 | DrumBeat: July 13, 2006 | The Oil Drum | "If there was nothing to be worried about, then there would be no (oil) price increases." |  |
And So It Begins...
Posted by Prof. Goose on July 13, 2006 - 1:42pm
Topic: Site news
Tags: oil, oil prices, peak oil [list all tags]
For the all of you new folks coming in, and those who want to pass around links to their friends, I would suggest two key links:
- Why are oil prices going up? Because there's no extra supply. Why is that? Here's our "first time here?" link.
- What can we do about it? Here's our brief on changing the political discourse on energy.
Dusty: Bill, it's coming! It's headed right for us!
Bill: It's already here!
which may be an unfortunately appropriate model for what will unfold, whose Act I Scene ii begins:
"Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiousity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? ..."
This tragedy is barely commenced; see,
The audience is yet spare and still crowds
Sweatily through our playhouse' portals.
Far more have seen and heard nought, meander
Abroad in supine ignorance knowing not
This balmy breeze stirring spring leaves forebodes
A tempest to rip the world asunder.
But I get ahead, our play is just begun.
On oil price, it should put on another couple of $ tomorrow, Friday 14th, since little is likely to wind down tension on Israel / Lebanon / Palestine / Iran / North Korea / Nigeria / Iraq soon and it's a G8 meeting in St Petersburg, Russia this weekend. But it shouldn't top $80 before next week unless a further turn for the worse happens. Next week could see $85 if any problems rachet up at all.
My own thinking is, the really radical Jihadists can see that relatively low-level warfare is only gradually sapping their strength and while they're getting better at killing Americans, Americans are getting better at killing them too - not fun. Look at the new weapon the US has, called a SMAW or something like that, vaporizes buildings. Ow.
So, if you're a really radical Jihadist, who doesn't mind losing a bunch of your own people too, you get USrael involved in a real, large-scale war. That's the one thing that can solve your problems. No. 1, Israel gets its money and weapons etc from the US. And the US economy can't stand fighting a real, large-scale war right now. This won't be your grand-dad's war, with the US as huge oil producer and US farms and factories producing tons of the stuff needed to fight a large scale war. Today's US is a debtor nation, which produces very little, and can't afford to lose say 30% of its oil imports - or more. Sure the US can keep chugging along, but fighting a real, serious, war will mean WWII type gas rationing and so on, the conditions of a real war, and what made us stronger in the 1940s will put us in a hospital bed in the 2000s. Dollar collapse, here we come. The US in a "hospital bed" means the US unable to keep the war toys flowing to Israel, unable to keep the war toys flowing to its own troops, and the same kind of isolationism and near-revolution we had in the 1930s. The US won't be able to afford to be in the ME, we won't be under a real Cuba style powerdown, but it will be close.
If you're a real hardcore Jihadist or just an ordinary Joe Blow in the ME you believe with every justification that it's only a matter of time before USrael wipes you out and your people so why not?
Now if you are comparing the Rapture to anything else, then IMHumbleO you are just plain fooling yourselves.
I dislike when some people or group make a bad name for the rest of us. I am a Christian. From all my reading The End does not look like the "left behind" series. IT IS THE END Period.
But I could debate with some people till it happened and not get anything good out of it.
Just try not to Lump all us Christians in the same boat as others who call themselves Christian. "You will know them by their love!" not hate, not back biting, not hoping for the rapture so they get to say i told you so, none of that. Test the things that Christians say by their actions and by the Bible, and Christ's Teachings in the Bible.
Just so those that read here, know we have all kinds posting.
Charles E. Owens Jr. AKA Dan Ur (A charactor in a short story, by above author)
I neither judge nor test people by their religion; people are welcome to their beliefs and delusions, a person is how a person be. I am anti-monotheist, pantheist, pagan-ish, and tolerant-ish.
Posting agian.
Just to take your minds of peak oil if this is real the Artic Ocean just melted.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/arctic.jpg
But you exaggerate! There are 6 days of arctic sea ice left, plenty of time to call Superman...
Funny the graphs are fixed now ...
They were broken for days.
I think we know were some readers of theoildrum work.
I did look at the photo archive, too. Comparing 2005 and 2006 I'd say that 12th July 2006 most closely approximates to 20th July 2005 and that the annual minimum looks to be around 15th september 2005.
Hopefully superman will fix the link on the Candian Archipelago image map thats broken.
