common name in Spain); and Valle (pronounced BA-jye), all my students from the spring; have not returned my phone calls.

Only Carlos, a young wine maker/merchant, has agreed to continue classes once a week, which doesn’t even cover my rent with the academy.

But many of Druzhka’s students also have not returned: Jose Manuel, Daniel, Maria, and a couple of young students of Russian, are not continuing their lessons with him this fall.

Because of my social security pension, I can subsist here without extra income. Druzhka can’t. As a 31-year-old Russian native, he of course has no pension. He lives rent-free in his former boyfriend’s apartment, but he has to buy food, clothes, and other necessities, and that naturally requires money.

On the brighter side, last week the local newspaper gave him and me and our school some free publicity. The Academy from which we rent space every month has also printed some flyers featuring our school.

But if there isn’t an upturn soon, Druzhka has no alternative but to return to Moscow. The upside for me is that I will inherit his students. It will give me some extra income to supplement the roughly 800 euros ($ 1100) that my pension provides.

That will enable me to stay here and to play host to Patrick, to Robert, to Maxim, to Alexei, and to others from Russia and the U.S. if they are able to make it here.


A couple of weeks have passed since I wrote the above, and little has changed, but a lot has changed. Carlos says he has two more students for me. The article in the local newspaper hasn’t had time to work, but I have one new student from the pre-existing flyers in the local universities.

Druzhka is now planning to return to Russia for good in the middle of January.

That’s the bad news!

But that’s also the good news :-)

It turns out that he has enough students to pass on to me that it will about double my pension. So in addition to living well, I’ll be able to put away several hundred bucksi a month! It’s not quite enough for him, but it puts me in very good shape financially. So maybe things are looking up for me :-(

I am continuing to take my Spanish lessons from Elvira and Pili, and I think my Spanish is improving. I arranged with Johnny (his name is Jonathon, I found out) who works in the grocery store across the street, to have coffee with him one evening last week after he finished work. But the next day he had a toothache and a huge swollen jaw, so we haven’t met again. He’s 24 and has a twin sister. He grew up in Madrid and has been here less than a year. I think he’s an orphan, but I’m not sure. I gather that his parents were/are in jail, and that he grew up without them. But I’ll find out more at our next meeting – assuming there is one.

I had another letter from Maxim, and he says he will come as soon as he can, but he doesn’t know yet when that will be. He also asked for Druzhka’s e-mail address so that in case he doesn’t hear from me and is worried about me, he will have somewhere to write. I miss him, but have to conduct something of a balancing act to be sure that two of my potential guests don’t come at the same time – particularly when Maxim is here.

I still think he may be secretly gay. He has never mentioned a girlfriend, though he is now about 23 and very handsome and intelligent, and he seems very fond of me. Anyway, I want to get him in bed with me, lecherous old goat that I am. The truth of the matter is that I love him, to the extent that I dare. The question is, does he love me? I think the answer is yes, but how much? Anyway, I can live with the answer, as I have many times before.

Ah well, we must have our dreams and fantasies.


Speaking of dreams and fantasies, Pili has raised the possibility of my playing guide to her family, including and especially 14-year-old Saul, in London next summer to give Saul a chance to improve his English. I don’t see how he could avoid rooming with me, unless the family has more money than I think they do.

She would pay all my expenses. I’m not sure whether her husband and 19-year-old daughter would be going too. That would be okay as long as Saul, who will be 15 by then, roomed with me. Don’t throw me in the briar patch!


My landlady Elvira is going to hook up my computer next week, so I’ll finally have a computer with e-mail in my apartment. This computer is there now, and I use it to write my column and books, but I don’t have e-mail or Internet. In order to send a column to Basil to put on line -- this one, for instance -- I have to take my laptop to the Internet café and send it there.

It’s a pain in the ass and about twice as expensive. It costs me about 40 euros a month to use the Internet Café, but it would only cost 20 euros to install internet in my apartment.

