http://www.odograph.com/experiments/php/kcalc.html

It's the cat's pajamas when it comes to understanding your energy use ... as this excellent article illustrates:

http://digitalcrusader.ca/archives/2006/10/household_energ.html

The author comes to an intesting conclusion with regard to conservation for co2 reduction.

found by way of:

http://groovygreen.com/groove/?p=571

Dad noticed the earthquake.  Everything swayed, and tons of leaves flew off the big lichee tree in the front yard.  But he's a little hard of hearing, and apparently didn't hear things crashing in the house.  He didn't even go inside to check it out.

The power went out when the quake hit, so Mom came home from the gym.  (Guess you can't exercise without electricity.  ;-)  She pulled into the garage and saw everything on the garage shelves had fallen off.  

Then she went inside, and found total chaos.  In the kitchen, all the food had fallen out of the fridge and cabinets.  Dishes and jars were smashed.  Pictures had fallen off the wall.  There was cracking along the base of the house walls.  The closet doors had fallen out.    

Of course, the biggest problem, from Dad's POV, was that with no power, there was no football.  However, the electricity did come back on in time for the Sunday night game (an afternoon game Hawai`i time).  

O`ahu, where most of the population of Hawai`i lives, was without power a lot longer.  Apparently, the problem was software that shuts down the entire grid when there's a shortfall.  Though only two generators (out of 11) actually went offline due to the quake, all of them were automatically shut down.

Because Hawai`i gets its water from artesian wells, without power, there's no water, either.  Tourists were in a bit of a panic, rushing to convenience stores to buy bottled water.  Many of the locals stood in line for hours to buy food and drink from lunch wagons. Home Depot was one of the few stores that stayed open; guess they just fired up some of their generators.  They sold out of batteries right away, but reportedly still have propane and charcoal.  

Airplanes were allowed to land in Hawai`i, but could not take off.  Without power, the security machines couldn't run, so no one was allowed to board outgoing planes.

Some buildings partially collapsed, including the hospital where my sister worked part-time when we were in high school.  A structures engineer said the shaking had turned some concrete into powder; he described it as a "mini 9/11."  

Highways are closed due to rockslides, and as many as 170 bridges on the Big Island may be damaged.  Engineers are being flown in from the mainland to inspect them.  Hotels have been asked to keep tourists as close to the hotel as possible, since the roadway infrastructure may not be safe.

Only a few gas stations were open; they attracted long lines.  Many limited purchases to $20, and/or accepted cash only.  

Some grocery stores opened for emergency purchases.  People were escorted in one at a time, guided by an employee with a flashlight.  Hundreds lined up outside.

No lights in Honolulu last night, except from cars

Bush Buys Land in Northern Paraguay

Buenos Aires, Oct 13 (Prensa Latina) An Argentine official regarded the intention of the George W. Bush family to settle on the Acuifero Guarani (Paraguay) as surprising, besides being a bad signal for the governments of the region.

Luis D Elia, undersecretary for the Social Habitat in the Argentine Federal Planning Ministry, issued a memo partially reproduced by digital INFOBAE.com, in which he spoke of the purchase by Bush of a 98,842-acre farm in northern Paraguay, between Brazil and Bolivia.

The news circulated Thursday in non-official sources in Asuncion, Paraguay.

D Elia considered this Bush step counterproductive for the regional power expressed by Presidents Nestor Kirchner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.

He said that "it is a bad signal that the Bush family is doing business with natural resources linked to the future of MERCOSUR."

The official pointed out that this situation could cause a hypothetical conflict of all the armies in the region, and called attention to the Bush family habit of associating business and politics.

ef ccs tac rmh

http://www.plenglish.com/article.asp?ID=%7BEBA55617-2676-4091-ABBC-20650EB6FEE1%7D)&language=EN

'It's time to get out of here'

Kathy and Jim Radke have a dairy farm next to the Scotford Upgrader north of Fort Saskatchewan, and they will soon by surrounded by more upgraders.

Dairy farmers Kathy and Jim Radke are bracing for the worst.

Their farm north of Fort Saskatchewan is just two kilometres east of the giant Scotford Upgrader, due to begin a $5-billion expansion in a few months. Directly north of them, the new Heartland Upgrader is under construction.

This area, dubbed Alberta's Industrial Heartland by the municipalities that govern it, is undergoing rapid change. As many as six bitumen upgraders could go up in the coming decade, bringing boom times to the Edmonton area but making life difficult for the Heartland's rural residents.

"We would like to get out," said Kathy in an interview in the family kitchen. "We just don't have the funds to do it."

For the Radkes and others, air pollution is a central cause of concern.

An emission from the Scotford Upgrader on Sept. 12 sent residents inside their houses for hours, after getting a call from Shell. The Radkes said their throats were burning so badly they left the farm. Bad air also drifts across the river over from a fertilizer plant, which could soon have three new upgraders as neighbours.

