DrumBeat: June 19, 2006
Posted by threadbot on June 19, 2006 - 9:10am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Global spare oil production capacity may double by 2010, helping reduce the “fear premium’’ that is helping boost crude oil prices, according to BP Plc, Europe’s largest oil company.
When load shedding goes bad: Angry football fans attack power supply offices.
BANGLADESH - Angry football enthusiasts attacked Paikgachha and Batiaghata Palli Bidyut Samity offices in Khulna on Tuesday night, as they could not watch World Cup matches due to power outage.Something strange is going. We've already had OPEC telling us to conserve oil. Now we have a car guy who thinks we should drive less. The CEO of the largest chain of auto dealers in the country wants the gas tax raised by $1/gallon.They hurled stones at both the offices and damaged the windowpanes at about 10:45pm protesting the load-shedding. Security forces deployed at the centres, however, foiled their attempt to break in.
Money and Markets warns that the most powerful force on earth, population growth, is the real problem driving peak oil, inflation, and the cycle of debt.
Peak Speak 2 is a free peak oil conference, organized by Powerswitch. It's Saturday, 15 July 2006, in Hackbridge, just outside London.
A lot of warning signals on biofuels going up. Scientists are worried about biofuel plants' impact on aquifers in the midwest. Kurt Cobb says that "renewable" fuels are not really renewable. In the northeast, scientists caution that biofuels are good short-term solutions, but not sustainable over the long haul.
Oil company execs defend high pump prices:
Americans paying $3 per gallon at the pump have it relatively cheap when compared with prices globally, say oil and gas company executives who defend their record profits as essential to maintaining supplies.Looks like they're really worried there will be a windfall profits tax or some such thing.
Seven states vie for futuristic power plant
Touted as the power plant of tomorrow, FutureGen involves technology that converts coal into highly enriched hydrogen gas that burns cleaner than coal. Plans call for the 275-megawatt plant to capture most of its emissions of carbon dioxide _ a "greenhouse" gas widely blamed for global warming _ and inject them permanently into underground reservoirs, a process called sequestration.Update [2006-6-19 11:14:10 by Leanan]: TheStormTrack.com has a synopsis of an article from Science called “Climate Sensors Dropped From U.S. Weather Satellite Package”:
Six instruments that have been scrapped from NPOESS are Conical Scanning Microwave Imager/Sounder (CMIS), the Total Irradiance Sensor (TIS), the Earth Radiation Budget Sensor (ERBS), the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor, the Space Environment Sensor Suite, and an Ozone Mapping Profiler Suite. The first three instruments on the list are of critical importance to monitoring climate while the last three are important to air pollution monitoring, solar terrestrial relations, and stratospheric ozone properties, respectively.Cost was cited as the reason for the cuts....As the NOAA is the only current source of global climate information from satellites, researchers may have some difficulties in their climatological studies due to a lack of solid data.
http://www.whbf.com/Global/story.asp?S=5045050&nav=0zGo
I'd love to get folks comments on how much they think social capital (or social cohesion...) matters in the range of peak oil scenarios. I've put up a long post over at TOD NYC - I will update that post tomorrow with some of my final comments on the book.
AZ is just below "high" and they are dominated by the soulless Phoenix, where everyone lives behind walls, one does not know their neighbors name, nor even what they look like, but what they drive.
Meanwhile, Louisiana which has New Orleans, numerous small towns and several 100,000 to 250,000 cities with stable families with roots, ranks at the lowest possible rating.
At one of the Louisiana planning sessions, an interactive computerized feedback was set-up. One question was "how deep are your family roots". 53% had been there for 3 or more generations.
Which ones are those? To me, it looks like the right-leaning states are the ones that are "cohesive."
On several ocassions in the past I have been involved in this sort of thing, and they are typically done by using some sort of matrix scoring system to make it look objective, but in reality the way the various factors are weighted introduces the bias that was there from the very beginning. In other words, these things generally come up the way the people doing the ranking wanted them to come out before they went through the formal exercise.
I think the main flaw in a state-by-state ranking is inherent in the very idea that somehow a 'state' is something having the same level of reality as a mountain range or a sea. People forgot that a state is really nothing more than an agreement by the general populace to govern the area inside these lines on a map seperately from the area inside those lines on a map. I think some people need to be reminded that you can't see any state boundary lines in a satellite photo of the US.
