277 comments on DrumBeat: August 15, 2006
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277 comments on DrumBeat: August 15, 2006
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During the Katrina price spike, some stations raised prices to as much as $6/gallon, but those who did so ended up getting prosecuted under "anti-gouging" laws.
In Baghdad, there's an "official" price, but you have to wait in line, sometimes for days. You can buy gasoline on the black market with no wait...but it costs 3 to 4 times as much.
It's generally accepted that the lines in the '70s were caused by rationing.
Why do government impose price controls and rationing when they cause long lines and don't decrease consumption? Because letting the price rise until demand matches supply often has unfortunate side effects. Think Marie Antoinette, and "Let them eat cake."
Marco.
For this reason, I think we are headed toward far more government regulation, despite the lip service the dominant political party gives to smaller government. The Alaska editorial I posted above ("Gambled and Lost") is a good example.
Alaska is a solidly "red" state. Oil has been very good to them. But they did not like the idea of a 30-year freeze in oil production taxes, even at a much higher level. Even without that piece of legislation, many think Big Oil is getting away with something.
That's why I think that an ultra-liberal state where people are allowed to demand whatever they want and with no real independant leadership is doomed in the long run - it will either fail and/or will go to the other extreme.
"Moderation in all things" is good advice, even 2500 years later.
There will apparently be a segment on Peak Oil at 9:30 PM, Eastern Time, on MSNBC (Scarborough Country). A producer asked me if I would be interested in appearing (I would assume that I am not their first choice); she is supposed to get back with me shortly. In any case, it will be interesting to see how they handle it.
Jeffrey Brown
When I launched my thread about dog food and coffee yesterday I hoped I'd get at least one comment on how we are preceived.
Well, you saw it on tv.
Liberal Cornucopian Technofix Douche was just as bad.
The little peak oil girl couldn't have been more timid and unconfident. She was very sweet and all, but that won't cut it.
I don't have much hope that the general population will take the appropriate steps to cope and adapt to oil depletion and the other catastrophes we face. I'm pretty apathetic to the whole situation. This display was infuriating, yet a the same time hilarious to me.
To those of you that are still in the fight, don't let this get you down. It was Scarborough Country for one. Second, it was on MSNBC, who I'm pretty sure no one watches.
Ever.
.......UGH!!! Stossel!!! What a d***head!
I would have said yes, companies and individuals can plan ahead and solve a problem ... if they see it coming. But what if we don't hear about it?
Strossel said "high prices are good", an opportunity to agree, and ask him how high they are going, and if people know enough to be prepared.
He's not afraid to be mean. Kunstler would definately not have hesitated to call him an "idiot", which is the only way to describe Stossel tonight. It was so obvious that the guy didn't do a shred of research or preparation.
But the thing about Stossel is that he mostly said true things which don't tell the whole story. He threw in a few stinkers as well (oil shale), but I think the way to deal with the guy is not to call him names, but to tell the truths that complement his.
IMO "higher oil prices are good" is a very mainstream PO position.
I entirely agree, unfortunately.
For lack of alternatives a realistic solution could be to let darwinian selection work out the problem by weeding out the morons while trying to salvage some basis for the future.
And I DON'T mean back to stone age primitivism.
A tricky endeavour!
I suggest once again that we carefuly read “What normative obligations do we owe to future generations?” [PDF 41 pages].
Excerpts:
Within my taxonomy, the most fundamental intergenerational question—“What normative obligations do we owe to future generations?”— is not an ethical question at all. The principle of reciprocity operates in very limited ways between generations. Caring for the elderly makes sense in part because the continued ethos of such care makes it more likely that we will be cared for in turn as we age—an implementation of the Golden Rule.84 We apologize for past wrongs as a way of signaling our intention to cooperate in the future.85 Apart from these and a few other discrete behaviors, little of what we commonly refer to as “intergenerational ethics” is subject to the principle of reciprocity. Regardless of how we behave, our descendants will not be able to reward or retaliate against us effectively. More fundamentally, implicit in any invocation of the principle is the premise that our well-being is as important as anyone else’s. From an evolutionary perspective, however, our well-being is irrelevant; all that is important is whether we survive and reproduce into the future. Using the Golden Rule to protect present well-being against claims by future generations is precisely what we should not be doing.
