Matthew Simmons, chairman of the Houston based energy investment bank Simmons and Co. International, talked recently with Bloomberg’s Rhonda Schaffler about the need to address energy use, his view that global supply has peaked and the likelihood oil prices could reach as much as $300 a barrel.

To have someone like this, with his credentials, appear on Bloomberg saying what he does is really quite amazing. Peak oil as a theory is coming of age and moving out of the tin foil hat arena.

Schaffler was quite humorous at one point, sounding as if she wasn’t prepared well enough for the interview. She seemed overly shocked to hear the $300 a barrel price tag, amazed that it’s already happening elsewhere and that certainly there must be something to do. As if magic will make more oil appear underground. No, sorry Rhonda, we need to cut oil use and prepare for further declines in the oil fields.

As a van dweller, who makes my vehicle my home, I do wonder what the economy of car living will be in the nearish future. When I currently get nine miles per gallon in city driving planning trips will mean a whole new thing when I tally the miles at a couple dollar per turn of the odometer.

youtube video here

The short answer is yes. Sadly. Visit Canada and Mexico wisely folks. I can understand and appreciate the need for border security but for a person who lives in my vehicle I keep my entire life on my computer and I don’t want just anyone poking their nose in there.

I’m really curious what would happen if I was asked and refused to give the myriad of passwords used to protect and encrypt various parts of my system? How long would the work at it if I conveniently forgot the passwords and how long would I rot in jail for refusing to have various federal agents reading though my personal journal or other information that’d not elicit even a momentary glance if held in paper format on my front seat.

Do we really need to have one-touch shopping for groceries? Who in their right mind is going to surrender their biometric data to a grocery store so that they don’t have to remember a pin number or carry an ID or whatever alleged perk this system offers.

When the US government is going willy nilly in spying on their citizens without warrant, I for one am not going to even point at this data collector let alone touch it. Perhaps I’ll even avert my eyes.

Maybe my van getting about 10.5 mpg city and 14.5 mpg on the highways isn’t so bad after all. It’s nearing 200,000 miles it’s still going and probably will for a good many more. I wonder what the total energy cost will be for it in the end. CNW Marketing Research Inc. tallied up the total energy impact of various vehicles and if they’re to be believed the hybrid cars now out there will ultimate cost more to the environment than the standard versions they replace.

This supports my long standing hypothesis that hybrid cars are not the answer. When they first came out I looked at their mechanical complexity and saw the high cost of engineering those new components and the environmental costs of machining them and wondered if the net result is worthwhile. According to CNW, it’s not.

Car and Driver has a nice wrap-up about it.

And while many consumers and environmentalists have targeted sport-utility vehicles because of their lower fuel economy and/or perceived inefficiency as a means of transportation, the energy cost per mile shows at least some of that disdain is misplaced.

For example, while the industry average of all vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2005 was $2.28 cents per mile, the Hummer H3 (among most SUVs) was only $1.949 cents per mile. That figure is also lower than all currently offered hybrids and Honda Civics at $2.42 per mile.

“If a consumer is concerned about fuel economy because of family budgets or depleting oil supplies, it is perfectly logical to consider buying high fuel economy vehicles,” says Art Spinella, president of CNW Marketing Research, Inc. “But if the concern is the broader issues such as environmental impact of energy usage, some high-mileage vehicles actually cost society more than conventional or even larger models over their lifetime.”

Personally, I’m waiting for completely alternate fuel vehicles that leave gas behind in the prehistoric age like the dinosaurs that made it.

While we’re on the subject of foods, seems like all that food science stuff is actually doing little to nothing to benefit us the eaters. Stuff may be easier to produce by the mega farms and easier to ship, but we’re suffering nutritionally because of it.

Donald Davis, a biochemist at the University of Texas, said that of 13 major nutrients in fruits and vegetables tracked by the Agriculture Department from 1950 to 1999, six showed noticeable declines — protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin and vitamin C. The declines ranged from 6 percent for protein, 15 percent for iron, 20 percent for vitamin C, and 38 percent for riboflavin.

Oh, and let’s add into the mix all the genetic modification going on too. And the designer seeds that need designer pesticides because of induced mutations. Oh, and what about all the toxins not allowed for use in the United States but produced here and sprayed on produce grown elsewhere and shipped back to us?

So just what is safe to eat anymore? Eight dollar a pound heirloom tomatoes from an organic co-op? Hunting and killing our own wild game for meat? Will we soon rely on the grocery store to fill our stomachs and the pharmacies to deliver our nutrition in pill form? Or will they just treat us as we’re sick and dying?

Is the government going to force me to be a hippie or something? All I ask is no jam bands please. A big government federal mandate is need be. If I want pointless noodling in my ears I’ll just shove in some pasta made from genetically modified wheat.

New York is set to roll out a huge wave of 500 new surveillance camera. In this age of the War of Terror we’re increasingly faced with having our civil liberties taken away with grossly ineffective and expensive invasions to our rights to live freely. The initial 500 will cost $9 million dollars and an addition $81.5 million is requested for the project which could bring the total up around 4,500 more. To what goal are the trying to achieve. Serious criticism of the effective of this style of policing are rampant and civil libertarians are up in arms.

Cameras already in place have shown not to reduce crime. They were ineffective in stopping the terrorist attacks in London and they did nothing for the killing spree in the Atlanta courthouse.

So what are they there for? Nefarious kicks? Is there some payola scheme of kick backs from the manufacturers? Politicians looking to impress future voters with some tangible though ineffective means of “safety?” Is this the beginning of the end for Innocent Until Proven Guilty? Where all citizens are just future criminals waiting to happen?

One fear I have is with the technology is the currently limited means to effectively monitor the incoming data streams, but it is cheap to store. Hard drive prices alone are an indicator of the massive storage banks that can be built easily. At what point does the recording of our entire lives happen? What will happen when processing power is far greater than today and can interpret automatically all sorts of details from the vast wealth of collected material from the already installed cameras? When will the current face recognition technology take the next step and start assembling dossiers of everyone, tying that information to all the other various government and private databases available to government agencies?

When will we fondly Joseph McCarthy era witch hunts as quaintly trivial and small? When will our government be able to extend it’s current inward seeking eye to include all of the daily comings and goings of our society? Combine this with some national IDs with the proposed biometric data encoded in the RFID and we have the making of being goldfish in a bowl.

To me part of being an American is the freedom to go about my day without undue interference from any government agencies. The photo boxes I’ve seen in the wild have only caused me concern for the freedoms they take away. If a criminal is going to mug me then all I have to do is step out of camera range. I know where the camera is and so does the thief. The solution isn’t more cameras as it’ll just move the criminal activity yet again. Fixed cameras are not the answer, more cops are. Beat cops, randomly walking or riding around provide a set of eyes that cannot be predicted and the visibility of a human with a badge will do more than the camera ever could. The camera doesn’t jump down and arrest, but a cop will, and even the stupidest criminal knows there will be a dispatch time from being caught on camera to a cop showing up in the area. So what is the system for in terms of legitimate enforcement? Catching only the stupidest of criminals?