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DrumBeat: January 10, 2007
Posted by threadbot on January 10, 2007 - 9:05am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Venezuela's Chavez seeks control of gas projects
CARACAS - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Wednesday recommended the state take control of natural gas projects as part of his intensified program of nationalization.Venezuelan law currently allows foreign firms to own gas projects in the Caribbean state but Chavez proposed a legislative change.
Belarus climbs down, Russian oil may flow soon
MOSCOW/MINSK - Russia and Belarus neared a deal on Wednesday to resume oil supplies via a key export pipeline, as Minsk claimed a compromise with Moscow and European customers said crude could start flowing within hours....Belarussian Prime Minister Sergei Sidorsky said Minsk will revoke an oil transit duty it imposed last week, meeting Russia's main demand for ending a bitter trade dispute.
2006 was warmest on record for U.S.
Preliminary data from the National Climatic Data Center listed the average temperature for the 48 contiguous states last year as 55 degrees Fahrenheit.That's 2.2 degrees warmer than average and 0.07 degree warmer than 1998, the previous warmest year on record.
Worldwide, the agency said, it was the sixth warmest year on record.
IEA: Venezuela's oil nationalization could crimp output
Venezuela's plan to nationalize four multibillion-dollar crude oil projects could impede investment in the OPEC member nation and hinder its ability to boost production, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency said Wednesday.
How richest fuel global warming - but poorest suffer most from it
By the end of tomorrow the average Briton will have caused as much global warning as the typical Kenyan will over the whole of this year, according to a report.The findings highlight the glaring imbalance between the rich countries that produce most of the pollution and the poor countries that suffer the consequences in the forms of drought, floods, starvation and disease.
Chrysler questions climate change
Chrysler's chief economist Van Jolissaint has launched a fierce attack on "quasi-hysterical Europeans" and their "Chicken Little" attitudes to global warming.
The EU wants to build an energy strategy in the Caspian region
Energy security has come back again to the forefront of the European Union's international political agenda. The EU is trying to deepen its energy relations with the former Soviet republics in the Caspian region through the so called “Baku Initiative”, aimed at creating a Black Sea/Caspian regional energy community shaped on Brussels' energy rules. Even though it will not alter the current pattern of energy trade in the Eurasian space, it will help in the long run to build more market-friendly energy relation between the EU and Caspian energy producers.
Bulgaria's Cut Export Triggers Energy Crisis in Albania
The Albanian power corporation announced it is urgently looking to increase imports of electricity to avoid a shutdown of its main hydropower stations.The country is gasping to meet energy demands suffering from lack of rain and buing no more electricity from Bulgaria after the closure of nukes 3 and 4.
China misses efficiency, pollution goals in "grim" 2006
BEIJING - China last year missed its goals of making a 4 percent cut in the amount of energy it uses to generate each dollar of national income and of reducing emissions of major pollutants, a top official said on Wednesday. The failure to curb the country's appetite for energy will be a blow to top officials, who backed the challenging goal with a raft of new policies including tying civil servants' career prospects to their energy saving achievements."2006 has been the most grim year for China's environmental situation," vice minister Pan Yue was quoted saying on the Web site of the State Environmental Protection Administration.
China braces for rising gas prices
BEIJING - When Belarus reluctantly accepted a sharp rise in the price of Russian gas in the dying minutes of 2006, China started preparing for higher natural-gas prices in the middle and long terms.
Critics Say New EU Energy Policy Lacks Bite
BRUSSELS - The European Commission launches an overhaul of EU environment and energy policy on Wednesday with new proposals that critics already say are too weak to fight climate change and secure future energy supplies.
9 South Korean workers kidnapped in Nigeria
PORT HARCOURT, Nigeria - Gunmen stormed a compound housing expatriate pipeline workers in the oil-rich southern region Wednesday, kidnapping nine South Koreans and a Nigerian, officials said.Dozens of soldiers and security guards at the complex failed to foil the latest in a series of kidnappings in the area, said Ekiyor Wilson, a local government spokesman.
Changes Made to Status of Two OCS Areas; Royalty Rate Increases
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced that President George W. Bush has modified the leasing status of two areas in the Outer Continental Shelf in response to Congressional action and the requests of state leaders. In addition, Kempthorne announced that he has increased the royalty rate for most new offshore deepwater federal oil and gas leases to 16.7 percent (1/6th).
Japan and U.S. to cooperate on civil nuclear energy
WASHINGTON: Japan said Tuesday it was considering providing financing for the construction of new U.S. civilian nuclear plants as part of a larger U.S.-Japanese energy cooperation effort.
