New Open thread

For those excited about the other great TV event premiering this weekend, and other issues (grin)
The Doctor just isn't the same without the cheap sets and the moonlighting Shakespearean actors playing aliens.  And Leela.

Did anyone besides Odo & Stuart follow the Econbrowser thread on ExxonMobil and PO?  Tough sledding against those attitudes.


The Doctor had a number of hot companions over the years.  There was something intriguing about Leela.  Ace was kind of fun too - who can't like a girl that likes to play with dynamite :-).  I kind of liked Peri too (despite the fact that the actress was nervous and flubbed her lines), but I couldn't stand the jerk who played the Doctor opposite her.

I don't know if I can bring myself to watch the new one.  I am sure that it will be loaded up with special effects crap and have an absolutely inane plot.  Then again, the plotlines in the original series were kind of inane as well, but they all had a quirky charm to them.

If you had to ask me who my favorite Doctor was, it would have to be Tom Baker, with John Pertwee as my second choice.

Sara Jane was the best companion. (IMHO) ^_^
Well, the worst companion had to be K-9.  I liked the blonde Romana (Lalla something), too, but they frequently saddled her with that annoying dog-bot.

I'm also partial to Pertwee and Baker.

Best villain(s)?  

It'd be a toss up between the obvious candidates: the Master, the Daleks or the Cybermen.  I'd put an honourable mention in for the Sontarans though.  Favourite Doctor: has to be Tom Baker.
Until very recently I would have agreed, Tom Baker was my favourite. But I reckon that Christopher Eccleston was brilliant as the new Doctor.
I met John Pertwee at an AETN (Arkansas Eductional Tv Network) fuction in the early to mid 80's My brother dressed as Tom Baker in the hat and scarf that an Aunt made for us.  

I liked Tom Baker the best, there was a cute girl that was a fellow time lord trainee or something that tagged alone with him for a while and in the real world Married Tom Baker.  But my brother is the expert in the family over Doctor Who.  

I hope they don't screw it up any, but I guess the jury will be out till it hits the mass media.  

I thought the Doctor (Baker) seemed awfully emotional when Romana (Lalla Ward) stayed behind in her last episode.  Turns out they only stayed married for 16 months, though.
As we tap more oil supplies with lower and lower EROEI, won't the price of energy become highly volitile as the price of energy required becomes a greater fraction of the cost of making energy. I'm not sure I can even follow what I just said, but I hope you get my drift. I guess it occured to me in discussion ethanhol. Suppose an EROEI of 1.5. That says to me that the price of energy (oil, nat gas, whatever) will be a major cost component in manufacturing ethanol and thus the price of ethanol. Seems like a positive feedback which will amplify volitility.
It struck me recently that another odd factor in play with fuel sources like ethanol is that they can act as a store of value in a perverse way. Inputs to ethanol (fertilizer, diesel fuel) can be purchased up to a year before the ethanol comes out of the plant. Part of the perceived value of ethanol may just be the fact that the inputs were that much cheaper when they were purchased.
In regards to the new Mexican oil find, a question:
Seems I read somewhere that oil could not exist in
a liquid state much below 15,000 and if hydrocarbons s
are found would be natural gas and NGL. If this
deposit is at 13,120 ft. below the earth's surface
and 3,117 ft. below the ocean surface, would this
not be well below 15,000 ft.? I seem to recall
that saltwater adds approx. .45 psi per foot of depth.
I think that the formation of NG vs oil depends mostly on the temperature at the depth, not pressure. Besides the water is 2 to 3 times lighter than the rocks, so 3117 ft of water would be equivelent to some 1500ft. of rock.
Speaking of the new Mexican find...

Analysts Skeptical of Claims of a Large Mexican Oil Find

Analysts say they are skeptical of news this week from the Mexican state oil monopoly that exploratory drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico shows signs of a giant new oil field.

Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, says that early indications suggest that the field could be as large as 10 billion barrels. But analysts said that it was premature to make an estimate based on preliminary drilling.

