 | The Energy and Environment Round-Up: October 14th 2007 | The Oil Drum | Prepping for Peak: How Fast Can We Change? |  |
DrumBeat: October 15, 2007
Posted by Leanan on October 15, 2007 - 8:50am
Trillions in spending needed to meet global oil and gas demand, analysis shows
HOUSTON: Companies that produce, refine and transport oil and natural gas will need as much as $21.4 trillion (€15.04 trillion) in capital expenditures between now and 2030 to meet sharply growing global demand for hydrocarbons forecast by experts, a new analysis shows.Larry G. Chorn, the chief economist for Platts, which provides energy and commodities information, said Monday the tab for capital spending is likely to exceed $1 trillion (€0.7 trillion) annually in 2016 and $2 trillion (€1.41 trillion) in 2026 as the industry tries to satisfy surging consumption in the U.S. and abroad.
The bulk will go toward exploration, development and maintenance of the crude oil supply, the Platts' analysis says. Refining and transportation will account for the remainder.
...Already, the industry apparently is falling behind the spending curve.
What's wrong with state-sponsored gambling is simple: it promotes the idea -- inconsistent with the realities of the universe -- that it's possible to get something for nothing. It is unhealthy to an extreme for a society to make this idea normal because it defeats another idea that a society absolutely depends on for survival -- namely that earnest effort matters. It conditions the public to magical thinking -- a characteristic of children-- and disables their ability to function as adults. The expansion of gambling is especially tragic at a time when this society faces epochal economic problems that threaten its existence, and by this I mean the permanent global energy crisis that will require us to reorganize virtually all the crucial activities of daily life. This is a time when the nation can least afford to disable adult thinking and earnest effort.
Plastics recycling industry ‘starving for materials’
Consumers have unknowingly put the plastics recycling industry in the United States on a starvation diet by failing to recycle sufficient quantities of soft drink bottles and other waste. That’s the conclusion of the cover story scheduled for the Oct. 15 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, ACS’ weekly newsmagazine.
Oil futures hit new record above $86
NEW YORK - Oil prices surged as high as $86 a barrel Monday for the first time after OPEC said crude production by non-member countries is likely falling even as global demand for oil is rising....Despite the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' decision last month to boost its production by 500,000 barrels per day beginning next month, the rest of the world will likely produce 110,000 fewer barrels of oil per day than expected in the fourth quarter, OPEC said in a report.
At the same time, fourth quarter demand for crude oil will grow by 100,000 barrels a day over last year, OPEC said.
Chevron to build $500 mln production unit at Miss. refinery
Chevron U.S.A. Inc., a subsidiary of Chevron Corp., said Monday it plans to build a $500 million gasoline production unit at its refinery in Pascagoula, Miss. The unit, which the company plans to complete by mid-2010, is expected to increase production at the refinery by about 10%, or about 600,000 gallons a day. End of Story
FIRE-FIGHTERS of the Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) gained access to the company's 10-inch Utorogu-Ughelli Pumping Station Condensate trunk line which exploded, Friday evening, at the outskirts of Otor-Edo in Delta State while pipeline vandals were busy stealing condensate, and succeeded in putting out the fire after more than 12 hours of blistering rage.
New presentations by Matt Simmons
40 Year Energy Perspective: Where Have We Been? Where Are We Going? (PDF)
Future Energy Challenges: Are We In Denial or Facing Hard Truths? (PDF)
Peak Oil is Here (PDF)
A peak in world oil production under 85 million barrels daily (mbd) now looks like fact and supports our buy recommendations of oil and gas producers. Each new monthly compilation of U.S. government statistics confirms that the rising trend of global oil production ended in 2004 contrary to market expectations. At the same time, forecasts by government analysts, generally in line with investor expectations, keep climbing with targets of 85, 86, 87 and 88 mbd released in September 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 respectively (see chart World Oil Supply Forecasts). If oil supply expectations are too optimistic as we believe, then it is likely that oil price expectations, currently $72 a barrel for the next six years, are too pessimistic as we also believe to be the case.
The quickening pace of oil deals between Kurdish regional leaders and foreign companies is another sign that Iraq is spinning out of control and the Bush administration has no idea how to stop it.
Kazakhstan PM steps up oil fight with Western companies
Hopes of a swift resolution to the dispute between the Kazakhstan government and a consortium of Western oil majors were dashed this weekend, as the Kazakh Prime Minister hinted at new legislation.
UK: Soaring cost of gas guzzling
MEASURES to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the pre-budget report could mean extra costs for both air passengers and drivers.The planned changes include a move to encourage the development of greener cars that use biofuels and switching air taxes from individual passengers to flights, from November 2009. The measure is expected to raise an extra £520m a year for the Treasury.
Former Shell executive accuses oil firms of ‘hypocrisy’ over human rights
THE DEALINGS of oil companies in countries such as China and Burma have led a former Shell executive to accuse his ex-employer and its rivals of "hypocrisy" in regard to human rights.Paddy Briggs, who worked for Shell for 37 years before retiring in 2002, has criticised oil giants for continuing to be involved in countries accused of human rights abuses, despite issuing statements insisting they support those rights. Briggs cites Shell's involvement in China and Saudi Arabia, and Total's investment in Burma as examples of this hypocrisy.
Securing Europe’s Energy Future
Most Europeans agree that reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy is crucial to Europe’s security and prosperity; that energy can be used as a political weapon, as when Russia shut off gas to Ukraine in January 2006; and that Europe is far too dependent on energy supplies from undemocratic and unstable countries or regions. Yet, despite wide agreement on these matters, there is little consensus about how to address them.
India's Energy needs will skyrocket
Over the last fifty years the most significant shift in India’s energy consumption was the replacement of non-commercial energy sources with commercial sources such as coal, oil and gas, hydro and nuclear power.
Aussie coal to fuel Vietnam's rapid expansion
Vietnam imports almost no coal, but billions of dollars are set to be invested in building coal-fired power stations in the south, and the country is expected to import 20 million to 30 million tonnes a year by early next decade.
US motorists key to long-term oil prices
Another, seemingly contrary trend and less noticed by the oil market is the gradual slowdown in the growth of US petrol consumption. Incremental demand growth year on year in motor fuel has slipped from 200,000 barrels per day (bpd) in January 2007 to almost nil or negative figure. By the beginning of October, consumption of gasoline was down 200,000 bpd against the same period in 2006. These figures, like all oil market statistics are volatile but a trend is emerging that should not surprise us. Already bludgeoned by debt and a credit squeeze, Middle America is reacting to high fuel prices and demand is beginning to tail off.
The History of the Electric Car
No one would mistake Chris Paine for a General Motors shill. In his 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, the filmmaker laid out a damning case against GM for unplugging the EV1, the electric vehicle it manufactured in the 1990s and then discontinued in 2003, preferring instead to produce high-margin but gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. "They were a technological leader, and they fumbled that leadership away," Paine says. Ask him about the U.S. carmaker now, though, and Paine sounds almost admiring. "Their new hybrids are making a difference, and their plug-in technology is a real advance," he says. "GM is making some really good moves now."
Raymond J. Learsy: Artic Agonistes: Ceding Its Treasure of Oil and Gas
From Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Research, we learn that all the models have apparently underestimated the speed at which the Arctic ice is melting; indeed, the ice has "already tipped," the institute says. In other words, the ice has shrunk to the point where there is too little of it reflecting the sun's warming rays back into the atmosphere and too much dark ocean water absorbing the heat of those rays, thus creating a vicious circle that further speeds up the warming trend. If the German scientists are correct, the polar icecap may already be a lost cause.
Turkey's rising nuclear ambitions
As Turkey pushes ahead with its nuclear energy ambitions in the face of predicted energy shortfalls and a perceived threat from Iran, critics express concerns about internal safety, security and a regional arms race.
Military regimes survive thanks to rich nations' aid
Recent developments in Myanmar and Pakistan highlight an important new reality in the world today -- the calls by the Western world to build democratic institutions and to facilitate peaceful international change are not working.
“Hands off the Amazon”, Brazil tells environmentalists
Brazilian Defence minister Nelson Jobim stated that the Amazon sovereignty is non negotiable and rejected recommendations from a United Nations panel that last week shared with former US Vice president Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize and suggested the creation of an international treaty to guarantee the protection of the vast rain forest in South America.
Zambia’s Indeni oil refinery resumes production
Zambia’s Indeni Oil Refinery has resumed production, MD Gerald Gueglio said today, after a prolonged shutdown which sparked fuel shortages as suppliers gave copper mines priority.
Low supplies are keeping gas prices high
A tight supply of oil has kept Michigan gas prices – currently $2.89 a gallon – significantly higher than they were at this time last year.
Russian Oil - a Depletion Rate Model estimate of the future Russian oil production and export
Oil is a heavily used natural resource with a limited supply. Russia is one of the largest oil producers and the second largest oil exporting country in the world. Many surrounding countries are dependent on Russian energy. Swedish oil import from Russia has grown from 5% to 35% during 2001-2005.The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 caused the Russian oil production to drop by 50%. The production is currently growing again – but how will it develop in the future?
On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.
What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?
With Al Gore and the IPCC wining the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, lots of people are talking about global warming. The remaining holdouts and dead-enders continue to bray about hoaxes and imaginary disputes, but by and large the dominant focus of conversation about climate disruption boils down to a simple question: what do we do about it?
Tucson: City candidates on the issues
Redirect the development (which is both well-intentioned and necessary) effort toward something in the best interests of the taxpayers instead of the special interests, using ecocity design principles, and honestly appraise the most likely effects on Tucson of global warming and peak oil in the coming decades.
Petroecuador to rent PDVSA rigs at half price
Ecuador`s state oil company Petroecuador will pay its Venezuelan counterpart PDVSA US$18,000/d for two rigs to drill new wells in the Amazon, the former said in a statement.The price is half what Petroecuador pays private companies, the statement said. Both companies are due to sign the rental contract in coming days.
Fortum to increase price of electricity for 400,000 Finnish customers
Fortum said it will charge Finnish households more for their electricity from December 1 as it looks to compensate for a recent increase in the wholesale cost of electricity.
GM enjoying success in Indian car market
After struggling for years to gain a foothold in India, General Motors Corp. is tasting some success lately. In the past six months, the U.S. automaker sold nearly 2 1/2 times the number of cars it sold in India in the same period last year, even as overall demand for new cars was hit by a sharp rise in interest rates.
Investing in Mode-Shifting: Preparing for a Peak Oil World
Technology will not save us from peak oil, but the invisible hand of economics will. It's easy to get excited about all the amazing new vehicles the world's car-makers are promising us. Even if we believe manufacturers' hype, the Cadillac SRX your neighbor bought last week will be on the road for at least a couple decades, and all the fuel saved by your next plug-in hybrid will not make up for the amount it guzzles.
New York oil price breaks above 85 dollars for first time
Oil zoomed to a new record high above $85 a barrel on Monday as a robust demand picture amid booming commodity markets and fresh geopolitical worries put tight oil supplies into sharp focus.U.S. light, sweet crude for November delivery was $1.15 higher at $84.84 a barrel by 7:22 a.m. EDT, off a new record high of $85.19 -- its fifth straight session of gains.
..."A run at $90 is now seen as reasonable," Citigroup analysts said in a note.
OPEC maintains estimate for oil demand growth in 2007
OPEC maintained its estimate for world oil demand growth in 2007 even as oil prices jumped to fresh record highs Monday."World oil demand growth for 2007 is forecast at 1.3 million barrels per day (bpd) or 1.5 percent," the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries said in its October monthly report, released as the price of New York hit a record high of 85.19 dollars.
A stark warning by Canadian Economist Jeff Rubin about the expected decline in oil exports and possibility of a $100 per barrel crude oil by end of 2008 has caught the attention of the mainstream media in recent weeks. It has also been praised by the advocates of the Peak Oil theory who believe that global oil production has already peaked and is currently on a downtrend.Yet a careful examination of Rubin’s analysis and his underlying assumptions about the oil market, raise some doubts about the accuracy of this prediction.
Casualty of high oil prices: oil firms
Drivers aren't the only ones being squeezed by record oil prices. A surprising casualty of the escalating cost of crude and sagging pump prices turns out to be the oil industry itself.Even as oil futures set a new record north of $84 a barrel last week, a number of refiners warned that their third-quarter profits won't be as robust as once expected.
China to build commercial oil storage facility in Hainan
China plans to build a commercial oil storage facility at the Yangpu Development Zone in southern China's Hainan province, the Sinopec-owned China Petrochemical News reported, citing a senior official with the Hainan provincial government....The Hainan government also plans to apply with the central government to build a strategic oil reserve base in Yangpu.
It's time to leave fossil fuels behind and support the growth in renewable energy sources.
Edwards, McCain win enviro endorsements
Democrat John Edwards and Republican John McCain picked up separate endorsements Sunday from two national environmental groups that highlighted their commitment to ending global warming.Edwards won the backing of Friends of the Earth Action, the San Francisco-based political arm of Friends of the Earth. Republicans for Environmental Protection endorsed McCain for the second time. The group also backed his 2000 campaign.
Sydney Harbour icon at risk from climate change
The sandstone walls of Fort Denison have withstood the waves of Sydney Harbour for more than a century, but rising sea levels mean the landmark could become an early victim of climate change.
Commonwealth warns of devastating impact of global warming
Global-warming and its devastating environmental effects were to top the agenda of a two-day meeting of finance ministers from more than 50 Commonwealth countries due to open here Monday.Ransford Smith, deputy secretary general of the 53-nation organization, said the international community needs to balance economic growth with the use of new and clean technologies because climate change would adversely impact on agriculture outputs in many developing countries, as well as employment patters and populations shifts.
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OPEC 10 production unchanged in September
OPEC is out with its semi-official production numbers for September. I say semi-official because they are published on OPEC’s own Monthly Oil Market Report but since no OPEC country publishes their production numbers, they make sure you understand they are according to secondary sources. However these are the figures OPEC used when setting their quotas.
The September production numbers are on the very last page of this 49 page PDF report.
OPEC Production in millions of barrels per day.
*Note: If you total the above numbers for September they come to 30.59 mb/d but OPEC lists 30.61 mb/d as their total. I have no idea where that extra .02 mb/d came from. But it is worth noting that production from the OPEC 10, all the nations that are subject to quotas, was virtually unchanged. The big increase of just over 200 thousand barrels per day came from Iraq and Angola, who are not subject to OPEC quotas.Ron Patterson
Should the OPEC 10 line not read:
OPEC 10 .... 26.73 .. 26.72 .. -.01
Interesting numbers all the same.
Thanks Pager, that was a typo on my part. Leanan has corrected my error. Thanks Leanan.