Russia Becoming 'Frighteningly Arrogant' Over Oil
The latest energy spat between Russia and one of its former Soviet neighbors has cut off oil supplies to western Europe and led to fresh concerns over the west's dependence on Russian oil. It highlights how ruthless and arrogant Russia has become with its energy policy, and forces Europe to step up its search for alternative supplies, say German media commentators.
EU: Days of secure, cheap energy over
BRUSSELS, Belgium - Energy-dependent Europe is moving to wean itself off oil imports and slash the carbon emissions blamed for global warming.With world demand for limited stocks of oil and gas surging, top EU officials have embraced a new energy strategy that emphasizes diverse and renewable sources of fuel. The plan is due out Wednesday.
Drilling for Deals in the Oil Patch
As oil prices have retreated from record levels, companies in the red hot energy industry are getting cheaper and consolidation activity is sizzling. Two more deals hit the news on Jan. 8.
Deepwater oil drilling is not for faint-hearted
As easier-to-reach oil deposits run dry, energy companies are venturing farther out into the frontier for new reserves to quench the growing thirst for oil.The U.S. Minerals Management Service defines deepwater as below 1,000 feet, a feat first achieved in the 1970s. But improving technology for exploration and production is bringing oil from much deeper water within reach.
The new technology could expand deepwater production around the globe.
Nigeria: '50 Percent of Nigerians Use Wood for Energy'
About 50 percent of Nigerians are using wood to generate energy for household activities, the Council for Renewable Energy in Nigeria has said. This constitutes a health hazards particularly to women and children the council said.
Bush lifts Alaska oil, gas drilling ban
WASHINGTON - President Bush lifted a ban Tuesday on oil and gas drilling in Alaska's Bristol Bay, an area known for its endangered whales and the world's largest run of sockeye salmon.The action clears the way for the Interior Department to open 5.6 million acres of the fish-rich waters northwest of the Alaska Peninsula as part of its next five-year leasing plan.
How low can oil prices go from here?: Keep an eye on OPEC, hedge funds, the global economy and the weather
Call it the energy dividend. After 2006 tore a big hole in consumer’s wallets and took a bite out businesses' bottom lines, a recent sharp reversal in prices may help make up for some of that pain.
China’s auto industry takes off
BEIJING - Sha Heping was a proud husband on New Year’s Eve as he put down the deposit for a $15,000 subcompact with the optional sunroof, a gift for his wife who used to commute to work by bicycle every day, even in biting winter cold.With savings from over 20 years of service as a Beijing government functionary, Sha is the latest statistic underpinning the world’s hottest market.
Next Schwarzenegger target: fuel emissions
SACRAMENTO — Escalating California's battle against global warming, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to announce today that he will order a 10% cut in motor vehicle emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide.Under the proposal, petroleum refiners and gasoline sellers would be ordered to reduce the carbon content of their fuels over the next 13 years.
Burtynsky is now beginning to tackle a subject larger than China. “I’ve been interested in trying to photograph things that may exist today that will not exist tomorrow,” he says. He’s set out to document the idea of peak oil and its impact on society. “I’m looking at the industry and the oil fields and the last great sources of oil on the planet.”
Petrobras: Won't Change Invest Plans Amid Venezuela News
Brazilian oil giant Petroleo Brasileiro (PBR), or Petrobras, will not change its investment plans in Latin America after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced he will nationalize key industries, including the energy sector, Petrobras Chief Executive Sergio Gabrielli said Tuesday."(This announcement) should not be a surprise to anybody ... He has been moving towards announcing this for some time," Gabrielli declared at an airport in Rio de Janeiro.
WWW or Whining, Waxing and Waning
“The richest 2% of the world’s adult population own more than 50% of the global assets while the poorest 50% own only 1%.” — UN Assets ReportThis reality explains much about the inability of the left of the developed world to come to terms with the real nature of capitalism, why it takes a Subcomandante or a Hugo Chavez, or indeed a Fidel Castro to remind us. Thus, whilst we get all worked up over ‘peak oil’, ‘resource wars’ and other red herrings, the real issue is the periodic crisis of over-production! Crises now complicated by the realisation that over-production has now resulted in the disaster of climate change to add to our woes. And as if to reinforce Marx’s brilliant insights, not to mention adding insult to injury, we in the developed world are now being pressured to reduce our consumption in the name of slowing down global warming!
It might amuse car-guys to know that Malcolm Bricklin (Wikipedia is kind of harsh) is still out there, and planning a Chinese-built plug-in hybrid.
Here's a good one: Detroit Automakers Want Half Billion For Battery Research
Oh yeah, CAFE, MPG requirements, etc. interfere with a "free market" ... but when you want $500,000,000 where do you go?