:)
Looks to me like seasonal melt, nothing more than usual, or very slightly increased at most. (I am not a numbers junkie. This is just an observation from the graph.)
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/archive.html
You can see there that while the whole Arctic is not going to melt in six days, what is happening now is unprecedented.
Hudson Bay will be entirely ice free in a couple of days, that never happens till late August. The White Sea was ice free already in mid May, never happens until mid July. And so on.
Their sums of area melted from the graphs don't add up for some reason.
How people find the site:
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=sm6peakoildrum&r=55
Moving average of page views (really shows an upswing):
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=sm6peakoildrum&r=57
90% of visitors however do NOT find the site via a search engine. I think that should probably be changed.
Sorry, you guys may be right, this may be the BIG IT, but that's reading a lot into a story that could have been copied forward from 1948, 1956, 1973, 1982, etc, etc. This is "fear factor" stuff.
"Peak oil" is different from the run of the mill Isreali run in with their old enemies, that is as regular as clockwork...
Geological Peak, the real Texas style, North Sea style, I don't care if no guns are blazin', we can sink all the wells we want and the OIL WILL NOT COME OUT ANY FASTER style peak, is what we should be interested in.
Hubbert really didn't seem to care that there were no wars going on in the lower 48 states, peak was going to occur anyway.....that's peak, the real thing, that's when it begins. War is only a distraction if that happens.
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
Hezbollah wouldn't make any move without Iran's approval. It could even be at Iran's request. The question we need to ask ourselves now is this:
Why would Iran's leadership do this now?
Are these fundamentalists really this crazed? Is it designed to raise oil prices, a calculated risk?
For the new people visiting TOD, I will mention that there is no spare oil capacity in the world supply right now. This means essentially that any major loss of supply, which I will define arbitrarily as 1.0/mbd (million barrels per day) or more, will cause shortages somewhere and lower the quantity demanded somewhere. The system must come into balance.
As you say, time will tell. And maybe quickly. We'll see.
Israel says they have "concrete evidence" of what Hizbollah is up to. How would they know? Only by having omniscient and omnipresent spies inside Hizbollah. They had this with PLO, why not with Hizbollah? When you have spies with that presence you also have some level of control.
Do not trust BBC so much. They work for Tony Blair now. Half the old BBC stringers are with alJazeera now, the worlds most trusted news source.(that last not a joke)
My guess (it's a guess) is that we are at maximum game playing right now. Iran has ins with Hizbollah but so does Mossad. What we are about to find out is who wants war. It is impossible to get a clear read on what is happening when there is a reasonable case that multiple actors are suicidal. With everything else going their way for many months it's hard for me to believe that Iran is the most suicidal of the players. Iraq is falling apart completely just now, the elections (US) are coming up, it is the USA and Israel who are ready for desperate action.
And it is desperate action in a hall of mirrors
But it's possible that this is orchestrated by the US and/or Israel. There is no possible way we could tell at this point - we may never be able to. Perhaps the best indication of who is in control at this early stage will be to watch who appears to be best prepared vs. who seems to have been caught flat-footed.
We shall see if this involves Iran directly, or Syria, or anyone else. Just tipped over $78 per barrel. Sigh - I hope this does not go the way it could - I'm not ready yet.
Hmmm, you think Israel bombing Lebanon might be orchestrated by Israel? Don't you think that's a stretch?
The bad scenarios, well let your mind go, it gets pretty ugly very quickly.
I have no idea if Bush is going to do this but I would not put it beyond him. We lack the ground forces to fight a major land war in the Middle East so we either concede the fight or we escalate. Iran may believe we are incapable of escalating. Iran should remember that there has already been one (short) nuclear war and that the US was the only one that used such weapons. To presume that the US would not use them again would seem to me to be a foolish position.
Breaking the taboo on nuclear weapons would then make the world overall much less safe and that is especially true for small countries such as Israel. This is so since Israel has enemies who state that they would like to eradice the country and surprise attacks to kill the maximum ammounts of civilians would probably weaken their ability to mobilize their army much more then harder precission attacks against their military bases. This do of course only leave Israel with the MAD option and a large part of the region will go up in flames if they return fire.
You realy do not want to let this genie out of its bottle.
That might be a good idea.
Perhaps modernism has failed in Iran. Perhaps they are going back 1,000 years no matter what--no democracy, no rights for women, no rule of law, no electricity, etc.