Sunday Open Thread
Posted by Prof. Goose on March 12, 2006 - 9:29pm
If you need something to get you started in the OT, Michael Klare writes:
It's official: the era of resource wars is upon us. In a major London address, British Defense Secretary John Reid warned that global climate change and dwindling natural resources are combining to increase the likelihood of violent conflict over land, water and energy. Climate change, he indicated, "will make scarce resources, clean water, viable agricultural land even scarcer" -- and this will "make the emergence of violent conflict more rather than less likely."Also, anyone else see Oil Crash?
“I'd put my money on solar energy… I hope we don't have to wait til oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”
—Thomas Edison, in conversation with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, March 1931
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Matson fuel charge to rise by 3.5%
Also has some interesting info on shipping costs, including a graph of shipping fuel prices.
"One reason why Hawaii will be lousy place to ride out peak oil:..."
How does one ride it out? Wait for new oil to form? :)
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48897
It's kind of ironic that Peak Oilers call for government to mandate higher prices, while these people want government to force them to be lower. Everyone wants to have their hands on the wheel, I guess. Apparently having prices set by supply and demand is the one solution that is unacceptable to everyone.I guess they haven't reached the point where cost trumps convenience yet.
It's incorrect, not surprisingly. It's not the higher cost of transportation the gas price is supposed to address. The cap allows extra for transportation and taxes. Hawaii feels it's being gouged because they're a small market where there's no competition. The gas cap ties their prices to the larger markets in NY and LA, that's all. And ut only affects the wholesale cost; the retailers can set any price they want.
Also, Gov. Lingle can suspend the law if she decides it's doing more harm than good.
http://www.energybulletin.net/docs/EnergyTrendsAndTheirImplicationsForUSArmyInstallations.pdf
I work for a major defense contractor, with both Army and Air Force contracts, and knew the writing was on the wall for me when this was posted. Of course, to listen to the management and, sadly enough, most of the people I work with, "the future's so bright, we have to wear shades"...
However, existing programs are just now starting to be "restructured" (can you say cut?) and a certain amount of uneasiness is becoming evident. This causes me to feel both anger and sadness-- I have been followng Peak Oil for maybe 18 months or so, and only because I like to pay attention to what's going on in the world. Why aren't more of the bright, well-educated people I work with ready for this? Then I look at the most oblivious ones, and it seems like they're the nicest ones I know-- young engineers just starting families and previously savvy "old-timers" looking forward to a guaranteed retirement involving spoiling their grandkids. However monstrous the organization is, the military-industrial complex employs a lot of bright, kind and good-hearted people that are going to suffer along with the rest of us.
But if true - and it sure looks legit - I cannot understand why it's not on the front page of every paper and the subject of the most heated discussion. Instead, we hear nothing in the MSM. It seems like we must be living in some sort of Alice in Wonderland time period.
But whether the mainstream in the military really act on it is something else. Despite that global warming report, we aren't doing much about it.
No direct quarrterly numbers to meet will do that for ya.
And a broad mandate of 'protection' lets 'em.
They are worried about the reacation of other huamn beings to the changes that are a-comming.
Note that it is not the generals who screwed up the Vietnam war, it was their civilian superiors. President Eisenhower was smart enough not to touch Vietnam with a ten-foot pole (and seriously pissed off the French by not coming to their rescue at Dien Bien Phu in 1954), but "smart Harvard lawyer" JFK and his McNamara/bean-counter Sec. of Defense and the Dean Rusk brain trust of lawyers got us into what was a disaster and quagmire ten times worse than Iraq.
Before invading Iraq, the highest-ranking Army guy
says, "Hey it is going to take 400,000 American troops to do the job," and so the politocoes force him out because that is not the Gospel accoding to the straight-shooting;-) Cheney and Co., guys who truly are ignorant of military history. I cannot figure out Rumsfeld, who actually served in the military, how he can have said and done the stupid things he has. It is a big puzzle to me. And how could he not have had the honor to resign after the revalations of mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners? This is a BNG, Big National Disgrace. Also, why did not Bush have the guts to fire Rummy? Misplaced loyalty? The conventional wisdom is that Bush is dumber than spit and merely a puppet dancing on strings pulled by the Big Money Boys, but I do not think this is the whole story, and I think it will probably take historians fifty or a hundred years to figure out an accurate account of what is actually happening now.
Some days, I'd love to resign and spend more time with my family. Can't afford it.
Bush is not stupid, but IMO he is willingly being handled by some really sharp, calculating characters that are in every way a lot smarter and better informed than him. It saddens me, but a lot of people I know, members of my family, see nothing wrong with what the US has done at Gitmo or Abu Ghuraib. I think their sense of immunity is sort-sighted.