In my view the main divide is between urban and rural. A resident of New York City and a resident of Chicago will generally have much more in common with each other then the New York City resident has with an upstate New York farmer or the Chicago resident has with a downstate Illinois farmer.
So, state-by-state is a very flawed way of looking at such things as cohesiveness or quality of life. At the risk of oversimplification, the single most important factor determining your quality of life is how much money you have, not which state you live in.
Try comparing quality of life in Nigeria with quality of life in the Netherlands. I assure you that you will find very real differences. The differences between US states are no less real, just smaller. Or are you really saying that there is no difference between California and Mississippi?
So have I. One should expect some correlation between what we think we'll see and what our measurements say, else why make the measurements at all? This is what theory formation and hypothesis testing is all about. If you don't like the way things are measured, then go get your own measurements and present them for others to critique.
Social scientists labor under two problematic conditions --the inablity to conduct experiments and 'squishy' variables that are based on difficult-to-measure concepts. Yes, it's hard, and it's often wrong, but social scientists at least make the effort to apply, however imperfectly, the scientific method.
Yes, but collective agreements on governance are often more important to everyday life than something 'real' like a mountain range. Legal slavery, for instance, was an important distinction between US states before 1865, no? If you look here you can see that since 1945 alone political violence has killed an estimated 24,083,800 people worldwide. That's quite a lot for something that isn't real, isn't it?
I agree on both points. Rural/Urban is probably the most important societal cleavage and that is always better to try to get as disaggregated data as possible. Unfortunatley, that is often very difficult to get. You have make do with what you have. Insofar that some states are more or less rural that will usually show in the statistics. However, in the map above, rural/urban doesn't seem to be a terribly great indicator of social cohesiveness. The Dakotas and the South are very rural, yet are on the extremes.
How did Putnam rank the states? What was his method?
Duh. Which is why it's a rather trivial statement. Gee, all things considered, it's better to be rich! The sky's blue too, in case you haven't noticed.
The relevant comparison is between poor people in cohesive vs non-cohesive societies or between rich people in cohesive vs non-cohesive socieites. If social capital makes, other things being equal, the poor and rich better off that's an important thing to discover. It the context of the debate at this site, it means societies that have lots of organizations and institutions that cut across social cleavagess will likely fare better under Peak Oil conditions than those that don't. It also means that differences between rich a poor are less likely to turn violent in a society that is rich in social capital than in those that are not.
Don't you watch all those detective shows?
Actually, the move to suburbia was middle and upper America's response to crime of the 1960's. It removed the "opprotunity" part of the equation.
Pervasive public transport allowed roving gangs of young people to move easily from one neighborhood to another in the "inner cities" of the 1960's. Older people don't commit as many crimes because --well they are old & slow, and perhaps they have developed a set of morals (except for Enron execs). So the violent crimes problem is mostly one of gangs of unemployed males.
It is the expansive highway system and the need for expensive cars that keeps large gangs from forming in Suburbia (outside of school grounds). Recently, we have advanced to "gated" communities. Why?
I know there were plans to evacuate large cities in Sweden and disperse the population on the countryside in case of total mobilization during the early cold war.
Building suburbia is more or less a volotary preemptive evacuation.
These plans were later replaced with a shelter building program. Maintaining the shelter stock is more or less what is left of our civil defence, hardly any are built nowdays. :-(
They are not especially fancy, the minimum spec on later generations were detonation of a bomb with 125 kg of TNT in 125 kg of steel casing with no further containment 5 m from a wall or roof, 50 kPa long lasting overpreassure or 8 kPa long lasting underpreassure, 97.5% fallout reduction, basic NBC filtering with 60 Pa overpreassure, 72h livability with one person per 0.75 m2 and 50 year design life lenght of the construction. Finnish and Swiss designs seems to have better minumum radiation specs and the Finns have added roof concrete spalling reinforcments as a minimum requirement.
But the Finns and probably the Swiss continue with complete shelter building, I envy those that are wiser.
Most of the hardened civil defence structures being built nowdays in Sweden are overground or partly buried control centers for municipiality fire brigades and county disaster control centers. Almost every municipiality had an N hardened small civil defence control center built in bedrock, most of them are now abandoned or used as server halls, backup storage and so on. But they had the drawback that they took longer to mobilize then having a control center next to city hall. What is slowly being built today is the ability to react on for instance a traffic accident with nasty chemicals in an urban area.
