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Thurs open thread
Posted by Yankee on April 20, 2006 - 4:05pm
Topic: Miscellaneous
Sorry to leave you hanging today. (Get it? Hanging by a thread?)
242 comments on Thurs open thread
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242 comments on Thurs open thread
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Someone from Peraguay (?) posted how they don't have AC there and they get along fine.
Sailorman mentioned how farmer kids don't want to farm any more becuase of the hard work and low pay.
My thesis is that, anyone, given the opportunity, will take comfort over hardship.
Look at the quote at the top of The Oil Drum today.
"A third of humanity doesn't want to ride bikes anymore; that has profound geopolitical implications."
--Anne Korin, the co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (May 1, 2005)
We have just had the ability to purchase (although with debt) the cars and a/c and houses and avoid the hardships of heat and humidity and biking etc. So I don't think this is just an American mistake. As the Chinese middle class grows, won't they be doing the same thing? Doesn't anyone once they have the money to do so?
Ok, I'll be quiet now. :) Thanks for listening.
A more insightful question might be how Europe has positioned themselves better than the US for Peak Oil. They've had high gas taxes for years. So now they have an infrastructure of public transportation, towns where you can walk to shop, and a fuel efficient car fleet. Why did they do it? This is not a rhetorical question. Who was lobbying for high energy taxes?
Help us out Europeans...
As for our political leadership. I am rather cynical on this topic. I look at our last Presidential vote. Both Bush and Kerry were members of Yales Skull and Bones. My point being is that it is all beyond our control. We really have no say in who runs, wins, or the decisions they make afterwards. Just my opinion.
The most important reason for petrol taxes has for a very long time been fiscal. It gives a lot of money to the state budget. The main reason to implement the tax were to finance road building and maintainance. But since we more or less withouth interruptions have had a socialist governmnet that tries to implement socailism by raising taxes and enlarging the government sector they have allway been raised. During the last 4 years the increase have been quicker due to our greens demanding it for enviromental reasons.
We had early on an advanced electromechanical industry, we imported coal but had plenty of hydro power. We started early with railway electrification to save coal and expensive locomotive maintainance and get larger capacity for exporting ore.
WW2 kind of worked in our favor. We were lucky and licked ass to avoid being attacked and during the war we had a massive crash program for almost complete electrification of our railways to save coal wich we imported from nazi germany in exchange for iron ore, ball bearings, etc. Car use and road building boomed during the 50:s end especially 60:s but most of the rail infrastructure were kept and some investments done. It has become clear to mee that a large reason for this were Swedens militarization after the second world war and during the cold war. We were second only to Israel in war preparations to avoid being destroyed as our neighbours had been during WW2 and to avoid being forced to again lick dictator ass to save our own. Railway infrastructure were kept and maintained for the potential of fuel efficient transportation if WW3 would be like WW2.
The 70:s oil crisis probably saved some of the railway infrastructure and gave a major boost to our nuclear program wich replaced most of the fuel oil use for small house heating.
In the late 80:s we started to build new railways. I am not sure why, it was probably a combination of enviromental reasons and the recognition that it is good for commuting. New rail links started to be a lifeline for small and medium sized towns that almost were close enough to large growing towns. This building trend continues but only 1/3 of the projects on the wish list are being built within a few years. We will have an outstanding railway network in 2030 or later. :-/
One factor might have been that our capital Stockholm is built on granite rock ground on a set of icelands and creek(?) divided ground. It was expensive to build roads but fairly inexpensive to build subways and it has for a fairly long time relied on railway commuting.
The popularity of fairly dense towns is not easy to explain. We industrilized and urbanised late being a mostly rural country. One component might be that most large industries built during the industrialization had housing built within biking distance giving us manny fairly dense towns that then were enlarged generation for generation.
Perhaps some of the longing for suburban living were satisfied by having summer cottages? Often in connection to an old family farm or so. It has been and still is very common to have a flat in the town and a summer cottage or caravan. Areas with summer cottages fairly near large towns did later transform intor suburban all year housing.
Peak oil is probably now becomming a major factor for city and infrastructure planning. One idea in my home town Linköping that I realy like is to build new bus roads with a geometry suitable for future trolley tracks when the economy starts to favor them.
Which gives way to more collectivism - more willingness to make sure that others have enough, and no-one gets too much. If a Swede had too much while others went without, it would result in envy, which in Sweden is a very bad thing (although from what I've heard, there's LOTS of envy in Sweden). Whereas in North America, having others envy you is sold as a great thing -something to aspire to.
So, here there's more resistance to doing things for the common good. Here, your fancy, big car parked in front of your mortgaged-to-the-hilt house is a good thing, but taxes to invest collectively in transit or compact, social housing is bad. In Sweden, the tradition is the opposite, thanks to "Jante's Laws" and the national character.
Anyway, the Law in itself is pretty thoughtprovoking.
the following is from the link at the top of the list after a google serch on "jantelov":
http://www.bearcy.com/janteloven.html
http://www.bearcy.com/janteloven.html#Anti-Janteloven
the "Jante-law"
You shall not believe that you are somebody.
You shall not believe that you are as worthy as us.
You shall not believe that you are any wiser than us.
You shall not imagine that you are any better than us.
You shall not believe that you know anything more than us.
You shall not believe that you are more than us.
You shall not believe that you are good at anything.
You shall not laugh at us.
You shall not believe that anyone cares about you!
You shall not believe that you can teach us anything!
Aksel SANDEMOSE 1899-1965 (famous Danish writer)
The "Anti-Jante-law"
You are exceptional.
You are more worthy than anyone can measure.
You can do something special.
You have got something to give to others.
You have done something you can be proud of.
You've got a bundle of unused resources.
You are good at something.
You can accept others.
You've got the capability to understand and learn from others.
There are someone who love you.
I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.
I want to sincerely thank both of you for your comments about your countries. I believe that it is vitally important for those of us in the US to see what other countries have done and are currently doing.
My wife spent her junior college year at the University of Madrid (almost 50 years ago). It had a profound impact on her and she still maintains friendships developed then.
I think much of this is from our country being rural and quite cold during wintertime. You absolutely have to have your house in order, stockpiled food and stockpiled firewood otherwise you die. You have too take very good care of your animals otherwise they die and then you. You have to cooperate with youir neigbours for defence otherwise the Danes or Russians come and steal your stockpiles. You need consensus and working solutions for your problems otherwise nature kills you. This gives that people can be neighbours their whole lives hating each others guts but still get some things done togeather if they must be done.
We also had no nobelity to speak of. Our farmers have allways been an independant class and we have most of the time had an alliance between the king and the farmer class to ballance the small nobelitys power. This and very orderly and logically run state have for most of the recent history made us efficient. It can however backfire into extreme militarism that has bled us white a few times. Authority has been very respected although after a sufficent period of incompetence it is usually replaced, Swedes are very obidient as long as things work well. This has probably been eased by our town, corprorations(bruk) and even state being fairly small.
We logically tore down a large part of our regulations and liberalised in the mid 1800:s to industrialize and attract foreign capital. We had untill the late 1960:s almost exactly the same kind of development as China is halfway thru right now although it took us a hundred years, not two generations.
Our national character with jante, consensus culture and respect for authority was very susceptible for socialism. Communism was rejected as dangerous, probably due to the civil war in Finland. The liberal ideas lingered and influenced our politics and the early generations of socialists were practical people that realy did work for the common good, at least for large scale capitalists. Nobody complained since we had enourmous growth fueled by hydropower, oil, innovation and not being bombed out during WW2. It started to rot fast in the 70:s some years after the original socialists were replaced with career politicians. Now we have a socialist nomenklature that works for maximizing our state to provide jobs for them and their friends.
The local politics are right now quite intresting. I think our socialists are breaking down, more due to internal incompetence then the opposition. Market solutions and pseudo market solutions have for some years penetrated some sectors and the consensus regarding how to run things have started to change. I think we are due for a total state renovation as the one we had in the mid 1800:s.
