I’ve been getting up at 5am for a while now to walk the dog, and that’s been good both for me and for her. However, all our usual walks were getting stale, so for the last two days I’ve been walking on the King’s Highway. This dirt road runs not far from campus (it borders it for about 80 feet), and it’s woodsy on both sides. Once up and and back on that, and then down the campus road to our buildings & grounds facility, and then up and around the pond, and then around the campus of the neighboring school, is about an hour from start to finish. It’s a nice walk.
Today, Clio and I startled a doe from her covert. She bounded across what will eventually be the new soccer field, and into the woods between the two schools. She was magnificent in motion, these efficient bounds that took her across the field and under the trees. It made me think about Native peoples here in the Americas before Europeans came, and what it must have been like to be in that time and in that world, when animals were omens as well as meat and tools on the hoof.
I read the other day that a couple of big oil company executives admit that we are past peak oil in most of the world, and probably in OPEC countries as well (who, for political reasons, massage and inflate the value of their proven reserves). These guys expect that we will be short 30-37 mb/d (that’s million barrels per day) in terms of world supply within about 5 years, compared with demand. Right now, the world needs around 100 mb/d. Meanwhile, the oil execs figure that a) half the oil in the ground is gone, and b) world production will never top 100 mb/d. Ever. That’s expected to increase around 140 mb/d over the next decade. That shortfall is going to pinch. And hurt, a lot.
