The Texas RRC Oil and Gas Production Data with production data for August is out.
The RRC data is always incomplete but if this month’s incomplete data is less than last month’s incomplete data then that’s a pretty good indicator that production this month is down.
The EIA data here is only through July. They have Texas production peaking in March at 3,644,000 barrels per day and declining by 197,000 bpd to 3,447,000 bpd in July.
Dr. Dean Fantazzini has Texas peaking in March also, at a slightly lower point than the EIA but they both pretty much in agreement by July.
Texas crude only, when the final data comes in, will show the peak in March.
Dean’s algorithm still has crude only peaking in March but holding on a plateau since then.
Texas condensate peaked, so far, in December. It is unlikely that any month, in the next year or so, will top December for Texas condensate production.
Dean has condensate peaking in December also but not the dramatic drop since then that I think may be happening.
Texas total natural gas apparently took a larger drop in August than did oil.
And Dean agrees. The August drop in total gas production almost matched that of last December.
Texas gas well gas may be in serious decline.
Texas associated gas did not have the dramatic decline that the gas well gas had. But any dramatic gain in associated gas seems to now be a thing of the past.
A new Peak Oil book just came out a few days ago:
Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture
In recent years, the concept of “peak oil”—the moment when global oil production peaks and a train of economic, social, and political catastrophes accompany its subsequent decline—has captured the imagination of a surprisingly large number of Americans, ordinary citizens as well as scholars, and created a quiet, yet intense underground movement.
In Peak Oil, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson takes readers deep inside the world of “peakists,” showing how their hopes and fears about the postcarbon future led them to prepare for the social breakdown they foresee—all of which are fervently discussed and debated via websites, online forums, videos, and novels. By exploring the worldview of peakists, and the unexpected way that the fear of peak oil and climate change transformed many members of this left-leaning group into survivalists, Schneider-Mayerson builds a larger analysis of the rise of libertarianism, the role of oil in modern life, the political impact of digital technologies, the racial and gender dynamics of post-apocalyptic fantasies, and the social organization of environmental denial.
“From Mad Max to Mad Men, this dead-on critique of long held beliefs about masculinity and traditions of American individualism and techno-optimism—all steadily becoming associated with a ‘shift towards libertarianism’—is by turns entertaining, insightful, and troubling. The book clearly outlines how these traditions and beliefs present daunting challenges to communities interested in organizing and implementing effective and timely responses to accelerating global climate change.”
I just do not get the connection between peak oil and libertarianism. I am not a libertarian and never intend to become one. I think the libertarian philosophy is a little absurd. Like the anarchists, they dream of a world that could never be, a world of little or no taxes and total freedom for everyone. But regardless of what one thinks of libertarian politics, I can find little connection with peak oil or those who follow peak oil and libertarianism. I wonder if libertarianism is a favorite subject of the author and that he is simply trying very hard to make the connection. I may buy this book but I would like to read a few more reviews first.
“…all steadily becoming associated with a ‘shift towards libertarianism’…” I am sorry but I just don’t believe that is happening.
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I had participated in a survey by the author of the book: Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture a couple of years ago. Basically it was a very simple survey, asking only a very few questions, primarily about the “new technology” that supposedly brought about the shale revolution. I tried to explain to him that the technology was not new, that it was the $100 oil that made such expensive wells possible. Anyway here is the email I received from him today:
Dear Peak Oil Survey Participant,
Thank you again for your participation in the survey(s) I conducted a few years ago. I’m writing one last time to let you know that I’ve just published a book on the peak oil movement that draws heavily on responses to those surveys (along with interviews, analysis of websites, peak oil fiction, and other sources). It’s called Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture, and you can find it at Amazon and other stores. Though it’s published by an academic publisher, it’s written in language that is accessible to a general audience. It includes many quotes from the surveys, so you may very well find your words inside.
If you do happen to read it, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. While you may disagree with some of the conclusions, I hope that the picture I paint is not wholly unfamiliar to you.
Sincerely,
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
Assistant Professor of Social Sciences (Environmental Studies)
Yale-NUS College
But the title of the book shocked me. I had no idea that peak oil had anything to do with Libertarian Political Culture. And I really don’t think it does. But I thought I would get the opinion of some of the readers of this blog what they thought about that.
Hopefully I will get some interesting comments…. hopefully.
But the title of the book shocked me. I had no idea that peak oil had anything to do with Libertarian Political Culture. And I really don’t think it does. But I thought I would get the opinion of some of the readers of this blog what they thought about that.
This is something that I have commented on many many times! Those who continue to try to frame the issues we are facing, such as resource limits, peak oil, population overshoot, climate change etc… etc… in terms of politics whether it be right wing or left wing , conservative or liberal are just caught in a really stupid blame game mindset, that IMHO, is a direct consequence of being in deep denial of reality. Blaming someone else for what is going on may make some people feel good at least temporarily but it solves nothing! I guess that they truly don’t understand that we are all in the same boat together. For the record, those on this site who have attempted to place me in one or more of these labeled boxes, you can call me anything you want but I neither have a cause nor an agenda. I’m more of a Groucho Marx, “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member”
“But the title of the book shocked me.” It didn’t shock me, I found it silly. Peak Oil is the point when the maximum rate of extraction of petroleum is reached. Libertarianism is a political philosophy. I don’t know what Apocalyptic Environmentalism means but apparently it’s “a vision of the environmental movement from the 1960s and early ’70s that was generally pessimistic”. How about: Peak Oil, Witchcraft and the Meaning of Life?
Nice Doug!!
“Peak Oil, Witchcraft and the Meaning of Life”
Didn’t Kunstler already write that book?
No, it’s clearly a John Michael Greer title.
How about: Peak Oil, Witchcraft and the Meaning of Life?
Now that sounds like a book I’d be willing to read! 🙂
Oh, Fred.
It sounds like Szilard was right: “They are already here. They are called Hungarians.”
You know, if Szilard was right then the Magyar are to Homo sapiens sapiens as the ctenophores appear to be to Kingdom Animalia…
Well, well: no need to follow that out, I’m sure.
LOL! Well if nothing else ctenophores are mesmerizing creatures.
I have spent time watching them while diving, they can be quite beautiful.
“But the title of the book shocked me. I had no idea that peak oil had anything to do with Libertarian Political Culture. And I really don’t think it does. But I thought I would get the opinion of some of the readers of this blog what they thought about that.
Hopefully I will get some interesting comments…. hopefully.”
Ron,
The author, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson “equates” and “identifies” american dream, free enterprise, libertarian attitude toward individualism and pursuit of material bounty and free market capitalism (among other factors), as/to the main culprits of the situation we are in today: environmentally, energetically, etc. etc.
He is correct in what he writes and says….but his solutions are flawed and very, very very late!
He does not see that we are on the other side of the “hump” and rapidly going downhill.
Although a very knowledgeable scientist, he is a naive “simpleton” when it comes to understanding human psyche, nature and history.
Perhaps he should have read: “The competitive exclusion principle” (among others) to better understand human nature….
This will help understanding where he stays:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRJMN5GNbVU
The reviews for his book presented on Amazon (that you quote above) are done by: either people that never read the book, and/or are morons.
“It would eventually have happened even if not one lump of coal, one drop of oil or one whiff of natural gas had ever been discovered…” ~ R. Paterson.
Thank you for the update on TX.
Be well
Petro
I feel that most people translate ecological problems into perceptions of political and economic ones. Egyptians in 2010 seemed to believe that new political leadership would solve their problems which in my opinion are ecological. That’s just one example but there are numerous. I believe that as we enter collapse there will be a rise in the popularity of crisis cults. The Ghost Dance movement and the Nazi party are good examples of crisis cults. I also feel The Boxers, from the Boxer Rebellion, were a crisis cult. Perhaps The Tea Party is to a certain extent. ISIS is most certainly a crisis cult. To paraphrase Carl Von Clausewitz, War is an extension of politics by other means. I’ll do him two better. Politics is an extension of economics by other means and economics is an extension of ecology. It’s natural for people to perceive ecological crisis as a political and economic issue. And they’ll fight about it willingly and with enthusiasm.
Ron,
I am a peak oiler and a libertarian.
Have sympathy for my wife……she is sick and tired of hearing about either subject.
I certainly can see how Libs might latch on to peak oil as a possible means to their ends, “after collapse we can implement our system” kind of thinking.
I don’t know of any true peak oil understanding person who would look to Libertarianism for any kind of solutions.
Actually, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson understands “peak oil” and a lot of other predicaments we are facing very, very well!
He “confuses” libertarian-ism and free market capitalism with greed and material bounty obsession and concludes (actually, he is convinced of it!) that libertarian-ism is the cause of our problems.
…has nothing to do with “libs” or “cons”…
Read his book before commenting.
Be well,
Petro
HI Petro, If you have read it, how about a summary?
A WHOLE LOT of authors understand certain issues but write about them with all the intellectual honesty of an advertising copywriter.
OFM, thank you for asking.
Yes, I have read the book, but the reviews are not my cup’o tea.
The author is a scientist, a very knowledgeable one and, most importantly regarding the way he presents his case and the conclusions he reaches – a very concerned one! He is concerned for the future of humanity and planet Earth as a whole.
The book is a condensed presentation of everything you have read in this respected forum (and others like/similar to it i.e.: oildrum) for the past several years. Everything written is backed by scientific facts, reputable studies and sound observations.
The author makes the claim (and conclusively proves it in my opinion) that if we humans continue BAU, our planet and biosphere which it sustains will look very differently in a few decades.
However, in my opinion the author is a utopian idealist at heart and his hopes that we can save the future and more importantly, his proposed solutions on how we can do that, are naively misguided.
His mistakes start with the fact that he equates and identifies human greed for “more” ( presented by such things as: “american dream”, “capitalistic entrepreneurship”, “free market competition” and “economic growth”) with “libertarianism” -not as the current political meaning of it, but as the individualistic pursuit of material bounty and “happiness”. As consequence of that and his idealism, he erroneously concludes that only a ” communistic” (not in the political meaning, but the “common”, “togetherness” meaning) and close-fisted approach in dealing with natural resources (and other things) and their distribution, can save the future. He appears to be a “zeitgeist” type
He should have read Ron’s brilliant “The Competitive Exclusion Principle” before writing the book…
It has nothing to do with “libertarianism” as a political definition, nor it has anything to do with “Libs”, or “Cons”, or what have you. At the end of the cycle, empire – if you will, at the end of the fourth turning, at the end of the rope – the diametrically opposed extemities lose their meaning and fuse.
At the end of the empire the difference between Libs and Cons, Dems and Reps, Left and Right, Commies and Fascists, Good and Evil, God and Devil, etc, etc, etc… is ONLY semantics! This binary entrenchment is the most brilliant invention of the “blue-bloods” to comfortably rule the “hoi-polloi”.
Once one understands that, one sees farther and clearer into the future…and it ain’t pretty!
So instead of assertively commenting on something they know little about, commentators should follow Ron’s approach in being open to reading more reviews before considering the book himself.
“It would eventually have happened even if not one lump of coal, one drop of oil or one whiff of natural gas had ever been discovered…” ~ R. Patterson.
Here is something to consider in understanding where the author stands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRJMN5GNbVU
Be well,
Petro
It has nothing to do with “libertarianism” as a political definition, nor it has anything to do with “Libs”, or “Cons”, or what have you.
Then perhaps he should have used a different word, even if he had to make one up. Libertarianism comes with political baggage.
As I mentioned, I’ve run into some libertarians online and then looked at some of the writings about libertarianism. I’ve found enough holes in the thinking that I won’t be embracing it.
Thanks Petro,
It appears that I owe the author an apology for everything except his title and chapter headings.
But that sort of posturing is highly damaging to the environmental movement. The title alone is enough to piss off a hard core right winger and leave him assuming that it is a left wing propaganda piece.
This book one be the one good one out of a stack of a dozen with similar titles randomly selected.
Generally speaking I have a very low opinion of the thinking of social scientists since they mostly deny the reality of human nature. Somehow they just fail to get it, we are just naked apes.
This one appears from your description to be subject to the same failing. All the liberal professors I ever met seem to be guilty of believing everybody shares their world view and their value system and can be convinced to do the “right thing ” as the professor sees it.
What people are going to do is what they have always done, to the extent they can, which is as they please. Maybe if things get bad enough, the people of the world will turn their affairs over to an authoritarian government- which would probably turn out quite well for those with high positions in it, but not so well for everybody else.
Such a government could however put a stop to some things, such as overfishing the seas.
Powerful noble or royal families owning lands reserved for hunting preserved some species of animals in parts of Europe.
An enlightened ( technically ) authoritarian would preserve his local environment so as to make life pleasant for himself and his own family and friends.
“Somehow they just fail to get it, we are just naked apes.”
Dear OFM,
even if I pulled out an all-nighter, I could have not said it better!!!!!!!!!
Ron could perhaps (I am still in awe of his “The Competitive Exclusion Principle” – among other wealth of info Ron generously enables us for FREE here!!!!), but not I.
The author, although far smarter and knowledgeable than I, is one of those who understands EVERY detail, yet somehow misses the principle (big picture – if you will!):
-“Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.” ~ Prince N. Machiavelli
The author is not a “lefty” ( he mocks Al Gore and others…..) – he is an Utopian, Idealistic Commie (and I seriously doubt he understands what that means)!
“We will kill them all” ~ R. Patterson
Be well,
Petro
P.S.: with all its flaws, it is a good read!
Powerful noble or royal families owning lands reserved for hunting preserved some species of animals in parts of Europe.
That’s what I consider the upside of income inequality. It may be better for the environment.
If you impoverish most of the world so that they have to cut back their lifestyles to a bare minimum, their consumption of the world’s resources will go down. They may end up depleting their local areas, but they won’t be able to afford big houses, big cars, plane trips, and so on.
The small number of rich can buy up land, put up their moats, create animal and plant preserves, and so on and perhaps preserve a part of the world for future generations lucky enough to have access to that property.
But wasn’t it the so-called rich and/or the correlated dynamics that got us into these predicaments in the first place?
I’m unconvinced that your prescription is going to get what you suggest will happen, and even feel it to be a perverted, twisted and/or nihilistic sense of logic, which doesn’t seem like much of a step to suggest simply killing people to control the population… Maybe that’s part of the logic behind the American governpimp apparently dropping weapons ‘in the middle’ of ISIS/ISIL/IS territory? Create more chaos and death?
But wasn’t it the so-called rich and/or the dynamics behind that that got us into these predicaments in the first place?
Sure.
I’d rather not have income inequality. But perhaps impoverishing most of the world will slow down environmental destruction.
It’s crazy talk, Boomer, and in the wrong place at the wrong time, very dangerous talk as well. People can take it and run with this kind of thing.
Caelan,
When Matthew Schneider-Mayerson did the extensive polling of “peakists” for his book, he found that between 7-9 percent self-identified as “anarchist” and 10-11 percent as “socialist.” However, that was in 2011, and as Schneider-Meyerson notes, it “does not presume to accurately describe continuing manifestations of peakism.”
If we fast-forward to today, it looks like you’re pretty much the Lone Ranger on this forum when it comes to holding down the anti-capitalist fort. Have the anti-capitalists abandoned the peak oil movement? That seems to be the case, which would leave behind the liberals, neoliberals, conservatives, libertarians, green capitalists and doomers.
Victor Wallis notes that capitalism’s “crisis tendencies” are “permanent trends” which cannot be reversed. “They encompass: (1) increased concentration of economic power; (2) increased polarization between rich and poor, both within and across national boundaries; (3) a permanent readiness for military engagement in support of these drives; and (4) of special concern to us here, the uninterrupted debasement or depletion of vital natural resources,” he explains.
Wallis concludes that “an agenda that is insistently capitalist and one that accentuates the green dimension is impossible.” And even though the green capitalists and the corporations they represent will “try to present themselves in green clothing, they will not hesitate to misrepresent the questions at stake and to invoke technological ‘solutions’ that have little chance of being successfully implemented.” The four tendencies of capitalism will proceed as before, but now presenting “themselves in green clothing.”
http://monthlyreview.org/2010/02/01/beyond-green-capitalism/
Even though most anti-capitalists, like Naomi Klein, have abandoned the peak oil movement, another anti-capitalist, Craig Collins, believes this is a mistake. As he explains:
But even if they’re [peak oil theorists] wrong about total collapse, peak hydrocarbons are bound to trigger escalating recessions and accompanying drops in carbon emissions. What will this mean for the climate movement and its galvanizing impact on the Left?
Klein herself acknowledges that, so far, the biggest reductions in GHG emissions have come from economic recessions, not political action. But she avoids the deeper question this raises: if capitalism lacks the abundant, cheap energy needed to sustain growth, how will the climate movement respond when stagnation, recession, and depression become the new normal and carbon emissions begin falling as a result?
Klein sees capitalism as a relentless growth machine wreaking havoc with the planet. But capitalism’s prime directive is profit, not growth. If growth turns to contraction and collapse, capitalism won’t evaporate. Capitalist elites will extract profits from hoarding, corruption, crisis, and conflict. In a growth-less economy, the profit motive can have a devastating catabolic impact on society. The word “catabolism” comes from the Greek and is used in biology to refer to the condition whereby a living thing feeds on itself. Catabolic capitalism is a self-cannibalizing economic system. Unless we free ourselves from its grip, catabolic capitalism becomes our future.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/17/overlooking-the-obvious-with-naomi-klein/
It’s crazy talk, Boomer, and in the wrong place at the wrong time, very dangerous talk as well. People can take it and run with this kind of thing.
That’s a fair point you are making.
I just speculating (rather cynically) on how all of this may play out.
I don’t consider myself a doomer because I think some form of humanity will survive.
But I do think that if times get tough, it will be the poor, the elderly, and the disabled who will likely suffer the most.
If people (as many do here) talk about an inevitable population reduction, then we have to look at who will bear the brunt of it.
