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Page added on September 8, 2015
Melting Ice Isn’t Opening Arctic to Oil Bonanza
The warming Arctic should already have transformed this impoverished fishing village on the coast of the Barents Sea.
The Kremlin spent billions in the last decade in hopes of turning it into a northern hub of its energy powerhouse, Gazprom. It was once the most ambitious project planned in the Arctic Ocean, but now there is little to show for it aside from a shuttered headquarters and an enormous gravel road carved out of the windblown coastline like a scar.
“There are plans,” said Viktor A. Turchaninov, the village’s mayor, “but the facts — the realities of life — suggest the opposite.”
The dream of an Arctic Klondike, made possible by the rapid warming of once-icebound waters, has been at the core of Russia’s national ambitions and those of the world’s biggest energy companies for more than a decade. But even as Royal Dutch Shell began drilling an exploratory well this summer off the north coast of Alaska, Russia’s experiences here have become a cautionary tale, one that illustrates the challenges facing those imagining that a changing Arctic will produce oil and gas riches.
Tectonic shifts in the global energy economy, fierce opposition from environmentalists who oppose tampering with the ecologically fragile waters, and formidable logistical obstacles have tempered enthusiasm that only a few years ago seemed boundless. After years of planning and delays, Shell’s drilling project in the stormy waters of the Chukchi Sea is now being watched by the industry, officials, residents and critics as a make-or-break test of the viability of production in the Arctic.
“From an economic point of view, I’m not sure going offshore Arctic is very rational,” said Patrick Pouyanné, chief executive and president of Total, the French oil company, which once also planned to drill off Alaska’s northern coast.
Shell has already spent $7 billion and this summer has faced tribulations like those that marred an ill-fated exploration three years ago, including dogged protests, harsh weather and an accident in July that gouged a hole in one of its ships after it struck an uncharted shoal in the Aleutian Islands.
Only seven years ago, Shell and other companies — ConocoPhillips, Statoil of Norway, Repsol of Spain and Eni of Italy — together paid $2.7 billion for leases for the fields off Alaska. The price of oil at the time climbed to nearly $150 a barrel, and the accelerated reduction of ice that once choked the Arctic Ocean seemed to make exploration easier.
Then the market changed. The world today is awash in oil and natural gas, largely because of the shale revolution in the United States and the advent of hydraulic fracturing, which has so increased production that the United States has slashed imports. Saudi Arabia and other states around the Persian Gulf are producing at maximum levels, and if the nuclear agreement with Iran gets final approval and economic sanctions are lifted, Iran’s reserves could soon flood the market. In the last year alone, the price of oil has plummeted to less than $50 a barrel from more than $90.
Across the Arctic, from Russia to Norway to Canada, offshore projects have already proved disappointing. After drilling eight exploratory wells off Greenland in 2011 and 2012, Cairn Energy, a Scottish company, abandoned them. Chevron shelved exploration in the Canadian waters of the Beaufort Sea last December, followed in June by a consortium including ExxonMobil and BP.
American sanctions imposed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year forced ExxonMobil to withdraw from a joint venture in the Kara Sea with the state-owned oil giant Rosneft, which has had to suspend its drilling plans there as it searches for new partners.
“When we look at Arctic opportunities, they are always the opportunities that are 10 years away,” said Kenneth B. Medlock III, director of the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University.
The difficulties of getting oil and gas out of the Arctic are daunting. Winters are long and dark, and the Arctic seas, despite reductions in the permanent ice pack, are still clogged with floes and icebergs, while intensifying storms have threatened ships or oil rigs even during the summer. Marshy tundra onshore complicates the construction of pipelines and support facilities. So do coastal erosion and melting permafrost.
There are few roads or airports, or people for that matter, near the areas to be drilled, requiring workers and equipment to be shipped long distances. Despite agreements by the Arctic Council, an international organization that includes the United States, Russia and six other Arctic countries, few resources are available for search and rescue or the cleanup of oil in icy conditions. That, along with strict requirements imposed by the Obama administration, forced Shell to send a flotilla of more than two dozen ships to the Chukchi Sea this summer.