Half a billion is chump change. The Fed writes a check on thin air to buy more U.S. Govt. debt, and there the money is--helps to stimulate the economy, don't 'cha know;-)
I'm not actually opposed to basic research into battery technologies (at all!), but the thing I'd keep an eye on (if I had any power in this) was where "intellectual property rights" would reside. The killer these days is when public funds advance science, and then hand off ownership to a corporate entity. We, the little people, pay more than once.
All 'alternative' energy forms, just like the conventional ones, depend on public funds. That's where the money is. You can make a list and see how true that is, from tar sands to nuclear to clean coal to ethanol, it applies to every single case.
And those are direct forms of subsidy (let's count tax credits among them). It doesn't include the fact that extracting finite resources should, but doesn't, show up in the ledgers, and under normal accounting rules would require that a form of compensation be paid.
The result is a hugely distorted, entirely unrealistic, far too low, picture of the true price we pay for energy. Which can have only one effect: more consumption. Without that distortion, the price of gas would double or even triple, which in turn would lead to significant changes in the workings of society. These changes would be beneficial to all parties, except for energy producers.
The one exception was supposed to be new nuclear plants in the UK, where the government shouted out loud that all investment had to be private. There is a deep silence on that file by now. No surprise.
so why do nuclear (high capital-long life technologically intense large scale little greenhouse emission) plants
get the most scrutiny and harshness?
Doesn't it seem backwards? Government investment is useful when the quantity needed and timescale needed is deeper and longer than typical, and where the benefits are diffuse.
Says who?
Isn't it truw that the more public money you need, the worse your economics are, perhaps?
maybe chernobyl et three mile island ?
It's about Liability. If an accident occurs, who pays the claims? Gov't as self-insurers or the industry? If the industry, it exposes itself to bankrupty. Imagine the claim amount. Thus govt's usually cover the tab.
"All 'alternative' energy forms, just like the conventional ones, depend on public funds. "
This is just wrong. I have built several passive solar houses, none of which received any public funds. The house I currently live in was a passive solar remodel, that has been functioning fine on less than 30% of the heating energy that my neighbors use for 15 years.
Examples of subsidy-free alternative energy abound. Throughout the off-grid regions of the world (Nepal, Latin America) I have seen many PV systems that were purchased with no government subsidy (mostly low-tech Chinese made 1 panel, 1 battery, 1 flourescent light systems).
tommyvee.
passive solar is not an energy form
Of course it is. It is Solar Energy, with the most direct and material-saving way for homebuilders to heat. Just because you don't put it in a pipe, battery or a tank doesn't mean that it is not DIRECTLY doing what everyone else does with 'Ancient Sunlight', Oil, Gas, Wood, Coal, Nuclear (Ancient 'Starstuff'?)
But it is this very illusion that energy has to seem like 'stuff' or be run with some kind of machine, or be a quantifiable market item- if even just the charge on a battery.. to be considered energy at its most essential, which is to say, energy being used for what we need. Most importantly, Tommy's houses are NOT having to burn nearly as much of the other stuff.. so it is 'dirty-energy spared'. (And I'm not put off by the arguments of how 'someone else' is just going to use it then. It's not a cause/effect relationship)
Bob
Good for you. Any investment strategy that has to do with energy, whether personal or public, should begin with how now to need the energy in the first place. This is typically where the greatest returns lie. This country, while supposedly finally waking up, is mostly about supply and fanciful investments in magical potions like ethanol and hydogen. While we pursue the impossible, there is all that cheap insulation out there just waiting for the next home or the next retrofit.
Another one of your moronic economic statements. The Fed is not the Treasury. It is independent. And Washington must sell instruments to acquire funds. And they don't miss their payments. Don't be such a fool when folks expect better from u.
If that's chump change the Treasury can send me a check anytime, I'll recommend another for DS and one for TOD. Right after mine clears.
Roger that. You've gotten kinda anti-social real recent. People follow you on a daily basis. Don't dis them. You wanna sleep that's cool just tell someone so we can send out sentries. YOur six oclock.
You think this is funny.
So do I. I just can't figure how to mix how big this girl's boobs are with how cool my story line is. Serious ethical problems.
Thing is. I always have stuck by Jack and Jack by me. I can't stop laughing. Jack always said that the Iranian oil bourse was shit. He was totally right. Who is the only one that ever backed him 100%. Jack knows. I'll walk this time. I'll do it. I'll make the scene. Around 2 o'clock. Seeya soon.