I am not terribly worried about local large scale prepartions for peak oil. Our authorities are usually logical and we will do the right things if people encourage them to do so, a little late but before most other countries. And there is a small engineer inside most swedes that I am sure will survive our generation of dumbing down culture.
I'm a yank, but am still a Tomte deep in my heart~ MorFar was from Lincoping..
I spoke with a Swedish woman in NY a few years ago who was annoyed that America's 'Conveniences' weren't at all convenient. She said in her town, (which I think was ALSO Lincoping!) that she would ride a bike into town, and then walk around to get to everything she needed. Thought I was watching a Disney movie! I'm hoping I can help Portland, Maine get a fleet of small Electric Shuttle buses to connect our main areas, otherwise, it's mostly walkable.
Bob Fiske (nee; Johannson)
The bicycle lane network has continued to grow. http://kartan.linkoping.se/lkkarta/default.htm tick off "cykelleder" for bicycle lanes, whole drawn are for biking and walking, dotted line is mixed with car traffic, circles are tunnels. The map is unfortunately not complete some tunnels and bicycle lanes are missing from it.
I live in Skäggetorp, Tornby is the mall area with IKEA and so on and I bicycle to the university in västra valla. Tick off "hållplatser" to see bus stops, it looks better then it is since the bus traffic only is dense along a few routes.
Other kind of green infrastructure is almost complete coverage with central heating. Most of the heat comes from a garbage incineration plant that also produces electricity. There is also a heat and power plant with three boilers, one for biomass, one for coal and one for oil to diversifie the fuel use to optimise for changes in the market and tax system. And there is a small combined heat and power plant in the form a a marine diesel that is part of the cities electrical icelanding capability if we get national grid problems. It was originally built as an emergency powerplant for meat processing food industries and I think it still can provide them with steam. There is also a fairly large central cooling network wich uses excess heat from summertime garbage incineration to produce chilled water with large centralised absorbtion heat pumps.
All of the busses and most of the taxis and a lot of other cars run on biogas from a local plant that mostly ferments waste from the food industry. The second generation plant is now being built in the neighbouring town Norrköping where it will use left over protein from ethanol fermentation and fresh grass and cereals as feedstock. Yesterday it was decided that the ethanol plant owned by cooperating farners will increase its production from current 50 000 m3/year to 200 000 m3/year in 2008.
Linköping is not conciderd to be an especially green town exept for the biogas where we are a few years ahead of most of Sweden and we have one of the best bicycle lane networks.
Most of the transportation infrastructure money goes to new roads and we need some more roads since a 4 min stop is conciderd a queue problem worthy of solving. People from Stockholm laugh at this where an about 15 min stop is regarded as a real problem. I guess Californians etc laugh or cry at us all. It is nice to have parallell infrastructures for public transportation commuting, car commuting and bicycling, how could you otherwise get it to work efficiently?
We need to invest more in the raiway infrastructure to get parallell high speed double track alongside the current double track that soon will be full with traffic. We have some fairly unused railtracs that could be renovated and replace a fair ammount of car commuting giving a lifeline to some smaller towns. It is unfortunately very expensive but the investments last for decades, if I remember right the normal design lifetime for large road and railway bridges is 120 years. (If that is correct, a lot of the bridges from the 60:s have needed realy major maintainance after only 30 years. I hope that gives lessons learned. )
The main industry in Linköping is not as green. Saab Gripen fighter planes, but it might become a popular product. It is at least the most fuel efficient fighter in its generation and well suited for cost efficient national self defence. :-)
With todays world price on oil and the current taxes biofuels have become cheaper to use then oil based fuels. A mass replacement of oil based fuels have started and if the trend holds it will be complete in less then 20 years. This will destroy the tax base financing our roads and silently funding other parts of the state budget. The biofuels can handle the general sales tax but nothing more and how do you regulate fair tax levels between half a dozen biofuels and industrial feedstocks? The only way to solve this in an easy to regulate and efficient pseudo market way is to have a fee related to road wear and roadspace use. This would also make it harder to siphon off money for other uses within a state budget, that is good since our state is too big and inefficient.
This can be compared to the fees on railway use. The cost for running a train is the cost for the additional maintainance needed when one more train is run on the tracs. New investments are financed with the state budget, the pseudo market only finance the upkeep. The idea is that very expensive "structural" infrastructure is decided by the political process but the running and upkeep of present infrastructure is too be run withouth a political process.
This works to about 50% since the fees are a too small and the state budget for the additional maintainance is too small in favor of large new projects. I hope this will change so that we dont have to have infrastructure maintainance on the day to day agenda.
The cost for such roads is mostly charged from the people building a mall or other development. General improvements of the road network in municipialities is paid by their part of the income tax. Large improvements are conciderd a national priority and are bult after 5 to 70 years (and counting...) in the nation road building queue with money from the state budget. Rich municipialities jump this queue by lending money for building major rodas from their own budget and then wait a number of years for their place in the national queue to get the loan back without intrest. The same system is used for railway investments.
Local fuel taxes would only result in manny petrol stations right at the municipialities border.
Few mainstream political parties fail to accept that it is the state's duty to provide medical care largely free at the point of use, free public education for the vast bulk of children, support for nurseries, a minimum state funded pension and state funding for the arts. To the left many want far higher state involvement.
To this end it is accepted that there will be high tax levels. People complain about taxes here as they do everywhere but what is grudgingly accepted as reasonable by the broad mass of people would cause riots in America. Here in the UK income tax of 20% rising to 40% for income over $57,000 pa, sales tax on nearly everything at 17.5%, property tax of an average of $1700 pa per house, fuel tax that takes gasoline to nearly $7/US gallon, Inheritance tax of 40% of estate value over $500,000, $35/litre on spirits (in addition to sales tax) and corporation tax of 30% on profits over $M2.7 p/a are not a major political issues. The right wing Conservative party has decided to drop commitments to cut taxes as they were not popular in the political centre ground. The left wing Liberal Democrats are generally thought to have won more votes than they lost at the last election by promising to raise the base income tax from 20% to 21%
Thus we accept state intervention on a scale vast sectors of the American electorate would not countenance. The augments are about how much the state should subsidise energy conservation. Once it is accepted that energy conservation is needed it is assumed that the state will play a major role in this. The mayor of London's proposal to mandate solar energy on all new buildings in the city has met with wide approval as has his implementation of a charge of $12.55 per day to drive into the centre of the city. Paving over streets to form pedestrian areas is common and popular , Cycle lanes are spreading rapidly.
In addition to this there is the advantage in some countries, such as the UK, of there being little space for urban sprawl. You cannot live 30 miles outside a UK city, cities are not that far apart. We also have a history of building out of durable materials, brick, slate and stone and a romantic attachment to old buildings. Whole areas of 150 year old buildings are common and 200 and 300 year old buildings are not rare. Compact city centres are rarely demolished. Old buildings are refurbished and the city centre patterns remain the same. As such many are not well suited to private cars and public transport is more easily accepted.
We still have long way to go and most energy conservation is largely based on climate change which is now very widely accepted and not on peak oil. Sweden is the exception in accepting peak oil at Government level. Still media awareness of peak oil such as on the BBC and UK papers such as the Guardian and Independent seems to be much higher than the main stream media in America.
As a consequence to all of this, in Europe the car is considered a luxury - a point I want to stress upon. The primary mode of transportation is mass transit (very good to excellent in all countries) and the personal car is accepted as a complementary luxury for those who can afford it. In all countries luxuries are taxed and are an important milk cow for the governments. In exchange (in countries with good policy) the governments have been investing heavily in the mass transit infrastructure even though from purely economical perspective mass transit is generating losses in most cases. The states and the individuals have rightfully unaccounted that the gains from saved land, preserved neighbourhoods, reduced traffic and pollution far outweight the subsidies needed.
Robinson said something like, if you look back and user your body like your paleo ancestors did, you find you are using less oil.
