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Drumbeat: July 26, 2010
Posted by Leanan on July 26, 2010 - 9:53am
U.S. Says 27% of Gulf of Mexico Oil Production, 10% of Gas Idled by Storm
About 27 percent of crude-oil production in the Gulf of Mexico and 10 percent of natural-gas output is still idle because of Tropical Storm Bonnie, the U.S. government reported.Oil and gas producers report that one rig and three production platforms remain evacuated, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement said today in a statement on its website. About 428,000 barrels of daily oil production are shut-in, along with 618 million cubic feet of gas.
Russia's Novatek forms Arctic JV with Gazprom Neft
(Reuters) - Russia's largest independent gas producer, Novatek, has formed a joint venture with Gazprom Neft to develop several Arctic fields, Novatek said in a statement on Monday.
China First-Half Gas Demand Rises 22% as Output Grows
(Bloomberg) -- China, the world’s biggest energy user, consumed 22 percent more natural gas in the first half compared with a year earlier as the country boosted production and use of the cleaner-burning fuel to cut emissions.
Spill puts Obama's oil fund chief on hostile turf
BAYOU LA BATRE, Ala. (Reuters) - The man who acquired a solid gold reputation for fixing sticky situations for the U.S. government is facing one of his toughest challenges yet: running BP Plc's $20 billion compensation fund.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Talk of the imminent departure of embattled BP chief Tony Hayward has the rumor mill working overtime on the man expected to replace him.So just who is Bob Dudley?
BP’s Hayward to resign in October
Tony Hayward, who became the face of BP PLC's flailing efforts to contain the massive Gulf oil spill, will step down as chief executive officer in October and be offered a job with the company's joint venture in Russia, a person familiar with the matter said Monday.
W.House - BP must clean Gulf, no matter who in charge
(Reuters) - BP Plc must meet its obligations to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, despite any changes among its executives, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Monday.
Latin America: A Blind Spot in US Energy Security Policy
For more than a decade, America’s relationship with Latin America could most accurately be described as unfocused engagement, driven by reactions to events or crises at best and benign neglect at worst. Apart from intermittent efforts to secure free trade agreements (NAFTA and CAFTA), combat drugs (Plan Mérida and Plan Colombia), and weigh in—often too late and too sheepishly—to political events (Honduran Presidential crisis or President Hugo Chavez’s saber rattling), the US has failed to engage the nations of resource-wealthy Latin America in any strategic manner.This lack of attention to our closest neighbors—and some of our strongest allies—is quite alarming given US dependence on Latin America to provide our energy. Currently, more than one-fourth of imported oil comes from Latin America (and almost 50% from the Western Hemisphere). In 2009, the top sources of US imported crude oil (and their percentages) were Canada (21%), Mexico (11%), Venezuela and Saudi Arabia (9% each), Nigeria (7%), Russia (5%), Iraq, Algeria and Angola (4% each), Brazil (3%), Colombia and Ecuador (roughly 2% total). As is widely known, America imports more than 65-70 percent of its energy needs, which means that we are vulnerable to disruptions in the supply chain and to price volatility, which are affected by domestic political and economic conditions in oil-exporting countries upon whom we depend.
Tropical Storm Threat Passes, Operations Resume in GOM
Offshore oil and gas operators in the Gulf of Mexico are re-boarding platforms and rigs, and restoring production following Tropical Storm Bonnie. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement's (BOEM) Hurricane Response Team is monitoring the operators' activities. This team will be activated until operations return to normal and the storm is no longer a threat to the Gulf of Mexico oil and gas activities.
View Is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan
A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.
...The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.
WikiLeaks: More US documents coming on Afghan war
LONDON – The release of some 91,000 secret U.S. military documents on the Afghanistan war is just the beginning, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange promised Monday, adding that he still has thousands more Afghan files to post online.
Interview with Art Berman - Part 2
I personally think the current administration is milking this thing for all the political capital they can. Nobody who’s handling this for them really knows much about the oil and gas business. You have a theoretical physicist running the Department of Energy and I’m sure he’s a very intelligent and high-integrity guy but he didn’t really know anything about drilling or petroleum and I don’t think Salazar is particularly schooled in it. President Obama doesn’t know anything about it. So you have a bunch of amateurs dealing with something that needs a bunch of professionals. Even on the networks and cable news shows, I haven’t seen anybody they’ve brought on who knows anything about it. A lot of interesting people get in front of the cameras and talk: college professors and oceanographers and image analysis specialists and the director of a center for biodiversity-he seems like a real smart guy-but they don’t know anything about drilling operations or petroleum. I don’t say that hyper-critically; it’s just a fact.
Some new rings of power as the Gulf enters a third age
The under-fire BP chief executive Tony Hayward’s recent visit to the Middle East may mark a new chapter in the long-running relationship between this region and the supermajor oil companies.
Tullow Discovers ‘Major’ Oil Field Off Ghana’s Coast
(Bloomberg) -- Tullow Oil Plc, the U.K. explorer with the most licenses in Africa, discovered a “major new oil field” off the coast of Ghana.
China says ocean cleared of oil 10 days after spill
Chinese officials say crude from the July 16 pipeline explosion near the port city of Dalian has successfully been cleaned up. Environmentalists say that, despite the removal of oil, damage is extensive.
Rosneft Second-Quarter Profit Advances 60% on Gains in Production, Prices
OAO Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil producer, said second-quarter profit advanced 60 percent on higher oil prices and output.
ISLAMABAD (APP): The five-day week system adopted by the government has saved millions of rupees in fuel and energy costs, besides enhancing efficiency and improving social life of the people, a survey said. The government initially adopted the five-working day week to cut down by 33 percent or 500 MW of electricity in April this year and the results were soon evident.
Analysis: EIA Analyzes Proposed Climate Change Laws
On March 29, 2010 the U.S. Senate (specifically Senators Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman) sent a letter to the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) requesting analysis to help them in their consideration of climate change legislation. Three goals were mentioned as the top priorities of this proposed legislation called the American Power Act of 2010 (APA): creating jobs, achieving energy independence, and reducing carbon pollution (in that order).The EIA responded this month with their findings in a paper titled Energy Market and Economic Impacts of the American Power Act of 2010 (pdf). The EIA's report focuses on the impact that the policy proposals envisioned in the American Power Act of 2010 would have on the decisions of both consumers and producers and the implications of these decisions on the U.S. economy.
Kurt Cobb: Asymmetrical accolades: Why preventing a crisis almost never makes you a hero
A friend recently related to me that the quality assurance manager at the pharmaceutical firm he used to work for was an absolute stickler for one thing: There had to be a convincing cleanup procedure for anything anyone proposed to bring into a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant. If it got on the floor or in the air or on the walls or in the production line and it wasn't supposed to be there, there had to be a way to get rid of it completely. Either that or it wasn't coming into the building.This friend explained that the quality assurance program run by this man was so good that the Food and Drug Administration pointed other firms to it as an example of what they should be doing. So, how did people at the company feel about this man? Well, they didn't really like him. I imagined that to his fellow employees this man must have been like an insect buzzing around their heads--a beneficial insect, to be sure--but a buzzing insect nevertheless.
Turkey: Iran to respond to concerns about nuclear swap deal
Istanbul - Iran will respond to concerns about the nuclear swap deal it signed with Turkey and Brazil in May in a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Monday, Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Sunday.'Iran notified us that they will submit a letter to the IAEA tomorrow morning,' Davutoglu said after meeting his Brazilian counterpart Celso Amorim and Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki in Istanbul.
Can sustainable farming really feed us?
After a vivid and thoughtful discussion of the organic farming practices and the positive effects of a strong local economy that has in many ways rejuvenated the town of Hardwick, Vermont, the host, Robin Young, asked a pricelessly dense question: “but can sustainable farming really feed us all?” The thoughtless presumption of the question is that unsustainable farming might possibly be a better approach, that we ultimately have any choice but to follow sustainable practices, at least if we wish to sustain our civilization.The answer I would have liked to have heard is: “but is unsustainable farming really sustainable?”
Growing Shortages of Water Threaten China’s Development
With 20 percent of the world’s population but just 7 percent of its available freshwater, China faces serious water shortages as its economy booms and urbanization increases. The government is planning massive water diversion projects, but environmentalists say conservation — especially in the wasteful agricultural sector — is the key.
'Villages' let elderly grow old at home
Phinisee, a widow for 40 years, can get around her home on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., but she needs help opening jars and reaching things. She can't handle even minor repairs around the house or drive places (she gave up her car in 1993).That's OK because Phinisee lives in Capitol Hill Village, which began operating three years ago and is the oldest of six such villages in the nation's capital. She calls the village office, and they send her folks who clean her garden, install a railing, fix her windows, bring her groceries or drive her to the bank.
Ed and Margaret Missiaen, both retired and in their late 60s, are Capitol Hill Village members who volunteer. Margaret has cleaned Phinisee's garden. Ed has helped fix her windows.
They're counting on the village to help them when the time comes.
Nuclear experts seek to advance fusion project
MARSEILLE, France (AFP) – An explosion in costs has cast a cloud over a multi-billion-dollar nuclear fusion project aiming to make the power that fuels the Sun a practical energy source on Earth.Delays, rocketing costs and financing problems have hit the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) whose consortium members start a meeting on Tuesday aiming to get the project back on course.
ITER was set up by the European Union, which has a 45-percent share, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Russia and the United States to research a clean and limitless alternative to dwindling fossil fuel reserves by testing nuclear fusion.
Crude Oil Declines a Second Day on Concerns Recovery Stalling
Oil declined for a second day in New York on speculation that the global recovery may stall and crimp fuel consumption.Crude oil slipped from near its highest level in 11 weeks as European equity indexes pared gains on losses among health- care and food companies. The U.S. economy probably expanded at a slower pace in the second quarter as the trade deficit swelled, economists said before reports this week.
“We are bumping up against resistance again around $78,” said Christopher Bellew, senior broker at Bache Commodities Ltd. in London. “It’s going to take better macroeconomic news or perhaps storm activity in the Gulf of Mexico to spring prices from their narrow trading range.”
Survey: Gas prices barely rose in 2-week span
CAMARILLO, Calif. — A survey says the average price of regular gasoline in the United States has gone up in the last two weeks, but by less than a cent.The Lundberg Survey of fuel prices released Sunday says the price of regular rose slightly to $2.73.
Gulf Storm Drives Gasoline Bets Higher on Refinery Threat
Gasoline futures trading rose at the fastest pace in more than four months as Tropical Storm Bonnie, the second of the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season, threatened to disrupt refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.
Chavez Warns of Cut in Venezuela Oil Supplies to U.S. if Colombia Attacks
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said his country would suspend oil shipments to the U.S. if a military attack were to be launched from Colombian territory.The U.S. plans to assassinate him and overthrow his government, Chavez said yesterday on state television, citing a letter from a source he didn’t identify. Chavez has used speeches to warn that the U.S. is planning an attack from seven Colombian military bases where it has access, and to denounce alleged assassination plots.
EU to apply pressure on Iran with extra sanctions
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – EU foreign ministers will approve tighter sanctions on Iran over its disputed nuclear activity on Monday, with steps to block oil and gas investment and curtail Tehran's refining and natural gas capability.The measures go beyond sanctions imposed by the United Nations last month and mirror steps taken by the United States in recent weeks to apply extra pressure on Tehran and get it back to negotiations over its uranium enrichment program.
ANALYSIS - Iran oil sanctions will leak
(Reuters) - Sanctions on Iran tighten their grip on Monday with European measures to make business with the OPEC member even harder, but no-one expects its oil trade to cease as high profits and energy needs inspire ingenuity.
Sanctions on Iran affect Gulf states
The sanctions are expected to disrupt the development of the Gulf region’s biggest shared resource, the giant offshore gas and condensate field known as the North Field in Qatar and South Pars in Iran. It ranks as the largest single conventional hydrocarbon deposit in the world, containing an estimated 310 billion barrels of oil equivalent in total reserves and supports Qatar’s position as the world’s leading LNG exporter.
Tehran Exchange Begins Trading Futures to Attract Investors
(Bloomberg) -- The Tehran Stock Exchange, home of the world’s second-best performing equity index, began offering derivatives based on local banks to diversify and attract foreign investors.
Formosa Petrochemical Shuts Down Unit at Mailiao Oil Refinery After Fire
Formosa Petrochemical Corp., Taiwan’s only publicly traded oil refiner, said it has halted its 540,000 barrel-a-day refinery at Mailiao after an oil leak triggered a fire at a residual processing unit.
Dalian Port Resumes Operating Two Oil Berths After Explosion Caused Spill
Dalian Port (PDA) Co., operator of China’s largest crude-oil terminal, said two oil berths resumed operations after a pipeline explosion caused a spill.A third berth, capable of receiving 300,000-deadweight-ton crude oil tankers, will restart “in the near future,” the company said in a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange.