So here is what we have to deal with:
1. Population reduction.
2. Those most likely to be reduced (the weakest).
Would I prefer that the assholes go first? Definitely. Not sure how that will happen, though.
Boomer II,
Historically speaking, during times of die-off and population contraction, it is the elites who suffer the most, with the lower orders of society less.
For a detailed account of this history, there’s Peter Turchin’s War and Peace and War.
Do you believe this time will be different?
Trying to get this under the right thread. So this is a repost.
Do you believe this time will be different?
I haven’t studied the history, so I haven’t based my opinions on that.
I’m just going by what I see happening around the world now.
I see civil wars.
In this country I see the right attacking women, minorities, and so on. Not the rich.
I think the rich can protect themselves for a longer time than the poor can protect themselves, so I would expect that if there is a die-off, it is going to hit those with the fewest resources.
I mean, if you were looking for a country to engage in world dominance, doesn’t the US seem most likely? What other country or group has enough power to do so? And if some country or group wanted to come in and disrupt the US, why would the average US citizen turn against the rich in the US rather than the outsiders doing the disruption?
Relatively speaking, the rich have more to lose, but they could still come out on top if they have accumulated assets they can use.
I mean, think of it. If the average survivalist thinks he can protect himself with guns and stockpiles of resources, why wouldn’t the extremely wealthy survivalist do even better?
I doubt Schneider-Mayerson is accusing resource depletion analysts of being economic libertarians.
His ongoing critique of capitalism has been shifting toward a libertarian characterization and away from the mercantilist version he has made use of in the past. Either-or-both criticisms are valid and both somewhat beside the point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cnj3dObd6do
Sounds like one big hardcover ad hominen attack. I’ve better things to do with my time. The whole catastrophic mindset is an interesting subject in of itself but I imagine someone’s covered in detail already.
I seem to recall a few libertarians hanging out at peakoil.com, for what that’s worth. Don’t know what good that would do you – if we just had less government intervention we could extract an unlimited amount of oil? The US with government intervention aplenty has done a bang up job of getting oil out of the ground. The industry all on its own used to waste millions of barrels of the stuff too. I’m reminded of a story about a sale of a tanker truck in the early days of oil in Los Angeles. The buyer had no need for the oil itself so just opened the spigot and let the black stuff flow where it may.
Question about TX production data.
Does it appear that the revisions each month are shrinking (due to better data collection) or are they still rather large?
Looks like maybe TX is flat lining like ND?
Texas is behaving quite closely to ND data. Using data from September 2011 onward and my Texas corrected data we have:
-linear correlation: 0.99
– Spearman Rho: 0.98
– Kendall Tau: 0.93
You know, that’s a bit surprising. The costs are significantly different.
Unless they are thought zero in both places — as loans that won’t be repaid.
‘many members of this left-leaning group into survivalists’
What? Jesus save me from these morons! Good God Almighty, have mercy, please.
Not only that, the Libertarians are on top of the peak oil conundrum. That’s something right there. They have their finger on the pulse and know exactly what is happening.
Conflation, word of the day.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/conflation
I would hope Lew Rockwell was a participant of the survey.
When you live on the farm, it is survival every day. EVERY DAY!
You aren’t a Republican, you aren’t a Democrat, and you certainly aren’t one of those new left-leaning peak oil Libertarians survivalists, whatever they are.
I am tired of hearing Donald Trump lecture everybody and I’m tired of listening to HRC, so the only choice is to tune them out.
It is a ridiculous title for the book – none of the libertarians I have had the misfortune to have dealings with have ever espoused any view on Peakoil. In fact resource depletion in general is (in my experience) an issue they as a group have very little truck with…..
Comment threads on blogs are a book sales technique. Who started this one again?
When the Bakken went whole hog, the time for peak oil got here right now.
It was time to look at survival in a whole new light.
A book won’t do the job.
“But the title of the book shocked me. I had no idea that peak oil had anything to do with Libertarian Political Culture. And I really don’t think it does. But I thought I would get the opinion of some of the readers of this blog what they thought about that.”
Well now, when we get right down to it, I am no more than a well read amateur when it comes to the oil industry.
But when it comes to books-I have read more than my fair share of them. The title of this one stinks like last week’s chum bait, the bait that you forgot to throw overboard.
Now if somebody reads it- and I am wrong-I will apologize.
But the title says by implication peak oil advocates- and by implication other environmentalists in who are trying to get out the message about peak one time gift of nature resources – are not to be taken very seriously, that we are out of the intellectual mainstream.
Even when the actual text paints a better balanced picture, the damage is done. Ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times as many people will hear about the book as ever read it-IF it is reviewed by any major magazine or newspaper. First impressions when it comes to books are all to often the ONLY impression, and reviewers quite often have agendas of their own.
If there is a page or paragraph that can be quoted out of context by right wing cornucopian think tanks, they will quote it. Ditto left wing think tanks and pundits. Almost everybody in the mainstream, right or left, believes in eternal growth and is thus predisposed to think of peak oilers as less than intellectually competent.
Both the right and the left wings in this country look sideways at libertarians, although those on the left are more open minded about alternative lifestyles when it comes to sex and drugs. Both wings however believe in PLENTY of government. The right wingers just want a DIFFERENT government, with the right wing being far more uptight about dope and sex but more relaxed about business and environment.
Now THERE IS a real possibility this is an excellent book, well written, but with a click bait title.
However, I have thumbed thru hundreds of books about the environment and environmental politics over the years while drinking over priced coffee at Barnes and Noble , reading a chapter or two, before buying.
My habit for years and years was to tip well, buy coffee and pastry, and take a dozen books to an easy chair once a week or so and spend three or four hours examining them. I was buying a book or two a week.
If a stack of randomly selected books all have click bait titles, you can safely bet on them one at a time that they are not very good books and you will win a hell of a lot more than you will lose.
It is unlikely anybody in this forum will read it.I won’t for sure.
Writing a few books is more or less part of the job description for professors, but the vast majority of them never sell more than a few thousand copies.
Incidentally anybody who questions what Fred Maygar has to say about environmental limits, eternal growth, etc, is less than truly knowledgeable in the physical and life sciences, to put it as mildly as possible.
You can read the first chapter on google books. I found it intensely irritating, whilst the actual meaning of the words was mostly reasonable, the constant reference to liberatians and peak oilers as some sort of online online doomsday cult made it sound like a sociology phd thesis. Having discovered that there is no organised peak oil ‘movement’ the author spent the next 300 pages trying to invent one.
Thanks Ralph:
Find it here:
Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture
As I started reading I felt sick. I had never heard of “Oily Cassandra”.
The book appears to be adapted from an American Studies PhD dissertation done at the U of Minnesota. The author said he wrote the book while sitting around in coffeeshops. I kind of wished it was that easy for me at the U — I had to deal with toxic materials, high voltage, nasty acids, pressurized tanks, liquefied gases, etc.
Here is one post I wrote over at PO.com regarding this book.
Loki,
I don’t really remember how he got my name? I thought it was from this site or TOD. For several years I was a resource/contact person for a Buisiness School at a west coast university, but that was because my brother-in-law was the prof. It could have been that or from past students. But I think he read profiles on sites and if I remember right I had a cryptic email address on TOD. I remember a few of us exchanging info on different subjects.
Yes, I am a middle aged white guy, well educated, who is quite libertarian but socialist on some viewpoints. Apocolyptic? Man, I didn’t think so. Realistic? I do think so. The trajectory I see in slo-mo, (without future change or scale back), is that the US and to a lesser extent other 1st world countries keep growing in population with reduced opportunities until we all either live in a Harlan County or Phily slum. I simply cannot imagine the suburbia dream continuing. I don’t hear sweet tunes of opportunity, but rather a game of musical chairs. I believe I/we also have an appreciation of historical context, that is to say our past 50 years of wealth and opportunity has been a social anomaly fueled by burning carbon at a planet poisoning rate. As for current debt levels, I simply wasn’t raised that way. I grew up on Minnesota truisms: “fish, or cut bait”, “there is no free lunch”, and “we all have to work for a living”. I suppose the author would characterize such attitudes as ‘quaint’. My Dad and Mom, who spoke this philosophy, were products of The Great Depression and WW2. I am thankful for their wisdom. I imagine the author is a product of an upper-middle class 2 parent home who paid for his university education. I would be surprised if he ever worked anywhere beyond academia or Starbucks.
From Quint (Jaws):
“You have city hands, Mr. Hooper. You been countin’ money all your life. ”
And:
“Well it proves one thing, Mr. Hooper. It proves that you wealthy college boys don’t have the education enough to admit when you’re wrong. ”
His Vitae:
http://www.yale-nus.edu.sg/wp-content/u … ebsite.pdf
Having discovered that there is no organised peak oil ‘movement’ the author spent the next 300 pages trying to invent one.
I tried to read some of it but I won’t be wasting my time reading the book, that much is for sure.
While the Iraq War, rising gas prices, climate change awareness, and internet acess provide the proximate causes of the peak oil phenomenon, these events and developments unfolded amid shifting popular conceptions about energy availability, the free market, and technology.
HUH?! Climate change awareness, is one of the proximate causes of the peak oil phenomenon?
Really? By what bizarre piece of twisted illogic is it possible to conclude such a thing?
Just for shits and giggles I did a quick Google search on prerequisites for a major in Sociology and I landed purely by chance at Berkley. I will assume that most universities would have similar prerequisites such as this:
Introductory Statistics or Logic – Any introductory course in basic statistics or logic (or critical thinking) will satisfy this prerequisite. Though all students have the option to take logic for this requirement, a statistics course is highly recommended. At UCB these courses may include Sociology 7, Statistics 2, 2X, 5, 20, 21, 131A, or Psychology 101. UCB Philosophy 12A or 14A will satisfy the logic requirement. This course may be taken for a letter grade or Pass/No Pass.
Disclaimer this is a prerequisite post 2009. I have to wonder if the author of ‘Peak Oil Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture’ ever took a course in basic logic…
This just reinforces my personal highly biased opinion towards Social Science not being a rigorous scientific discipline at all.
You can graduate from just about any Ivy League U these days without taking even one real course in a real science.
I learned more about reality in the first quarter of my freshman year as an ag student than any sociologist or political scientist I have ever talked to learned by the time he got his doctorate.
Fred,
you may enjoy this blog post by http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/
Time for a thought experiment. Suppose you showed up at a university anytime between, let’s say, 1910 and 1970, and went from department to department asking (in so many words): what are you excited about this century? Where are your new continents, what’s the future of your field? Who should I read to learn about that future?
In physics, the consensus answer would’ve been something like: Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Dirac.
In psychology, it would’ve been: Freud and Jung (with another faction for B. F. Skinner).
In politics and social sciences, over an enormous swath of academia (including in the West), it would’ve been: Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Lenin.
With hindsight, we now know that the physics advice would’ve been absolute perfection, the psychology and politics advice an unmitigated disaster. Yes, physicists today know more than Einstein, can even correct him on some points, but the continents he revealed to us actually existed—indeed, have only become more important since Einstein’s time.
But Marx and Freud? You would’ve done better to leave the campus, and ask a random person on the street what she or he thought about economics and psychology.
In his opinion though… […]I also believe that the social sciences are harder—way harder—than math or physics or CS.[…]
It’s a good read.
Bob Nickson,
Scott Arronson is right.
The great thing about working in the natural sciences is that the natural world is out there, it really is, and it does not care one whit about what we think. There is an external standard that limits what we can think up and accept about it.
Those working in the social and political realms have to face and deal with a much more complex and difficult subset of the natural world, the subset that consists of what we have brought about, in our minds and by our actions, and it looks to me like there’s a long way to go before anything like a scientific framework will be constructed. If ever.
Me, I’ll take studying the natural world outside our heads any day.
In his opinion though… […]I also believe that the social sciences are harder—way harder—than math or physics or CS.[…]
It’s a good read.
I read it and it was a good read and I think I agree that transforming Social Science into a rigorous scientific field based on falsifiable premises is a rather daunting task. Maybe one day they will get there but I don´t think that day is quite here yet.
There was one paragraph that for me really underscored how profoundly those who do not understand how the ‘hard’ sciences are actually done, end up missing the mark.
I submit that, even without the hindsight of 2015, there would’ve been excellent reasons to be skeptical of these claims. Has it ever happened, you might ask yourself, that someone sat in their study and mused about the same human questions that occupied Plato and Shakespeare and Hume, in the same human way they did, and then came up with a new, scientific conclusion that was as rigorous and secure as relativity or evolution?
Let me know if I missed something, but I can’t think of a single example.
He is missing something very important!
He is obviously guilty of a rather common misconception that Einstein came up with the theory of relativity as a thought exercise while sitting alone in his study. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Special Theory of Relativity was the result of many empirical findings by Einstein, Lorentz, Poincaire and others. These scientists actually did the experiments and the math too.
Fred,
I doubt that the social sciences did the hard work behind these findings, which are interesting:
http://anthro.palomar.edu/synthetic/synth_4.htm
“In the mid 1990’s, a striking example of intense selection against one of the homozygotes for a trait came to light. This stemmed from the discovery that some people do not get AIDS even if they are repeatedly exposed to the HIV virus that is responsible for this usually fatal disease. The people who are immune have inherited two copies of a rare mutant gene known as CCR5-delta 32 –they are homozygous. Those who are heterozygous apparently have a partial immunity or at least a delay in the onset of AIDS. Approximately 10% of Europeans now have the CCR5-delta 32 gene variant, but it is extremely rare or absent in other populations of the world. There is a surprising connection in this story. The CCR5-delta 32 gene also provides immunity to a deadly disease of bacterial origin, bubonic plague. People who are homozygous for the CCR5-delta 32 gene variant are completely immune, while heterozygotes have partial immunity. It is very likely that this life-saving allele occurs as a random mutation and that it was selected for by the devastating black plague epidemics that swept over Europe beginning in the 14th century. During the first wave of plague, between 1347 and 1350, one fourth to one third of all Europeans died from this disease. Natural selection favored those who by chance had inherited the CCR5-delta 32 gene variant. Repeated waves of plague over the next three centuries resulted in an increase in the frequency of CCR5-delta 32 in the European population.
Because the CCR5-delta 32 gene variant has been found in the DNA of bones from some Europeans who lived more than 2,000 years before the medieval plague epidemics, it has been suggested that this gene may also have been selected for by other deadly contagious diseases such as smallpox.”
http://anthro.palomar.edu/synthetic/synth_4.htm
It is a well known truism that the social sciences require only scholarship whereas the physical sciences require BRAINS.
You find a hell of a lot of people who are unable to hack it in the physical sciences or engineering etc, switching majors to business administration or psychology or education- fields that require little in the way of brains.
The toughest of all these days, in terms of doing top level work, may be the life sciences,since you now have to be very good at physics etc as well as biology to do original cutting edge work in some areas.
Anybody who thinks the social sciences are tougher intellectual going that the physical sciences is an idiot.
You can memorize your way thru a degree in political science or sociology. You can’t memorize your way thru freshman chemistry or calculus.
Bob Nickson,
Fernando Leanme should like Scott Aaronson’s post.
From the title, one might conclude that one is going to read something similar to Orwell’s “Politics and the English Languare.” But instead, we’re treated to an anti-Marxist tirade, the likes of which would make Milton Friedman proud.
Aaronson blasts social scientists for using words like “privilege,” “deligitimization,” “dialectic materialism,” and “theoretical superstructures.”
“I will confess to contempt,” Aaronson rails, “for anything that I regard as pompous obscurantism — for self-referential systems of jargon whose main purposes are to bar outsiders, to mask a lack of actual understanding, and to confer power to certain favored groups.”
“And I regard the need to be alert to such systems, to nip them in the bud,” he adds, before the “jargon-weeds” can prevent us from nurturing “new truths.”
If Aaronson were only so vigilant about weeding his own garden!
For if one scrolls down and gives a listen to his interview on Rationally Speaking, we see Aaronson’s garden is overgrown with jargon-weeds, zingers like “rational disagreement,” “interactive epistemology,” “rational agents,” “Bayesian,” “rational Bayesians with common priors,” “Bayesian conversation with the common prior,” “Martingale property,” “Bayesian prior probability distribution,” “Aumannian conversation,” “idea truth seekers,” “Aumann updaters,” “Bayesian updaters,” “epistemic communicty,” “eigen-trust,” “eigen-democracy,” etc.
And the worse thing is there’s not a scintilla of original thought in the whole damned interview. It’s the same old stuff philosophers have debated for several hundred years, if not thousands of years, but dressed up in new “self-referential systems of jargon,” as Aaronson himself puts it.
The person who drops in on this world is bound to feel like Gulliver visiting the Royal Academy of Lagado, with its solemn “projectors” laboring to extract sumbeams from cucumbers, build houses from the roof down and restore the nutritive value of human shit, all convinced of the value of their work.
I completely agree with you. It hasn´t absolutely anything to do with “libertarians” or “political culture” (whatever that means) I guess you have to be an “Associate Professor of Social Sciences” at Yale to come up with such an inappropriate association. The peak issue (what an understatement!) is far beyond any political and social consideration, we´re dealing with geophysics here, nature does not loan, refinance or grants forbearances and you just can´t struck any deal with it…period! No politics involved at all.
It´s sad and annoying to say the least, watching such misleading, delusional, outreaching, self-important and unnecessary publications come to life, when we are well over ten years in the process. In fact, that´s the last thing we need. I was born and live in Spain, a country already harshly beaten by “peak everything” There´s no doubt in my mind that five to seven years from now, the 1.3 million barrels a day this country imports will have drop to zero or a negligible amount of oil, and I say so because there´s no “let´s redistribute available oil exports to make room for net buyers” That´s never been the case. It´s always been blockades, retaliation, war, proxy war…you name it. Well, that´s politics Mr. Schneider-Mayerson! A wrap to cover much deeper problems. Pompous, impressive, but a wrap nonetheless. And I know that is going to happen in my country because of something called “Export Land Model” that maybe the professor should take a bit deeper interest to understand.