That works for me, though I don't expect everyone to choose that path ... buy hey, it does appeal to a certain hedonism/vanity to suggest that responding to peak oil will give you bigger biceps.
Biking definitely works the legs more, but there is some ... is "dynamic tension" the right words? ... as the grip on the handlebars is leveraged to the pedals. I can feel it in my arms after a long mountain bike downhill ... but that's less car replacement than motocross replacement ;-)
There are lots of links here:
http://www.massbike.org/bikelaw/bikelaw.htm
The law basically states that electric bicycles with fully functioning pedals, no more than 750 watts of motor power output, and a top speed of 20 mph on motor power only, are to be treated as "bicycles", and are not subject to motorized vehicle laws.
Electric bicycles that fall under this category are not generally required to be registered or licensed as motor vehicles, and a drivers license is not generally required to drive them. They are, however, subject to all the rules of the road, and additional laws governing the operation and safety of electric bicycles may be extended by state or local governments. This new law offers the freedom of being able to use an electric bicycle on public roads and bike trails to people in every state.
I found that information on the website for an electric bike conversion kit.
See also the "Safe And Complete Streets Act of 2005
...and the To encourage energy conservation through bicycling.
Worse, the law makes it a Federal Crime to posess an electric bike that doesn't comply. i.e. one that attains 21mph even with a low power enough motor. It's a "controlled substance" like all manner of industrial chemicals!
It would have been nicer if the 750W rating was the only compliance criterion, allowing people to play around with gearing, add a fairing, etc. to get better efficiency. What a disappointment. But that's the Bush regime for you!
Let's face it. A Lance Armstrong makes half a horse at best but can do a lot better than 19.999mph. The motor power is two Lance Armstrongs at full speed. The bike if geared right would thus outrace Lance!
It's scary enough that an unlicensed and unskilled electric bike rider is going to be sharing the bike lane with me at 20 mph.
If someone wants to go 30, 40, ... , let them go be a "motorcycle" under the law. That is compeletly reasonable.
For the electric-only law, it would be nice to have a power limit like 750 watts of mechanical work, but you get to add fairing or gear it to taste. The result is that inventors out there will find the most efficient method of getting that 750W to push that bike to highest speed. Most people willing to take a welding rod to a bike frame will think twice before they test-drive their device! Just like those ultralights. I know I would, even with The Law on my side.
Is the Bush regime encouraging fitness like Lance Armstrong? If so, it will fail as he's a pro athlete. How the law is coded is designed to deter innovation, either to encourage athleticness or oil use. Take your pick.
Since we want to encourage energy savings, the last thing we want to do is deter e-binke use. Or for that matter motorcycle use. Make motorcycles easier to use. That'll be good. As fas as e-binkes, all the better. Plug in your 10-speed to use less energy than a lawnmower would be better. Not everyone is a Lance Armstrong.
http://odograph.com/?p=332
No, if anything the suburbs and exurbs will very likely stay populated and be the engines of change that help lead the transition to a post-fossil fuel world. Why? Simple: These are, on average, people with above-average incomes and in many cases a clear need to cut back on transportation and other energy costs. This makes them perfect early adopters for things like the first mainstream, all-electric cars, home solar panels, thermal solar water heating, better house insulation and energy use, etc.
Some of your above-average income exurbanites and suburbanites have above-average debt as well, and may also be only a few paychecks away from default. The fiscally prudent will be in better shape, but I suspect the early adopters will also be the first to move closer to work.
The truly wealthy may inherit the exurbs, buying all the items you mention to maintain themselves, buying cheap property and tearing down McMansions to live like landed gentry. I've been wondering if horse-drawn transportation will make a comeback in rural areas.
I work in financial services. When 9/11 hit, my old company went bankrupt because all of our customers (brokerage firms) went bankrupt because all of their customers (retail customers) lost money in the collapse.
Unless telecommuting picks up in a massive, massive way where many residents of the 'burbs can work at a new job remotely, where will the above-average paying jobs be? And then there's the saying that if your job can be done via telecommuting, it can also be done via outsourcing.
I say again: Suburbanites are not evil, not stupid, not immoral. They weigh costs and benefits, just as do fishermen who overfish, feedlot operators who pollute air and water, and peasants who have a dozen children to ensure security in old age.
Extra credit to anyone who includes the cost of the military in the cost to provide gasoline.
http://www.grinzo.com/energy/downloads.html
If they've ever been to Disney, they can relate.
Or this website at the Center for Transportation Analysis with lots of transportation energy data.
Like a genuine,
Bona fide,
Electrified,
Six-car
Monorail!
What'd I say?
Monorail!
http://www.greencarcongress.com/topics.html
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/
You can see that we lag the world in fuel efficiency.
RR
also USA leads in the number of miles/km driven in average by a driver. In the same way the average distance from home to the work place is longer in USA comparing with any country in Europe or with Japan.
Also the average fuel efficiency of the cars on road in USA is poorer than that in Europe/Japan.
This is due to the fact that USA is the first society in the world that was motorized in mass proportion. If I recall exactly around 1920-1930 80% of cars produced in the world were made in America. Mass motorization was of course made possible by the abundance of cheap energy. America was blessed with large reserves of oil that sustained this until well into the '60's. The other sustainig factor was of course the economy and the fact that from the '30's the average income per family was higher in USA than in Europe or Japan. Income gaps have widened even more after WW2. most of Europe and Japan were lying in ruins in 1945. Then the West Europeans and the Japanese got back to work and their economies started to grow faster than America's and closed most of this income gap but since the 1990's USA has been growing faster than both his main economic rivals.
Higher incomes, vast available land and cheaper fuel have led to the urban sprawling. All these are elements that both the Europeans and the Japanese have so far had less of. I'm sure we in America will have to make adjustments of our lifestyle as the price of fuels will inevitably go up, but I feel that we have the resources to adjust, inovate and adapt...
As woried I can be about the peak oil I stand by the principle that the most valuable resource of any country are the people. I'm, if anything, more worried because of the relative poor performance of the American high school students in the PISA study compared with kids from a bunch of European countries and also from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore ( China's catching up quick too) than from the limited oil availability...
not that will be unlikely that this will shake America harder than Europe or Japan but by all cues we have so far we are at the dawn of knowledge economy. The smartest and best educated will prosper...
Sprawl was the result of a series of gov't policies to encourage precisely this type of development (which is actually a lower quality of life, with more social isolation, more obesity, more time in vehicle, less access to social resources (libraries, concerts, city hall) etc.). Quite deliberate.
One datum. I have seen a Chamber of Commerce type film short promoting sprawl into Jefferson Parish from New Orleans circa ~1952, all white faces, etc. A telling blurb "You can use your VA loan to buy a new home in Metairie, but not to fix up an old home in New Orleans."
And we do NOT have the resources to easily build our way out of this. Our Balance of Payments is - $800 billion/year and heading south as oil imports cost more. We have no savings and are selling our infrastructure piece by piece to pay for imports.
Sorry, but your optimism is misplaced. I know, I live in New Orleans and I clearly see that we are no longer a great nation "that can do anything they set their mind to".
The United States of America is no longer a great nation as we once were.
(Remmeber their $5 Oil cover story in 1999, when they predicted permanenly low oil prices of $5 per barrel? I would view this cover story as a very, very strong buy signal for oil.)
Press Alert
20 April 2006
For Immediate Release
Why the world is not about to run out of oil
This week's Economist publishes a special report on worldwide oil markets. Economist correspondent Vijay Vaitheeswaran explains that the world is not about to run out of oil; there is enough to go round, providing it can be extracted.
The oil production peak is unlikely for decades to come, argues The Economist. Governments may decide to shift away from petroleum because of its nasty geopolitics or its contribution to global warming. But it is wrong to imagine the world's addiction to oil will end soon, as a result of genuine scarcity.
there is enough to go round, providing it can be extracted.
That caveat gives them a bit of an out. Not that anyone in the elite social classes actually pays for intellectual retardation.