Ron
Is this part of what caused the runnup in oil prices for the day.
Geez!, I unplug for a day (to finish my taxes) and TSHTF! Well, as I said last week, I look for this to go on about two more weeks, tail off until just before the US Thanksgiving before dipping a bit further.
But I must admit the though crossed my mind that we aren't all that far away from hitting 3 Yergins ;->
If oil stays up this week, it'll make the class I'm teaching in Atlanta next week pretty interesting.
Opec was talking last week of up by 550,000 barrels for Saudia, then down 600,000 barrels for someone else.
I wonder what the Peace Prize folks are going to say when the Arctic melts and billions of Tons of Methane gets pushed into the air and cause global meltdown.
Oh well gloomy mondays, Dad was sick all night. It is rainy and the world is just so clean looking with all the bright shiny SUV's going to work today.
Btw if I don't get into the Whitehouse I will run for local Office.
God Grant you peace.
God Grant you Love of your fellow man.
God Grant you Faith and Trust.
Write in Candidate for President 2008.
Free Right Now party. No donations.
Term limits for congress, Min wage for them too
Charles Edward Owens Jr.
Charles, the 500,000+ barrel increase was for the entire OPEC 10, not just Saudi. And the 600,000 barrel per day drop was for the UAE, November only. They say they will have a lot of wells down for maintenance in November.
It is interesting to note that the UAE and Qatar are now producing at their all time peak and Algeria is only 10 kb/d below their all time peak. Looking at the charts of all the OPEC 10, it appears that they all are producing flat out except possibly Saudi And Kuwait. And I am not too sure about them.
Ron Patterson
So how soon do you think this Peak in their production will get the worldwide attention it should get?
God Grant you peace.
God Grant you Love of your fellow man.
God Grant you Faith and Trust.
Write in Candidate for President 2008.
Free Right Now party. No donations.
Term limits for congress, Min wage for them too
Charles Edward Owens Jr.
CEO, Jr.
A City Council run is a lot more suitable for someone with no financing and no political experience. You can door knock and talk to people, which makes up a lot for not having any publicity.
Its also going to be very important in a peak oil world to have people addressing local problems on a local level. That's who makes transit decisions, recycling the trash decisions and all the infrastructure that will help us all power down
Bob Ebersole
A friend went all the way to try to get elected as State Governor in the last election and got 6,000 votes or so. I am running for the Higher office because of the current crop starting so soon to run for an Office that is voted on up to 2 years away from when they announced. Call it "in Spite of the fact I won't make that much of a showing". But really I have about 20 local folks that will vote for me because they know I stand behind what I say and if I am wrong about something I will take the heat and go on about getting the messages out that are on my agenda.
Knowing about a problem like Peak Oil, Climate Chaos, Or homelessness is only 10% of the problem finding solutions is the big part. The city I want to run in is not the city I live in, We over here have a good mayor. I know the Mayor over in Little Rock, he has shown up at several Homeless Venues lately. Jessie Goodrum is the fire brand that I help. She is the real power behind the movement, While God is the ultimate power over all things, He set her to this task and has given her the voice to do it. I just run the Internet protion, And do foot work, and offer networking via my always on Cell Phone and my abilities to plan and Map vast amounts of Data.
But thanks for the advice, I might have time to run for Emperor of the Empire of USA in 2012, If someone gets that far into the thick of things like some are saying.
Best, Charles.
God Grant you peace.
God Grant you Love of your fellow man.
God Grant you Faith and Trust.
Write in Candidate for President 2008.
Free Right Now party. No donations.
Term limits for congress, Min wage for them too
Charles Edward Owens Jr.
CEO Jr., I wish you luck with your campaign and I believe that you would try to do 'the right thing.'...But, TPTB will not allow you or anyone to come between them and their goals. They will do what ever is necessary to stop you... Whatever is necessary. TPTB had no qualms about eliminating two high profile Kennedy brothers so what makes you think that they would hesitate to eliminate you should you become a 'problem' for them? Perhaps you are a brave person or one that thinks that they have lived a full life and are ready to retire from the living?
I agree with OilManBob...Run for city council or the school board or some local office. Remember, all politics are local and that will become more evident as this ludicrous federal government becomes less relevant as each day passes. Good luck, whatever you decide.
Thanks for the comments.
Full steam ahead though. Call me crazy if you like. I have sat in the back of a police handcuffed before, not prison time, but nothing much scares me. Locally the police know my name I work with the Homeless.
God Grant you peace.
God Grant you Love of your fellow man.
God Grant you Faith and Trust.
Write in Candidate for President 2008.
Free Right Now party. No donations.
Term limits for congress, Min wage for them too
Charles Edward Owens Jr.
Ron - looks to me like Kuwait in Sept should be 2.50, not 3.50. ( I didn't "reply" so you can edit if you get there quick enough)
Thanks Sunspot, that was a typo on my part. I have corrected it now. And thanks again for not reminding me with a "reply", thus allowing me to correct it.
Ron
Hello Darwinian,
I just want to thank you for your longtime data tracking effort. I imagine that it is quite time-consuming, but the contribution that you and other data-freaks make to the TOD community is Priceless. A additional big hat tip to Khebab, Ace, Rembrandt, and any other TODers that I have overlooked.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Bob, Humans are smarter than yeast , we track data. But humans are dumber than yeast we can't make beer without yeast, and bread is a bit on the wafer side, or cracked a bit without yeast.
Tips back a good German pilsner, looking for the yeasties.
God Grant you peace.
God Grant you Love of your fellow man.
God Grant you Faith and Trust.
Write in Candidate for President 2008.
Free Right Now party. No donations.
Term limits for congress, Min wage for them too
Charles Edward Owens Jr.
Hey, our ancestors were thriving on unleavened bread for thousands of years before we began adding yeast to make it rise...And, the early Egyptians brewed a sort of 'beer bread' that was low in alchol content but high in nutrition and was a staple of their diet...Sliced bread might not be the greatest thing since bubble gum...If you check your gocery store shelves you will find about a kazillion different kinds of unleavened breads for sale...called crackers here and biscuits in England. I have many boxes in long term food supply for the shelf life is much greater than the yeast variety that grows mold in a few days. Jif and Saltines will keep one going for a very long time and is a better diet than Big Max and Fries!
I am a Chef, it was mostly tongue in cheek, but Yeast make good fish fry food ( fry are baby fish). Solent Green (sp) the Charlton Heston movie of food loss, comes to mind.
God Grant you peace.
God Grant you Love of your fellow man.
God Grant you Faith and Trust.
Write in Candidate for President 2008.
Free Right Now party. No donations.
Term limits for congress, Min wage for them too
Charles Edward Owens Jr.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/city/dallas/stories/101...
West Dallas business owner kills 2 suspected burglars in 3 weeks
09:32 PM CDT on Sunday, October 14, 2007
By MARISSA ALANIS / The Dallas Morning News
Dead criminals don't become repeat criminals. :)
~Durandal (http://www.wtdwtshtf.com/)
ya got that right
"Death solves all problems,No man no problem" - Stalin
right.. all that and
Arbeit Macht Frei
Fight them there so we don't fight them here.
Obey your Thirst
It just goes to show that crimnals don't read the paper. He got a write up the first time I am sure. Now he should not have any trouble going forward. Or will they come to harm him to get their ill gotten gains.
Welding supplies and such would be a hefty recycling dollar amounts.
I wonder how bad it will get when it really gets tight.
God Grant you peace.
God Grant you Love of your fellow man.
God Grant you Faith and Trust.
Write in Candidate for President 2008.
Free Right Now party. No donations.
Term limits for congress, Min wage for them too
Charles Edward Owens Jr.
On a related note...
As slayings of cops rise, a new brutality surfaces
From the link:
Do the people see a culture where leadership/people with more money-power say one thing and do another?
And when made aware of things like this:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gangsofiraq/view/
How does this end well?
For what it's worth, there has been no long-term upwards trend in slayings of on-duty officers. From the FBI UCR on this, 2007 is shaping up to be a bad year - on par with 1997 and 2001 (not counting 9/11), but not terribly unusual.
The current number killed is 5% over the average for the last ten years, and - if current rates continue - the total for the year will likely be 70-75, which is 2 standard deviations away from the mean, meaning you'd expect to see a year like that once every 2 decades. (Discounting the effect of increased population, which should be expected to bias the numbers slightly upwards.)
I can't help but note the article quotes Miami Chief Timoney. Google "Timoney, Miami, WTO". Remember that? Didn't he also do Boston DNC convention? Or did they decide better and not hire him for that?
It's a two way street. As the cops get more brutal, the response is going to get worse. One can't blame it entirely on the cops, but society in general is getting more brutal. Get ahead, screw your neighbor, bomb, bomb, bomb Iraq. And were do so many of the Guard in Iraq work in "civilian" life? Police, prisons. Those skills and attitudes pervade the authoritarians here and there.
At this point it seems to me that relatively little of the violence is attributable to the fact that there is one set of laws applied to the wealthy and whites and another to everyone else. People are staying in line.
cfm in Gray, ME
I can't say I disagree with this. A guy who used to work for me was robbed and pepper sprayed as a young man while working at a convenience store. He and his cousin were both employed there and they both armed and trained themselves. A few months later Mr. Pepper Spray came back with a small handgun ... and the cousin solved the problem once and for all with a single well placed .357 round. This has been some time ago but that one round kept that place nice and quiet for five or six years straight ...
I'm a Massachusetts liberal pansy and all that, BUT... we can't afford to let metal theft escalate. It will get innocent people killed if it doesn't get enough burglars killed first. Lock and load, people.
Apuleius--
Even Jesus advocates Lock N' Load:
http://www.misspoppy.com/catalog/xcart/customer/product.php?productid=16419
911 service was out to thousands of homes in Dallas a few days ago because some guy ripped out a few dollars worth of phone cable.
More reason to change out to optical fiber and to have packet radio bypasses ready for all vital telecomm services.
Optical fiber I understand, but its not a cure all - in Vietnam they have big problems with fishermen dredging up undersea cable and cutting it. They want the old, abandoned ones full of copper, but they don't know what they've got until they slice it open :-)
"Packet radio bypass" - this one could use some clarification. Packet radio to me is hobbyist HAM type stuff. If you mean microwave links they get put in but its increasingly rare as the fiber web spreads.
I do think HAM radio is going to see a revitalization as things get funny in telecom, but we'll need to wait a bit more to determine which way that will go. We have one cell tower in this town and due to a merge service is stinky poo and has been for a while - one way audio, many call failures due to lack of capacity, etc.
Wall Street will make as big as mess as any force at work in the telecom business as the ARM scam unwinds - going concerns people will need for their wellbeing will be ripped apart to satisfy the last gasps of "profit", leaving hollowed out shells ... again I find myself grateful for Iowa, where we've never had telecom consolidation, and they'll take vegetables and eggs for payment when times get hard.
Theft of undersea cables is not going to be solved by switching to fiber, but the overland stuff, I think will.
As for packet radio, there are quite a few wireless technologies out there that can be grafted onto the side of any telephone exchange to make sure a couple lines to the next exchange stay open even if a line is cut. THat doesn't restore full service, but it will keep 9/11 open.
But yes, ham radio operators are going to be kept pretty busy over the next few years.
Well no, it will not, not for power anyway. The cable the guy got fried stealing was a high voltage power cable. Fiber optics is great for transmitting data but you cannot transmit one watt of power with fiber optics. Copper is usually used for underground power and aluminum wrapped around a steel core is what is usually used for above ground power cables.
Ron Patterson
The more ignorant of these thieves will be lost to Darwinian processes soon enough. In the mean time, more skilled thieves will go for the low voltage easy prey of the phone cables, unless the phone companies move first and replace them with fiber. That's what makes it urgent.
Power is of course a tougher issue, but at least it's more dangerous to begin with.
There is a 1,200 pair under a bridge in North Kansas City that has been stolen three times, armored mounting and all. After the third time it got alarms and cameras :-)
Tip to copper wire thieves: Not the live ones
So how about a homeless person who thinks a place is abandoned? How about a kid who cuts through your yard and steps on the flowers. Surely the kid has no right to vandalize that flower garden (a $500 orchid), so just shoot him. How about those people who tried to walk out of flooded New Orleans, along a freeway ramp - the police of the neighboring town threatened to shoot them. And then there's that guy who cut in front of me on the off ramp...
Mr Walton probably should have just called the cops. What this shows (and I suspect the reason it was posted) is just how quickly we could descend into a kill or be killed mentality if extreme economic stress occurs. Texas will apparently be among the worst places of all - lots of guns and a shoot first attitude.
Creepy.
PS: Doesn't the US constitution say that no person shall be deprived of life or liberty without due process of law?
how quickly we could descend into a kill or be killed mentality if extreme economic stress occurs.
And how long do you think the citizens will keep paying to keep the prisons running if things as bad as many posters at TOD have posted?
Uh, no. What this shows is that not everybody thinks exactly like you do. Plenty of people in Texas think Walton did nothing wrong.
It is almost invariably a grave error to assume that everyone else looks at the world the same way you do. In general, predicting behaviour based on your personal intuition is likely to fail; that's why aggregated statistics based on analyses of large groups are used instead (e.g., marketing, polls, etc.).
I agree with you PtE, I also seems the story shows more than one thing. Really, I don't see where you got the idea I believe other people think like I do. Surely not from riding my bike in traffic :*) Nor from my occasional visits to Houston.
PS: Doesn't the US constitution say that no person shall be deprived of life or liberty without due process of law?
That's Sooo pre-911, Pre-Bush.
Little humor here.
Bush World
Cronies fail upwards:
While the mortgage company he founded is in shambles and many of its customers facing foreclosure, Roland Arnall continues to enjoy a life of prosperity as the United States ambassador to the Netherlands with an estimated fortune of $l.5 billion.
"If you're building a 'Mount Rushmore' of people who should be on the face of the mortgage lending crisis, I think Roland Arnall has a distinct place in that litany," said Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.
Ameriquest has fired thousands of its employees and closed its sales offices after settling a lawsuit brought by 49 state attorneys general over alleged deceptive and predatory lending practices. The company has since been sold.
There are some quirks in Texas law regarding people breaking and entering, but things really are different down here.
One of my favorite Texans and Their Guns stories involved a guy sitting in his car in a local mall, who witnessed a murder, and saw the shooter heading back to his car. So, the witness pulled out his 44 magnum and executed the shooter with one shot to the head, as the guy was about to drive away. The grand jury no billed him--no charges were filed.
Another one involved a rancher who saw a state trooper get shot after he pulled a guy over. So, the rancher got his rifle out of the truck and executed the shooter, from a rest stop overlooking the scene of the crime. The state trooper association gave the rancher an engraved rifle as a thank you gift.
