It's interesting what's happening in Florida that Charlie Crist is thisclose to leaving the Republican Party and running for Senate as an independent.

ION, I've been following peak oil stuff for a while now. It's confusing, as estimates as to when we'll reach peak oil vary from "it's already happened" to the year 2040. But here's an estimate that's depressing - it's put out by the Department of Energy and the US military.

The Imminent Crash Of Oil Supply: Be Afraid

The "Unidentified Projects" part of the graph essentially means "We have no idea where this oil is going to come from".

Basically, the graph is saying that we have a small surplus of production, and that surplus will be gone by 2012. After that, the supply will fall 4% a year instead of continuing to rise to meet demand.

What does it imply? The supply of the world's most essential energy source is going off a cliff. Not in the distant future,but in a year and a half. Production of all liquid fuels, including oil, will drop within 20 years to half what it is today. And the difference needs to be made up with "unidentified projects," which one of the world's leading petroleum geologists says is just a "euphemism for rank shortage," and the world's foremost oil industry banker says is "faith based."

Fuck.

Dillo is usually too rambunctious to eat enough dinner at dinnertime, so sometimes he really is hungry. Also, he plays his daddy by asking for snacks at bedtime and dilly-dallying.

Oh my. This is my son to a T. The latest is that if you go to bed hungry because you refuse to eat at dinner, so be it. I guess you'll be hungry. It's the natural consequence of not eating. The downside is that hungry is also the natural impetus to being up at 4:00 AM bothering mom.

In some ways, Grace's g-tube is a blessing. She eats so quickly and on schedule and her full meal without one of us begging her to please sit down and eat. Ditto for meds. No coaxing, just a push into the stomach.

Tommy, I thought there was still plenty of oil, it's just not sitting in convenient pools that can be extracted with a a pipe and a pump. Isn't there a lot of oil still in shale and stuff?

::hugs new hybrid::

Tommy, I thought there was still plenty of oil, it's just not sitting in convenient pools that can be extracted with a a pipe and a pump. Isn't there a lot of oil still in shale and stuff?

Well, there's still plenty of oil; it's just that we've used up the easy-to-get-to stuff. What remains is hard and expensive to get to, and we just can't pump it out of the ground fast enough to meet the current level of demand.

Most of the world's oil fields are experiencing declines in production, even as they adopt more extreme measures to get the remaining oil out of those oil fields. It's the nature of the business.

There is a whole bunch of potential oil in oil-shale. It's expensive and environmentally harmful to convert to petroleum, but when the price of conventional oil gets high enough those concerns will fall away.

When oil-shale derived petroleum becomes cost-competitive, then suddenly the USA becomes one of the countries with a huge reserve of oil.

From what I've read, they won't be able to ramp up oil shale production fast enough to compensate for the declines in production of existing oil fields. I mean, most major projects to increase oil production would take about ten years to ramp up.

From what I've read, they won't be able to ramp up oil shale production fast enough to compensate for the declines in production of existing oil fields.

But that would imply that oil companies are more interested in short-term profit versus long-term stability. What are the odds of that happening?

Random question for well-travelled ladies: I'm reading this info I just got about the Greece/Turkey trip I'm taking, and it says that women should wear "long skirts or slacks to cover their legs" for some of the religious places. How long is long? Covering the knees or longer than that? Is it different for churches v. mosques?

"long skirts or slacks to cover their legs" for some of the religious places

My experience has been "cover your ankles". But I'm sure others have more recent info.