I heard Ed Burtynsky speak two summers ago at a conference in Toronto, and recently saw "Manufactured Landscapes". Both the movie and Ed's work drive home a sense of the scale of the human endeavour, and make you ask yourself some serious questions about population, consumerism, exponential growth and sustainability. I'll never look at a Chinese-made plastic snow shovel the same way again.
For me, one of the most impressive scenes in the movie was his visit to a Chinese coal yard. Mile after mile after mile of black mountains. Then we read that China's projected coal consumption for this year is 2.5 gigatonnes. And that they missed lat year's pollution and energy intensity reduction targets by a mile. If I wasn't such a natural optimist news like that might depress me a bit.
One problem with doing something to ease additional global warming is if rich countries benefit from it.
There is a strong opinion in tiny (9million pop) Sweden that we should do what we can to slow down global warming. But there is a fair chance that GW overall would make life more comfortable here and why should we then use massive ammounts of investments to do our part in slowing down GW?
Its a larger problem for the hurting regions if GW is beneficial to Russia, they are large enough to realy matter.
I'm on thin ice here (quite literally this year) but as I understand it a key downside to global warming is as follows:
Western Europe enjoys moderate winters due to a gulf stream conveyor belt. That is, warm water from the north american gulf circulates across the Atlantic up past England, across to Greenland and then sinks to the bottom to return to the gulf.
Global warming is thought to be able to stop the conveyor belt. If this happens, Western Europe will have much colder winters.
I'm afraid Canadians share a similar attitude. Here in Ottawa we have only half an inch of snow on the ground, which we got yesterday. There is rain in the forecast. People are enjoying the mild weather and I don't mind not having to clear the driveway.
On the other hand, the Rideau Canal Skateway (listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as the largest skating rink in the world) will not open this year. When I looked last week portions still had not frozen while 18" of ice are needed to allow the grooming trucks onto the ice.
These minor benefits and irritants aside, I don't know whether rich countries will benefit from Sweden doing its part or not. I do know that poor southern hemisphere coutries will greatly appreciate your efforts.
My teenage son asked me recently about global warming. He said he would "get involved," but he didn't think he would ever be the Ghandi of global warming so what was the point. I told him that we already have a Ghandi of global warming and his message is "Turn out the light when you leave the room."
It isn't what the messenger does about global warming, it is what we each individually do about it.
John,
First, of all, thanks for being syntactically correct about the shutting down of the 'conveyor belt.' So many people talk about the Gulf Stream shutting down and this is just plain ignorant. The Gulf Stream will not shut down any more than any other major ocean current will shut down.
Second, every so often I toss out this bit of contrarian research for comment. I don't know how robust it is or if there have been follow up studies, but it has the imprimatur of Lamont-Doherty which is quite respectable in the Earth-Sciences and climate change area.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-01/teia-crr012203.php
Thank you for pointing me to that report. It helps to illustrate that there is so much we don't know for sure. It sure makes one leary of emphatic proclamations.
Yesterday I linked to an article by Douglas Gnazzo that saw a sinister side to the Club of Rome (CoR) steady-state population and capital ideals.
What I go out of it though was the thought that there really is no other solution than what the CoR proposes, is there? We have to scale down our population and impose rules on population and capital growth to ensure a steady state sustainable society.
It is often said that humans lived in a sustainable state prior to employing agriculture. The question to me then is, do we know that we can run a sustainable society at some level of "industrialization" higher than that of the HunterGatherers?
Imagine we start over on some unspoilt hypothetical part of the earth, with abundant resources, and we were given the challenge of building a society to last 100,000 years. How would you do it? What technologies would you initially use? What political system? What philosophy would you use to guide such a society through such a long time?
I am not sure that we can do it. Even starting from scratch, with the best intentions and the best of everything humans have learnt over the last 10,000 years, I am doubtful that we can do it.
What do you think?
I think Diamond's Collapse has the answer. It's possible, but only under certain conditions.
1) A small society, where everyone knows everyone, and everyone feels they have a "stake" in sustainability. "Our" water, "our" beach, "our" forest, etc. Once it's not "ours" but "his" or "theirs," it's over. Such a society needs to be isolated from possible conquerers; I suspect that's why Diamond's examples of successful sustainable societies were island-based.
2) A large society with strong central control. Perhaps with hereditary rulers (so the king has incentive to manage the country well, for his heirs to inherit).
All in all, I'm pretty doubtful, too. I suspect that if we do achieve sustainability, it's going to be at great cost to individual rights.
But of course Diamond himself has said recently:
In answer to the question above, I think it is actually unknowable. Some will work back-of-the-envelope calculations for footprints possible, etc., but it really takes too many assumptions, and too many rough guesses for the basic numbers involved.