In any case, it is my understanding that murder rates have generally fallen in states that have passed conceal and carry, compared to states that don't have conceal and carry (although I could be mistaken).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry
One major conclusion was that locations which enacted more permissive concealed carry laws had a decrease in violent crime but an increase in property crime.
So would the various shootings described above have been counted as violent crimes?
I have been to Texas quite a lot in the past.
I was always struck and impressed by the well mannered civility of people to each other and to strangers like myself.
It was almost like a trip back in time.
But, If you can carry small arms, civilitity and politness will quickly become part of evolution: Most bad people die before breeding...
Anyway, Americans will probably muddle through PO. Small- Town Local Minutemen will work out ways to see off Blackwater-SS-Dirlwangers , when they come home from foreign parts.
Anyway, time to knock off, time to do the washing up.
At nine tonight, a docu-drama on the liberation of Bergen - Belsen.
My old Eng.Lit. Teacher was one of the first through the gates as a Junior Infantry Officer he had already been awarded an MC. He took Shakespeare off the page and brought him to life. - When he wasnt being arrested on anti-war marches in the 60's and 70's
FLEAM: If you are out there, Old Doc Pope was a real man.
And not a tatooed knuckle-dragger...
Criminals get their guns by stealing them from law abiding gun owners. Some how having a gun doesn't prevent police from being shot.
Gun related crimes are reduced across the board in countries where gun ownership is highly restricted. England and Japan for example have very low gun-related crime rates.
England HAD a very low crime rate, until they brought in radical gun control - now gun-related crime has skyrocketed and crime in general is through the roof.
Japan has a lot of gun-related crime, but among their organized crime. The general people get along with knives, etc. But, Japan is very tough on criminals, it's a good place to end up sitting in a jail cell for the rest of your life and you misbehave.
Japan also has the idea of "honor" that comes from their more recent feudal background. Going to jail is a great dishonor to your family, if you're at any level below the lowest stratum of society. For the lowest stratum, well, Japan is very different from the West, very very different. I'd not be surprised if a certain number of criminals end up killed off without any real police process - just executed like those baddies in Texas. Not by gun, just caught and strangled or something and maybe dumped in the bay.
I assume that you noticed that you were quoting a Dallas police officer who was basically congratulating Mr. Walton on his shooting skills.
Gee, I mean called the cops *before* he shot the guy.
It is common knowledge in Texas that trespassers may be shot. The due process occurred when the state made this legal. Ignorance of the law is no defense.
I am in favor of this sort of thing, but that is the ISP operator in me. Who protects the internet? The U.S. government? ICANN? The FBI? The Microsoft paperclip?
Nope, wrong on all counts. The overall routing is the way it is due to a citizen's vigilance committee known as the North American Network Operators Group. DNS root nameserver policy is the sole responsibility of Jon Postel. Jon passed in 1999 and we miss him terribly. His continued posthumous responsibilities are jealously protected by a fellow named Paul Vixie, an outspoken objectivist immediately recognizable as an emanation of Ellis Wyatt, a character from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.
You are the government. Gather round with your fellow citizens, have a word with the sheriff, and if the need is great you are the law enforcement agency for your city as well. You're also health and human services and the department of economic development, too, but that has been well covered in other threads.
Here Hear Here Hear.
"You are the government. Gather round with your fellow citizens, have a word with the sheriff, and if the need is great you are the law enforcement agency for your city as well. You're also health and human services and the department of economic development, too, but that has been well covered in other threads."
Thank you very much for reminding us. The FREE Right NOW Party was founded on that principle and a few others, namely the Christ is Risen so you can be free right now if you are a Christian.
Government for the sake of the guys and gals who get the big bucks, and big paychecks and big retirements and 3 hours of FAME and all the Fortune and Power they can handle, has been the norm for a few years now and I have basically gotten sick of it Locally and Nationally. Humor is one of my forte's and I see the need to run for President not only as a Humorous Aside to my current life, but as A Grass roots movement toward getting back to the basics of our founding.
I would support a national change in Gun Laws to a federal level of carry laws like Texas.
I know how to handle a gun and am a fairly good shot. Training with Staves and Pikes makes you learn very fast the eye hand and other coordinations. I sometimes Play an AI robot, that has a tip jar and a sign reading Ask your AI a Question. I have some 3rd cousins that love to watch me work and still think I am crazier than anything they have ever seen. I have even written minute long skits where a Christian is faced with a man going to kill them with a gun.
I walk right now and I am on the streets of two cities which have higher gun deaths than they did 30 years ago. So high in fact that Little Rock almost Passed 2 a week this year.
Best, Charles
God Grant you peace.
God Grant you Love of your fellow man.
God Grant you Faith and Trust.
Write in Candidate for President 2008.
Free Right Now party. No donations.
Term limits for congress, Min wage for them too
Charles Edward Owens Jr.
Uh, the Constitution says the _U.S. Government_ will not deprive you of life or liberty without the due process of law.
_Other people_ may deprive you of life or liberty under the constitution. Traditionally, other people have been restricted under state law from depriving you of these things.
Most homeless people I know fear the cops a bit more than most other citizens. Abandoned buildings are not that hard to find and only some homeless sleep in them. Lawlessness goes on right now right under our feet. Look online for how many deaths occured in cities like L.A. or N.Y.
I forgot that I had this post up and went to bed. I am up only because I slept 3 hours 9 pm to Midnight, got up and opened a book for the first time.
Walter Koenig's Chekov's Enterprise, Only to find that the Author has signed the inside cover of the paper back. I got it for 50 cents at McKay's Books and CD's in Chattanooga last Sept06 while visiting my 2nd Ex-wife who was near by in Alabama for a visit, we went to the store because I owed her money and she got books and CDs with it.
We make our lives what our lives are worth. The crimnals in the stories above treat their lives as worthless, and if they find death in the crimes they find death, they don't worry to much about death because their lives are worthless to them. They also I would bet feel that your life is worthless as well.
As a Christian your life is worth my life. I would gladly die for any one of you the readers. It is not a cliche, it is a point of fact. Ask my closest friends if I mean what I say and do what I say. Some have ridden with me as passenagers when they had to get somewhere in a hurry, Or needed things. I give what I have gotten. Freedom.
Best, Charles.
God Grant you peace.
God Grant you Love of your fellow man.
God Grant you Faith and Trust.
Write in Candidate for President 2008.
Free Right Now party. No donations.
Term limits for congress, Min wage for them too
Charles Edward Owens Jr.
Woao, this is one of the biggest difference between the US and europe I think..
The American West is different from Europe. The man shooting the burglar would have been hauled before a grand jury in about forty states of the union and would likely have faced charges unless the intruder was armed and the entry wound was on the front of his body.
The rancher shooting the man from the overpass and the citizen shooting the escaping murderer would themselves face charges in almost every jurisdiction today.
The 44 magnum case occurred in Fort Worth, right around 1990, if memory serves.
I personally know of one case, about 10 years ago, where a man was waiting to pick up his daughter, in front of his ex-wife's house, when a couple of teenagers accosted him. Words were spoken, and accounts differ as to what happened next, but the father shot the two teenagers (who had no weapons), badly wounding both of them. His daughter witnessed the episode. The grand jury no-billed him. No charges were filed.
There was a case 10 or so years ago in Louisiana (which has similar laws to TX), where a Japanese man, Yoshihiro Hattori was shot and killed while knocking on the door looking for a Halloween party. In that case the shooter was acquitted in the criminal trial, but found guilty in the civil trial.
The shooter seemed to be genuinely convinced he was in danger, but I can imagine if he'd come out to protect his property with a baseball bat instead of a handgun with a laser sight, Mr. Hattori would be alive today.
I just hope that cooler heads prevail when the energy crisis hits hard.
As I recall, the homeowner saw an unfamiliar person at the door and yelled "freeze!". When the partygoer didn't stop moving, he killed him.
I think it made big enough news in Japan that most of them now realize that "freeze" is an American colloquialism for "if you move I will kill you".
Bet that's in the electronic translators these days.
There was something similar with a Scottish tourist about 10 years ago. He was knocking on a door shouting for help, as I recall, and the family fired through the door, killing him. No charges were laid, as the shooter believed he was in danger, and there appears to be relatively little legal requirement to communicate that fear to a perceived intruder.
An isolated incident, to be sure, but it bespeaks substantial differences between American culture and that of much of the rest of the West.
.
SCT,
I think you are wrong here...just not long ago many states passed the 'Do Not Have To Retreat' law..which means that no longer does one in those states(mine included) have to retreat from a prowler in their residence , and in some cases out in public.
You might want to google that to satisfy yourself, but I am certain becuase last year I received a letter from my state rep and senator on them telling me how they had passed this legislation..
The laws...they are a changin
airdale
Mr. Walton definately deserves a medal, some sort of award. He's eliminated one criminal and at least discouraged another.
I really need to look into moving to Texas, enough of this admiring the place from afar.
When you get here call around to my place, if I fill you full of lead by mistake, at least you will understand.
Deal!
I lived in a place in California once where, one night, some questionable characters came around to my door and wanted to see me, they saw me and mr colt .45 acp.
Things got quite cordial, and I don't remember them coming around any more. And yes I'd gladly have shot them if they tried charging inside - there was no back exit to this place.
But, fair's fair and, I knew, and know, that I should expect equal treatment if I go skulking around and banging on people's doors with a few scary friends, at night. That's why I don't do it.
The domesticated animals in the great feeding pens of Europe (and Massachusetts) seem to forget that an armed society is a polite one.
Ah great isn't it.
You should have blown them away for practice.
Never know when you might have to for real.
I invited a guy over last week I didn't like, I gave him two barrels of my 12 gauge. Got rid of him and got some needed experience at the same time.
I told the cops it was a mistake but it was his fault for skulking.
A few more notches and I'll be an ace, someone might even write a dime novel about me.
Maybe they're just not as concerned about carrying weapons, since their rates of violent crime are lower than most of the places with relaxed gun laws.
Would you characterize Baghdad or Mogadishu as unusually polite? Or Tokyo as unusually well-armed?
Or perhaps that quip by Robert A. Heinlein is somewhat less than perfectly true.
Banks pool billions to stem credit crisis
Can anyone say "desperation"?
One of the guys on CNBC called it a Frankenfund, trying to bring the dead back to life.
I think insiduous would be the proper term. From WSJ today:
NB: This seems to be mostly about Citigroup, they are in deepest when it comes to structured investment vehicles, or SIV's. Other banks won't bail them out, so now the Treasury attempts (what free market?) to let investors do it.
Some have theorized that US dollar weakness is related to the unprecedented level of "insider" or anti-free market activity promoted by TPTB.
All I know is I read, last night and this morning, The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith, 1955, and it's one of the "necessary" books I think.
Very very good on what happened, what happened before the crash (the write up of the Florida real estate bubble will send shivers up your spine) and the measures by banks and companies to try to head off the Crash. There was even a mini-bubble before the Crash just like our dot-com crash.
My copy cost me 25 cents at a library sale - your library probably has it, or it may even be on gutenberg.org or someplace.
Westexas -- That's what I needed to mention in the book - one of the things the banks and companies tried to do was hold up the values of stocks by doing massive buys of them. The result was the money going into the massive black hole and the stocks still sinking in value as if nothing happened.
If any of you have read the book or get to read it, you'll love the humor of Galbraith, he makes a comment about it being a time when many people swindled themselves.
Instead of instilling confidence in the market, etc., these types of moves just show people at what lengths financial companies are going to "stay afloat". Another disturbing move is seeing mortgage companies trying to get even more creative with loan packages (i.e., 40 or 50 year term house loans).
The article I read stressed three times that "taxpayer money will not be used". Maybe. I guess people worry when a scheme like this was hatched by two "former" Goldman guys controlling the US Treasury dept.
"Taxpayer money will not be used" ... until the howls of those losing their homes rise up to Washington. I translate that as "It won't be us who asks that taxpayer money be used".
If the world were reality based there'd be direct benefit for those in trouble with their homes, but it would be available for those with not more than 500 feet square per person, and it would allow the mortgage grifters to burn while the home owners remain.
As it is I expect some effort at welfare for grifters laundered through McMansion owners ...
Yeah, right.
How come the fraudsters claiming to make 100K/yr flipping burgers in the ghetto that got a 100% loan at interest only are victims?
They just paid rent for a while, they have no own investment in the property and they were looking for a place to live when they found this one. They may have been dreaming of profits, but they lost nothing.
The victims are the decent people that invested in proper mortgages with down payments and had these sub prime people move into their neighborhood eventually destroying property values. But even the victims have been pulling tax free capital gains for a long time, so even if they lose a 100 grand they already made 5 or 10 times that much over the years. If they spend it on bullsh*t that's their problem.
The real truth is that this has been happening for the last 30 years, when I had a young family with children in CA we routinely had to sell our house and buy in another neighborhood. The ones that stayed always lost, even then.
What really happened is that they ran out of ever lower classes to import, the last batch was the illegals that can't function at any level in society or speak english. Where are you going to find anyone causing them to move out? You stop pushing people into the next higher level and the game stops, the game stops and real estate prices collapse in 80% of the middle. The real prime and the real shit housing don't change much.
There is nothing new to any of this, they are just making a big ball of wax out of it because they want a bail out when in reality they lost nothing, other then their free ride was called off.
I'm just a old retired E7, but no one needs a PhD to figure this one out.
Get proactive.
If the neighborhood starts to fail, raise your voices louder and get the city to act better. I have lived 2 doors down from a crack house/drug selling shop. I called the cops and asked what the folks in Neighborhood watch were willing to do.
I have the t-shirts to prove I was a member of the Watch. The nieghbor hood is still bad, but for a while there my street was safe. I was out and about walking my streets at night. And I trained my Martial arts in my front yard and I never locked my door. I knew who were the Local Gossips and I cultivated making friend of them and showing them some of my neat tricks with my staves.
When you can walk on hot asphalt with a steel 73 inch stave balanced on your head down to the Gossip's house they tell all kinds of tales about you. No one messed with my house up to 2 months after I moved out. After that it went down hill fast. But 2 months lag time is pretty good.
Be more proactive and defend your right of a safe area to live. My parents won't move, 30 years in the same house with only them in the whole 2 blocks of houses as Originals, and we were the Second wave to hit the area.
Learn to protect your rights, or else someone will take them from you and force you to move the rest of your life.
God Grant you peace.
God Grant you Love of your fellow man.
God Grant you Faith and Trust.
Write in Candidate for President 2008.
Free Right Now party. No donations.
Term limits for congress, Min wage for them too
Charles Edward Owens Jr.