The saddest part is that, here, apart from a few (impressive) blogs set up by concerned individuals, there´s almost nobody trying to educate people. I only know of one scholar, Guillermo Turiel, a research physicist in the country´s top public research institution, who´s taken the task really seriously. In the USA at least you´ve got this blog, Chris Martenson, Post Carbon Institute, etc.
So, to sum it all up, the oil peak, just like the peak of coal, gas, uranium, pgm´s, phosphorus…is a hard science issue, undeniable, unavoidable, globally reaching and impossible to avert, only manageable to some extent, not known by anyone in this world, and several orders of magnitude above any political consideration and ability. People like this professor should have come to terms with it many years ago. We´re decades behind schedule and going the wrong way. A long time ago, one of the most brilliant minds the USA has ever had, Richard P. Feynman, gave the most honest (and probably accurate) definition of what such things as “social and political sciences” really are. I can´t hardly believe how right he was.
Kind regards to you, Mr. Patterson.
But regardless of what one thinks of libertarian politics, I can find little connection with peak oil or those who follow peak oil and libertarianism.
I don’t see it either.
I’ve run across some libertarian thinking among Silicon Valley types, but they don’t talk about peak oil. In fact, at least as of a few years ago it wasn’t even on their radar.
The libertarian essays I’ve read seem to assume that everyone starts out with property, and therefore property rights are there to keep people from losing property. They don’t really address how to deal with those who don’t have property.
Unfortunately we do not have Dean’s graph for Casing head gas, but it appears as though it is still increasing, while oil and condensate production is flat to falling, indicating a higher gas to oil ratio, (GOR). The easiest way to increase the GOR, is to open the choke, which increases production, in the short term, but destroys the well in the longer term.
I believe the players will reap, what they sow!
Hi Toolpush. I agree 100% with you – all indications are that those highly praised productivity gains are fully open chokes – and as you mention, this is going to hurt them in the long-run!
This chart shows total oil/gas/water production in ND, and the gas/oil & water/oil ratios, based on the latest NDIC data.
Thanks Enno,
From your graphs, the GOR starts to increase at the end of last year. I know there were some gas restrictions at the time, and some gas processing facilities came online, which allowed more freedom of gas production.
Since January, oil production has remained flat, while the GOR continued to climb. We can go with the RBN theory, that the more productive areas have a higher GOR, but I am not buying it. They didn’t even publish my question when I commented. But it appears we can’t upset the industry line!
Opening the chokes, is a much more plausible and simple explanation, but we know as the number roll in, the veil will be lifted.
Thank you, Enno.
Is that total produced natural gas (including flared and reinjected) or marketable gas only?
Alex,
In the data a distinction is made between “gas produced”, and “gas sold”. The above graph is the gas produced, so I belief it indeed includes all gas produced. Gas sold is just over 20% less.
Thanks!
Slightly off topic, but definitely gas related …
Just took a quick glance at the latest numbers from EQT’s Scotts Run Utica well, the one with the all time highest IP.
First 52 days production … 1.6 billion cubic feet.
Restricted choke (40psi/day drop) with 30 million cubic feet day output.
Projected to produce 7Bcf @ 8 months.
Lateral is 3,200′ long.
Expressing these numbers in oil related energy output, this well has produced nearly 300,000 boe in 7 1/2 weeks.
At 8 months, well over one million boe.
If these deep (12,000’/14,000′) Utica wells prove to be repeatable and viable as the delineation/step out wells are drilled farther to the east and south, the amount of gas recoverable may truly surpass the Marcellus.
That’s the all time highest IP. I have seen a single conventional oil well produce 50 million bsto in a field with a 5 million bsto average recovery. This well happened to be a straight hole in an offshore development, with the platform set on the very top of the structure.
I can see cases where a horizontal well tapped into a set of open natural fractures and drains a much larger volume than usual. Or it could be in a sweet spot where the Utica is thick and has dry gas.
It could also be tapping a conventional reservoir with a limited extent, for example a well sorted turbidite.
Dood, I want you go to searching for the worst IP ever seen and post its description, and follow it with
If these other wells are this poor, no one will be able to proceed.
I tested zero ip wells a few times. One cost a bit over $100 million. The scenery was gorgeous, but the reservoir was tighter than a witches’ tits.
What is “a surprisingly large number of Americans” anyway? While many people may be trying to solve climate change, or any number of other global challenges, I don’t believe they are aware of, or know what peak oil, or peak energy is. I believe this is directly related to it’s inherent nature as a predicament (without solution). I would be interested to know what others think, but in my run of the mill; very few folks could tell you what “peak oil” is.
Most libertarians are just republicans who like to deal drugs, and have no one look into their bedroom, or how many weapons they have.
The high cognitive ones are just anarchist’s still on training wheels.
I’m a libertarian, but I don’t deal drugs, and I can’t vote republican because I don’t support the way they know tow to the Israel lobby and the military industrial complex.
In Peak Oil, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson takes readers deep inside the world of “peakists,” showing how their hopes and fears about the postcarbon future led them to prepare for the social breakdown they foresee
I’m a firm believer in the concept of Peak Oil but I’m not doing any preparations whatsoever for social breakdown, nor am I wishing for it.
From Mad Max to Mad Men, this dead-on critique of long held beliefs about masculinity and traditions of American individualism and techno-optimism
I’m not a techno-optimist nor do I believe American individualism is a good idea. My beliefs are always based on hard data and logical deductions, never wishful thinking or fantasies. And I think this applies to most people who frequent this site.
Green on Green!
http://www.downstreamtoday.com/news/article.aspx?a_id=49616
Power Line Opponents Give Renewables Their Keystone Moment
The visitor represented Clean Line Energy Partners LLC, a Texas company established to build transmission lines for carrying wind and solar power. He had come to tell Ulery about a planned line that would cut through the untouched woods of pine and oak trees on his property, bringing power generated by wind farms 500 miles (805 km)to the west, to serve customers 250 miles to the east.
snip
The Sierra Club also the supports a Clean Line effort in Arkansas’ Pope County, where last year the group tried to block Plains All American Pipeline LP’s Diamond oil pipeline.
“I worked really closely with the Sierra Club on the pipeline issue, but on this issue we are at absolute odds,” said Alison Millsaps, an artist who lives with her husband and three children on an 80-acre property in Pope County.
Millsaps, 37, supports development of clean energy but can’t stomach the idea of transmission towers cutting off the top half of a property that has already given up space for a gas pipeline, local power lines and a road. She has organized community opposition to the line through an active Facebook page and blog.
“Landowners are the only ones who are actually being asked to sacrifice,” Millsaps said.
It is a sacrifice that many expect will be asked increasingly of landowners as states seek to meet their green power goals.
So what colour Green are you?
The one thing that remains constant with human nature. Build what you like, as long as it is, Not In My Back Yard!
She might as well sell her property and move to another place, buy property there until the clean energy artful dodgers show up at her door once more. Then do it all over again until the ennui becomes too much.
She will lose the battle.
Get rid of the road and the gas pipeline, put in the wind power lines. Three problems solved.
It seems power lines could be run along existing highways and pipelines and meet less resistance.
Running a power line, a big one with large towers and lots of conductors, along roads doesn’t work out as well politically as cutting thru the woods and fields out in the deep country.
Rural people to tend to be concentrated along side the highways.
Now a pipeline once buried is hardly noticeable at all.
huh? just force them to use the same right-of-way, and demand annual rental payments. problem solved and make some money!
I am not opposed to a new power line coming thru my neighborhood , if it is needed, but I sure as hell would raise hell about it being routed alongside the road and across my lawn, where I would have to look at it CLOSE UP every time I go outside or get in the truck.
And getting a right of way thru the woods and fields away from the road means the power company has to deal with far fewer property owners,and that if it becomes necessary to use eminent domain, it is a hell of a lot cheaper. A power line on towers might depreciate my house- which is only a hundred fifty feet from the road- let us say fifty thousand bucks- in terms of ready market value.
The frontage is only three hundred feet.
Now my FARM land, out of sight of the road, and unlikely to be developed anytime soon, would be depreciated very little, and on average it is over a thousand feet across. So – a longer right of way deal at much lesser cost to the utility in my case.
Hi OFM,
When I said highway, I was thinking of the interstate. Usually there are not a lot of homes right near the interstate as it is too noisy and it is already an eyesore. Through the woods is fine with me, but if there are objections, then putting powerlines along the interstate would work.
I recently visited my parents in Florida and noticed a lot of power lines were near route 95 and other roads of that type (divided highways with limited access).
Hi Dennis,
Yes along interstates would be far more acceptable, but here in Virginia this solution would meet really intense opposition compared to going thru the woods because a lot of our interstates are still relatively pleasant in terms of the scenery.
I expect the same thing would hold true in any state heavily dependent on tourism except Florida. Nobody goes to Florida for the natural beauty of the place, they go for the amusement parks and waterfront rooms on the beach.
A comment about libertarianism and Peak Oil
It’s easy to get from either right wing authoritarianism or left wing ‘cooperation and joint endeavors’ to a cynical position of Libertarianism by thinking about Peak Oil and what groups of people typically do when confronted by a long-running problem. Once you begin to understand that things are going to get bad, and after that, even worse, you begin to look at evidence of humans being able to cooperate in joint efforts where the payoff is slow to arrive, and uncertain. Many people end up convinced that the general population is clueless and cannot be taught.
The only answer then, is a kind of libertarian tribalism. Humans definitely need other humans in order to create a sustainable society. But the sustainable society is so different from current left-wing or right-wing fantasies that there is little chance for a society organized by either left or right wing agendas. Rule out the idea of a solitary survivor holed up in a bunker with guns and ammo and food, and you are left with the notion of a small group of people who are attuned to the truth who also possess the good sense to cooperate on matters crucial to the survival of the group. In order to do what the small group needs to do, the small groups needs maximum freedom from government intervention.
Which is where Libertarianism comes into play. Ron Paul, in an interview a few days ago, stated with the most important thing Americans could take into the future is the absence of a sense of entitlement. In other words, you must earn your daily bread every single day.
Don Stewart
That’s what I need. A daily homily from L. Ron Paul.
Even your worst enemy is apt to have a few things to say occasionally that ought to be carefully considered.
I am not a Paul fan, but going into the future leaving behind the current day sense of entitlement impresses me as a thought WORTHY of serious contemplation.
I am not a short term doomer, and don’t EXPECT society to go entirely to hell in a handbasket SOON, but barring some near miracles, things are going to go down hill gradually from here on out, and we are going the eventually reach a tipping point past which things are going to go down hill FAST.
One such tipping point for example is in the rear view mirror already. A liberal arts degree is more nearly worthless every day in terms of landing a job or position with real career potential.
The welfare state constructed by my parents and grand parents is not apt to take as good care of me as it took of them. Within another generation or two, the pay as you go tax system is going to have to collect enough from one working individual to support one person who does not work – or else it must crash.
I foresee it crashing.
Most younger people today are not entirely without a clue. Ask one how much he expects to collect in social security bennies for example and he is likely to simply laugh at you.
I just posted this and it didn’t show up. I’ll try again.
The welfare state constructed by my parents and grand parents is not apt to take as good care of me as it took of them. Within another generation or two, the pay as you go tax system is going to have to collect enough from one working individual to support one person who does not work – or else it must crash.
The money is there. But it is concentrated in the hands of relatively few people. The difference between what some CEOs are paid and what average workers are paid is huge. Those wealthy could provide an annual income for quite a few people if they took less themselves.
I think, though, it would be fine to say everyone needs to work for a living. However, the way the economy is structured, we don’t have enough jobs that pay a decent living to support everyone that way.
For example, machines haven’t yet replaced those who care for children, the elderly, and the disabled. Those are important jobs. And yet we don’t want to pay people very much to do them.
So either we find a way to pay better wages for certain jobs, or we provide welfare to keep people alive.
Will the welfare system end? Perhaps. Sort of. If resources get scarce, I can see us going back to a feudal system where there is a very small group of people who have wealth and property and they support a community that provides whatever humans are needed to provide to keep the wealthy comfortable.
I posted a reply and it hasn’t shown up. Something must have sent it into the spam folder. So I am going to break it down into sections and see if I can post it that way.
The welfare state constructed by my parents and grand parents is not apt to take as good care of me as it took of them. Within another generation or two, the pay as you go tax system is going to have to collect enough from one working individual to support one person who does not work – or else it must crash.
The money is there. But it is concentrated in the hands of relatively few people. The difference between what some CEOs are paid and what average workers are paid is huge. Those wealthy could provide an annual income for quite a few people if they took less themselves.
I think, though, it would be fine to say everyone needs to work for a living. However, the way the economy is structured, we don’t have enough jobs that pay a decent living to support everyone that way.
Part two. (I’ve been trying variations on this and none is going through.)
For example, machines haven’t yet replaced those who care for children, the elderly, and the disabled. Those are important activities. And yet we don’t want to pay people very much to do them.
So either we find a way to pay better wages for certain occupations, or we provide a non-wage way to keep people alive.
Will the w*fare (trying this way to avoid words that might trigger the spam block) system end? Perhaps. Sort of. If resources get scarce, I can see us going back to a feudal system where there is a very small group of people who have wealth/property and they support a community that provides whatever humans are needed to provide to keep the wealthy comfortable.
Okay. Now three “part twos” are showing up. Two of them are awaiting moderation. Both of those can now be deleted.
On my wave, Don, well put.
That book’s sales number is being pimped on blogs and y’all are participating.
Watcher, I really don’t give a shit. If it makes for some interesting comments that is all I care about. If it helps his book sales, I really don’t care. I will continue to post links on books about peak oil every time a new one comes out and I know about it. It doesn’t really matter to me if the guy is a peak oiler or thinks it is all nonsense. Deniers are every bit an interesting subject as are true believers. Hell, I think they are more interesting.
One thing for sure, no book, pro or con, will affect the peak date.
People out in the deep country can slow down the construction of power lines and pipelines and highways, but in the end, they generally get built. The folks in the cities have the political clout to see to it.
Let’s just hope the necessary power lines and pipelines get built. Now as far as ROADS go, we probably have about as many or more than we need, given that cities and suburbs are road saturated, and folks out in the country are generally out there anyway partly because they like it peaceful and quiet.
The lady mentioned seems to be uncommonly unlucky in terms of being in the way of a new road, power line and pipeline.
But a LOT of somebodies likely had to give up some land for the road and power line that almost for dead sure serves HER house.
The Big Blue, 3rd qtr comments on shale.
http://oilpro.com/post/19462/third-quarter-realism-sets-stage-next-industry-phase?utm_source=DailyNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_term=2015-10-21&utm_content=Feature_1_txt
Third Quarter Realism Sets Stage For Next Industry Phase
The problem for the E&P industry was that few of its leaders were willing to follow the example of Odysseus in The Odyssey to avoid hearing the song coming from the island of Siren. He was told that if he listened to the song, he would want to go to the island and then remain there the rest of his life, something he wanted to avoid during his homeward journey to Ithaca. To avoid falling victim to the song, he plugged his and his men’s ears with wax and he had his men lash him to the mast. For E&P executives the siren song was cheap capital – public market debt and equity, and private equity money interested in building new, and presumably highly-profitable companies – and most succumbed to that song.
test
Sons of Wichita is a well written and comprehensive history of the Koch family. Each of the four brothers is unique and of interest. The first part of Schulman’s book documents the early history of the Libertarian Party in the US. Charles Koch was one of the founders. He no longer claims to be a libertarian. http://www.amazon.com/Sons-Wichita-Brothers-Americas-Powerful/dp/1455518727/ref=sr_1_1/189-1116930-8925711?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445479506&sr=1-1&keywords=sons+of+wichita
Jeff Riggenbach discusses Schulman’s take on libertarianism. https://soundcloud.com/libertydotme/kranky-notions-episode-3-the-sons-of-wichita
On one online discussion of libertarianism, I asked one of its proponents why Native Americans don’t get more claim to property since their ancestors were the original owners and sometimes their property was taken away unfairly.
He essentially said that property rights don’t go that far back. Property rights are to be protected for current property owners, but tough luck for those who lost it in the past.
In other words, he’s all in favor of protecting property rights if you already have property. But he doesn’t plan to help you get property which you don’t have but might be entitled to.
True. None of the various tribes acceded to the Magna Carta.
fear of peak oil and climate change transformed many members of this left-leaning group into survivalists
I wonder if he researched The Whole Earth Catalog.
Does he understand that both self-sufficiency types and survivalists have very similar interests in living off the land, and that people have been sharing info about these skills for decades and totally unrelated to Peak Oil discussions?
The book Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson does sound interesting. I found his bio here http://www.yale-nus.edu.sg/about/faculty/matthew-schneider-mayerson/
“My interests are fairly diverse. I have articles under consideration on alternate history novels (a genre of popular fiction) and the connection between peak oil movement (a secular apocalyptic movement of the new millennium) and the American ideology of unlimited economic growth. My dissertation focuses on this subject and a growing awareness of the limits of natural resources and America’s global power. However, this is something of an outlier: my primary interest is in postwar American popular culture and political power, from film to music to popular fiction. In addition, I am an avid lifelong basketball fan, and find myself returning to sports, which I view within the context of race, class, and culture.”
I like the phrase “secular apocalyptic movement of the new millennium”, but I doubt I would buy his book because he does seem to be a standard leftist describing everything he doesn’t like as neoliberal.
One reviewer of his book states “the author deftly uses his analysis to dissect some of the most significant invisible forces influencing society’s current trajectory, including individualism and techno-optimism.” This is a topic that I was discussing on the previous thread on this blog about commentators here on this blog. I was asking what exactly are the politics of Team Koch and Team EV. A genuine question because without knowing what these libertarian politics actually are it would be hard to recognise them. But I doubt this book will tell us much, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson probably uses libertarian just to mean someone who doesn’t share the same brand of leftism he does .
But I doubt this book will tell us much, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson probably uses libertarian just to mean someone who doesn’t share the same brand of leftism he does .
