DrumBeat: June 9, 2006
Posted by threadbot on June 9, 2006 - 9:25am
Now for some wise words from the readers of The Oil Drum...
“The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.”
—James Madison, FEDERALIST #57 (1787)
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With Oil's Cash, Venezuelans Consume
Fuel for Westexas' "peak export" theory?
And Greg Palast thinks "the Peak Oil crowd is crackers." He thinks tar sands, oil shale, etc., will save us. Which means Venezuela will be the next country to be "liberated."
(I guess we're even, because I think Greg Palast is crackers...)
As I have also noted before (based on someone else's post on the Internet), Canadian oil production in 2005 was far below EIA projections made in 2003.
In regard to Greg Palast, IMO Mr. Palast either grossly misunderstood Dr. Hubbert's work, or he deliberately misrepresented Dr. Hubbert's work.
From the Texas/Lower 48 article:
"To be clear, despite what is either a profound misunderstanding of or a misrepresentation of Dr. Hubbert's work in some quarters, Dr. Hubbert was not predicting the end of world oil production by 2006; he was predicting that production peaks when producing regions have consumed about half of their recoverable conventional oil reserves."
BrianT -- You say "He's a sharp guy. It's highly unlikely he misunderstood."
So basically he deliberately misrepresented Dr. Hubbert's work...? What's his motivation in doing that?
-- I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm posing the question of his motivation in that direction. (I had actually posted on Palast while back calling on TODs to debunk him), FYI...
-C.
money talks and the people we are dealing with think anyone has a price.
Peak Oil challenges a lot of people on the traditional Left because they assume that:
(a) Capitalism can only be surpassed in a society of material plenty for all; and
(b) Admitting that energy consumption is way past a sustainable level and has to be cut would bar the way to socialism.
IMO, he's wrong in that (a) actually says a good deal less than he thinks because the concept of "plenty" is actually a social construct; and (b) is plain incorrect.
At a guess, his idea of "socialism" would probably have a lot more in common with the economics of the late, unlamented USSR than mine does, though I'm certainly not accusing him of supporting the political regime that existed there.
The fluid flow will never end.
God gave "us" dominion over all things on this Earth.
There are plenty of alternatives for the blood that feeds our non-negotiable way of life. After the sweet and easy ones are gone, why, we'll just drive our straws into the alligators next. No worries:
(Mosquitos are We)
In short, it is no surprise that Venezuela is contracting to buy oil from Russia. They just can't produce it fast enough.
Classic argument that I have seen 100s of times on the web. Nobody he's questionning how large the tar sands can be. The real question behind PO he's how fast can we convert tar sands to synfuel. Here is the mistake: PO is not about How much oil is left but, I quote Colin Campbell:
Notice that people pushing the tar sands/shale oil argument never adressed the question of what will be the production rate from such sources.
as "PoW-Wo-ER":
Peak of World Wide oil Extraction Rate
(Painting: Morning Pow Wow --err)
"Green River oil shale has been hanging over the conventional oil industry since I was a little kid. When oil was $3 per barrel, many people thought that if oil ever reached $8 per barrel, Green River shale would have it revenge on Spindletop and shut down the oil industry."
Petroleum is the single fuel that powers everything including alternatives and as it become dearer so do it replacements. Folks who misunderstand this do not really appreciate their own place in the universe. Sadly enough, it is all about entropy.
I think Deffeyes' point is that shale oil isn't very useful. I agree. It's really an expensive, primitive precursor to oil, like coal except not as good.
But he's not talking about energy-ROI.
E-ROI (or EPR) has been thoroughly researched for wind. It's about 80 to 1, meaning that the power you put in is recovered in less than half a year. Furthermore, the power you get out (electricity) is higher quality than much of the power you put in (process heat for steel & concrete, fossil fuel feedstock for carbon/plastic parts, etc), so the return is even better than that. Solar PV is averaging around 15:1 (about 2 year payback for conventional silicon, much better for thin film and concentrating), and improving rapidly (at least 10% per year).
Labor is the big thing. For instance, wind turbine blades still commonly use primitive, time consuming methods for producing the carbon fibre composites needed. This will change, and continue to improve wind's cost advantage over fossil fuels (when all costs are included). Let
s assume the world oil supply drops by 25% in the next 20 years, and oil prices triple. Because energy costs are maybe 5% of the cost of a wind turbine, some users would be squeezed out (mostly the poor), but the cost of a wind turbine would go up maybe 15% (or less, as they'd look for efficiencies they're not using now at lower prices). So alternatives would be perfectly practical.
I've looked at almost all of the peak oil books (Kunstler, Deffeyes, Goodstein, etc), and none of them convincingly discuss the usefulness (or lack thereof) of wind and solar. Kunstler clearly knows nothing about them - he just assumes they can't help because he wants things to collapse - wishful thinking. Deffeyes says right out that alternative energy is not his expertise. Simpson is just dealing with oil. Goodstein simply notes that a transition to alt energies would be a very big job, and that we should get started now. So does Hirsch.
You mentioned entropy:
The 2nd law of thermodynamics tells us 2 things: 1) any closed system (say, the ENTIRE Universe, or for practical purposes, our solar system), will eventually run down. This really tells us nothing about the earth, which is extraordinarily far from a closed system (the ratio of the sun's energy input to human energy use is something like 10,000 to 1).
2) Perfect efficiency is impossible. Again, this tells us nothing useful about human energy use, which is probably about 2% efficient from a system point of view. If human energy use were made 95% efficient (with which the 2nd law would be perfectly consistent), human energy use would drop by about 50 times.
The 2nd law tells us nothing useful about practical engineering of energy systems, or limits thereof.
Peak oil is a big problem, but there's no theoretical reason why it's the end of civilization. It's entirely up to us, and our ability to be creative.
From our "favourite" internet look up source wikipedia
Ignoring space dust, asteroids and other impacts and various other (on a percentage basis) rather small mass exchanges, the earth is considered a closed system...
Well, in any case, I believe then that the 2nd law applies to "isolated" systems. A system that accepts the enormous energy inputs of the sun won't run down until the sun does, in several billions years.
Each human represents a considerable accumulation of sunlight energy, energy that would have passed long ago into entropy if we were not here. As a thought exercise, ask if the release of stored energy from burning fossil fuels is compatible with the purpose of life.
I'm not sure I want to think of my main purpose in life as hoarding energy.
OTOH, this suggests that nature abhors inefficiency, and also that our mission in life should be to capture as much of the sun as we can. Sounds good.
Kunstler's argument is very simple. 1) Suburbs and cars are bad. 2) Suburbs and cars need oil. 3) There's no replacement for oil, so peak oil is peak energy. 3) Peak energy would be bad for suburbs, therefore peak energy is inevitable. He doesn't prove any of these assumptions, and his logic doesn't follow.
It's wishful thinking on his part - it's as simple as that.
As I discussed earlier, if you search through his book, (as well as other by Deffeyes, Heinberg, Simpson, etc) you won't find any detailed or substantive analysis of wind and solar. Kunstler clearly knows nothing about them - he just assumes they can't help because he wants things to collapse.
Actually the amount of earth energy radiated into space is exactly equal to the amount directed at the earth from the sun. If not the earth would become a fireball. Currently some mini mini miniscule amount may be retained to provide for GW.
Technology and industrial processes being developed for the the Boeing 787 will be easily applied to automated lay-up of carbon fibers on wind turbine blades.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/273302_fuselage09.html
As for "all energy is oil" POV, nonsense.
Steel requires very little oil. Underground coal is almost entirely an electrical process. It could be transported via electrified railroads to a smelter to melt scrap Hummers into steel supports for wind turbine towers or the coal could be used to make concrete for concrete supports.
Some oil is involved but minimal amounts.
just because you think it's minimal doesn't mean it is.
Coal rail cars can be pulled by electric locomotives (Lake Powell & Black Mesa RR in AZ is).
Unloaded and moved around steel plant by electric conveyor belts. (Some times by electric cranes).
Half of US steel today comes from scrap steel, half from ore. Scrap is collected by a variety of means (locate junk yard by rail line). Most scrap moves by rail.
Note that ALL US railroads use 220,000 barrels/day. So electrification is great, but we will NOT run out of diesel to run RRs and other high value/low oil transportation uses (water for example).
Most iron ore is surface mining, which can use trucks OR conveyor belts to move ore. Giant shovels often run on diesel, but can run on electricity. Explosives (if needed) can use nitrogen fertilizer (from NG) and diesel. But the quantities are minimal.
Petroleum is the primary energy source of this particular distributed and mobile infrastructure we've created since the industrial revolution went into high gear in the late 1800's. There is no way that this system can adapt to lesser energies or produce alternative energies. Petroleum is as much the cause of our industrial metabolism as sugar, glycose, and ATP are the basis for mammalian metabolism.
Well, no, not really. "designed" with oil? The PC's that are used for design these days maybe have $1 worth of oil-based plastics. If the price of oil triples, PC's might go up in price by $2. PC's run on electricity, and only 3% of electricity comes from oil. The same kind of comments apply to most of the activities in this list.
Transportation is the one thing that depends on oil, and with a little transition time (say 10 years for the first 25%, 30 years for the rest) that can be switched to electric.