Are these well recognized banks firstly going to kidnap Mr. Credit with their left hand – and simultaneously bail out Mrs. Crunch with their right hand? And at the same time stuff away the concept of Peak Oil for another 100 years?
These are special times indeed - but Peak Oil (and more) is at least twice as expensive to get rid of IMHO,– that’s for sure ..
Or perhaps this was the plan all along? The big guys come in and buy up all those loans from failing small guys for pennies on the dollar. Even at a non-performance rate of 25% (far higher than has ever been seen) they stand to make billions.
By holding the krappee loans they make off the balance sheet, they can continue to show wall street the earning numbers they demand. And thereby cash out their stock options for a little while longer.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Mish has a good one on that today.
Super SIVs - A Fraudulent Attempt at Concealment
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/
The thesis by Aram Mäkivierikko has few factual inaccuracies. Saudi Arabia is *not* the largest producer of oil. Talk about its export capacity is just that, talk. Also, Gazprom did *not* turn off the gas flow through Ukraine. It reduced the gas flow by the amount taken by Ukraine. Gazprom used an independent Swiss firm, which monitored the gas meters coming in and out of Ukraine, to validate that Ukraine siphoned gas destined for other customers. It's too bad that regurgitating MSM BS is considered acceptable for a thesis at Uppsala University.
I have not had a chance to read this thesis which Leanan quoted from Energy Bulletin. A link to the thesis itself can be found here.
According to the abstract:
I would expect that the reason that the report talks about Saudi Arabia being the largest producer of oil is that it was written a while ago. I noticed with Robelius's thesis that there was quite a lag.
I expect that this is an important paper that others will want to analyze closely. His conclusions are important ones. The reserve estimates used in his analysis are shown on Page 45 of his thesis. The top of the range ones seem to be Russian estimates. Even at the top end of the range, the author is not saying that Russian oil will increase much.
The issues that you talk about do not seem to be central to the analysis Aram Mäkivierikko is performing.
Well ,most MEng theses will have a few inaccuracies in them. I've just browsed through the whole thing, and I think the gist of it, modelling Russian production and exports, was done very well. And there was certainly lots of other useful info there. I will read the whole thing through when I have the time and am pretty sure I will understand Russia much better after that.
I would like to hear Jerome's comments on the thesis, IIRC he's a bit of an expert on Russia.
p.47: "The Arctic region has been subject to vertical movement of the crust due to the alternating weight of the ice cap in the past. Source rock that originally was inside the oil window might have been pushed downward so that gas has been created instead."
The arctic ice cap is floating, and so doesn't push down the local crust at all, other than a few minor exceptions (e.g., Greenland).
With basic errors like that, how are we supposed to take this thesis seriously?
Part of the problem with this thesis is that it relies far too heavily on hearsay - for example, the above bit of nonsense is cited as "personal communication with Colin Campbell", as are key variables such as decline rates for different situations (p.53). In essence, the thesis is doing little more than saying "trust Campbell" on these key points.
Unfortunately, Robelius's thesis - from the same research group - has similar problems with opaque methods used to determine key parameters and a lack of testing the validity of the model used, leading me to wonder about the level of rigor and objectivity in their research group at Uppsala. Gaps like those would cause either thesis to be raked over the coals at the research lab meetings I'm familiar with.
Today's "ice cap", i.e., Arctic sea-ice, isn't the issue.
Having not read Aram Mäkivierikko's work, I presume he was writing about the ice sheets which build up during an Ice Age. The latest round began a little more than 3 million years ago and thick ice covered most of Canada since that time. We are still in an Ice Age, although the past 10k years or so has seen an interglacial warm period, during which the lands of Eastern Canada and Scandinavia rebounded from the previous glacial depression. If the climate were to follow a natural path, the Earth would return to mile thick ice in future, which could add enough mass to push the surface down again.
E. Swanson
I don't know about Uppsala, but the thesis mill in many places around Europe is run for internal profit.
Each dept gets more funds to spend depending on how many people graduate.
It's the quantity of thesis that matters, not the quality.
I think I understand your points about errors and source criticism, but I think the overall picture still emerges in form that is useful.
It is, after all, possible to arrive at a useful and interesting conclusion, by making a few (non-critical) errors on the way.
Again, this is not to say the reader shouldn't be critical.
This is my first post to TOD I read it everyday.
Thank you to all users for your intelligent input on PO and the AWG.
AGW and Peak Oil are two catastrophes that are coming together to create a global crisis in the near future. I reviewed several articles in the October issue of National Geographic magazine on GW, energy, and biofuels. There was a pull out graphic that showed the timeline of CO2 and temperature derived from ice core data. This graphic shows clearly that after every CO2 peak (280 ppm) there was an abrupt temperature decline. The atmosphere now contains 380 ppm CO2 plus other GHGs. My first question was why the sudden drop in temperature. The most obvious answer is that the THC changed in the North Atlantic Ocean. The amount of ice lost this summer in the arctic indicates that is the earth approaching this threshold. Another cause may be the increase of moisture in the atomosphere due to higher sea level and warmer water. This may lead to cooler temps due to more cloud cover and precipitation. I would say yes, that this is happening, since the CO2 levels are 27% higher now than in ice core history, and then are we close to a severe abrupt climate change. It doesn’t seem we need to be too concerned about what will happen with GW over the next century or two. The real concern seems to be a quick rise in sea levels, then THC slowing and abrupt change to lower temperatures.
GW gets more press than PO, however if the sea levels rise to displace populations, disrupt oil terminals and refineries just when production is peaking keeping warm and food production will be major issues.
There will be little time for mitigation of our energy dependent life style. There may be only ten years before GW crashes and the same for energy. I still don’t see many people giving up their pickups and SUVs. Light Rail Transit is talked about as projects for the next 10 or 20 years and little talk of electric train/coach transportation systems. Unless the hammer drops few people will do anything voluntarily about GW and PO.
The US has an absolute leadership vacuum in Washington on all issues facing this country. Until that is changed I do not expect any meaningful action. This is simply the most critical period in the history of the environment and possibly for mankind to have such a vacuum in US leadership. This administration has systematically changed, undermined, and countermanded environmental laws and scientific data since day one.
Interesting JNK and I hope you post more interesting stuff.
I watched a segment on 60 Minutes last night about Dubai. They built this huge island, shaped like a palm tree, with hundreds of million dollar homes and multi million dollar hotels. It looked like the whole island was whole was only a couple of feet above sea leve. I could not help but think that in a couple of decades the sea lapping at the foundations of every building on the island.
Images of Dubai’s Palm Tree Island
Article with link to a video
Home: Living Here: Dubai: The Palm Islands
Ron Patterson
Maybe they read about the Arctic ice melting during the Medieval Warming Period, where it did not give a problem, and decided that it wouldn't this time (which I suppose we might start to call the American Warming Period (???) either.
More likely, they just think that they'll rebuild it higher if needed, with no thought that the party might be over by then. Like we built our interstate system with a 40-year lifespan, because hey, in 40 years we'll probably want all new roads anyway.
I don't think they think.
It's nearly impulse buying. I want it today, delivered, tomorrow at the latest.
They certainly don't believe in global warming or sea level changes. And if all else fails, insurance salves the back of their mind to fix all problems.
The medieval warming period is a joke. Not only it wasn't as warm as it is now, but we can't just compare the world of today to the world of then, can we?
And the danger is not even in how hot we are already, the danger is on how hotter this will become...
No, it wasn't a joke - it was warmer than now, as shown by considerable archaelogicial evidence quoted in numerous articles from places around North America and Europe, and from ice core data from Greenland.
Maybe not a joke, but mistaken nonetheless.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/medieval.html
No it is not mistaken. I understand that there may be a wish to prove "the hockey stick" by denying the existance of the MWP, but, for example, the melting of the polar ice is shown by the whaling activities of the Thule back in the MWP. I gave an example last week of the data from the Hudson Valley it is not hard to find similar research describing equivalent results in British Columbia, Alaska and of course there is data from European sites. If the facts don't fit the model, the facts are wrong?
It would be more accurate that to say that you are trying to disprove the hockey stick (Mann et al) by citing evidence that is not pertinent. No one is saying that the MWP was not significant, its just that we are way past those temperatures now and on a steady uptrend. But of course, in order to bolster your denial, it would not be convenient to cite this evidence.
Cherry picking of evidence at its worst.
Wtf are you talking about, mister?
Neither it was warmer then than it is now, neither it is the present temperature the problem we face.
What we face is the trend. And that is up, up, up.
Better when the key point of the graph is seen.
Yikes. It was only 600 pixels wide. It was cut off for you?
Yes. I'm running 1024 x 768 pixels, not uncommon.
At 1280 x 1024 I get the larger graph fine. (But now my eyeballs are 8"-10" from the screen :(
On a 1024x768 screen, the active entries only cover a little more than half the screen, even less when they are well down in the reply tree and pushed to the right. The ad/blogroll and login/masthead columns cover the other (almost-) half. So, yes, a 600-wide graphic is slightly cut off. With this particular graphic, slightly is all it takes.
It's always amazing how little of the screen area is actually occupied by the material one is actually trying to see on a website. Commercial sites are often even worse, and YouTube is worse still. With those, all but the middle 10 to 25 percent of one's expensive, power-hungry screen real-estate is plastered with ads, trademarks, and other mechanics of the web site and of Windows or Mac OS - without all that stuff, a ten inch monitor would be just fine.
Yes, but the problem is that I believe you are plotting a reconstruction of global temperatures and at this particular point we are talking about Arctic temperatures. You are, in fact, confusing apples and oranges. The preponderance of the evidence is that the Arctic and much of the Northern Hemisphere was warmer, see the evidence cited. This is a widely accepted arachaeological event, with corroborating evidence, i must confess to some bemusement at the passion with which folk seek to deny it.
No, it's global temperatures that count. That is what we are talking about.
You cite only one reference in this thread, while the opposing camp has many. Your reference deals primarily with drought and precipitation changes, and does not mention temperature, except when referring to the Little Ice Age. No mention of temperatures higher than today.
Could you point to other work which specifies temperature?
I would not hold my breath waiting for evidence of a claimed global nature to the MWP because there is none at this time. In reality it is just a canard used to obfuscate the uninformed (willfully, in my opinion) about the threat we are facing right now. And for those who wonder why we talk about GW in a PO group - the central issue is that we will have to deal with both problems in roughly the same time frame.
This paper from 2003 has a temperature reconstruction graph for for the Northern Hemisphere. It is very similar to the one shown above. More interestingly, the author goes on to say
"Careful analysis, unfettered by pre-conceived ideas, reveals no prima facie case for a globally extensive, synchronous warm period in Medieval time. It is a will-o’-the wisp that distracts from understanding the true nature of climate variability and climate forcing over the past two millennia."
Additional graphs for hemispheric and global temperature trends can be found in this 2006 book. Like the paper above, the authors found little hard evidence of a global, or even hemispheric, medieval warm period. They said:
"Evidence for regional warmth during medieval times can be found in a diverse but more limited set of records including ice cores, tree rings, marine sediments, and historical sources from Europe and Asia, but the exact timing and duration of warm periods may have varied from region to region, and the magnitude and geographic extent of the warmth are uncertain."
Then there is the section of the 2001 IPCC report which asks "Was there a 'Little Ice Age' and a 'Medieval Warm Period'?" The answer:
"Thus, current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this timeframe, and the conventional terms of "Little Ice Age" and "Medieval Warm Period" appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries."
A 2006 article published by "Climate of the Past" comes to the same conclusion.
In fact, the only recent study (written in 2003 by two Harvard astrophysicists) published in a scientific journal that argued for a global medieval warm period with temperatures higher than, those of the late 20th century, was later retracted by the journal after heavy criticism regarding the poorly chosen analytical methods used by the authors and their misuse of other researchers data to make claims the original researchers did not support.
Luis, great chart, thanks for posting it. Do you have a link? I was wondering what each of the different colored lines represent. And you are absolutely correct, the trend is what we should be concerned with. What would give anyone the absurd idea that the upward trend will suddenly stop or reverse without something causing that halt or reversal. And from everything we know, all the causes are forcing the temperature higher, not lower.
Ron Patterson
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:1000_Year_Temperature_Compari...
scroll down website for journal references to the various curves. The graph was created by Robert A. Rohde at UC Berkeley.
Another reference: Wikipedia article here and graph here.The heavy black line is just one of eleven reconstructions; the other reconstructions only extend to 10, 15, or more years ago. So whether the black line can be linked with the others to form a proper statistical series would be a question, as switching methodologies in the middle of a series tends to be frowned upon. But there it is.
Chapt 6.6 of the IPCC 4 report. The graph is on pg. 467.
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Pub_Ch06.pdf
Index to all the reports, Working Group 1.
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html
===
http://logicalscience.blogspot.com/2007/06/wall-street-journal-op-eds-di...
You've gotta look at the pictures here about Dubai.
Some inCredible pictures. (hit continue at bottom of page)
http://dubai.isnuts.googlepages.com/
Interesting to hear how construction is so close to the coast. I visited the Gulf coast in Florida last spring and most of the built up areas are within 2-3 miles of the coast and only 2m above sea level. They need to go inland to get dirt to raise new construction another meter or so to faciiltate drainage. Millions of people will need to migrate north to get to dry land and fresh water.
Yes, JNK, there are several of us that post on this board that are long term residents of Florida and live withing a few feet of sea level. I dont know what the other Floridians have done, in the way of preparations, to get the hell out of Dodge if the water rises quickly. My wife and I have a piece of property near Ashville that we can retreat to if we are not overcome by a sudden tidal wave.
The trend in Florida for the last couple of years has been more people moving out than in. This is a first in the history of the state as far as I can tell. I would very much like to see a survey of those moving out to find out why they are moving out. Florida has traditionally survived on perpetual growth and tourisim and both of those industries have been hurt recently...But, I have a hunch that some of those moving out are doing so because they know the water is going to rise and that their real estate will be worthless in a matter of time. The politicians here are scared witless and they were clueless about governance to begin with. It is not a pretty picture.
Have you considered the possibility that Washington has NO leadership vacuum.
It's just trying to lead towards some other goals and based on different values than what you (or me) subscribe to?
That is another, imho equally plausible, explanation.
As for GW/PO crash within certainty of 10 years. Don't count on it.
Even if world peaks within ten years, that is not the same as a crash (of society, economy, etc). Possible, probable? Yes. But not the same.
The same goes for GW. Nobody really knows. It is impossible to foresee the future.
As such, it's useful not to despair, but to keep on working towards goals and changes you see important.
Why Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness
Touches a bit on "Stumbling On Happiness" (people can't predict what will make them happy) and "The Paradox of Choice" (too much choice makes people unhappy). But it ends with this:
Which fits the two primary types of responses, among the conventional wisdom folks, that I got to the ELP recommendations, to-wit, that it is socially unacceptable to under-consume and/or that it is somehow vaguely unpatriotic.