Humans evolved to be tribal apes and will defend their in group’s members to the death. Unfortunately that is not necessarily a useful survival trait for humans, living on a full planet with diminishing natural resources, in the 21 st century.
The heretic
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said, “Stop! Don’t do it!” “Why shouldn’t I?” he said. I said, “Well, there’s so much to live for!” He said, “Like what?” I said, “Well, are you religious or atheist?” He said, “Religious.” I said, “Me too! Are your Christian or Buddhist?” He said, “Christian.” I said, “Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, Me too! Are your Episcopalian or Baptist? He said, “Baptist!” I said, “Wow! Me too! Are your Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord? He said, Baptist Church of God!” I said, “Me too! Are your Original Baptist Church of God or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?” He said, “Reformed Baptist Church of God!” I said, “Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?” He said, “Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915!” I said, “Die, heretic scum!” and pushed him off.
If you laughed even a little bit at that joke may I suggest you not laugh too hard… Just look at the current refugee crisis in Europe. There, but for the grace of ‘GOD’ goes any one of us.
But if you happen to be one of those people who thinks being a poor German worker in Hamburg is bad and that those deplorable conditions are a consequence of liberal Greens forcing alternative energy schemes down the throats of the destitute German taxpayer, then maybe you might want to visit Myanmar where the peace loving Buddhists are practicing genocide on the
their fellow countrymen, the also peace loving Muslim Rohingya.
http://www.npr.org/2015/08/31/436229704/relations-between-buddists-and-muslims-underly-southeast-asia-refugee-crisis
The above is just one example of many hundred’s that I could cite. Maybe we all have to do some serious soul searching about our basic human natures for if we are to survive as a global civilization. We probably will need to find ways to get beyond our tribal evolution. Before anyone resorts to political labeling and playing the old blame game maybe they need to be reminded that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ecosystems Inc. Nature doesn’t care which deity you believe in or if you are a liberal or a conservative! She will just as quickly dispatch any, or all of us for that matter, into the dustbin of extinct species.
”We probably will need to find ways to get beyond our tribal evolution. ”
It’s the dustbin for ninety nine percent of us, eventually, barring miraculous good luck.
But given that we are so adaptable, and the world is so large and such a diverse place, we will probably survive as a species for a very long time.
I base this prediction on my personal opinion that most of us will die off BEFORE we can damage the biosphere beyond all hope for humanity as a species. Some bits and pieces of it sufficient to support naked apes in small to moderate numbers will likely remain when most of us are gone.
But given that we are so adaptable, and the world is so large and such a diverse place, we will probably survive as a species for a very long time.
Hey OFM,
As I am sure you are well aware, the data suggests that modern humans evolved from archaic humans only about 200,000 years ago. Given the fact that in evolutionary terms that is less than a blink of an eye, one has to seriously consider the possibility that in another 200,000 years or probably less, Homo sapiens sapiens might be indeed be extinct. This doesn’t mean that some other descendant species of the current Homo genus might not be walking around in some survivable niche of the planet by then.
BTW, modern humans and Neanderthals were contemporaries for a few thousand years, both lineages probably having descended from a common ancestor, Homo heidelbergensis.
Given that natural selection pressures have significantly increased recently on modern humans both from a biological and also a very unpredictable cultural standpoint, my bet is that humans as we know them today are extremely unlikely to be around for, as you put it, a very long time!
Of course I could be wrong and our species might be more enduring, perhaps becoming something more like the Coelacanths of the Homo genus. Though to be fair and scientifically accurate one must take into account that even the Coelacanths have been subject to natural selection and evolution and are no longer quite the same as their ancestors of 400 million years ago. 🙂
Given that natural selection pressures have significantly increased recently on modern humans both from a biological and also a very unpredictable cultural standpoint, my bet is that humans as we know them today are extremely unlikely to be around for, as you put it, a very long time!
Fred, I love all your posts and I consider your posts among the most intelligent and informative on this blog. But in the above paragraph I believe you are off by a country mile.
Natural selection pressures are the greatest when only a few of the total offspring survive. If only barely enough survive to keep the species going survive then the any mutation or characteristic that allowed those few to survive are carried on into the next generation. Likewise those with any pernicious mutation or characteristic would die. Natural selection is just as much about death, those who do not survive, as it is about those who do survive.
Every species produces far more offspring than can possibly survive. Those that do survive carry forward the adaptations that allowed them to survive while environmental pressures cull those that do not possess them.
During times of plenty when almost all offspring survive natural selection almost completely loses its effect on the population. The population just naturally explodes under such conditions.
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.
– Richard Dawkins: River Out of Eden, page131-132.
The human population has exploded during the last two hundred years or so. Today almost every child survives to childbearing age. Never in human history has there been less natural selection pressures on the human species.
On extinction, species go extinct for a reason. Low population due to various reasons like predatory pressures, lack of prey, the inability to adapt to changing climate are among them. No species has ever gone extinct because of overpopulation. Also no species, or no mammalian species is as adaptable to different climates and environments as the human species. No doubt humans will one day go extinct. But I believe that day will be far, far into the future, well after all other mammalian species have gone extinct.
Ron, first of all, I do appreciate your compliment! Thank you very much for doing the work that you do and maintaining this site.
You said:
Natural selection pressures are the greatest when only a few of the total offspring survive. If only barely enough survive to keep the species going survive then the any mutation or characteristic that allowed those few to survive are carried on into the next generation. Likewise those with any pernicious mutation or characteristic would die. Natural selection is just as much about death, those who do not survive, as it is about those who do survive.
According to a strict definition of what natural selection actually is and given what know is still happening to the human genome, I would definitely have to beg to differ.
I’ll provide but two links here, to suport my general thesis that Humans are indeed continuing to evolve. I could delve into the scientific literature and cite many more.
Perhaps one could argue that selective pressures are somewhat weak at our current juncture but it would be incorrect to unequivocally state that we are not evolving at all. I personally agree with the conclusions of the NIH article linked below, that not only are humans evolving now, but that the selection pressures can only become much stronger therefore increasing the speed of our biological evolution in the relatively near future.
So I will stand by what I said: “I find it highly unlikely that 200,000 years hence, there will be any Homo sapiens still roaming the planet”. Homo something or other, perhaps, but not Homo sapiens sapiens. Let’s also keep in mind that 200,000 years on an evolutionary scale is lightning fast!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3327538/
In recent years, scientists have accumulated intriguing evidence that humans continue to evolve despite cultural and behavioural buffers against environmental stress. However, predicting the future course of human evolution is futile because we cannot accurately predict the environmental stresses that we will face. On the basis of the current state of our species, we can at least answer several questions. Will humans continue to evolve? The answer depends on whether the two mechanisms outlined at the beginning of this paper still apply to our species. Is there inheritable variation? Yes, variations between individuals are inherited genetically, and humans and the populations in which they live are still variable. Are there differences in reproduction or survivorship between individuals? Yes, and they depend on access to resources.
http://www.livescience.com/445-darwin-natural-selection-work-humans.html
Darwin’s natural selection is the process by which nature rewards those individuals better adapted to their environments with survival and reproductive success. It works at the level of genes, sections of DNA that encode for proteins serve as the software of life.
In one of the most detailed human DNA studies ever conducted, researchers analyzed nearly 12,000 genes from 39 people and a chimpanzee, our closest living relative.
The findings suggest that about 9 percent of the human genes examined are undergoing rapid evolution.
“Our study suggests that natural selection has played an important role in patterning the human genome,” said Carlos Bustamante, a biologist at Cornell University.
A separate study announced last month indicated the human brain is still evolving, too.
I’ll provide but two links here, to suport my general thesis that Humans are indeed continuing to evolve. I could delve into the scientific literature and cite many more.
Continuing to evolve is about ten country miles from: Given that natural selection pressures have significantly increased recently on modern humans… My point is you have that dead wrong. Natural selection pressures have significantly decreased ever since the population explosion begun about 200 or so years ago. That fact is not disputed by anything you posted.
Your first link speaks of human evolution since the beginning of agriculture about 12,000 years ago. It talks about things like lactose tolerance that has evolved during that period. Geeeeze, no one would dispute that such things have evolved in the last 12,000 years. I, and I thought you also, was talking about right now! That is since the beginning of the population explosion that begun just about 200 years ago.
Your second link gives no time frame whatsoever, it only talks about what has happened since our common ancestor with chimps:
Bustamante’s team found that the genes most affected were those involved in immunity, sperm and egg production and sensory perception. A comparison between human and chimpanzee genomes found that these genes have undergone more changes in humans than in chimps, despite the fact that the two species shared a common ancestor some 5 million years ago.
If one wishes to make the argument that we are still undergoing rapid evolution because of natural selection then it would behoove them to explain just why and how that is happening. Natural selection is about selection. That is characteristics being selected for by aiding in survival and/or reproductive rate. And also characteristics being selected out because of early death or causing sterility in humans. Natural selection must affect survival and/or reproductive rate if it is still happening.
Of course that is still happening but not to any great extent. Natural selection has a dramatic effect on the genome in times of great stress, when the death rate is high and only enough survive to barely keep the species alive. When almost everyone survives to bear offspring, how can natural selection work? Right now almost everyone is selected in and almost no one is selected out. Natural selection, under such conditions, has a much diminished effect. And, quite obviously, a population explosion is the result.
Continuing to evolve is about ten country miles from: Given that natural selection pressures have significantly increased recently on modern humans… My point is you have that dead wrong. Natural selection pressures have significantly decreased ever since the population explosion begun about 200 or so years ago. That fact is not disputed by anything you posted.
Ok, I see your point and I’ll grant you that nothing I posted addresses that specifically.
However I think we are just beginning to see clearer signs of increased stress. Case in point.
The World Health Organization tells us that it is estimated that 1.8 billion people use a source of drinking-water that is faecally contaminated. I think I could call that a form of stress.
How about the fact that an estimated 3.3 billion people in 97 countries are at risk of malaria.
More than one-third of the world’s population lives in areas at risk for infection by Dengue fever and Dengue hemorrhagic fever.
I think that the current refugee crisis in Europe is but another kind of sign of stresses. What is happening in countries like Venezuela or Egypt makes them canaries in the coal mine.
We know for a fact that at least 800 million people around the world are literally on the verge of starvation right now and one easily could argue that quite a few more are in danger of slipping into that state with just the slightest change in fortune.
I know that there are not many refugees as of yet that can officially claim they are being impacted by climate change or sea level rise. Drought and famine due to massive crop failures would add to the list of stressors raising the the numbers of people on the edge of starvation.
As I said, I see all of these things as just the beginning of the increase in selection pressures on a human population that has not stopped evolving even without such overt conditions for natural selection.
So I guess I still disagree that natural selection pressures have significantly decreased ever since the population explosion began about 200 or so years ago. At the very least they have remained a constant. I contend that if they haven’t started significantly increasing they will soon enough.
Time will tell how quickly humans will be evolving from here on out.
Fred, it is very easy to tell when natural selection pressures decrease in a species. The population of that species increases. In fact the rate of population increase or decrease is inversely proportioned to natural selection pressures.
They are always there, they never completely disappear. But when almost everyone survives to childbearing age, then you know the the natural selection pressures are very weak. They are not selecting anyone out and just letting everyone in regardless of good or bad mutations.
It is really simple Fred. All you have to do is just sit down and think about it for awhile.
“All you have to do is just sit down and think about it for awhile.” ~ Ron Patterson
All you have to do is just sit down and wait for awhile. (natural selection) ‘u^
Fred, it is very easy to tell when natural selection pressures decrease in a species. The population of that species increases. In fact the rate of population increase or decrease is inversely proportioned to natural selection pressures.
By that criteria I would have to agree with you that since there was an exponential increase in population starting in the late 1700s to the present from about 1 billion to our current 7 billion plus and it would seem at first glance there was indeed a significant diminution of natural selection pressures on humanity during this period.
BTW, that time period, not by coincidence, also happened to correspond to an explosion in the use of coal and oil, starting with the industrial revolution, the green agricultural revolution, and the beginning of modern industrial civilization with incredible advances in science, medicine, access to sanitation, antibiotics, etc, etc. However we must keep in mind that all of these benefits and advances did not impact all of humanity equally. Even throughout this period there were large pockets of humanity that fell through the cracks.
There is an interesting study done by evolutionary biologist Alexandre Courtiol of the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin which confirms that as recently as a mere 200 years ago there was clear evidence of natural selection occurring.
Here is a link to write up about the paper:
Natural Selection Is Still With Us
http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2012/04/natural-selection-still-us
And this is a link to the actual paper itself:
Natural and sexual selection in a monogamous
historical human population
Alexandre Courtiola,b,c,1,2, Jenni E. Pettayd,1, Markus Jokelae
, Anna Rotkirchf
, and Virpi Lummaaa,b
https://goo.gl/0fvgKQ
My hunch is that if we are indeed at a point where peak fossil fuels and other limits to natural resources are being reached and if we do not find suitable alternatives then we should shortly begin to see a peaking and plateauing of the human population followed by a possible crash in population at which time natural selection pressures should increase dramatically.
So if anything we have had a period in human history of a couple of hundred years at most during which natural selection pressures were diminished for a significant part of the population probably due in large part to the accident of fate which gave us access to easily available fossil fuels. I think that window of opportunity is currently fast closing on us.
There is an interesting study done by evolutionary biologist Alexandre Courtiol of the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin which confirms that as recently as a mere 200 years ago there was clear evidence of natural selection occurring.
Fred, you keep referring to the fact that natural selection is still occurring. That point was never in question.
People Getting Dumber? Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests
Our technology may be getting smarter, but a provocative new study suggests human intelligence is on the decline. In fact, it indicates that Westerners have lost 14 I.Q. points on average since the Victorian Era.
The reason people are getting dumber is so simple it’s silly. Smarter people have fewer kids and dumber people have more. I talked about this in The Competitive Exclusion Principle And Garrett Hardin talked about it in “The Ostrich Factor”.
And remember the competitive exclusion principle: if fertility varies in a population that is offered options in fertility, then as the generations succeed one another, the pronatalist elements in the population will, in time, displace the ones who conscientiously limit their fertility.
In other words we are getting more dumb people and fewer smart people. Therefore the average IQ is dropping.
The point of contention here Fred, is your statement that natural selection pressures have significantly increased recently on modern humans and not at all as to whether they are continuing or not. It is a simple law of nature Fred. Natural selection can never stop. It is simple logic however. Natural selection pressures decrease in times of plenty and increase in times of extreme scarcity.
It is simple logic that no evolutionary biologist would disagree with. Just think about it Fred.
Intelligence evolved. Throughout human history the natural state was always a struggle for survival. Food was always scarce and predators were always present. The smartest people were best able to find food and avoid predators. That is the smartest had a much higher survival rate than dumb people. Therefore, under such conditions, the average intelligence level of the population always increased.
But then came times of plenty. Dumb people had far more kids than smart people. Therefore, as long as the less intelligent have more offspring than smart people the average IQ of the population will drop.
The point of contention here Fred, is your statement that natural selection pressures have significantly increased recently on modern humans and not at all as to whether they are continuing or not.
Perhaps our point of contention is really about how we see what is currently happening. I think the way I see things is more in line with Greg Laden’s view below. And I think the way you see it, is what was probably quite true even in the very recent past. I’m saying things are in flux now and pressures are increasing.
I also think it is Ok for us to disagree on this point, which it seems we do.
Though given that you run this site, I think you might agree, that barring some unforseen miracle, if they haven’t already, selection pressures are highly likely to increase in the near future.
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/08/24/humans-are-no-longer-subject-t/
It was possible, maybe, 25 years ago or so, to incorrectly but convincingly hold up Western Culture and Civilization as the place/time where many of the environmental forces of selection have been reduced. However, more and more people each year living in Western Civilization are less protected because of increase poverty and a widening gap between the “haves” and the “have nots.” On top of that, some of the ravages of nature that we thought we were protecting ourselves from (like bacteria and viruses) are co-evolving with our defenses. And, presumably, or defenses are co-evolving as well. Yet another factor is the novelty of the environment. Some populations may have gotten out of being eaten by lions or running out of food, at least for the time being. But these populations have likely run into other problems. Obesity results in morbidity and mortality and may affect fertility or reproductive success in various ways. Obesity is growing to an epidemic in the US right now. Obesity as a consistent feature starting in childhood will certainly have selective effects. How can it not?
There are probably dozens of effects of “civilization” that have their own selective stories. So Natural Selection is still very much at work in the usual ways. Natural Selection in some areas is relaxed, thus changing evolutionary rates and trends, and not by any means eliminating them. And Natural Selection is working in relatively novel ways through the effects of changes in the environment caused by modernization
My view is that all of the things mentioned by Greg above and quite a few more that he hasn’t even touched upon are all factors that are indeed increasing natural selection pressures on modern humans as we speak.
BTW, while I’m very much enjoying this exchange with you, Ron, I also don’t want to hog this thread. So I apologize to all those to whom this conversation might appear to be far afield of the topic of ‘Peak Oil’ and energy.
Fred, I will only say, as this is my last post on the subject, that if you polled a thousand evolutionary biologists, you would not find one that claimed that natural selection pressures increase in times of plenty when the population is exploding.
The principle is so simple, just so goddamn simple, that I am at a loss as to why you still do not understand it.
Ron, I do understand principle and what you are saying. Natural selection pressures would not normally be increasing in times of plenty and when a population is exploding. That much we agree on.
But I’m agreeing with Greg Laden, in that we are no longer in times of plenty. Also that the population may have been exploding but we are now in overshoot which changes the dynamic in unforeseen ways. Furthermore our civilized way of life has created selection pressures of its own which can not be discounted out of hand.
As he says:
It was possible, maybe, 25 years ago or so, to incorrectly but convincingly hold up Western Culture and Civilization as the place/time where many of the environmental forces of selection have been reduced. However, more and more people each year living in Western Civilization are less protected because of increase poverty and a widening gap between the “haves” and the “have nots.”