"To me it's entirely speculative and hypothetical," said David Shields, an oil analyst and consultant in Mexico City.

Sounds like "political barrels" to me.  

i posted this in the last open thread but i got no responce.
has this been factored into the equations or is it just a bs claim?

Two geological basins in northern Afghanistan hold 18 times the oil and triple the natural gas resources previously thought, scientists said Tuesday as part of a U.S. assessment aimed at enticing energy development in the war-torn country.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1501AP_Oil_Afghanistan.html

Even if the new revisions or estimates are correct, its not really going to make much impact in regard to PO.
Scientists Find Big Afghan Oil Resources

Always consider the source and the hopeful language.


Nearly 1.6 billion barrels of oil, mostly in the Afghan-Tajik Basin, and about 15.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, mainly in the Amu Darya Basin, could be tapped, said the U.S. Geological Survey and Afghanistan's Ministry of Mines and Industry.

More work remains to assess petroleum reserves, conduct seismic exploration and rehabilitate wells, say government and industry officials.


Nowadays, that would be considered a pretty big find if any of this could be believed. Karzai is under big pressure to find some alternative to opium, which is Afghanistan's largest cash crop. Announcements like this should be taken with a big grain of salt.
of course they should be taken with a grain of salt but they should not be discounted either.
just trying to help keep everyone on top of the information.
It could be important to Afghanistan.  Globally, however, 1.6 billion barrels is less than 20 days worth of production - a drop in the bucket.  
Well, you did ask "is it just a bs claim?"

I think it's probably a bullshit claim.

Opium sounds like a very profitable line of business when oil's three times today's price.  Karzai might just want to think about that.  A very nice pipeful of dreams about all those trips we used to take could command a good price.
Don't believe this announcement contains a significant amount of BS. While Karzai is under pressure to fix the opium problem, turning opium farmers into oil workers is not the answer. Very little oil and gas exploration has been done in Afghanistan ( see http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/afghan.html ) and I see the findings as credible. Have a geologist friend looking at the data and will check into it personally next time I'm in the area.

It's also important to know that this area has very little infrastructure and it will be many, many years before these resources can be developed - if ever. For example, Bamiyan Province has one of the largest iron ore deposits in Asia, but no one (to my knowledge) has ever proposed developing it. Why? No decent paved roads to Bamiyan and the area has never had electricity other than that supplied by generators. To illustrate the problem, it's about 100 miles from Kabul to Bamiyan - about 8 hours of dust and bone jarring bumps

1.6 billion barrels isn't a whole hell of a lot.
We also need to look at oil in place vs recoverable reserves. Whenever announcements like this, they are giving optimistic scenarios of possible oil in place, between 25% and 65% of which might be recoverable.
I need a better editor - "Whenever announcements like this are made,"
Speaking of 'Not a whole hell of a lot..'  I haven't heard much about the EROEI and other issues affecting ANWR.  I'll have to look up the senate's vote from today, if it happened yet, plus the Pipeline spill in AK last week.  I don't know. It feels like we're watching the big ship sink, and not giving enough attention to prepping the lifeboats..

Even if it's little more than Symbolic, I planted my first 3watts of solar generating capacity in a window this week, charging 9.6v makita batteries and old 2.3ah Camcorder batts.  Then again, Symbolism is the essence of important changes, isn't it?

What's in your tank?

I'd like to take a slightly different position than the people saying "it will not make a big difference".

Yes, by itself only it will hardly make any difference compared to our current appetite for oil. But first the accumulative result from several such finds will make a difference, and second - sooner or later we will have to get used to live with much less. When that time comes such discoveries will look to us almost like we look at Ghawar today.

Bingo.  As I like to say, sh*t happens, things change, and variables vary.  

The easiest and deadliest mistake to make when looking at something as complex as worldwide energy supply and demand is to assume things will continue the way they are now.  I see this mistake countless times in energy issues (and economics in general), often when I'm sure the people doin' the assumin' are unaware of it.  