WT, I believe that this view of underconsumption being 'vaguely unpatriotic' is all wrapped up in the usually wrong headed notion that 'if an American works hard he/she will be rewarded by becoming part of the 'well off.'...Whatever 'well off' means. It is still possible for an average person to become 'well off' but it is far more difficult today than in 1950-1980 era. I am talking about the average factory worker that could save a great deal of money and invest it in that era, not the biz wiz. In the service economy that is America today it is difficult for an average hard worker to become well off.
Most average people require 'ideals' and these are provided by TPTB in the form of movies, awards ceremonies, sports heros, lives of the rich and famous, war heros, business tycoons, great political leaders (long ago), etc.
The 'average person', by media exposure to the 'ideal people', get clues about how they should dress, act, strive, acheive, conduct relationships, marry, raise families, buy houses, buy vehicles, consume, etc. In other words if 'average people' did not have the 'clues' provided by 'ideal people' through various media they might conduct their lives in a totally different manner...One not so slanted tword consumption. Since the 'ideal people' depend on the 'average people' for their wealth, the 'average people' must be steered to work and consume in a manner that will continue to create wealth for the 'ideal people.'
All of the above can loosely be classified as 'class warfare', but this war was lost by the 'average people' long ago because they have, mostly, succumbed to the easy credit, shiny cars, too large homes, and all the other credit traps laid by TPTB. The 'average people' have failed to look beyond all the chrome and glitz and think for themselves. Too bad.
could be "average people striving to be ideal people" or it could be the slugs are hypnotized by advertising ..............buy.......consume..........marry and reproduce.............do not question authority..........drive an suv..............move to a vinyl sided three car garage house in the treeless 'burbs............consume.............c o n s u m e......................C.......O........N.........S.........U...........M............E......consume.....consume
I agree. Money does not buy you happiness, the best thing you could get out of it is security.
Ironically the need for security is greatly increased by the nature of our system itself. We have been conditioned to believe (or brainwashed if you like) that the system is not supposed to provide us with security, because you see, your faith is in your hands (or put in another words, security is your own problem).
Thus the system creates somewhat artificially the need for security, which in turn makes you play the game which enables the system itself! It's a vicious circle. I have not seen a way to escape from this on a personal level - the very basics for living: healthcare, education, shelter and soon food and energy are or are getting extremely expensive. The cheap plastic toys at Wal-Mart are hardly a replacement at all.
Show me a rich, happy, non-consuming society or culture of humans that are or ever have been on this earth.
Unfortunately, humans have to consume to live and the consumer culture is just an extension of that.
BTW, what does happiness have to do with anything? The "pursuit of happiness" inalienable right of the Constitution may be the greatest fraud foisted on the USA.
The pursuit of happiness is not in the constitution. It is in the declaration of independence. As such it is not a constitional right.
Happiness, incidentally, is what people think they should pursue, with the idea that if they pursue happiness, they will reach it. Certainly, this works in the short term. I have my doubts about long term implementation...
ummm, believe that would be the Declaration Of Independence, not the Constitution. Jefferson came up with that and never really did see fit to elaborate on it much, I believe it was a slight take-of on John Locke's triplet of 'life, libery, and property', from that golden age of political rhetoric where oratory borrowed from Poetry, 'Libertee, Equalitee, Fraternitee', anyway...I have always held it to be the most sublime concept of either the Declaration or the Constitution.
I've been rereading the "Grapes of Wrath". Steinbeck hits this theme of money and happiness time and again in the novel.
Also great for it's drought description, of forced migrations. Pair it with a set of Dorothea Lange photographs and it's quite predictive.
This reminds me of the article about Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan I read the other day at Information Clearing House.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18551.htm
The article, entitled "Guru of Greed: The Cult of Selfishness"
The article asks why Americans seem so selfish and yet so easy to persuade to vote against their own self interest.
From the article:
" The answer may be contained in the writings of the Russian emigrée and radical libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand. Two decades after her death, she remains the darling of right-thinking Americans and sales of her novels, paens of praise to unbridled capitalism, are even outselling The Da Vinci Code.
More copies of her book Atlas Shrugged are sold now than when she was the literary pied piper of Wall Street. In his early thirties, no less a figure than Alan Greenspan, who married one of her closest friends and went on to become the chairman of the Federal Reserve fawned over her. On Saturday nights he made his way to Rand's deliberately darkened apartment in Manhattan to sit in rapt admiration as passages of her novels were read aloud to her conservative salon.
"Ayn," Mr Greenspan would say according to those who were also present, "upon reading this, one tends to feel exhilarated!" (end of quote)
I don't think we can blame Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan for all of our troubles. The cult of selfishness became deeply entangled with American Christofascism in recent decades.
Prior to the latter part of the last century Americans struggled mightily with the same tendencies all along, but in the past 40 years or so the unholy fusion of a Christian heresy, the cult of selfishness as expressed by Rand, and militaristic fascism have created a nation more violent and brutal than I could have imagined as a child.
This growing brutality is at least as disturbing as anything else I've experienced in my life. It seems that we are grooming ourselves to devour the planet and then die off.
There are other trends at work. There are some positive developments. But I wonder if the positive things can survive the orgy of violence we have set for ourselves?
Ayn Rand is wonderful ... but only when tempered by reading Nathaniel Branden. Branden was an early disciple and his book Judgment Day largely confirmed some things I'd suspected about Rand based on her writings.
Irrational exuberance?
What are you trying to convey?
How did the reference to christian fascism get wedged into your comment that started out with Rand and Greenspan? Rand was an athiest and rather a noisy one at that.
In addition, I don't know when you were a child, but although it may be just a thin veneer, the outward appearance of the U.S. in 2007 is of a much kinder and more politically correct place now than during the 1930's / 40's through at least the 1970's. For points of reference think the Great Depression, institutional racism, World War II, the Korean War, Vietman. Hell, a black fire fighter in Los Angeles whose nick name is the "Big Dog" just got $1.5 million for a supposedly racially motivated incident where he ingested a small amount of dog food in a hazing incident.
"Yes" by any comparision it is a brutal, repressive and insensitive society we live in.
"Christofascism" is a term used by some theologians to describe the fusion of Christian identity, faith, or narrative with the beligerant nationalist militarism of fascism.
In the USA we see the use of a apocalyptic, eschatological Christian narrative to fuse the identity of the USA with the modern state of Israel in interpretations of "Biblical prophecy which demand aggressive militarism by the USA in defense of God's Chosen People Israel. See, for examples, this article on Christian Zionism:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4531.htm
Christofascism is especially useful as a powerful cultural story with which to justify almost any militaristic aggression by identifying such an action as an act of obedience to God.
The "free market" intellectual heirs of atheistic Ayn Rand have essentially married the televangelists and fundamentalist Christians who were duped into voting for Reagan and Bush I & II.
Our culture is therefore a kind of blasphemous hybrid -- imagine Ayn Rand wedding Jerry Falwell and putting their offspring in the White House. The religion that began with a little anti-empire Rabbi who broke many rules and urged his followers to act lovingly toward others has now become the religious narrative that drives an empire built on avarice and hatred.
Of course religious fundamentalists of all sorts -- including atheists -- can make mistakes that end up destroying any germ of truth or beauty that gives rise to enlightenment.
ICH just posted a link to Chris Hedges' article "Outsourcing Torture" which gives another take on the brutality of our culture, which of course must also be applied here at home.
Hedges sounds much like the revered scholar Chalmers Johnson, who argues that we have nearly completed the transformation from Republic to Empire, and so a brutal police state at home will be needed to prop up the attempt to rule the planet to our advantage by brute force.
Finally, ICH posted an article by Cindy Sheehan entitled "Matthew 7:3 (Look It Up)" about the link between our brutality and oil.
I notice that CommonDreams has two of these articles up today, along with a Boston Globe article "Religion and Nation" by James Carroll that speaks to the same themes.
The old "Manifest Destiny" that justified the genocide across the North American Continent through the 19th Century is very much with us today in a globalized form.
It is ironic to see the intellectual heirs of Ayn Rand and the intellectual heirs of "Dispensational Theology" melded together to provide the MegaChurch Nation with a Gospel of Wealth and Power to justify endless resource war.
It is furthermore fascinating to see the business world and the political and religious establishments destroying the Rule of Law so that the last vestiges of Reason can be torn away from Empire. No more Geneva Convention, no more rules against torture, no more human rights or civil rights. See how fast the politicos scramble now to do away with the Rule of Law in our Homeland.
Greed is good, is it not? Rand's objectivism married Falwell's fundamentalism and gave us American Fascism, complete with a religious narrative to identify what is blatant "Rape Culture" with God Almighty.
Anyone ever notice how Ayn Rand
portrays her female characters?
Is there a better definition of
misogyny?
Why is a female author the Prophet
of Testosterone?
It's called penis envy.
Then again, what glory is there in the notion that you have Alan Greenspan by the balls?
Perhaps journalist Andrea Mitchell has dug into this one.
ROFLMAO
Money doesn't guarantee anything without the ability to use it, money however is very valuable when used properly to buy time and freedom to do what one wants to do without having to spend time on basic necessities.
If you look at acquiring money like at acquiring a hammer, a CNC machine or a weapon for what they can do if properly used rather then something to buy drugs or chinese junk with, then it is a valuable tool.
As it is now money is a tool to project your will on society.
When society changes then it's no big deal to change, when I'm up in MT I basically barter for most I need with the Huttenite's next door.
I can live either way.
Anyone who's not happy with their money can send it to me.
Hope I beat The Chimp to this one!
As always it's the Leanan posts that are the heart and soul of these Drumbeats.
For the individual, crazy. For the "Economy", very profitable.
So, let's assume that if you have a large country, a technological leader, whose industry becomes a sort of interlocked set of corporations that envelop media, a good part of government, education, etc., and this large country has put quite a bit of research into behavior control and propaganda over the decades.....
It would be extremely surprising if you didn't end up with a populace who felt it was their reason for being, to work until they drop for "The Economy".
We need more oil
China and India are adding over 6 million new vehicles on the roads this year. (replacing bikes and scooters??)
let's say 1 gallon of fuel per vehicle per day
That's 142,857 barrels per day
There goes most of the OPEC increase reported up line.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/10/business/AS-FIN-India-Car-Sale...
http://www.china.org.cn/english/business/227425.htm
Ed
Off Grid, Off Mainland, current profession:Beach Bum
I read Robert's wonderfully sincere and thoughtful submission late yesterday, along with the comment thread. It surprises me that the many creative and lateral thinkers that post here seem to be ensnared in false dilemmas, like either/or hypotheses about what powerdown will look like.
Folks, we're all correct: It's happening now, all around us, in every form that we've imagined. It isn't only the large collapses like Zimbabwe that sow the seeds of famine; Poverty appears in pockets in most places in the world, and as the situation becomes more dire for everybody, there will be less and less kindness extended to strangers. Here in the West, the crash will be much longer in coming, and some places may not merely escape, but will positively boom because of PO, GW, and war. I'd expect real estate inside the Beltway to continue appreciating for some time to come, for example. The powers that control the food and water supplies will be able to extract labor and wealth from everybody else, just as they always have. Ayn Rand wrote that it makes no difference to the despot whether his subjects are prosperous or destitute, because he need only squeeze a single grain of rice from each of his millions of peasants to enrich himself.
It gives me no comfort to think of my family being safe or saved or spared, when our humanity is sacrificed on a me-first altar of survivalism. The fact that we here think about tribes or communities or larger groups makes no difference in the end: The goal is the exclusion of the starving, desperate hordes, whether they're from India or Tijuana or Milpitas.
We're witnessing the hardening of hearts worldwide now, even among the strong, safe Western people who have the means and the mores to lessen the misery of others. We here are the only ones who have the latitude to act in a tolerant and compassionate fashion, but no, we applaud the murder of petty criminals, and dream of ways to heat our houses when the rest of humanity cannot.
Don't look at me for answers - I have no idea what to do, but .22LR ammo sure seems like a good investment from where I sit. Fear and greed are deep inside us all, so although I know my money would go much further buying water-purification equipment in Africa, I can't seem to loosen my grip enough to help those who need it most. In other words, PV is the next SUV, as we scuffle with the crowds to get our share.
Mister, I hate to say it, but I fully agree with you.
But perhaps it is only because it is raining here.
And what of the persistent "me-first altar" of contemporary global capitalism? Is that somehow better?
nelsone,
While I agree with much of what you wrote I disagree with the following thoughts:
As to your first sentence above I would argue that "our humanity" has already been "sacrificed on a me-first altar of survivalism" in the form of a so-called civilized techno-industrial culture that is full of arrogance and denial of earthly realities!
As Terrence Des Pres noted in his book about death camps, The Survivor:
"The function of technology is to serve physical and economic needs well enough for us to ignore them. The function of culture is to negate the primal facts of nothingness and death. Both aspects of civilization reduce conciousness of our condition as biological creatures. And in the end both breed contempt for life... Western civilization is the negation of biological reality; and unavoidably, since life and death are inextricable, the denial of death comes finally to be a denial of life... There is terrible irony in this, for whereas awareness of death generates firm care for life, death-denial ends in a fury of destruction."
Also, as Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death puts it:
"What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types -- biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue...
"Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving hope that comes with the organism's comfort and expansiveness. 'Questo sol m'arde, e questo m'innamore,' as Michelangelo put it."
In my opinion what is coming is the inevitable result of our humanistic attempt to avoid reality.
As to your second sentence about tribes, communities and such having as their end goal "the exclusion of starving, desperate hordes" presumes much that I think worth questioning.
The first presumption is that collapse will be fast and catastrophic. I have no doubt that over the long haul it will be pretty ugly and hellish, but (barring a nuclear exchange) I seriously question this fast crash into desperate starving hordes from say India and Mexico. Parts of Africa definitely has it problems as probably will China. But how bad this may get as you suggest is pure speculation, dependent upon how bad climate change and other ecological disruptions occur, and when or how fast, and a whole host of other matters. One just can't say for certain. Should infectious diseases take hold as they might that will hit hard any desperate starving hoards, as well as the better off. Ultimately pure luck will matter and there is no way to plan for that.
Still, for those of us who are trying to work locally to prepare ourselves and our communities for the Long Emergency ahead, exclusion is not the end goal at all, but rather trying to position oneself for the transition to reality. Will it be enough? God only knows, but what other choice is there? Will we have to cope with such realities as death, survival, impoverishment on levels we've never known before? No doubt we will. But can we conceivably and collectively do these things while not turning into monsters? I believe we can when the time comes. Of course, some places will fare better than others in this, but in truth that's largely how human life used to be on earth and will become dominant once more. Cause and effect will be immediately recognized for what it is.