I’ll leave it at that.
Anecdote that may be relevant re selection for lower IQ.
All of my grandkids are way more intelligent than I am. Easy to see why. My kids were smart, they went to good universities, they met smart mates, and lo and behold, my grandkids, with a long string of science/math phd’s as immediate ancestors, are incredibly smart, so much so that I dare not mention the evidence.
This kind of process is sorta predictable, no?
Been noted by many, here and elsewhere.
Einstein-“You don’t need a lot of theoretical physicists, a few good ones will do.”
Regarding IQ declines, we have also introduced unprecedented amounts of poison onto our planet in the last 100 years, most of which are having relatively unknown and understudied effects, particularly with regards to the synergistic effects of multiple poison exposure on our collective intelligence and everything else about us. Someone posted this link here recently with regards to lead poisoning, but it bears re-posting as it is an excellent article:
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline
Dawkins is one of my favorite writers on evolution, and if nature is not red in tooth and claw then I am a dunce of the first order.
Now as far as humanity going extinct, I must agree with Fred that there is a distinct possibility that we will not survive very long, even in HISTORICAL terms, meaning less than ten thousand years.
A flat out WWIII could muck up the ecological works so badly that between the engineered diseases and poisons that would be used in such a war, we would perish to the last individual.
Sooner or later another good sized asteroid will hit us, sooner or later there will be another super volcano.
But otoh, differences of opinions are what make horse races. We are now living in so many different places under such diverse circumstances that I don’t see it as likely any one disease or parasite or predator or natural event is likely to get us all.
We are no doubt still evolving, but my personal opinion is that most current evolution is more the result of drift and random mutation – the basis of the process- and not much, compared to other species, resulting from survival of the fittest, the finishing secondary touch.
We don’t need to evolve nice hairy coats to deal with winter in the far north, but if we didn’t have clothing, some of us would no doubt be evolving in that direction.
We don’t need to evolve teeth and claws with which to capture prey, we will always have at the least clubs and spears and fire.
We will not need to evolve squirrel like incisors to open nuts because we will always have hands and rocks.
Most of us may perish because we can no longer raise enough food or gather enough to support ourselves, but it seems to me that somewhere someplace on the planet a viable sized population of people WILL succeed in feeding themselves.
I strongly suspect that if I could go around and select the hundred hairiest men and the hundred hairiest women I could find, and pair them off , and select for hairy offspring, I could breed humans as hairy as chimps in a hundred generations and maybe even as few as a eight or ten..
The question in my mind is IN WHAT WAY is current human evolution contributing to reproductive fitness?
My impression is that technology, in the form of clothing, fire, shelter, etc, is taking most of the edge off of any evolution actually happening.
But suppose we consider a population of people whose diet is less than ideal, for instance people living in a place where rice is the basic staple food and other foods are very scarce. Over time, such people would evolve to better tolerate such a diet.
Take a different group, say people living in the far north where their diet consists primarily of fish, ducks, red meat such as seals, etc, and you would expert that over time they would evolve to better tolerate this restricted diet. The people living in the very cold environment could be predicted to evolve more compact bodies, with a less skin per kilo of body weight so as to better conserve body heat.
After a few hundred or a thousand generations , or maybe only twenty generations, move an individual from one environment to the other, and he would very likely have some real problems with his digestive tract, compared to the locals.
People who are more susceptible to a particular poison who live in an environment where this poison is found in the food, water or air in significant amounts can be expected or predicted to gradually evolve a greater tolerance for it, over a very long period of time, because the ones who die young from it will have fewer children.
When the shit hits the fan, and it WILL eventually, and people once again have to get by with only the very most basic of medical care, evolution is going to get to work again with a VENGEANCE.
A woman who has such a narrow pelvis that she cannot give birth except by C section is not apt to survive her first pregnancy without highly skilled care. A man who was kept alive as a kid with various antibiotics because he has an inherently weak immune system is apt to pass his immunity problems on to some of his kids- kids that will be more likely die young from infections.
Fred might be right, we might not be around very long.
My impression is that more fully qualified biologists would agree with him than would agree with me, depending on what is meant by ” a very long time”.
I just don’t see any line of humans evolving into anything significantly different from what we are today, in terms of behavior or appearance, at least not within the next hundred thousand years.
But evolution could be FORCED, if a society were to choose to force it.
Nobody is likely to breed humans for their pelts, but suppose a cult of self selected individuals- individuals with excellent genomes, people who tend not to get the killer diseases, individuals who tend to live a long time, and especially individuals with powerful brains- were to create for themselves a closed society, pairing off only among themselves and only occasionally allowing in some carefully selected new blood.
It has been half a century since I was reading Robert Hienlen all night, but he wrote about such a society.
Supermen, after a fashion, COULD come to exist, men smarter, stronger, longer lived, less susceptible to disease.
But would such men be a new species? In my opinion, they would not.
Mac, I did not read beyond the following sentence. That was enough.
Now as far as humanity going extinct, I must agree with Fred that there is a distinct possibility that we will not survive very long, even in HISTORICAL terms, meaning less than ten thousand years.
Mac, no species goes extinct without a reason. Some species are very short lived, only a few tens of thousands years. And then again some species survive for hundreds of millions of years. It all happens for a reason.
What is the reason Homo sapiens will go extinct? Unless you can give me a good reason then I must conclude that this is just a willy-nilly opinion of yours that have no basis in any kind of logic.
I find your assertion that humans will go extinct within ten thousand years laughable. For what reason will we go extinct in such a short time?
Charles Galton Darwin postulates a million years. But with a lower population. http://eindtijdinbeeld.nl/EiB-Bibliotheek/Boeken/The_Next_Million_Years__how_to_kill_off_excess_population___1953_.pdf
Hi Ron,
Actually, you ought to be questioning Fred Maygar about the possibility of humanity going extinct in the “short” term.
He pointed out that I am perhaps too optimistic about our long term survival and his knowledge of the life sciences is far superior to my own in many respects.
When I wrote that we might go extinct within ten thousand years, I was merely acknowledging the validity of his argument that we might NOT be around for very long, in biological or geological terms.
The odds imo are very good to excellent, barring a flat out NBC WWIII, that we WILL be around although perhaps not more than a few million of us, at times , for a very long time.
By a very long time, I mean many tens of thousands of years, maybe even a million years.
But natural systems are non linear, and there are tipping points that once passed would mean the end of us.
He can probably list as many such tipping points as you please to read right off the top of his head.
Of course I could be wrong and our species might be more enduring, perhaps becoming something more like the Coelacanths of the Homo genus. Though to be fair and scientifically accurate one must take into account that even the Coelacanths have been subject to natural selection and evolution and are no longer quite the same as their ancestors of 400 million years ago. 🙂
– Fred Magyar
Had me curious so Google does all of the work.
http://vertebrates.si.edu/fishes/coelacanth/coelacanth_wider.html
Looks like they had a tough go of it. Thought gone and forgotten, but no.
Great reading and exchange.
HI OFM
It’s the dustbin for 100%. Just a matter of births vs deaths as to population levels. If you mean population will be reduced by 90% that would be a good thing for the planet. If total fertility ratios fall to 1.5 births per woman by 2100, we will be down to 10% of current population by 2300.
Jeju, I’m the team Koch quarterback coach, we emphasize handing off to the halfback, who follows right behind a full back who is tossing AAA batteries on the ground, ahead of a hard run right up the middle. The Team EV gets distracted looking at the batteries and we score about 70 % of the time using this rather simple play scheme.
Thanks Fernando, am still smiling the fourth time reading your comment.
All in the name of cooking plant earth on the way to the bank by the Fascists Koch machine.
You should be so proud Fernando
US Gas Market,
A long term view of the Texas Gas Well Gas market shows how volatility has changed over the last decade. Although the latest three months of production are subject to revision, there has never been a decline in this magnitude. The current daily data from bentekenergy.com indicate a very likely intensifying trend. For me there is no reason why this trend should reverse over the next months. This is another indicator that the US market is very much on track for a substantial decline in natgas production.
Hi Heinrich,
I wished you were right. Just looking at the EIA website shows that Gas production is flat in the US. So is this an isolated Texas event?
Florian,
Not sure if it is isolated to Texas, but I am sure it is isolated to areas with production cost are above $2.40 mcf, which is the current HH on CNBC!
I imagine quite a few areas would be under water at this price.
Florian,
If you look at the curve you see that most of the decline came within the last four months. The EIA data are in most cases older than three months. Although the RRC data have August as the last month, it is the latest daily data from bentekenergy.com and from the FED production index from September, which strongly confirm the trend. Yesterday daily Texan total production (gas well gas and associated gas) has been just 19.3 bcf/d and today it is 19.4 bcf/d. This would be 20 % below last year’s production. So, evidence is mounting that there is a massive slowdown.
Heinrich,
The market does not look too concerned about the fall in Texas gas production. The current gas has dropped to $2.19 mcf. Not sure if has anything to do with new Marcellus/Utica takeaway capacity currently coming onto market, the unexpected fall in the LNG export market, or just the fact of the annual storage being nearly full?
Current Nat gas price $2.08 down 8.9% in one day!!!!!!!!!
It was $2.50 last week!
US dry gas supply curve, based on 2015 remaining resources
Source: Rystad Energy
Weighted average breakeven price based on the 2015 and 2016 expected production for main shale gas plays
Source: Rystad Energy
Total US dry gas production (TCF)
Source: Rystad Energy
AlexS & Tool,
Thanks for the information. IMO,only a combination of an early and strong winter plus the high depletion mentioned by Heinrich plus reduced associated gas plus continuous low gas directed drilling can bring the price above $3.
The EIA statistics suggest US dry gas production growth virtually stalled within 74-75 bcf/d range since March, and shale gas production since April at 41.1-41.2 bcf/d.
The EIA expects slow growth to resume in 2016.
US dry gas production (bcf/d)
Shale gas production
AlexS,
Bentekenergy.com reported daily dry gas production of just 70.5 bcf/d on Tuesday and 71.5 bcf/d and 71.4 bcf/d for Wednesday and Thursday. This is at least 5% below the EIA forecast. The daily data fluctuate somehow, but I am following the Bentekenergy.com comments daily and the production rate has been firmly below 72.5 bcf/d over the last three months. In its weekly update the EIA reports also just 2% yoy growth for natural gas production, which is the lowest for at least a year. During spring the yoy growth rate has been over 6%. So, in my view there is a clear downtrend.
Heinrich,
I agree with you 100% that there has been a leveling to decline in production growth in Nat Gas production. It may have sometime to do with the current $2.30 HH price, the amount of gas in storage near max levels or the concern that the LNG export market may not be the panacea the market expected. Basically the current US Nat Gas market if flooded, with new pipelines about open to add more Marcellus/Utica gas to the market over the next month or two.
Your concerns will be a problem only if the nat gas producers do not respond once the excess capacity is worked off. The fact to storage component is so large in the Nat gas market, allows the producers time to respond. It would be very hard to see any problems this winter, due to high storage, LNG export will be shut out and electric generation market will make some very swift adjustments. The question will be, will the produces be able to respond by next winter with a reasonable injection over next summer?
Mr. Leopold, Alex, Push, anyone interested in the ‘gas world’ ..
Seeking Alpha has the Oct 22 transcript of EQT’s 3Q conference call.
Of note is the update on the dry gas Utica Scotts Run well.
First 86 days production, 2.6 Bcf (400,000+ boe).
Flowing 30+ mmcfd (5,000 boe).
At 7 month mark, projected to exceed 7Bcf (well over one million boe).
Somewhat astonishingly, the CEO said their company was turning their development focus AWAY from parts of the Marcellus and concentrate on the dry gas Utica (now being called the Deep Utica to distinguish it from the shallower, wetter areas to the west).
To give some perspective regarding size, the third largest gas field in the world is Russia’s Urengoy at about 230 trillion cf. (The largest being Iran’s South Pars at 1.4Tcf).
The Marcellus recoverable potential is still contested, but many analysts peg it at 800Tcf.
According to EQT’s CEO – and a growing array of observers – the Utica may surpass the Marcellus in recoverable resource.
“The Marcellus recoverable potential is still contested, but many analysts peg it at 800Tcf.
According to EQT’s CEO – and a growing array of observers – the Utica may surpass the Marcellus in recoverable resource.”
According to the EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2015, Marcellus technically recoverable resources amount to 152 Tcf, Utica – 55 Tcf.
Alex
There are numerous analysts, the most recent being the consortium headed by the university of West Virginia, projecting recoverable from the Utica at about 800 Tcf, comparable, on their view, to the Marcellus.
I personally prefer to shy away from EURs and estimates of field recoveries as they constantly change and seem prone to ‘interpretation’ based on the source.
There is no doubt that there exists massive amounts of hydrocarbons in both the Marcellus and Utica.
It will be interesting to see if, and by how much, the EIA’s estimates change 24 months from now.
Coffee,
I think it pointless, to argue resources in the shale plays, as most of the numbers are subjective at best. None of the numbers quoted are reserves, though I do agree very large quantities of gas do exist in both the Marcellus and Utica shales. What is important, is what price that sufficient quantities of gas be produced to satisfy the market?
I don’t think sub $1 is going to cut it, but as new pipelines open up and markets can balance, we may shortly find out what that price maybe.
BTW, I think your numbers for South Pars is slightly mixed, and I thought the North Field, in Qatar and the southern extension was the largest?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_in_Qatar
The natural gas in Qatar covers a large portion of the world supply of natural gas. According to Oil & Gas Journal, as of January 1, 2011, reserves of natural gas in Qatar were measured at approximately 896 trillion cubic feet (25.4 trillion cubic metres); this measurement means that the state contains 14% of all known natural-gas reserves, as the world’s third-largest reserves, behind Russia and Iran.[citation needed] The majority of Qatar’s natural gas is located in the massive offshore North Field, which spans an area roughly equivalent to Qatar itself. A part of the world’s largest non-associated, natural-gas field, the North Field, is a geological extension of Iran’s South Pars / North Dome Gas-Condensate field, which holds an additional 450 trillion cubic feet (13 trillion cubic metres) of recoverable natural-gas reserves.[1]
These measurable reserves, the shale resources number are at best guesses, that is why there is so much variation.
Push
I agree completely in how important the economics are, as well as how variable estimating future recoveries can be.
When an outfit gets $1 for gas, $30 for oil, it impacts the viability in the extreme versus getting $12 or $140.
These multi billion dollar reserve impairment write downs are the reverse of the huge runup in asset value when prices were high.
The hydrocarbons are still there, naturally, just uneconomical to extract.
The South Pars/North Dome number I posted up above should have been 1,400 Tcf, which matches the sum of your figures. Same field … biggest in the world, but the Iranians and Qataris are not exactly BFFs. This huge resource straddling their border plays a role in the current Mid East tensions.
By the way, Push, Aubrey MacClendon is heading your way, having purchased mineral rights to 55 million acres in the Cooper Basin … and looking for more. That is one and a half times the state of Oklahoma.
Hang on to your wallets, mate.
coffeeguyzz,
Thanks,
Great well indeed.
From RBN:
( https://rbnenergy.com/dry-county-utica-dry-gas-wells-headline-third-quarter-production-spurt )
• “Much of the recent gain in [U.S.] natural gas production has come from new Utica Shale output. “
• “U.S. dry gas production has remained relatively flat through the summer despite the dramatic rig count decline earlier this year.”
• “potential for an uptick in production volumes in 4Q2015, enabled by higher demand, higher prices, improved price spreads and more pipeline takeaway capacity. Indications are that any growth would likely come from the Northeast.”
• “much of the growth in Northeast production this year to date has come from the Utica Shale in particular, buoyed by new drilling and recent record initial production (IP – the first 30 days of output) numbers from wells primarily targeting dry gas.”
• There is a figure (too heavy to post here) showing “the relatively rapid rise of Ohio Utica production volumes in 2015 relative to the regions in the Marcellus”. “The production trend during 2015 in West Virginia and PA N.Central has been mostly flat to lower. PA N.West has shown slight growth since the beginning of the year while PA N.East has seen a substantial decline from the effects of shut-ins in that area due to very weak prices. In contrast, Utica production, which is represented in the graph by all receipts in Ohio, has maintained a sharp upward trajectory through this year. Utica production averaged 2.6 Bcf/d in Q3 this year after reaching as high as a record 2.8 Bcf/d on July 16, 2015. The Q3 average is 1.5 Bcf/d higher than a year ago and about 0.4 Bcf/d higher than earlier this year in Q2. Drilling further down into Ohio production, again using Genscape flow data, we find that the majority of recent growth comes from one county – Monroe County, OH. Of the 1.5 Bcf/d increase in Utica volumes, nearly 75% (1.1 Bcf/d) came from Monroe. Monroe County is at the heart of the dry gas drilling trend in the Ohio Utica” [All numbers by Genscape].
• “with oil and natural gas liquids (NGLs) trading at significantly lower prices than in 2014, the economics for extracting dry gas are now on par with or even favorable in some cases over those for liquids- or oil-rich plays. Rig counts and producer portfolios indicate a shift in producer resources and drilling activity back toward dry gas plays following the decline in oil and liquids prices. This is particularly the case in the Utica shale, where several dry gas wells have made headlines and earned industry celebrity status for their record initial production (IP) results in recent months. Data from Baker Hughes’ weekly rig count through Sept. 18, 2015 shows that while OH rig counts targeting oil and gas have both declined since late 2014, rigs targeting gas have declined by less. Of the 20 rigs currently operating in Ohio, 14 are targeting natural gas. Of those 14, no less than 5 are located in Monroe County that sits in eastern Ohio along the border with West Virginia in a primarily dry gas “window” of the Utica shale”.