This is why I keep stressing how uncertain the future is.  All it will take is one breakthrough in the right place to completely change the rules of the game.  I'm not suggesting that "technology will save us", but that technology will throw us more than a few curve balls in the next 20 years.  We're definitely in for some very rough times and major challenges, but they and our responses to them will take shape in ways that are less than completely predictable.

Isn't this the problem though?  Say we do pull off a techno-fix which delays peak by 20 years or so, won't that just result in a much steeper decline rate at the tail (assuming a URR of 2.2 TB's and 3% growth in extraction)?  Surely an early peak in the 2005-2010 time bracket with a 2-3% decline rate is infinitely better than a peak around 2025-2030, with a 6-8% decline rate?  What economy could survive that kind of punishment?  Better to take one's lumps early...
I'm not sure I agree with that.  What we need, above all, is time, which at the moment IMHO is in very short supply.  Time first of all for decision makers to understand the problem, and time for the populace to accept the hard choices which will be necessary.   In that respect we do need an initial shortfall / price hike, but once the realisation has set in we need the time given by every possible new find, every technological advance both in EOR and in replacement power technology.  Without that, the more dire prognostications seem inevitable.
What your saying is we need 20 to 30 years to get our house in order and maybe we can handle the problem.

But we have had 30 years to get our house in order, and we didn't do it.  We kept looking for the next oil field.  We continued to consume.  If we have another 20 years we, as a society, will not make any changes.  We will continue to consume.

I think there are too many people that make decisions based on what is best for them now, not what is best into the future.  Politicians do not put together 20 year projects.  They try to cut taxes now to make the voters happy for the next election cycle.  The most forsight a politician has is about 3 years (maybe 5 for senators).

Even if PO was proven scientic fact that even the general populace could understand, and it was proven that it will happen in 2025, the general populace would make little to no changes in their lifestyle until then.  It won't be until the effects of PO are being felt and can be directly linked by Joe Blow to PO before he will start to change his lifestyle.

I would much rather have PO now with a 2%-3% decline vs 20 more years of increasing damage to the environment, 20 more years of ramping up consumption, 20 more years of population growth, and then a sharper drop off.

Kevin

Even worse than that, countries and regions that did try to 'get their house in order' got financially ruined in the 1980s and 1990s when oil prices tanked. In New Zealand a massive natural gas to petrol plant was built, providing 30-40% of the country's fuel. However by the time it was finished it was almost uneconomic, and then the nat gas started to get more expensive; and now when it would actually be useful the gas field has started to run out!

There is no reason this pattern of boom and bust in oil prices will not repeat to some extent, which would further bankrupt any risky government or private schemes.

I imagine this means that many technological fixes will be in the form of dual use technologies- like extra power plants that can charge electric cars OR houses OR trains, rather than coal-to-oil synfuels.

Hedge those bets...

The Methanex plant paid for itself by allowing New Zealand to defund their armed forces. They no longer had to contribute to the US led alliance to stabilize the Middle East because of the crucial importance of maintaining low cost oil, like we did.
Now they are paying 60$ a barrel, until, and if, they get more natural gas to run the Methanex plant, or build a coal syngas/power plant right next to it to make power and gasoline.
I don't think Lou is suggesting that all the techno-fixes will be in the area of extracting more fossil fuels, even though that was what kicked off his post.  Say we had a breakthrough in efficient energy storage.  That would make the attractiveness of intermittent sources such as wind and solar that much more viable.  It may also allow more of the transportation sector to move onto the electrical grid.

Another way to look at these new oil finds is not that they will postpone peak production (although they might), but that they will reduce the rate of decline post-peak.  This will buy time and lessen the economic dislocation while we are transitioning to a post-fossil fuel society.

Extending from the previous open thread, for those TOD'ers with an economics bent take a look at the
Stern Review
.

In these documents are calls for developing new economic paradigms to deal with the global externalities as it is stated that current economic theory doesn't handle these well (not being an economist, I'm not judging the veracity of this). For a quick overview, see the bottom of page 5 in the pdf of Nick Stern´s Oxonia lecture at Oxford on 31 Jan 2006, the third PDF file listed.