Elvira is also my Spanish teacher and occasional coffee partner. I don’t really care for her very much, but it’s the luck of the draw and could be a lot worse.

I also got another e-mail from Misha asking me to send him $ 500 in December, because he had already arranged for a loan of 20,000 rubles – about $ 625. But that’s a total of about $ 1,125 plus Western Union fees of probably at least $ 200. I don’t have the money to do it now! Maybe in a couple of months, after my new income has kicked in.

I have to have money to travel to renew my visa, etc., which is an absolute requirement. And then there’s the trip to London, entertaining Maxim while he’s here, etc.

Big decision!

I sent Misha an e-mail last week telling him that I love him very much, but just don’t have the money now to send him. “We must be patient,” I said. “Hopefully in a few more months, there will be more money.”

And now, it looks like there will be. Thanks gods, as my Russian English students used to say.


We are headed for an energy crisis over the next quarter of a century “that will make everything we have experienced before seem like a pleasant memory,” warns veteran energy analyst and “peak oiler” Colin Campbell on the EnergyResources web site, a web site that has for many years followed – and predicted – the world’s energy-related economic ups-and-downs.

Campbell notes that the new International Energy Agency (IEA) report on world energy is out, and for the very first time, it not only mentions peak oil, but acknowledges that it is behind us: the most oil the world has ever produced – or will ever produce – in a single year was brought to the surface in 2006 -- four years ago.

It’s all down hill from here – or uphill, depending on whether you consider less oil downhill or up.

However, neither in this account nor anywhere else has anyone mentioned the current world economic crisis in connection with oil peaking in 2006. Could the two events be connected?

Duh, I wonder!

But back to the IEA report: Energy analysis and reporting firm Chrismartenson.com notes on the EnergyResources net that “you need to pay close attention to Peak Oil, and you need to begin adjusting, because it has already happened. The first conclusion is mine; the second belongs to the IEA.”

The IEA report really talks about two kinds of oil – conventional oil, the kind we’ve always used to fuel our car, manufacture our medicines, and make our lives happy (now virtually all – nearly 100%! -- of daily activities involve the use of conventional oil, the only kind that really makes a difference right now); and non-conventional – oil from coal, natural gas, oil shale, etc.

The good news is that there’s lots of unconventional oil. The bad news is that it’s much, much, much more costly to get and refine -- in terms of both money and other vital natural resources like water -- and produces a fraction of the net energy that conventional oil makes available.

Bottom line: It’s too expensive for commuting, making kids’ toys, etc.

In any case, to blithely suggest that developed nations can now turn to alternative energies – after admitting the year of peak oil has already come and gone without any prior attempt to focus the world’s attention on alternatives to conventional oil, as the IEA has done, says Campbell, “is akin to playing tunes on a sinking ship” – an obvious allusion to the heroic futility of the doomed orchestra aboard the sinking Titanic nearly 100 years ago.

Not a very comfortable allusion.

What is truly shocking is that up to this time the IEA has steadfastly refused to let the words “peak energy” sully their annual tomes. Why? Especially when an unidentified IEA whistleblower confides that the world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates indicate?

It seems that it has been “imperative not to anger the Americans,” over the past several years, who didn’t want the panic that might spread on the financial markets if people found out their world was unraveling. “And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources.”

“The idea expressed above is simple enough,” says Campbell, writing on the EnergyResources site: “The oil data has been fudged to the upside (by the IEA) so the IEA could paint a rosier picture than a strict interpretation of the data would warrant.

“To speculate, the reason why is that there are a host of interlocking vested interests in the financial, but especially political, spheres that would find the public recognition of Peak Oil to be disruptive, and therefore unwelcome.”

That’s a polite way of saying that the world powers-that-be have tried to keep secret the fact that there would ever be a peak moment for the production of “black gold,” and certainly that it was imminent.