As harsh as this may sound to some, it needn't be -- it will be just the way life on earth is. Death will be a central element of life again, but so too will joy, love, compassion and sharing, as well as the ability of individuals to stand alone if need be.
Returning to Becker, he concludes:
"I think taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, or the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved from within the subjective energies of creatures, without deadening, with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow."
That's being fully alive and that's where we are headed to.
The best one can do then is to accept it, prepare as best one thinks or is capable to try and do, and hope for the best, preferably in a community that offers some decency of the same to cope with the long emergency ahead.
My only recommendation is to find your place that fits the above and dig in.
Man, is this response ever something, godraz. Yes, your deconstruction helps me gel some things that were unclear in my first posting. Amazing that you have those quotes at your fingertips.
But a seminal point is that there are already hordes starving in India; they're just dispersed and distant enough that we don't see them as anything but statistics. It's only a quantitative difference between Calcutta and Mexico City, and there's no way to know how much worse it's getting, or where. Yes, let's all hope for a soft landing, but TPTB have placed so much effort into their BAU disguise that the inevitably steeper ultimate decline will hurt the utterly unprepared population that much worse.
And it hurts to watch my part in this unfold - I can't *not* prepare for my own family welfare, despite the opportunity cost of those resources not going to the wider community per se. As John Galt observed, first you have to stop the engine of the world, before it can be restarted again.
Some time ago a poster here described our national leadership perfectly with two words: dysfunctional and maladaptive.
nelsone, in further consideration of your posts I'm adding the following:
All in all when I consider the state of the world from all the angles I honestly think we are FUBAR. One way or another breakdown is coming. We just don't know for sure how it happens or when, or whether or not it will result in a complete sudden crash and burn topped off by bombs bursting in light, or a serial sort of punches to our collective gut that awakens us from our slumber before it is too late.
I hope for the latter, as that at least offers some hope of redemption. None the less, the bottleneck of troubles ahead does readily suggest that in order to have a chance at redemption, which is to say continuance of conditions suitable for life both human and otherwise, our global population will need to be brought down.
How this happens will matter but I suspect that it will happen in a fashion largely beyond our control -- by natural attrition as would occur to any species in overshoot. (As for TPTB, their control is a lie and will largely prove useless as presently configured. This is not to say their attempts to control things won't matter, but one can hope that there still is time for better leadership to arrive to guide us, not control us in the daze ahead.) As a personal matter what might end up happening in severely crowded and badly compromised land areas will definitely be beyond my control.
As you note there are already a lot of hungry under-nourished people dispersed around the globe, many of whom die of hunger or some other cause related to it. Do I like it? Of course not, but my sorrow about it isn't going to stop it. Not only is death unavoidable it is everywhere, but we mostly don't see it. Tragically, our civilization has come to equate the value of life with the mere avoidance of death.
As David Ehrenfeld, in The Arrogance of Humanism, notes: "[W]hat we want is often a separate thing from what actually happens, and I do not believe for a minute that the two will coincide in the future. This is partly because we want so many different things, many of which are not compatible with each other."
He also tells a story whereby as a college student he and some other classmates had an opportunity to visit with an eminent old heart surgeon to whom one of Ehrenfeld's colleagues remarked with feeling that heart disease was the number one cause of death; the heart surgeon, after pausing to consider, answered: "What would you prefer to have as the number one cause of death?"
In consideration of all this it is on the one hand an impossible bind we are in and on the other a matter of supreme relevance in our personal ethic. The trick is to give up on the lie that our humanistic culture lives by that we can control things, especially death. Having succeeded at this for as long as we have I do believe that death will be returning from the off-stage closet we've shut it away in to retake a leading, perhaps remarkably horrible, role in our lives once more.
We'll just have to wait and see how broadly the strokes fall, and what level of chaos it leaves in its wake. What makes our situation appear so unbearable is that we won't know until it occurs.
Again, as David Ehrenfeld notes: "The main difficulty that we are now facing... is the spectacle of global waste and destruction that are occurring in the last great selfish denial of human limitations. We are all participants in a horrible race between destruction and preservation. Destruction has the power of death, which is final and irrevocable. Preservation has the power of life, which is evanescent and fragile, but which can grow and spread under favorable conditions."
Of course the conditions do not at all appear favorable, but like Alan from Big Easy, I refuse to give up on the hope that all is lost. So I do what I am capable of to craft a decent life as much as possible outside the system of destruction, practicing what I can to be a good steward where I am. With any luck and enough like-minded souls where I live and across the globe, just enough of what is good and necessary of Creation for life and decent survival, for both our kind and other kinds, will make it through the hell to pay ahead.
What I'm trying to suggest is that I don't think that one's sorrow and desired avoidance of deaths yet to come is suitable cause to give up on one's own life and decency of response to what we'll all face.
Returning to Terrence Des Pres, his conclusion about those who lived through the horror of death camp internment was that they did so partly by luck and partly because of "[s]omething innate -- let us think of it as a sort of biological gyroscope -- keeps men and women steady in their humanness despite inhuman pressure." And what is this innate biological force but an ancient will to live & survive, which exists in us all and can arise in some more than others in time of great need.
Most recently Cormac McCarthy gave voice to this instinct in his post-apocalyptic novel The Road although I hope it never comes to the level he depicts. And despite the dire sense of news and resulting noise as is raked over here, IME I know a lot of good people even if they are presently fully unaware and unprepared.
In any event, any such dire future prospects as contemplated here does not give me comfort either, but as Edward Abbey wrote to me once on a postcard in reply to a letter I sent him: "Good luck to you & never give up. Never."
That's where I am at.
Thank you gordraz,
I'm coming back late to this post. I really appreciate it.
Hell of a post. Thanks. Those quotes are something.
"It gives me no comfort to think of my family being safe or saved or spared, when our humanity is sacrificed ..."
I'm with you Nelsone. I took some heat several months ago for stating that I discount the extreme doomers bc/ I said that even if they are right and 80 to 90% of all humanity will die, I would prefer to die with the unprepared than live through it. I am not willing to kill the man who tries to steal from my garden or firewood pile in order to ensure my survival. I'm not depressed or suicidal by any means, it's just that dying doesn't scare me that much. I've been a first-hand witness to scores of deaths (mostly professionally as a physician but also a few family members).
It is a well-known fact in medicine that most of the people that we "save" from death in a code blue never make it out of the hospital alive. Many who do make it out of a hospital alive never make it out of a nursing home. Just let me die in the first wave of the die-off. Why would I want to resusitate myself only to live a brief life of misery while everything I care about- people, culture, bourbon, mountain biking- evaporates before my eyes in the die-off?
I'm sorta on the same page, but would put it a little differently. I look myself in the mirror every day, and I need to be able to live with the person I see myself being. I don't do bad things to other people, because I don't want to live with myself being the type of person that does that.
Do people who follow that philosophy of life sometimes end up being victims of those with fewer or no such reservations? Of course they do. So what? I'm going to die anyway, and I've already lived longer than the average person has for most of human history. At best I might have another two or three decades ahead of me; then again, I might be dead tomorrow. The important thing is to make the most of what I am, and of the time I have, while I'm still living. Becoming something I loathe for the sake of adding an unknowable but probably short increment of time to my lifespan doesn't appeal to me.
So AOL is dumping 20% of its workforce - seems not so many people are using dialup and they've not had good success in transitioning their brand to high speed access.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/15/news/companies/AOL.ap/index.htm?cnn=yes
The forehead slapper here is that they're moving their HQ to New York to be "closer to the advertising industry". I guess its the best they can do, but the mortgage scam is going to take that one out from under them, too.
OK, the Simmons and McDep (Peak Oil is Here) post up top show some scary sh*t!!! The beast of global awareness is awakening.
I see WTI is in the $85.50 area. Did I miss a recent prognostication from Yergin?
Normally I'm not really prone to gloating, but I would so love to know what Yergin et al. are saying to their clients who paid $1000 (or was it even more?) for those CERAious reports...
Probably this: "It's speculative, trend-like price rise and part of the commodity/inflationary/dollar depreciation cycle. It will play out, but make you rich enough to throw in those new investments for all the new Arctic oil fields you so desperately glamor. Oil will be down again in the $45-60 dollar range within a year or so, so prepare for it."
Or something similar: i.e. it is a transitory phase, prices will fall. There's plenty of oil left and it's cheap enough to exploit.
Why would they change their tune? Only if they start losing customers would they do that. Don't change a winning formula....
They'll say it is all because of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, etc. If you read the fine print you'll find an escape clause when it comes to above ground factors.
Sure, oil WOULD be <$40/bbl - IF we lived in a different world than the real one we've actually got.
WT's Export Land Model got some play on DailyKos today.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/10/15/12276/167
If this board really wanted to make a policy impact getting discussions going there would be a good start. Shall I register ExportLandModel as a username and start a TOD watch? There would have to be a contingent from this group willing to join and post to help flesh things out ...
Beginning to look like a bidding war:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/21309263
"US motorists key to long-term oil prices" article above says demand is weakening in the US.. Has the USA as a whole started experiencing demand destruction because of the high oil prices, or is this just a consequence of the financial troubles? Since the price is rising there is clearly more than enough demand internationally, especially if you don't get paid in $.
I would.
Hello TODers,
A spider has to balance the size and maintenance of its energy-intensive spiderweb to the harvested return if it wishes to survive--we should be striving to do the same with our infrastructure spiderwebs.
A rotating brownout or blackout is like a varying strong wind tugging at all the strands of a spiderweb; this pulsing gradually weakens the keystone threads until the entire web becomes unhinged. A smart spider would cut off the most-unneeded threads to reduce the overall wind forces acting on the vital foundational threads.
Recall the recent newsposting talking about how some outlying suburbs in my Asphalt Wonderland have very high foreclosure rates and abandonment. If my region is now post Peak Everything: the utilities should announce that future blackout times will be heavily extended in the outlying areas compared to the essential urban core near the railroads and TOD stations. This is no different than a homeowner turning off lighting and heating/AC in unused rooms so that they can still afford electrojuice for the essential refrigerator and stove/oven.
This announcement will further accelerate the outer ring abandonment rate and vastly increase migration to the urban core quickly increasing pop. density/square mile. This can only help increase the demand and financing possibility of further RR & TOD.
When [not if] the area water shortages become obvious: the same principle should be applied for potable water and sewage access. Again, the outlying suburban areas should be the first areas whereby potable tapwater flow is cutoff; instead, tanker trucks are parked forcing the neighborhood to daily wheelbarrow home the desired amounts in jugs. The larger diameter, formerly potable pipelines can be easily converted to handle untreated water suitable only for agri/ permaculture irrigation.
Municipal Humanure recycling strategies should begin first in those outlying areas furthest from the sewage treatment plants. This can save many maintenence dollars as the gradual abandonment, then recycling of the outlying burbs' webs can provide a source of funds to reinforce the vital RR & TOD urban core. Recall my earlier postings on strategies to pre-emptively declare designated neighborhoods as targets for transition change: sewage tactics for quick topsoil enhancements, guards to prevent theft/arson of recycleable items, etc.
Same principle applied to fuel access: outlying gas-stations could be easily forced to refill their underground tanks less often causing outlying price/gal to rapidly rise in comparison to inner city prices. Imagine the same delivery restrictions applied to outlying grocery stores, medical buildings, and other infrastucture spiderwebs.
It can also help speed the conversion of the outlying areas to relocalized permaculture within relatively easy bicycling distances from the city center. Especially if my bicycle peloton hitch-hiking idea has merit to easily facilitate longer, daily bicycle commuting distances from the last RR & TOD station/depot to the further outlying fields, orchards, and livestock pasturages.
The rising costs of distributive logistics is going to make this phenomena naturally happen on its own over time, I am merely applying Asimov's Foundation concepts of predictive collapse and directed decline to help speed the required paradigm shifting process along, and also adding interim resiliency to the system to help prevent hitting civilizational Liebig Minimums to mitigate violence levels.
Lastly, the implementation and timely execution of this idea will make many millions of Southwestern desert dwellers opt to instead migrate to Cascadia and the New Vermont Republic. Moving from a drought area to an area of plentiful water should always be encouraged, IMO. Recall my recent posting on a hypothetical FEMA strategy to move drought-stricken Southeasterners in Atlanta to a quickly rehabilitated urban Detroit near the huge Great Lakes.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Isn't a lot of this simply going to flow from the cycle of foreclosure, fuel price increase, and where the work will be?
Your policies make sense ... but they're crazy, because politicians will let it burn before they take such radical(but needed) steps.
Bob, analogies like these are simply wonderful, and paint a striking picture of events and possible actions to help mitigate the challenges of powerdown.
Being a resident of Cascadia, I fear the prospect of mass migrations from the marginal lands. But it certainly seems like a likely happenstance. The population of the Willamette Valley has been doubling approximately every 20 years for around a half century. Makes me wonder what the next doubling will look like--if it happens.
Even in this late stage, with suburbia spread around Portland, Salem, Corvallis and Eugene, the Willamette Valley has around 1.3 million acres of agricultural land. Unfortunately, there are about 2.5 million people here. At five million people, that would be about 4 people per acre. :o(
Here's a little something from Washington County Peak Oil:
3 Acres Per Person at current population levels. They didn't break down ag/other use. Some of the write-up on the Willits, CA, area below the Wash County article are pretty interesting.
Nevertheless, if 30 to 50 million people move from the SW into OR and WA, it's going to be a serious challenge in the eats department. Ugh!
Maybe us Orygunonians should encourage them to head on up to WA and BC. ;o)
-best,
graywulffe in CVO, OR
The distance-rationing of commodities is how China's leaders managed to hang onto power during the outyears of the Great Leap Forward. There are lots of peasants, but they're widely dispersed enough to not pose a threat to central government. Feed the cities first - Everybody else get in line.
If you're in a digging mood:
http://digg.com/environment/Top_20_Environmental_Blogs_You_Can_Read
it contains a nice article kind to TOD (ranking us #8 in the top 20 "environmental blogs you can actually read...")
here's a link to the list at doshdosh:
http://www.doshdosh.com/environmental-blogs-you-can-read/
Re: Oil futures hit record above $86
It's not just futures. At 4pm Bloomberg had WTI spot price equal to Nymex crude future, $86.13.
This is of course the expected time for the first of ace's "oil price shocks" - due in fall 2007, fall 2008 then almost continuously after fall 2009. If oil does indeed hit $100 surely it will be time for most people to get the message, so we may be on the verge of a breakthough in media dn public acceptance. Unfortunately, a fallback in price in 2008 would most likely be due to demand destruction resulting from recession in N. America and W. Europe.