“The entire cost structure up there is three to five times more expensive than onshore lower 48,” said Scott D. Sheffield, chief executive of Pioneer Natural Resources, a Texas-based oil company. Two years ago, his company gave up on a field projected to contain 100 million barrels of oil in the Beaufort Sea — drilled from a man-made island and connected by an eight-mile pipeline to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska — in order to invest more in Texas shale fields.
“One-hundred-million-barrel-type discoveries will not be economical in a $100-a-barrel oil environment, and they certainly won’t be economical today,” Mr. Sheffield said.
The Competition for Resources in the Arctic
Areas with 50% or greater chance of large undiscovered oil and gas reserves
High seas and outer continental shelf
Extent of Arctic waters under Russian control
Exploratory
drilling by Shell
ALEUTIAN
ISLANDS
Bering
Sea
U.S.
Chukchi
Sea
White area shows Minimum extent of sea ice in 2014
Hudson
Bay
Arctic
Ocean
Canada
Baffin
Bay
North
Pole
Laptev
Sea
Denmark
Countries have jurisdiction over natural resources in their Exclusive economic zones
Russia
Norway
Area of
SVALBARD TREATY
Kara
Sea
Norway
YAMAL
PENINSULA
Iceland
Barents
Sea
Atlantic
Ocean
Shtokman
field
Norwegian
Sea
Prirazlomnoye
platform
Teriberka
Murmansk
Even optimistic projections suggest the Arctic might not prove to be as transformative as once imagined. According to Rystad Energy, a global consultancy based in Norway, production from offshore fields in or near the Arctic could double between 2015 and 2025 to 1.4 million barrels a day, which would still be less than 2 percent of current global production.
“When people say the Arctic is the next frontier and there is great resource potential, of course there is the risk that it is hype,” said Jon Marsh Duesund, a Rystad senior project manager.
High Hopes in Disrepair
Teriberka, a village of 1,000 people on the Barents Sea, is where Gazprom’s offshore ambitions collided with the harsh realities of the Arctic.
It was a thriving fishing village in Soviet times, with fish-processing factories and even a farm for harvesting the pelts of snow foxes, but it fell into decline in the 1970s with the advent of industrial fishing. The population dropped from more than 6,000, wooden piers crumbled, and fishing boats that once brought back cod were scuttled in the bay where the Teriberka River flows into the sea.
Like people in Alaska and other places who look to the changing Arctic for economic development and jobs, the village’s residents welcomed Gazprom’s plans to tap an enormous gas field, called the Shtokman, that was discovered in 1988 about 370 miles offshore.
Under the control of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Gazprom emerged as an energy giant controlled by the state, and for much of the 2000s, the Shtokman was its biggest prize, a project that Russia dangled before eager foreign investors. After reaching deals with Total and Statoil, Gazprom began construction of the road in Teriberka where it hoped to build terminals for processing and shipping the gas in liquefied form — all at a cost estimated to rise to $20 billion.
After years of work, however, Russia’s plans for the project came under pressure from enormous technical challenges, the changing energy market and finally the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.
Russia, as the world’s largest producer of natural gas, found itself struggling to compete against alternative supplies to countries in Europe eager to reduce their dependence on Mr. Putin’s government, even as prices dropped significantly.
“Monopolies do not have strategic vision,” said Vladimir Chuprov, an energy expert for Greenpeace Russia who opposes offshore exploration in the Arctic. “The decisions are very political, and the economic background is not a factor.”
Statoil pulled out in 2012, writing off more than $335 million in costs. Total wrote off $350 million last year and, according to Russian news accounts, returned its 25 percent share of the project to Gazprom in June.
The Arctic is at the core of the nationalist ambitions of Mr. Putin, who once said that tapping the region’s resources was as natural as hunting and harvesting berries and mushrooms.
Russia already operates the first offshore production platform above the Arctic Circle, called Prirazlomnoye, which began pumping the first commercial shipments from the Kara Sea in late 2013 and reached a modest two million barrels last year. The figures, however, are a fraction of the more accessible gas and oil reserves onshore, including the Yamal Peninsula in northern Siberia 900 miles east. Plans for more offshore projects have stalled, and Russia has shifted its focus onshore, especially following American sanctions that targeted offshore Arctic projects.