We also had civil defence battalions and brigades that had mobiliziation depots distributed around cities and towns with massive ammounts of pneunmatic jackhammers, diamond saws and so on to get people out of shelters below fallen buildings. All gone now since we in the future wont have anythings as old time as a war in Europe. I realy hope that is a good prediction of the future.
I believe the answer to your questions can be partially derived from studying Genetics and Memetics: Googling Hans Selye's General Adaption Syndrome [GAS] and the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness [EEA] which obviously includes 'inclusive fitness'. Evolved behavioral switches, which can be probabilistically extended to larger social groupings, combined with entropic decline forms the basis of discussions by Diamond, Tainter, Hanson, et al--what I call the Thermo-Gene Collision.
Isaac Asimov's Foundation concepts of predictive collapse and directed decline uses Hari Seldon's psychohistorical analyses to mitigate decline. I have no proof that any governmental orgs are using supercomputer simulations to do the same--it remains beyond my discovery-- yet historical trends seem to point to various manipulations.
We have had long ranging debates on certain Yahoo forums about this Foundation possibility and ultimately agreed to disagree about the existence of such an entity.
Evolutionary inevitability vs. human exercise of freewill is obviously a volatile topic, yet Overshoot and Dieoff occurs constantly in Nature. I believe humans will be very, very lucky if we can optimally mitigate our own decline-- the odds are against us when one considers the totality of the forces arrayed towards a plague specie.
Here are a few links to get you started:
http://www.objectivethought.com/articles/psychohistory.html
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/17/194059/296
Thus, there is a very good reason Asimov's Foundation Series was voted the best Hugo Science Fiction Award-- a tantalizing glimpse of a possible Rosetta Stone to predict how masses of humans will behave and how to control them. Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Aldous Huxley, H. G. Wells, Darwin, Malthus, et al, were way, way ahead of their time.
Peakoil and climate change is just thermodynamics [physics in action], the real interesting stuff is on the human genetic and behavioral side. Googling Foundation brings up everything from Al-Qaeda [the base or foundation!] to Joseph Caldwell [a nuclear weapons scientist's prediction of our demise in a full-on nuclear gift exchange to less than 500 million]:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda
http://www.foundationwebsite.org/
http://www.foundationwebsite.org/WhoAmI.htm
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Studies of non-US cultures within the US show that even when the poverty is dire, inhabitants of say, Indian reservations etc., have more actual security than even the very rich in the greater US.
Think about it, you can be uber-rich and you'll still only get the "friendship" and care you can pay for, and that only until they've figured out how to get your money and let you die. But those damned Indians etc. they'll help each other because they actually LIKE each other. They care for each other, feel obligated to each other, are a true extended family. Yeah, there are assholes even on the Rez, but sociologists have found a basic level of decency unimaginable in our society. No wonder we tried to wipe 'em out.
The next three are Montana, Nebraska & Iowa. Iowa is fairly progressive, MO & NE more R.
The next six states are four New England states, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire & Conneticut and Oregon & Washington. All but NH solidly progressive left and/or limousine liberal.
The lowest 11 states are Nevada, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, North & South Carolina, and West Virginia. WV usually votes democratic, but it is a very conservative D state.
I think the political bias (and the blatant ignorance of reality) is apparent.
Before the right-wing spin machine painted Howard Dean as a crazy liberal, the knock on him was always that he was a Republican in Democrats' clothing.
This must be from one of the statisticians destined to drown in that lake with the average depth of 1 meter..
I mentioned before, when I was working in NewOrleans last month, just how easy it was to just go up and talk to folks, you didn't feel like you had to 'merit' to make a little conversation, ask for directions, find out what's going on... It reminded me of NY, which may look gruff to many, but can be very sociable and helpful on the personal level. I think that some cities where you are on your feet a lot give you a lot of contact and break down that 'decent distance' barrier I feel in some other places. Everybody is a little odd, or different.. it would take too much energy to worry about all of them being a 'threat'.. so you don't.