Sorry for link failure.
It's Bloomberg, aka http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/commodities/energyprices.html
But only for a day until Britney Spears does something new...
And I noted this morning that a Dec 08 80 crude call option I bought in May for $1300 is now worth $5300.
Yet options get cheaper for 08, 09, and 2010 as you go out. This will clearly not be the case at the point the "peak oil" meme takes hold. Wish I had a few more bucks; I suspect the window is pretty brief.
There are already relatively few folks selling long-dated naked crude calls; I wonder when they'll think better of it.
yee ha :-O, the bubble is off and running! :-)
It's peak everything, all at once! Bloomberg today quoted one of the "experts" said oil at $100 a barrel by year end, and then on up from there, $150, $200 by the next three years!
I just talked to a friend in the investment business, who said he is putting all his investors in commodities, no where to go but up! I reminded him that a lot of commodities are at or near all time highs now, but hey, not a problem he said, it's the safe place....(????) Gee, I'm an old man, I can remember when commodities training was considered risky....but, not now...no where but up!! The price affect demand? Get serious!!
The old myth of unlimited resources and steady advance in technology and extraction methods was of course silly....but it is now being replaced by a "new myth"...the Earth is hollow...there's nothing there, and improvements in recycling, extraction methods, and abilities to find resources is over. Science has STOPPED, dead, having reached perfection no where to go but down now, the one cubic mile of production of oil is all there is, all there ever will, and all alternatives are garbage...
So the money is flooding in....like those that trade in ivory because elephants will soon be extinct and there will be no more, so the last of the hoarders, the panic prone descend on the commodities, and the speculators and speculator promoters are there with a story, just like they have been since the days of the tulip mania, the 1920's, the S&L crisis, the dot com bubble, the Asian bond bubble, the housing crash, the Euro currency bubble, and now, COMMODITIES, BUY, BUY, NO PRICE TO HIGH! It's a SLAM DUNK, safe fast money! All those who missed the really big runup can still get in if they hurry, and even at all time highs the price will still double, and double again, infinite growth based on a hollow Earth, on the belief that business and industry and individuals are stupider than the speculators, will not change consumption, and cannot even if they wanted to!
As my investment community ask me, just as they did about house prices a half decade ago, do you really think the price is going to go down?? Don't be silly.
I ask them....we ran out of everything at once? Every "depletion curve" hit the same dead end at once? Our ability to improve extraction in every commoditiy, even those that can be recycled collapsed at once? We found it all, everything, at once? And only 10 years ago, NO ONE in any of the commodity extraction industries, in the trading pits, saw it coming?
Folks, there are a lot of people hanging their azz out, just like they did a couple of years ago on the premise that the price of natural gas would never drop again...many of these investors have had NO experience in the commodities game, but are just chasers, chasing after the latest "easy money".
New maxim for the age...."History repeats itself, but it don't matter because no one remembers anything anyway", based on the old maxim...."this time, it's different."
RC
"this time, it's different."
My prediction is that oil prices will fluctuate--in a long term upward trend. However, for the benefit of oil trader types I did issue a Red Alert in late June, when Daniel Yergin issued a strong "buy signal" for oil (when he predicted that oil prices would be back down to $60 next year). I suggested, based on prior history, that oil prices would be 100% higher than $60 within a year or so.
In regard to production, it's really not different this time. The world and Saudi Arabia are showing the same production patterns as the Lower 48 and Texas, at the same approximate stage of depletion.
Post peak: Higher crude oil prices + Increased Drilling = Lower total crude oil production.
We can find new fields post-peak. We just can't offset the declines of the old large oil fields.
The Yergin "Buy Signal"
Roger, you are great at trashing other's predictions, but what are your predictions. One cubic mile until freedom? One cubic mile untile we are forced to find some new kind of energy? And just what would that be? What new kind of energy is coming down the pike that will free us from being a slave to oil?
Methinks Roger, that you just do not get the big picture. There is nothing coming down the pike that will replace crude oil. There is no other form of energy that can be produced cheap enough and in great enough quanities to replace cheap oil. I think we are fu**ed Roger. But if you can tell us exactly what new form of energy is going to save us, then like Ross Perot, we are all ears.
Yes, people have cried wolf before but remember the last time the boy cried wolf, there was really was a wolf. The last time he cried wolf, it was really different.
Yes history often repeats itself. But history does not always repeat itself. Often things occur that has never, in history, happened before. Peak oil has never happened before. But we know it must occur! How can anyone be so damn cocksure that it is not happening right now?
Ron Patterson
Ron,
It was not my intent to trash anyones predictions. Peak may have been 2 years ago, maybe more, or may not be for another 20 years. As I have often stated, I take the position that we are running completely in the blind, and one "prediction" is about as good as another.
On oil price, it depends on much more than the peak, or supply and demand. Investment will mean everything, demand will mean everything, the value of the dollar will mean much, inflation rate will mean much. Could it go to $150 or $200 bucks in the next year, or couple of years? Of course. With the speculators and "advisors" now promoting commodities as the guarenteed road to wealth, the prices have no relation to reality anyway (remember the housing boom?). It could go to $500 for awhile, who knows.
So am I " damn cocksure that it (Peak) is not happening right now?" Nope.
It may be. It may not be.
As for alternatives, same ole' same ole'. We do not have to replace all oil production/consumption. We don't have to. Grid based transport, better design of transportation, logistical changes to rail and barge for shipment, advanced PV and solar thermal, Methane recapture. All well known. Can they happen fast enough? Who knows? Just recall what Matt Simmons said....70% of oil is used in transportation alone. Streamline consumption there and you free up billions of barrels a year.
My point was, be damm careful before you buy into this "price going up forever" thing in the commodities market. They may. But the odds? Hedge. Be careful.
Thanks,
RC
I have to give you Credit RC, you are a good voice of reason around here.
Roger, we may be running in poor light but we sure as hell are not running blind. We have production data from every nation, we know who is in decline and who is still increasing their production. As Matt Simmons puts it "Data trumps all theories."
Obviously the price of oil cannot continue to climb forever. Demand drops as oil is priced beyond the reach of many. That simply the way it works, when the commodity is scarce, the price rises until supply meets demand. When the world produces 40 million barrels per day, the price will rise until 40 million barrels is all that can be sold at that high a price. And that will hold true no matter how far the dollar falls or what currency the oil is sold in.
And that is exactly what is happening right now. A lot of countries that burn oil for power are in the dark, a lot of people are simply doing without. And the higher the price of oil, the worse it will get. That is what most people on this list fail to realize, it is happening already.
If we are at peak oil right now, and I believe we are, then there is nothing that can possibly come on line fast enough to make much difference. It takes at least a decade to build the infrastructure for all that energy saving technology. If we start heading down the slope right now there is no way in hell streamlining consumption can keep up. After all, it isn't keeping up in many poor countries right now.
Again, I am making a prediction. I am predicting that we are at peak right now. We have been on a plateau for over two years now with production slowly inching downward. I track every major oil producing nation. Twenty three, out of thirty eight major oil producing nations have peaked and have dropped over 4 million barrels per day in the last 26 months. Most of the remaining nations are near their peak or are on a plateau.
I don't see how anyone can examine the data, the nations peaking with many in a steep decline, and declare we are running blind. The data screams at us, we are at or past the peak.
Ron Patterson
Want to see a peak? look at the 1978 through 1983 period:
http://info.energyscenariosireland.com/images/e/e0/Peak_oil_aspo.jpg
Now in 1981-82, who in their right mind would not have said, "This is it. It's peak.
Many did. Many invested that way. Many lost their azz, coming right into the greatest fastest drop in oil prices ever. Many were then not able to invest in the greatest market rebound and longest running expansion in world financial markets in history. For many, it basically left them two decades behind, and I know some folks who stil have not fully recovered the two lost decades of what was the greatest opportunity in history.
Now, I REPEAT, I am not arguing that peak is not already here. I simply do not know, and I don't think anyone does. 1981, one could make every single argument your making now, and have the charts to prove it.
If someone wants to throw everything they have on the bet that prices will keep going up from here, virtually without interruption, they should be savvy investors, not just following the advice of advisors who says, "Go down? Trust me, can't happen, this is a slam dunk!" And the promotors are out there working the suckers, I have SEEN IT, heard it. I have heard their pitch.
Oil prices and commodities price betting is still A VERY SPECULATIVE game.
If people go in with their eyes open, and by free choice, that's their choice.
But again, be careful. I have seen this before.
RC
Oil rises a dollar a day and hit $100 before the end of this month?
Here's an article about how the Pentagon is suggesting space-based solar as a solution to eliminating reliance on imported oil.
Link here.
or
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=9275
We discussed that one last week.
That was one of the purposes of the space shuttles, to supply materials for "powersats" that would gather solar energy and beam it back to Earth via microwave.
As I recall we should have built the first lunar base by now, centered around the nuclear powered "mass driver" that was to launch lunar material into L-7 orbit where we would construct the first of many "space colonies".
What happened to that dream?
Reality. It tends to do things like that.
Hi TOD.
I'm an old reader, but this is my first post.
I live in Queensland, Australia, and as we have [too] many sunny days here, my thoughts are directed toward solar energy.
I have a few 'projects' on my 'drawing board' that could result in a cheaper kWh from the Sun. At this stage, my belief is that concentrated solar power plants (CSP) are the most promising. But, the existing designs suffer from some serious flaws.
Have a look. This is the so-called 'Solar Two' facility in California, USA. As you can see, there is a large number of flat mirrors around the power tower. All these mirrors are focused to a single point, which is the tower's top. As the Sun moves, the mirrors need to be adjusted in order to stay inline with the tower. Every single mirror needs to be equipped with its own tracking mechanism. There is also a central computer that synchronizes the whole system.
Same facility. The picture, I believe, explains why these power plants are so expensive. A fairly complex mechanism is employed to support a fairly small mirror area. It also looks pretty vulnerable to strong wind.
This design, featuring curved mirrors, seems to be a bit cheaper. Still, all mirrors have to follow Sun's path.
I have a slightly different system laying on my 'drawing board', the one that has fixed flat mirrors and an adjustable power tower. There is no a real tower - the receiver is on the top of a crane, controlled by a computer. The receiver slowly moves from West to East following an arc-like path.
Because the mirrors do not move, I believe that my CSP could be used in highly-populated areas (i.e. 'suburbs'). Mirrors would be installed on rooftops. And a high crane with the receiver on the top would colect the light. No noise, no smoke, no polution.
I would like to ask you guys if you are already familiar with this idea and/or if a system based on this concept, to your knowledge, already exists.
Thanks,
Miroslav Olenjin | Queensland Australia | molenjin@gmail.com
Is there some evidence your system will work? I don't think the mirrors will all focus the sunlight on the same magical point all day if they aren't tracked.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Hi Robert,
I'm a software developer, so it wasn't too hard for me to create a simple computer simulation that proves the idea. Yes, the focus is moving but stays consistent. There is a small dispersion if the mirrors are positioned under very different angles, but that would hardly be a case in reality.
Oh, yes, let's not use the words "magical point". It's not a point but an area. The mirrors would be min. 2x2 metres, and the receiving area at least 4x4m. Now, if you need to concentrate that power even more, instead of using a flat black receiver you can use a parabolic dish with its own focal point.
Cheers, MO
Hi Miroslav_QLD – from the little you say, I think You have to think again..
The “conventional” systems you refer to have to “look at the sun ALL YEAR – ALL DAY” to do its intentions/job. And as for the Solar-tower mirrors they have their individual pitch and yaw, every single one of them-
Question to your system: Which day of the year and at what time that very day “will you fix mount” your mirrors?
(Direction: morning-noon-evening, Season: winter summer ... suns inclination varies all the time, zenith is best..)
When you fix mount the mirrors – you will only be able to have them all focus the same little area ONCE a year (few minutes eg. 1 split second..) … that’s it. Do you see the problem?
A “crane-tower” has to be all-over-the-place to receive the rays from all the mirrors … AT THE SAME TIME (!)
Sorry -Not possible.
Hi Paal,
The computer simulation I mentioned proves the concept. It is simplified on that way that only analyzes two mirrors, but that's enough.
Try this: take a reading lens and keep it fixed, but slowly move the light source. You will see the focal point moves too but stays pretty much the same size. (This all of course, if you don't move your light source more than a few degrees.)
>When you fix mount the mirrors – you will only be able to have
>them all focus the same little area ONCE a year (few minutes eg.
>1 split second..) … that’s it. Do you see the problem?
Of course. But the crane moves up and down, not just left-right.
In terms of efficiency per area unit, my design would be, true, a bit behind the "Solar Two", for example. But isn't it cheaper to add a few more square metres of fixed mirrors than to build/maintain a complex tracking structure? In terms of efficiency per $$$, I strongly believe this design with fixed mirrors would be much better.
Let's not forget one more thing, that solar energy will never be a dominant source. It will always be a supplement. What we need here in Australia is something that can support our peak demand that we have from 10am to 5pm - air conditioners, stoves, office equipment and that sort of things. And that's the time when the sun is up.
Regards, MO
I understand you better now – still I’m not convinced at all-
As I read you, your system is working “in sections/ steps” – taking the energy between say 9-10 o’clock from one segment … and so forth … 10-11, 11-12…
Depending on how many sections you plan for – you have X-1 idle at all times …
-your mirrors will be the same cost as “the others” per area …
-you save “some money” on the tracking facilities, e.g. step motors and bearings other..
-the controlling SW “is already done” for solar towers
-and your moving-tower (with a lot of unknowns) will be way more expensive than a fixed structure of today’s Solar One. You have a moving heat collector – demanding some unconventional thinking… and so forth (this piece is not cheap – I can tell you)
It all boils down to - if your “moving-crane tower” PLUS the cost of your “idle mirrors” ,which is a real and “wasted” cost of yours …
… is cheaper than - all the step motors/bearings and some wiring…
I doubt that to a 100% certainty. We didn’t even mention how little your system provides as compared to Solar One – power wise.
You should be able to provide some sketches, because from my part its actually nonsense to discuss this hypothesis - without knowing what I discuss :-)
Hi again,
No, I wasn't talking about "idle mirrors" - all mirrors are employed all the time.
It's just about designing this system in that way to be optimized for the peak demand / summer time. First of all, the mirrors - if you look at the pic 1 ("Solar Two"), you'll see the mirrors are positioned around the tower, creating a semi-circle. My design is based on mirrors grouped in an rectangular formation. The reflected rays would be almost parallel. I am also analyzing a concept of more-or-less horizontal mirrors and the tower behind them. This concept might be good for a flat piece of land, not rooftops.
