The Rocky may be no more, but the Gazette is very much with us — and looking for a roving reporter:
Gazette.com, in Colorado Springs, is looking for a morning person in our newsroom. Your job: update gazette.com by 7 a.m.; record a quick vodcast with headlines and promos to upcoming coverage; hit the streets and post breaking news throughout the morning; update your blog; then polish selected stories for the Gazette’s print edition. You’ll be mobile and wired, and will have a police scanner and a camera. You need strong reporting and writing skills. You need to be an early technology adopter, able to pick up on new and better ways to get the news you report to your readers, wherever they may be and through whatever channel they prefer. This is critical: readers will not come to you; your job is to go to them. You need dependable wheels. We’ll give you the tools and space you need to make the beat your own, and to let your personality and authority shine through. Journalism degree or relevant related experience required. Send letter, resume, clips to managing editor Larry Ryckman: larry.ryckman@gazette.com. See us at gazette.com; on Facebook (colorado springs gazette), and Twitter (csgazette).
Well, that sounds like a day’s work and then some. When I was a sprout pounding out the word count for what was then called the Gazette Telegraph, in the late Seventies, it was not uncommon to write a half-dozen pieces a day, massage a few rewrites and then go out and get good and drunk. We were often both mobile and wired, but not in a strictly professional — or even marginally functional — sense.
Happily, that was then, and this is now. Anyone who’s charging around 21st-century Bibleburg with a backpack full of esoteric electronica, grilling the brass as to why the troops dick around with C4 during red-flag warnings and otherwise making themselves unwelcome between Twitter tweets, Facebook postings, website updates and hard-copy journalism is liable to find the pubs shuttered come quitting time — assuming he or she can afford a few glasses of ale on what the G is willing and able to pay in this market.
I think I’ll stick to cycling journalism. I don’t have to teach a seminar on Open Records 101 to any uniformed governmental dysfunctionaries on a daily basis, I can work in my skivvies, and the ‘fridge full of ale is only a few shorts steps away. Say, it must be 5 o’clock somewhere, don’t you think?
Mad Blog Media 
I wonder if they would actually check my resume? I could use a lead or two on a good job right about now. You see, I received definitive word this morning that the stimulus package did not reach Colorado in time to save my summer geologist job with the Colorado Geological Survey. I am now officially unemployed and without prospects. And to think I passed on a couple of opportunities because I wanted to do geology with the CGS again this year. That was a mistake!
All that was once old is new again, like this joke from the 1980’s: How do you call a geologist in Colorado? “Waiter!”
Or this one: What’s the difference between a Colorado geologist and pigeon? A pigeon can make a deposit on a new car.
Eh. Those used to be funny.
Damn, John, that sucks. And it’s definitely going around, like the flu. A buddy lost his gig when the Rocky Mountain News shut down, and a neighbor in the hotel business just got pink-slipped. She’s gonna have to sell her house, which should be big fun in this market. Another pal in the construction trades finds himself with a lot of free time for running and riding the bike — and some new, cut-rate competition, possibly hobbyist hammerheads 86’d from some other lines of work.
You looking at having to relocate?
Looks like the wife and I are going to try to ride things our here in Dysfunction Junction. Who could say “no” to a town so whacko conservative that it views paid sick days for food workers as some sort of commie plot? Whereas Bibleburg can point to the bible thumpers to explain its weirdness, Junctionites just seem like they’ve had a few too many closed head injuries. When I watch the local news I don’t know whether to laugh or cry; I just don’t see me leaving this sort of entertainment behind. Where else could I find a town this conservative and this stupid but with fantastic road and mountain cycling?
Besides, relocate to where? Unlike the oil shale bust of the 1980s that the downturn around here is being compared to, this bust appears to extend past the Mesa County line. Junction isn’t missing out on the fun, but it’s not being hit as bad as some other places either (Detroit comes to mind).
The wife graduates from college in May, at which time she loses her intern job with the BLM. So if I don’t find something soon I’ll at least have someone to keep me company at home besides the bored looking cats.
Come to think of it, the fat tabby could make a good stewer. I think we can stave off starvation for a spell anyway.