Small towns can be warm and welcoming, but they can also be suspicious of 'outsiders' and 'the freaks', leaving folks out of the club, too. I told a doctor I was at upon my return how great it felt to be able to just go up to people in N.O., and he said, "Unlike Maine, right?".. and I had to agree, in part. Maine does have some very strong community bonds, family connections, and a sense that individuals should be capable and independent, but not with that sort of isolated 'pioneer' mentality that grew out west. But you do have 'insiders and outsiders', there are definitely cliques and clubs that you do or don't belong to, and class, poverty, and resentment of outa-staters is not just a stereotype. Education Disparity and some heavy Addiction also serve to keep us from cutting across old barriers, here.
I want to look at how people across the political divide are building bridges and staying friends. We've got that sort of ridiculous Blue/Red State thing, too, which gets countered with a 'shades of purple' states.. neither of which is really useful, in my mind. I think we're constantly fed all this stuff which makes us see the differences, when we could make some progress finding the things we agree on, and get to work on them. There is a little patch of Cobblestones atop our 'Munjoy Hill', right in the Middle of Congress St... here in Portland, with the last 30' of our old Trolley Rails, looking cute, and helping noone, sad to say.
Maybe you can give me a link to one of your approp. articles again that I could keep handy as I talk with our Town Council about their Transit Planning. I would love to see Hybrid Electric Buses (Electric-while-intown, etc), if not Rail-based transit helping to make Casco Bay more accessible without a car.
We also have an historic Narrow Gauge Railroad that runs a few-thousand feet down by the Old Port, but the owner has tried to raise the possibility of expanding that into a neighborhood transit solution.. Don't know if it makes sense, but it could be a boon to tourism as well as commuting, if it worked out..
http://www.mngrr.org/
Regards,
Bob Fiske
Let's spin a story about why this may be instead of simply disregarding the results becasue we don't like them. Isn't that what folks here say others are doing in relation to Peak Oil?
I've read Putnam's "Making Democracy Work' -- which is basically how social capital aids democratic governance in Italy. Haven't read Bowling Alone so I don'tk now how he measured the concept in the US, but I'm familiar enough with his study of Italy to understand what moves his model.
Social capital is basically trust. Do you trust other people enough, for instance, to trade with them regularly? Do you trust them enough to rely solely on formal political institutions in order to guarantee your life or property? If you don't think this is important, see Iraq today or, closer to home, post-Katrina New Orleans.
So what factors increase societal trust? Off hand I can name four -- population size, social diversity, economic inequality, and horizontal versus vertical organization of civil society.
Very simply, small populations promote trust as it is easier to keep track of everyone and how you have interacted with them in the past. Once populations get too big the large number of non-personal relationships reduces your trust of other people because you, obviously, don't know them.
Diversity also reduces trust because of the insider-outsider mentality it brings. Members of other religions/racial/ethnic groups aren't 'like' you or members of your group so you don't necessarily trust them as much as members of your own group.
Economic inequality acts in the same way as societal diversity. The poor and the rich quite simply see themselves as different tribes. If you are rich it is easier to trust another rich person while if you are poor it is easer to trust another poor person. This problem is compounded if you don't have a middle class that in essence interacts with both, thereby serving as a go-between for the two.
Finally, the organization of civil society is important. If organization is 'horizontal' it cuts across the above cleavages and increases trust between members of very different groups. If civil society is vetical, it does not cut across group boundaries and, instead, reinforces them.
Now, why is the 'South' deficient of social capital in relation to the rset of the country? Very simple:
- Relatively large populations.
- Very racially diverse.
- Lots of economic inequality.
- Long history of 'separate but equal' racial animosity that kept groups apart. The Southern Baptists, for instance, was specifically formed to keep blacks out of white churches.
Why are the Dakotas rich in social capital?Any idea why Nevada is so starkly white among neighbors aren't?
Don't know. As a first guess I would have to say it's due to the relative newness of a lot of the population in Nevada -- especially Las Vegas. Not a lot of time to develop lots of cross-cutting organizations. Another may be the transitory nature of the population or the type of folks moving there. It's a definite outlier and I would need to know more about it.
I have no idea why they're choosing Nevada, I understand the weather's actually worse than Phoenix, and it's not good for farming. I favore more a tactic of political/demographic coordination, choosing farmable areas in California and moving to them en masse, and using the same block politics the invaders use, but again, these are older folks whose lives have by no means prepared them for a real struggle for survival. They mainly just want somewhere they can retreat to and hopefully die nonviolently in their own beds.
The result is a lot of whites in Nevada, as well as Arizona, from California.