The Shtokman field, Mr. Putin has boasted, remains a prospect, but one for the next generation.
“As soon as they speak of the next generation, it means something is wrong,” Mr. Chuprov, of Greenpeace Russia, said. “In this country — in Soviet times, in czarist times — nobody thinks about the next generation.”
Despite Gazprom’s promises to resume drilling — in 2014, then in 2016 or 2019 — residents in Teriberka have become resigned about the boom that never was. The contractors who arrived in droves have departed, and the enormous embankment where Gazprom built a gravel road, encroaching on the village’s cemetery, comes to a dead end at a rocky cliff.
Teriberka is better known now as the location of the Oscar-nominated “Leviathan,” a bleak film that depicts one man’s struggle against a venal bureaucrat who wants to seize his beloved house on the bay.
“They built the road,” Igor Abanosimov said when a neighbor lamented that the project had changed little. Mr. Abanosimov owns a series of floating cottages that he rents out, dreaming, perhaps improbably, of developing a yacht club and other amenities that might attract tourists instead of energy companies. The Arctic, he said, has its own soul.
“Those it wants to accept, it accepts,” he explained. “Those it wants to banish, it banishes.”
Shell’s Many Mishaps
In late August, a ferocious storm whipping through the Chukchi Sea forced Shell to suspend its drilling operations only a month after one of its two floating rigs drove a drill bit into the seafloor. The company resumed operations after the weather cleared. It was just the latest distraction in Shell’s long effort to tap one of the last remaining untouched giant oil reserves.
Three years ago, the company came close to reaching oil, but its plans for two exploratory wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas died after a series of bizarre accidents. One of the two drill ships, the Noble Discoverer, nearly ran aground on a sandy beach in the Aleutians. An Arctic containment dome was crushed during a vital test. And a tow line on the second drill ship, the Kulluk, snapped, setting it adrift on the high seas.
To environmentalists, the accidents bolstered their arguments that exploration in the Arctic is simply too risky. Shell did not give up, though. The company replaced its senior Arctic leadership team and devised another plan to overcome the natural and regulatory hurdles.
And still it has struggled. A private Finnish icebreaker it contracted, the Fennica, struck an uncharted shoal in the Aleutians in July. With no adequate facilities in Alaska, the Fennica had to go to Portland, Ore ., for repairs.
When the ship tried to head back north, protesters tried to block the vessel with kayaks and then suspended themselves from a bridge over the Willamette River, obstructing safe passage. A court then threatened Greenpeace with fines of $2,500 an hour if the protesters did not clear the way.
The Obama administration has set strict limits on how Shell can operate. It prohibited the company from simultaneously drilling two wells, as planned. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service ruled that marine wildlife protections required a 15-mile buffer zone between simultaneous drillings, while the company had planned for a nine-mile buffer. Workers on Shell’s ships also have to keep watch and avoid crossing the migratory paths of whales and other marine mammals.
“Most of the natives up here in the north are concerned with the marine mammals,” said James Pakotak, a resident of Barrow, Alaska, where the airport serves as a hub for many of Shell’s workers. The storms that battered Shell’s flotilla also hammered the town. “What if there’s an oil spill? What then?” Mr. Pakotak said.
To be sure, there are those who still believe in the Arctic’s potential. They cite efforts to drill there in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a study by the United States Geological Survey in 2008 that estimated that 13 percent of the world’s untapped oil and 30 percent of its natural gas lay in the Arctic.
The National Petroleum Council, in a report commissioned by the Department of Energy and released this year, said the technology and expertise already existed to extract oil and natural gas safely in icy conditions, replacing declining supplies on Alaska’s North Slope.
Ben van Beurden, Shell’s chief executive, said in a conference call last month that the company’s stake could ultimately be “multiple times” more bountiful than in the vast Gulf of Mexico.
