Montpelier has received an $8 million grant from the US Department of Energy for a district heating plant fired by local wood chips, according to Gwen Hallsmith, Montpelier's Planning Director. My understanding is that the new district heating plant would go into the building that now houses state government's oil-fired district heating plant (the one with the big smokestack), behind the Department of Motor Vehicles building, and that the buildings served would include downtown businesses and residences.

Montpelier got the biggest award of the five projects that the Department of Energy today announced shared $20.5 million; the next largest award was $5 million.

This is how the DoE press release describes the project:

This project will further Montpelier’s energy goals by supporting installation of a 41 MMBtu combined heat and power district energy system fueled with locally-sourced renewable and sustainably-harvested wood chips. The CHP system will be sized to provide heating to the Vermont Capitol Complex, city owned schools, the City Hall Complex, and up to 156 buildings in the community’s designated downtown district for a total of 176 buildings and 1.8 million square feet served. By providing 1.8 million KWh of power to the grid, the system will maximize its operating efficiency and reduce thermal costs for users in the community. Montpelier will conduct outreach to encourage replication regionally and nationally through its project partners, the Biomass Energy Resource Center, the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation, and Veolia Energy North America. DOE share: $8,000,000

I don't suppose this will change the minds of my secessionist colleagues...but hold the secession until Montpelier secures these funds, OK? ;-)

Thanksgiving Day is a special day for those following the peak oil news. Geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, author of Hubbert's Peak, predicted that Thanksgiving Day 2005 would mark the peak in world oil production. After that, oil production would decline, irreversibly. And he may have been right. Crude oil production figures have been removed from the most widely influential official statistics, so it's not easy to check. Even if crude production numbers were easily available, the numbers are so uncertain that it's hard to see anything other than the biggest trends.

When Deffeyes made the prediction, almost two years before Thanksgiving 2005, his tongue was only slightly in his cheek. Oil production data are not nearly precise enough to establish a peak day.

Was Deffeyes at least right about the year of peak oil?

I looked for the answer in the official figures from the US Department of Energy and the International Energy Agency in Paris. The main tables on world oil production no longer report what's called crude oil and condensate. Condensate is a byproduct of natural gas production. What they call “oil production” now includes all manner of liquid fuels, including ethanol and synfuels, synthetic fuels. Peak oil is about, well, oil. Not how much alcohol is produced.  

Probably if I dug down into the web sites, or made some phone calls, I could find the crude oil data again. But when the two primary public energy reporting agencies in the world change the most prominent way they report oil production, and they do it in a way that could hide peak oil, I'm suspicious.

Second, even if I found the crude oil and condensate numbers, it requires a leap of faith to believe them. Matthew Simmons is an investment banker with decades of experience in the oil industry. The way he tells it, the unaudited oil production figures sound suspiciously like the finance industry's CDOs, collateralized debt obligations. The ones that played a big role in bringing down the world economy last year, when they turned out to be worth a lot less than people thought. Like CDOs, no one really knows what's in the oil production figures from each country. Incredibly enough, there's no outside auditor to check them out.

Simmons thinks that 2005 was the peak year for oil production. If so, Deffeyes might even have been right about oil production peaking on Thanksgiving that year.

Deffeyes' prediction looks pretty good even if we look at the unreliable and misleading data on total liquids, including ethanol and synfuels. There was a rapid run-up in price from 2005 to 2008, which you'd think would lead to greater production. But no, production stagnated in 2006 and 2007, and only increased slightly in 2008. Since then, economic collapse has reduced demand, so production in 2009 is down again, below 2005 levels. According to the official figures.

Regardless of the actual date of peak oil, we can give thanks for oil's blessings. As Deffeyes put it: "Thanks for the services of the first half of recoverable world oil. Thanks for the automobile, the airplane, diesel trains and ships, two-lane blacktop, warm houses, plastics, and a huge range of petrochemicals. [The Thanksgiving dinner itself] was produced with fertilizers, tractor fuel, pesticides, and transportation provided by oil and natural gas."

Of course, oil has been a mixed blessing. The age of oil has also brought the age of World Wars, poisonings from pollution on an unprecedented scale, destruction of cities for parking lots and ugly suburbs, and habitat destruction, climate change, and other pressures that threaten most species on the planet, including ours.

As we give thanks for the blessings of oil, let us keep in mind the curses of oil, and let us ask for the wisdom to use the remaining half of the world's oil reserves more for useful, durable products than throw-away plastic cutlery, more for insulating homes and constructing wind turbines than for heating drafty homes and generating electricity, and more for medicines and food production than for guns and warplanes.