China could be set to buy less natural gas from countries like Australia in the future.According to a new study, China is preparing to develop its own huge gas reserves and will import significantly less LNG in the future.
ONGC Said to Plan $5 Billion Spending to Boost Gas Output 60% in Six Years
Oil & Natural Gas Corp., India’s biggest energy explorer, plans to spend a record $5 billion to develop gas fields to boost output by almost 60 percent in six years, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said.
Russia May Sell Stakes in Rosneft, Sberbank in Bid to Raise $29 Billion
Russia may raise 883.5 billion rubles ($29 billion) to help cover its budget deficit by selling minority stakes in 10 companies including OAO Rosneft, the country’s largest oil producer, the Finance Ministry said.
U.S. official: BP’s Hayward will be replaced
NEW ORLEANS — Gaffe-prone BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward — who incensed many on the Gulf Coast by saying he wanted his life back as they struggled with the fallout from the company's massive oil spill — will be replaced, a senior U.S. government official said Sunday.The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because an announcement had not been made, was briefed on the decision by a senior BP official late last week.
BP boss expected to quit but new payoff row looms
LONDON (AFP) – BP chief executive Tony Hayward is expected to quit imminently with a payoff of up to 18.5 million dollars despite being lambasted over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, British media reported Monday.The size of the payoff, which must be agreed by a BP board meeting in London on Monday, risks sparking fresh controversy as the British-based firm battles to rebuild its reputation after the worst environmental disaster in US history.
Voyage to the bottom of an oily sea
It's not for the claustrophobic, the seasick or anyone fearful of venturing underwater, but the mini-submarine operated by the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute offers an unparalleled glimpse into the potential impact of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Our view on gas tax: Price holds key to ending nation's addiction to oil
Two years ago this month, crude oil prices spiked to more than $145 a barrel, driving the price of regular gasoline to more than $4 a gallon and painfully reminding the nation once again how vulnerable it is to the whims of the international oil market.It's reasonable to ask what policymakers have done in the past 24 months to try to reduce that vulnerability. For that matter, it's reasonable to ask what they've done in the 37 years since the Arab oil embargo, which caused huge lines at gasoline stations, to stop enriching hostile petro-states in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The answer: not nearly enough.
Opposing view on gas tax: Unwise and unaffordable
If you think the USA would be better off with a higher unemployment rate, fewer small businesses and less money in family bank accounts, you should support big increases in federal taxes on gasoline and other motor fuels.
Senate Democrats to introduce energy bill
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will unveil as early as Monday a slimmed-down energy bill seeking to make offshore drilling safer and convert trucks to run on domestic natural gas.The full Senate could begin consideration of Reid's bill on Tuesday and Democrats would like to pass it by the early part of the following week.
How Soon Will Saudi Arabia Turn To Nuclear Energy?
While a growing number of countries have announced their civilian nuclear energy ambitions more than the past twelve months, no other nation is probably to have a lot more of your psychological impact on the nuclear energy picture than Saudi Arabia. We believe the Kingdom’s organic gas and drinking water issues will lead them to nuclear, sooner somewhat than later, possibly as early as this year.
Russia police kill two power plant attackers
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian police killed two men on Sunday accused of bombing a North Caucasus hydroelectric plant, media reported, just days after President Dmitry Medvedev threatened to sack security officials if there were another attack.Six masked men, suspected Islamist militants, stormed the Baksanskaya power plant in Kabardino-Balkaria Wednesday, shot dead two guards and set off remote-controlled bombs beside the main generator units, bringing the station to a halt.
Brazil Indians block workers at hydroelectric site
SAO PAULO – About 300 Amazon Indians prevented workers from entering or leaving the construction site of a hydroelectric plant that protesters say is on an ancient burial ground, Brazil's official news agency said Sunday.Indians from eight tribes taking part in the protest are demanding compensation for losses caused by construction of the Dardanelos plant in the southern Amazon city of Aripuana, according to Agencia Brasil.
Brazilian Indians take hostages at Amazon dam site
BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazilian native Indians on Sunday took 100 workers hostage at the construction site of a hydroelectric plant in the southern Amazon region, local media reported.As many as 400 Indians from several different tribes occupied a power plant they say was built on an ancient burial site.
My story begins a few years ago when I taught a series of classes through the Shasta College Community Education Program before they got wise and quit letting me teach there. They were not well attended but I've had worse. I recall having 5 to 15 in each one. This particular class was one night only and the topic was a bit dark. I called it The End of Oil and showed a film called The End of Suburbia.I did a PowerPoint presentation on Hubbert's peak and explained that way back in 1956 this geologist named M. King Hubbert predicted that oil production in the United States would peak in 1970, which apparently it did about then.
Foreign genes are being spliced into algae and native genes are being tweaked.Different strains of algae are pitted against one another in survival-of-the-fittest contests in an effort to accelerate the evolution of fast-growing, hardy strains.
The goal is nothing less than to create superalgae, highly efficient at converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into lipids and oils that can be sent to a refinery and made into diesel or jet fuel.
Engineers race to design world's biggest offshore wind turbines
British, American and Norwegian engineers are in a race to design and build the holy grail of wind turbines – giant, 10MW offshore machines twice the size and power of anything seen before – that could transform the global energy market because of their economies of scale.
Smart home meters draw consumer complaints
As smart meters become more common in U.S. homes, they are triggering complaints that they're causing an increase -- not a decrease -- in utility bills.
2011 Ford Explorer makes its debut as an evolved SUV
DEARBORN, Mich. — It never became a symbol of excess, like the Hummer, but the once wildly popular Ford Explorer had become a relic of days when gas was cheap, housing prices were rising and the idea of driving a big, truck-based SUV to the suburban supermarket was rarely questioned.But Ford unveils its new-generation 2011 Explorer today in a different world, where unemployment is still painfully high and people are questioning the costs of everything: gas, food, college degrees.
For Hybrid Cars, a Hybrid Invention
A company with a different approach to the electric car battery problem got a small boost recently when the Patent Office said it would issue a patent on its concept: using a storage device called a capacitor in conjunction with a traditional battery.
Cities tackle traffic head-on with commuter options
MINNEAPOLIS — The morning rush-hour traffic on Interstate 35W is crawling. The highway, which connects downtown Minneapolis and its northern and southern suburbs, is the busiest road in the state. When traffic snarls here, backups spread across the region.A year ago, Peggy Birler, 45, would have been right in the thick of it, spending up to an hour driving alone to work. Today, Birler has a much shorter commute: She drives less than a mile to a Park & Ride lot, boards a bus for a 10-minute trip downtown, zipping along in a bus-only lane, then walks 1½ blocks to her office.
Paper Mate has biodegradable pens for back-to-schoolers
It may be less crucial for your kids to have Iron Man or Hannah Montana's images on their back-to-school supplies this fall than it is to have a currently far cooler word stamped on the stuff: biodegradable.More than a decade after recycled paper started to become a serious factor in the $55 billion back-to-school market, the new buzzword for 2010 appears to be biodegradable (i.e., an item that will decompose in soil or in your garden compost pile).
Peak Oil and Climate Change: Between Too Soon and Not Soon Enough
We are going to burn all of the oil and coal we have, because their benefits as energy sources are concrete, immediate, and local, while their costs are gradual, delayed, and global.Not to put too fine a point on it, but when facing similar choices, humankind has never chosen the more long-term view.
Gift Economy (1) - Reconceiving The Market
The show this week looks at the gift economy. We look at a range of reasons to challenge the cynical, capitalist view of the human as 'red in tooth and claw', listening to evidence from speakers including Alfie Kohn, Genevieve Vaughan & Jeremy Rifkin.
The Ecological Crisis is an Economic Crisis is an Energy Crisis
The world crisis is economic, ecological, and energy-based. Liberals want the state to regulate business and have a "new New Deal" to rebuild the economy and ecology. It won't work. Revolutionary anarchists want a new, ecological, economy which is democratically planned, produces for need not for profit, and is a decentralized federalism.
The Seventies were a great decade for apocalyptic enthusiasms, and none was more potent than the fear that human population growth had outstripped the earth’s carrying capacity. According to a chorus of credentialed alarmists, the world was entering an age of sweeping famines, crippling energy shortages, and looming civilizational collapse.It was not lost on conservatives that this analysis led inexorably to left-wing policy prescriptions — a government-run energy sector at home, and population control for the teeming masses overseas.
Social conservatives and libertarians, the two wings of the American right, found common ground resisting these prescriptions. And time was unkind to the alarmists. The catastrophes never materialized, and global living standards soared. By the turn of the millennium, the developed world was worrying about a birth dearth.
This is the lens through which most conservatives view the global warming debate.
Modern cargo ships slow to the speed of the sailing clippers
Container ships are taking longer to cross the oceans than the Cutty Sark did as owners adopt 'super-slow steaming' to cut back on fuel consumption.
Four Ways to Kill a Climate Bill
IF President Obama and Congress had announced that no financial reform legislation would pass unless Goldman Sachs agreed to the bill, we would conclude our leaders had been standing in the Washington sun too long. Yet when it came to addressing climate change, that is precisely the course the president and Congress took. Lacking support from those most responsible for the problem, they have given up on passing a major climate bill this year.
California: Climate law adds jobs to state payroll
The state's landmark global warming law has yet to create the promised bonanza of green jobs, but it has boosted payrolls in another sector of the economy: state government.At a time of budget cuts and state worker furloughs, the state agency primarily responsible for regulating global warming has bulked up its staff as it prepares to enforce AB 32, the climate change law signed in 2006 by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Arctic may be ice-free by 2050: Russian expert
Media reports say Moscow and Washington are discussing cooperation in Arctic at the highest political level. Russia and Canada would also soon start negotiations on the integration of their national space systems to monitor the Arctic.Anatoly Shilov, Deputy Chief of the Federal Space Agency, said Russia would spend USD 2 billion for the creation of multipurpose space system Arktika (Arctic) to monitor climatic changes and survey energy resources in the Arctic region.
The fact that it was sometimes warmer at our measurement site at the West Coast of Greenland than it was in Central Europe at the same time surprised us quite a bit. However, some recent studies indicate that such a distribution of relatively high temperature in parts of the Arctic and relatively low temperature in Northern and Central Europe and parts of the US might become somewhat more wide-spread in the future. While the Arctic has always shown large internal variability that lead to large-scale shifts in weather patterns, in the future the ongoing retreat of Arctic sea ice might cause those weather patterns to occur more often that allow for Northerly winds to bring cold air from the Arctic to the mid-latitudes. Hence, it is quite possible that because of the retreat of Arctic sea ice, some smaller parts of the Northern Hemisphere will experience pronounced cold spells during winter every now and then. The mean temperature of the Northern Hemisphere will nevertheless increase further, and the export of cold air from the Arctic of course leads to warm anomalies there.
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To add to today's stories about climate change, here's todays Op-Ed from Paul Krugman...
E. Swanson
I have a great deal of respect for Prof. Krugman — he's gotten a lot of things right in the last decade. OTOH, I think he's flat-out wrong about the magnitude of the carbon tax needed to get significant changes. And he tends to think in terms of the median; when he did his prize-winning research on international trade, he assumed that the trade winners would be forced to share their gains with the trade losers, and everyone would be better off. At least he has now written that that was a bad assumption, and suggested that his conclusions about trade benefits should be revisited.
It doesn't take a lot of error in the magnitude of the effective carbon tax to cross the line into “and then the poor get hammered” territory. It may be a trivial tax for a rich household that spends 3% of its income on energy; and a modest tax for a median household that spends 6% of their income on energy; but it's neither trivial nor modest for the poor household spending 16% of income on energy [percentages from US Census Bureau data].
A lot of things right??? Are you kidding???
The man is an Uber-Keynesian knob jockey. He is certifiable. End of.
Sigh
Well first your wrong (of course that is in my opinion), but more importantly do you know what a 'knob jockey' is? Here let me give you a definition
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Knob%20Jockey
Ask yourself if that is really how you want to put it.
But there are of course corrective action (redistribution of some of the excess funds raised by the high price). But maybe your poor person who is spending 16% is a big time energy hog. Then he needs to change his behavior.
And well, Keynes was brillant. The biggest problems with Keynesianism are twofold -the inability to save during the good times (note Korea and China did this, and have been able to do stimulus of the appropriate magnitude, and are doing well). And secondarily, what if the world is reaching hard (or soft) resource limitations? Then something new must be added into the theory.
