 | A little more on gas, European and Asian | The Oil Drum | CNN/USAToday/Gallup: There are "major problems..." (oh, if you only knew...) |  |
New Open thread
Posted by Heading Out on March 16, 2006 - 6:10pm
Topic: Miscellaneous
For those excited about the other great TV event premiering this weekend, and other issues (grin)
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.
I'm also partial to Pertwee and Baker.
Best villain(s)?
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.
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.
Analysts Skeptical of Claims of a Large Mexican Oil Find
Sounds like "political barrels" to me.
has this been factored into the equations or is it just a bs claim?
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1501AP_Oil_Afghanistan.html
Always consider the source and the hopeful language.
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.
just trying to help keep everyone on top of the information.
I think it's probably a bullshit claim.
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
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?
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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'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' ;)