Kathy Radke said her daughter Shelley was able to throw her asthma inhaler away after she moved to southern Alberta.

"It's time to get out of here," echoed Maureen Chichak, who lives on an acreage in the area. "It's far too dangerous."

The Radkes said their cows have started sickening in the past year. They've lost about 35 cows since last fall and are down to a dairy herd of 100. The herd has been tested and cleared for mad cow disease. Jim Radke thinks a combination of environmental causes, including the air pollution, is killing his cows.

It looks like many, but not all of the articles are free at the public area of the WSJ web site.  The main page for the section is here:

http://online.wsj.com/public/page/2_1252.html

U.S. at 300 million: 'Heaven on earth' to 'uncharted territory'

The 300 millionth American will be born early Tuesday, the U.S. Census Bureau says. The United States has become a "supersize, metro-nation with a fast-growing population, and supersize appetites for housing, land and resource consumption," one expert says. The U.S. is now a vastly different nation from the one where the Baby Boomers were born.

300 million US consumers make an outsized environmental mark

The United States, the only industrialized country with strong population growth, now has 300 million people whose lifestyle makes a disproportionately huge mark on the global environment, experts say.

The world's third most populous country behind China and India, the United States has five percent of the world's population. But it consumes -- alone -- more than a quarter of the world's natural resources, more than any other country, according to the National Report on Population and Environment, put out by the US-based Center for Environment and Population.

"The nation's relatively high rates of population growth, natural resource consumption and pollution combine to create the largest environmental impact, felt both within the nation and around the world," the report read.
"The US population has the largest ecological footprint in the world," it adds.

The United States emits almost one quarter of carbon dioxide (CO2) and greenhouse gases -- emissions that are expected to soar 43 percent by 2020.

With more than 237 million vehicles in 2006 (up from 98 million 40 years ago when the population was 200 million) the transport sector alone accounts for a third of CO2 emissions. The average US driver spends some 47 hours every year in rush hour traffic jams compared to 16 hours 20 years ago, according to the CEP.

And the size of typical American homes has ballooned even as the number of people living in each home has declined from 3.1 per household in 1970 to 2.6 in 2000. "At the same time, the average size of new single-family homes increased by more than 700 square feet," the report says.

The taste for super-sizing homes has driven up the amount of natural resources used in home construction as well as the amount of energy used to heat them in the winter and cool them in the summer. Overall, taking into account the space given to housing, schools, roads and commercial areas, each American uses 20 percent more land than in the mid-1980s.

Americans also use an average of three times more water than the average planet resident. Pollution has left roughly 40 percent of US rivers off-limits to fishing and bathing.

Every day, US consumers toss out 2.3 kilos (five pounds) of trash -- an average of five times more than people in developing countries.
Their food consumption, one third of which is animal origin, tops the scales at an average 136 kilos of meat per person compared to 72 kilos for a European and 27 kilos for a resident of a developing country.

With a growing population and a mushrooming demand for resources the country's infrastructure is vulnerable, said Carlos Restrepo, a research scientist at the Wagner School's Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems (ICIS). One sign of straining infrastructure is that there have been some 400 blackouts between 1990 and 2004.

Given the interdependence of production and electric distribution systems, and water supplying and oil or gas supplies, breakdowns are taking longer to fix, Restrepo said.
"Those levels of energy consumption are probably not sustainable," he said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601072&sid=aJNu32QG4gYI&refer=energy

``If you told me I had to go long or short today, I would go long,'' betting on higher prices, said Pickens, whose Dallas hedge fund is up 120 percent this year. Gas may reach $10 this winter if cold weather depletes inventories, he said on Oct. 11 in New York. He declined to predict when his fund might get back into the gas market after exiting earlier this year.

I know many here highly regard Pickens, and his fund is up 120% this year.  Holy crap!

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aVWp2YNByXWU&refer=worldwide

Credit Suisse Group, Switzerland's second-biggest bank, lost about $120 million on South Korean derivatives in the third quarter, an undisclosed stumble by equity traders struggling to catch the leaders in the securities industry.

Derivatives are dangerous when not used correctly.  Do you think there's more shake out coming?  I do.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aqFRXrWq703k&refer=us

Corn production in the U.S., the world's largest grower and exporter, will drop this year because farmers sowed less than they planned and drought damaged some fields, the Department of Agriculture said Oct. 12. The amount of corn used as animal feed and to make fuel has exceeded production in six of the past seven years, reducing inventories to the lowest in two decades.

``The world is just beginning to confront the issue that it has not been able to produce enough corn,'' said Dave Marshall, a market consultant in Nashville, Illinois. ``Farmers the world over have not had the incentive to produce bigger crops.''

