When the weather in the mid-West gets hot and humid, as it does at this time of year, it is pleasant to have the chance to head up to Maine, (along I might note with two solid streams of traffic from Boston all the way North). Thus it was that I could get up, this morning, and pick fresh raspberries for breakfast from the bush outside the window. Raspberries are, like cherries, one of the transient crops that one savors each year when they are in season and then waits until they appear on the bush again next year.

In this way they are a food resource when they grow, but if we don’t put additional work into their condition, they cannot be considered as a reserve for the longer haul. Unless that is, we are willing to make the time and money investment, by canning them, or making them into jam, they don’t count much toward the family food reserve (and note that I have, in the past, helped make raspberry jam).

The difference between a reserve and a resource is a relatively important distinction that often gets overlooked in the debate about our energy future. Some sources of energy are fairly easy to describe and to understand. Place a wind turbine in an area with a recognized wind pattern, or a solar collector array in the American South-West, and we can run tabulated data through simple calculations to understand the value of the returning energy on the initial investment. It is however, the amount of heavy oil that can be justified as a reserve volume that drives today’s post, and with very heavy oil we have to go the other way - in other words turn the consistency from something closer to jam back into something closer to juice.