An individual's energy consumption tends to rise with income. However, the more wealthy a person, the larger the share of indirect energy consumption, that is, energy consumed in in the form of goods and services consumed, not actual gallons of oil products or BTU of NG. Electricity consumption often represents a much larger amount of primary energy, particularly coal, which may not appear in your census data. I found US Census data which was taken from the EIA, which reports residential energy consumption in BTU's, including electricity consumption. I did not find an income breakdown for indirect consumption...
E. Swanson
The nuclear fusion crowd have been at this since around 1954.
Over 50 years. Yes, that's right, OVER FIFTY YEARS.
In that time mankind has invented the MRI scanner, been to the moon & back, digitised & connected the globe etc ... and the fusion crowd have delivered ... err, NOTHING.
How many fusion related conferences, meetings, pensions of managers, civil servants and low grade scientists have we, our parents and our grandparents paid for over the years?
If we HAD to get fusion going in, say, 12 months to save the world from meteorite impact doom then I am sure that WE COULD and WE WOULD... and not with the current shirkers either.
We need a new start - probably from the private sector.
If it was that easy it would have been going decades ago.
Fusion is one of those ideas that is deceptively simple. All you need to do is smash light elements together and you get energy back out of them. We've been able to do that with significant energy output since the 1950's.
The only problem is you need to control this reaction with less energy than you get out of it.
That's the bit that isn't so easy.
Trying to mate the immovable object to the irresistable force, eh?
ahh! If the EU is really content to keep paying for it, then go for it. It's a crazy plan, but it just might work. Otherwise half those engineers would probably have to be designing new Fighters or Ordnance..
"There's no greatness without Audacity." - O.Wilde
As usual, I agree with Greer on technological optimism. From his latest:
http://www.energybulletin.net/53529
Hoping for the ultimate fusion solution is like hoping John Wayne and the Cavalry will come roaring in and save the day. It generally happens only in fantasy land. We will be forced to adapt to the solutions we already have and suffer the consequences of our collective lack of foresight. We took the wrong trail quite a ways back.
Circle your wagons folks!
Ghung, you should have quoted the sentence that follows that paragraph.
That is the point I have been trying to get across from day one. Every time I do someone calls me vile names. But I will say it again. It just ain't gonna happen folks! When we are halfway down the decline curve of peak oil there still will be nothing that has replaced more than a fraction of the oil that has disappeared from the market.
Okay, call me more vile names then go argue with John Michael Greer in the link provided by Ghung above.
Ron P.
Take it easy, Ron. Most of these folks will end up like the Donner Party.
Keep your thick skin on!
How to survive?
Move to the outback. Near a free flowing spring fed stream to dam and use water power. I know where there are plenty of these areas. Plentiful wildlife,good springs,some good creek bottom land.
Then , here is the kicker. Burn or dispose of you toilet paper. ??? Yes your toilet paper.
By the time you have figured out how to have a decent, viable, healthy bowel movement and thereby NOT need toilet paper you will have been onto the proper path to very good health and survivability.
Toilet paper is for a society with bad food and bad habits. If you eat healthy and are healthy then you will not need nor miss TP. Guaranteed.
Think about it. You can make soap. You can tan hides. You can catch fish. You can do all that is necessary by learning and doing. What is the result? You find that TP is not essential.
NOW. How many will give it up? That is the criteria for the future. Most will simply rather die in place rather than try to live with the horrors of no TP.
What is the first thing that is hoarded when hurricanes or tornadoes threaten? Toilet paper.
Too bad. Its the canary in the mine so to speak.
I rarely use the stuff. I try to go outside where it is NOT at hand.
So by the time you have learned to eat well and be healthy you will no longer require its usage.
And one must think of that dark and crazy time in the future when ..saint's preserve us....there will BE NO TOILET PAPER!
If you must then use corn cobs. Rather nothing but good health...AND you cannot eat todays 'factory' food and not make copious use of TP.
Sounds off beat but its been on my mind for a long time.
The Germans it is said, in the past , examined their children's bowel movements as good indicators of their health. I submit that this is so. It is a very good indicator.
Without a very good digestive system I think odds of survival in the future will be very high indeed.
Myself I believe in the excellent qualities of sauerkraut and its raw juice. Got 5 gallons working off right now.
Hey did the pioneers carry toilet paper with them as they trekked into the wilds and across the prairies? Not recorded that they did so. On the farms in my youth we had none.
No laxatives either to think of it. What is it with this society? Anal retentive?
"The Germans it is said, in the past , examined their children's bowel movements as good indicators of their health."
I inspect my dogs,,,,,,,,well,for worms and such, and it is a good indicator of their health. And we had the "peak tiolet tissue" discussion at a recent Campfire: http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/6764#comment-684688
I think the consensus was that bidets are a pretty good option (well they were prefered over corncobbs).
How to survive?
No one does. We are mortal.
The question is either how to survive past the crash, how to survive to a ripe old age, how to survive longer than others your age now alive, or how to survive long enough to pass your genes into the next generation (than includes how to help your offspring survive to pass their genes on).
Everyone now alive will die....that is what being mortal means.
I can vouch for the fact that a vigorous person getting plenty of exercise and eating a diet with plenty of raw fruits, vegetables, corn bread, some meat and so forth doesn't really need toilet paper-when I was young living on the farm,I could go and find only a token trace of brown stain on the paper.
A soft poorly formed stool is a classic sign of bad health recognized as such in Chinese medicine iirc.
A leaf or a bunch of grass was perfectly adequate out in the fields or woods in a pinch.
I can't bring myself to believe cobs were ever widely used except maybe in an "emergency".
Grass, straw, leaves, and such are easily come by and far less unpleasant.I tried a cob-once.
I've been looking, again, at letters written by some of my ancestors who moved from Kentucky to SE Iowa when settlement was first starting (early 1830s). It's hard to pick a better area in which to be an agricultural settler -- great land, adequate water, timber, game, etc. They had all the skills you mention. What do you see? (Granted, they intended to be "settled" rather than hunter/gatherers.)
Send anvils, send metal tools, send iron stock, send nails, send pots and pans, send woven cloth, send glassware. Send rifles and gunpowder. Send lead to cast for ammunition. Send sheet tin and copper.
And people dying. Lord, did people die. Compound fractures were fatal. Infections of all sorts. Exposure. What sounded like anaphylactic shock from bee stings. Women died in childbirth (the "send" list included sturdy women of marriageable age). Infants and children died of all sorts of respiratory distress.
In all seriousness, when was the last time there was a successful "frontier" that didn't depend heavily on (a) having a substantial number of people, (b) seeding from an existing civilization, and (c) reestablishing the basics of the seeding civilization locally quite quickly. A thousand years ago? Two thousand?
The Native Americans had none of these items you ask to 'be sent'.
Yet the pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and MADE what the needed from the earths raw materials WITHOUT destroying it.
For 20,000 years in the continent of America. Tools found of late indicate that length of time span. I could source this easily but the book is not at hand right now.
You can either live on the earth in harmony with nature or not. If young or newborn die then perhaps it strengthens the gene pool. For those unable to live the life perhaps better to pass on.
Bee stings? Yes women died in childbirth. They had bad features for child bearing. Yet my ancestors fathered many offspring and lived long lives as gravestones attest. There were small markers alongside for the babies that were not viable. Part of life. Not everyone is born equal.
Many likely did not need to leave one area and go to another. Only the brave and able were likely to make it.
But the ones who survived and prospered likely outweighed those who perished and were unable to survive.
The volumes have been written. The history uncovered. The past is plain. If you do not have what it takes you will likely perish.
If you grew up in a rural setting of the past and you survived beyond , say your toddler stage, then you were 'good to go' for a quite long life. You had the physique and the stamina and ability to live long.
I remember a plaque somewhere states:
“The cowards never started/The weak died along the way/Only the strong survived/These were the pioneers.”
To live the kind of life you describe, two things are necessary :-
1. A fair amount of open space in which to roam freely
2. An abundance of natural resources
We no longer have either.
It just is not feasible to "go back" to that life, except for maybe a very small handful of individuals.
Those who live in cities and suburbs do not have much space and few natural resources. That was their choices.
Not my choice so I have a lot of open space around me. A very large amount. Some mine and some others but still open and when farming dies there will be a return to open range.
It will be feasible for those who are in that category. The rest will have to go elsewhere and contend for those two items.
Those on this website who have made the decisions are our last and best hope. The rest can cover their eyes and make believe.
Again choices but choices that might become very hard to find later. Squatting might work but the locals may decide differently. In fact I think they will. But vast tracts of 'public' land exists in almost all states. This is for the taking once certain events transpire. Fall of government or the smoky-the-bears who watch over it.
If I were in that fix I would already be checking out viable areas that I described as public lands, above.
Or sit in suburbia and wait for the axe to fall.
I've been saying this for a long time. People always talk about survival on the frontier as if they had no supply lines "back East".
The rapid colonization of the West, was, in fact, an occupation, and part of deliberate policy of the government at the time. Offering land to anyone who could irrigate it, for example.
There's an image of survival on the frontier that has been as deliberately spun as any PR campaign in place today. I'm not in any way saying that the pioneers didn't face very tough times, and overcome extreme obstacles, but there is a lot of romanticism about it, and people forget that much of it wouldn't have happened without the supply lines of the railroads, and the presence of the General Store.
"Manifest Destiny".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_Destiny
That frontier was once my state. And my ancestors came to it in about 1800 give or take.
I have their history. I can visit their graves and homesites.
One paddled a canoe up the Mississippi and had zero contact with the 'folks back east'.
Not saying its all that way but I have read many historical articles and studied it extensively. I see little 'romantic' views or PR campaigns.
The land was extremely rich and huge amounts of wild game lived upon it. Huge catfish were in the unpolluted waters. Felling trees they built simple homesteads and open ranged their stock.
You should read the Foxfire series for material in this area.Also Eckert's historical very well researched books in this area. Several very good ones exist in that venue.
I speak also of those who traversed the Smoky Mountains and fled the oppression of being a colony of England. They hacked homes out of the wilderness.
The far west was a different time and different story. In the time I speak of there were NO RAILROADS. There were no steamboats. There were flatboats and rafts. There was the Cumberland Pass and walking was the mode of travel.
But they also had guns.
In other words, they were dependent on industrialization, even if it was the industrialization of 19th Century England.
If they went with no guns, no metal or fabricated tools, and only built what they had with their own two hands, nothing else, with what they found in the woods, it would be a whole different story.
While I wouldn't dare predict the future, I will say that I'm 99% certain that you are absolutely wrong that nothing will have replaced "more than a fraction of the oil that has disappeared..."
The missing oil will be replaced by more bums in the seats of less cars. It will be replaced by more bodies, in more beds in fewer houses. It will be replaced by more people wearing out shoe leather and bicycle tires. It will be replaced by less trips to fewer malls. It will be replaced by a greater proportion of all trips made by mass transit...
The tradeable energy lost will be in some significant measure replaced by various forms of captured current solar including electricity from solar, wind, wave, etc and heat from biomass, solar, etc and electricity from nuclear fission.
Almost all the changes in behaviour and technology which have occurred, are occurring and will occur are due to the leadership of price.
Price will continue to lead people to adopt well established alternatives to oil use and to create the conditions that will inspire the best and the brightest to conceive and develop even more alternatives to oil.
So, Ron, enjoy your misery. I'm sure it somehow causes your dopamine to flow. But, for myself, the pleasure is in the knowledge that our species is well equipped for adaptation.
what's the price per head of exterminating the unsustainable human population?
what's the price of cobbling together some entity that has the right to decide who lives and who dies?
what's the price of a guarantee that religious fanatics will not further reduce the carrying capacity of the earth with radioactivity from samson options and nuclear primacy first strikes?
Nature will take care of it for free. No need to get up..
Besides, we'll need all the spare workforce we can muster just to handle burials and keeping lists.
"I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a ... black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder even more thrilling than before--upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows. " E.A. Poe .. The Fall of the House of Usher
"Nature will take care of it..."
that's the scary part, isnt it?
...especially if we include human nature.
if we had enough time, we might be able to breed our way out of this pickle... breed for a sense of justice or fairness or whatever.
an awareness of justice and fairness is part of human nature, too...
the way the system's set up, though, we're breeding for the survival of sociopathic looters, because they will be the people who will accumulate enough loot to survive and reproduce while the rest of us eat each other's children.
oh well
'Breed our way out of it.'
I hear your point, but it still reminds me of 'me at a buffet'. I will eat a bit too much, keep going back to snack on this or that like it's Thanksgiving, and then when my stomach hurts, I'll cruise those tables again to see what's there that might help stop my stomach from hurting.
Obey your thirst.
"follow your bliss" and suffer the consequences
Rotorhead?