Yes, that is a pretty big "if," no?
And there is a virtually limitless supply of methane on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Provided that it can be extracted.
Well.... give us 20 years or so (ala Hirsch rpt) and we might come up with a much scaled back version of the current oil-dependent economy.
Of course, if OPEC can't "rev up production," a significant component (oil) of the cost of recovering commodities or processing these commodities or growing corn for ethanol might still remain constrained. It might also be possible we are reaching the physical limits of one or two of these commodities.
I like that -- "check any economics textbook." Case closed, I guess. He must be right.
Since it is subscription based, I have summarised
the main points.
Economist article Summary
Steady As She Goes
Why the world is not about to run out of oil
It is arguable both that the world is about to hit peak oil and that such an event would cause economic ruin.
Colin Campbell has been saying peak is imminent since the early 1990s. Kenneth Deffeyes is wrong, global peak did not happen last year.
Non Opec peak around 2010-2015
Peak oil advocates best argument is that OPEC inflated its reserve figures Kuwait's reserve figures always looked dodgy, IHS Energy has been using a 50bbl figure
for a long time. Saudi ones are more reliable.
Quotes USGS to say that there are 3 trillion recoverable barrels in the ground and only a third has been produced.
It is true that finding new super-giant fields is unlikely.
However there are technological breakthroughs that are lifting the recovery rate
- Multilateral drilling
- 4D seismic analysis
- Electromagnetic "direct detection" of hydrocarbons
Sharp peak followed by collapse unlikely to happenCERA says there should be price signals to indicate peak is near and this would speed investments in alternatives to oil. Peak metaphor is wrong, "undulating plateau"
is closer to the mark. (Daniel Yergin, CERA)
According to the Cato institute, the key to avoid economic disaster is not to impose price controls or other monetary blunders like in 1970s.
Shows a chart (from CERA) which shows the price points where alternative fuels become economic
$80 Biodiesel (excluding tax credits)
$60 US Corn based Ethanol (excluding tax credits)
$50 Shale oil
$40 Tar sands, Brazilian cane bases Ethanol, Gas to Liquids, Coal to Liquids
$20 Conventional oil
Oil business transforming from a risky exploration business to a technology-intensive manufacturing business.
Describes GTL projects underway. North gas field in Qatar is bigger than Ghawar when measured interms of energy.
Describes how Chevron brought Kern river oil field "back from the brink" by using a sophisticated steam injection process allowing the heavy oil to be lifted. This technique can be applied in China, Canada and Venezuela.
Saudis have invited Chevron to test this technology in neutral zone. Ali Naimi estimates it may improve recoverability from 6% to over 40%.
Oil production peak unlikely for decades to come. Global warming or geopolitics may influence government
oil policy, but world's oil addiction will not end soon.
Just what TOD needs.
Yergin has already been widely discredited. The CATO institute is a shill for elites, who could care less about $20/gal gas.
Miraculous undemonstrated and unfeasible technological developments and claims of "technology-intensive manufacturing" has not prevented the drilling of billion dollar dry holes nor suddenly trumped geology, economics, or thermodynamics yet, and will not in the future, no more than we will all be riding around in George Jetson air cars. Dream on friend, dream on.
Or better yet, actually try reading previous posts on this website that have already covered these issues at length and in depth.
Please do read up a bit concerning the topics you raised, and I believe you will see what I stated is, in fact, true.
To examine the strongest and best statement of views that we believe to be erroneous is the best way to clarify and examine and strengthen our own positions.
To ridicule or automatically denigrate opposing views, is, in my opinion, extremely counterproductive.
Views expressed in "The Economist" may indeed be quite wrong. But they are not foolish nor to be brushed aside with scorn.
Perhaps if our posts are clever enough we might induce "The Economist" to assign a reporter to looking at TOD on a regular basis;-)
Your post says more than anything else about why Peak Oil doomsters are likely to be more wrong than right. Yergin discredited? Maybe in your reality. Maybe next year, maybe never. Certainly not today. The danger with sites like this is that they tend to collect people who agree with each other and then they start to develop their own realities through groupthink.
I don't mean to tar everyone on TOD with the same brush, but the number of mutually reinforcing doomsters is growing rapidly. When I see a post like yours I see how debate is stifled because it doesn't fit with your world view.
I have actually been reading TOD for about six months now, and I have been following the Peak Oil issue since the 90s. I think there is substance to Peak Oil, but the subject collects chicken little types very quickly. I have read "The Coming Saudi Oil Crisis" and "The Skeptical Environmentalist". I still find Lomborg more convincing than Simmons.
His focus, IMO, is too narrow. He doesn't consider whether infinite growth is possible on a finite planet, even if we do it via railroads instead of cars.
Of course oil is not recyclable but there are plenty alternatives it is just we need another 15-20 years to ramp them up.
Personally I think a recession is a real possibility, it is one way to reduce demand as alternative fuels ramp up.
I strongly disagree with that. In the end, the base of the economy is energy. We will not continue the current ever-expanding Ponzi scheme by selling each other insurance.
The finite world/infinite growth paradox was the thesis of Ehrlich's "Population Bomb", The Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" and even Malthus "Essay on Population". They were all wrong, because they assumed growth has a linear impact on resources. For every extra X %growth you need X % more farmland. In reality people become better at farming, using energy and other resource.
Read The Story of Wheat. That represents my view of things.
How can you say the global economy is a Ponzi scheme? That's what the Soviets used to say! <grin>
As my agronomist dad likes to say, Malthus was wrong only in his timing.
The story of wheat is the story of the Green Revolution. The oil-fueled Green Revolution.
Read Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies. That represents my view of things.
Humans can "innovate" their way out of problems...as long as they have the energy to do so. To get around peak oil, we will have to find an energy source that is better than oil. One that is not as good will not work.
Where's Dave? He has posted here several times that he thinks Marx was right about capitalism being a Ponzi scheme.
Frankly, I think he may be right. The best system for exploiting abundant resources will not be the best system for dealing with a resource-constrained world.
BTW, Simmons points out that the reason the Club of Rome's prediction has not yet come to pass is that they made a flawed assumption: that the rest of the world would start to catch up to the U.S. That did not happen. Instead, the gap between the haves and have-nots widened into a chasm. Instead of a car in every garage, Africans are still lucky to have a bike, while Americans have a car, an SUV, a riding mower, and boat in their garages.
And that, I think, is the most likely result of peak oil. I'm not ruling out the more catastrophic outcomes: nuclear war, a fast, Mad Max crash. But I think most likely, inertia will carry us for decades, maybe even centuries. The gap between the haves and have-nots will become ever wider as more and more people fall out of the middle class, and it becomes next to impossible to "rise above your station."
We could grow the economy without growing the population if we keep raising our standard of living, forever and ever and ever...but that's not going to be possible with limited resources. There's only so much you can do with recycling/efficiency improvements.
*See Hartmann's <U>The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight</U>
BTW why didn't the HTML underline tag work?
Use begin-anchor and end-anchor without an href=
some people predict that peak population will be around 2050-2060 at around 10-11 billion. China will stop growing in the next decade at around 1.5 bil, India past 2030 with 1-200mil more people. USA will peak around 400-450mil and close to 50% will be then Spanish speaking... The countries of current EU, including the new members in the club, will remain around 400-450mil ( not much different from today's numbers and also Russia seems will stay around 150mil).
- When will it start?
- How long will it last?
- How severe will it be?
After consulting the stars, livers of sacrificed animals, chicken entrails and tea leaves, here are my tentative answers:- Soon. Probably in 2006.
- About eighteen months, depending on way too many variables to have any confidence at all in a time estimate of duration.
- Severity of recession could be anything from mildness of recent (e.g. 1990-91,) downturns to severity of early eighties to . . . if monetary policies are horribly stupid or if some stupendous bad luck comes down the pipe . . . downward spiral into global trade wars and another Great Depression.