Now, fossil fuels are a bit harder. Oil only accounts for 40% of man-made energy, FF is probably 80%. But alternatives will work. Replacing all FF is a much bigger job, but we have a much longer time window: peak gas is probably 15 years out, and peak coal is at least 40 years out.
The larger problem is global warming: we need to get alternatives going much more quickly to address GW than we do for peak FF. Fortunately, we're on our way: planned wind generation is 40% of overall new generation in the U.S. in 2006 and 45% in 2007 (adjusted for capacity factor), and this trend is likely to continue. Wind could easily handle all new generation in the US within 5-10 years.
These come from the Nuclear Energy Institute:
http://www.nei.org/documents/Energy%20Markets%20Report.pdf on page 7, and capacity factors are here http://www.nei.org/documents/U.S._Capacity_Factors_by_Fuel_Type.pdf
Re: Total Petroleum Imports
We've got 22 weeks of reported total petroleum (US) imports for 2006. Let's look at the four week running average of total petroleum imports for these 22 weeks versus 12/30/05, and let's look at a comparable time period last year versus 12/31/04.
Relative to 12/31/04, 19 of the 22 weeks in 2005 showed higher imports than the four week running average ending on 12/31/04.
Relative to 12/30/5, two of the 22 weeks in 2006 showed higher imports than the four week running average ending on 12/30/05.
Notice a pattern here, especially in light of Saudi Arabia's recent admission?
After that, the US would have to pay more for the oil they bought, but the extra cost would be very small, and be approximately equal to the cost difference between shipping from Venezuela and shipping from the next suitable source.
But consider this. Venezuela would forever more have to accept lesser prices for their oil, approximately equal to the extra cost of shipping to the next most demanding market.
This is bad for both parties: USA pays more and Venezuela is paid less. The winners would be the shipping owners or lessors.
Furthermore, the threat of embargo against the US might be politically useful, whilst an actual embargo would probably be quite costly in political terms. It's best for Venezuela if things stay as they are, unless things start to look like they might get messy.
The opposite of this is exactly why globalization does make you better off. Specialization sucks I won't disagree, but when we are still considered the money center of the universe (you know we think this way) I chose my profession accordingly. How we continue doesn't appear promising though. I'm almost done with my degree and just finding out about peak oil, so I'm thinking of new ways to put my skills to use.
The problem with the people who have lost to globalization are those most suceptible due to their inability to perform in college or they are not motivated enough to try and be retrained. A factory worker can't expect to keep being a factory worker when those jobs are vanishing.
They have to decide another way to make a living by applying the skills they have in a different way, or learn new skills in the new competitive environment. If they are lazy and don't ackowledge the changes around them, they won't make it. There are more of these people who are loosing out and our manufacturing base is being stripped.
I suppose that even though the US will hurt the most, we will bring many, many economies down with us again due to globalization.
"Displaced factory workers" was the story of the '70s. Today's displaced workers are educated. They are engineers, computer scientists, financial analysts. Many of them have gone back to school and been re-educated in a different field, only to lose their jobs overseas again.
And really, this is what we should have expected from globalization. It's one thing to get a "better job" when the job lost was as a line worker in a factory. But when the job lost requires a PhD in computer science...what do you do to "stay ahead"?
There's a reason why "service industry" jobs have shown so much growth in the U.S. Hard to outsource you if you have a job that requires a physical presence. As one of my friends put it, "In a few years, we'll all be hookers and hairdressers."
That is assuming globalization continues. I don't think it will. Peak oil will put an end to it. And when that happens, a lot of young people who went into debt to get that sheepskin are going to find they wasted their money.
I also agree that globalization is not sustainable. I think it will continue, but it will peak years after peak oil. Container shipping is so cheap even at these prices. When you break down the shipping cost of one mcdonalds toy made in china, it's less than a penny at per Forbes. Trade will continue, it has for nearly all of mankind. It provides more choices and both parties agree that they are usually better off trading.
We have always traded, but before fossil fuels, it really wasn't worth shipping anything but luxury goods. The Silk Road was for transporting silks and spices, not turnips.
You might enjoy this op-ed piece in today's NYT. It's about outsourcing CEO's...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/opinion/09orlow.html
There is a Carnegie Endowment piece that covers a lot of the effects of NAFTA on Mexico -- and the numbers are not pretty.
So the jobs got sucked to China, and then the jobs started disappearing there too. Eventually robots could do all the work of manufacturing. Globalization is not the problem.
Walmart and Huffy Bicycles was a classic forced shift to cheaper (overseas) manufacturing. Made the papers here.
Agriculture dropped from high percentage employment a hundred years ago to low percentage (and we are all fat now). And manufacturing is following the same route (and our closets are stuffed). We are going to have to accept "service" jobs until R2D2/C3PO show up.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_05/b3818001.htm
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_17/b3930053_mz005.htm
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/060303_jobs.htm
http://www.itpaa.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2231
Additionally, factory workers do not necessarily have the ability to quit work, enroll in a 4 year university program, and come up with both the spare change to pay for both in the mean time.
I respect you immensely Tate, but this is an example of fallacious logic.
In our current political environment, Bush is cutting funding to schooling and I firmly believe one of the most important institutions of gov't is educating their people. Higher education should not be so expensive. It should be accesible to everyone, especially those in the lower classes. The middle class is getting squeezed out of college or burdened with massive debt. The future doesn't appear as bright as it once was...damn college.
I'm sure someone is going to say get off you're soapbox, but after talking to a lot of my peers it's become very hard to attend college. In the great state of Misery (MO), we've had funding cut for colleges for the last four years. So the colleges raise tuition, but the Stafford loan amounts are dated from the 70's I understand. It might have been nice back then to get ALL that money, but inflation has destroyed that now and no one wants to pay to educate our youth. Education isn't a priority and it's sad.
I will say that I'm glad I went. Even in the face of the debt I've taken a lot of social capital in addition to understand truly how diverse a world we live in. The business program is wonderful and it woke me up and made me interested to find out how things work. I can apply that anywhere.
Education is a funny thing, as it is the one thing a person possesses that cannot be taken from him.
Wealth can be squandered or lost. Luck is fleeting and fickle. A great job can be lost. Friendships and even relationships come and go. Material possessions are, well, you get the idea.
I wish you well on your quest.
p.s. no ill will intended here. It's just that we do not know what skill sets will be the succesful ones in the world to come. It may not be brain power.
As for my kids i do indeed wonder what they will have for options. The one who tutors whats to become a teacher. I hope they have a society where that is still a needed occupation. They have all worked at the family nursery-- I suspect that horticulture will have a future that they can fall back on. It will be indeed diferent than now for the access to chemicals/fertilizers will indeed change.
I know private colleges graduate higher quality students than do state schools(aggregate). I'm fine with that and those who can afford to pay, should continue to do so. I think all those who have the desire and motivation should be able to attend a state college at a minimal cost so they can build their skills. College is the new high school diploma and while I'm being forced to attend to "level" my playing field, I shouldn't have to constantly have to worry how I'm going to pay for it.
Also, Financial Forensics 506 will be a good course so that you can learn how to cook the books even better than the Enron raptors did. We need people who know how to produce "good numbers".
best of luck
Everyone is not created the same
Who is better off? Careful. Just because someone is better off, doesn't mean everyone is. It is possible, for example, to argue that large scale international trade provides exploitable advantages prinicpally to large scale multinational companies. There may be other considerations as to whether these advantages trickle down to the majority of the citizens of countries harbouring those multinationals.
I obviously agree that trade provides mutual benefits. But, to whom do those benefits accrue? Would any of the parties actually be better off in the absence of the trade? Interesting questions, if only marginally related to peak oil.
I disagree that most of the advantages have gone to large companies. Their bottom lines have improved no doubt, but consumers have watched durable goods prices plummet in the last 15 years. We're now seeing inflation hitting these durable goods, but the consumers also benefited by lower cost products and better products at marginally higher prices. The "exploited" workers are better off making more money in a factory than the farm. I don't give a damn what they are WILLING to work for (low wages compared to the high US standard of living). If they make more money in the factory than the farm, they are better off in economically speaking.
I don't have the citations but I have heard Arundati Roy speak on globalization's impact on India and she said that over 10,000 small farmers have gotten so despondent they have killed themselves in recent years.
Mexico has 16 million more people in poverty now than they did pre-NAFTA. And with Monsanto selling all the seed, Mexico has all but eliminated native drought resistant strains of corn that used to be sustainably grown by compesinos.
I'm in a country that will probably be suffering under CAFTA (called TLC here) pretty soon. CAFTA seeks to do things like bust up and privitize state-owned public utilities and the healthcare system, socialist systems that work very well here. You only have to travel to Panama or Nicaraugua to see just how well they do function. The vote will be close, as was our last election, but it will probably pass.
Yeah, I know, I am an anti-corporate, pro-worker, pro-union, anti-globalization, left-wing loony. Obsolete, probably, but still functioning, most days.
Back to cervezas and the World Cup!
Would peak oil threaten such significant consequences in the absence of extensive globalization?
I am not supposing that either party to a trade loses. It is the third parties that I am refering to.
My brother worked for ten years at McDonalds while studying for his business computer degree. He was a systems analyst for 15 years when the company eliminated his position. He's back working at McDonalds.
Think about it.
A baby learns a new language in one year.
How long does it take for a 40 year old?