What type(s) do yo drive?
alouette III, lamas, s58, 58t, s55t, h43 recip... fires fertilizer seismic
retired 2000, drinking slowly into the sunset.
you...?
Practically zero if you use the right microbe. In another few decades smallpox would do the trick, since few of childbearing age would have been vaccinated. It is thought that it wiped out over 90 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population.
Biological controls have been effective for rabbits in Australia.
The history of myxoma virus in Australia
A plague on the pest – rabbit calicivirus disease and biological control
so who does it?
could they get away with it?
i was gonna ask, "could they live with themselves afterwards?", but that's a silly question, isnt it?
Ultimately, I mentioned that this is 'Nature's Job' because there are many more pressing questions we can be working on. Not more pressing than 'Population', just more salient than these traumatic queries about genocide.
Work at the other end with family planning, informed and empowered women and secure societies.. and really, let nature take care of the other end.
People are valuable, even 'surplus people'.
"many more pressing questions we can be working on..."
if we have to get rid of a few billion people in the next... say... 50 or a hundred years, isnt that gonna put a strain on the family planners and the informed and empowered women?
"let nature take care of the other end?"
what "nature"... what "other end" would that be...? ...the "other end" that's held up by racists, religious fanatics and looters, who seem to be setting themselves up for ever more absolute control over the rest of us?
maybe we wont have to worry about excess population because all females will be sterilized at birth by nature, "nature", in this case, being the racists, religious fanatics and looters who got the horsepower.
good deal.
You should read the book '1491' lot's of good stuff there. From memory, hepatitis was a bigger killer of indigenous Americans, but there were lot's of European borne diseases that took part in the great kill off process in the 'discovery' of the 'new world'.
Yes, I know you are certain Toil. The vast majority of people are just as certain. You are saying that what we can't replace we will wind up doing without and things will be a little tougher, but just a little. Just a few tiny things is wrong with that theory however.
All that excess energy, that we will be doing without, provides employment for millions of people.
And only the developed world actually has excess energy. The rest already rides bicycles.
And the world is already in deep overshoot. If even half of those seven billion people turn more to wood for cooking and heating then the world will be stripped bare of wood in only a few years.
And if more people turn to bush meat instead of cows or even grain grown with fossil fuel, then the world will be stripped bare of all wild animals in just a few years.
And I could keep adding other things but you get the idea.
But you are correct, there will be a lot fewer cars, and a lot less food, and a lot less people. Well at least we can agree on that. Wait... wait... you said nothing about less food or less people. But I suppose that was just an oversight on your part. :-(
Ron P.
Yep and burning that wood will both add more CO2 while turning areas into deserts unable to feed people or capture CO2.
And further as energy declines who is going to care if Coal burning plants don't capture their CO2 as long as they eke out a bit more power? Who is going to care if nuclear wastes are properly disposed of if the power bill stays the same? Who will object to more offshore drilling?
No one survives, but it begins to look like this will become a world that no one wants to have their offspring have to live in. No matter how strong our genetic programing is to reproduce, we also have programs to wait until bad times are over. I can imagine as we finish trashing the planet that the reproduction urge will die.
see http://www.jaguda.com/2010/06/30/oil-spills-in-louisiana-why-should-i-ca...
Here's a species that found carbon from deep underneath, figured out a way to turn all of that carbon into itself, including full blown mating games involving sports cars. It is even discussing its own demise on a mystical network that passes and stores lossless communication.
Its magnificent! just that the so-called "Acceptance" should be on a different scale altogether. The straw still sways in the wind, its dew reflecting sunlight brilliantly like it did a couple decades ago.
I didn't say that things will be tougher. That's your peculiar notion. I expect the decline in oil supplies to lead to improvements in the quality of life. Social isolation, nature deficit disorder, obesity, world wars, children raised indoors in a variation of the way we manufacture meat with everything ordered and measured, noise, a polluted environment and the like are characteristic of increasing supplies of oil. Give me the decrease, as quick as you can.
Alas, it won't happen quickly. On the otherhand it is happening quickly enough to send a price signal containing a whole lot of information, not all of it understood by all the recipients. Nevertheless, almost all are responding. Especially industry.
It strikes me that though you show some comprehension of the structural nature of peaking oil, you can't get your head around the structural nature of peaking population. Population is going to increase to about 9 billion and then around 2070 go into decline. This is due, as Longman and others have noted, to culturally rooted changes including a shift to smaller families and to a widening gap between generations.
The world already has enough food for 9 billion tummies. Starvation today, just like starvation all through the climb up Hubbert's Curve, derives from income distribution issues.
Climate change threatens food security, but declines in liquid hydrocarbon supply do not. One of the silliest claims you and other doomers continue making is that food production will decline in sync with declines in oil supply.
You folks just don't seem to appreciate how markets work, even the seriously distorted agricultural markets. In the real world, when the last oil consumption efficiencies have been rung out of the farming sector, then a greater share of the remaining supply of oil will go to food production. When there is no more oil, which is a long ways away, further than the population turning point around 2070, and even before, other forms of energy will be used to substitute for the work oil provides. More human labour will be among these substitutes. If you can't see any part of the current acreage planted to food and forage crops being turned to sources of bio-diesel, then I guess we'll just have to give up golf and use all those courses to grow hemp. Not to mention the roadsides, the five acre horse ranches...
Your concern for the unemployed is moving. Moving me to a mixture of laughter and tears. Increasing supplies of oil has displaced millions of workers and somehow we've survived. Now I wonder what will happen when the work that oil has provided, work does equal heat after all, decreases. Hmmm?
One of the reasons that I, as a socialist, appreciate markets so much, is how good they are at resolving the issues that arise from something such as declining energy supplies. It just that, as a socialist, I want markets to be designed to serve everyman and women and not just a few maggots, most of whom were born to privilege.
Rather than spending the rest of your life in a doomer circle-jerk, why don't you all start to address important issues such as equality of opportunity, the formation of capital in a post peak oil economy, and so on.
the looters, religious fanatics and racists have the bit in their teeth.
what are you gonna do about them?
i'll post these questions again, in hopes you have some answers...
.
looks like we got a long way to go to come up with clean, renewable energy to replace the fossil fuel, especially if we've got people running things who could care less about the rest of us.
soooooo... what are you gonna do about those people?
What would we do without a little comic relief once in awhile?
No, the population will increase to around 7 billion people in 2012 or 2013 then go into decline, steep decline. Massive amounts of food has enabled the population to explode. More food, more people, it was that simple. Yes, parts of the world have a huge food surplus but the vast majority of the world lives hand to mouth. When their food disappears, they disappear.
Pointing to massive waste in the Western world is a joke. There is no waste in India, or China and most of Asia and Africa. It simply does not matter how much food is produced in America and Canada, that does nothing to feed the starving in Asia and Africa. If people have no money then they have no food. Americans do not give their food away, they sell it.
Sure it will. We found coal. Then we found oil and gas. Next we will find the other forms of energy that we have not discovered yet. Yes... other forms of energy, that's the ticket! Other forms of energy. Other forms of energy will keep the population booming until 2070. By that time we will have extinguished the life of all "other forms of life" on this planet. We will have turned all rain forests into deserts. We will have pumped the water from all aquifers on earth. We will have dried up or polluted every lake and inland sea.
We, Homo sapiens, are competing with all other species on the planet for territory and resources and by God we are winning... big time!
Ron P.
Hey, Ron! Do you think that, when we have eaten and used everything else on Earth, we will turn on ourselves, and the final victory will be the last capitalist eating himself, one body part at a time?
Craig
zaphod42 -
read your Steinbeck.... very angry grapes... and something about dogs..
indeed.. ;)
... but darwinian, life itself is such a game. Its "my species" vs everybody else. I might choose to co-operate but that's again for selfish needs. In the end, its a meaningless game driven by that good old thermonuclear reaction nearby.
The real problem would be inability to make the distribution of food from farms to markets. Decline of availability of energy would make a triage of energy use necessary. It is how that is done, and by whom, that will make the big difference.
When coal and gas peak, projected in from 20 to 40 years from the peak of oil, there will be insufficient commercial fertilizer available for factory farming. The soil is already so depleted from overuse that without that addition, there will simply not be sufficient food available for 1.5 Billion, much less 7 to 9 billion. You can have all the demand in the world, and if there is no food to be had, it won’t do much. When the reason for the decline in food production is lack of fertilizer (and, make no mistake, the so called ‘green revolution’ in farm production comes from natural gas, and from diesel fuels), the planet will have to slide back to a sustainable population.
Best information we have of pre-fossil fuel production seems to show the number sustainable in human population to be somewhere between 750 Million and 1.5 Billion. It is difficult to be precise since the industrial revolution was not overnight, and the population grew gradually. Pre-coal, the energy for ‘growth’ of nations all came from animal power, and in the case of Western Europe in particular, and the so called civilized world in general, from human power in the form of slavery. So the answer to your question about what will happen is not so pleasant… and, I don’t think I look forward to a return to feudalism and slavery.
I agree that just making doomer noises is not productive. We do need to address issues, and to me they are education, retaining knowledge and passing it along, holding together those of our institutions that we are able, and forging new ones as conditions change and demand. On a more immediate note, rethinking our energy and transportation infrastructure would be a good start.
As for formation of capital, I went through “there is money to be made” discussions for a number of years, trying to ‘convert’ my capitalist friends. In time I learned that the maggots are determined to hold on to the way things are until the last do-die. Financial institutions may not survive, and a barter economy is not conducive to monopoly.
In short, we need to do all we can to keep and maintain such of our technology as possible – I am afraid it is already too late to do a lot, but there are some things that can and must be done. We need to preserve the knowledge we have, and add to it as to sustainability positions. Paramount to all of this is keeping a robust public education system, and a dynamic democratic form of government. Whether as a federal system, some socialist/progressive paradigm, or a pure democracy, a smooth transition to a popularly supported government, or continuation of what we have but with greater local participation would seem to be necessary.
And, while you have stated well the paradoxical dream of the ‘good old days,’ your view of all the nice things is not balanced with reality. We have seen what we get from just coal and gas as our energy sources… read, for instance, “A Tale of Two Cities.” Life expectancy, in your heralded days of yore, were in the 40s and 50s, not because people did not live long, but because so many died young. As oil stocks diminish, so will the host of pharmaceuticals we now create from them. As with fuel, I am not sanguine about how and by whom medicinal triage will be conducted. If the markets are the means, the maggots you refer to will have a definite edge.
I do not consider myself a doomer. I believe that we can prepare our children and grandchildren; I believe that we must prepare them. I am a realist, however, about human nature. If I saw some action, or even some discussion by your maggots about the problems predictably ahead in the next decade or two, I might be less apprehensive.
Still, as a golfer, I look to the day that the fairway is bounded by weed. It might not be so bad, after all.
Be careful what you wish for… you might just get it.
Craig
any relation to you?
Strangely enough, given sufficient libation of gin n tonic, or PGGBs, I would say, "yes." OTOH, given the question, my inclination is to state, with some authority, that the answer is, "42."
Craig
"42" seems to be a very good answer, but now i've forgotten the question...
Good thing, too. If the same person knows both the question and the answer at the same time, everything changes, the world becomes much stranger, and - maybe - we can look for the great handkerchief.
I sure miss Doug!
Craig
No, the answer is zero!
'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo
"In the beginning there was nothing- which exploded"
- Douglas Adams
Yep! :)
I didn't say that things will be tougher. That's your peculiar notion. I expect the decline in oil supplies to lead to improvements in the quality of life. Social isolation, nature deficit disorder, obesity, world wars, children raised indoors in a variation of the way we manufacture meat with everything ordered and measured, noise, a polluted environment and the like are characteristic of increasing supplies of oil. Give me the decrease, as quick as you can.
Alas, it won't happen quickly. On the otherhand it is happening quickly enough to send a price signal containing a whole lot of information, not all of it understood by all the recipients. Nevertheless, almost all are responding. Especially industry.
It strikes me that though you show some comprehension of the structural nature of peaking oil, you can't get your head around the structural nature of peaking population. Population is going to increase to about 9 billion and then around 2070 go into decline. This is due, as Longman and others have noted, to culturally rooted changes including a shift to smaller families and to a widening gap between generations.
The world already has enough food for 9 billion tummies. Starvation today, just like starvation all through the climb up Hubbert's Curve, derives from income distribution issues.
Climate change threatens food security, but declines in liquid hydrocarbon supply do not. One of the silliest claims you and other doomers continue making is that food production will decline in sync with declines in oil supply.