That's a good reference and I've looked at some of the papers there, but something fundamental seems to be missing in all this economic analysis of climate change: economic thinking.

Economics is not just the study of exchange rates and taxation policy. Fundamentally, economics is a way of looking at problems that focuses on questions of what people value, what their costs are, and how they can use their resources to achieve their goals. It is this kind of thinking that seems to be absent in these papers.

The economic approach to global warming should focus on cost tradeoffs. How much does it cost to reduce carbon emissions to a certain level, and how much benefit do we get by those reductions? The most fundamental question is this: what is the optimal CO2 level we should aim to target?

I don't see any analysis of this question. Instead, the analyst pulls a CO2 level out of his hat. 450 ppm, or 500, or 550. The only thing these have in common is that they are multiples of 50 and are higher than where we are today (almost at 400, higher if we consider the contributions of other gasses). Then he talks about how we can get there.

But nowhere does he discuss how much more it will cost if the number turns out to be 550 over 500. Or if the number turns out to be 600, or whatever. We have to have estimates of these costs! Then we can compare the short-term cost of achieving a more stringent target with the long-term cost of letting the number get higher.

That is the fundamental economic question of global warming! It is the first question we must ask to even begin to decide what strategy to adopt. And yet we have hundreds of pages of economic analysis, and I haven't yet seen someone try to do this calculation, or even admit that this question exists.

Now, granted, this is an enormously difficult question to answer. At a minimum we must estimate the technological and economic capabilities of year 2100 Earth. Do they have starships and robots? Or are they back to horses and donkeys for transport? It's a ridiculously hard question. Certainly nobody in 1900 foresaw the world of 2000 in even the dimmest terms. Everything that happened was a total, complete and utter surprise.

Nevertheless this is the first step that must be accomplished to begin to estimate the costs of global warming. And that calculation is crucial to achieve a reasonable estimate of what CO2 level will minimize costs.

This is the economic way of thinking, and as I said it is spectacularly absent from the papers I have seen so far. Probably the reason is that it reveals the near-absurdity of the process of what we have to go through - guessing at inventions not yet invented, evaluating the creativity of generations yet unborn. Yet it has to be done.

I'll tell you how I would do it. I would curve-fit. I would extrapolate economic growth and technological improvements forward based on the record of the past few centuries. And since that record reveals ever-faster growth of technological capability, I would predict that late 21st century science and technology will be as far beyond our own as we are beyond the stone age:

http://hanson.gmu.edu/longgrow.html

In such a world, global warming can be dealt with as easily as we build an aquaduct today to bring water from a source hundreds of miles away. It is a modest engineering project, and the main difficulty is acquiring the legal rights-of-way. But the capability will be there, if we apply the simplest possible curve-fitting extrapolations.

So this is the other way that economic analyses of global warning are noticeably bereft of economic thinking: because thinking logically about the problem makes it go away. Dumb, curve-fitting based extrapolations from the past are the most unbiased method of predicting the future, and they predict that global warming will not be a major problem 50 or 100 years from now.

Um, err, what's the economic value of plankton and coral reefs, which are the basis of the marine food web, and, in the case of phytoplankton, produce 50% of global oxygen?

http://www.w3ar.com/a.php?k=548
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20020801plankton.html
http://www.truehealth.org/oxydecl.html

These sources of life and breath are already dying.  This says nothing of the loss of terrestrial carbon sinks, "food factories" and oxygen sources - i.e. forests.  Price 'em out if you like.  But when we're starving and gasping for breath, I'd guess the price would be about, oh, infinity.

Despite decades of our best efforts, we have yet to wipe out harmful bacteria; in fact they are evolving resistance to our best antibiotics. I imagine that a similar thing will happen with microscopic sea life, that as ocean conditions change, they will evolve adaptations to allow them to thrive in the new circumstances.