How long does it take for a 60 year old?
Don't give me that BS about the older ones having their minds "clogged" with accumulated info.
The adage is true.
You can't teach an old dog new tricks.
P.S. I was looking for that Far Side strip with picture like the one above except dog is peddling his carnival troop across a circus high wire (no safety net below) on a unicycle and the caption reads:
Despite things going well, Rex could not get rid of that nagging thought: this was a new trick and after all, he was an old dog.
DJM,
I'll concede that sponge-like learning can go on until young adulthood (age 25). Hell, I switched careers at age 30-something.
But a lot of these "retraining" programs promise to take a 40 year old male who has worked in a steel mill the last 15 years and make him into a C++ programmer. Give me a break. I've seen too many of these geezer boot camps to fall for the BS that it is "just a matter of retraining". There are just somethings that a 40+ year old man will never "get" no matter how many hours he spends in geezer re-training class while a young pup will pick it up in minutes.
BTW, I come not here to deprecate geezers --I'm one myself, well at least according to ARP.
The point is that all this "retraining" and reallocating of our human assets from one slot in the economy to another is pure political BS. It just doesn't happen in real life.
Hmm.
I learned proper working German (NOT "school German"!) in about 2 years at the age of 39.
I then changed career from software developer to a medical profession at 49.
Neither was especially easy - but I had no major problems ... except the cost for the career change ... about $60k total.
Too many people give up when they reach 40.
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2005/jan/1108055.htm
Do you think your employer ever has your best interests in mind? Businesses will find ways to lower costs. Labor is usually the highest % of operating expenses. It's more cost effective to hack your largest cost down. If you get knocked down get your ass up. Go into business for yourself and exploit those workers too then. Whining about what is happening is like crying over spilled milk. Clean up the mess and move on.
Don't get me wrong, I will never give up and lie down, but I know the system is rigged against me (cynical old fart that I am). As a trained and experienced product development engineer, ostensibly in the prime of my working career, I will be dropping out of that line of work shortly. So will most of the guys I work with, whether they want to or not, and once that group is scattered something of value will have been lost. The work we did created the new products that kept a manufacturing site going, and kept quite a few employees (also quite skilled) working. Most of our salaries will probably never be as high as they are now, and it remains to be seen what kinds of contributions we will all be able to make to the society in general. This kind of thing is happening all over, and overall it's a net loss to our society. Is the fact that I can buy a cheap DVD player at MalWart fair compensation, either on a personal level or on a society level? Wait until the price of fuel goes higher, and the masses cannot refinance their homes again, and see where our economy goes.
Look at the reality of the massive accumulation of wealth at the top of society, while more and more people slip in the "have not" regions. Tell me again how globalization is a good thing? Actually, don't bother.
In the end I think it will hurt us due to the accumulation of lost intellectual capital. Just like you are telling me our engineers are leaving. As an engineer, is there an excess in the supply of engineers world wide? Can you INCREASE those engineering skills to set yourself above the crowd? This is what it would take. If there is a glut of xxx engineers, then wages must fall. If you seperate yourself by adding on to your existing skills, you are more valuable.
Oh and about my youth. I know I feel the way I do b/c I am young. Up until a few months ago I honestly felt I was living in the greatest time of all. Those cheap consumer goods have worked in fooling the masses though, eh?
And if you have free markets capitalism will reinvent itself asap.
Indeed. Just look at the state the world's in.
The market is not free because many people have no choice but to sell their labor or even themselves. There is no alternative. Those who would like to live self-sufficiently and not participate in the capitalist economy cannot do so without accumulating a pile of money first (to buy land).
It would be better with more labour buyers giving the choices needed to get better working conditions, start a career and so on. I got the impression that the worst of the partly industrialized developing countries are those where the state authorities stop such developments to keep the economy static and easy to control.
As we have become part of a large corporation, we have less money available for people who DO things because more must be spent on nonproductive parasites within the organization. The best and most expensive employees have left or been forced out. The solution for this is to contract out the productive parts to "Low Cost Countries", and keep the overhead. It does not matter how skilled I become, I will not provide such services for the kind of wages paid in the LCCs, nor will I even get the choice. I will use my skills instead for my own direct benefit, and if I must work for some other company, I will provide just as much in return for whatever I am paid as I think it's worth.
I look at people busting their asses for the company - getting jerked around in all manner of ways, sacrificing their precious time that could be spent with their kids and families or learning new skills useful in the coming times - they think they are getting ahead, that they are buying something with this effort. But their pay is dropping in real terms, the cost of living is rising, and yet the company clearly sees them as just an expendable commodity - something to be used up and discarded.
I will always be increasing my skills in one way or another. I just won't be looking to further specialize in the area I've been working in. Instead I'm planning to broaden my skills into other areas, and I don't plan on working for any corporations if that can be avoided. I know my income is likely going to be much reduced, at least for some time, and I may as well embrace that reality and deal with that on my own terms.
There are days when I feel that a life of crime might be more rewarding than continuing with the race to the bottom. But then I just exploit my fellow man, the way corp-jerks exploit their "human capital".
Did you really intend to say this? Yes I understand this is the way the world works, but it doesn't make it any less sad. Do you really support the notion of setting out to exploit someone?
The trouble is finding people with the same motive or sufficient skills to make it happen. 99% of the workforce lives paycheck to paycheck. As the employeer, expect to bankroll thier wages unless you have sufficient revenues at the start.
>It also makes for a great working environment, strong worker loyalty, and very high quality work.
I wouldn't count on that. Generally, most people are only as loyal when they believe its in their short term interest.
I've been in business for nearly a decade, operating a small business. I tried to do that same thing your about to. The issue is finding people with entrepreneur spirit that you can used to grow your business. What your likely to endure is a give take relationship with co-workers. You give, they take and rarely do they assist you outside of their job responsiblities. They'll quickly latch on, and ride on your efforts, hoping to cash in on a startup. Rarely will they put in the effort to help grow or expand your business.
This is why most businesses operate as they do with a central authority making the decisions and taking all the risks. If your fellow employees are not willing to share in the risks than they don't reserve the rewards.
If do decide to start your own small business, I would advise that you remain as the business authority. If you find that your employees make the cut you can always tender them an partnership position. I would also recommend that you build up some savings in the corp accts rather than pay out everything to your employees. You will need savings to draw from when your reveneue is lower than payroll, and you want to avoid dipping into your own personal savings to keep the business afloat.
The most perfect form of slavery is one where the yoke of oppression is so light that it is barely noticed. All the more so when that yoke is chosen by the person bearing it.
We globaly and locally need to get a lot of things done.
Go into business myself? Sure, but for a 40-something former steel worker who is desperate the best job may in fact be stealing from you, the young, go-getting entrepreneur.
When communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union a free-market utopia didn't take over -- the mafia did. People forget that a public social safety net for the disenfranchised and dispossessed is in reality an insurance policy against social revolution. Take that net away and those folks will very quickly find no problem using blunt, medeival weapons to relieve you of your property.
I agree wholeheartedly!
The limiting thing in the current US economy is NOT that people lack the proper training for all those good jobs out there; it's that 'all those good jobs out there' just ain't! There are already to many people who are far too educated and far too overqualified for the jobs they are doing.
It should be abundantly obvious that if say an auto company no longer needs 10,000 assembly line workers, it sure as hell isn't going to need 10,000 robotic engineers, computer programers, or financial analysts. The whole purpose of automation is to replace labor with technology, not to create an equivalent number of highly specialized and highly paid jobs. The whole purpose of outsourcing is to replace expensive labor with cheap labor.
In many people's minds there is a sort of built in assumption that there will always be as many jobs as there are people who need jobs - a constant one-to-one correspondence. This notion is also rubbish. If the purpose of high-tech manufacturing is to replace labor with technology, then why should it be surprising that there are now more people than there are decent-paying jobs? Let's face it: the world probably has at least a billion superfluous people - people who are literally not needed for anything. What becomes of them? And what becomes of US when THEY realize that fact?
Oh, I think it's more like 5 billion superfluous people out there. Gaia is groaning under their weight right now...
"If they are going to die let them do it and decrease the surplus population" -- E. Scrooge, CEO
... I thought they only needed one, to pilot that Last Starfighter or something ...
China would get their oil for less and Venezuela would sell their oil for less, if they stuck to the contract. But it would make no difference to the rest of the world, except perhaps a few ticks in the price of the oil.
Why is this so difficult for some people to understand?
The price would rise, and the oil-producing countries would have more high-priced oil for the future.
Why should they sell such a valuable resource so cheap? Are they crazy?
Right now the average sulfur content of world traded oil is rising and the average grade is getting heavier. (We used the best stuff first.) This does NOT make oil one iota less fungible. It simply means we must pay more for the good stuff but if we build a refinery that can handle the heavy sour stuff then we can by that grade cheaper.
In order to have a valid argument ET, you must explain why, if China buys more of any particular grade from Venezuela, that other producers of that particular grade would be preventing from selling, at a higher bidding price, their oil to another importer.
Simply stating the well known fact that there are different grades of oil does not change the fact that ANY grade of oil must compete on the world market for the best price against nations producing that same grade of oil.