The fact that we now find ourselves on the downslide of available world oil has been kept under wraps because the world string pullers are afraid of what the average world citizen will do if he finds out that the supply of oil in the world is getting scarcer by the year and will never be as cheap as it is today.

Since energy is such an integral part of all manufacture and activities, the economic impacts of coming higher oil prices will make today’s “economic crisis” look like “the good old days (my conclusion).

The IEA report notes specifically that the oil needs of India and China, as an example, will continue to increase enormously as their nation’s people elbow their way up the economic ladder. Indian Premier Manmohan Singh warned just earlier this month that his country’s demand for fossil fuels was set to soar 40% over the next decade!

The IEA, of course, doesn’t contradict him; it just says that the European, North American, and other developed economies that make up the Organization of Economic and Cooperative Development (OECD) will voluntarily decrease their consumption of fossil fuels to accommodate the burgeoning oil needs of developing India and China. It will do this by an enormous increase in renewable fuels and development of coal, LNG, oil shales, etc. – ventures which take decades to develop, but most of which are not even yet on the drawing board!

Furthermore, warns Campbell, “never has such a thing happened in the entire industrial history of the OECD….To suggest that the next 25 years for the OECD will be characterized by a reduction in the use of the two primary industrial fuels (conventional oil and coal) is an astonishing claim….This is not going to happen.”

What almost certainly is going to happen (says I, not Campbell) is that there will be a bidding war for the conventional oil that is left, with prices over the coming years and decades soaring out of sight. I have already pointed out in past columns that the U.S. is simply not geographically laid out to live without enormous quantities of oil to fuel Americans’ shopping trips and daily commutes to the office.

They are not going to easily give this up (read End of Suburbia by James Kunstler for the grisly details of what’s really going to happen to an America facing at best sharply increased oil costs or, at worst, sheer non-availability of oil).

Something that neither economist nor energeticist (if we may coin such a word) has pointed out is that capitalism, the economic engine of most of the world today, assumes constant growth; constant growth does not occur without constantly available new energy; lack of available new energy for continuous growth wipes out capitalism. What is going to replace capitalism as an economic engine in the decades to come?

If it’s even possible, “sustainability,” which many “peak oilers” are proposing as an alternative to today’s addiction to growth, certainly would eliminate capitalism. Is the “barter economy,” which is typically espoused as the adjunct of a sustainable society, really going to replace capitalism? Maybe at some neighborhood levels, but I daresay not as a national economic system.

Our traditional news sources, like the New York Times, CBS, Fox News, and other legendary bastions of “truth,” have their own axes to grind, their own reasons for not wanting the idea of scarce energy and no-growth to make the rounds. For one thing, what would happen to advertising and the stock exchange if there were no growth? And what would happen to The New York Times, CBS, et al. if there were no advertising or stock exchange?

Of course, there are lots of scary stories floating around about the kind of world our children and grandchildren are going to be living in. The climate is going to be much hotter and more inhospitable (the kind of summer experienced in Moscow last year, for instance, which was reportedly responsible for 11,000 extra deaths, according to news reports, will become routine); drinking water will not be available for huge chunks of people; world population will drop from 6 billion-plus to less than 2 billion (probably through shockingly increased death rates from starvation, plagues, murders, etc.); medicines will be largely unavailabile; and social security will be what you are able to coax from the ground and steal from your suspicious, gun-totin’ neighbor.

(Will today’s high-tech communication – computers, mobile phones, etc. – even be available in such a world? Doubtful, according to some contemporary reports.)

Some of these scare stories may be true; some not. But one thing we can be pretty sure of: The world 25 years from now is going to be a meaner, harsher, more cruel, more evil – and more energy scarce -- world than the one we are living in now.


See also related pages:
Chapt. #308 - Christmas in Spain – Feliz Navidades a Todos :-)
Chapt. #306 - A bad case of politics in the u.s.a.


This day years ago:
2005-12-5: Chapt. #177 - The unbelievable happens: He lets me suck his cock!