DrumBeat: August 25, 2006
Posted by threadbot on August 25, 2006 - 9:11am
Topic: Miscellaneous
As CNN noted this morning, the models on this one are unusually congruent. Not the typical mess of spaghetti:
TheStormTrack thinks this one could be nasty - worse than the NHC is currently predicting.
USDA-DOE Announce Additional Key Note Speakers for Review: Matt Simmons is on the list.
Additional keynote speakers have been confirmed for Advancing Renewable Energy: An American Rural Renaissance. This conference is co-hosted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and is designed to create partnerships and strategies that will accelerate commercialization of renewable energy industries and distribution systems, the crux of President Bush's Advanced Energy Initiative. Advancing Renewable Energy, is scheduled to take place October 10-12, 2006, at the America's Center in St. Louis, Missouri.
Biofuels may strain U.N. goals of ending hunger
Venezuela's Chavez plans to more than triple oil exports to China
Arab region's gas demand growth overtakes oil
South American Gas Pipeline Project on Hold, Petrobras Says
Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil's state-controlled oil company, said plans to build a $20 billion natural gas pipeline from Venezuela to Argentina are on hold because of an impasse between Brazil and Bolivia over energy prices.
Mexico's PEMEX Restarts Development of Mature Fields
Russia spins global energy spider's web
Geostrategic oil interests and the Gulf
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World can absorb oil rises, bank chief says
Six Steps to Beating Global Warming
Coal Gasification Archive Goes Online
At least I got the first comment. ;)
Right now it's too early to say if it will even make landfall -though the smart money says it will. But the question is where, and right now the tracks show anywhere but northeast Mexico to the Florida.
We'll see.
The StormTrack is predicting that it will become a hurricane, and will have a track something like Dennis. (Thunder Horse, beware!)
I think if anything, Global Warming has made weather prediction much more difficult because we are seeing new patterns all the time....an increase in anomalies (droughts, warm where it should be cold and vice versa, etc.)
Heck, I wouldn't be surprised to see a hurricane that formed in the Gulf and just sat there spinning around for a few days without moving anywhere...kinda like the Great Eye on Jupiter.
Risky Business
The insurance industry does not officially believe in global warming, but they do accept that the climate is changing.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/08/state_farm_insi.html
Social collapse first maybe? Thousands of people are pissed! Now they've got PROOF! Bring em down...
they are placing there bets that the monthly fee's from the insured will vastly outnumber the amount of claims they do have to pay out when stuff happens.
the big sign post that tells people that they actually lost the bet with Katrina is that they are trying to find ways no matter how minor to deny people their insurance payouts.
the damage done by Katrina would do any one insurance company in so they are franticly trying to minimize their lost income by shredding and denying claims.
Uncontested claims, where the homeowner was willing to just take the adjusters estimate, went many months before payout. Local theory was that they had to liquidate real estate / other investments and just did not have the $$$.
Allstate & State Farm did NOT do right by many of their policy holders. Others kept a tally of the few good and many bad insurance companies.
On the other hand don't insurance regulations vary greatly state by state. Is it really that state farm was so bad, or is it that the state government was lax in making an enforcing regulations.
Remember the Pinto and how Ford calculated it would be cheaper to settle lawsuits than recall the car and therein save lives?
Enron. WorldComm. And now maybe State Farm. When do exceptions become the rule?
This is normal behavior for the corporation. Only the relatively sure threat of costly punishment leads to what we would call 'good' behavior.
Last year Berkshire was profitable overall despite a $2 billion hurricane-related re-insurance/ catastrophe insurance payout. Buffett is clearly hoping to make money on the catastrophe lines this year, with prices high enough to cover at least some payouts before having to draw on other funds. It could work unless there is another huge disaster like Katrina.
"My other car gets 100 miles to the gallon"
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/8/24/132130/286
It raises some great points, some of which Alan has raised in his posts some of which are new (I may have missed some of Alan's posts).
I'd also like to know if everything the author says in the Daily Kos post is true. For example, here's one bit where he says a train gets the equivalent of 180 miles per gallon (if you calculate it figuring in all the people it carries):
"The average current technology diesel locomotive gets two to three gallons per mile. Based on this, given a fuel economy of 3.45 gallons to the mile (2004 average fuel economy for diesel commuter rail per US government statistics), the train uses 217 gallons of diesel to travel from Chicago to Harvard. Given the average train load of 619 passengers, this gives a fuel usage of 0.35 gallon (slightly more than 1/3 gallon) used per passenger to travel the 63 mile trip. Doing the math, this gives a fuel economy of 180 passenger miles per gallon of fuel used."
The US is not Switzerland, but (as Alan has noted) in the Second World War, per capita oil consumption in Switzerland was 0.15% of per capita US oil consumption today.
I think that Alan Drake and Jim Kunstler--electric trolley car lines and New Urbanism (Alan would say "Old Urbanism")--are pointing us toward the only real hope of retaining some semblance of a civilized society. The irony of course is that we are just trying to get back to what we had in the early years of the 20th Century--before the nightmare of out of control suburban growth descended upon the land. We have only begun to see the McMansion Meltdown.
CNBC is reporting that H&R Block, which has a sub-prime mortgage division, is warning of very large mortgage related losses. . . A "tiny" paid for house, or a small rented apartment along a mass transit line looks better and better.
"Cut thy spending and get thee to the non-discretionary side of the economy."
(Because very large segments of the discretionary side of the economy are going to be contracting very fast. BTW, the Tom Cruise/Paramount fight is just one example of this. Hollywood, and the rest of the entertainment industry, are going to be fighting over a shrinking pie for years to come.)
Westexas,
Is education considered non-discretionary?
Garth
Very very slow motion wreck of a very very large and ponderous train.....
I'll guess that people are now replacing their home desktop computers with $600 laptops. And then the home computer market will be completely saturated. This generation of machine has a good lifespan (and fairly low energy consumption!) And people's disposable incomes will take a nosedive... so they will be stuck with them anyway.
General recommendation : replace your 2+ year old desktop system with a laptop.
Hard times mean that people like to give themselves little rewards. A movie or a premium beverage is a relatively cheap thrill. On the other hand, there is a difference between a recession and depression.