In my opinion, a rather long and severe recession would be the best possible economic scenario for giving us much-needed time to adjust to peak oil.One of the straws in the wind I am looking at is the bottleneck caused by the shortage of huge tires for trucks in the mining industry. Such bottlenecks are typical of an economy at or about to reach full production capacity.
Remember, however, that God created economic forecasters to make weather forecasters look good by comparison;-)
That said, what I told myself in the shower this morning was "it'll be a 10 year bear market."
I have no idea if the voice I heard in the shower will prove correct.
I had the opportunity to learn a little bit about reading chicken entrails, hanging out on Indonesian outer islands, while in search of waves. The chief would summon-up a chicken at the time of a pending decision, and I think it was the shape of the liver, or maybe the liver-kidney combo, that would aid in the decision to be made. This was in the late 1990's.
I've been thinking about PO and island living. I'm about to go off to a little South Pacific spot for some surf, and I'm pondering the future for these out-of-the-way places. Less planes, fewer ships, less plastic crap aboard the ships, but simple sustainable living a possibility. There's a size at which I think an island is too big/too developed. (Maui - though I've never been there. They have a Costco. Most of the Hawaiin chain)
I think these little, nearly stone-age villages (really!) in Indonesia will have the last laugh. Water Buffalo, rice and papayas, chickens, fish and a pig now and then.
I'd rather be there than here with 400,000 Portlander's when TSHTF.
On the island issue, I do believe that climate change will have more effect than PO in some cases. A lot of non-Westernized poor folks just aren't that involved in the oil economy. But they ARE involved in the natural world: seasons, rainfall, heat, drought, catastrophic storms (though relatively infrequent, these suckers REALLY screw things up for many folks, for a long time)etc.
I'm all for alternate fuels. The campfire will keep us warm and our legs will take us where we need to go.
The "economy" part with esoteric derivatives, intellectual properties and symbolic resources and unenforcable long term business deals will be in world of hurt in depressing peak oil scenarios.
The Economist article summarised above does not represent my opinion. I wanted TOD to debate this article because I think it is an important one. It is the first item in the mainstream media that I have read or seen that actually refers to "Peak Oil" and attempts to tackle the debate head on. One person picked up the article but didn't address its substance. I couldn't post a link to the article because it is subscription only. I can't post the article itself because that would be breach of copyright. So I summarised it.
It think it is a good summary position of "the case for the opposition".
Besides, I remember that March 1999 "Drowning in Oil" cover. Where's my $5 oil? ;-)
You can bet that the Economist thought long and hard about that mistake before publishing the "Steady as she goes" article. They have a new editor. They know this is a risk. But I like that they write these articles. It is so much easier to be CNN and put together a doom laden collage and call it "We were warned".
They don't publish footnotes, it is an opinion magazine. However there are a couple of nuggets that are worth discussing. Firstly they address the reserves issue for the first time. The dodgy Kuwait figures are acknowledged but do not extrapolate to Saudi, according to "more independent contractors and oil majors with first hand knowledge of the fields". It would be nice to have a detailed breakdown of who said that.
Above all the Economist believes in the power of the market to deal with situations where nobody has the complete picture. They don't discount the notion of a peak but they also argue against a sudden collapse in production and from that they argue that a global peak need not cause a big global recession.
Those who argue that Peak Oil is imminent must also argue that the market is not working as it should.
I would say the market can't work as it "should." The whole idea of free market capitalism and its attendant constant growth is a product of fossil fuels.
If, say, the Easter Islanders had free markets, would they have been able to save themselves from collapse? I doubt it. In the end, it comes down to natural resources. We have hidden that from ourselves, but it will become painfully obvious when the cheap oil is gone.
They also had a population that was perhaps 10% the size of their previous population, and got that way through warfare, starvation, disease, and cannibalism.
That is something that Tainter found in his research. Societal collapse results in a 90% drop in population. Our tendency to overshoot at work, I guess.
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/24/042.html
He lets his agenda slip here and there. Here for instance.
Also if you have Collapse to hand look at the figure facing page 497. (Political Troublespots vs Environmental Troublespots) Apparently the wars in the planet is cause by environmental damage. It is an utterly ludicrous theory, which he attempts to prove with a nonsense picture. It is a technique called counting the hits and ignoring the misses. That is why I cannot take Jared Diamond seriously.
I dont think we will make it to 10 billion people.
China is already importing Wheat and set to try and import more.
Coming soon: Oil wars, water wars and food wars, if not already here in some degree or other.
After reading the articles, I believe they accurately reflect the long-held views of the Economist and its energy corresponent Vijay Vaitheeswaran. Their main thesis seems to be "there is no shortage of oil reserves, but they are increasingly concentrated in the OPEC countries of the Middle East." Last year the Economist published a similar special issue on oil with the same thesis. I also heard Vijay Vaitheeswaran, along with Chris Skrebowski of Petroleum Review, on the now-defunct NPR radio program The Connection, in which he reiterated these views.
http://www.financialsense.com/Experts/2005/Vijay.html
They said that each engineer looks after 1000 automated and small wells and said is has transformed the process from "flying blind" to one where the wells monitor themselves. They provide no links or references. The field was the Kern River Field in California.
Deffeyes put the world 50% of Qt (crude + condensate) mark in December, 2005. The most recent EIA data, for January, show production falling by about 500,000 bpd. It takes a couple of months for declining exports to work their way through the system.
When did US net petroluem imports start falling? February.
When did the recent runup in oil prices start? February.
Khebab and I used only production data through 1970 to predict post-1970 cumulative Lower 48 production. Actual cumulative post-1970 Lower 48 production was 99% of what the HL method predicted. The world is now where the Lower 48 was at in 1970.
In contrast to this proven method we have a collection of "experts" that have a common characteristic of being consistently and flagrantly wrong regarding oil production, reserves and prices--USGS; Yergin and the Economist "$5 Oil" Magazine.
They say this could last 30-60 days.
So when is the Depression headed our way?
Won't that be good for us in a short run?
How long will this one last?
How many food kitchens in the suburbs will there be?
Will Las Vegas go under, or will it do a booming business?
I am sure you have your own ideas, mine are still out for the day, I have kidney stones again, and just want to bang my head on a wall, it'll help the pain in my side a lot.
In the Philippines, Malacañang Palace is calling on people to conserve. Fuel prices are subsidized there, and prices have been held down, but at the cost of other government spending. They are hoping coco-diesel and ethanol will help.
In Australia, a new study has found many truck drivers are living below the poverty line, due in part to high fuel prices.
In Uganda, the energy crisis is being blamed for slowing economic growth.
Even the United States, where conservation is for wimps, energy prices are starting to curb consumption. Americans are driving less:
CNN asked readers how they are dealing with higher gas prices. Read a sampling of the responses here.
The Dayton Daily News (free registration required) reports that Higher energy prices may stunt corn crop.
And on the production side...
Plenty of repairs still to go in the Gulf of Mexico:
And Texans are warned to expect more blackouts like Monday's unless more power plants are built.
Most of them just shrug and accept it. All of them have a Reason that they need to drive their one person car or truck into the centre of Ann Arbor. One has to pick up children then speed home to telework for another couple of hours (OK, that's a fairly good reason). Another absolutely must get to the gym at 4:30. Others live over an hour away @ 70mph and have no other way of getting into work.
All of them think they are just screwed and yet do nothing about it.
What about me? Well. I keep meaning to stop my car at the park and ride and take the bus the remaining 4 miles into work. Problem is, the bus doesn't run after 6. I guess I need to change my hours to finish at 5 instead.
In the meantime I'll just shrug and accept it...
On a completely different subject:
Shouldn't stocks that depend on frivilous spending be tanking right now? Whenever I look at the news, all the fancy furniture, food and other businesses still seem to be doing really well.
What on earth are people cutting back on to pay for gas?
If my net is $2200 per month, do I really want to spend $960 on commuting?