Now, the efficiency issue. Let's have one more look at this type of CSP:
Technically, this CSP with curved mirrors is obviously inferior in comparison to the "Solar Two". These are some of the reasons:
- curved mirrors are expensive
- mirrors can only move up and down
- the temperature of the working fluid is lower
- there are losses of heat due to long pipelines
However, this type of CSP is actually more efficient per invested $$$ than the "Solar Two"..!
I am trying to say that efficiency per area and per cost of a kWh are two completely different things.
Let me use another comparison. Let's say we have a 747. It operates between two continents, the flight takes 10 hours. This would be the flight profile:
1. Take off and climbing - 30 mins
2. Cruising 1000 km/h at 13.0000m - 9 hours
3. Descending, landing - 30 mins
As you can see, the 747 goes through different stages, i.e. speeds and attitudes, from 0 km/h to 1000 km/h, and from 0 metres to 13.000. This requires many different flight regimes. However, 9 hours, or 90% of the time, the 747 has to fly 1000 km/h at 13.000 - so they design the airplane to give maximum efficiency during that regime. This includes the shape of the wings, the airfoil, engines. The 747 is not very efficient at low speed and attitude, but something's got to give.
That's how it goes with alternative energy sources like wind, solar, tidal, etc. A coal or nuclear plant can give 100% any time, but these alternative sources have their peaks. Therefore, you design such plant in that way to have maximum output when the power is most needed.
So, the system I have in mind would be optimized for summer time and daily peaks. It can work during the winter as well, but then you don't need A/C - you need something to warm you up. So you simply bypass the generator and use the system to heat water.
I actually recall something similiar to this many years ago in the late 1970's.
It was very large parabolic mirror (built of smaller segments, that were affixed to what looked like a "bowl" set into the roof of a building. The mirrors making the parabolic were fixed, but a moving "pickup" was hung down into it by three struts. To each of the three struts ran a cable with motors. the heat was carried out by a very high pressure/high tempeture hydraulic line which was flexible. The working fluid passed down into the pickup, and back up a a return line, to drive steam a steam turbine. The three motors on the cables constantly move, by virtue of one motor pulling and the other releasing cable, so that the pickup "dangled" but was being moved in a pre programed pattern by virtue of the cables moving it about.
It is hard to picture without actually seeing a drawing or photo, but very simple looking once you have seen it. I wish I could tell you what the resulting performance was, but this was years and years ago and I now have no source.
RC
You would have to arrange your fixed mirrors as a parabolic dish. Then you would get focus when the sun is off-axis, but it will be progressively more distorted as the sun moves further from axis. Off-axis, the focus will exhibit a type of distortion known as "coma," just like a Newtonian telescope does for stars off-axis, only worse due to the extreme angles. This will increase the surface area needed for your collector. I think you will need more than 2 mirrors to simulate this adequately. You could probably use telescope making software like OSLO.
You would need to build the parabolic dish support. Perhaps dug into the ground.
The hardest part, as noted elsewhere, is the moving collector. The focal point may span far more than the entire diameter of the dish from morning to afternoon. If the dish is large, the collector would have to be placed very high even at very small focal ratios. Hundreds of feet or more.
I don't think its workable.
>I think you will need more than 2 mirrors to simulate this adequately.
Sure. If you want to prove that there is always a focal point, you need three.
I can show you here a mathematical proof that three mirrors, once calibrated to focus the same point in 3D space, will keep the focus after moving the light source. Of course, the focal point will be somewhere else in 3D, but it will exist. And if it works with 3 mirrors, it will also work with N of them. But this mathematical proof is a bit too long and messy for a web site of this type, so I will pass it. Anyone with a firm ground in geometry, however, is able to do the same. Use polar coordinates, sin/cos, Pitagora's, etc. And don't forget - sun's rays are always considered parallel.
>You would have to arrange your fixed mirrors as a parabolic dish.
Well, yes, if you think about it, in any case it's a parabolic dish (or a tiny segment of it). "The Solar Two" facility, for example - each mirror is actually a small segment of its belonging parabolic dish. Otherwise you won't have a focus.
Miroslav;
Thanks for presenting your idea. I think SOME of the challenges to it were reasonable, but I'm glad you know your idea well enough to stand up for it. This site attracts a rabid 'debunking' mentality, which makes me wonder if anything positive or creative is a little threatening to the constant focusing on doom that keeps germinating in these scary times, and on this rabidly skeptical site..
If you've been here awhile, you've surely seen the beatings that are given to a few posters who frequently present news items about new batteries or ethanol processes. I don't usually object when the original post has that tone that says 'here's the answer.. there's nothing science won't figure out, and this is the proof!'.. It's fine to take a look at someone's new concepts .. I think we have to look at all of them, and sometimes recheck ones that seemed off the first couple times, and see if there's something that we missed.. it's just too bad when someone judges it with too much certainty in either direction without really simply taking it in and playing with the components to see what useful ideas there might be at play in the thing. I don't think that blind faith is any more dangerous than blind skepticism.. (ie, 'The cat who steps on a hot stove will never step on a hot stove again, but he'll also never step on a cold one')
Your idea makes sense as a re-evaluation of CSP, considering the options of moving the collector instead of the mirrors, and you seem to have worked out the focal distortions and range of motion.. as with one other poster, my thoughts go to the transfer of the heating fluid/medium.. (??) and the mechanism's reliability.. seals, exposure to heat and other weather issues.. but your example of the hundreds of heliostats on existing concentrators certainly reveal the level of complexity that has already been tried in that direction.. certainly it can be simplified.
If you ever watch football, you've prob. seen the 'skycam' rig that cable-supports a camera so it can fly through the stadium. That might be an alternative to the crane, as I think you'd really need a stable point in space when positioning the collector.. the computer control/engineering is already there.. would just need to be a much heavier version. What I'm thinking of is more of a great big gimbal, with the collector at the end of a pivoting/counterbalanced arm..or maybe a gantry crane (which is like a winch/crane on tracks..
Whatever. I just wanted to say that I think there are a number of interesting directions you can take this, and the immediate and brusque dismissals of Paal and Robert in Tucson (It just happens I'M also a Robert in Tucson, for a couple days) was pretty unhelpful and uncurious. Too bad.
Good luck!
Bob Fiske
Hi Bob, and thank you for encouraging words. Paal and Robert are OK. I don't mind if people put my stuff under scrutiny. If it's a good idea, it should be able to withstand all mistrust.
Here in Australia, we are in a pretty good position. We have coal, gas, some oil, lots of uranium - and only 21 million citizens, occupying a piece of land as big as Europe. Possibilities for solar and wind energy are enormous. But, one thing needs to be clear - no solution will save us in the future if don't stop WASTING. And we waste like crazy.
I am still new in this country (4.5 years) and observing things around. This is a country of air-conditioners, remote suburbs and long roads. 1 of 4 cars on the street is 4WD. 2 of 4 have 6 or 8 cylinders. Most of cars you can see carry only one person. We still build houses with dark roofs and no insulation. A/Cs are everywhere. Every office got one. People don't bother turning them off when leaving for lunch. In the middle of the most severe drought in Australia's history, people are irritated because they are not allowed to fill up their swimming pools, wash their cars or water their gardens. An average Aussie spends more water than any one else on this planet. We are building more and more remote suburbs. If you don't drive a car you can't live there. You simply can't get there. You can't even walk, there is no walkway. My wife drives 35 kms to get her eye-browses fixed for 6 dollars. Etc, etc.
It is completely unsustainable. I am afraid we gonna hit the wall very hard. So it's important to act now. Any idea, any initiative is worth of consideration. Oh yes, in this country we can survive much longer than people in other parts of the world (Mad Max will first come to you). But I don't know what we are going to do when thousands of rafts with refugees start arriving here from surrounding countries..
So what is your proposed focal length? Have you worked out the distance that your collector will have to travel to cover the portion of the day of interest?
You are correct about there always being a focal point. My points about distortion are not relevant if your collector is at the exact focal point and the mirrors aligned as exact parabola. I guess the focal point is at the center of the collector, so distortion off-axis may not be much of an issue.
How about a super high efficiency PV cell mounted on a cable system that moves? These cells work best at high solar concentrations. A lens could be placed in front of the cell and behind the focal point to make the concentrated light more parallel. The cell might also need to tilt when off-axis. This seems more realistic and simpler as a way to meet peak demand. Heating of the cell could be a problem if dish is too big, but a system of modest sized dishes might be easier to build anyway.
>"The Solar Two" facility, for example - each mirror is >actually a small segment of its belonging parabolic dish.
But they don't collectively have to form a dish. Yours will need to, as you know.
Interesting to think about.
>How about a super high efficiency PV cell mounted on a
>cable system that moves? These cells work best at high
>solar concentrations.
Yes - a PV cell sounds better to me than a heater-pipes-turbine-generator mess. The cell would need a good cooling system, to avoid overheating. But that's actually another plus for the system, because you can have both volts and joules.
I have a slightly different system laying on my 'drawing board', the one that has fixed flat mirrors and an adjustable power tower. There is no a real tower - the receiver is on the top of a crane, controlled by a computer. The receiver slowly moves from West to East following an arc-like path.
Such a design has already been proposed.
http://geocities.com/solarsinter/mosaic_basics.htm
VIA the place to go for Heliostats:
http://www.redrok.com/main.htm
And a link about the sell off of a tower system:
http://www.eventhorizons.com/solar/solar2.html
Hi Eric Blair (Orvel?) Your links are interesting but not really similar to what I have in mind.
Regards,
Miroslav
From what I could tell, your idea was to have fixed mirrors and a moving 'target' - and I know such was proposed years ago.
Thus, if you are looking at a patent....it may be covered under past works.
I am starting to reach the point where I dislike Monday Drumbeats. Not because of the posters or anything like that. Its just that the mounting gravity of the situation we are marching into as a civilization is making it clear to me that I have a few more steps on the path to acceptance to walk before I can start feeling some comfort in the truth spelled out in front of me. I have immersed myself in the literature and graphs to the point where I need to convert intellectualism into preparedness. I have this urge to just stow the fantasy, pop the blue pill and unsubscribe to peak oil. In all good conscience I just can’t do that now. In a way I envy the millions of folks out there that are blissfully unaware of where we are headed. Perhaps I am embarking on one of the most important chapters in my life. Perhaps I can better serve myself by learning to live in the moment, to treat everyday as a gift. I also envy those of you who contribute to this community that have had those cathartic moments that birth acceptance. In times like those yet to come mankind turns to god to find solace. As people scramble over one another will I retain the ability to find the good in my fellow man? I ask these questions rhetorically, I know I am the only one who will be able to find the answer for me. I know this site is first and foremost a place to examine the data objectively. To supply proofs and hypothesis so this phenomenon can be better understood and taken seriously. Some times the answers to our biggest challenges cannot be found anywhere else save the bitter mote of the soul.
(I am not a doomer, just a scared human being trying to make sense of it all)
Zer0nerve
Zeronerve,
I think that you, just like me, will begin to realize that one can remain glued to their computer chair for long hours reading all the posts on TOD and a few other selected PO sites...so much so that before you know you have wasted precious time each and every day when you could have actually been doing something productive about preparing...
I therefore only view it when its dark out..very early or raining so I can't do real work.
It sucks you in. It messes with your head..
You must do something REAL to begin to make steps towards the future and sustainability....too much perusing will wear you down.IMO
Get tape out and start marking off your ground. This is the best time to start for next springs plantings. Get your garden wintered over and then start another project..like a outdoor wood fired oven,or a ash hopper for making potash and lye. Build a motor powered bicycle. Find and anvil and forge and start pounding iron. Whatever.
Go read WWW.WTDWTSHTF.COM
airdale-reading is good,real work is necessary and better
Does this make sense?
So tell me; what is this ability you claim to have for finding good in your fellow man?
Got a link for that?
:)
Not to turn sarcanol into wine or anything, but my link to the good in my fellow man IS my fellow man. My main strategy against the fear is to be building those links, trying to find any way I can to make connections with my neighbors and leave us all seeing how we can be resources for each other.
No kumbaya, just sharing tools, helping out, making an effort, saying hello instead of looking down.. (tough one for me sometimes.)
Bob
Ah..."The Numbing" approaches...you are in good company my fellow TODer. You must face the fear and allow it to pass through you (ya...stole it from Dune, but is appropriate here). I have found salvation in humor and doing little things, like the garden mentioned aboce or buying a decent mountain bike (good for getting through all types of weather if need be). Work on getting out of debt and putting some of your $$ somewhere safe.
Remember...all things, issues, problems are magnified here in TOD-land. You live in just a small piece of it. Take some info, digest it, see how it applies to your local situation, see if can help you somehow prepare.
Yeah, today's was especially bad.
Re: Trillions in spending needed to meet global oil and gas demand
So $21 trillion is needed for CapEx between now and 2030 to meet forcasted demand for gas and oil. To put that in perspective:
At an average price of $5/W of solar (PV or CSP) energy, price-averaged over now and 2030, and putting out a conservative 1.2 kWh per Wpeak annually, that $21 trillion could buy solar-generation equipment yielding 5 TWh per year, or about 25% of global consumption estimated for 2017.
Or, an electric vehicle costs $50,000, so $21 Trillion could purchase 420 million EVs, or about 55% of the 2006 global fleet of 750 Million vehicles.
Hi john macklin – I noted that one myself, and grabbed my calculator …
1 trillion dollars (annually average) during the next 20 years is 1 000 000 000 000 $ (in real numbers)
Now the math’s: Annual world crude/liquids production ~ 30 billion barrels
30 000 000 000 @ 80 $ = 2 400 000 000 000 $
Comparing today’s (2007) world wide “oil-turnover” at 2,4 trillion dollars – with these interesting numbers of “needed investments” of 1 trillion dollars annually … leaves little left to the imagination of mine. Other operational expenditures are not subtracted from the 2.4 trillion oil revenue number ..
I’m not certain what numbers are used ”around” today by the oil business – to achieve break-even - but I think ca. 40$ (more) are a rule of thumb in the North sea …. at least. So subtract 40$ from my 80$ a barrel used, and see where that is going in the years to come.
Didn’t anyone mention those Receding Horizons some time back ? And where is EROEI in the total picture?
And now for something completely different.
Not sure how Leanan missed it.
http://www.livescience.com/technology/071012-robot-marriage.html
I didn't miss it. I left it out for a reason. ;-)
Ha. I would have too, but the posts above were especially dark-seeming so I endeavored to inject a little levity. Energy and our future, excelsior!
(I'd put in an advance order for a Rachel-model replicant, but my wife won't even let me buy a motorcycle. Probably just as well; I'm afraid battery problems will be worse for love-droids than for PHEV's. Best hopes for long extension cords and beer goggles).