This statement actually makes my point. A quantity of the same grade of crude is obviously going to be relatively more fungible with another equal quantity of the same grade with the difference largely in shipping cost. I can see a point coming where say light-sweet crude is only available from certain ME countries potentially hostile to the US. This would raise the scenario of no crude of that type available at any price to the US but only to neighbors friendly to the producing countries. My point is simply that the political factors become a larger influence to the fungibility issue as depletion continues. Why do you think US politicians beat the 'energy independence' drum so loudly. And, correspondingly, why are the Saudis wary of customers switching to 'other' types of energy?
What you apparently don't realize is that most of the oil coming out of Venezuela is extremely heavy and sour. Right now there is a glut of heavy sour crude in the world and a scarcity of light sweet crude. The margin between "heavy sour" and "light sweet" has went from about $5 a barrel to over $15 a barrel in the last two years. The oil coming out of Venezuela is definitely fungible if any oil in the world is fungible. That is, there is more of it, (mostly heavy sour), available from more sources than any other grade of oil.
Political factors do not affect the fungiblity of oil any more than they affect the fungiblity of lumber. Lumber is considered a fungible commodity but everyone knows mahogany is not interchangeable with knotty pine. The word "fungible" does not mean that there are no different grades of the fungible commodity, political factors notwithstanding.
This link gives the different grades of oil coming from most exporting nations.
http://www.hpiconsultants.com/crude_assay/viewlist.htm
I don't think we fail to understand it, it's just that if the amount of oil available for export is dwindling and there is greater and greater competition, I'm wondering if making 1,500,000 barrels a day of oil and products from this shrinking pool off limits to the U.S. might do more than just slightly increase the cost for the U.S. There would be a huge psychological effect on the markets and it would force the U.S. into an even more frenzied bidding war with other countries.
But you do not understand the impact that Venezuela selling only to China would have. Venezuela produces mostly heavy sour crude. Shipping it all the way to China, instead of closer markets, would simply mean Venezuela would get less for their oil. Then if Middle East exporters shipped more of their heavy sour to the US, it would add a few cents, or perhaps a dollar or so, to the shipping cost. The impact would not be that great.
Adding the distance tankers must travel would definitely raise the total cost of ALL oil on all markets. But not that much. In the grand scheme of things it would make little difference, if any at all.
thanks for helping those of us who are laypersons to the oil industry understand things better.
Also, thanks for noticing the hole in my head ;) I did not choose the name bc/ discovering peak oil has had a Jekyl and Hyde (or phineas gage) effect on me. I am concerned, however, that our society may have that type of reaction once they get hit upside the head by peak oil. I am a by training a physician and part of what I do is take care of people with traumatic brain injuries and strokes. I've always been fascinated with how the brain works and how injuries can alter its function in surprising ways. Obviously you don't want to be one of my interesting cases!
For those who don't know who phineas gage really is, his story is fascinating, here's a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
Here's an image of what happened to phineas gage:
sorry never answered your question. Never heard of that case, can't seem to find it. It's certainly believable but with a couple of caveats. We typically think of frontal lobe injuries causing emotional lability and poor impulse control. Somtimes with a right frontal lobe injury, the opposite occurs and the individual suffers from a flat affect and the inability to experience (or to detect in others) the usual range of emotions. These people usually speak in a strane, monotone voice devoid of any inflection. They lose the ability to use or understand the 90% of language that is non-verbal. So this could "cure" someone of depression but only at the cost of losing all ability to experience and comprehend emotion. Certainly not a recommended treatment.
Why should it have all the fun?
To SUV or not to SUV?
That is the question
--for my primitive brain to decide.
(Ask people in your sales department what part of the brain they appeal to in order to close a sale.)
and karl rove knows it.
(Beware. Out "there" are the "them" who hate the freedoms of your inner lizard. "They" are out to cage and grill your lizard if you don't french fry "them" first. You love life. Remember? YOU hate them. Remember? Now go forth my minions and ... kill, kill, kill, ... hee ha ha --evil laugh. And don't forget to drive safely.)
Sometimes it seems like America as a whole has a kind of frontal cortex impairment
well said
Jesus Loves A Machine Gun
It's the new "Left Behind" video game, where you maim and murder and hate, all in God's name. Praise!
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2006/06/07/notes060706.DTL
It is occasionally suggested that Gage's case inspired the development of frontal lobotomy, a now-obsolete psychosurgical procedure that leads to a blunted emotional response and personality changes. However, historical analysis does not seem to support this claim. It seems that consideration of Gage's injury had little influence on the development of this practice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
But I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
- Dorothy Parker
Long weekend's inflated petrol prices fuel mounting anger
And Bangladesh has been forced to raise prices again - one of the biggest fuel increases in the country's history:
www.gasbuddy.com
2.89/ gallon on this one:
http://www.gaspricewatch.com/new/
These 2 sites update their numbers frequently and usually reflect a change before AAA or other organizations release their weekly average.
Two oil tankers collide off British coast
The emissions standards for diesels in both the USA and Canada are tighter for the 2007 model year than in 2006. The big problem will be NOx, with particulates (soot) a lesser issue. In VW's case, the company has to develop an ultra-high pressure injection system to improve combustion efficiency to the point where a new engine might meet the standards.
VW is planning to stock up with 2006 model year Golf, etc. diesels until the end of this year. After they're gone, sometime next year, there will be no more until at least 2008, except for the Touareg SUV. The Touareg diesel faces a different standard until 2009, I think, because it weighs over 6,000 lbs (shudder).
VW sells only about 25,000 diesel cars a year in the US. There's no doubt that VW, as a company, must have seen this problem coming. The reason we will have this hiatus is related to the low sales volume: it's not cost effective to develop a new engine for North America alone. The EU is planning to tighten its NOx standard for diesels in the not too distant future (years, though) and any redevelopment VW undertakes will probably be done with that market in mind.
VW is not alone in having this problem. Jeep will discontinue the small diesel in the Liberty, though they have announced a new, larger one based on Daimler-Chrysler technology.
On German TV there were a couple of reports recently about farmers who burn wheat for heating. Grown your own, CO2 neutral, renewable, etc.
What started as a protest due to low wheat prices is turning into a trend as other farmers take notice. They claim to save substantial amounts of money in comparison to the use of heating oil.
But one man's solution to high energy prices is another's moral outrage. Burning food when so many people are going hungry.
A fascinating debate.
-- sorry I couldn't resist.
Scary numbers indeed.
Yes, I find that extremely scary, and sad.
You'll get two humans every second.
We can't be controlled...
I know a mysterious lady who would like to offer a bet in regard to this matter
I keep hearing that song from school(the one from english class...."consumption junction what's your function..." Anyone remember this? Maybe it was taught to indoctrinate us to consume as much as possible. It appears to have worked better on some than others.
http://www.schoolhouserock.tv/Conjunction.html
http://www.schoolhouserock.tv/Conjunction.html
Top regions (normalized)
Here's a water filter link: http://www.countrylivinggrainmills.com/pricing.html
Scroll down until you see The Big Berkey and replacement filters.
You can also google British Berkefeld water filters for other places that sell a variety of models in different sizes.
I'd stumbled across this (very old) technology some time back, and wondered if it worked, compared to, say, a First Need or Katadyne filtration unit.
Any information would be greatly appreciated.
According to the box they come in, the black ones will filter out pathogenic bacteria, cysts, parasites, trihalomethanes, radiologicals, inorganic minerals, volatile organic compounds and heavy metals (95% reduction), while reducing or removing nitrates, nitrites, rust, silt and sediment.
I've had rust and sulphur problems with my well lately, which is what made me think this might be a good idea. At the moment I can treat the well and take in water samples for analysis regularly, but I might not always be able to do that. Also, the pump on my well requires electricity (which I supply with PV and a battery backup) and won't last forever. If for any reason I can't replace it when it eventually fails, then I could rely on water from the old hand-pumped dug well on my property for drinking and cooking by using a water filtration system.
I like the fact that it's low tech and has no moving parts. It's also relatively small and portable (there are larger sizes available on other sites that sell British Berkefeld). The availability of a clean water supply is absolutely fundamental, and this is a relatively cheap and effective means of achieving it.
We really cannot put in a PV-powered well, as the water table is 200+ feet below us, and that is also too far to pull it up by handpump, so my tenative plans involve catching and treating rainwater from the (metal) roof.
Hooking up words and phrases and clauses.
Conjunction Junction, how's that function?
I got three favorite cars
That get most of my job done.
Conjunction Junction, what's their function?
I got "and", "but", and "or",
They'll get you pretty far.
"And":
That's an additive, like "this and that".
"But":
That's sort of the opposite,
"Not this but that".
And then there's "or":
O-R, when you have a choice like
"This or that".
"And", "but", and "or",
Get you pretty far.
Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
Hooking up two boxcars and making 'em run right.
Milk and honey, bread and butter, peas and rice.
Hey that's nice!
Dirty but happy, digging and scratching,
Losing your shoe and a button or two.
He's poor but honest, sad but true,
Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!
Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
Hooking up two cars to one
When you say something like this choice:
"Either now or later"
Or no choice:
"Neither now nor ever"
Hey that's clever!
Eat this or that, grow thin or fat,
Never mind, I wouldn't do that,
I'm fat enough now!
Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
Hooking up phrases and clauses that balance, like:
Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
He cut loose the sandbags,
But the balloon wouldn't go any higher.