.../...
The ethos of reciprocity that operates within the We of a person’s family (e.g., “We the Setos”) may require an individual to undertake duties vis-à-vis family members that she would not feel compelled to undertake with respect to outsiders and would not, in turn, expect them to undertake with respect to her (“Of course your kids can stay at my house the week you’re in New York”). The same actor may also consider herself part of a We defined by her church (“Our prayers go out to members who are not able to be here this morning because of illness”) or other social unit, and part of another We defined by her ethnicity (“No daughter of mine is going to marry one of Them”). In international affairs, some assert that we should only protect citizens of other countries if doing so is in our “national interest”—another way of saying we owe protective duties only to members of We the people of the United States.
One of the current frontiers of ethics is whether our broadest We should extend beyond the human species.
History is, in part, a story of the expansion of We’s. From the tribe to the city-state to the ethnic group to the nation-state to the species, the set of actors to whom we feel at least some sense of ethical obligation has over the long run consistently expanded. It has done so because development of an ethos of reciprocity between groups otherwise in friction is almost always adaptive. The frictions that arise between two groups who have not yet formed a single We are analogous to those that arise between two individuals who have no ethos of cooperation. In the long run, they hurt both.
A Hobbesian international order is no more functional than a Hobbesian nuclear family.
By Theodore P. Seto
My emphasis.
BUT....The subject is being broached. That is positive. Now, would someone please treat the subject with the respect it deserves?
odegraph, exactly correct.
If I tell people that if they don't change, they could lose everything, and they ask, "What do we have to change or give up, and you reply "everything", it sure don't take much of a great mind to see that nothing from nothing leaves nothing.
Sometimes I love to just come by myself to listen to the sing song.....solar, pointless, too small, wind, pointless too small too localized, hybrids, give it up they consume more than they could ever save...electric cars, forget it, you will still need roads and the batteries....geothermal heat pumps...it will take Diesel to dig the holes....I mean, it gets absolutely absurd! Even if you take the darkest case scenario there will still be billions of barrels of oil and tens of billions of feet of natural gas left in the world for most of the rest of this century, OHHHH but that's right, no matter how efficiently and cleanly you try, you can't use it because of global warming.....
No, it won't sell. And it's not Stossel's fault it won't even thought the consensus view that he is as thick as a brick is certainly correct.
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
Roger,
The fact that there are billions of barrels left for the balance of the century might not matter.
We just watched (via media) Israel reduce large sections of Lebanon to rubble. We saw tanks, helicopters, and airplanes do the heavy lifting on one side and barrages of missiles from the other. Despite incredible destruction of infrastructure, the missiles never stopped.
What do we do when the barrages of missiles seek a GOSP (gas/oil separation unit) in Saudi Arabia?
Point #1 being, the oil is not here. It is there. Those GOSP's matter more to us than the Twin Towers.
Point #2 is: the more we engage Jihad, either ourselves as in Iraq, or via proxy, in Lebanon, the more expensive and tenuous it gets. In our wonderful free market way...we have commercialized terror since 9/11. Now it is a trillion dollar industry and growing. It has trajectory. It's embedded now... like farm subsidies. And, we are rapidly expanding a quasi-military machine via corporate contractors as well. Halliburton and Black River are but two examples. This phenomenon also has trajectory.
This trajectory, and the tragedy of it is: trillions of dollars of "national security" invested in surveillance and weapons systems, not your trains, wind and solar.
To subsist, this trajectory looks for, and requires, enemies everywhere, not friends.
Our persuasive powers are in decline, for sure. We lead by force, not by example. But to lead by example, we'd have to lead the charge to alternative fuels, rather than exterting military control over the remaining oil.
Golly, breaking news!!
Regarding MSNBC's handling of Peak Oil, is there any surprise considering who owns them, and who their target audience is?
Turn to the Tom Whipples of the world for journalistic support of Peak Oil. And of course TOD.
About a month ago I seem to recall seeing another local heavyweight, Mike Papantonio, as a participant at a conference that dealt with source/sink limitation issues. Mike and Joe are partners in the same firm. Hmmm...
Darwinian, does your social network extend into their world?
Ed
Unfortunately BJJ, I do not have a social network.