Realtors have perked up here recently, after being dead all Winter (we capitalize Winter in Wisconsin) we are showing the old house ’bout twice a week. A lot of them ask me how to buy a house. I don’t think the understanding is there, but I explain that they go to a bank, list their assets, and try to get approved for a bank loan. Be real nice not to hafta mow or chip ice crystals every other day at two locations so I can ride more than last summer. Hey, I’m dealin’! Anybody want to buy a good starter house & garage fer $126,900?
Hey John: Last fall there were numerous articles in the Northern Wisc papers about the 2 oil refineries that exist on Lake Superior(Duluth-Superior), upgrading facilities to accept the humongous amounts of shale oil Canada plans to bring there by pipeline. Billions of Bux. The news on that has butt-plugged since. That’s pretty dirty stuff to refine, but have you ever spent an afternoon in Duluth? They won’t notice.
Sounds like they were (are?) planning on sending some of the Alberta tar sands via slurry pipeline to Duluth for refining. You are correct, sir: that is some wretched stuff to refine. If I was Canada, I’d want it refined somewhere else too. I’ll bet you it really stinks up the place.
The Canadian tar sands are just that: they’re tar in sandstone. It used to be oil but long ago it got too cooked and all of the lighter stuff went away, leaving just the heavy petroleum. What we have here in Colorado is inaccurately called “oil shale”, it’s actually lake bed limestones with so much organic material in it that it will actually burn. I’ve tried it, it smells really bad when it burns too.
If you listen to the local chamber of commerce long enough it starts to sound like we’re the next Saudi Arabia. They keep talking about how many “billions and billions” of oil is locked in the “shale”. What they don’t say is that so far, at best, it takes darn near one joule of energy in to get one joule of energy out. No matter how expensive oil gets, that’s still a non-starter. But whoever heard of a chamber of commerce being influenced by something as silly as reality?
When you ignore all of the politics and environmental concerns and just study petroleum geology, it’s really quite interesting. A very specific set of circumstances and conditions must occur in order for petroleum to be produced and concentrated so that it can be accessed. The conditions are so narrowly constrained that it’s amazing that any oil is available at all. It seems a shame to just burn that stuff so we can fly down the interstate in a two ton steel monstrosity.
Not for the first time it occurs to me that I’m way too liberal to be a geologist. Maybe that’s why I’m an unemployed geologist?
John, those are all good points. Maybe that’s your problem: you think too clearly to be employable these days in our pseudoeconomy.
The tar sands, from my recollection (and I’m neither a conservative or a petroleum geologist) require a lot of water to cook the tar off the sand, so there is a large cost to extract the resource. Maybe that’s why they want to ship it to somewhere near the Great Lakes.
So too releasing hydrocarbons from “oil shale” requires work. As John said, if the work to release it approaches the work to use it, you are not producing energy, simply expending it.
The elephant in the room is that a lot of these secondary sources of hydrocarbons have huge downsides, which is why no one wanted them before. Wanna go hungry? Burn biofuels while people starve. Coal, while we are at it, will require carbon sequestration and control of the rich load of heavy metals (such as Hg) that are released. I recently read a paper on the Intertubes saying the Chinese are considering mining coal fly ash for uranium.
Nuclear produces a relatively tiny footprint of waste compared to the energy released, since fission energy is roughly a million times more energy intensive then chemical energy, but the N word scares the crap out of people. Renewable (solar, wind, burning legislative gasbags) requires a storage media so you have the energy when the wind is not blowing or the sun not out.
Nothing is as convenient as pumping oil out of the ground. Sad we waste it so frivolously.
“Pseudoeconomy” I like that. It’s one of those things that I’m not sure what it means but I think I’m living it anyway.
The generation of nuclear power doesn’t concern me that much, just so long as it’s closely regulated (nothing like making nuclear power for profit to tempt some folks to cut corners). However, nuclear power plants do make a tempting target for bad guys, if you worry about that sort of thing. I don’t, it’s the waste storage that concerns me. As part of a geology class I studied (a little) the Yucca Mountain disposal site: it’s probably the best site available to store nuclear waste. But what about once it fills, then what? Well, on to the second best storage site, which by definition isn’t as good as the first, and so on. Sooner or later you’re storing the stuff somewhere you’d rather not be storing it.
One thing I came across that was kind of creepy: the DOE at one point enlisted cultural anthropologists to design a set of symbols that could be placed above ground that would warn cultures thousands of years in the future that they should stay away from a nuclear waste site. Basically our own Stonehenge that says: “You see this land? It’s hosed. We fucked it up. Now go away.” It makes me wonder about the ethics of ruining land that people not yet born could have used.