You folks just don't seem to appreciate how markets work, even the seriously distorted agricultural markets. In the real world, when the last oil consumption efficiencies have been rung out of the farming sector, then a greater share of the remaining supply of oil will go to food production. When there is no more oil, which is a long ways away, further than the population turning point around 2070, and even before, other forms of energy will be used to substitute for the work oil provides. More human labour will be among these substitutes. If you can't see any part of the current acreage planted to food and forage crops being turned to sources of bio-diesel, then I guess we'll just have to give up golf and use all those courses to grow hemp. Not to mention the roadsides, the five acre horse ranches...
Your concern for the unemployed is moving. Moving me to a mixture of laughter and tears. Increasing supplies of oil has displaced millions of workers and somehow we've survived. Now I wonder what will happen when the work that oil has provided, work does equal heat after all, decreases. Hmmm?
One of the reasons that I, as a socialist, appreciate markets so much, is how good they are at resolving the issues that arise from something such as declining energy supplies. It just that, as a socialist, I want markets to be designed to serve everyman and women and not just a few maggots, most of whom were born to privilege.
Rather than spending the rest of your life in a doomer circle-jerk, why don't you all start to address important issues such as equality of opportunity, the formation of capital in a post peak oil economy, and so on.
toilforoil:
You may be right...but only in the long run, after we're all dead.
The die off must happen. It may not happen soon...may not happen for 10, 50, 100 years. But it must happen. There is no way that a population of 7,8,9 billion humans can be fed, employed, or have any type of aspirations in this world without burning fossil fuels.
When all is said and done, I imagine that sometime in the distant future human civilization will be built around two fundamental principles: population growth must be contained, and money must be based on a metallic standard.
These two principles will be as sacred to future generations as, say, the Constitution or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are to us.
Then maybe we can start to be a little optimistic.
As a proponent of tar pits development, you should be well aware that in one hundred years the world will still have hydrocarbons for essential needs. If, and it is big if, we and our progeny aren't smart enough to find substitutes for the work that oil currently provides food production, then I'll bet my gold teeth that tar pits' based oil will be allocated to agriculture either by policy or market action.
And of course in one hundred years the world will be trying to figure out how to slow the decline in population. Take a look at The Empty Cradle by P Longman.
The tar pits will save us!
Damn, now why didn't I think of that? Of course, of course, all is well. We can close all peak oil lists down now. There will not be an energy crisis. Well, not for another 100 years anyway. We have tar pits.
Ron P.
Actually, our brain will enable us to adapt to changing resource availability, or as you put it in your simplistic, fundamentalist, Book of Revelations influenced, apocalyptic, doomer perspective, "save us".
It's increasingly obvious though that yours won't be making much of a contribution.
If things don't entirely fall a part, a hundred years from now population should not matter as mostly everything should be mechanized.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
However, technology isn't energy, you seem to be too enthusiastic in regards to low flow rate oil.
Technology is the exosomatic conversion of energy. The availability of pools of concentrated stored solar drew us down one path and effectively imposed a regime on our civilization. An exercise in social engineering that lies beyoond the ken of most conservatives.
Technology begins in the brain and we are already in increasing numbers forging new technologies to permit an adaptation to the changing resource landscape. The most recent manifestation of the centuries old scientific revolution, low cost communications, will ensure that this proceeds with social costs well below the levels of suffering that accompanied our climb up Hubbert's curve.
Where do you get the idea that smaller families will remain the norm? When the government ponzis stop working, people will realize only their kin can help them in the future. Is it really "industrialization" that decreases family size, or is it because the productivity increase makes politicians believe they can levy greater taxes making individuals feel as if they can not support a family?
I believe it to be the latter, look at the TFR of Israel.
I don't think it's that simple. Urbanization decreases family size, even in countries where taxation is low to nonexistent. Children who are useful labor on a farm are a burden in a small city apartment.
My guess is that if we really do go back to the farm, family sizes will start rising again.
I grew up in the labour intensive tree fruit/vegetable industry. My father had 6 kids. My brother whose only just retired from farming the same orchard as well as additional acreage had two. The multigenerational immigrant family from India who farm the land now has two.
It's not just a question of increased mechanization. That in fact has hardly changed. I used to climb 16 foot ladders to pick apples and cherries. Today I could pick most of the fruit from the ground, or with an 8 foot ladder at most. More product per acre. Less labour. The human brain at work.
You are wise to put an 'if' in front the going back to the farm idea. We are just as likely to take farming to the cities, as the vertical farm becomes more energetically attractive.
Moreover, family size is predicated on important assumptions about the survivability of offspring. Public health measures have changed those assumptions, though as with all things, traditions and ignorance slowed the change in assumptions. But changed, they have, and just about everywhere, and with the $35 computer on its way, the force of in-formation is unstoppable, accept in pockets of fundamentalists committed to ignorance. But even in those pockets, the children escape.
Those public health measures were not the outcome of the use of hydrocarbons, nor are they dependent on them, but rather developed as part of the same scientific revolution that began before James Watt and engendered his work and the industrial revolution. People, doomers especially, the modern expression of an ancient apocalyptic tendency, see cause and effect, when the relationship is something else, indeed.
Doomers, I observe, have a perspective that is a mix of crude Marxist determinism and apocalyptic religious thinking. They need to read Hegel.
You are exactly right (on this issue). Anyone who thinks differently is off in la la land.
Well it is John Michael Greer who is right, I am just agreeing with him.
I know it will not happen. John explained why it will not happen.
Ron P.
Aw Ron, no modesty. You had all these thoughts already which is why you readily agreed with him. JMG just has enough flair to get his words published.
I suspect that in fact you had thoughts in this direction for a long time before Peak Oil began to be talked about on discussion sites. I sure did. Peak Oil knowledge crystallizes and puts a time frame on the feeling that this world is rushing headlong into disaster. Greer, Richard Heinberg, Jay Hanson, etc just made it available to more people - if you weren't already leaning to this understanding you can read these folks all you want and likely still not get it. If you were heading that way on your own, they provide the data. But when you read them its more like confirmation than revelation.
There will be no success in terms of useful fusion energy on any time scale that matters to anyone reading this forum- not even a precocious six year old in Daddy's lap.
More than a few academics and disinterested engineerring types have explained why lots of times.
In a nutshell,nobody knows how to build any of the machinery necessary to do the job, since the temperatures and energies are far far greater than anything existing can handle;the materials have to be invented first.Then somebody has to figure out how to man ufacture the not yet invented materials.Then a design incorporating them has to be drawn up, and built, and tested,and the bugs worked out.
Then a fusion plant would have to be built.
At any point along the way, there are dozens to hundreds of intractable problems to be solved.
Some of them may take years-and hold up the entire process.It is likely in the extreme that there will be many dead ends, necessitating throwing out years of work.
Some of the problems may simply be beyond solution-only one could stop everything.
Success in the end depends on solving all the problems;the probability that all of them can and will be solved with the resources available, within a meaningful time frame, is near zero.
A very well thought of Cal Tech chemistry professor has a video posted on the university web site which covers this subject very well, but unfortunately I have lost the link.
All the thousands of people working on this job together for decades have not yet achieved the equivalent of banging two rocks together to start a fire-using some of the largest and most expensive facitities in the world.
If they ever get the fire started, they will be as far from a working power plant as a camp fire is from a conventional power plant.
The entire contents of the giant building dedicated to that rock banging job would be destroyed in a couple of heart beats if the reaction were to have enough fuel supplied to produce some useful energy-say enough to drive a typical power plant turbine turbine.
I'm an optimist, in terms of believing in technology, but I'm not buying any of this one.
You also need a way to get the fusion energy out of the system without roasting all the machinery needed to provide a container where the fusion can happen.
Can't you just send it to the transporter room and beam it out?
;)
That's the crux of it, and what I don't understand is why the ITER fusion reactor being built in France is essentially the same reactor that at a smaller scale cannot produce a net energy return. Apparently, they think a larger scale version will be net positive. In any case, they don't plan to test until something like 2018-2020, is it? How far down the rabbit hole of oil decline from peak will we be by then? Even if it worked as planned, would there be sufficient capitol to make more or even time to, as the basic infrastructure of civilization degrades without replacement or upkeep due to reduced revenue, by way of less economic activity from higher priced fuel, and so on? But even beyond those basic questions is this one: How does fusion help replace crude oil? We still have a problem with transport. Ahh, transport of goods and services! That's the one advocates of a fusion forget about. Ok, sure, with enough capitol and time an electric transport system could be erected, however meanwhile the economy would still be tanking, so I don't see the basic problems of peak oil would be solved.
We are reliant on oil. We need an energy packed liquid to replace oil, primarily for transportation. Ethanol - won't scale up. Algae - still not there yet, there's the problem with scaling up even if it did work, and the cost per gallon which we don't know yet.
Once a civilization has become dependent on an energy filled liquid that is pressurized to rise up out of the ground at about 74 mbd, how is that replaced? It's equivalent to 37 super tankers a day! That's an awful lot of valleys filled with algae growing farms.
For the same reason that we can't scale fire down too far in size. Heat loss per unit area decreases with increasing size. We see that with gravitaionally bound fusion reactors as well. Anything smaller than a few tens of times Jupiters mass, and no dice. Then the bigger you make it the faster it burns through its fuel. The problem with this sort of technology is even if it works, it will come in multi-gigawatt units. Not an easy thing to plan for. Not an easy thing to plan for what to do when it is down and the output must be made up for.
It will be interesting to watch how commercial fusion-on-earth for electrical power progresses, if at all.
It seems the majority opinion that BAU will not happen once fossil fuels are exhausted.
I am fine with that.
I hope that humanity will reach a sustainable size, and be happy, with whatever resources remain. Hopefully those that remain will be 'small' enough in population that there is enough easily accessable copper and steel (abandoned cities?) to have power via solar and wind turbines :)
All to say is that we already have a solar system fusion power source, and with today's technology we just need to collect it via solar panels and wind turbines. An existance using electricity mostly collected from wind and solar will not be BAU. (I am curious as to whatever the 'new age' will be called.)
Not an origainal idea, but Pretty sure the current Age will be called something like the Fossil Fuel era.
I suspect that the huge delay is telling us something : either it's not do-able - or we aren't bright enough to do it - or we doing it in the wrong way.
Software development provides a useful duality - above a certain software project & code size, software development projects simply aren't do-able. Humans can't create huge software systems that work.
I suspect that the current fusion projects may be suffering the same effect - and have been for decades ... but nobody wants to point out that the Emperor has no clothes. Too many vested interests and careers.
We need a new start - probably from the private sector.
Well the cold fusion crowd think they got something.
http://www.coldfusionnow.org/
http://www.lenr-canr.org/
And there is this...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
How many fusion related conferences, meetings, pensions of managers, civil servants and low grade scientists have we, our parents and our grandparents paid for over the years?
And how much does it cost to deploy a soldier for a year to Afghanistan? Or to employ a Senator?
I'm betting there is worse to spend your cash on.
I took a look at the fron of the Cold Fusion Now website, and I must say I am thoroughly disappointed.
They have labs generating MW of power with mere grams of palladium and they are still looking for funding?
That smells like gross incompetence or a scam to me. I wouldn't touch it with your money.
At least the polywell folks are realistic in their claims, and they are starting from a technology base that has been definitely demonstrated to produce fusion. They could be wrong, but at least they don't sound like they are trying to hawk the latest generation of perpetual motion machines.
I wouldn't touch it with your money.
Plenty of things being touched with "my money". (really a debt obligation) Plenty are more questionable than explaining 'Hey - why do these palladium 'nodes melt, explode or do nothing'? Polywell, understanding how to reproduce the ways to melt down a palladim 'node and how to trigger the fusing....I'm for that even if neither end up being a human useable power source.
trying to hawk the latest generation of perpetual motion machines.
Terrawatt research claims to have one. Or perhaps it removes the magnetic field from the output side. No idea - but the appeal to authority is the UL numbers make 'em sound authentic.
http://www.terawatt.com/ecm1/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&i...
Well, CF went through the usual scientific paces and came up empty, even with scientists who really wanted it to work.
And Terawatt? That one is truly hard core. If I had tech like they seem to be claiming up my sleeve my "demonstration" would be to run my lab off the thing, not some UL tech to verify the instrument calibration on a rigged demo.
This is the bio of their "Chief Scientist" listed on their website...
ROFLMAO!! Hey wait a minute, the guy stole my idea! I need a lawyer...
When this guy gets a Nobel prize in Physics and is invited to research at the LHC, I'll take another look at what he says...
Yeah, right!
Bet he can't do the math to come up with real physics of intermolecular fluctuations.
http://www.physics.adelaide.edu.au/~dleinweb/VisualQCD/Nobel/
My guesses:
1) The graph reflects pulses of energy - not the overall output.
2) The magnets are being de-magnetized
The testing was done in 2008. I can't believe that spinning magnets can't be commercialized in under 3 years.