When I try to talk about peak oil & its implications to my associates at the office, I see their eyes glaze over as their thoughts drift to the yummy Arby's "meat" sandwich they had for lunch, or to the alcoholic beverage they will consume when they get home. Engaging these people in this kind of conversation is fruitless. Too bad for them when TSHTF.
By the way...I keep bringing up lawn mowing because I've never seen anyone analysis this add gasoline supply impact in the Spring and Summer and I believe it must have some impact. How many lawn mowers are operating in the US? How much gasoline do we go through to mow lawns over typical weekends?
U.S. Census Bureau:
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
Housing units, 2002 = 119,302,132
I will estimate conservatively and say 50% have lawns =
59,651,066 lawns mowed every week
Estimated suburban lawn mower tank size = 1/2 gallon
Each household uses 1/2 gallon of gas each week = 29,825,533 gallons of gas used.
Toyota Camry tank capacity = 18.5 gals
The equivalent number of extra Toyota Camrys burning gas each week = 1,612,191
Lawn mowing season = April, May, June, July (tappers off in Aug/Sept, but I have mowed in October before).
Gallons of gas expended on mowing lawns during the mowing season (April - July) = 17 weeks x 29,825,533 = 507,034,061 gallons or 27,407,246 extra Toyota Camrys on the road.
And that's probably very conservative. Does this seem significant to anybody, but me?
Let your grass grow.
Let wildlife flourish.
Fortunately, I live in a community that contains many and eccentric folk and generally tolerates them well. After one neighbor (a newcomer) complained, I explained my position to some officials at City Hall, facetiously claimed to be a farmer (and my property is zoned commercial; I can legally do most things on it) in the business of raising whatever I felt like growing--including dandelions and tall grass.
I host numbers of prarie dogs, birds of some dozens of species, and critturs of all sizes up to and including the occasional wandering wolf or black bear.
Lawns are so boring.
My soil is thick and rich from years of unraked maple leaves falling and decaying. Not quite a wilderness, not quite the forest primeval, but IMO lawn care is a variety of mass mental illness induced by some trauma having to do with no longer living in the hunting and gathering societies humans evolved in.
Think about it. Do lawns make any sense at all?
It makes absolutely no sense at all.
In the 'old days', you might let your livestock graze on them (sheep or goats out in front of the manner house, how shocking!), but the concept of an eternally green, scalped, and manicured expanse of turf grass is a fairly modern concept, something only possible with the advent of the mower and copious supplies of cheap energy to waste on its useage.
Land was for farming, or left fallow to rest, not to endlessly fertilize, spray with green chemicals (chem-lawn, anyone?), and obsessively buzzcut.
I agree with you 100%, however, my work and family choice landed me in a suburb at this point in my life. I try to landscape it as much as possible to attract wildlife, but I have to cut the grass still. It is my predicament and I will have to live with it. I'm hoping after TSHTF, there will be no social/municipal constraints on suburban lawns and we will be free to grow whatever is needed to survive.
Do you have to live in a suburb?
Is the conformity and isolation and anonymity of a suburb the only way you and your family can find happiness?
Do you have to work at your current job?
Are there places where you know your neighbors, walk to do most errands, and school teachers are some of the best-paid people in town?
Just a few thoughts from Lake Wobegon, the land that time forgot (where all the women are strong, the men are all good looking, and the children are all above average)
I do not get why it must be impossible to talk and cooperate with ones neighbours.
And all suburbs are NOT created equal. Mine is older with woods and streams close by, not the antiseptic type with gates. My property has several large trees and I plant many wildflowers that seed and grow again the next year. I can walk or bike to the center of my town, but decided to drive to a larger city for work 7 years ago.
In the current economic climate, I may start looking for work closer to home or move closer to my current place of work. Problem is my wife is a professor in a town 30 miles in the opposite direction.
Welcome to the modern, nuclear family dilemma.
Yes, developed in 1834 or so, for "those Americans". 2.5 blocks from the St. Charles Streetcar Line (my section opened in 1834, the rest in 1835) and 1.2 miles (2 km) from the French Quarter and a mile the center of the CBD.
My neighborhood sounds much like yours in Sweden, but with a higher % gay (~1/3), better food and a nearby 12 square block urban park and small lawns/gardens in front of most homes (we are known as the Lower Garden District).
I would expect factoring in those missing pieces would raise that gasoline consumption considerably.
To my credit and fuel savings, I always combine errands with my afternoon mission home instead of go home, then drive elsewhere. I've had that habit since 1999 when gas started a slow price climb from 99 9 cents a gallon. BTW, what is up with that lame little 9 anyways? (the 9/10 of a cent that I pronounce with a high pitch faked voice)
Raised beds, Bests ones I have seen used bricks and concrete to build up about 6 inches, or plain concrete for a foot high bed. Personally I will build highers for sitting and gardening. Betwen raised beds, don't grow grass, mulch the ground heavily. Adds to your graound water and no lawn mowing in between beds needed.
Terrace the whole yard, walls up to 2 feet wide, to walk on and beds 3 to 4 feet wide, no ground not covered.
Plant native plants and do not add water that they don't get from rain fall. Water your garden with stored rainwater from your roofs collected over the course of the year, even dry areas, should be able to store several 100's if not 1000's of gallons. Be creative in the storage methods. Ponds can add water storage and fish and plants for ediable yards.
I mow my lawn only when I have to find my car. Or the city gets on to me, about 6 to 8 times a year. Don't know what it will be like when I move.
"I have seen more beggars out looking for $$ the closer I get to downtown. I wonder what that indicates?"
The weaker members of the pack are always the first to fall to predation or other environmental dangers (i.e. "The devil take the hindmost").
We're starting to see this already with the various poorer, 3rd world countries regarding demand destruction, and will also see this here at home. Those who cannot afford to compete economically for ever more expensive resources are the first to fall out of the running.
Here's what I've experienced: I push it from the garage out to the edge of the lawn (I don't need to mess with finding a gas can, filling it up, or pulling handles to get it started.) I push it across the grass and it cuts it in about the same amount of time as a regular gas-powered mower and with even a little less pushing resistance because it is much lighter in weight (no engine.)
The only problem is that with a reel-type mower you really have to keep up with regular cutting -- once the grass gets too high it has problems cutting crisply and you may need to go over it a second time in a perpendicular run pattern.
It's really a piece of cake, and the lawn looks good. I am truly a little aghast at how little difference a power-mower makes, if any. This one does the trick. I wonder how much gas I've used over the decades cutting my lawns?
I was just curious to quantify the "mowing" effect on overall gasoline demand and what possible benefit the US could harvest from curtailing a large portion of lawn maintenance if required.
Paying the minimums on their credit cards?
Of course.
A couple years ago, when California was going through all the rolling blackouts, and initially "deregulation" was getting the blame, I distinctly remember them saying it could never happen in Texas due to how well our grid was managed (and isolated from other states), even as we set to embark on deregulation ourselves.
Now we have rolling blackouts (admittedly minor compared to the Cali ones) And now what are they saying? "Plants were down for maintenance" "It was hotter than we expected" "freak accident, it won't happen again" But they are also saying "we need more power plants" which can be read as 'ease up on restrictions, start handing us some tax benefits, etc. or we'll make you suffer through rolling blackouts'
Texas has had TONS of power plants on the drawing board (Matt Simmons used to always make it a point when he talked about the coming natural gas crisis that all the plants on the drawing board were designed to operate on natural gas, since, at the time it was the cheapest thing going. He predicted that would end soon and we'd have trouble). This smacks of "natural gas costs so much now that we'll err on the side of not enough generation and just hope it doesn't get hot"
It's also not at all uncommon for us to see this kind of heat, if we set a new High Temperature Record anywhere in the state it is likely one that has been on the books for fifty years. This isn't global warming, this is Texas in the spring (and summer, and fall). It's hot. Should not be a surprise to anyone, least of all the power companies.
Grrr.
An article in today's Austin American Statesman.