Let's go up to the mountains,
Or down to the sea.
You should always say "thank you",
Or at least say "please".
Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
Hooking up words and phrases and clauses
In complex sentences like:
Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
Hooking up cars and making 'em function.
Conjunction Junction, how's that function?
I like tying up words and phrases and clauses.
Conjunction Junction, watch that function.
I'm going to get you there if you're very careful.
Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
I'm going to get you there if you're very careful.
Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
I'm going to get you there if you're very careful.
This from the latest Short-Term Energy Outlook, http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/contents.html
Party time after "Zarqawi" killed again.
Also, Bloomberg claims Iraq production ticked down again in May.
As gold rush ends, meltdown begins
I was speechless.
-C.
Anyone else hear about this? 60% more than previously reported... maybe I've been asleep at the wheel...
-C.
Nigeria Niger Delta shut in over 800,000 barrels per day
-C.
And the USA expects 25% of its oil imports to come from
Nigeria in 10 years? Somewhat unwise methinks.
(It does explain the presence of US warships stationed off Nigeria ... uninvited)
Sorry to be redundantly tautologous, but IMO we are going to have to keep bidding up the price of light sweet oil in order to keep the oil coming our way.
As Leanan has noted, there are lots and lots of case histories of poorer countries reducing their petroleum use so that we can keep our import levels up. However, at some point US consumers are going to be forced to curtail their petroleum use. The poorer importers are providing a glimpse of our future.
there are lots and lots of case histories of poorer countries reducing their petroleum use so that we can keep our import levels up.
Another dynamic that's beginning to happen
is that various governments can no longer
afford to directly susidize low domestic prices
Demand destruction will occur in 3rd world
countries as fuels prices are allowed to
rise closer to actual market prices
Expect to see increasing reports of local unrest
as prices are allowed to float ..
Imagine Venezuela with $3.00/gallon gas
In the short run, it might actually increase
the amount of crude available for export if
countries were forced to adopt true market
pricing in their domestic markets ..
Triff ..
I maintain that policies that subsidize oil use increase consumption and reduce the ability to develop alternatives. This is true in the developed and developing world equally.
The removal of subsidies in most countries seems to have gone over very smoothly in most of the countries mentioned and is probably an important part of why they are reducing their oil use and the negative impact that high oil prices have on all of their citizens - rich and poor.
Hopefully governments will compensate the poor in a fuel nuetral way. Most poor people would rather have a dollar than a dollar worth of fuel. That is a far better way to support them and the cost to the government (in non-producing countries) is the same.
Agreed. But maybe it's easier to subsidize food/energy than it is to distribute dollars? I am drawn to the idea of a Basic Income (preferably global, but that would be harder to pull off) to replace welfare in the West and to replace subsidies in non-welfare nations.
Wouldn't gas in the US be about $1.50 a gallon if it wasn't subject to state/federal taxes? Hmm, just checked NYMEX unleaded gas, it's $2.15 a gallon. I guess this is the price without taxes and retail markup?
would be the better benchmark price ..
Either way it doesn't negate the point I was
trying to make about countries that subsidize
domestic fuel prices at substantial discounts
to market .. ie Venezuela for example ..
Triff ..
Here is a long article from Last Sunday's NYT on the massive problems subsidized gasoline has been causing in Iraq. In my opinion is is probably one of the larger factors financing the insurgency as well as providing the insurgency with something to do when they are not busy blowing up civilians.
There is some really good stuff here. It is free now, but I think these articles usually disappear behind a paywall after about a week.
Since Shell admits to 500mb+ shut in just of their own, and Chevron, Total, Exxon and ENI also have big Delta operations, the new figure seems plausible.
I wonder if EIA and IEA will go back and revise their figures downwards?
All that heavy oil, or more accurately "tar", does not appear to be helping them very much. I don't think any of it is being turned into regular crude and sold to refineries. Some of it is being mixed with water and sold for boiler fuel however. I wonder how long it would take them to gear up to convert any of it to regular crude and how many barrels per day could they produce by say.... 2020.
Venezuela peaked in 1970 at just over 3,700,000 barrels per day and are currently producing about 2,540.000 barrels per day, crude and condensate only.
the ASPO article can be found at: http://www.peakoil.ie/newsletters/773
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/5/22/165318/469
http://www.peakoil.ie/newsletters/774
Matt Simmons said that when Saudi peaks, the world peaks. Wake up and smell the coffee, Saudi Arabia is post peak and we will enter the down-slope of peak oil production this year.
--Is this sourced? Searched google news and could find no such thing, and the article does not cite the source or the person quoted. Let me know if you have another source aside from ASPO on this, I'm interested in getting this verified because if it is true then I have no idea why we haven't experienced a black tuesday in the markets...
Saudi Aramco boosts drilling efforts to offset declining fields
Dubai (Platts)--11Apr2006
Saudi Aramco's mature crude oil fields are expected to decline at a gross
average rate of 8%/year without additional maintenance and drilling, a Saudi
Aramco spokesman said Tuesday.
But Saudi Aramco has taken a number of measures to offset a decline in
output from the country's aging oil fields, the spokesman added.
"A variety of remedial activities are always being taken in oil fields
influencing their effective decline rates," the spokesman said. "The drilling
of additional development wells in the producing fields is Saudi Aramco's
standard practice to offset normal declines of older wells."
This is particularly important when oil fields are progressively depleted
under a well thought out strategy of maximizing the sweep and displacement
efficiencies, leading to high ultimate oil recovery, the spokesman said.
"This maintain potential drilling in mature fields combined with a
multitude of remedial actions and the development of new fields, with long
plateau lives, lowers the composite decline rate of producing fields to around
2%," the spokesman said.
Underscoring these efforts, Saudi Aramco signed two contracts with J. Ray
McDermott Middle East and McDermott Arabia Company Ltd, subsidiaries of J. Ray
McDermott, to detail design, procure, fabricate, transport and install
offshore facilities for the Maintain Potential and Khursaniyah Upstream
Pipeline programs, Saudi Aramco said April 6.
The first contract includes two drilling support structures in Zuluf
field to be installed in December 2006 and one new wellhead production
platform in the Central Safaniya oil field to support onstream start-up in May
2007, Saudi Aramco said.
Three additional wellhead platforms will be installed in the Central
Safaniya and Zuluf fields by December 2007. New associated flowlines will
connect these platforms to existing offshore tie-in (manifold) platforms.
To support increasing production in the Central Safaniya field, a new
tie-in platform (Safaniya TP-18) will also be engineered, procured, fabricated
and installed by December 2007, along with a 24-inch trunkline between it and
a subsea connection on the new 42-inch trunkline flowing to the onshore
Safaniya GOSP-1, installed under a separate contract.
The second contract is associated with the subsea portion, some 22 km (14
miles) long, of the 30-inch gas pipeline from Abu Ali Island to an onshore
site at Khursaniyah to be installed by May 2007.
This subsea portion is part of the new 66 km BKTG-1 pipeline that will
transport 220 million cubic feet/day of gas from Abu Ali Plant to Khursaniyah
Gas Plant.
--Glen Carey, glen_carey at platts.com
For more news, request a free trial to Platts Oilgram News at
http://www.platts.com/Request%20More%20Information/
Who Killed the Electric Car?
New Movie coming out later this month
19: Stonecutters' Song - The Stonecutters
Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do! We do!
Who leaves Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the martians under wraps?
We do! We do!
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do! We do!
Who robs the cave fish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscars night?
We do! We do!
This song is the ancient drinking song for the Stonecutters. The Stonecutters are a 1500 year old secret organisation "who, since ancient times, have split the rocks of ignorance that obscure the light of knowledge and truth" (according to "Number One" - the Springfield Stonecutters' leader). The aim of the society is for the members to get drunk, play ping-pong and find the Chosen One who has the Stonecutters symbol for a birthmark. This turns out to be Homer.
2F09 - Homer the Great
For years the price differential here in N Atlanta are has always been 10 cents a gallon between regular and mid-grade & mid-grade to premium.
A few days ago a lot of the stations suddenly jumped to a differential of 14-16 cents a gallon between mid-grade and premium. (still 10 cents for regular to mid).
What's up with that?
Have they realized that people with vehicles that require high test are probably better off and can handle it? Or are the additives suddenly more expensive?
You add marginally low cost items that are marginally high profit items. Whipped Cream, sprinkles, & any thing else you've seen there. It doesn't cost them hardly anything at all per cup and they know it. Even if it costs a quarter more to add something, and it cost Starbucks .02, that's a profit of 1250% on an "extra." The people who don't care and want the "experience" will indict themselves by buying more than coffee. Those who just need coffee will prefer a lower price. They single these people out and they gladly pay more. There's also little nuances like getting rid of the word small. Small is grande!
If both sides stop pumping money into this market, what happens when they compete? The US and the Europeans both think they will be losers, so they've talked about this for years. The last meeting was suppose to address this, but many now believe a deal won't be reached.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20060608/ts_usatoday/fatdaysmaybeoverforfarmsubsidies
I caught this story on PBS last night. It appears he has made considerable progress in the 3 years since this was written. He has a working model in his lab using NaOH as the absorbent. CO2 levels at the intake were about 540ppm, due to the presence of humans in a closed environment. Outflow levels were about 150PPM. I didn't catch what you do with the resulting product, but it seems a really interesting idea.