Is this more "market fundamentalism"? That by adding a little bit of free-market fairy dust immense problems get solved? Free markets are good at deploying already designed technologies which are also short-term economically profitable.
Nuclear fusion is extremely hard because of the laws of physics. Nuclei repel electromagnetically. Fusion only occurs with a 'dead-on' collision, but all other near-misses result in increased entropy and dissipation. Also, new unexpected discoveries were made, showing unexpectedly high energy losses due to complex nonlinear dynamics.
And in truth there has not been substantial large-scale investment in fusion research, it has been rather meager. All the inertially confined fusion investment (the only thing happening in the USA at a large scale) is for nuclear weaponry, not power production.
I believe fusion will never be economically successful for fundamental physics reasons. We need to concentrate immediately on what works now: fission. That it went from fundamental discovery in 1938 to commercial use in early 1950's is not accidental: physics was on its side. Physics is not on the side of controlled fusion. It won't ever be.
I personally believe that large-scale deployment of fission (e.g. 50-75% of primary energy use) is the only hope to prevent thousands of years of barbarian civilization.
Link up top: How Soon Will Saudi Arabia Turn To Nuclear Energy?
I find this absolutely astounding! 200 kWh per cubic meter for steam desalination verses only 6 kWh for RO? That just doesn't make sense. If that were the case why would anyone ever use steam? Saudi has a lot of RO plants but their largest plant is steam. They have a steam plant sitting just North of Ras Tanura that has two very large pipelines, almost large enough to drive a Volkswagen through, that runs all the way to Riyadh. But this plant doesn't run on electricity, it runs on natural gas.
I have never heard of a steam desal plant that runs on electricity. I don't believe there is any such thing. Of course they were probably talking about the "equivalent" of 200 kWh but that is still way too much. And four places in the article they talk about Saudi's natural gasoline reserves. Obviously they meant natural gas reserves but the whole article smacks of an author who has no idea what he or she is talking about.
Edit: I just found this on the net.
Saltwater Technologies Desalination
Just as I thought, 200 kWh is just silly.
Ron P.
Indeed, the Saudi Desalination plants are net providers of electricity. That is, they are combined desal/generation plants fueled by gas or oil. They make steam and then use the leftover heat for desalination. Thus, it is difficult to compare efficiencies with RO plants.
Darwinian -
I also didn't get the impression the author had too good of a grasp on either the technology or the numbers.
One thing that should be kept in mind when comparing reverse osmosis with multi-effect evaporation, is that the operating pressure (and hence the energy consumption) associated with operating an RO system is dependent on the salinity of the water being processed. This is why RO is the preferred choice when operating on relatively low-salinity brackish water, whereas the energy consumption of evaporators is only very weakly dependent upon salinity. Which says to me that if one is trying to desalinate actual sea water, RO may not be the first choice, particularly if one has a cheap source of fossil fuel, such as natural gas in the Middle East.
Also, while I can't be certain, I strongly suspect that the energy figures for RO are in terms of the electricity input to the RO unit and not the total amount of fossil fuel used to generate that electricity. Given that a good power plant runs at about 40% efficiency, the total electricity consumption for RO would then have to be multiplied by 2.5 to arrive at the true total energy consumption.
Size can also be an important factor. RO units are largely modular, so beyond a certain size there is little economy of scale. However, multi-effect evaporators do benefit greatly from economies of scale.
Let us also not forget that desalination evaporators can also be solar powered, and Saudi Arabia has no shortage of strong sunshine.
Does anyone know at what rate these various technologies can produce water? Surely just as in the PO debate it would be the rate that a particular amount of input energy can produce at which would be the salient point (no pun intended!).
No point building a plant to support 10,000 people if it does not provide enough water per day for them...
Desalination... Wiki
That plant is just about one mile north of the Gazlan Power Plant where I worked for two years, the one with the two huge pipelines running all the way to Riyadh. Anyway that will produce 300,000,000 cubic meters of fresh water, from salt water, in one year. That works out to be 821,355 cubic meters per day or 34,233 cubic meters per hour or 570 cubic meters per minute.
That is a lot of water. If you have the natural gas, or oil, to power the plants then there is really no limit to the fresh water they could produce. After all they could just build another just like it up the coast a ways.
Ron P.
Thanks Ron,
I'm kinda guessing that it must use a whole slaughter load of NG to get that 300 million cubes per year. Here's the question: could it be done with electricity?
RO plants are always run by electricity, electric motors to be exact. The motors pump the water through the RO plant which is just a variation of a micron filter. All the water does not go through the filter. Most of it is flushed out the other end, a little more salty than when it entered. A back-flush ever so often washes out minerals and other stuff that might clog the filter.
Anyway they are modular. If you want more water just add more modules. But RO plants are usually not nearly as large as the steam plants.
Ron P.
i wonder why the ksa isnt using solar energy for desalination, sort of the old fashioned way, the way lewis and clark did in 1805 ?
http://www.lewisandclarktrail.com/section4/orcities/seaside/saltworks/in...
except that lewis and clark were "salinating" instead of desalinating. they left out the condensation part.
Solar distillation is an old technology. Here's a description of some of the work which has been done. The efficiency of a solar still can be improved by making the still air tight and evacuating it, which is usually not done. Or, the heated salt water can be plumbed thru a flash evaporator. Or, go for concentrating collectors driving the whole process instead of using natural gas. It's interesting that a greenhouse can be designed to also function as a solar still, providing fresh water to grow plants in locations which are water starved. In the desert, where it's cool at night, heat a large mass of water in the day, then run the evaporator/greenhouse at night, increasing the thermodynamic efficiency and keep the greenhouse warm in winter.
E. Swanson
Debbie Cook had an article on desalination a while back, Desalination - Energy Down the Drain. According to that article:
She shows this graph of energy use per acre foot. The plant under consideration (Poseidon's Ocean Desal.) was a reverse osmosis plant.
And, on a serious note, Ron, I have a question about desalinization in general, and hope you might have the technical savvy to answer them.
How salty is the water that exits the plant? Or is the salt that is removed seggregated from the water source?
Doesn't all that salt make the body of water from which you are intaking much saltier over time?
I know that the salts come from the land, as water from rain and irrigation run out to sea. Over time, inland fresh water sources have been made unfit by just such procedures. It is fine that salt is being removed, but isn't the area close by made unfit for fish or other marine life from that process? Or the land close by. And if the salt is segregated out from the water, it has to be deposited somewhere on the land, and that would destroy the land, it would seem to me.
In short, my theme for today is TANSTAAFL, and unintended consequences from good ideas. How does commercial desalinization overcome that?
Craig
Okay, think of a pipe that is twice the diameter at the intake as it is at the outflow. Off that pipe are thousands of small capillaries that are also open on both ends with the open end much smaller. Water under high pressure is passed through the system. Fresh water sweats off the small capillary tubes. They are actually porous and can pass water molecules but not sodium or other larger molecules found in the water. The water that dumps out the other end is salt water, a little saltier than when it entered.
No salt is removed or segregated, it stays with the water that is pumped out as brine. Nothing accumulates.
Hey, we are talking about the ocean here, or a very large sea like the Persian Gulf. The water around the dumping place will be only a little saltier but nothing to worry about. The tide will take care of everything. The salty water is not dumped on land, it is dumped into the sea, right back to where it came from.
Some RO plants are inland in some areas but they are using non-potable aquifer water. In that case there is no salt to worry about.
You must stop thinking that there will be unintended consequences with the discharge water. That is not a problem. The problem is with the cost for fuel or electricity for desalinating the water.
Ron P.
HAcland -
Just to provide some perspective, if you just evaporate the water into steam without condensing it, you will consume about 1,100 BTU per pound of water. However, if you efficiently reclaim most of the heat released during condensation, such as in a multi-stage evaporator, then the unit energy required can drop to roughly 50 BTU/lb, which is about 420 BTU per gallon of desalinated water produced.
Heating oil contains about 130,000 BTU per gallon, so if you power the evaporator with heating oil, you will produce about 270 gallons of water per gallon of oil burned (assuming 90% efficiency). A reverse osmosis unit can do quite a bit better, but it uses high-quality electricity instead of low-grade waste heat as in the case of these combined power plant/desalination units in Saudi Arabia.
Whichever technology is used, it's still a very energy-intensive way of providing potable water. In essence, one is drinking fossil fuel. As energy becomes more scarce and expensive, those countries or regions heavily dependent upon desalination will find themselves increasingly vulnerable.
Thanks Joule, that's the sort of detail I like!
Is a 90% efficiency possible/realistic?
HAcland -
Yes it is, though perhaps a bit on the optimistic side. Basically, what you are doing is evaporating water and then condensing it, with most of the heat losses being through heat transfer off of surfaces. (Theoretically, the only energy required in desalination is the difference in free energy between salt water and distilled water, i.e., the 'heat of solution').
Keep in mind that a modern high-efficiency domestic hot water heater can approach 90% thermal efficiency, that is, only 10% of the heat content of the fuel is lost in the stack gases.
The real energy cost of "waste heat", assuming you want electricty and are simply making use of the waste heat, is the decrease in the efficiency of generation necessitated by using the wasteheat application. I suspect for a well designed plant that this is only a few percent. Thermodynamically the maximum efficiency of the power plant is reduced because the temperature of the "waste heat" is larger than the temperature of simply dumping it into a cooling tower. I suspect this is only a few percent, but it would be nice to see some real numbers.
Ok, I guess I have to make a remark here, despite the fact that I am too sleepy to think.
A while back we were given the task of thinking about turning solar into drinking water in SA. What we came up with was a stirling engine that did nothing but pump water, no electricity involved, run of course on concentrated sunlight. It worked just fine and was mechanically super simple.
You want a lot of water? well, use a lot of stirling engines.
And that was the end of it. Once again, fossil fuel was too "cheap". All we gotta pay for it is our planet.
Nighty night.
How Soon Will Saudi Arabia Turn To Nuclear Energy?
Will it be 'allowed' and would it be 'allowed' to continue if the government changes?
(Bonus for the better read....In listening to wack-job radio, one talking head claimed there was a claim that the Shaw of Iran had nuke ambitions. Does anyone have more than a talking0head charge they can share? If true - what does such mean for the "peaceful atom"?)
And back to water:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingshot_%28water_vapor_distillation_syste...
The two components are a water purifier called Slingshot that uses a fraction of the power of alternatives and a Stirling engine based power generator that works on cow dung. The $1500 water purifier will produce 1000 liters of water a day, while the $3,700 generator produces around 1 kW, which is enough to deliver light to a small village.
The Shah of Iran most certainly did plan nuclear power with the blessing of the US/UK. His nuclear engineers were learning their trade at the same university as me, back in the late seventies. Obviously when he was deposed, those plans got dropped.
The 'fission plant for power' is well known and documented.
The talking head said (as i remember) 'it is alledged that the Shaw had his own nuclear weapons program'. I'm hoping someone has something better than a verbal statement by a podcast. A book, released papers, results of a FOIA. It may have been in vogue for most nations to have a nuclear weapons program in the 1960's/1970's - and may have been canceled so they could buy the Westinghouse reactors.
Hence my looking for something beyond a comment on a podcast.
those plans got dropped.
Its possible that documents were released from the Shaw's time about what the Shaw was up to.....would be interesting if documents of that time showed some kind of weapons program. But that would be 30+ years ago and hard to verify.
I went fishing this weekend, off the SE coast of England. Best part of the trip was seeing a 100+ turbine wind power array under construction. Talking to the boat's skipper as we tried in vain to catch the promised "big fish", he explained that the turbines sit on top of steel poles bedded into the seafloor, and that these are very thoroughly coated in anti fouling agents.
While I can understand the logic of wanting those poles to stay free of marine encrustations, I couldn't help but think we've missed an opportunity here. Our fisheries are in decline, and the foundations of these wind turbines could have been used as artificial reefs. Given trawlers won't be dredging their way through wind turbine arrays, they could have formed effective marine reserves where fish could breed and grow unmolested (apart from sustainable line-fishing perhaps). I'm sure there will be some benefit from just excluding the boats; but artificial reefs added into the mix would have made for much richer habitats.
Seems to me we have another "monoculture" mentality in operation; trying to make the offshore wind farms as efficient as possible as wind farms, while ignoring any other possible benefits that could also be achieved. We could have had 2+2=5 here; instead we've ended up with 2+0=2.
Is this typical elsewhere, or are there examples of people planning large scale renewables installations with the "big picture" firmly in mind?
Sadly 'big picture' thinking in our specialised world is fairly rare.
Perhaps the antidote is thinking really really small...
http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/eco-tourism/photos/10-of-the-smallest-homes...
Economically disadvantaged people across the US have already adopted this trend. See: trailer parks.