Kennedy's knifefighter instincts were perfectly suitable to running a PT boat, and he no doubt would have made a wonderfull privateer captain, but if you want to fight a land war in Asia you have to understand farmers.
1. Do not become involved in a land war on the Asian land mass.
2. Do not become involved in a land war on the Asian land mass.
3. Do not become involved in a land war on the Asian land mass.
IMO JFK was an ignorant and arrogant a-hole who tried (egged on by little brother Bobby) to kill Castro at least six times, enthusistically did the dumbest things imaginable, damn near got us into World War III through really stupid mistakes, bungled the Bay of Pigs Invasion bigtime, was the only U.S. president ever to use full-time the services of a high-class pimp, and was so addicted to drugs that he had a hard time reading his speeches.
His image and the whole Camelot thing was a total fantasy created by spin doctors and fawning journalists. IMO he bears most of the problem for us getting inot the Vietnam fiasco.
God rot his soul in hell.
And by the time we got out, we could brush our teeth, swim, read , and feel good about being able to do at least something.
My father, who saw heavy action in both big wars, told me the first thing to do in a real fight was to shoot all the peacetime parade ground tyrants because they were the ones that would get you dead. Too bad that hasn't been done in DC.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/energyresources/files/Westervelt_EnergyTrends__TN.pdf
bruce from chicago
Recylcling In the First World is a CRIME - a syndicate of unnecessary and parasitic middlemen. The Third World recycles correctly - on the spot, w/o the Red Tape of a Central Pod somewhere...
Penn and Teller point out the Fraud of First World Recycling Charades. They get it wrong too when they say recyling doesn't Pay or Work.
In the First World it acts as welfare for and subsidizes GreenFreaks- a bad approach of a Large Centralized Organ. The Third World Get's Mother's Prize - Profoundly Local Recycling efforts On The Spot. No Energy Using Middle Parasites need apply thank you.
Good luck folks. You be needing it. Shortly, I'm sure.
Once again, I confidently predict, with no fear whatsoever of successful contratidiction the future of oil prices: They will fluctuate.
You are correct(as always)in your prediction that prices will fluctuate - but then the real question becomes, how much will they fluctuate?
A big turning point will come when expectations of price level changes go from being adaptive to "rational."
Another Huge Unpredictable Factor (HUF) is the collective behavior of rumor. Rumor rules the day-to-day fluctuations to a large extent, and I am 100% certain that some of these rumors are planted with the intent of manipulating the market for profit.
For example, did you hear? Terrorists just blew down the Statue of Liberty . . . . Well of course that is bullshit, but a clever person or group using the Internet (which is 90% to 98% BS, it seems to me) can spread a rumor like this, complete with fake photos, fake press releases to bounce prices a couple of bucks in a matter of minutes. Will the SEC or anybody ever catch them? Not likely--could be in Russia, anywhere.
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
POE
"Women sense my power, but . . ."
I guess winter's not over yet...
Industrial users may be cut off. Many have already cut back due to high prices. (Among them, building materials manufacturers and fertilizer makers.)
And here's the graph. Yowsah.
I just spoke to my Mum and Dad who live on the south west coast of Scotland. They had 8inches of snow last night and were expecting more snow tonight.
My mum said that almost the whole country had snow, but the west coast had more than the east.
Luckily they use heating oil instead of gas, and I've been telling them to keep the tank topped up in case of big price fluctuations.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060308212104.htm
Perpetuum mobile? Or maybe cheap fusion?
"When you go to the store and buy three cans of tuna fish, buy a fourth and put it under the bed," Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said. "When you go to the store to buy some milk, pick up a box of powdered milk, put it under the bed. When you do that for a period of four to six months, you are going to have a couple of weeks of food. And that's what we're talking about."
Also it is cheaper to buy buckets of peanut butter by the dozen.
Just be sure to date everything, use First In, First Out inventory control and only buy stuff you will eat anyway.
Query: Is it moral to shoot your neighbor when she wants to share your stockpiled food after TSHTF? This was a big topic back in the good old "Build your own fallout shelter" Cold War days.
My answer: Choose your neighbors with care. Don't get yourself into "not enough space in the lifeboat" situations.
And if you have a third-class ticket on the Titanic, good luck.
We got a nice little booklet (for free!) from UKGov last year telling us all to stock approx 21 days worth of food just in case... (Just in case of what?). Most people threw it in the bin I suppose. Anyway thats 21 x4 (+21 x 1 retriever). So... last September, mad-daddy the PO nut tried to some way stock up and be, (like the boy scout he was)prepared.
It is an interesting excercise in its own right.