Synthetic trees could purify air
Last Updated: Friday, 21 February, 2003, 10:10 GMT
By Molly Bentley
The invention is confined to paper so far
A scientist has invented an artificial tree designed to do the job of plants.
But the synthetic tree proposed by Dr Klaus Lackner does not much resemble the leafy variety.
"It looks like a goal post with Venetian blinds," said the Columbia University physicist, referring to his sketch at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Denver, Colorado.
But the synthetic tree would do the job of a real tree, he said. It would draw carbon dioxide out of the air, as plants do during photosynthesis, but retain the carbon and not release oxygen.
If built to scale, according to Dr Lackner, synthetic trees could help clean up an atmosphere grown heavy with carbon dioxide, the most abundant gas produced by humans and implicated in climate warming.
He predicts that one synthetic tree could remove 90,000 tonnes of CO2 in a year - the emissions equivalent of 15,000 cars.
"You can be a thousand times better than a living tree," he said.
Carbon sinks
For now, the synthetic tree is still a paper idea. But Dr Lackner is serious about developing a working model. His efforts suggest the wide net of ideas cast by scientists as they face the challenge of mitigating climate change.
Dr Lackner believes that carbon sequestration technology must be part of the long-term solution. Global reliance on fossil fuels would not decrease any time soon, he said, and developing countries cannot be expected to wait until alternatives are available.
The technology calls for two things: seizing carbon and then storing it. Direct capture of CO2, from power plants for example, is the simplest, according to Dr Lackner. But this doesn't work for all polluters. A car can't capture and store its carbon dioxide on-board; the storage tank would be too large.
"It's simply a question of weight," he said. "For every 14 grams of gasoline you use, you are going to have 44 grams of CO2."
The alternative is to capture emissions from the wind. In this case, a synthetic tree would act like a filter. An absorbent coating, such as limewater, on its slats or "leaves" would seize carbon dioxide and retain the carbon.
Dr Lackner predicts that the biggest expense would be in recycling the absorber material.
"We have to keep the absorbent surfaces refreshed because they will very rapidly fill up with carbon dioxide," he said. If an alkaline solution such as limewater were used, the resulting coat of limestone would need to be removed.
Dr Lackner is considering other less-alkaline solutions to prevent carbonate precipitation.
"There are a number of engineering issues which need to be worked out," he said.
Home use
A synthetic tree could be planted anywhere. A small one could sit like a TV on the lawn to balance out the CO2 emitted by one person or family.
But more practically, said Dr Lackner, a device the size of a barn would sit in the open air, near repositories for easy transportation and storage of carbon.
He estimated that 250,000 synthetic trees worldwide would be needed to soak up the 22 billion tonnes of CO2 produced annually.
But not everyone is rooted to the idea. Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineer Howard Herzog thinks Dr Lackner's design will not hold together on the scale he proposes.
He said you would expend more energy in capturing the CO2 - in keeping the slats coated in absorbent and disposing of it - than you would save.
"Once the solvent captures the CO2, it holds it on tight," said Dr Herzog, "and it's going to take a lot of energy to break those bonds."
He said that much more research was needed on the technology.
"The idea of air capture is seductive and would really be great to have," said Dr Herzog, "but it's important to separate out the concept from the technical details."
'Early days'
Meanwhile, Dr Lackner is pursuing his idea for carbon storage. While he was at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, his team worked on a storage method based on a natural chemical process known as rock weathering.
When CO2 binds with magnesium, it creates carbonate rocks which, according to Dr Lackner, retain carbon permanently and safely.
Currently, he said, the process is still too expensive to develop on a large scale.
But Dr Lackner is optimistic that the costs for carbon capture and storage will come down.
"This is still the early days of climate solutions," he said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2784227.stm
So the guy has made an artificial kind of "tree", that needs to be manufactured, transported and probably replaced after a while too.
If he went out of his lab for a moment, he could become of aware of the existence of real trees, that capture co2, produce oxygen, clean the air, regulate moisture in the air and the soil, support fauna, produce food, produce wood, give shade, smell good and look nice. Furthermore they maintain and reproduce themselves, are not poisonous, don't require an energy supply, don't require resources and recycle all by themselves.
Sigh. Another techno-junkie looking for his fix.
This 'artificial tree' concept looks like a very bad idea to me, solely from a technical standpoint.
If you use an alkaline chemical solution, such as sodium hydroxide (NaOH) to absorb the CO2, then you are faced with having to produce an amount of that chemical directly proportional to the amount of CO2 removed.
NaOH + CO2 > NaHCO3 (sodium bicarbonate)
Unfortunately, the manufacture of NaOH from brine (via the chlor-alkali process) uses quite a bit of electricity and is relatively energy-intensive. So, the production of that additional electricity will result in a proportionate increase in CO2. Then, to remove that extra CO2 you will need more NaOH, and the thing becomes a sort of vicious circle.
Using lime is even worse, and in fact totally absurd, because to get lime (CaO) you need to calcine limestone, the very process of which releases an amount of CO2 that is exactly as much CO2 as you can absorb from the lime you just made, as below:
calcination: CaCO3 + heat > CaO + CO2.
CO2 absorption; CO2 + CaO > CaCO3
This is chemically the equivalent of digging a hole and filling it back up again.
Of course this doesn't include the amount of CO2 produced from burning the fuel to operate the lime calcination kiln. So, it would be even worse.
I suspect that some of these academics are just trying get on the CO2 sequestration bandwagon to get their noses into the government funding trough and keep some graduate students busy.
They don't use NaOH or CaO for scrubbing because, although they work very well in a laboratory, the reagents are consumed in the process and cannot be obtained in sufficient quantity to do any good on a global scale. A coal-fired electric generating plant can consume a trainload of coal in a day, and by simple stoichiometry, would produce about 4 trainloads of CO2 (if converted to dry ice). The scrubbing activity described above might "cost" about 40% of the plant's power output. You can see that it would take several more trainloads of NaOH to absorb it all. Then there's disposal...
As for sequestration after-the-fact, I'd like to see them explore this technology a little more. But the real bottom line is, we're going to have to consume less.
Other oil fields have seen much better recovery with CO2 injection (scrubbing effect of super critical liquid as I vaguely understand it).
The Chinese had good results with injecting power plant exhaust (N2 + CO2 + a bit of argon) into oil fields.
I suspect that injecting total exhaust volume is often the better solution EXCEPT
for under development GE combined cycle coal fired plants. This (AFAIK) requires burning coal in oxygen. About 20% less coal burned.
Removing nitrogen before combustion rather than after may be the way to go.
And there's the disposal problem again ... liquid carbonic certainly makes a good solvent for depleted oil fields, tar sand, etc. but my gut feeling is that there will only be a market for a smallish fraction of the total CO2 produced. Even if we use depleted reservoirs for sequestration, it's not gonna be easy. Return oil tankers to the Middle East full of CO2? Or LNG carriers, maybe? You'd probably still have trainloads of leftover carbonic.
Another suggestion I've heard is to pump it to the ocean floor, where it will take hundreds of years to make its way back to the atmosphere. Probably not the best idea, but hey.
Plugging into the future
Jun 8th 2006
From The Economist print edition
Electric cars: A grassroots movement is building hybrid petrol-electric cars that can be recharged from the mains. Why?
WITH a licence plate that reads "I00 MPG", Greg Hanssen is used to his car attracting attention. Even so, he seemed especially pleased by the crowd that gathered around his modified Toyota Prius at a hotel parking lot in San Diego, during a recent conference held there by the Society of Automotive Engineers. They poked at various parts of the car with vigour, and positively gushed when he opened the back to reveal what any punter would have described as an ordinary-looking electrical plug.
Such enthusiasm is surprising, since automotive engineers are a hard bunch to impress. The technologies involved in cars have been refined countless times since the first internal-combustion engine appeared over a century ago. It would take a pretty big breakthrough to take their breath away today. And yet that is what happened in San Diego, at a conference devoted to hybrid cars.
Hybrid technology, pioneered by Toyota with its Prius, combines the usual petrol engine with an electric motor and battery that never need to be plugged in. The resulting gain in fuel economy is impressive: the Prius achieves over 40 miles per gallon, perhaps 20% more than it would without hybridisation. But the gathered petrol-heads, almost all of them men, yawned through presentations on various aspects of hybrids until the final topic: "plug-ins". As experts described efforts to connect hybrids to the electrical grid, those in the audience scribbled furiously and asked eager questions. And when Mr Hanssen, a plug-in pioneer, was pointed out in the audience, the room gave him an ovation. Why all the hoopla, when his big idea--plugging the car into the mains for recharging--seems to some people to be a big step backward?
Electric sceptics
For one thing, say the sceptics, plugging in will be expensive and will stress the already overloaded power grid. Actually, that is unlikely. Because drivers will mostly plug in their cars overnight, they will benefit from cheaper off-peak power rates. In America, using cheap electricity to power cars can reduce the cost per mile by 75% compared with petrol (or even more, given current high petrol prices). The savings are even greater in Europe, which has high petrol taxes. True, if many drivers plugged in during the day it would raise peak demand, but software in the cars could prevent daytime charging.