“Alaska is a long-term play,” he said. “That is the way you have to look at it. We can’t be driven by today’s, tomorrow’s, or next year’s, or last year’s oil price.”
29 Comments on "Melting Ice Isn’t Opening Arctic to Oil Bonanza"
dissident on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 7:48 am
The usual anti-Russian drivel from the NYT. Tell me more about poor fishing villages you tw*ts. You would think there were none in North America. This Barents sea village is like dozens of similar ones in Canada in the north and in the Maritimes.
Shtokman was put on ice for geopolitical reasons.
forbin on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 8:12 am
title is “Oil Bonanza”
EIA qoute :
“The USGS Arctic assessment estimated a total oil and natural gas resource of 412 billion barrels of oil equivalent, with 78 percent of those resources expected to be natural gas and natural gas liquids (NGL). The composition of undiscovered Arctic hydrocarbons is largely determined by the West Siberian Basin and East Barents Basin, which hold 47 percent of the undiscovered Arctic resources, with 94 percent of those resources being natural gas and NGL.”
ok theres a dispute between Russia and Norway over the Barents sea with most resources being on the Russian side
seems most of this “oil” is actually Nat gas – something Rockman said along time ago would be the case ( TOD days )
so we have a slanted article claiming oil bonanza when actually its a little oil , some NGL and the bulk is Nat Gas
ho hum
Forbin
Fat Lady on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 8:40 am
Forbin, add to,”so we have a slanted article claiming oil bonanza when actually its a little oil , some NGL and the bulk is Nat Gas ” the fact of unrelenting year round shit weather the likes of which will only mean no production and/or unmitigated spills and disaster.
ghung on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 8:51 am
I recently heard a comment on a show about the opening of the “NW Passage” (trying to find it) that the thinning sea ice is more of a hazard than old permanent ice, since it is more easily blown and moved around by storms; never know where it’ll be day-to-day. The ice doesn’t need to be so thick and hard to be a danger to exploration and drilling. If the wind changes and piles ice flows up against your rig, nothing you can do.
Sort of like the rivers in Alaska; most dangerous when the ice is mobile; forming or breaking up.
Makati1 on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 9:20 am
ghung, you are so right. Just on the little Susquehanna River in PA, I have seen ice floes 2 foot thick and an acre in size, slice the 50 year old trees off of an island when the ice broke up one spring. I can only imagine what one the size of Rhode Island could do to a drilling rig, if it collided at say 5 miles per hour, pushed by wind or current. For example:
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/08/07/greenland.ice.island/index.html
dissident on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 9:43 am
http://www.gazprom.com/f/posts/63/407714/avd49654_1.jpg
Gazprom’s oil rig is seen in the above photo taking multi-meter thick ice floe impacts. That ice could mow down whole forests.
BobInget on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 9:57 am
Contrary to popular, repetitive, press, demand in China, India, the US continues to rise.
http://marketrealist.com/2015/08/china-us-consumption-role-crude-oil-market/
India: Currently imports 79% of oil needs.
That number goes to 90% in twenty years.
rofit.ndtv.com/news/economy/article-indias-oil-imports-dependence-may-hit-90-in-2-decades-report-1211991
Boat on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 11:02 am
Bob,
It’s the same rhetoric you get from the point of the spear of doomerism here at peakoil. The charts tell a different story and have for years. Most of the cause for the high price of oil for 6 years or so were geopolitical events disrupting oil flow, but because the US tech advanced fracking there is now more oil available short term and long term.
penury on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 11:39 am
I really question the economics of ff production in the Arctic. Can any nation or group of oil companies finance even the exploration or will it be done on borrowed money? if so from who?
Boat on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 12:02 pm
penury,
Like any industry, to survive you have to innovate, overcome new challenges. As oil depletes expensive to operate fields will compete with electric cars, nat gas trucks etc. The advantage the oil industry has is most cars run on gasoline. Electric cars are not cheap enough yet. But will they be when oil hits $150?
BC on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 12:05 pm
Unlike the imperial “Scramble for Africa” in the late 19th century through WW I, we have the “Scramble for the Artic” and “Scramble for Africa II”; however, this time the Oil Age epoch is ending rather than just beginning, and China is a competitor in a world of more than four times more people than in the 1880s-1910s.