Happy Thanksgiving!

[This is an updated version of a post from 2007.]

I was surprised this morning to see Jim Douglas' photo prominently featured at the For Our Community section of the web site of Central Vermont Medical Center (usually known as CVH). There was nothing on the page to indicate why his photo was there.

I expect to see the governor's photo when I go into state offices, but CVH is not a state hospital. Curious about why a politician who doesn't live in the area would be featured on "For Our Community," I called CVH to ask about it. The switchboard connected me to Public Relations. I told PR I was a reporter and had a question about an image on the web page. I was transferred to Hjonis Hanson, who explained that the photo was from Relay for Life in Montpelier, and the woman with Jim Douglas was hospital employee Amy Gendron. After a few more questions, Hanson said he wasn't the right person to talk to the press about this. I also heard him start typing furiously, which seemed significant a couple minutes later.

Hanson referred me to his colleague Susan Kruthers, and I called her immediately. When she looked at the web page, the photo was gone. I hit refresh on my browser, and it was gone on mine, too! It didn't take long to take it down.

I can understand including a photo of a politician at a hospital web site if there's a story about an event or issue that the politician has figured prominently in. But I don't see a reason to include a photo of our governor, no matter who holds the office, as a generic picture on the community section of our hospital's web page. I'm glad CVH appears to agree--at least their actions indicate that.

Here are the pre-scrubbing and post-scrubbing versions of the web page:

This post originally appeared earlier this month in my column, "Interesting Times," in The World, a weekly newspaper in Washington County, Vermont.

What do people eat when the economy nosedives? During the current Great Recession, can we learn from what Americans ate during the Great Depression?

A 1930s stimulus program provides some answers. When the nation went through the Great Depression, writers from the Federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) documented what people were eating regionally. Now Mark Kurlansky has collected many of them in a new book, The Food of a Younger Land.

I looked for the WPA reports from Vermont. Roaldus Richmond, born in Barton, wrote that the varieties of pickles Vermonters made were “almost infinite,” and he listed many fruits and vegetables that people pickled in the 1930s: pears, peaches, apples, plums, raspberries, cucumbers, and so on. He also included a recipe for lemon pickles—how often did Vermonters get their hands on enough of the southern fruit to want to pickle them? Or maybe the lemons were only seasonally available, so people bought them by the case and preserved some for later in the year. Many older people have told me that an orange, another southern citrus fruit, was a treat they got only at Christmas back then.

The power purchase negotiations between one of Vermont's major utilities and Entergy Corporation, owner of Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, are "on pause," according to a spokesperson for Green Mountain Power. The revelation further casts doubt on whether the legislature in 2010 will consider Entergy's request to extend the plant's license.

Robert Dostis, who leads customer service and public relations for Green Mountain Power, was on my radio show Relocalizing Vermont on Thursday. Asked when Green Mountain Power had last sat down with Entergy to conduct negotiations, Dostis said, "It's been a couple months, I think, since there's been conversations. I would say the negotiations are on pause... I don't know that any side has asked for the pause; it's just not happening."

This post originally appeared last month in my column, "Interesting Times," in The World, a weekly newspaper in Washington County, Vermont. I've found the real-world mileage for the scooter is about 90 mpg, the way I drive it. I'm still not sure whether it's saving me gas overall.

Can a scooter that gets 80 mpg help me save fuel? That’s a question I’ll be researching over the next months, while riding my first-ever motorcycle.

A scooter is a type of motorcycle with a step-through frame, like the famous Italian Vespa. Mine has a 125 cc engine—bigger and faster than a moped, but not by much. The EPA rated mileage is 96 mpg, so I’m hoping that in the real, hilly world of central Vermont, I’ll get at least 80.

No question that the scooter is more fuel efficient than the cars I have access to—one gets 30 to 35 mpg, the other 50 to 60. But a lot of my local transportation is by bicycle, or by carpooling.

A Massachusetts doctor visited central Vermont and made the startling claim that living with less oil can lead to longer, healthier lives-and save money. Since we're probably faced with oil shortages in the near future, she brings good news.

Jill Stein is a former Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and she co-founded the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities. She spoke on August 7 at Goddard College in Plainfield.

Stein focused on the big picture. Some of the worst chronic diseases in this nation afflict advanced industrialized countries in uniquely high numbers, she said. They include diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. Alzheimer's may also be part of this cluster. The good news? We know  how to prevent them.