The "city" referenced must be Austin -- it's smack dab in the middle of Travis County, and is known for using more green energy than any other city in the nation. This is a bit of a surprise.
The following comment is hilarious , moreso if the chap who made it wasn't taking the pish.
"I fill my car with 50 dollars worth of gas. I drive to the store to buy a 6 dollar bag of beef jerky. It takes me 3 dollars to go 14 miles to buy the jerky. I eat it all before I get home so I must go back to the store to buy more jerky for 6 dollars. Again it costs me 3 dollars in gas. I finish the jerky just as I arrive at home only to get an upset stomach from 1/2 pound of dried beef swelling in my stomach. I now have to spend another 3 dollars in gas to buy a 7 dollar bottle of Rolaids. This 1 hour of my life cost me 28 dollars. With the price of gas these days I think its time to give up on beef jerky. Another pleasure gone due to gas prices."
If it has this effect at £1/ litre then what happens at £2?
More bad news (from the Press and Journal 20/4/06):
FUEL PRICES RISE 'WILL BRING NEW CLEARANCES'
IAIN RAMAGE AND EILIDH DAVIES
09:00 - 20 April 2006
Higher fuel prices in the north will decimate business and force many people to uproot, it was claimed yesterday.
The bleak warning came as fears emerged this week that unleaded petrol at £1 a litre is likely to arrive this summer.
And they increased yesterday as oil prices in the UK hit a new high of more than 73 (nearly £41) a barrel due to fears that Iran's dispute with the west may hit oil supplies.
One leading member of the north business community warned tourism could suffer as a result of the high fuel prices, and local residents may even be forced to leave the region.
Frank Buckley, who lets holiday cottages at Melvaig, near Gairloch, Wester Ross, said: "It's expensive to live in the Highlands as it is. There's a widespread belief in Inverness and around the areas where I travel that fuel prices are going to cause the next Highland Clearances because people are on low incomes
What can you say. On the one hand those guys might not seem that bright, but on the other, the major media and/or the government have not been giving them very straight projections about future gas prices. They keep quiet, and let SUV pushers talk about when gas prices "will return" to lower levels ... as if there ever was a stable low price ...
Drivers Turn To Pawn Shops For Gas Money
There's a CNN video here:
http://tinyurl.com/lfsp9
That's a classic analyst's nonsense, but it reinforces this apparent disconnect between impacts at lower and middle income levels, and at the stock market or CEO level.
I found Big Gav's tapeworm economy post pretty interesting. As I said a while back, I think the process of "fast globalization" is showing some cracks.
After reading the dieoff site (which got me into the oil peak topic) I came to a conclusion like the "tapeworm economy" essay. Big business of all types end up being like an alien protozoan lifeform on paper like a bacterium. But becuse a corporation is only on paper, the "bacterium" can grow like a cancer cell to huge size and a corporation, unlike a bio-bacterium, can "eat" anything and it defacates product and waste products.
Corporations, unless regulated, "eat" workers by working them until their health fails, then disposes them with the same disreguard as a drunk disposes of an empty beer bottle. In a real sense, we created artificial life, not (yet) in the lab, but in the petri dish of financial markets. Like any life form, a corporation privatises anything it needs to exist but tries to socialise all its waste - exactly like yeast in a jug of grape juice. Each yeast cell eats the sugar then defacates alcohol, until they poison each other with the wine they generate.
This inevitable behaviour of corporations is WHY regulations were invented in the first place. We have seen how crazy things get with deregulation. I sure hope it's not too late to re-regulate corporate behaviour. I don't want a Jay Hanson style scenario.
http://www.vacationspringfield.com/vacationspringfield/gas.htm
WGW
Couple of weeks ago I had the chance to talk with an Iranian woman, visiting US about all of this. My impression is that she was proud and stayed distant (btw all this talk about women discrimination in Iran is a BS)... that's how peaceful people get devided by their governments and become enemies. What a madness...
If this article is wrong, well then it is easy to explain.
But if this article (and translation analysis) is correct, then how does one explain all those other translations? They are in so many places, from quite a few countries, and they are all so similar. It would seem to require that they must all stem from some common source, and it would not seem too hard to track it down. But the implications are disturbing.
There probably are both common source of the statement and common interest not to dig in into the correctness of this source. The message is convenient for everyone and in the interest of everyone to stay this way - after all Iran is classified in the "Axis of evil" for a long time - our media will be the last to confront our government. Who of importance is going to announce the truth? Our allies in the West??
I'm still amazed why you think this is "disturbing". Such propaganda, twisting or decoration of facts etc. are a normal practice in the West and US in particular. Look at what happened before all those dirty wars in Iraq (I), Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq II... We've become experts in double standarts and manipulation and IMO a lot of people seem to accept that as normal already - it is much easier psychologicaly to let yourself believe what you are told than using your own head.
On the bright side it is all coming back to us... oil is $75 this very moment... it won't be long.
Autocensorship.
http://atimes.com/atimes/China/HD18Ad02.html
excerpt:
The SCO, an Intergovernmental organization whose working languages are Chinese and Russian, was founded in Shanghai on June 15, 2001 by China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The SCO's change of heart appears set to involve the organization in Iran's nuclear battle and other ongoing regional issues with the United States.
Visiting Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mohammadi told Itar-TASS in Moscow that the membership expansion "could make the world more fair". And he spoke of building an Iran-Russia "gas-and-oil arc" by coordinating their activities as energy producing countries. Mohammadi also touched on Iran's intention to raise the issue of his country's nuclear program and its expectations of securing SCO support.
how do I get that into a nice blue box?
http://alternet.org/story/35186/
Last Tuesday I was reading a piece on the BBC's website, and they reported that a journalist had asked President Bush directly if he had plans to attack Iran with nuclear weapons. Instead of using this golden opportunity to finally lay this story to rest, and brush off Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article once and for all, Bush chose to repeat his line that 'All options were still on the table.' He was still looking for a 'diplomatic' solution to the problem. He pointedly refused to deny or rebuff the journalist's agressive question about plans to nuke Iran. I was rather surprised by his answer, and to find something like this on the BBC, which has a tendancy to 'smooth things over' regarding dangerous and controversial statements like this coming out of Washington.
I mean, here we have the most powerful man on earth, the Commander in Chief of the world's greatest military machine, refusing to rule out an American nuclear strike on a country which only has conventional weapons and posses no real threat to the United States, now or in the forseable future. His remarks would appear to casually cast aside about fifty years of American military policy, that is, the United States will not attack non-nuclear nations with nuclear weapons. Is this a new, radically agressive military posture we are seeing unveiled? Is it anything at all? Has Bush gone nuke nuts? Does his attitude even matter? Just because I and the BBC think it's worth mentioning, so what?
Anyway, the next day, yesterday, Wednesday, I went back to the BBC and the article was still there, the same heading and the same photo, but something was missing. All mention of the question about a nuclear attack on Iran had been edited out. I thought this was interesting and odd. Why remove sentence or two, just because they dealt with a nuke attack?
I began to wonder if I'd been dreaming, maybe my brain was going? It felt strange, like something from a movie. I then tried to find out if anyone else had a source for this 'nuclear attack question' and I couldn't find anything. Maybe I wasn't smart enough or thorough enough. Then I went to Reuters, and finally, buried away, I found their version of the story. They seemed to confirm that a journalist had indeed asked a question about attacking Iran. 'President Bush Refuses to entirely rule out nuclear strikes against Iran if diplomacy fails to curb the Islamic Republic's atomic ambitions.' They then went on to quote him as saying 'All options were still on the table.'
So I hadn't been dreaming after all! Still I sort of wish I had been, as, let's face it were dealing with atomic weapons here, once again Bush confirms Hersh's story that, yes, nukes are still on the table, and we may be getting ready to start a nuclear war in the Middle East! Hersh's article is correct, damn it!
I'm still not sure how much significance one should read into Bush's answer to this direct question, but I really wish he'd catagorically dismissed the idea or plan as nonsense, totally nuts, and stated once and for all that the United States would never use nuclear weapons against a country like Iran. I just wonder how long it'll be before we give Iran an ultimatum to abandon its nuclear programme - or else.