Speculawyer on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 1:01 pm
Well if we as a people want to keep the climate in good condition, we should not be drilling up there and instead focus on getting off oil. We have plenty of oil as is, we don’t need more. We need to use less.
Boat on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 1:08 pm
Spec,
Ask the Ethiopians how they do it without oil. They manage on less than $300 per year. Something like 6 cars per 1,000 people. The electricity used by 8 citizens equals the electricity of one modern refrigerator. These model green living citizens don’t live as long but sacrifice for the rest of the world. Doomers should take note and lessons. Show the example of true doomerism.
GregT on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 1:10 pm
“Electric cars are not cheap enough yet. But will they be when oil hits $150?”
Considering the fact that electric cars are manufactured with oil, how do you suppose that tripling the cost of oil will make electric cars cheaper to produce?
Boat on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 1:34 pm
They will compete more equal on the price of the car over the lifetime of the car. Example
The electric car has less moving parts Maintenance costs will be much cheaper.
Did I mention I will save close to $5,000 per year at today’s prices compared to $3.80. $150 per barrel could have gasoline up to $5.00 per gal. That could be an approx $9,000 swing. At that price I would be forced to go electric if the car was less than $40,000. The electric car would pay for itself compared to gas powered. This could easily happen over the next 15 years.
penury on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 1:41 pm
I do not know how much mileage you get from that car, but by my calculations you would be driving about 160,000 miles a year to save that money. Park and eat sometime and you will save even less from the lost driving time,
Kenz300 on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 2:54 pm
Climate Change is real…. we can deal with the cause (fossil fuels) or we will deal with the impact.
The Year Humans Got Serious About Climate Change — NYMag
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/sunniest-climate-change-story-ever-read.html
Kenz300 on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 2:57 pm
Electric vehicles are the future……. every major auto manufacturer has released or is releasing a hybrid or fully electric vehicle. Electric vehicle sales are growing around the world.
Electric / hybrid technology and battery technology continues to improve every year……
The first/second generation of the Iphone was really cool too but the next generations were much better………..
The next generation of electric/hybrid cars, batteries and charging stations will all improve the owners experience and increase their acceptance.
Bob Owens on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 3:40 pm
Shell’s drilling in the Artic is the last gasp of a dead deal. Everyone else has pulled out or selling out its assets at fire-sale prices. It takes too much $$$ for them to continue any longer. We should be thankful for the tiny bit of sanity being imposed on the oil companies by the low price of oil and lack of financing. Now if only the oil sands and shale drillers will die quickly too.
apneaman on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 4:10 pm
Boat, you still do not understand what a doomer is. I just bloody well explained it to you yesterday.
Doomer means just that. No hope of saving industrial civilization no matter what. Too late. Big dieback coming and possibly ape extinction.
I think you are mixing up environmentalists, like Kenz3000, with doomers. Pay attention.
Makati1 on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 7:40 pm
Ap, lots of ‘mixed up’ commenters on here.
Like the cost of electric cars going down if the cost to build them and to supply the electric to power them goes up.
Another unicorn huger who is panicking that the future will not be more of the same … just a bit different. Denial is rampant. Especially in the Western countries where life is still kinda good and the citizens are spoiled.