The Utica hasn’t had 14 gas wells in the Utica since the 9/25 report. The last Baker Hughes report had 18 rigs drilling for gas, up by 3. I think we are looking at well over 4 bcf/d from the Utica in 2016.
the article is dated September 21
Marcellus and Utica natural gas production (bcf/d)
Source: EIA Drilling Productivity Report
Marcellus and Utica rig count
Source: Baker Hughes
Speaking of gas, EQT missed earnings estimates, largely because they realized $1.21 per mcfe on their Q3 production. Only hedging and pipeline tariffs kept them from having a terrible quarter. Looks to me that companies without significant pipelines have trouble making ends meet in the Marcellus, Utica and Huron.
HI Heinrich,
We should look at all gas including casinghead gas. The FED metric looks at oil and gas, it has been flat with oil falling suggesting a rise in US gas output.
Dennis,
At first sight the graph below looks like a normal chart, yet it reveals several interesting trends. First, over the last decades volatility of the Texan gas market has changed dramatically. There have been cycles for conventional gas production, yet the cycles have been quite weak. With the advent of shale in 2005 (clean water act) the cycles started to become very steep and pronounced. It did not matter as production went up anyway – sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker. And there we are at my second point: The cycles are steeper and they are down significantly. The first cycle from 2007 to 2010 started with phenomenal growth of 20% yoy and ended in 2010 with -10% decline. The second cycle from 2010 to 2013 started much weaker at just 10% growth and ended with just a – 5% decline. However at the end of the second cycle there was a huge price upswing in 2013/14. The third cycle showed barely any growth at the beginning and we are now at close to a -20% decline and the downswing will be much steeper at – 40% decline over the next few months. For Texas alone this will be 10 bcf/d less production, which is for the total US -15% less production yoy. As much as in the second cycle we will get an huge price upswing in the third cycle – depending also on the weather during the winter. So, shale brought more production and it displaced conventional production, yet we will experience enormous volatility in the natgas market. This is what the numbers are telling me. The numbers are like a fingerprint and they describe the internal structure of a certain system. The numbers never lie. Timing is an issue, and the price upswing may come over the next winter, yet it will happen.
There is a zero chance of a 10 bcf/d decline next year in Texas. Sorry about that.
Don,
In my view it will happen. This is what the sharp decline of the last three months implies. It is just a question of will it happen within the next six months or within the next two years.
Sometimes I get an email that I think should be posted in the comments.
Dear Mr. Patterson,
I found your article very interesting and cannot help but think along those same lines myself. After recently drilling three wells on the same location, it is evident to me that one, does affect the other!! And not as concisely as one would think!
Our first well came in free flowing 160 bold: until we drilled #2! Well #2 was quite temperamental throughout our course, (and still is actually!) and is holding a steady 600 psi on the front side with a continuously climbing backside which was 900 psi yesterday morning and up to 1125 psi this evening. She is selling a reasonable amount of gas, and unfortunately, is bringing approximately 80 powd along with it. Oil? About an inch or two a day. Well #2? Water! Our 160 bopd has vanished …and thus far, has not surfaced in Well #2.
I must add, however, that tonight, after sitting a pumping jack on Well #1 and a day full of water production, the sight glass at the separator showed what I could only fathom as drilling mud for several minutes, and following that was a thick flow of Texas Gold. Quite ironic, since we had Well #2 closed in all day.
I admit I am quite ignorant of the downhole going-ons, but perhaps that ignorance causes me to see certain things in a different light. Regardless, I believe your charts speak for themselves.
Sincerely,
Melissa Frizzell
Can someone interpret? What of well #3? Was that a typo?
That’s a tight hole.
Here comes peak oil. Time to write a book calling anyone who actually sees it enviro – wackos. Reality is way out of fashion nowadays. Actually seeing it is really dangerous. That’s the way it is. Thanks for putting labels on us and calling us “libertarians”. No mention of the reality of the situation. Best to just push us into some box, and then the problem will go away…
Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture
Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Republican Political Culture will be the next book Matt writes. Republicans will buy it, but probably not read it, they would just want a copy.
How about The Peak Oil Vortex?
Stop the presses right now!
Re-post from the Open Thread…
Lesson In Solar From A Northern Neighbor
October 21st, 2015 by John Farrell
Based on population, Ontario would be the 5th largest state if it were part of the U.S., but its installed solar capacity, 1,500 MW would rank it 3rd. The province has also shut down all its coal-fired power plants. How does a northern province become a solar and climate leader, despite one of the poorest solar resources in North America?
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/10/21/lesson-solar-northern-neighbor/
Ontario only had 2% coal in the mix. Nuclear and Hydro make up 85% or so.
Your comment is very misleading. Sell the fantasy!
Definitely energy related (we should copy this).
CHINA GOLF: COMMUNIST PARTY BANS CLUB MEMBERSHIP
“The Chinese Communist Party has banned all 88 million of its members from joining golf clubs, in its latest update of party discipline rules…..Extravagant eating and drinking, and abuse of power, are also formally banned, said Xinhua news agency…”
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-34600544
The ideals of the New Socialist Man, the new Jesus Christ for the godless communists, triumph once more.
Of course, like the Catholic Church, indulgences will be granted.
Just another religion on the planet with no God required.
Only 88 million communists in China?? With all these new restrictive rules, communism might just die out. No adultery, no mistresses, no shady deals? Sounds like a new religion to me.
A belated thanks to OFM for his link a few weeks ago to the Ancient Rome History series on YouTube. I am slowly watching my way through this excellent series. My ideas on surviving the collapse of empires were instilled a long time ago reading Isaac Asimov’s foundation series in my teens. At the time I assumed he was forecasting the demise of the current American Empire. In fact his story was based on the collapse of Ancient Rome. This topic has been recently discussed on this blog and then here http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
Where I found this praise – “Glenn Stehle, commenting on 9/16/15 on a thread in the excellent website peakoilbarrel.com (operated by the estimable Ron Patterson) made a number of excellent points that I am taking the liberty of excerpting: (with thanks to correspondent Paul S.) “
Jeju, my wife and I watched something similar via Netflix. Seemed like the same repeating pattern; ambitious leader/s, expansion into other lands to bring back wealth, backstabbing and poisoning to kill those in the way of gaining more power, Wars upon wars as needed to control areas and take more land. Eventually some stupid ruler kills his best general out of fear of sharing power and then all hell breaks loose as the army cannot hold off other armies and eventually Rome falls to other tribes. But you’ll notice the same repeating pattern after a while. They do the same thing for centuries. Nobody trusts anyone and everybody is subject to short lives.
One of the most unfortunate stories is of a Roman general that leads his troops into a territory, in which this guy jumps out in front of the legions and says “It’s a trap, don’t go any further.” They throw him out of the way and go down this path that pincers in to the point they can only progress single file because the trap has walls built on both sides of the trail that closes in as they move farther into the trap. Once the army is stretched out real thin, they get attacked from both sides and most get killed including the General who commits suicide by sword so they can’t capture and torture him. Now that was some dumb ass general.
Jeju, my wife and I watched something similar via Netflix. Seemed like the same repeating pattern; ambitious leader/s, expansion into other lands to bring back wealth, backstabbing and poisoning to kill those in the way of gaining more power, Wars upon wars as needed to control areas and take more land. Eventually some stupid ruler kills his best general out of fear of sharing power and then all hell breaks loose as the army cannot hold off other armies and eventually Rome falls to other tribes. But you’ll notice the same repeating pattern after a while. They do the same thing for centuries. Nobody trusts anyone and everybody is subject to short lives.
One of the most unfortunate stories is of a Roman general that leads his troops into a territory, in which this guy jumps out in front of the legions and says “It’s a trap, don’t go any further.” They throw him out of the way and go down this path that pincers in to the point they can only progress single file because the trap has walls built on both sides of the trail that closes in as they move farther into the trap. Once the army is stretched out real thin, they get attacked from both sides and most get killed including the General who commits suicide by sword so they can’t capture and torture him.
Thanks for that link.
That led me to this:
http://michael-hudson.com/2015/04/sovereignty-in-the-ancient-near-east/
It talks about a new book:
Labor in the Ancient World
http://www.amazon.com/Labor-Ancient-World-Piotr-Steinkeller/dp/3981484231
At lot of the transcript/interview is about debt cancellation in the ancient world, where labor was in short supply, and the continual efforts of elites to use debt and bankruptcy to grab people’s land.
Then he rips the Democrats for protecting Wall Street and allowing runaway financialism which is setting up collapse.
I’m struck by the thought that ancient empires collapsed due to debt build up, and the people simply fled to escape creditors, depriving the empire of labor/soldiers.
In our time, we have a massive labor surplus, so the people are just hosed as the financial interests gobble up everything.
This was at the end of the last posting and seemed to get no notice. However it has major ramifications in energy transport and the chemicals needed to keep industrial civilization operating. Even a reduced version will have major ramifications. Two major commuter rail lines in the region have declared they will cease operations. One of those lines freight also.
HOW TO END CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT WITH AN ACT OF CONGRESS
Back in 2008 Congress enacted the Railroad Safety Improvement Act RSIA). The deadline for the implementation of Positive Train Control is Dec. 31.
Due to this deadline Norfolk Southern issued a Notice of Cessation of Service Effective December 1, 2015, for All Shipments of Poisonous-Inhalation-Hazard (“PIH”) Commodities
http://www.nscorp.com/content/nscorp/en/service-alerts/notice-of-cessationofserviceeffectivedecember12015forallshipment.html
Looking at the list of chemicals that would be banned from travel, industry and commercial activity would be strangled. Products would not be made, contractors would not have materials to work with, massive unemployment would occur. These are critical chemicals if we want to continue business and industry.
With only 15% of track miles completed so far, the earliest the rail system can implement PTC and be compliant, would be 2018.
Here is the AAR response with amounts of implementation completed and a timeline for future completion. Costs are also listed.
https://www.aar.org/policy/positive-train-control
And it’s not just Norfolk Southern, BNSF and CSX have declared they will shut down if the timeline for completion is not extended. BNSF is taking a broader interpretation of the law as implying that no trains can legally operate without PTC after Dec 3ist.
http://cs.trains.com/trn/b/fred-frailey/archive/2015/09/09/bnsf-we-will-be-paralyzed.aspx
So keep your eyes and ears open on this one, Congress may not want to destroy the economy and stop up industry.
COLLAPSE TOPIC: SLOW AND FAST STARVATION EFFECTS
Starvation, short, slow or total will occur if collapse of civilization occurs.
We all know that lack of water ends in death in a few days, but lack of food can go on for weeks and months. Drop in metabolic rate, hypotension, loss of muscle mass, severe fatigue are the result of starvation. There are also dramatic changes in mental mood and capability. Here is a review of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment run in 1944 and 1945.
http://www.madinamerica.com/2013/05/starvation-what-does-it-do-to-the-brain/
Short periods of starvation (24 hours or less) are apparently good for us. There is much modern evidence that going without food for short periods allows the cells to use energy to “clean up” broken proteins and other harmful metabolites. So being hungry for short periods is helpful but longer periods does serious damage to the body and the fatigue and mental aberration produced could be deadly in a collapse situation, preventing one from obtaining food or protecting oneself. Eventually the immune system fails.
Starvation is one of the most deadly conditions on the planet; according to some studies, the effects of starvation play a major role in between one-third and one-half of all worldwide deaths of children under the age of five.
Here is an article on how your body adapts to starvation to maintain life.
http://io9.com/5941883/how-your-body-fights-to-keep-you-alive-when-youre-starving
For those wanting to get into more detail, this is a paper from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition concerning the long term (two years) caloric reductions that occurred in Biosphere 2
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/72/4/946.full.pdf+html
The problem with peak oil is that it has fallen out of favor with the environmental movement, and nobody wants to talk about it any more. This is the only place I ever mention it any more. Now we are being turned into libertarian pariahs. Great. Well it’s just the way it goes. Nobody wants to acknowledge reality any more…
The problems with the larger culture that peak oil adherents have had is that there have always been adherents who got trapped into saying when the moment of peak oil would arrive. The truth is we don’t know and won’t know until after the fact. It is much easier to predict the life cycle of a particular well, more difficult to be precise about a nation, and near impossible to be precise about world peak. It is too difficult to predict within a narrow error band, a bit easier within a large error band. So when peak oil was delayed briefly by shale, it was easy for critics to dismiss. The issue is still with us, but we still don’t know whether this decline is a fluctuation due to price and subject to change or the start of a long-term trend.
I come at it from a different angle, I observe the industry from the inside, and I sense there’s no good exploration plays, the new technology costs a ton of money. there are no additional new technologies being developed, our activity level has to go up to a fever pitch to sustain production, in many cases the reserves have been overstated, and the world lacks the economy to pay for the prices we will have to charge to keep production steady.
The actual timing is quite variable, we just have too many variables, but I can’t see oil and condensate production climbing endlessly. I would bet the peak will be reached prior to 2035.
Everything’s connected, Ron. I think it’s the essential premise of those interested in a systems approach.
So then, if you have what amounts to large-scale centralized undemocratic and coercive gangs some of us call ‘government’ (and I’ve posted a quote from an author explaining how what some of us call government really isn’t true government, but simply a ‘non-plural’ gang or gangs of anarchists) ‘running’ things and sucking up all that nice oil and messing up the planet in the pursuit of their vested (read, non-plural) crony-capitalistic plutarchy interests, why wouldn’t the topic of Libertarianism (or anarchy or the improvement of our ‘social technology’) come up?
(You know, many of us talk about the improvement of our electromechanical technologies [windmills, PV’s, EV’s, etc.] in this peak oil light, but less of simple ethics or [problems with] our social (and psychological) technologies, like so-called government and other socioeconomic institutions and how/if to fix or get rid of them and create better, ethical systems.)
“A national oil company (NOC) is an oil company fully or in the majority owned by a national government. According to the World Bank, NOCs accounted for 75% global oil production and controlled 90% of proven oil reserves in 2010.
Due to their increasing dominance over global reserves, the importance of NOCs relative to International Oil Companies (IOCs), such as ExxonMobil, BP, or Royal Dutch Shell, has risen dramatically in recent years. NOCs are also increasingly investing outside their national borders.” ~ Wikipedia
Some of the Libertarian stuff seems a little contradictory based on my reading of it on Wikipedia and elsewhere, but in any case, if we cannot or will not, improve our social condition/’technology’, then it is tribal anarchy we will get– if we survive– when coercive war/violence-based gangs– non-plural anarchists– we call ‘government’ drags us all off the edge. (You’ll notice I didn’t say if, but when.)
Tribal anarchy isn’t so bad, though, and might be pretty good and very successful; is essentially in large part ‘who we are/what makes us human’; and is apparently how we grew up and what we had for much longer than most anything else. So if we are going to have large-scale stuff, maybe we would do well to attempt to model it after this tribal anarchy.
But, yes, we’re in a pickle and much of it, and reasons for it, seems to run into our very makeup as a species. (See Jay Hanson for some clues about that.)
Most high cognitive libertarians are just anarchists in kindergarten.
Some will make into higher education.
We are not evolved enough and/or there are somehow evolutionary/biological constraints– Fermi’s Paradox and all that… Like the reason why we don’t, say, have condos on Mars or The Venus Project like we should by now. And McDonalds there. And spam on our Venusian networks. Or war breaking out in the Syrtis Major Planum region.
It’s like what we spoke about some time ago on the late Oil Drum, something along the lines of ‘clever but not wise.’
And so we continue to barely exist in these retarded-cum-average-intelligence -IQ coercive/violent Matrix/Plato’s Cave/Truman Show Capitalist-Statist Anti-Utopia manifestations… Until they hit the fan like the shit they are…
While we consume so-called art for money-profit… Venus
Happy 30th Anniversary, Back To The Future Trilogy!
I’ll mention a bit more about some of the online conversations I had with a prominent Libertarian.
I asked how Libertarians would handle environmental damage caused by a company or individual. Well, the damaged parties could sue. So they would go to court, try to make a case that their property had been damaged by the actions of the polluter and then collect for damages.
What this approach requires then is a court system and a way to force someone to pay damages. That means we’d end up with a lot of lawyers, we’d need courts, and presumably we’d need jails to put the non-payers into. Or if we didn’t jail them, then we’d probably need cops or armies to take away property from the polluters. So we’d end up with quite a bit of government.
We’d also need a system of researchers to provide info to the victims so they could state their case in court and prove damages and how much they need to be compensated from the polluters. (Maybe we’d have a lot of those climate scientists keeping busy generating data to use in court.)
I’m guessing that if the Libertarian system was in place, BP would have had to pay so much money to the victims of the Gulf oil spill that BP would be out of business. However, my impression is that many Libertarians would assume that the environmentalists wouldn’t have so much power as to put BP out of business.
I’ll add that the Libertarians I’ve read are against government regulations. So they say the alternative is lawsuits.
That would mean we’d have even more lawyers suing people/companies whenever anyone felt their lifestyle or property had been damaged.
I’m not sure that having an increased number of lawsuits would actually be preferable to regulations.
Now, I am guessing that the Libertarians who don’t want regulations are wealthy enough that they assume they will win all lawsuits against them, but for everyone else, getting rid of all regulations to protect the environment and public health would not be in their best interests.
Libertarianism in the US seems to be proposed by those who already have power and wealth, and not much thought given to helping those without power and wealth.
Boomer II. Other libertarians might advocate having those who lose lawsuits pay the defendants legal fees. This would tend to decrease litigation. There is no single belief for all libertarians. In the past I encountered vicious differences of opinions regarding abortion, whether elective or therapeutic.
Other libertarians might advocate having those who lose lawsuits pay the defendants legal fees. This would tend to decrease litigation.
But that would tend to rig the system even more in favor of environmental polluters, which is my point.
I find that American libertarians tend to be rich people who don’t want anyone to get in their way, even if what they do is damaging to the environment or public health.
Boomer …more litigation Libertarians bad – less litigation Libertarians bad… You can’t have it both ways.
Boomer …more litigation Libertarians bad – less litigation Libertarians bad… You can’t have it both ways.
I’m not a Libertarian and find holes in their thinking.