My favorite is that last quote.  Farmers are going to magically alter drought conditions.  Right.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-coal16oct16,1,1411854.story?coll=la-headlines-business

DALLAS -- A building boom that would add scores of coal-fired power plants to the nation's power grid is creating a new dilemma for politicians, environmentalists and utility companies across the United States.

Critics, however, say the company is driven by the profit motive and is rushing to beat more stringent federal restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions in an era of escalating concern about global warming. Texas already produces more carbon dioxide than any other state, a fact that worries big-city mayors downwind of the proposed plants.

OK LA times piece.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/business/16hedge.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin

In early March, executives from Movie Gallery, a big movie rental chain, held a private conference call for their lenders to talk about how disastrous 2005 had been for the company. A string of Hollywood flops had kept customers away. More people were recording movies from television instead of renting them from a store. The executives said they needed more time to fix the problems, which included more than $1 billion in debt.

Most of the roughly 200 lenders were not bankers, but hedge funds. And what they heard was supposed to be confidential: it was inside information, as valuable to investors as a tip about an imminent takeover.

During the next two days, though, Movie Gallery's shares were heavily traded, and its stock plummeted 25 percent.

I'm beginnning to firmly believe it will be a hedge fund that does break the camels back.  This article is important as it shows the power of hedge funds.  I've read that increasingly upwards of half of the business is settled at JP Morgan and Sachs.  Increasingly debt is what hedge funds own as assets.  We all know these aren't assets.  When the domino starts falling, there will be no one to stop it.  

Personal opinion, but a basic finance principle is risk/reward.  For increased risk, you demand (and usually get) higher returns.  There's a reason these funds return stellar results, in business cycle peaks, and there are reasons they will be DOGS in the coming recession.  These are not true hedge funds as they were orignally coined, but as Janszen posits, Unregulated Investment Pools.  Increasingly more people are jumping on the debt based bandwagon (pension funds, insurance, any business with spare cash laying around).  You've got one sector of the financial community controlling close to 1/6 aggregate GDP.  Nice.

After thinking about it, even if the conspiracy theory should happen to be true, I think that it may be best if peak oil folks stay away from pursuing this issue. Some considerations:

1. Where would such a conspiracy theory lead? Suppose it were true that there was some involvement of the Bush administraction in 9/11. Both the US population and overseas oil producers (and others) would be outraged. We need a functioning US government and we need other nations to be happy enough with us to continue selling us oil, in order to have the framework to continue at a reason level, as long as we can. Thus, disclosing this information would likely make the country worse off than we would be otherwise.

2. Bush and his compatriots will be out of power in a little over two years, regardless of what information is disclosed. Perhaps the elections in November will reduce their power.

3. Those involved in peak oil have enough other issues to deal with. This issue doesn't really add to the solution.

This link on the Unholy Trinity posted by Leanan this morning was extremely revealing. The Unholy Trinity is peak oil, climate change and water shortage.  The author almost acknowledges that we are already in overshoot:

The weight of scientific evidence points to the fact the globe cannot support its present population, let alone an additional 2.5 billion, unless we embrace change.

In fact the above statement is entirely incorrect. We are already deep into overshoot and no way can the earth support, long term, 6.5 billion people no matter what changes we embrace. But I find those last four word, in one form or another, repeated by peak oilers, environmentalists and just about everyone else who is aware of the terrible mess humanity is in. In fact, Lester Brown has written an entire book on just how we can get ourselves out of this mess.  Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.

But we will not embrace change. We will not embrace Lester's Plan B. We will do absolutely nothing until it is way, way too late to do anything that will make any real difference. Why? Simply because it is not in our nature to do so. People who give rescue plans, or plans for their idea of Utopia, or any kind of plan that requires most everyone to behave in this manner or that, know absolutely nothing about human nature. Only a tiny percentage of people are ever convinced by argument. The vast majority of people, perhaps in excess of 99%, are only convinced by events. People, as Francis Bacon pointed out, desire to believe what they desire to be true. Doomsayers, even doomsayers who offer a plan of salvation, are simply laughed at by that vast majority. Very few will believe the well is running dry until the day they can pump no more water. Few will believe in climate change until the rains no longer come, or come every day. (A few in Australia are beginning to believe however.;-) And a very few will believe in peak oil until years after the actual peak.

And even when these events actually happen, especially the peak oil event, few will still embrace the fact that it is truly because of depleting oil fields. They will find someone to blame for their predicament.

So people, the statement "Here is what we must do" is totally meaningless. We, the population of the earth as a whole, are not going to do one damn thing. Catastrophy must happen first! Then we will swing into action in a big way. Yeah! Of course then it will be way too late.

Ron Patterson

The mass of mankind is ruled not by its intermittent moral sensations, still less by self-interest, but by the needs of the moment. It seems fated to wreck the balance of life on earth - and thereby to be the agent of its own destruction. What could be more hopeless than placing the Earth in the charge of this exceptionally destructive species.
- John Gray, Straw Dogs