apneaman on Tue, 8th Sep 2015 10:15 pm
We may be in for all sorts of surprises as the Arctic continues to melt
Warning on deadly ancient viruses awakening in Siberia as climate change melts the permafrost
http://siberiantimes.com/science/others/news/n0395-warning-on-deadly-ancient-viruses-awakening-in-siberia-as-climate-change-melts-the-permafrost/
apneaman on Wed, 9th Sep 2015 1:13 am
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf: towards further assessment of permafrost-related methane fluxes and role of sea ice
“Abstract
Sustained release of methane (CH4) to the atmosphere from thawing Arctic permafrost may be a positive and significant feedback to climate warming. Atmospheric venting of CH4 from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) was recently reported to be on par with flux from the Arctic tundra; however, the future scale of these releases remains unclear. Here, based on results of our latest observations, we show that CH4 emissions from this shelf are likely to be determined by the state of subsea permafrost degradation. We observed CH4 emissions from two previously understudied areas of the ESAS: the outer shelf, where subsea permafrost is predicted to be discontinuous or mostly degraded due to long submergence by seawater, and the near shore area, where deep/open taliks presumably form due to combined heating effects of seawater, river run-off, geothermal flux and pre-existing thermokarst. CH4 emissions from these areas emerge from largely thawed sediments via strong flare-like ebullition, producing fluxes that are orders of magnitude greater than fluxes observed in background areas underlain by largely frozen sediments. We suggest that progression of subsea permafrost thawing and decrease in ice extent could result in a significant increase in CH4 emissions from the ESAS.”
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/2052/20140451
comicrelief on Wed, 9th Sep 2015 3:41 am
“Electric vehicles are the future”
“Electric cars are not cheap enough yet. But will they be when oil hits $150?”
Who has a list of oil wells and coal mines that were closed because of electric cars?
The world is burning all the fossil fuel it can produce. They are looking to rape the Arctic for oil and you fuckwits think electric cars are the answer.
When oil was cheap and easy to produce, there was not a sign of any stinkin’ electric cars…those parasites only turned up to ride on the infrastructure that fossil fuels built. They need fossil fuels to get built, marketed, maintained and scrapped.
Davy on Wed, 9th Sep 2015 5:21 am
“Electric vehicles are the future”. There is no future with this attitude and the traditional status quo attitude. The greens, the browns, and the trying-to-survive poor of the world all are looking to development and technology to survive. This survival for the greens and browns is maintenance of their rich world ways that center on complexity and energy intensity. Any of you here are one or the other. If you are truly green turn the PC off, bye. Most greens are wealthy techies. Most browns are wealthy (by world standards) blue and white collar consumers with an attitude of more the merrier.
There are greens that are truly green and live with less per an orientation to nature dictated by low carbon. Most greens want low carbon high complexity and energy intensity which in the end is significant carbon. In other words greens attitude is a ludicrous incongruous juxtaposition. It is still fossil fuel driven at every level and has no future without fossil fuels. The sooner they admit this the sooner we can take a failed plan B off the shelf. Browns are disgusting and a complete failure. Just watch fox news if you want to puke.
AltE is profoundly important but only as a tool and a niche for the descent to a new post carbon man. Browns are just status quo delusional. Many are uneducated and living an unhealthy complex and energy intensive lifestyle revolving around the blowout of entropic attitudes and lifestyles. Look at modern consumerism, leisure, and eating to see this absurdity and insanity in regards to the serious side of survival. It is great as a festival and party. The party is about over and the grim reaper is waiting.
I am among the few who are honest and sober on what is ahead. If you believe in solutions then you are one of the above colors and delusional. Even those who are just trying to survive are bought into the green or brown. They will live like a modern human “king” if they could. Few very poor have been educated. Much of the third world (I include the poor of the developed world) are not educated enough to understand the dangers we are in now with overpopulation and over consumption. There is 1% of 1% that truly understands there is little hope because delusional educated people and delusional uneducated people are bought into the status quo.
This 99.99% believe in energy intensity and or development (green or brown) is the answer. None truly believe population growth is the problem of the highest level. If we did there would be a draconian population reduction effort along with a draconian consumption reduction effort. These two predicaments go hand and hand. This would be admitting a rebalance is imminent with excess deaths over births that will be the worst of what we can imagine but it would be embraced as the only hope. Strange huh, death is our only hope.
I should not interject religion in this but religion truthfully has found some of the deepest spiritual truths of man. Yet, religious truths has also been hijacked by organized religion as just another human social system of beliefs, morality, and lifestyle. The deepest spirituality of all respectable religions has little to do with their resulting organized religion. Most of these deepest truths deal with our end either personal or as a civilization. All organized religions are bought into the religion of technology and energy intensity. This means more people becuase most religions want a bigger flock.