Factors in the environment, like availability of places to exercise, have a huge impact on these chronic diseases. Stein pointed out that when you're surrounded by traffic, or roads are constructed with no place to walk, it's hard to get outside and exercise. On the other hand, exercise opportunities abound when life is designed for using less oil. You walk or bicycle to school, to work, to the store, and other places.

Food also contributes strongly to health. Stein said that the Mediterranean diet can reduce your risk of getting many chronic diseases. Foods included in the Mediterranean diet are lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, olive or canola oil, and fish. Legumes like lentils are an important protein source in the diet, which is low in red meat.

When you do eat red meat, it's important how it was raised, Stein said. Meat from pasture-fed animals contains high levels of the important omega-3 fatty acids. Meat from feedlots, not so much.
 
The Mediterranean diet both prevents chronic diseases and can help people who already have them. Stein told of a randomized trial of people in the intensive care unit of a hospital, after suffering a heart attack. Some were put on a Mediterranean diet. Others were given a different diet, also considered to be heart healthy. Over 5 years, those on the Mediterranean diet had 70% lower incidence of new heart attacks, which she called “incredible.”

What's the connection of the Mediterranean diet to declining oil availability? Stein pointed to Cuba in the 1990s as a country-level laboratory that answered the question. The collapse of the Soviet Union left Cuba without its subsidized oil imports and forced Cuba to become more self-sufficient.

Cubans were forced to walk or bicycle more, and to do more outdoor work in food production and eat local food. The diet? Low in red meat, high in fresh fruits and vegetables. And people got healthier-chronic diseases were reduced, while mortality dropped nearly 20% for all causes.

Stein declared, “This is what health reform should look like.”

It's also health reform that can save real money. We now spend $1.5 trillion a year treating chronic diseases-money Stein says we could save with relatively small investments now. Sounds like a good deal to me.

This post originally appeared as the debut of my new column, "Interesting Times," in The World, a weekly newspaper in Washington County, Vermont.

On Saturday, Montpelier's first Village Building Convergence opens. Here's what to expect:

The last week in August, Montpelier will come alive with a community-wide celebration of sustainable living, practical homesteading skills, and visions of a more resilient local community.  The VBC is 9-day event filled with hands-on education in permaculture design and construction, ecological building, and public art that will extend and celebrate the Great Reskilling of our communities embodied in these projects.  All projects are built through collaboration and the commitment of a neighborhood to strengthen itself.

The VBC is a volunteer run grassroots organization.  Most events are free and open to the public.

The schedule includes dances and other celebrations, workshops in things from raising backyard gourmet mushrooms to fruit and nut tree propagation to renewable energy. There'll be a chance to help install an edible landscape with Mark Krawczyk. I'll be hosting one workshop, which the organizers have given the Zen-like title of "The Way of Two Wheels."

The event is modeled on an annual convergence in Portland, Oregon which now attracts hundreds of people to a week of building projects, learning, and celebration.

I interviewed event organizer Ben Graham and workshop leader Alyssa White on Equal Time Radio on WDEV on Monday (1-2 pm); check out the podcast for their comments.

The week sounds like a blast. Organizers plan to make it an annual series, and they're already starting to plan next year's. Come on down and make this one a big success, so they'll have momentum going into next year.

When I lived in Sweden in the 1990s, I was often frustrated by the newspaper reporters who assumed their readers had been closely following the domestic news for the last few decades. I commonly scratched my head while reading stories that followed up on "the IB-thing" or "the bugging affair," things that had taken place years before, with no explanation of the back story. This was before Wikipedia or even the web, so there was no easy and convenient way to check out the references.

During part of that time, the OJ Simpson murder trial was in the headlines in the US every day, and from time to time in Sweden. I liked to point out to Swedes who would listen that nearly every US newspaper article about Simpson's trial would explain, about paragraph 5 or 7, who Simpson was and what he was on trial for--as if anyone not living under a rock could have missed that.

I prefer journalists to err on the side of providing a little too much context to the Swedish model of not providing enough.

Still, I had to laugh at the end of Barack Obama's op-ed on health care in yesterday's New York Times. The obligatory bio helpfully explains, "Barack Obama is the president of the United States." 

Speaking of Obama's op-ed, it describes the stakes of health care reform pretty well. It's worth drawing on for replying to any crazy emails you get from right-wing relatives. 

The week began with encouraging news on the economic front. At the Council of State Governments' Northeastern Regional Conference in Burlington on Monday, economist David Hale told participants, "We are on the verge of economic recovery." (Daniel Barlow and Terri Hallenbeck published articles on the talk.) It's worth looking at people analyzing the fundamentals, for another view.