Chairman of the Board

For the last year and a half, or so, I've been serving on the board of directors for our local hippie grocery store -- GreenTree Cooperative Grocery Store. For the last year, I've been the board's vice chairman. Last night (or Wednesday night, since this post will probably be finished after midnight), I became the board's chairman.

This is part announcement, part disclaimer; as was the revelation the other day that I've done some light P.R. work for a local community supported agriculture (CSA) project (I'm a member of another one). It's not a position I necessarily sought out, because the person who was the chair was perhaps one of the most excellent, natural leaders it's been my pleasure to serve with. But, she'd also been doing it for a long time, and it was kind of the natural progression, I suppose, for me to move up the chain when she decided that she wanted to step down. But, let the record show that when I speak here, I speak not for the cooperative but for myself but that the things read here may be indeed influenced by the fact that I'm the chairman of a cooperative grocery board.

Summer of Yum!

Lunch today (well, part of it):

The contents of the salad are, lumped by source, as follows:

Mixed greens, sliced radish, green onion, carrot, and chopped carrot top from Swier Family Farms, one of the Community Supported Agriculture I'm a member of this year (I'm involved in two, and doing a little light PR work for them). They made their first delivery of the season yesterday, and I got green onion, carrots, mixed greens, and radishes out of it. I hear from the second -- Maggie's Farm (both of them are west of town) -- that they're seeing pea pods ripening, which is good because I didn't grow any this year and the boy is fond of them.

There are also clover sprouts in there, which came from my windowsill. I grew two tablespoons of seeds and the project was so prolific, the finished product is currently basically spread out all over my kitchen. I even topped my lunchtime bratwurst (leftover from grilling last night), and them ... not bad.

There are also some basil leaves in there, which came off my front porch. I was a bit nervous about the basil plant, and then it got warm and muggy and the plant is now both big and deep, lustrous green.

Meanwhile, I staked my tomatoes last week, and have to get back to my garden -- hopefully today -- to get the rest of the plants transferred to the ground.

While I was drilling for oil, I hit the bottom of the barrel

Skyrocketing gas prices has the usual gang huffing and puffing to cure our addiction by feeding it. Perhaps none sums it up as well as today's column by George Will, in which he suggests that anyone who's ever voted for a Republican has no business complaining about gas prices.

Also disqualified from complaining are all voters who sent to Washington senators and representatives who have voted to keep ANWR's oil in the ground and who voted to put 85 percent of America's offshore territory off-limits to drilling.

This is a sign of the times, I suppose. It's not that you aren't allowed to not complain if you think we should keep our mitts out of ANWR, it's if you voted for someone who thinks this. Talk about comity among Americans.

Will lists facts, like the estimated 10.4 billion barrels of oil in ANWR, and suggests that Chuck Shumer, who wants the Saudis to increase production of their own oil (there isn't much room above what they're producing to add more, mind you) in order that the price might drop, and the estimated million barrels of oil that might be flowing out of ANWR today if Bill Clinton hadn't vetoed ANWR exploration legislation back in the 90s.

Clinton can be forgiven this sin, I suppose, since oil was dirt cheap back in the 90s. Unless someone's got a time machine, there's no sense in blaming Bill Clinton for not knowing that today, China and India would be using a lot more oil than they did back in 1995, or that oil fields in the North Sea and Mexico might have been exhausted so quickly.

Here's another interesting tidbit ... 20 million. That was the daily usage of oil for Americans back in 2005. If we got 1 million barrels a day from ANWR, it would reduce our demand from foreign sources by a whopping 4 percent. That's if we get 1 million a day. At peak production, which if we started drilling in 2013 (the earliest we'd be able to reliably access ANWR oil), the EIA estimates we'd get substantially less ... when production peaks in 2025.

This itself raises the question of just how much we could get out of ANWR. While it's true that there might be as much as 16 billion barrels of oil in ANWR, the question is how much of it is recoverable. It's standard to assume that the first half is the easiest half to get at, after which it's a case of diminishing returns. Although technology has permitted us to recover a great deal more oil today than in years past, it's still not 100 percent. So, if there are indeed 10.4 billion barrels in ANWR, as Will estimates (a fair estimation, since it cuts the range in the center), only 5.2 are easily accessible. Beyond that, it's a question of when it stops making economic sense to chase it.

The same basic premises are true of off-shore areas in the Gulf Coast. The Gulf Coast may indeed have 86 billion barrels of oil, of which 43 billion are easily recoverable. That's about five year's worth of oil usage for the United States, and it would still take 10 years to start exploiting it. Beyond that, it would take several years to get production ramped up to full. Put simply, it is not unreasonable to ask people who have production up and running to produce more; but it is disingenuous for Will to suggest that it's hypocritical for Shumer to call on the Saudis to do that while also opposing opening up ANWR. The reason for that is because while the Saudis could immediately put more oil into the market (assuming that they aren't pumping at full production), it'd still take us almost two decades to get a return on our investment.

But, you almost get the feeling that Will, like so many of the others, think that the current state of oil prices is evidence that they were right all along. Otherwise, how else account for their crowing while being so incredibly wrong?