As far as food, globally we do not depend on the sea for the majority of our food supply, so even if that is impaired I don't think we will be starving to death.

And as far as running out of oxygen, hopefully this article will set your mind at ease:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-2.1/broecker.htm

AN OFT-HEARD WARNING with regard to our planet's future is that by cutting back tropical forests we put our supply of oxygen gas at risk. Many good reasons exist for placing deforestation near the top of our list of environmental sins, but fortunately the fate of the Earth's O2 supply does not hang in the balance. Simply put, our atmosphere is endowed with such an enormous reserve of this gas that even if we were to burn all our fossil fuel reserves, all our trees, and all the organic matter stored in soils, we would use up only a few percent of the available O2. No matter how foolishly we treat our environmental heritage, we simply don't have the capacity to put more than a small dent in our O2 supply.
"I imagine that a similar thing will happen with microscopic sea life, that as ocean conditions change, they will evolve adaptations to allow them to thrive in the new circumstances."

You obviously know nothing about biology and yet blithely spout off on the topic.  That prokaryotes (the bacteria in your text) have mechanisms to adapt to antibiotics - is not an argument that can then be applied to all the other "microscopic sea life" - the algal contingent of which are eukaryotes.

Evolution is a random process - it is not directed.  There is no guarantee that a species will be able to adapt.  As oceanic conditions change, selection of tolerant species will occur - and the less tolerant become extinct.  The restructuring of metabolic processes is a far more complex thing than 'simple' resistance to antibiotics.

But you are right, we won't "run out" of oxygen.  But what is the effect of all that CO2?  Do you know how many different types of carbon fixation cycles there are?  Do you know the effect on each of different levels of CO2?  Do you further know the interactive effects of water stress, nutrient stress and temperature? OR are they all just plants to you?

You know, Hubberts critics dissmissed him because "they imagined" that there was a lot more oil.

Do you use "dumb, curve fitting based extrapolations from the past" to manage your own stock portfolio, Halfin? I'd like to see the performance of your portfolio if you do that. And if you don't use such then don't try to sell that line of bullcrap here.

Robin Hanson assumes that ever increasing sources of energy are available to continue this growth. That's a pretty bad assumption to be making right now. Work requires energy - basic physics whether economics like it or not. And planetary engineering projects will require massive energy. I guess this puts you in the believer-in-technological-miracles camp. Don't do anything because something magic HAS to happen because the alternative is not what we want. That's not science. It's religion.

I apologise for not reading them tonight (tis 4am late), good to see some apparent recognition that there are perhaps problems with current economic paradigms - hard reality ultimately trumps economic reality which is only valid within its current solution space.

I've been thinking about money lately: how it works, the reality (and otherwise) of its value, the robustness of that, should it be re-instituted if it breaks, should there be controls on the 'scope' of money if so. Too soon for conclusions but my possibly perverse prejudices are forming some tentative conclusions.

For now I would suggest a few links if you are interested. My best guess is that the money system is more likely to break than not in the next 10 years. If so there may be some choice about how it is reformulated (the utility of a money system is probably beyond doubt, but the way it currently functions may be maladaptive).

This is a neat tropical island way of explaining money, its dynamics and imbalances (with relevence to current situation) from first principles:
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/2006/0205.html

Perhaps a more pointed view in a narrower scenario:
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/schiff/2006/0316.html

Going back to economic theories of money as it currently functions:
http://www.benbest.com/polecon/monetary.html
http://landru.i-link-2.net/monques/mmm2.html#MODERN
(there may be some interesting stuff on it's parent site but I haven't had time to read there yet:
http://landru.i-link-2.net/monques/  )

Much older, more land wealth based, still interesting:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/trgRfl1.html
More recent, von Mises:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Mises/msT1.html
http://www.benbest.com/polecon/monetary.html

It will do you no harm (in the sense of wasting your time) to think about money - how and what it is, and is not. You may be surprised if you do, perhaps you will begin to see answers that are different from those constrained by the present 'economic solution space' ;)