What we need is a new spirituality of death and rebirth. We should embrace the death of modern man and make plans for a rebirth to a postmodern man. We can advance spiritually but not materially at least in technological complexity and energy intensity. We can advance with technologies and knowledge that are optimal per permaculture and basic human health within a natural ecosystem.
These are low tech high natural connectivity skills and attitudes. For example hygiene both personal and community within the natural ecosystem. We would embrace population control as the highest spiritual level of this postmodern man. Population control is none other than complete respect for nature and submission to our place within nature. That is as profound as it gets folks. We would understand a large brain hairless ape must control his reproduction or he becomes an out of control predator and ecosystem destroyer.
We would move into a nutrient cycle at multiple levels per location and climate both nomadic and semi nomadic. For example nature provided unbelievable biomass production in the Great Plains with buffalo or in the Caribbean with sea turtles and other marine life as a short list. When nature is left to her own devices true energy intensity and complexity is achieved.
What I am saying is highly unlikely and frankly not possible. I think man is capable of it but we are cursed with some bad luck. Nature could give a shit about humans. Nature probed some of her deepest realities through human knowledge and now she is ready to move on to what she does best and that is produce life through the cycles of evolution and extinction. This is much higher than anything humans could ever have knowledge of. Ultimately it is the center of the universe or something but not for human understanding.
In the mean time we can mitigate and adapt to being a bottleneck man. That is all we are when stripped naked from complexity and energy intensity. We are going to die and suffer in a both slow and fast, difficult and sometimes horrible descent. We can make it less horrible.
I did not mention climate change until now but those of you who care it is the end result of technology and development. It will be the ultimate end of civilized man as we know it. It is possible to remain civilized spiritually without the modernity. We are capable of small bands of humans at the fringes of existence on a destroyed earth. Maybe just maybe the wonderful ecosystem man has destroyed can recover soon enough for a postmodern man to be part of. That is a long shot but who knows. If I have optimism that is it. In the here and now it will be about death, decay, and survival. The party is over lets sober up and take care of our love ones.
Beery on Wed, 9th Sep 2015 6:11 am
“I should not interject religion in this but religion truthfully has found some of the deepest spiritual truths of man.”
I was right with you until you wrote that. Religion is fantasy. You’re as likely to find “spiritual truths” in religion as you are in a George R.R. Martin novel.
Makati1 on Wed, 9th Sep 2015 6:42 am
Beery, religion is the last grasp of the weak. It makes them feel better to think they have another life coming if only…lol.
Meanwhile in the US:
“3 Louisiana salmonella cases may be in 27-state outbreak”
“Experimental GMO Wheat Crop Fails to Deter Pests”
“Neonic pesticide risk to U.S. waterways”
“World Running Out of Time to Save Oceans”
“Police are reading your bank & debit card balances without a warrant!”
“The Social Security disability fund is disabled”
“Gunman walks up to Las Vegas cops, starts shooting into car”
“Chart Of The Day: Homeownership Rate Plunges To 1967 Level”
“1.5 Million U.S. Households Live on $2 a Day per Person”
“The UN-Recovery: 94 MILLION “Not In Labor Force” Is 60 Percent Of The Civilian Labor Force!”
http://ricefarmer.blogspot.fr/
And the beat goes on…
Davy on Wed, 9th Sep 2015 6:50 am
Beer you must like religion if you read that homily of mine. Just a matter of semantics so, for those really discriminating intellectuals like you Beer, please change the word religion to theology and philosophy now understood through science and history. Does that make you feel better?
Folks a short comment on such a large topic is futile to find accuracy but we must begin this discussion as adults and or on this male dominated site as men facing the end days. The subject deserves volumes.
This by the way ain’t about being right it is a search for the truth. It is trying to get closer to that reality (truth) of which we are only slightly able but is so vitally important. Vitally important if you have sobered up from the wild party humans have been throwing and now understand starvation and death is imminent.
Davy on Wed, 9th Sep 2015 6:53 am
“Religion is the last grasp of the weak.” Sounds like a quote right out of Stalin’s diary. Bravo!