:)
I've also been contact by MSNBC for this segment. Apparently it's a debate with the ever-lucid champion of farness and truth, John Stossel. I'm waiting to hear whether I would have to travel to San Francisco to do this; if so, I'm likely to decline.
Richard Heinberg
Well, I'm honored to be in the same group as you, but I have to assume that I am on the "Third String" team. My "vote" is that you go.
FYI--I taped two segments on Peak Oil a couple of weeks ago (the McCuistion Program, syndicated on PBS). It was pretty much me against ExxonMobil and Michael Lynch. I did get Lynch to admit that some regions have peaked and declined, but he asserted that we are decades from any kind of world peak.
I have always been confused by the Huber/Lynch position that discrete regions will peak and decline, but the world--the sum of discrete regions--will virtually never decline. This is like saying individual oil wells will peak and decline, but the field--the sum of the output of individual wells--will never decline. This probably a good point to use with Stossel.
One other point. In a sense, Stossel and Huber/Lynch are correct. We will bring on alternatives and unconventional. The problem, as you know, is trying to replace the rapdily falling production from the big fields. Also, if you look at total fossil fuel + nuclear energy production, if we found an entire new Saudi Arabia, it would only increase our fossil fuel + nuclear energy production rate by less than 5%.
Jeffrey Brown
Great going for whomever gets the nod. Lynch tells people what they want to hear and gets paid to do so, it's the way of the masses.
Hopefully over time people will realize that the peak is near LIKE so many others of us that have seen the figures. Oh well, Either way they will see it now or after the fact and come hunting the folks that told them otherwise and those that did not tell them, and might even hate the rest of us for it happening in the first place.
People never seem to get it that WE ALL did it.
the difference between a me and a Luddite, is while i do not hate technology i do understand it has limits and those limits prevents it from saving us.
go out on any busy street with allot of people and ask them politely about basic things, like where our electricity comes from. many people will answer the outlet in the wall. a few will get it right but they are the minority.
Actually Luddite does not mean this at all. Its use has become over-simplified and corrupted over the years.
"E. P. Thompson advances many arguments against this view of the Luddites. He shows that the Luddites were not opposed to new technology, but rather to the abolition of set prices and therefore also to the introduction of what we would today call the free market."
See Wikipedia
cheers
The problem we have right now is peak liquid fuel for transportation. Peak energy will not be with us for at least a few decades.
I guess you had to see it. Joe asked, over and over again, if this ment the end of the 'suburban dream'. Sounds like that needs liquid fuels.
The coal and uranium claim wasn't untrue, but in the context didn't mean much.
"even if peak oil were true 'we have plenty of coal and uranium to supply us with energy."
The new Scientific American says something similar. They say coal and its derivatives can could tie the earth over for more than a century.
Now, now, don't get political. This is, after all, TOD. We're only interested in geologic realities. Politics and economics are not welcome here. All such intruders shall be shot.
Let them burn vodka ...
Well do I remember Phase I, Phase II, Phase III of price controls and rationing during the seventies.
More of the same--except worse--is coming, and unless we get a major recession pretty soon (which could happen), I think the presidential election year of 2008 will bring competing Dem and Republican plans for both fuel rationing and price controls.
Predictions: Democratic party platform will punish wicked oil companies with excess profits taxes and explicit price controls and provide subsidies so that low-income people can continue to drive their old gas guzzlers.
Republican party platform will be more complicated and somehow try to provide tax incentives for more oil exploration and development while providing some kind of fig-leaf tax on oil companies for profits on already existing production. I expect to see quotas or outright prohibitions on the importation of cheap and economical Chinese cars to "save" the U.S. Big Three auto industry and perhaps garner some United Auto Workers votes.
Indeed, I expect Republicans and Democrats will compete in trying to stimulate the economy by keeping out cheap foreign goods--especially if the next recession turns out nasty.
"Beggar thy neighbor" policies make great politics.
BTW, of course there is going to be a recession. There are three things neither I nor anybody else knows:
Maybe, but they'll be fighting the WalMart lobby, which has been actively promoting its "green" initiative as it prepares for this battle.
Will the "give it to me as cheap as possible" demographic be the next "soccer mom" electorate?
and people just simply running out with price controls
both are probably equally devestating to the economy