One of the holes is the idea that litigation will be preferable to government and regulations. It’s just another form of government. They want to eliminate regulations and say that lawsuits will protect people from damage and harm. But in order to do that, we’ll be run by a system of lawyers, judges, and jails.
If we have no way to protect against damages (i.e., no regulations and no lawsuits), then people won’t be protected from companies/individuals that pollute, poison, and so on.
And if we believe that everyone in the world will always act in the best interests of everyone else in the world, then we are talking about utopian societies, not all of which need to be libertarian societies.
In a real libertarian system the aggrieved party would visit the miscreant together with three large relatives, and accept an invitation to parley on their chosen site. The miscreant would show up with food, sit down to hear their cries and complaints, apologize, and agree to pay full damages. If he didn’t they would behead and eat him, and start a clan war.
Libertarians tend to be in favor of market solutions to energy shortages. Produce more or use less.. Older posters may recall the severe natural gas shortages of the 1970’s that resulted from price controls. http://naturalgas.org/regulation/history/
Libertarians tend to be in favor of market solutions to energy shortages.
But faith in market solutions does not a Libertarian make.
Libertarianism involves more than just letting the market dictate.
“Libertarianism involves more than just letting the market dictate.”
–My impression is that libertarians generally tend to be economic conservatives and social liberals. But they have a wide variety of beliefs, on immigration for example. Arguably a pure (but not popular) libertarian position might be for all countries to have open borders.. Personally I am a dedicated Malthusian with little faith in ultimate solutions from the left or the right. Perhaps dieoff will be the eventual free-market mechanism, as often happens in nature. By the way. What ever happened to Jay Hanson?
Never followed Hanson.
I do believe their will be a die-off and I do believe it will benefit those who are left. Which is why I am not a doomer.
I don’t think it terms of a market economy for those who do remain. I would imagine life to be more like feudalism.
Here’s a list which might be helpful.
10 Different Types of Libertarianism
And from that list, it says:
“The philosopher Noam Chomsky is the best known American libertarian socialist.”
I think this is what I ran across a few years ago when I was doing research on libertarianism and on post-capitalistic economic systems.
Libertarian Community of Utopia:: This paper develops a political framework inside which the libertarian advocates of proprietary communities, limited government, and market anarchism would be able to peacefully coexist as a single free nation. Embellished with some fictional details and humorous elements, I’d like to show exactly how it could be done.
Libertarians, imagine it’s 2050.
I tell ya, I can’t stand those Rush Limbaugh Born-Again Libertarians. A dime a fricken dozen if you ask me.
steve
“A dime a fricken dozen if you ask me.”
Steve,
I think you are being generous and overpaying there my friend….
be well,
Petro
I doubt that the Libertarian Party represents a serious political threat in the near or distant future. They garnered less than 1% of the presidential vote in 1980 election, with David Koch on the ticket. They did about the same in 2012.
–I am perplexed by the mention of Libertarian and Rush Limbaugh in the same sentence. I claim no expertise as I have not heard a Limbaugh broadcast in many years. But a cursory examination of material on the internet suggests that Limbaugh is a social conservative, strongly hostile to libertarians.
http://www.bnsf.com/about-bnsf/financial-information/weekly-carload-reports/
BNSF petroleum cars down another 2000 plus in week 41.
Native Women Shut Down Pipeline ‘Consultation’ (video)
I have not checked, but most likely there are twenty or more times the people in the handful of major cities in Canada than there are in all the FIRST NATIONS tribes or clans all combined.
The pipelines and rail roads will be built, and sooner than most people would guess.
The old folks who are opposed inevitably die, and the younger folks are all too susceptible to being bribed with jobs and money. All the boys are going to want the latest hunting rifles and off road vehicles, and just about every body is going to want a good road, a nice car or oversized pickup truck to drive on it, the girls want washing machines, the kids want computers. Local businessmen want more business, of any and every sort, from selling lawnmowers to paving driveways.
It distresses the hell out of me that my own little corner of the world is rapidly developing, and that many many places I used to walk I run into no trespassing signs. UGLY houses are springing up every where spoiling the views. But such is reality.
A lot of my neighbors wanted to sell a few acres, money is nice. Now they are mostly crying the blues because after they made it SO VERY easy for outsiders to come in, they can’t afford the property taxes anymore.The youngsters think living in the woods or on a farm where you have some privacy and peace and quiet and control is the pits, they want to be within walking distance of the athletic field and the mall.
And the newcomers, well, they are the politically active sort, used to demanding this and that and then some MORE from government, and by god, they intend to GET IT, and since they mostly own only a house, well then, the rest of us who own acreage are by god morally obligated to pay for all the services THEY WANT- services we generally do NOT want.
Being old is not all bad, I am apt to be dead before the orchard across the road from our house is converted into a fucking subdivision.
I made damn sure that it will take at least another two hundred years before Homo sapien v. urbanii ever gets close to where I am out in the country.
They’ll drive you mad those urbaners.
I hear you Mac.
Unless people wake up in droves and realize they are handcuffed to a runaway train, it looks like we’re well on our way to having hell to pay.
North Dakota throws a two-year lifeline to oil ‘ducks
“North Dakota regulators approved a plan on Thursday to give oil producers an extra year to bring a new well online, a change designed to give the energy industry breathing room during the crude price downturn.
Companies will now have up to two years to hydraulically fracture, or frack, drilled-but-uncompleted wells, or DUCs, under changes approved unanimously by the North Dakota Industrial Commission (NDIC), which is comprised of the governor, attorney general and agriculture commissioner. ”
The article starts with an amazing picture of stacked rigs.
The picture says stacked in Dickinson. That’s on a major rail and highway node. It’s far from the 4 core counties of the state.
It’s the sort of place you would stack them if you wanted it to be easy to ship them away from NoDak. Not where you’d stack them if you were waiting to get things going again.
Not only stack, scrap too.
A new Peak Oil book just came out a few days ago:Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture
This book is a gift that just keeps on giving. Looking at the contents page I see that chapter 5 is titled.
“White Masculinity and Post Apocalyptic Retrosexuality” Wonderful. We peak oilers must be having more fun than I was aware of. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson seems to have spent his time researching peak oil porn. Classic, a new genre. What a great guy for telling the rest of us.
For those who want the porn – find it yourself or ask Matt for the link.
Otherwise Oily Cassandra gets clean here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkcERyjy364
5 is titled.
“White Masculinity and Post Apocalyptic Retrosexuality” Wonderful.
And those of us who have a bit deeper understanding of reality wonder why so called conservatives have NOTHING BUT CONTEMPT for leftish intellectuals?
I am tempted to call up Rush Limbaugh and see if I can get him to review this book, just for the fun of hearing him foam at the mouth verbally about how stupid leftish leaning intellectuals are.
I am not sure if I should turn on my sarc light.
But as I have pointed out many times, nuance is everything, and sound bites are for ding a dings who are either incapable of thinking for themselves, or unwilling to do so.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-hurricane-patricia-20151023-story.html
Maybe the first or second most powerful hurricane ever documented will be hitting Mexico tonight. The heavy rains are already started.
Now a record busting hurricane does not prove forced warming, but neither does it DISPROVE IT. So far as I can tell from a casual check, the two most powerful western hemisphere hurricanes ever, including this one, are very recent.
I keep asking the people who do doubt forced warming where the cool years have gone. They never answer me.
OFM,
There is a very cool October here in Europe. Early snow in the Alps and growing glaciers. In addition, the last two winters have been very cold in the US and cold in Scandinavia and rather normal in Europe. As far as I can see it, there has been no warming trend in my environment. As I am very often in Scandinavia, I am waiting desperately for a little bit warming up.
Move to Siberia. There’s been some significant warming there.
As far as I can see it, there has been no warming trend in my environment.
Really?
http://www.weather.com/forecast/news/europe-heat-wave-record-highs-june-july-2015
Germany’s all-time heat record was toppled July 5 in Kitzingen, topping out at 40.3 degrees Celsius (104.5 degrees Fahrenheit), according to Weather Underground’s Dr. Jeff Masters. This eclipsed the previous German all-time high of 40.2C (104.4F) from August 2003 and July 1983.
We’ll see if next summer there are any more new heat records in Europe.
Fred Magyar,
There have been some hot days ( not more than ten days). June has been exceptionally cold (Schafskaelte). July and August had a few hot days. The media always reports any hot day and never reoports periods of lower temperature. It is quite normal in Europe to have some hot days, yet just for July and beginning August. By no way we had a heat wave in Europe. There was even a case when ‘scientists’ warmed up a weather station with truck exhausts to get warmer temperature measurements. The hype gets really absurd. There may be a global warming from whatever source, yet I can say for sure it has nothing to do with CO2. I am a chemical engineer starting up chemical plants worldwide and you can be sure that I can calculate the heat capacity of a gaseous mixture in any proportion. In the atmosphere, CO2 has a too low concentration (400 ppm) to contribute anything to a warming effect. Water vapour has a much bigger effect on global warming. If we would not have water vapour in the atmosphere we would have at least 4 C degrees lower temperature and that would be really a catastrophy.
There was even a case when ‘scientists’ warmed up a weather station with truck exhausts to get warmer temperature measurements. The hype gets really absurd.
Sure, if you say so!
This applies to Heinrich Leopold’s post at 10:11 of 23 October:
Dunning-Kruger alert.
For a combination of ignorance and unaware arrogance this one would be hard to beat.
There was even a case when ‘scientists’ warmed up a weather station with truck exhausts to get warmer temperature measurements.
Is there anyone on this list who really believes such crap? Anyone besides Heinrich I mean? The problem with deniers is their stories are just so absurd, so damn unbelievable. Surely they can do better than this.
“Is there anyone on this list who really believes such crap? ” No, just Heinrich.
Ron,
I know I have been provocative. However, we had no heat waves in Europe this year and the link for climate change and CO2 simply does not exist. No ‘scientist ‘ can challenge me on this. I have three academic titles and a long career in chemical engineering as well as scientific awards for innovation and many publications. The discussion about climate change is strongly based on politics and not on facts. The media wants to talk up a catastrophy (see also the recent hype around the hurricane in Mexico) and I will use all my democratic rights to challenge this insane whitch hunting.
Heinrich – “no heat waves…”?
explain this:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33316985
104.5 F in Germany
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/heat-wave-pushes-temperatures-in-germany-over-40-celsius/article25312728/
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/global-warming-july-was-hottest-month-ever-2015-course-warmest-year-photos-1516486
“the link for climate change and CO2 simply does not exist.”
You’re just deluded, and massively ignorant of spectroscopy, particularly infrared spectroscopy. You’ve been a troll – stirring up noise so you don’t have to take any responsibility for destabilizing the climate or face the real fear, just like peak oil deniers blather on and on – avoiding the fear of what happens once we go over the peak.
In the late 1950’s John Tyndall showed CO2 absorbed infrared radiation with simple photometry.
His 1861 Bakerian lecture to the Royal Society: On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gases and Vapours, and on the Physical Connexion of Radiation, Absorption, and Conduction
http://www.jstor.org/stable/108724?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Any sane people out there can enlighten themselves with:
https://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm
https://www.ucar.edu/learn/1_3_1.htm
That was the 1850’s when John Tyndall showed that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
There is a Tyndall glacier in Rocky Mountain National Park named for him (he was also a mountaineer). It appears on maps, has climbing routes shown in mountaineering books. And a few years ago, much to everyone’s surprise, the lower 2/3 of it fell down the mountain and melted.
I thought he was joking, especially about the glaciers. In Norway glaciers are now retreating at a rate of hundreds of metres per year, in some places.
2015 IS ON TRACK TO BE THE HOTTEST YEAR EVER RECORDED
“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says September was the fifth-straight month in 2015 to set a record high temperature.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/1dbd0b542982cc5570d76ab00badc135.htm
The steep temperatures seen in the surface measurements aren’t seen in the lower or mid troposphere (as measured by satellites). I just heard the climate establishment is in head scratching mode. Another source mentioned we should wait another 60 days to see if the troposphere measuremts start to climb. If they don’t the climate models will have to go back for a serious rebuild. ?
Fernando, It is highly doubtful that real scientists have the slightest concerns about this. My guess is you are just listening to your friends in the lunatic global warming denialist crowd. If you want to make a case for real science having a problem you will need to find a peer reviewed article describing the problem. Until you can do that claims such as this are just another case of anti-science propaganda having no merit.
Don, I’m concerned with the growing discrepancy between the surface measurements and tropospheric measurements. I heard they are worried, those who aren’t are simply not educated in the subject.
To those of us who understand the physics/heat transfer issues the problem looms as the key issue to be addressed over the next decade.
Virtually every climate model has a robust description/understanding built into the mathematics concerning linkage between the surface and the atmosphere. You will be able to find some peer reviewed science on the issue. It will almost certainly be limited to some very minor tweaking of some element of the process. There is no “problem.”
Obviously the anti-science crowd is desperately trying to find some “problem” that will have some traction in the wider society. With a second new all time high in global temperatures now all but absolutely certain this is a last ditch effort to find something to keep their thesis from being totally discredited even with their friends. It will not work.
If you want to sell doubt to others you should be reading the IPCC reports. They talk extensively about elements of climate that are not adequately understood or described. This acknowledgement of doubt is central to what science is about. It does not work to invent fantasies about “problems” that have no basis for the working scientists who are trying to understand what is real.
Actually the models aren’t robust at all. They have glaring gaps. For example, most of them can’t match today’s average temperature within 0.5 degrees C.
BS – You’ve change the subject. The IPCC report is presented with statistical bands that are so broad that it is almost impossible for them to be incorrect.
The models are useful tools to test for a broad range of different assumptions. They are supposed to differ both from other models and with empirical readings. Those differences are what are used by scientists to refine their understandings. Most people fully understand that the climate system is immensely complex. Many of these models require months of computer time to run as it is. The scientists discussing these models are very clear about factors that are inadequately included or not addressed at all. There is currently a significant distinction between the models based on different approaches. It is part of how science works.
My original comment:
“The steep temperatures seen in the surface measurements aren’t seen in the lower or mid troposphere (as measured by satellites). I just heard the climate establishment is in head scratching mode. Another source mentioned we should wait another 60 days to see if the troposphere measuremts start to climb. If they don’t the climate models will have to go back for a serious rebuild. ?”
And your comment still has no merit.
Doug,
Do you have some studies on Norwegian glaciers? Would be interested on some recent numbers. In the Alps the glaciers are definitely growing during the last two years (not before). Sometimes we have Norwegian guests and also my neighbor is from Norway. I will ask them as well.
I’m not glacier obsessive but since half my family are Norwegian I spent a lot of time in that country. My understanding is that the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate have the most extensive national glacier monitoring program in the world and a lot of their publications come my way. However, a simple internet search provides a list of Norwegian glaciers (monitored and reported on at fairly regular intervals). If memory serves, 27 of 31 monitored glaciers in Norway are currently in retreat — if that’s proper phraseology.
Doug,
It is not about glaciers, but about having an opinion based on proper information. As a young student I have worked as ski instructor and know therefore many glaciers in the Alps since over twenty years. My personal impression is that the glaciers did not change very much over the last twenty years and the situation became even better over the last two years. I am very much for protecting the environment and I have studied chemical engineering for this reason. I have examined many concepts including electric cars, photovoltaic and battery systems and also the situation with global warming. There is a lot of misinformation in this discussion and it does not help when people witch hunt people with other opinions. What we need is technical progress – which is clearly poor in this field – and not political pressure and fanatic wording based on shaky facts.
What we need is technical progress – which is clearly poor in this field – and not political pressure and fanatic wording based on shaky facts.
Ok fair enough! Would you mind providing us with concrete evidence of your claim that climate
scientists were heating temperature sensors with truck exhausts in order to get higher temperature readings?
Or was that just another clear case of the fanatical pot calling the kettle black?
Fred,
I know this was a provocative post. This was a newspaper story and I cannot give more details. However, the media hype and the political pressure is going too extreme. The link between CO2 and climate change does not exist as the concentration of CO2 is simply too low to have any material effect on global warming. This is a fact and nobody can challenge me on this. If you have any calculation that shows that 400 ppm CO2 in a gaseous mixture will have an effect on heat capacity, please show me. I have made too many calculations in this field during my life and people go too far by claiming that CO2 is the reason for climate change – although we will have climate change for other reasons. It is my democratic duty to challenge this insane media hype.
” The link between CO2 and climate change does not exist as the concentration of CO2 is simply too low to have any material effect on global warming.”
see
Arrhenius, S., 1896. On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature of the ground. Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, Series 5, Vol. 41, No. 251, April, 237-276.
=
Central and eastern Europe simmering in historic heat wave
By Jason Samenow August 10
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/08/10/central-and-eastern-europe-simmering-in-historic-heat-wave/
My personal impression is that the glaciers did not change very much over the last twenty years and the situation became even better over the last two years.
Science is not based on “personal impressions.” The real scientists develop instruments to measure the extent and scope of glaciers. Those measures indicate that relatively few glaciers are growing and most are declining.
Don,
However OFM asked for people who think that we have a cooling trend. I know I cannot present scientific data in this case, however I know for sure that we have this year in Europe a rather cold year – save a few hot days. By no means we have an exceptionally dry and hot year. This is all media hype.
The orbital forcing seems to lean towards cooling.
200 mph winds are beyond impressive, that storm is downright scary. The fact that it went from tropical storm level to well into the 5 region within 24 hours makes it very difficult to prepare for such a monster storm.
Coincidence or global warming? I go with warming since we have had the hottest recorded year on planet earth so far.
More like it’s an El Niño year and there’s no shear. The ocean temperature anomaly is 1.6 degrees C, which isn’t that unusual. But nowadays everything is global warming, I suppose. They are laying the bs with large shovels.
Maybe you should consider the depth of the temperature analogy, it’s extent, volume and calculate the total energy involved. Of course I am sure you would disagree that the energy driving the El Nino is controlled by the atmosphere.