Well, this TODer is not bored of the Iran issue; in fact he's quite worried over it.
The pessimistic case is that Bush is already planning to attack Iran, and the ultra-pessimistic case is that he's planning to do it with nukes.
Those more optimistically inclined view this as an elaborate game of chicken that will eventually be resolved by some sort of diplomatic breakthrough. Perhaps this will be Bush's November surprise: a last minute pull-back from the brink that will have everyone breathing a sigh of relief and grateful for Bush's restraint and diplomatic skill. However, the trouble with playing chicken is that sometimes one of the parties doesn't blink. And then there is always the possibility of something going wrong - some unexpected screw-up or unplanned event that unintentionally puts the match to the fuse.
One troubling factor is this whole equation is Israel. What if they decide to free-lance an attack on Iran? Or what if they threaten to free-lance an attack so as to pressure the US to take the initiative? The more conspiratorial among us have no trouble envisioning some sort of bogus Gulf of Tonkin type episode to provide justification for such an attack.
Taking that to the next level, the only way that the Bush regime could rally the US public for a nuclear attack on Iran is for there to be another domestic terrorist attack on the scale of 9-11. Were that to happen, many people in the US would be demanding that we nuke Iran. Some believe that such an attack could be arranged.
There are so many combinations and permutations as to what might unfold that I can safely say I haven't a clue as to what will happen.
Here's a post from Kevin Drum, which discusses that:
TALKING TO IRAN....
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_04/008657.php
Yes, but implicit in what you say is that SOMETHING will happen between now and November. And I agree.
Meanwhile, Hu has lost SO MUCH FACE TODAY that he's going to go home and pull the rug out from underneath the US economy.
I like Orwell's phrase for it - information is "stuffed down the memory hole".
If you have too much free time it can be mildly entertaining to watch the "breaking news" section of your favourite newspaper online (or go to Yahoo or wherever to read the AAP and reuters feeds) and then watch what happens to the more interesting articles over a period of time...
Peter MacKay (Foreign Affairs Minister), answering a question:
Stephen Harper (Prime Minister) also answering a reporter's question:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/2000/US/02/22/trucker.protest.03/
does anyone know who rush is blaming high fuel prices on?
I'm curious does anyone here listen
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,18866297-643,00.html
"THE search for oil in the biggest untested structure in the Carnarvon Basin off the West Australian coast has produced a "duster" in the Jacala-1 wildcat exploration well. BHP Billiton Petroleum and its farm-in partners, Tap Oil and Roc Oil, have found no evidence of hydrocarbons at the site after one of the most expensive wells sunk in Australia in recent years.
Jacala, deep in the Indian Ocean about 200km west of Barrow Island, is a huge structure which some analysts suggested could contain up to 1 billion barrels of oil. Drilling began last month, well behind the original schedule which had the well beginning in the fourth quarter of 2005.The deep-water, semi-submersible drilling rig, Atwood Eagle, had to suspend operations twice because of cyclone activity."
OPIS also has a (free) story on the front page (probably won't be there long) that says ethanol is expected to be short until mid-2007:
http://www.opisnet.com/index.asp
RR
ExxonMobil Pipeline Starts Delivering Canadian Oil To U.S.
Excerpts:
RR
So I wonder if this is new supply from Canada, or if it's just a different means of transport from the Patoka hub?
RR
Is it just me, or are the left and right columns of this page off by about 3 inches? It may be just me, as the PC I'm on right now is likely a virus-laden, spyware-pwned, hacked up piece of pooge.
RR
Actually it's just the left column that's off
I'm using IE 6.0
Maybe --the very generous with his time & skills-- Super G can address this
RR
RR
Thanks.
Occasionally, someone will post a comment with a long URL in it. In order to handle the case where the center column is too narrow to fit the URL, I've set the "overflow" property of the comment boxes to "hidden". The should cause the URL to get truncated at the comment box boundary.
It seems that IE is ignoring this CSS property. My question is this: Has this always been the case? Or has the situation not arisen since the CSS was re-done in March?
The offending comment is this one (It's not the commenter's fault. It's IE's fault!
Thanks so much for figuring that out and what to do w/it.
I know nothing about rubber. Any TODder know anything about this issue?
The greatest military in the world yadda yadda dependent on 3rd worlders tapping their rubber trees......
HO
around a worldwide shortage of tires for heavy equipment. The shortage is widely attributed to increasing demand from U.S. and international mining operations for tires, industry officials said. Military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have added to the strain on the tire market, said Jim Davis, a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. spokesperson. Drivers and mechanics at Wyoming mines are getting instructions intended to extend the life of off−the−road tires used on the giant dump trucks used to haul overburden and coal. Companies are also scrambling to make up the shortage through deals with suppliers, which are so tightly strapped that at least
one mine has had to idle some of its trucks in recent weeks. To meet the demand, manufacturers like Goodyear and Bridgestone Corp. are looking at expanding the capacity of their big tire plants. Davis said the heavy−equipment tire shortage could continue through 2007.
http://www.billingsgazette.com/newdex.php?display=rednews/2005/11/07/build/wyoming/40-tire-shortage. inc
I bought a 2002 Toyota Echo. I wanted a VW New Beetle TDI, but it wasn't in my price range. Aside from A/C and AM/FM radio, the car has pretty much no amenities. It doesn't have a cassete player, power windows or even a built-in clock. Yet, everyone at work is jealous of me. The car supposedly gets 32 mpg city/39 mpg highway, but I heard those figures are often overstated. Anybody know if this is true in the Echo's case?
That sucks. How are you going to listen to all those shitty Jethro Tull and Yes tapes you have?
I'm just kidding. Relax. Toyota is a good name. Totally reliable. VW's and Audi's are just expensive. There is no tangible benefit you would derive from a VW. The only thing VW has are the best ads. They have led in this respect for a while.
Japanese have chosen the correct path for quite some time now.
Anything over 30, you are doing the right thing.
Measure your gas mileage yourself. Be very accurate. Report back. You are the best judge as to what is overstated.
In Europe Peugeot and Citroen ( that make diesle engines for cars in colaboration with Ford) have introduced diesel hybrids.
if we finally be getting the low sulphur diesel that Bush has been postphoning for more than a year and the gas prices will irk above 3.50 I'm sure the American buyers will get very interested in such vehicles...
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/mpg/MPG.do?action=browseList
It looks like the manual transmission cars are pushing 40 mpg real world, which is excellent.
Here is one:
http://www.ecodrive.org/
Between 36-40 mpg for a small 'family' car is quite typical.
What insurance company works that fast and what city has a court system that schedules dates that quickly?
I want both so I can move there!
With a car that's a little on the underpowered side, you adjust your driving to match. You have to think ahead and strategise some, that's all. Good example. You get on a freeway onramp. Instead of waiting to accellerate at the last minute, you start accellerating immediately but gradually. Watch for ramps that are short and uphill. Look for downhill ramps or long uphill ramps as you can get up to speed before having to merge. Forget about "yellow go faster", you don't have afterburners.
If your car lacks power windows, look on the bright side. It's one less thing to fail. Power locks? Just check the doors with a walk-around. Without a clock, you can add one, which is cheap enough. With the killer gas mileage, you'll gladly after a while not miss the occasional amenity. BTW, at full speed, running the A/C uses less gas than aerodynamic friction caused by open windows. Works great for me, as my (long) hair won't blow around in-drive!
Pennies for scrap: it's good cents
A US 5¢ piece (a nickel) is 5 grams, 75% copper and 25% nickel and also getting close to face.
So far, I am just sorting out 1982 and earlier pennies and will buy mounds of nickels when the S gets closer to the fan.
Even in hyperinflation Germany, the smallest coins kept much of their purchasing power. I expect a $2 roll of nickels will still be able to buy food for a long time to come, no matter what.