First off: Assume that by day 14 you will be rationing your own supplies in the family (by day 18, your are eyeing the golden retriever...). Lets just assume 4 x 21 x1 can of tuna. 84 X $1.50 in your money. This is your basic protein. 84 X $ 0.50 Baked Beans. There is yer'Carbs
(actually i am slightly more adventurous and we have a reasonable gamut of canned goods, this is for brevity).
Then there is a few extras like rice, pasta - any dry goods that store well. Chocolate, Whiskey (mad - dads morale is important). etc.
So Storage can be an issue. Esp. in the UK for most people.
Then secondly, how to cook? Our stove is electric. If the lights go out then we dont eat hot food. So, An extra bottle of Propane and a 2-ring portable gas cooker ( tag: about $ 100.00 in the UK). Then there is lighting: Candles, Hurricane lamps, torches etc.
Our heating is gas, but the water pump is electric. So do we get a propane heater or just run on the spot for 3 weeks? - Lets assume it happens in a cold snap. Thats about another $100.00
We did not even consider bottled water at this stage.
Enough: you get the picture. I reckoned that to be truly prepped a UK family would, on average earnings need to spend an extra months food bill or more on all of the above. Many would spend all year tripping up over this stuff.
We got the basics sorted out (but we did not start from zero 'cos in rural scotland, you tend to squirrel stuff away) . The logistics for most people would be pretty hard financially and logistically.
Not easy, and worth a whole thread in itself.
They are recommending that you choose foods that do not need to be heated, in case the power grid goes down.
Link
On the basis that 7 days probably is not an emergency, by 10 days the problem gets worse, and panic buying clears most of the shelves in supermarkets. By day 14 you have a genuine emergency. By day 21 you are pretty close to collapse (The power engineers who could try and get the lights back on are too busy looking after family / cannot get to work etc). As each day passes, the chances of 'normality' returning decrease.
We had a little taster of this in 2000 when we had fuel protests by angry truck drivers and farmers .
Something like bird flu could indeed last 14 days and then of course not all the workers, drivers depo managers etc would be around or fit to remobilise food supplies immediately after quaranteen is lifted.
Cannot remember who it was (AJP Taylor?) who said 'Civilisation is only ever three meals away from barbarism'.
One can live without food for several weeks, but only a few days without water. If power plants go down, then it is highly likely that water utilties will also go down, at least partially.
And contaminated water can make you sick enough to kill you if you are already weakened.
A few well cleansed 30-gallon plastic trash cans in your basement will do the trick. Just clean them well with chlorine bleach, rinse well, fill with tap water, add a splash or two of bleach, and then seal the lid on with duct tape. Replace once a year. The water may taste of plastic, but it will keep you alive and won't make you sick.
For fuel, I like alchohol stoves, partly because alcohol fires can be put out with water but also because I've seen too darn many fatal explosions from gasoline fumes. Propane and butane have their own problems, but on the other hand they are less bad than gasoline by far.
Kerosene stoves have much to recommend them, and in a pinch you can operate them (with a lot of smoke) on diesel.
Sterno is good. Also from Cub Scouts or someplace I remember how to make a "candle stove" from half a dozen candles stuffed into a low coffee can or similar implement.
A gross of household candles is handy to have around. Also, empty two-liter soft-drink bottles and empty liquor bottles are excellent for storing water. If your tap water is good (Mine comes from ancient Pleistocene deposits, deep wells, very pure and good) you may not need the Chlorox. Some tap water is so bad (e.g. that in Minneapolis) that just drinking one glass of it makes me sick, fresh from the tap. So, make sure the water you are storing is good in the first place.
To bulk up, we reckoned on 4litres / person / day.
Including the dog, that would be 420 litres for an extended emergency.
In short. If anything goes badly wrong, and unless you have access to clean water, substantial supplies etc, majority of the UK population would be in dire straits pretty soon. The next question must be: Do we have the social cohesion of our grand-parents to ride it through?
If you want to try some dehydrated food before you make the commitment of purchasing several cans worth of the stuff, because it can get expensive, Wal-Mart (what can I say I still support the empire) sells individual packages of mountain house dehydrated food in their camping section. The mountain house dehydrated food in cans is supposed to last 30 years.
For example, shredded wheat, if kept dry, keeps indefinitely. How do I know this? Because, once when I was living with a family of scientists they found a box from 1943 or thereabouts, and here it was 1957, and so as an experiment we all chowed down a couple of ounces. A bit stale, but it was perfectly good and probably had all or most of its original protein and calories. Oatmeal and rice will also keep indefinitely if kept dry and reasonably cool. Rice needs to be cooked, but oatmeal you can eat right of the box if you have to. Corned beef keeps a long time and is cheap. Beef jerky is very convenient and keeps a long time.