Sceptics also argue that electric cars are misleadingly clean: they are "pollute somewhere else" machines, they scoff. While running on battery power they produce no tailpipe emissions but, critics note, the coal-intensive grid electricity they use surely produces more greenhouse gases than a petrol engine does. Again, that turns out to be wrong: studies by California's Air Resources Board confirm that generating the electricity to power cars in pure-electric mode produces only about half of the greenhouse gases of typical petrol vehicles. This assumes the power grid is half coal-fired, as America's is today. As the grid "decarbonises" over time, such emissions will fall.
Fine, but surely few people want a car you have to keep plugging in--what happens when the battery runs out? According to Bill Reinert of Toyota, one of the great advantages of the Prius electrical system--in which the battery is charged by the petrol engine and using energy recaptured during braking--is the fact that you never need to plug it in and that it never runs out of juice. That is far more convenient for drivers, insists Toyota, which has opposed the idea of plug-ins.
But Mr Hanssen notes that even if the battery pack in his modified Prius goes flat, it simply switches over to the petrol engine, just as a normal Prius does. The difference is that his car can go much further on battery power alone. That is because he has replaced the original nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) battery with a higher-capacity lithium-ion battery, and has hacked the control software to prevent the petrol engine kicking in until the car is moving at high speed. As a result, his modified Prius can travel over 30 miles in all-electric mode, compared with a mile or so for a standard Prius.
Toyota did not provide the software source code, but Mr Hanssen and his colleagues at EnergyCS, a firm outside Los Angeles, managed to trick the Prius's computer into thinking that his giant battery is really a factory-installed battery that mysteriously happens to be full of charge much of the time. Even when the petrol engine kicks in (as the master computer requires on all Prius cars at higher speeds), electric power is still blended in to improve fuel economy and provides up to 75% of the total power at 55mph.
Riding with Mr Hanssen from San Diego to Los Angeles in his hacked Prius, your correspondent saw the other reason he is a hero to the engineers. The detailed diagnostics screen on his dashboard verified that his licence plate does not lie: his car really does achieve 100mpg. Given that the average fuel economy of new American vehicles is less than 30mpg, that is quite an achievement.
EnergyCS has handled the conversion of around half a dozen Prius cars already. With the help of Clean Tech, a systems integration firm, it plans to offer plug-in retrofits to the general public this year for around $12,000. The company hopes to plug in Europeans through Amberjac, its European partner. It may find a receptive audience: Priuses in Europe already have a button allowing drivers to go into all-electric mode for brief periods. (The button is not wired up in American Priuses, though it can be activated.)
Blame it on the hydrogen
EnergyCS is at the forefront of a clean-car revolution, but it is not alone. A motley crew of hackers, entrepreneurs and idealists has sprung up to boost the nascent technology of plug-in hybrids. Most of these enthusiasts are in, or from, California--not surprising, given the state's greenery and its love of electric cars. Curiously, another common thread is a passionate hatred for hydrogen fuel cells.
As a forthcoming documentary film "Who Killed the Electric Car?" (released later this month) makes clear, this crowd does not blame the failure in the 1990s of battery cars--such as GM's EV1, the most aerodynamic production car ever made--on the limitations of battery technology or a lack of customer interest. Chelsea Sexton, a former marketer of EV1 cars and a star of the film, typifies the view of the plug-in crowd when she blames gullible regulators and cynical carmakers for abandoning electric cars for the distant dream of hydrogen. Inspired by the hacking of Priuses, various lobbying groups have sprung up hoping to entice manufacturers to produce plug-ins and to push politicians to support them. Ms Sexton, for example, now helps run Plug In America, a group that includes Jim Woolsey, a former head of the CIA.
Felix Kramer runs the California Cars Initiative (CalCars), a non-profit advocacy group that promotes plug-ins. With help from EnergyCS, his outfit created the first plug-in Prius--though it used cheap lead-acid batteries, which are much heavier and shorter-lived than lithium-ion ones. During Earth Day celebrations in April, Ron Gremban, CalCars' technology guru, led a group that converted a Prius into a plug-in in three days, while the public watched. In co-ordination with the Electric Auto Association, CalCars now plans to release a free "open source" version of its conversion instructions.
Plug-In Partners, which counts many electric utilities and green groups as members, is drumming up "pre-orders" for fleets of plug-in vehicles to prove that demand for them really exists. That is important not only because carmakers are notoriously risk-averse (given the huge sunk costs of existing capital stock). Battery enthusiasts whisper darkly that the car companies never wanted battery cars to succeed, and so lied about a lack of consumer demand. Ms Sexton and other former insiders point to long waiting lists they say were ignored by the big car companies, who chose instead to shut down their electric programmes and to crush most of those electric cars.
All this talk of the obstinacy and ruthlessness of Detroit comes as no surprise to Andrew Frank, an engineering professor at the University of California at Davis. The oil shocks of the 1970s inspired him, he says, to pursue technologies to make a big car capable of 100mpg. For three decades, he has been advocating hybrid technology--and seemingly getting nowhere with the big car manufacturers.
And yet Dr Frank has persevered. Visitors to his lab today find a plug-in Ford Explorer sports-utility vehicle (SUV) equipped with a giant 16 kilowatt-hour (kWh) battery designed for long range--a conventional Prius battery has a capacity of 1.3kWh. He has replaced the original 3.5-litre internal-combustion engine with a frugal 1.9-litre version, thus boosting fuel economy, but the added kick from the electric motor means this SUV can still accelerate to 60mph faster than an ordinary Explorer. He has made similar modifications to a Mercury saloon, so it can travel 40 miles in all-electric mode and achieve an astounding 200mpg.
Dr Frank draws inspiration from "The Great Race", a film from 1965 in which the offbeat Professor Fate takes on a conventional challenger in an automobile race. Team Fate, as Dr Frank's researchers are called, has won a number of contests with its hybrid vehicles--as the black victory banners depicting skulls and crossbones (Professor Fate's insignia) on the lab's walls attest. "In the movie the professor is really wacky," jokes one of his students, "and that's right on the money."
Dr Frank seems comfortable with his image as the absent-minded professor. "I've been Professor Fate a long time," he says with a smile. Even when he got somewhere with the big car firms, he thinks he got cheated. He showed off his technology years ago to visitors from Toyota. At the time they expressed no interest, he says, but he was struck by the similarity of the Prius technology later unveiled.
Hymotion, a Canadian firm, has also converted a Prius into a plug-in. Rather than retrofitting cars on-site, this firm has developed a modular kit that is intended to be installed (in just two hours, supposedly) by authorised garages around North America. Ricardo Bazzarrella, Hymotion's president, hopes his kit will fall in price from $12,000 today to $6,500 by 2008. He plans to develop similar kits for the hybrid versions of the popular Ford Escape SUV and the bestselling Toyota Camry saloon. "Every new hybrid that comes out, we're looking to make into a plug-in," he says.
Entrepreneurs and academics are not the only ones plugging in. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the research arm of America's power utilities, has joined up with DaimlerChrysler for a trial in which over two dozen of its Sprinter vans will be converted into plug-ins. It expects them to be used primarily as fleet vehicles, such as delivery trucks, that return to a depot for recharging every night.
The plug-in crowd may be paranoid and conspiratorial, but it is nevertheless effective. Thanks to its efforts, the number of vehicles converted to plug-in status seems likely to soar from a handful today to hundreds within a year. And if, as plug-in advocates hope, some of the big carmakers develop official, commercial versions of these plug-in vehicles, then this niche technology could hit the big time over the next few years.
Enough juice?
Grand ambitions are fine, but there is still one snag that could yet keep plug-ins from hitting the big time: batteries. Energy storage has long been the Achilles heel of electric cars. Have batteries really become cheap, reliable and compact enough? The answer is a definite maybe. Earlier versions of electric cars (such as the ill-fated EV1) used lead-acid batteries. This old technology is cheap and safe, but cannot compete with newer technologies on weight, range and life. With the first-ever hacked Prius, CalCars found that its 135kg lead-acid battery provided barely 10 miles of all-electric range, performed poorly at lower temperatures and wore out within a year.
"A motley crew of hackers, entrepreneurs and idealists has sprung up to boost the nascent technology of plug-in hybrids."
Hope springs eternal, however. Firefly, a firm spun off from Caterpillar, an industrial-machinery giant, has developed a radical new approach to lead-acid batteries. The firm replaces the conventional lead plates with graphite foam, which carries a slurry of chemically active materials. The foam increases the area of contact between the electrodes and the active chemicals, and greatly reduces the problem of corrosion. The firm claims that this new approach reduces weight and matches the performance of NiMH at one-fifth of the cost. It hopes to apply this technology to hybrid-car batteries.
It sounds promising, but has yet to be proven in the field. In contrast, NiMH batteries are battle-tested and safe (unlike some lithium-battery technologies, which have an unpleasant tendency to explode). Toyota's conventional Prius has a NiMH pack that weighs 35kg or so and costs around $1,600. Putting NiMH batteries into a plug-in Prius, as CalCars has done with the help of Electro Energy, a battery-maker, means carrying a lot more weight around. Such a battery costs around $5,000 and weighs 180kg--though CalCars hopes to reduce that weight by half with its next prototype. Stan Ovshinksy, who pioneered the NiMH battery, says he has now come up with a radical improvement on that technology that would be perfect for plug-in cars--if only his firm ECD Ovonics (partly controlled by Chevron, an oil giant) would let him go ahead.
