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A summary and latest graphics below the fold.

The Plenary

I covered Energy Secretary Steven Chu's comments in the previous post. Here, I will cover the rest of Day 1. This is not so much a comprehensive summary as it is a collection of observations and things I otherwise found to be interesting. My notes at times are spotty, so if someone was there and feels like this essay contains an error, please let me know.

Following Chu's talk, Professor William Nordhaus of Yale gave a talk entitled Energy and the Macroeconomy. I got called out during his talk, so I missed most of it. What I do remember him arguing is that oil embargoes are completely worthless, because oil is fungible. If Venezuela decided not to sell their oil to the U.S., they would end up selling it to someone else, which would displace some other seller, which at some point would end up with someone else selling it to the U.S. I missed the next point, but Gail the Actuary was there and said "a corollary of this is that there is no point in protecting the US oil and gas industry. We can just buy what we need elsewhere."

While in Europe

It is really a tale of two continents. In large parts of Europe, one can get along reasonably well without a car. In the past year, I have worked at my company's Accoya factory in the Netherlands most of the time. I fly in to Amsterdam, and there is a train station right in the airport. I catch a direct, 1 hour and 15 minute train to the Arnhem Central Train Station. From there, it's a 15-minute cab ride to my apartment.

I secured an apartment that is only about half a mile from work, and I adopted the common Dutch habit of riding my bike to work. I certainly don't feel safe all of the time with cars whizzing past me, and at times it has been an inconvenience, but the vast majority of the time the bike suits me just fine. (If you want to argue that my international flights more than offset any fuel savings from biking to work, you won't get any argument from me. But in this economy, you do what you have to).

On the post I put up yesterday called "A Few Thoughts about Petroleum Demand, Inventories, and Price", a couple of people commented that my forecasts of expected petroleum demand didn't match up well with recent weekly surveys. There is a reason for this, which is illustrated by EIA's demand numbers for December which were released today:

If one looks at the weekly forecasts, they are considerably higher than the monthly actual amounts. This seems to happen on a regular basis. For the year 2008, EIA's forecasts averaged 654,000 barrels a day higher than I would have estimated based on weekly data. This is about 3.4% high - not great if that is the basis for statements about how demand is running.