Times are good, stomachs are full, the law's against 'em, its easiest just to move on. It will be interesting to see how it will be when things change, after all, the Indians resisted being forced out to the badlands.
California is a large & diverse state, but the "white" influence of Los Angeles & San Diego (I know much less of SD) and Silicon Valley should make the entire state "white" or very close.
One woman helped knock in the windows at a "Big Lots", pushed out a shopping cart with "waterproof" goods on the bottom and diapers, paper towels, on top. She gave away 100% of her first load and kept a quarter of her second load. Another guy got a crate of oranges; handed out two to everyone and kept three for himself "Because I scored them".
The pastor at the Lutheran Church in the Marigny turned it into "Camp Marigny". 30 people at first, 80 in the end. His son (a recently discharged Marine with tours in Afghanistan & Iraq) was in charge of security & foraging details. First they cleaned out the homes of all that were there (drained hot water tanks for potable water) then broke into unoccupied homes (minimum damage & essentials only taken with records kept.)
My home was looted of a gallon of distliied water, all my wine, canned goods, an umbrella, flashlight and cooked meat in the frig (must have been early). Left my digital camera, and computers in plain sight. He or she left a mess with things thrown around.
"Christains with Chainsaws" were the first to create a path through (one vehicle wide) the streets with their fallen trees. The volunteers, perhaps 80% Christian groups, were and are still the core of the relief effort. Gutting out tens of thousands of homes (hard, dirty work in the heat).
My personal observation is that AZ* has almost zero "social capital" and the South is quite rich in it. His "analysis" shows otherwise. Therefore his analysis is TERRIBLY flawed. I have better things to do with my time than disect how this bigot derived his "scientific" findings. I am reminded of some German scientific findings from the late 1930s.
At first I was "tolerant", but I have concluded that bigotry should be called by it's proper name.
*Phoenix is about half of the population of the state. Tuscon is supposedly similar. I assume that the Navajo, Pima & Hopi have high social capital but they did not earn AZ its' "mid-rating".
Exactly. The social cleavage of importance here was between rich and poor and, insofar as it was correlated with it, between white and black. Religion obviously aided people in this case because it most likely cut across these social cleavages and prompted mutual aid. Thus your 'Christian with Chainsaws' comment above.
It is the observation of Daniel Yergin that there is lots of oil out there, thus the analysis presented here is terribly flawed.
Oh please. How is this bigotry? I explained the model as I understood it, suggested a plausible story as to why it got the results that it did. How is this bigotry? Did I or Putnam anywhere say 'The south is made up of racist rednecks and so have no social capital!' No, of course not. The model actually does quite well in explaining outcomes in Katrina -- small, homogenous communities maintained cohesiveness while large, diverse ones broke down.
Yawn.
Instead of polemics you should perhpas provide more systematic evidence or a more convincing story as to why his model is 'bunk' akin to Nazi raceology. There probably are very real flaws in his methodology, but one data point does not a trend make.
That was choice made by our national gov't and had zero to do with local social capital. It only had to do with the "social capital" of the current federal administration.
I now need to get ready for building some more "social capital" I am attending the Fauberg Marigny Improvement Assoc. monthly meeting this evening. I used to live in the Marigny and have kept up my membership there. I am also friends with the past President of this neighborhood assoc. She worked on Bourbon as a stripper whilst President. Contemplate the "social capital implications" of that.
And New Orleans is almost exactly half Catholic & half Protestant, both black & white. Before WW II, we were the most gay friendly city in the country (SF took that title from us after WW II). We are still the most "Tourette Syndrome friendly" city. I have a high degree of trust accross all social & economic groups here. More grist for the mill.
Plus, one way we could see for sure is simply inflict some sort of catastrophe on Phoenix. But, alas, we can't conduct experiments like that! ;-)
http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/pics/geo200/religion/lutheran.gif
http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/pics/geo200/religion/baptist.gif
The match for German ancestry is even better (large pdf)
http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/pics/geo200/pct_german.pdf
Is it political bias and ignorance of reality? Or is it the reality of the different outcomes arising from the politics in different states?
I don't know the answer but (I imagine) the survey would have been based on some methodology and should not just be dismissed before reflection.
One of the things such surveys are supposed to do is make a stop and examine our preconceptions. For sure, we need to check the validity of the evidence being put forward. However, I don't think we should just say, "This looks like bullshit served up by a politically biased agenda so I'll just trash it".