It strikes me as embarrassing the way some of us on the left need to relabel small houses as some kind of ecomovement rather than be tainted with the social stink of having less than others. Like, it's cool if it's a choice, but it's shameful if it's done out of necessity. Give it some time and if the decline crowd is right we'll all end up there in the same tiny boat.
I don't mean to single you out in particular; it's just an observation about the general silliness of this rebranding effort. I don't disagree with the sentiment of getting by while consuming less- it's just that trying to make it seem hip strikes me as off. We do it because it's right, not because it's trendy. And a lot of people were here doing it before us because they had to.
wideblacksky, I get your point and I think we have some common ground.
However, I do think there is a big difference between the newly poor supporters of BAU, making do in a trailer park and pretending to still being a part of the "American Dream" and those who are consciously adopting a new paradigm.
This group is reaching for sustainability and dropping out of the consumer society by choice and design rather than being just forced into it by necessity. I think it is possible to live in very high quality micro homes, trailer parks don't qualify.
Right after I was married I lived in a mobile home (12' X 60') and found it of high quality. The neighbors in the trailer park were friendly solid citizens. Doubltess there are sleazy mobile home parks, and doubtless a lot of sleazy people live in them, but in general trailer parks can be nice places to live. If I wanted to live in a nonurban environment, I'd look favorably on moving into a mobile home once again, as do many retirees.
In the UK I can imagine getting Planning Permission for a hi-tech tiny eco house in black & chrome .. but a similar trailer-park style home would be banned.
It's all a matter of image.
Hi-tech eco warrior ... or trailer trash.
There are trailer parks and trailer parks (or RV parks). I lived in my RV for 6 years (they call these folks "fulltimers"). I was travelling to various contract jobs, paying lots of child support and insurance and it didn't make sense to buy or rent a home. I generally paid about $300/month plus electric (usually about $25), and found it a very efficient way to live. I stayed at some beautiful sights (often very close to the job) and spent more time outdoors.
One park near me has sites open next to a trout stream, under the trees for $275 plus electric. Full hookups. Done properly it can be a fairly "green" way to live. I miss it sometimes.
There are at least two ways of preventing the downside of over specialistion:
a: Encourage highly focussed specialists to jump over the top of their walled garden now & then in order to do something a bit different and mind expanding.
b: Use 'Connectors' (as per Malcolm Gladwell) to cross-pollinate specialist groups.
We can optimise the (somewhat broken) system that we have built over the centuries - we don't need to destroy it.
The anti-fouling agents are applied to minimize the growth of the marine crustaceans because they eat away at the metal by one form or another thereby weakening the metal piling foundations. But, that doesn't mean they couldn't have put outer rings or other means of life form growth foundations around the pilings such as waste concrete debris. But, usually civil engineers are trying to prevent the growth of destructive organisms.
But, that doesn't mean they couldn't have put outer rings or other means of life form growth foundations around the pilings such as waste concrete debris.
Or something else.....
http://www.qualitymarine.com/News/Feature-Articles/Electricity-and-the-R...
"Seems to me we have another "monoculture" mentality in operation.."
Not entirely. There really is more 'compound benefit' thinking going on than we sometimes fear. I have seen several accounts of the benefits of Marine life development and protection in Windfarm waters.
Here's what I could find from a quick search.
http://www.awea.org/faq/wwt_offshore.html
" Given the relatively small area of seabed that is required there is no evidence to suggest that total fish catch will decline as a result of wind farm developments; if anything the opposite is true. Fish stocks have been in decline for many years due to overfishing. Many environmental groups believe that wind farms will provide welcome sanctuary for fish spawning as well as refuge from intensive fisheries activity."
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VDY-4X39400-1...
"Wind farms are often planned offshore where wind conditions are favourable and the visual impact is less important. Wind farms have both positive and negative effects on the marine environment. Negative effects include bird collisions, underwater sounds and electromagnetic fields, whilst positive effects constitute functioning as artificial reef and acting as no-take zones for fish, with possible spill-over effects.
This paper presents a spatially explicit framework to analyze effects of wind farms on the marine environment and aims to evaluate how wind farms can contribute to protection of the marine environment through strategic and economically viable location choices."
Re: "Chavez Warns of Cut in Venezuela Oil Supplies to U.S. if Colombia Attacks"
That crazy commie bastard Chavez! Where does he get the nerve to cut off our energy supply if we take action contrary to his interests?
"EU to apply pressure on Iran with extra sanctions"
Oops, hehe. Never mind.
How did our tar get underneath his jungle? Now we're down to grappling and grifting for the low grade.
Iran was prime target of SCADA worm
An absolutely outstanding interview of Jim Rickards on King World News.
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2010/7/26_Jim_R...
If you have 20 minutes you really should listen to it. He totally gets it. Listen to the way he talks about the need to simplify..
Very good interview
edit: unlike the one with Christopher Monckton to who is just about the most ridiculous person on the planet. I am ashamed that he is a Briton. Btw, people should be under no illusions that Monckton is a member of the House of Lords, he is not and never has been. He is just a complete buffoon of a man.
Yes good interview, but shame on him - he pulled about 90% of that from "Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter and never gave a single nod to Tainter and his work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
One of my on-line friends wrote a story about people washing pelicans for the San Francisco Chronicle. Here's her blog post on the impact this work can have.
Thank you for the link to "blog post". We are far from the action here in the high desert and this puts it in a personal POV.
Re: WikiLeaks: More US documents coming on Afghan war
Is the current state of events as concerning financial fraud, both on Wall St. and Main St., distortions about reality and the state of our "Wars" Orwellian in the classical sense?
Pres. Obama is discovering that plugging leaks is a futile waste of time. While the DOD rushes about looking for the "traitors" who had the audacity to leak the unvarnished truth there is hardly an eyebrow raised. Most reasonable people long ago assumed that the whole war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan was a fraud. How this puts our young men and women serving in these "pretend wars" is more to the point. Let's cut our losses now. Seal the country off like Somalia.
Somalia is not 'sealed off'. And who is the warmonger here in any case?
toilforoil - Can you be any more obtuse? Perhaps you're referring to "Somali Pirates" operating freely in a failed state? Are you saying that my statements brand me a warmonger? Is this the brightest response there is on TOD? Truly pathetic!
joe - you might consider a switch to decaf. i think toilforoil was referring to al Qaeda and the Taliban who sheltered them as the warmongers, but he definitely wasn't referring to you. I share your anger at these revelations and the course of a nearly decade-old war, but I don't necessarily agree with your suggestion of "sealing off" Afghanistan. Either way, please take it down a notch.
Tejanojim, your remarks are aimed at the wrong guy. Toil is the one who should tone it down a notch. He has a habit of throwing out insulting snippets with no explanation of what the hell he is talking about. Anyone would get angry at such.
Ron P.
Jeepers, I guess I'll just have to spell it out.
Somalia is not sealed off. I have neighbours who travel there not infrequently for commercial reasons, and others who go to visit relatives. Nice people, generally.
Who is the warmonger here in any case? Why should Afghanistan be sealed off, if such a thing was even remotely possibly in the first place? Has Afghanistan started a war against anyone recently? I know that some cowards, who as it happened had control of the executive branch of the US government in 2001, decided to appear to seek revenge against a few hundred criminals loosely organised from bases in Afghanistan and who were somehow tied to a gang of mostly Saudis who almost certainly managed to pull off a murderous crime on US soil. Said chicken hawks with the mental capacity of barnyard roosters decided to overthrow a group of nasties in Afghanistan by starting what was proposed to be a short military action. Most citizens in the various countries making up USland went along with this foolish notion, or were cowed into silence by a whole lot of idiots who knew nothing of Afghanistan. People like Eric Margolis who has a working brain and experience in that, shall we say difficult, part of the world were ignored or mocked.
The US starts war after war, winning none accept against tiny nations such as Grenada, but nonetheless the boys who get hard-ons inspecting the troops and the girls like Madeleine and Condeleeza and Hilary, who I suspect wear strap-ons to bed, who like to appear tougher than even Maggie T, still want to play war, and the hell to the health and well-being of the world, the nation and the folks in uniform.
I actually supported the war against Afghanistan, but not for reasons that would endear me to US imperialists. My calculation, which I openly expressed in fora as preparations for war were underway, was that yes, it would be tough for the Afghanees, but that in the big picture, the war would bog down the imperialists and at long last people in central and South America would have a chance to pursue long awaited reforms. Almost no one supported me, as antiwar types rarely are into these kinds of cold-blooded calculations.
Well, a horrible price has been paid, as made evident by the massive loss of innocent lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and to a much lesser extent in the US and associated countries. On the other hand important social and political advances in countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia are underway, to name only two countries whose actions today would in previous times have invited the overt and covert military interference of the Imperium. To be fair, the Imperium did try to overthrow the elected government of Venezuela, but failed. Still, I suspect that, if not for the erosion of American power by the failing effort to shock and awe peoples who've seen it all before, then Venezuela would have a puppet government installed today.
In any case, I wasn't suggesting that Joe is a warmonger. But maybe a little underinformed about the porosity of international borders.
It is my opinion that almost all large national governments keep some of their military actively engaged. Think of it as a sustained 'live fire' exercise to keep up actual experience.
Kinda like how a private pilot has to keep flying a certain number of hours to keep their cert valid....
Not trying to say it is right or wrong. Trying to convey it 'is just what they do.'
Or perhaps it's the military bureaucracies who find ways to lead the political class into foolish adventures. Or, as the very wise President Eisenhower warned, the agenda is being set by a military-industrial complex.
Jeez, I can't believe I'm agreeing with Darwinian on anything, but I'd have to agree "tone it down a notch"
I like a good rant as much as the next guy, and I tend to agree with you on Venezuela and Bolivia, but the strap-ons were a bit much. Not that there's anything wrong with that. On some other blog. :-)
How about everyone tone it down a notch?
Jeez. I don't know what it is, but February and July are always flamewar season. Maybe the weather....
Joe,if only Somalia could be sealed off.It's not only the pirates.Just look at a few incidents in Ethiopia,Uganda and Kenya.
In Australia we have Somali "refugees" who are doing time for terrorist related offences.But of course that is out stupid fault for allowing them into the country in the first place.
Or poisoning theirs in the first place with toxic chemicals from Europe destroying their fishing grounds. What goes around comes around. It's a small world after all....
Edit: I'm not attacking you just wanted to point that out to most people who wonder why the Somalis are so intent on piratein'.
Pentagon Papers redux. Gawd its like groundhogs day again and again. And I'll bet the person that did it was another intelligent, loyal, non-ideological type like Ellsburg was who saw a war that was moving from concrete pragmatism to militaristic idealism.
http://www.mountainx.com/news/2010/072110the_end_of_suburbia
Living west of Asheville I was somewhat excited about their transition initiative. I have friends there and, Asheville being a sort of magical place (as small cities go), I was hoping that their transition group wouldn't be populated by too many magical thinkers. So:
http://transitionasheville.ning.com/profiles/blogs/emoto-on-the-gulf-of-...
OK. My hope was that the idea of Transition Asheville would be a more........pragmatic one.
I plan to attend some of their upcoming functions, and with an open mind.
I don't personally claim that the water is different when we 'send positive thoughts' into it, but I do think it changes 'your own water', you might say.
Ultimately, I think it would act like meditation or focused thought patterning.. and as such, and as ever, Your Mileage May Vary.
I hear you, 'kuhl. It's just that there are over 50 churches of one sort or another in my little county, plenty more over in Asheville. Plenty of praying going on. Not enough problem solving. They seem very "Permaculture" fixated. Too idealistic for me perhaps.
Like I said, I'll check it out with an open mind. I'm just not into the "if we all hold hands and pray together we can fix this / group-magic" thing.
I prefer teachers to preachers.
I guess I've always been an outlier of sorts, though I'm glad they have each other. Keeps 'em out of trouble ;->
Preacher:"Prayer works."
Scientist:"Thou art a superstitious charlatan".
The truth:
Prayer changes people.
People change things.
Oh Lordy, make this terminal cancer in my body disappear.
Oh Lordy, why hath thou foresaken me?
Priest's answer: You didn't believe/pray hard enough.
Scientist's answer: Priest has a cop out for everything. The Lord is always working in "mysterious" ways when the ways suggested by Priest don't work.
I saw the video of "I am sorry...Please forgive me...etc." (an apology to the Gulf waters) on YouTube. Chanting....
The photographs just showed clean waves breaking on a clean beach. There was no oil. I think it was a little bit of a disconnect.
Probably there is a wish to imagine it didn`t happen and that chanting "I am sorry..." will make the whole thing O.K.
But it is good in a way that people are trying to connect their oil use with what happens in the ocean.