On a related topic, I haven’t heard much about nuclear fusion in a while. I seem to recall the Bush Admin cutting all funding for it, which makes sense because if nuclear fusion came along we wouldn’t need as much oil, and that would make Dick mad. Heard anything new?
Fusion has the same problems going for it as tar sands and oil shale, it takes more energy to create a self-sustaining fusion reaction than we can extract from the reaction. And we still haven’t managed to create a self-sustaining fusion reaction yet, best that’s been done so far was starting fusion that runs until the “seed” runs out, then it quits all in a fraction of a second. The technical issues with fusion are containment, and allowing fuel to enter the reaction so that it continues, without having to stop and restart the reaction. What unclassified research has done so far has an energy cost about 10 times the energy recovered.
Hey John, the Lincoln Child (not Childs, someone different) novel DEEP STORM is about a scientific undersea discovery that turns out to be a cache of horribly dangerous weapons that aliens left on our planet while we were still little weasels. Maybe we should send that stuff into space…wait, rockets blow up sometimes. Skip it.
Pseudoeconomy: using your house and the Chinese for an ATM in order to provide the appearance of prosperity when in actuality, we don’t make shit any more.
Agree with Opus as far as fusion. Folks are still working on it but containment is an issue and short of some Einstein coming up with a “Eureka”, I don’t see a fusion power plant closer than 93 million miles from here in the short term. The Sun does a far better job than we have managed to do, but has all the time and space it needs. And in the short term, we need not worry about thermonuclear accidents.
http://astrosun2.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses//astro201/evol_sun.htm
Agree with John about making sure nuclear plants are run safely for the benefit of society rather than run cheaply for the benefit of carpetbaggers. My theory is if we made the CEOs and Boards of nuke plants live on site (kinda like living inside a nuke sub), they would have a vested interest in safety.
Spent nuclear fuel storage doesn’t worry me. The amount of spent nuclear fuel needed to be stored in a hole in the ground would decrease dramatically if we reprocessed and recycled spent fuel and if we went to some of the new reactor designs that burn up nuclear fuel to very high levels, thus minimizing waste. Reprocessing has issues (nonproliferation concerns and cost) but so do other energy forms. There is no free lunch.
http://nuclear.gov/
Interestingly, folks are scared shitless about storing nuclear waste, but we have for the last century “stored” the waste of conventional fuels in places like the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and soil. If you grew up in an American city during the fifties through seventies, chances are you have a nice body burden of lead from leaded gasoline combustion, as well as a plutonium and 90Sr from atmospheric testing. There was a recent story in the NY Times about an area in Tennessee buried in an avalanche of coal fly ash slurry after an impoundment feature failed. And you think the story of Patrick’s basement was ugly…
Hundreds of Coal Ash Dumps Lack Regulation
“The coal ash pond that ruptured and sent a billion gallons of toxic sludge across 300 acres of East Tennessee last month was only one of more than 1,300 similar dumps across the United States — most of them unregulated and unmonitored — that contain billions more gallons of fly ash and other byproducts of burning coal.”
I don’t have a problem with working on elegant solutions, Opus. Its not as though what we have done so far is either benign or sustainable. I wish John luck–we need all the thoughtful help we can get right now!
Comment awaiting moderation? Since when is anyone here moderate?
John,
I started off working on a geology degree in upstate NY just as it became a very popular place to drill for natural gas. Even in the early local boom years it was clear being a liberal was going to be more remunerative. I switched to poli sci and land use and somehow ended up with a Masters in Library Service. Oh well worked for me. (slight aside, one of my profs said his oil job with one of the biggies was looking at the data, any data and writing a justification to go drill. Nixon years when they got paid for dry wells. He left to teach)
The Canadian oil sands are a great example of why capitalism and economics just sometimes drives decisions in just the wrong, wrong direction.
Logically if energy in equals energy out then don’t bother refining the product. But we’re dealing with different forms of energy and different market forces. As long as liquid Hydrocarbons have a gigantic market with an ability to absorb large increases in price then if we use natural gas in the refining process and the market demand for that is less, ie diverting it doesn’t hurt as much, well hell who cares about efficiency?
Not to someone out to make a buck or two or a billion.