Yet the future may belong to lithium technology after all. One reason, says Menahem Anderman of Advanced Automotive Batteries, a consultancy, is that recent increases in the price of nickel and cobalt have limited the opportunity for further cost reduction of NiMH and made lithium batteries, which have traditionally been far more expensive, more competitive. Alan Mumby of Johnson Controls, a big car-parts supplier, agrees. His firm has recently entered into a joint venture with Saft, a French battery giant, to produce lithium-ion batteries for hybrid cars. Mr Mumby maintains that "the lithium-ion battery both delivers and accepts power very readily, making it ideal for hybrids with regenerative braking. Lithium-ion technology is the wave of the future." Lithium also has the crucial advantages of low size and weight. Hymotion's production-ready battery kits, due later this year, will feature lithium-ion batteries weighing just 70kg but delivering an all-electric range of 25-30 miles.
Dead end or stepping-stone?
Even if the battery woes that have long bedevilled electric cars can be solved, however, such progress may yet prove a stepping-stone to hydrogen--the bête noire of the electric-car crowd. "Long term, plug-ins with fuel cells may be the ideal vehicles," says Mr Graham of the EPRI. Dr Frank agrees, noting that the hybridisation would mean cars would need less hydrogen on board, and smaller (and thus cheaper) fuel cells. Dr Ovshinsky even stood up after the New York premiere of "Who Killed the Electric Car?" to lecture the film's director and audience that batteries and hydrogen can work smoothly together.
The Prius hackers get to work
Everyone is agreed on the need for better batteries, however. And A123 Systems, a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is now promoting a new lithium battery technology which combines a novel lithium-ion phosphate chemistry with nanoscale materials that increase the surface area of the electrodes. Although it is still unproven in hybrid cars, even the sceptical Dr Anderman thinks this chemical cocktail is "considerably less volatile" than conventional lithium approaches; furthermore, it has potential for lower cost and long life. A123's batteries can already be found in some Black & Decker power tools, where they deliver two to three times the run-time and peak power as rival batteries. A123 plans to supply Hymotion with batteries for plug-ins, and says it has the manufacturing capacity to make 10,000 such batteries a year.
Given that there are only a handful of plug-in cars on the road today, that figure sounds rather ambitious. Even so, the lesson offered by Professor Fate is that thinking big can eventually pay off. "The automobile business is a gigantic battleship, and after 30 years I may have moved it an inch," reflects Dr Frank. That inch may yet grow to a mile. If the EPRI trial of plug-in Sprinter vans ends successfully, says Mr Graham, DaimlerChrysler is likely to produce a commercial version. Having long been dismissive of plug-ins, Toyota has confirmed that it is now seriously working on a plug-in Prius. Even Ford's boss, Bill Ford, has made encouraging noises about plug-in hybrids. Rising fuel prices and improving battery technology only strengthen the case for them. "This is here-and-now technology," says Dr Frank with some satisfaction.
What if I work at night and sleep during the day?
This kind of thing makes PHEV's a natural match for wind power.
http://www.effpower.se/
My guess is that parallell inroduction of four kinds of fuels makes most sense:
Mixable with gasolene, for instance ethanol.
Mixable with diesel, for instance RME.
Mixable with natural gas, biogas.
Electricity for plug in hybrids using other fuels.
And at a later date when things shake down perhaps DME depending on the development of syntehis processes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_targeting
Bernanke wrote a book on it:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691059551/002-9656574-0450414?v=glance&n=283155
==AC
"The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered." - Thomas Jefferson.
More here:
http://www.barnesreview.org/html/jefferson.html
Construction labor costs will also likely decline.
I'm not endorsing, just predicting.
There has been a lot of bits spilled talking about Bernanke's helicopters and 1920's deflation, but no one writes about his thinking on the 1970's inflation.
Oh an anchor the housing market as in how? Rates have to go up to protect the dollar against inflation. He has to raise rates and crimp the housing bubble. I can't wait to see May inflation numbers on Wed.
The Fed may be happy with building permits back to late 1990s levels (half a million lower) and a slower economy. This may temporarily solve some commodity/oil/CPI issues via decreased demand. U.S. rates are higher than Euro and Yen, so the dollar shouldn't get too soft too quickly, plus financial de-leveraging creates dollar demand. A slower economic pace would likely put more pressure on emerging markets, and therefore their currencies, causing some additional dollar support. All of this is "soft landing" and cannot be dismissed outright.
The worries are employment (esp. housing related), unexpected energy shock, Japanese monetary tinkering again, etc. Will we get to the point where the Fed has to choose between the dollar and the economy? Perhaps, but not right now.
What have you got on the inflation front?
Winnings are exaggerated and always reported to anyone within earshot. Losses are never reported (unless something is to be gained tax-wise). What I have found to be the case with oil-production figures is the exact opposite.
If, in any given month, Country A experiences a production loss of say 400,000 barrels per day at the beginning of the month, you will see all kinds of headline articles on this development and the 400,000 figure is immediately applied to all current and near-future estimates of oil-production. Even if the shortfall only lasts a couple of weeks, the initial estimate is immediately applied to the entire month. My guess is that these initial estimates are almost always inflated for dramatic effect. In the name of full disclosure, my evidence for this is purely anecdotal and based on personal experience with the energy press. I would suggest Iraq and Nigeria as good places to start if you want to see what I'm getting at.
Also, if this theoretical shortfall is the result of some political development or military crisis, or the result of some planned, voluntary reduction - it is still "counted" as proof of "decline/depletion" within the Peak Oil Community.
If, in the same month, Countries B, C, D, and E experience production increases of 100,000 barrels-per-day each based purely on investment, exploration, and drilling - you will hear nothing about it. Maybe a small blurb in some trade publication, but not here.
This is partially a response to Westexas' questions from yesterday, and partially just me trying to form up some thoughts I've been working on recently.
To be clear(and it is sad that I feel the need to state this), I am neither a doomer nor a denier, I am quite a believer in Peak-Theory. I am also quite happily sitting on the fence as far as what all this means - for now or the future.
I've got much more to say about this and will be posting more soon, but for now I will throw out a question to see if anyone is paying attention.
Stuart posted the monthly update to the EIA global oil production numbers. These were the numbers for March. They showed a roughly 400,000 barrel-per-day decrease from February. Which country contributed the most to this decline?
On one condition. You have to name number two to prove you weren't just guessing.
Old Hippie is still in first place.
Interestingly though, Norway had some absolutely huge declines in 2005(as well as upticks to match) that would knock Nigeria and others off the map were they to have happened this year.
I am still working on postable spreadsheet numbers, hopefully ready by tomorrow's threadbot. Stay tuned and keep guessing.
I work way too much from 'general knowledge'. The answer you want I don't know how to locate.As a guess Nigeria. Or Russia. Iraq bounces up & down. Maybe you could tell us where to look & why #'s from places like Nigeria or Iraq are trustworthy.
I would love to post who number two is, but have gotten too many responses on this one to give it away. It's not Russia, Nigeria, or Iraq.
I am definitely not making the case that anybody's numbers are trustworthy. I'm just working with what is presented to me.
I actually thought number two was number one. When I went to verify, after you guessed Saudi, I saw that you were right. They are very close. I had done this work in the last week and (assuming Saudi should be number one) was over-influenced by the fact that number two was actually who they were. This was what caused me to mistakenly believe they were number one.
This is just one month, anyway. When I post data in next day or two, I'll do last 15 months.
Chad only exports about 300,000 barrels/day.
- Saudia Arabia: 150,000 barrels per day
- United States: 136,000 barrels per day
- Canada: 59,000 barrels per day
- Iran: 50,000 barrels per day
Iraq had an increase of 100,000 barrels per day. All other contries had increases or decreases of less than 50,000 barrels per day.Have you noticed that when a large project is scheduled to come on line, the advance projection of how much and how soon it will add to production almost always turns out to be too optimistic?
I agree with your assessment of project projections. But they include a whole other dynamic.
Back to reality. I'm just using the EIA numbers. Nothing more or less. Freely available to anybody. As I have said a couple of times in the last few days, I don't know what level of faith we should place in these numbers.
An issue that I brought up a long time ago, and hope to revisit soon in detail, is an oil "buffer." I think Saudi is a good example of how strong an effect a buffer can play.
Another issue is Saudi's numbers when viewed in relation to those of other nations. People like to give the Saudis crap for how steady and even their numbers appear. Why don't those same people direct some of their concern to the numerous other countries in the world who do the same?
On a side note, I appreciate your responding. Don't take me busting your balls on a number of issues personally. I will continue to do so. I know you will do the same. We disagree on some things and there is no good reason why we shouldn't continue to fight about it :)
http://www.theoildrum.com/comments/2006/5/17/952/79161/172#172
This is just good business, to smooth out natural variations and provide steady output.
http://www.theoildrum.com/comments/2006/6/7/9152/98518/10#10
That makes two of us.
Let me give you an example of irony. I read Deffeyes and was convinced. I read Simmons and was ten times as convinced. (This is two and three years ago now). I come here and have had nothing but doubts ever since.
Interestingly, I used to think CERA was full of crap, but now believe they are full of shit.
But at the same time I believe Yergin's 'The Prize' is one of the best history books ever written. Go Figure.