Chanting....it seems so medieval somehow. Of course, that is fine with me. Anyone can chant if they want to. Maybe chanting is making a comeback. WHen people feel helpless and small, chanting is better than nothing???
This has me a little miffed:
I "launched my working group" 15 years ago. I'm not sure what their idea of a "launch" or "working group" is, but a sense of urgency would be encouraging. They seem a little relaxed about their Transition.
Well, relevant to this Unleashing and what you said about Meditation above, an important corrolary is that people here in the states are still swamped with the distractions borne by cheap energy and a cheapened culture that dutifully follows it. It's pretty tough to invent this whole discipline and 'new paradigm' while still 'soaking in it..'
Hard to truly clear your mind with all the noise.. so a lot of the people who see clearly enough that changes need to be happening, are still bogged down by the culture that they're mired in..
The analogy I keep getting in my head is that we're all deep in the mud, and those who are trying to climb out of it and get clean finally.. well, until they're pretty far out of it, they'll still be as coated in mud as the others.
"Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig enjoys it." Mark Twain..
Anyhow, Old Mac has me inspired.. I can't let him finish his next system with me procrastinating on mine. Time to scrape a little mud off, temporarily.
I understand, but it doesn't make me feel better. Kinda like what 'flash said above, in another context (but not really):
"Not trying to say it is right or wrong. Trying to convey it 'is just what they do.'"
I'm with you. I have too many irons in the fire and need to keep going. My solar thermal system is a jackleg (but working) assemblage of junk and I need to "get'er done". I'm behind on my firewood as well.
My oldest sister says that I never finish anything but it all works. That's why she thinks I'm a genius. She seems to finish everything, so maybe she's the genius.
You go, Mac! We luv ya, buddy!
part 1 of berman's interview here:
http://www.aspousa.org/index.php/2010/07/interview-with-art-berman-part-1/
a lot more meat there.
Modern cargo ships slow to the speed of the sailing clippers | Environment | The Observer
Rubin said in his book that fuel costs rise to 50-60% of the total for transocean shipping with oil at $100/bbl; always wanted to find more data about that.
The Physorg website is pushing the new Patzak paper:
Predictions of Coal, CO2 Production Flawed, Says Latest Research: http://www.physorg.com/news199375442.html?
Here is the link to the actual paper, with the abstract:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V2S-50338NC-1&_user=108429&_coverDate=08%2F31%2F2010&_rdoc=2&_fmt=high&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info(%23toc%235710%232010%23999649991%232163742%23FLA%23display%23Volume)&_cdi=5710&_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct=41&_acct=C000059713&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=108429&md5=789d52395d34e83b4e2b03acd6b5073b
Do we really believe CO2 from coal will decline after 2011 ?
Patzak really has gone out on a limb here.
Also, I am rather discouraged that Patzak seems to be, by his language in the Physorg interview, disparaging concerns over AGW. Sure, Patzak is a near-term peaker of fossil fuels, but humans modify the climate through many means.
Also, he seems to want to pile onto the IPCC stereotypes that are found throughout the anti-science American right-wing.
The scenarios that were used by IPCC in the AR4 were decided well in advance, by another working group, so we are looking at scenarios that are now several years old. And, since the IPCC AR4 authors don't claim expertise in fossil fuel production and economics they accepted what the energy industry/specialists say about fossil fuel availability. It seems like Patzaks real beef would be with the energy industry/fossil fuel community than with the IPCC.
Remember When . . .
Next week will be the 20th anniversary of Gulf War One, when Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait. I assume that for most of the 40 to 50 something plus set, it doesn't seem that long ago at all.
In any case, 20 years from now will bring us to 2030. 2010 is to 2030 as 1990 is to 2010. Kind of puts things in perspective.
Our best case indicates that the (2005) top five net oil exporters will be collectively approaching zero net oil exports around 2030. For most of us, I assume that life in 1990 was a lot like life in 2010, but I wonder what life will be like in 2030?
I also wonder very much what life will be like in 2030, and curiosity about this is one thing that keeps me going. In 2030, if I'm still alive, I'll be ninety years old. My father was born in 1896 and lived until 1956; he saw the first automobiles and lived during the first half of the oil age. I was born in 1940, and if I live another twenty years I'll see some of the last internal-combustion cars and the closing chapters of the oil age.
The great value of your Export Land Model is that is shows how remarkably fast imports of oil will decline after Peak.
However, I'm having trouble with 2005 as Peak Year: If 2005 was truly Peak, then why hasn't there been a notable decrease in oil production by now and an even more notable decline in oil imports into the U.S.? In other words, why have we been on a plateau for five long years?
Regarding global crude oil production, IMO rising unconventional production has partially offset the (so far) slow decline in conventional production, but I would turn the question around.
Annual oil prices have exceeded the $57 level that we saw in 2005 for four years and for 2010 to date, but why has global annual crude oil production (inclusive of rising unconventional crude production) so far not exceeded the 2005 annual rate?
Regarding US net oil imports, we have seen a substantial reduction, relative to our 2005 rate, from 12.5 mbpd in 2005 to 9.6 mbpd in 2009 (EIA).
Incidentally, the EIA appears to have their 2009 data up, but (alas) still without the data table. Saudi net oil exports through 2009:
I don't dispute that there was some degree of a voluntary reduction in Saudi net exports in 2009, but the 2005 to 2008 decline is harder to explain--as annual oil prices went from $57 in 2005 to $100 in 2008.
And here is the net export graph for Mexico:
Their net exports in 2009 were down by half, versus their 2004 rate, versus a production decline of only 22%.
Meanwhile, Chindia's net imports, expressed as a percentage of combined net exports from Saudi Arabia, Russia, Norway, Iran and UAE, rose from 19% in 2005 to 30% in 2009. At this rate, they would approach 100% in 2019.
It depends, Don, on what you look at as peak. In 2005, there was what may have been a peak in petroleum. Since the, there has been a probable peak in total liquids, though we seem to be on what has been called the 'undulating plateau' for some time. The plateau is created by rapid drilling and extreme measures to extend and enlarge production from existing fields. It is successful in creating a temporary level zone, and later results in more rapid depletion. At least that is the theory. How long will it last? I have seen statistical presentations that seem to show up to 15 or 20 years. But, I have seen none that show it lasting longer than that. What convinces me is that the US Military is planning for 2012 to 2015...
The price run-up put a big damper on demand in 2008. Since the, only moderate growth has had the effect of again raising prices, which again have stopped growth. Every time it looks like things are about to take of, oil goes to $80. That seems to be an inflection point, and that is where the economy stalls again.
We cannot be certain how things will play out. We can hope that this is a trend, and that it will s l o w l y drag out the depletion time, and lessent the dramatic impact. Depending on how serious deflation becomes (see my post, below), the negative could become overwhelming and swamp the world economy. At which point, all Hell breaks loose, I guess. I will only be 88 in 2030... and sometimes I consider my great grandfather being born in 1814, and how things have changed in just four generations. When you and I were born, 90% of the scientists who ever worked their craft were alive and active. Today, the same statistic is true. Or that is that an urban myth?
I think the things to look for are widespread power shortages, fuel restrictions causing freight delivery difficulties, and urban unrest caused by failed food deliveries. When we see these three indications, it is time to head for the hills. Until then, live it up I guess. Enjoy a few years of relative good times. Get to know your grandkids; help them to understand what is coming; prepare as best you can.
If you can figure anything better, let us all know. I always enjoy reading your posts!
Craig
Are you kidding me? Infield drilling will extend the plateau for 15 to 20 years?
Well I would think not.
No, the exact opposite is happening. Don't confuse depletion with decline. By decreasing the current percentage of decline you increase the depletion rate. So you are not slowly dragging out the depletion time, you are speeding it up. It is simple mathematics. The faster you pump from a finite resource, the higher the depletion rate.
Think of it this way. If you have one straw sucking from a milkshake, the level of shake will go down at a given rate. But if two people start sucking from the same shake, you will suck twice as much in a given amount of time but the level of shake in the glass will go down twice as fast. You are not s l o w l y dragging out the disappearance of shake in the glass, you are speeding it up to twice the former rate.
Ron P.
you are assuming a finite and fixed resource.
You lost me. What else are we talking about?
Craig
we no doubt have a finite and fixed endowment, more or less.
new resources are being discovered.
we haven't dug up all the cans full of cash in the back yard yet.
we may be spending the cash faster than it is being dug up, but the amount is not fixed.
it may be that they(aramco) couldn't do that two years ago. what can aramco do today or in the future ?
in other words, aramco may have been caught with their pants down in '08. the drop in demand may have allowed them time to pull their pants up. it appears that $ 75 oil is holding for now(within about a 10% price band), implying that aramco is able to control price by contolling supply.
i dont understand why some claim that production is either supply or demand. can't production be controlled by either? i dont know of anyone, except the fringe element herein who believes that aramco doesnt have any excess capacity.
because they are committed to $ 75 oil ?
here is my 1-1-09 post on oil price prediction, reinlisted at the start of 2010:
how difficult would it be for aramco to control price? if u.s. inventory gets tight, couldn't they offer a few supertankers full at say $75. they could probably deliver within a few weeks. inventory would loosen and price would fall.
I am sure that the Saudis are committed to getting as much as they can for their oil at this point.
That doesn't change the production curve, and indeed they may want to keep their production flat rather than trying to lower prices by selling more.
That doesn't mean that they can produce more on anything but a "drain the storage tanks" basis.
Right. And, by adding straws all over the world, you could even increase production for a period of time. But, you pay later. Like they say, TANSTAAFL.
Craig
It'll sure be different, that's for sure. In fact, I would hesitate to imagine it out of fear of being too far off. I cannot believe it seems so much like BAU...right now. I still think that one day, and quite soon, there will be 'the event' that triggers. My Mom had slow developing Alzheimers, and had a fall; probably a concussion. From that day forward the decline was astronomical. Silly analogy, but one that seems appropriate.
Empire State Building: Can the tallest be the greenest?
$13m refit aims to cut building's energy use by 40% and save emissions equal to 20,000 cars
See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/26/empire-state-building-...
Also in today's Guardian:
Engineers race to design world's biggest offshore wind turbines
British firm to design mammoth offshore wind turbines with 275m wingspan that produce three times power of standard models
See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/26/offshore-turbine-britain
Cheers,
Paul
Looking back at the last 6 months, we have seen oil up on speculation that the economy is recovering, then oil down because it will not continue; then, back up – things look good again – and down… bad news abounds!
And, no one seems to be making the connection that, with oil at $70 to $80 or more, minor changes in price will have major impact on economies. It is at that tipping point where, if minor changes make these sorts of dramatic price swings, the prospect of a major change is unthinkable.
Of course, from what I can see the more likely direction for all of this is downward, in a spiral of deflation that will prove the ultimate undoing of the world economy. So far it is gradual. Look out for that bad news day, though. It is no wonder that the Fed and the administration are working so hard to create a nice round of inflation. Too bad it isn’t working.
Craig
Climate change could spur Mexican migration to US: study
I'm thinkin this report is looking on the optimistic side, given that we're currently at 0.8C (1.5 F)and headed for 2.5-4C by 2050. Both DoD and DNI have considered scenarios that placed large portions of Mexico as being 'unlivable' by 2035-2050.
National Geographic's take on it. Global Warming Means More Mexican Immigration?
What a useless study. If Mexico is still an agricultural economy by 2080 and did not develop into something more advanced then it likely would have been governed by drug cartels for 50 years.
Perhaps the U.S. will become a more agricultural society by 2080.
from The Right and the Climate Op-Ed:
What a gem!
The "Wisdom of inaction". Can anyone think of a synonym for that?
Ribbit, Ribbit, Bubble, Bubble!
Very apt jokuhl! :-)
Try the mantra of Saint Ronnie the Wrong: "Greed is Good."
Craig
And yes, by frogs in a warming think and sink tank.
__________________________
Guys like us we had it made
Those were the days
"The "Wisdom of inaction". Can anyone think of a synonym for that?"
Procrastination?
I've been reading a book by Friedrich Hayek, published in 1960. He defines a "Conservative" (as opposed to a "progressive" or "liberal"), as someone who almost instinctively opposes change. The use of the phrase "Wisdom of inaction" would thus appear as similar to "Steady as she goes", which is not strictly, inaction, but continuing with the old tried and true ways. Lately, the GOP has been acting as "The Party of NO", opposing any of the changes which have been offered by the Democrats in the US Congress, as if the economic and financial "system" they has structured over the past 30 years had actually worked...
E. Swanson
Please... the impending implosion of the modern welfare state is a direct consequence of the liberal policies. Thank you LBJ for all you've done.
Ah yes, apparently Captain Smith was apparently "conservative" too, "steady as she goes, full speed ahead. What Iceberg...???"