But if you want to go all out, learn to make your own pemmican . . . .
http://www.whiskeyandgunpowder.com/Archives/20060313.html
Excerpts from the Comptroller General of the United States Report:
"The current financial reporting model does not clearly and transparently show the wide range of responsibilities, programs, and activities that may either obligate the federal government to future spending or create an expectation for such spending. Thus, it provides a potentially unrealistic and misleading picture of the federal government's overall performance, financial condition, and future fiscal outlook. The federal government's gross debt in the consolidated financial statements was about $8 trillion as of Sept. 30, 2005. This number excludes such items as the gap between the present value of future promised and funded Social Security and Medicare benefits, veterans' health care, and a range of other liabilities (e.g., federal employee and veteran benefits payable), commitments, and contingencies that the federal government has pledged to support. Including these items, the federal government's fiscal exposures now total more than $46 trillion, up from about $20 trillion in 2000. This translates into a burden of about $156,000 per American or approximately $375,000 per full-time worker, up from $72,000 and $165,000 respectively, in 2000. These amounts do not include future costs resulting from Hurricane Katrina or the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Continuing on this unsustainable path will gradually erode, if not suddenly damage, our economy, our standard of living, and ultimately our national security...
"Addressing the nation's long-term fiscal imbalance constitutes a major transformational challenge that may take a generation or more to resolve. Given the size of the projected deficit, the U.S. government will not be able to grow its way out of this problem -- tough choices are required."
David M. Walker
Comptroller General of the United States
Dec. 2, 2005
It's really amazing how things are changing now that Bush's poll numbers are tanking.
Bush is promising to do everything within his power to combat the IED (Improvised Explosive Device) threat in Iraq.
Bush is also accusing Iran of providing a lot of the IED's.
Yet another justification for an attack/limited invasion?
"Mexico has made a deep-water oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico that could be larger than the country's giant Cantarell offshore field, President Vicente Fox said on Monday."
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8GAVFN84.htm
Unknown amount of oil found somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico? Give me a break!
A Cantarell II will help Mexico delay the day of crisis, and probably the US. If it is of sufficient size, broght to production quickly enough and Production flows can be maintained (ie the Saudis can do what we dont think they can do) Then Peak Day may be a little further off.
If a Cantarell II exists, then the danger is that it will act as a sign for the cornucopians and not be seen to be a sign that we are drinking in the last chance saloon
http://www.energybulletin.net/13855.html
Mexico's Ability to Export Oil
"Khebab", GraphOilogy
Khebab's technical analysis demonstrates the high likelyhood of a precipitous drop in Mexican oil exports from a country near its peak in production, with a growing population and appetite for oil.
published March 15, 2006.
It's going to take a long time to drill all of the developmental wells in the new offshore discovery. So, even with a new significant discovery, it's quite likely that Mexico is starting a permanent and irreversible decline--as predicted by the HL model.
Also, keep in mind that the world is using--from nuclear + fossil fuel sources--the energy equivalent of one Gb of oil every five days.
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article351127.ece
That might give the oil bourse some legs. It just gets better and better.
So what does all this high-powered work show about oil? Well, if you just look at an oil price chart, you have embargos, invasions, inflation, and rumor making a mess of all the researchers' work. But you can come up with an enlightening chart if you cleanse it of some of these things. You can do this with an inflation adjusted longterm chart as is found at www.wtrg.com (a good source of oil info). If you modify the chart to remove some artificial pricing episodes, it looks like this:
If you consider the initial high pricing as being before oil was a market commodity, there are four artificial price gyrations shown. The spike of the early 70s was demand driven (see Simmons' discussion p58,59) but the pricing from the Iran/Iraq supply shock was not geologic supply/demand. Then there was the great price collapse of '97-'99, when the world was "awash in oil". The oil patch was in a depression from the glut of oil. But as Simmons describes in Twilight, p82, there never was a glut of oil, just a glut of bad oil data. This very quickly corrected by '00 kicking off our present climb. So what you have, if you ignore the artificial highs and lows, is a relatively smooth set of data that shows oil as a remarkably stable commodity trading in a range between about $12 to $20 for over 100 years! But then you approach the 1970s. You see a clear breaking of the century-long resistance level, a mild foreshock of the demand driven runup we are seeing now. Stock technical analysis is based on the efficient market theory, and if this were a stock, a technical analyst would say that there was a strong break of a well entrenched resistance level in the 70s climb, then a successful testing of this resistance level as support in the 80s and 90s signaling the beginning a large scale climb.
Even if you had never heard of Hubbert or seen a bell curve in your life, you would look at this chart and have to say that something monumental has happened with the supply/demand of this resource, and it seems to be centered around the year 2000 give or take 2 or 3 years. What an amazing coincidence!
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8GAVFN84.htm?campaign_id=apn_home_down&chan=db