Changing/redirecting capitalist decisions based what are becoming legacy market forces seems not to be doable in a timely fashion using economics, but rather requires the intervention of government or politics to define a different future such as Opus and Khal posit.
If the future were cost effective it would be here now.
I wish that if we are going to to nuclear we could do something better, cooler, than just boil water an make steam.
One can make hydrogen from water, too. That is, if we are looking to replace portable fuels to use in driving car like things.
Meet George Jetson…..
Ben: I’ve often wondered if I’ve made the best choice. I basically got in to geology as a sort of “planet appreciation” major. I wanted to know my home planet better, and I succeeded in this pursuit. Only, now what?
I like your point about using a cheaper source of energy, such as gas, to create the energy used to access the energy of a different source, like oil shale. Shell has been looking into doing just this around here. Oddly, even though consumers of oil can’t substitute gas as a cheaper energy source (I know I can’t put natural gas in my truck…yet), I have noticed that gas and oil prices seem to go up and down somewhat together. I’ve never heard a good explanation of this.
Khal: True, you can make hydrogen from water, but water is the product of the oxidation of hydrogen. When hydrogen is oxidized (fancy word for “burned”) the products are water and energy. So to make hydrogen from water the reaction would need to be reversed, so you need to put energy in to the system.
So true, hydrogen is a means of making energy portable, however it’s a loser when it comes to energy conservation (at least when you get the hydrogen from water). And of course, you never can get as much energy out of the hydrogen as you put in making it in the first place. That darn pesky second law of thermodynamics again.
Among all of the buzz about hydrogen as a fuel source, I haven’t yet heard much in the mainstream media about this little inconvenient fact. But then again, I rarely hear anything useful in the media.
Of course it is an inconvenient fact–one is paying to reverse hydrogen combustion that makes water. Ma nature has a reason that we have a lot of water and very little free hydrogen.
What you are paying for is as Ben said, the price of producing synthetic fuels that have a market value. Using nuclear energy to produce hydrogen has the advantage that you are not using massive amounts of fossil fuel to produce the hydrogen–now there is a losing situation.
But sure, its no free lunch. Alternatives that exist now, in cars, for example, such as lithium ion batteries, still take up a lot of space, weight, have a manufacturing cost, and have nowhere near the energy density as an equivalent tank of gasoline. We have been tapping the stored energy of hundreds of millions of years of slave labor donated by oceanic bugs. Trouble is, pretty soon it will be “last call” at the bar.
John,
Don’t sweat it. I loved geology. Being outside,the potential for getting paid to muck around in the earth and to understand how it all fit together. Well what wasn’t to like? (well lots, but..) There is a thrill when a landscape shows you how it was formed and works. (I am more of a topology guy than stratigraphy).
So I got a library degree. 30 years after graduation I’ve only spent 8 years actually doing librarian stuff. 19 years working in software supporting, consulting etc for university automation projects and now as a director of a small public library.
I like to joke (away from my staff and trustees) that have I risen to the bottom of the top of my profession. I do not do the stuff my degree is about. I manage – projects, crises and people (hopefully humanely). I don’t do library anymore. I am just a manager and that seems to be were the money is. Fortunately I like the opportunities to create that the position presents. In a way the poli sci and sociology classes have been most valuable.
You just never end up where you start. If you like where you started then you are well ahead of the curve.
If you did put LPG in your truck now you would be part of the economic pressure for the supply system to favor distribution to drivers of that product over using it to create expensive gasoline. I don’t mean that as a personal knock by any means. Like I said if the future was cost effective…
Swell,
The “Deep Storm” novel sounded interesting, so yesterday I went to the library, brought it home, and read it. Good read. Makes one think about the whole waste-that’s-dangerous-for-thousands-of-years dilemma a bit more. On one hand, I don’t feel like we have a right to screw up a place for a time so far beyond our comprehension – 10,000 years, for example, is just a number to us. On the other hand, Khal, I agree with much of what you’ve said, and given that the volume of nuclear waste is incredibly smaller than any other energy production method, I have trouble ruling out nuclear power. I grew up near a coal-fired plant, and that fly ash shit is nasty. The storage lake for my home-town plant is directly above the Ohio River…
It is interesting that James Lovelock, the founder of the Gaia theory – as I poorly understand it (having never studied it, even in passing), that the earth as a whole is like (or just is) a single living organism – has come out in strong support of nuclear energy, mostly for reasons like the ones Khal wrote about.