I think we have to deal with the problems and opportunities we have around us today. Some of that is pretty simple ... if the oceans are in trouble, stop washing your car with soap (around here "drains lead to ocean"), stop eating so many fish (especially middle-class luxury fish), and so on.
There are plenty concrete things to deal with, I think.
Don't you think the question was a little rigged? They asked him, not "Are you optimistic?" but "What are you optimistic about?"
He didn't have to say he was optimistic about "the state of the world," he could have chosen something else ;-)
(like the progress he's made on his bunker)
That would be just plain silly. What is he supposed to reply? "I'm optimistic about the Los Angeles Angels' chances of winning the World Series next season, as long as they don't trade Santana"? They were expecting an answer about the state of the world, or they wouldn't have asked him.
Come on, who's being silly?
You don't think a man as literate as Diamond could turn that question to say what he wanted?
Get real, or for amusement, picture how Kunstler would have taken that question and run with it.
No, if Diamond had wanted to express pessimism, I'm am confident that he had the tools to do so.
I think he did express pessimism, with the words "Cautiously optimistic."
In any case, Diamond's book expresses optimism, too. At least, cautious optimism. But I kind of think it has to. We Americans expect a happy ending.
Leanan, you are amazing.
Let's all focus on the "cautious" part guys, and affirm our doom.
Diamond makes one statement and you distort this to imply that Diamond must think everything will be ok so anyone who has read Diamond should accept this too? That is what you are implying, though you would never say that clearly since twisting words is your primary mode of operation and you expend great effort to never let yourself be clearly nailed to a specific position.
One can only boggle at the sheer linguistic contortion of your posts.
If Diamond had been another author talking about future growth and technological advance, and had made a single statement hinting at doom, and one of the doomers had run with it, you (of all the sophists here certainly YOU) would have skewered any such poster.
Why don't you drop the word games, odograph? Or are you going to play XOM style disinformation specialist endlessly by dragging your one selected Diamond quote up in every thread that mentions Diamond by name?
Diamond is a mainstream author. He has to show clean hands, be ‘balanced’, not offend or frighten. Support the status quo. The past, of course, is fair game. But we are better than that now, aren’t we? Intellectually, democratically, technologically, spiritually, scientifically, etc. etc.
Yergin’s masterful book is another example. When the history becomes contemporary, it is hands off and sugar water.
Argh!
Noisette,
If you are not frightened after reading Jared Diamond's "Collapse," may I respectfully suggest you read it again--including the material at the back of the book.
To me the book was frightening, because it made abundantly clear that our society is making many of the same mistakes as those that failed in the past. When I looked for examples of how our society is adopting tactics and adapting to environmental changes such as those Diomond lists as choosing to avoid collapse, I looked in vain.
I've talked with various authors who have written books in which they discuss the future, most notably the economist Robert Heilbroner. I asked him some years ago why in his more recent books he was less gloomy than in his earlier ones. Immediately the brow furrowed, and he tried to explain how he thought that he owed it to his readers to offer some hope. Well, his books were great commercial successes, and had he laid on the undiluted gloom and doom I doubt if they would have been published.
Heilbroner is an extremely honest man, but there are limits set by publishers as to what you say and how you say it.
BTW, while I am thinking of it, I recommend all of Heilbroner's books, especially, "The Human Prospect" and also "The Worldly Philosophers," which is an upbeat book about the history of thought in economics.
I agree, Don. Heilbroner is tops. I regularly use sections from his "Marxism, for and against" in my social theory and political economy seminars. Incisive, balanced and well written. I recommend this particularly in light of the last entry on Leanan's Drumbeat articles today "Whining, Waxing and Waning".
You guys are too sad. English is an expressive language, and Diamond is a wordsmith in that expressive language. I see the words "cautiously optimistic" and take them exactly for the conventional English meaning they convey, no more no less. I look for no "secret" meanings. Find a dictionary that describes "cautiously optimistic" and I'll be on board.
On the other hand this line looks like something that should be in a texbook:
I think, seriously, you need to slow down and [think] of the way values are created and shared in a sub-culture, and how those values might split from mainstream society. They become at once what creates a difference, and at the same time reinforces an identity. Is TOD a place where "Cautiously optimistic" really means "pessimistic?"
I'd use caution, because redefinition of language is often, actually, a cult practice.
Anyway, if you (and certainly not me) think there is a hidden message, why don't your write Diamond and ask him? Use exactly the words used here. Ask him if "the question was a little rigged?" and ask him if because of that, "he did express pessimism" in a cryptic way.
(to say that I am playing word games ... so freaking sad, but in the right sub-culture it might fly.)
It is akin to 'damning with faint praise.'
I'd agree with that one, and it certainly does convey that work is not done.