The energy flow driving El Niño comes from the sun. The atmosphere is just a piece in a huge machine which absorbs photons emitted by the sun, and radiates the energy back to space in the infrared spectrum.
I was trying to explain El Niño to a high school audience a couple of days ago, and summarized the phenomenom as “a cyclic shut down of a cold water current which pops up to the surface off the Peruvian coast and cools the Eastern tropical Pacific”.
The shutdown takes place because the machinery works that way, and the machinery does include the atmosphere. ?
The atmosphere controls 70 percent of the energy flow. There is no machinery, the atmosphere or the surface was not built by humans.
Radiation to space is not just infrared.
Fernando, the currents are driven by solar energies and heat differentials. The energy comes from the sun and is mostly controlled by the atmosphere.
Narrow, linear thinking in a complex system is often seen among scientists, but it still falls far short of completeness and understanding.
The atmosphere lacks heat capacity. The big time energy flows are in the ocean.
The big time energy flow is from the sun on a daily basis.
The atmosphere controls most of that energy.
Since most of the mass of the ocean is isolated from the surface, your statement has little meaning.
The interior of the earth is hot enough to melt rock, yet it’s energy output is small.
The ocean isn’t isolated from the surface. And we have to recall the atmosphere is transparent to visible light, and that visible light is mostly absorbed by the ocean.
Do you want me to give you a basic overview in my blog? I could write a brief memo.
You seem to have a very simple view of the atmosphere, It’s much more complex than you think and controls much of the visible light impinging upon earth.
Even more astounding is your statement that the deep ocean is not isolated from the surface. Really? Then how do you explain the large temperature differential between the surface layer and the deeper ocean?
If there was not thermal isolation between them the deeper layers would be much warmer. Heat exchange between the deep ocean and the surface region is very slow, therefor it is thermally isolated.
Marble, the ocean isn’t isolated from the atmosphere. I think you and I have a different definition of “isolated”.
I’m not about to write a brief outline of ocean-atmosphere coupling, or ocean circulation in a peak oil blog, but I could write a page or two with some cartoons to see if we can get on the same page.
However, I can offer a simple question for you to research: why is sea level increasing?
I didn’t say the ocean was isolated from the atmosphere. Please try and stay focused.
I said that the deep ocean is thermally (and dynamically) isolated from the surface regions, otherwise they would equilibrate as happens in a moving river.
You know where you can stick your cartoons.
From the Hurricane zone
Just got light but steady rain here, the mountains are taking the brunt of it. Will have to watch the rivers tomorrow, there could be a severe risk of flooding. No wind, quite still.
I would not like to be anywhere near Manzanilla, my thoughts go out to them. That area will get hit hard and will need a lot of help.
NAOM
They will be ok. I predict a few trees down, a few streets flooded, and a guy hit by a flying bar sign. The storm looked more like a large tornado, one has to be a few km to the south of the eye center to feel much wind, and it moves so fast it doesn’t have time to rock large trees long enough to pull them up.
I’ve lived through hurricanes in Cuba, Florida, Texas, and Lousiana. In a couple of cases I was in the eye. I also had lots of relatives go through them. My dad explained to me a long time ago the fast moving ones were usually better because the wind gusts didn’t have time to rock the trees and branches enough to pull or break them. He actually showed me how it worked during a hurricane in Cuba, he let me watch a tree he thought was gong to tip over, and I saw the whole process, the way it was rocked, gradually pulled out of th ground, and eventually sucked right up. That tree simply disappeared.
Flying junk is really dangerous. Tin roofs are awful. My dad told me he saw a guy hit by a tin roof when he was little, it sheared the guy’s head off.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/10/22/venezuela-envoy-to-un-dismisses-report-billions-in-bribes-at-oil-company/
This very short article is based on a WSJ article I can’t get, it is paywalled.
But nobody is going to be surprised.
Strange if I google it I can read the article but if I try to place the link here it is paywalled…. go figure.
The NY times has a very long story. I put it on my Twitter.
This story timing is really weird. I heard from Venezuela before these stories came out that Maduro was looking for a very high level punk he could blame for the economic mess. Maduro and Ramirez fell out a while back, they don’t like each other. Thus the story’s timing is convenient for Maduro’s team.
Maduro is behaving very erratically. He started threatening a high level businessman, Cabello played an illegal tape of this guy talking with an economist about Venezuela’s economy, and the regime is now moving g to have the guy arrested. But this guy runs the biggest food processor in Venezuela, and they do a pretty good job running their plants. So it seems Maduro is also trying to get ready for after he rigs the December elections and his party “wins”. They seem to be lining up fall guys for the absolute disaster Maduro and the Cubans created.
The election preparations are such a shambles Brazil announced they would not send anybody to “bless the elections” as they did in the past. Meanwhile Obama keeps blowing kisses at Raúl Castro, who happens to be Maduro’s boss. Go figure.
For the learnered money people,
After reading the RBN article on the bank borrowing readjustment. I had a question.
https://rbnenergy.com/time-of-the-season-fall-borrowing-base-redeterminations-for-e-p-companies-subdued-so-far
Were these adjustments made on PUD reserves based on the last years price of oil, and stated in the oil companies annual reports, or will the PUD have been adjusted to the new price scenario?
How will this indicate what we will see when the 2015 Annual reports are released in Feb? I get the feeling the oil reserve numbers are staying the same, even though the oil price has halved, and time will be running out of developing these lease before they expire.
Aren’t PUD reserves only allowed if there is a current short term plan to develop them?
It really sounds like a game of pretend and extend!
Going thru that in detail. It looks like the chart of a few days ago where an amazing number of resets were put into place pre 1 October.
The SEC reg is the price used to determine reserves valuation for collateral is first of month price over the past 12 months.
Skimming I see mention of non collateral tightening — Chesapeake’s credit line had been unsecured. The bank apparently demanded that it be secured. At first glance this would not matter for a big company because a default is a default — whatever loan, but by securing the line they establish a position in the collection queue for that asset. They are imposing an interest coverage covenant too.
Big picture from what is in that article — the major headline splash of collateral valuation destruction of credit lines is being dodged by the banks, while still limiting new borrowing the companies can do via imposed covenants. Completions are going to fall.
Watcher,
Thanks to your answer, and a special thanks to your persistence of getting your reply to post.
“”The SEC reg is the price used to determine reserves valuation for collateral is first of month price over the past 12 months.”
So you are saying every month, these calculations need to be made? Does this just discount the previously stated reserve figures, by the drop in the average oil price, or does that actually remove reserves that have become uneconomic due to decreasing oil price, and therefore shrinking, the reserve base. Plus each down grade in Capex, must be putting more PUD leases into no mans land and out side the SEC time frame for the areas to be produced.
Going thru that in detail. It looks like the chart of a few days ago where an amazing number of resets were put into place pre 1 October.
The SEC reg is the price used to determine reserves valuation for collateral is first of month price over the past 12 months.
Skimming I see mention of non collateral tightening — Chesapeake’s credit line had been unsecured. The bank apparently demanded that it be secured. At first glance this would not matter for a big company because a default is a default — whatever loan, but by securing the line they establish a position in the collection queue for that asset. They are imposing an interest coverage covenant too.
Big picture from what is in that article — the major headline splash of collateral valuation destruction of credit lines is being dodged by the banks, while still limiting new borrowing the companies can do via imposed covenants. Completions are going to fall.
I can’t see this comment but it says it’s posted, so I’m changing text.
The consequence of the above is not particularly different from a credit line reset. The companies still won’t be able to borrow, or if they do they have to undo the borrowing before the next re-examination of covenant compliance by the bank, which is more frequent than 2X per year. It’s a prevention of borrowing rather than forced liquidation — which may still happen.
In general it looks like they have bought time for the companies, but it’s time during which the companies can’t do much. They are really, extremely, gambling on a price rise.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/-6-5-billion-in-energy-writedowns-and-we-re-just-getting-started
Here is $6.5 Bn Write Down from just 2 companies: Freeport McMoRan and Southwestern. It might be a little early yet for RBN to make any predictions.
Bond yields go negative:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/draghi-s-signal-adds-190-billion-to-negative-yield-universe
Trying again:
Going thru that in detail. It looks like the chart of a few days ago where an amazing number of resets were put into place pre 1 October.
The SEC reg is the price used to determine reserves valuation for collateral is first of month price over the past 12 months.
Skimming I see mention of non collateral tightening — Chesapeake’s credit line had been unsecured. The bank apparently demanded that it be secured. At first glance this would not matter for a big company because a default is a default — whatever loan, but by securing the line they establish a position in the collection queue for that asset. They are imposing an interest coverage covenant too.
Big picture from what is in that article — the major headline splash of collateral valuation destruction of credit lines is being dodged by the banks, while still limiting new borrowing the companies can do via imposed covenants. Completions are going to fall.
I can’t see this comment but it says it’s posted, so I’m changing text.
The consequence of the above is not particularly different from a credit line reset. The companies still won’t be able to borrow, or if they do they have to undo the borrowing before the next re-examination of covenant compliance by the bank, which is more frequent than 2X per year. It’s a prevention of borrowing rather than forced liquidation — which may still happen.
In general it looks like they have bought time for the companies, but it’s time during which the companies can’t do much. They are really, extremely, gambling on a price rise.
Baker Hughes out
Basically flat,
Tx drown 5
La up 5
Permian down 4
Eagles Ford up 1
Oil down 1
Gas up 1
The Baker Hughes Rig Count
I emailed the author of the book and informed him that I had posted about the book on my blog. He replied:
Hi Ron,
Thanks very much for posting about the book. I didn’t read all of the comments, but it didn’t seem like many (or any) of the commenters had actually read the book. To evaluate the connection, you’d probably need to read it, or at least read certain parts of it. You might still disagree with me, of course, but you’d certainly have a much better idea of the argument and the evidence. Titles can be misleading, and book jacket descriptions are pretty minimal. If you ever do pick up a copy, you might be surprised.
Anyhow, thank you for writing, and for taking the survey.
Best,
Matthew
Dear Matthew, I’m not a regular white guy, I don’t live in the USA, I hate republicans, but I’m pro dope, pro gun and pro abortion. If you think I qualify send me a free copy of your book, I’ll read it and give you a free review in my blog.
Regards
Fernando
Fernando “Dear Matthew, …I hate republicans, but I’m pro dope, pro gun and pro abortion…”
You outline a position common to many libertarians.
” but I’m pro dope, pro gun and pro abortion…” – U forgot health care…. more things many gubberments can really foul up … but back to…. Peak oil .. how bout -> Lawyers, guns and money..
Im for health care too. There’s nothing like taking care of ones health
I have ordered the book from Amazon but it has not arrived. I have followed what is now called “peak oil” for more than 50 years. Have also loosely followed Neo-Malthusians and libertarian theory for a similar period, including the Objectivist Newsletter (circa 1963) and the Nathaniel Brandon/Ayn Rand scandal. I recall arguing with Barbara Brandon and other libertarians about whether Ayn Rand had John Galt invent a perpetual motion machine. Will be interested in the historical treatments of these movements and treatment of pioneers such as L. F.( Buz) Ivanhoe. Actually I doubt that many have read this book. There are only two reviews at Amazon.
— What became of Oily Cassandra?
Robert, we anxiously await your review of the book if you choose to write one. If you do and if you post it to me at DarwinianOne at Gmail.com I will put in the main text of the post.
I rarely feel competent to review a 280 page book. But I will take this opportunity to mention a somewhat longer book I found in our local library. The End of Plenty – The Race to Feed a Crowded World by Joel K Bourne Jr. He grew up on a farm and has a comprehensive knowledge of world agriculture. He is also an expert on Malthus and contemporary demography. He discusses various inputs to food production; water, war, plant disease, etc. He states that climate change could render half our farmland useless by century’s end. But he seems to ignore the importance of fossil-fuel inputs. I find one mention of energy on page 316. “Perhaps more importantly, the continent’s renewable energy resources — sun, wind, hydro and geothermal — are even more abundant than its newfound fossil-fuel deposits, creating the opportunity to make the demographic transition with renewable energy instead of coal gas and oil.” I tend to be skeptical of this transition. I find no mention of solar or wind powered tractors. This fossil-fuel hostility is becoming more common. Otherwise a good book recommended for anyone with a deep interest in world agriculture.
Wide scale starvation, grand scale starvation, is a very real possibility if oil and gas supplies come up really short on short notice. We have no way of knowing for sure just how fast production will decline, and some countries could simply find themselves unable to buy fuel, and just as importantly, manufactured fertilizers.
There used to be a big carry of grain over from one year to the next , but not any longer.
I am NOT predicting a wide scale famine will materialize anytime soon, but just pointing out that a large scale famine is not out of the question, considering peaking resources, nationalism, export land, credit crises, religious and cultural and energy wars, etc etc.
Over the long run, barring some miraculous luck on the demographic and technological fronts, famine on the grand scale is baked in.
Now if we are lucky, we meaning humanity as a whole, gas and oil will production will fall off slowly enough that we can compensate when it comes to producing food.
Air ports and airlines for instance are pretty far down the list of industries that keep us alive. There are enough F250 and F350 pickups on the road NOW to supply all the tradesmen’s needs for the next ten years EASILY. We can quit driving such vehicles to the grocery store. ETC.
It is damned unlikely imo that we will ever see a battery powered tractor, not a real one pulling plows and tillage equipment, nor a battery powered combine, not unless somebody invents a MIRACLE battery TWENTY TIMES as good as the best ones we have now. Cars CRUISE, they need a lot of horsepower only to get up to speed. Tractors run HARD all the time. The biggest Tesla car battery currently in production would suffice to run a petite size tractor only about an hour doing field work. In the busy season it would have to run twelve hours a day minimum for weeks on end. That would mean a supercharger on every farm- and the grid is not up to it and never WILL be up to it out in farm country. Eight or nine months out of the year such a battery powered tractor would be used only a few hours once every few days. Methinks diesel fuel or ethanol will always be cheaper and more practical.
Given adequate warning, meaning a large sharp edged brick upside our collective head, and enough lead time, we could produce enough synthetic diesel from coal or biodiesel or ethanol to run farms and trucks to get food from farm to market.
If the inevitably shrinking supply of fossil fuel is properly husbanded and diverted to the essential job of producing and delivering food, there is probably enough to last out this century – at least for those of us with the means to purchase it.Most people would rather eat than own a fuel guzzling car when you get right down to it.
While the labor efficiency of modern industrial agriculture is mind boggling, the overall energy efficiency of modern agriculture is appalling.
We could eat ok using a third of the energy and fertilizer we use now, here in the USA, IF COMPELLED to do so.
A couple of days ago I ate a fair size steak that probably had four times the energy embedded as supper tonight- potatoes,peppers, and onions sautéed in olive oil with a few bits of ham and spices.
Unfortunately if history teaches us anything at all, it is that people and countries can be expected to do the wrong thing as often as not.
DON’T get caught in Egypt.
There are simply too many things that can go wrong, and too many things that would HAVE to go right for the next century or so to be a happy time.
I believe in conservation and efficiency and falling birth rates and new technology, but my personal opinion is that all all of them combined are too little too late to prevent a very hard crash and a major die off of humanity at some point probably within the next fifty to hundred years.
It does not require a great deal of thought to understand WHY a really major shortage of food could come about more or less without any warning.
Agriculture depends to an extreme extent on industrial inputs ranging from machinery to pesticides to fuel to fertilizer to shipping containers. In this respect, the industry is very similar to other major industries.
Some of these essential inputs might be unobtainium in large parts of the world for various reasons ranging from a financial crisis to hot war.
Now if you come up short of new cars or new houses or computers, it is rather unlikely that any body much will DIE as a consequence. We can fix up the old car for another year and use the old computer in the closet and double up.
But we can’t quit eating and there is no large surplus of food in the world that could be diverted in the event of a truly major crop failure. Even if such a surplus were to exist, it might be impossible to deliver it, or to arrange for payment for it.
Now if a population providing its own food is growing substantially, this means that it is devoting more and more resources to domestic food production, meaning generally it is using more and more of its land and water and spending more if its national income on agricultural inputs.
A MAJOR crop failure MUST be expected at some point, due to some unfortunate combination of unhappy events such as war, drought, floods, blight, financial crisis, late frost, etc.
When the failure comes, it is going to come like the drought in California- everybody with a brain had to know it was coming, sooner or later, but hardly a soul did any thing to get ready for it.Californians did what people in general always do- they pressed their luck to the limit. Eventually their luck ran ALMOST out. It looks as if they may get enough rain this winter to give them a reprieve. MAYBE.
If the country involved is already at the brink of food insufficiency and cannot import substantial amounts of food, people who cannot leave will starve in considerable numbers.
To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single country in the world that has a realistic emergency strategic stock of food set aside for use in the event of a wide scale crop failure. The existence of any dedicated food reserve AT ALL is highly questionable although most governments do keep a bureaucratic eye on food supplies.
Now a country as large and geographically diverse and rich as the USA is not in much danger- a NATIONWIDE crop failure here in the USA is extremely unlikely, and if we did suffer the loss of one or two staple crops, we could slaughter a hell of a lot of cows and hogs and eat cheap meat for a while and live on beans and cornbread and potatoes and such for a year or two.
BUT if the monsoon rains were to fail in India…… the large majority of Indians eat damned little meat to begin with and are already eating at the bottom rung of the food ladder.
When you are living on rice and onions and you run out of rice and onions you are in one hell of a fix.
You are quite right, India does have a major population problem. They are also spread around much of the world, so the migration started a long time ago.
Watching how India handles it’s problems will be quite educational for the rest of the world that has not faced this yet.
Since you asked for help in the past correcting your writings, this may help.
You stated “Air ports and airlines for instance are pretty far down the list of industries that keep us alive. ”
Actually that is not really true. All commercial passenger aircraft carry freight and mail as well as passengers and luggage. Much of our commerce is carried by commercial aircraft.
Think too of the highway and very expensive high speed passenger rail infrastructure that did not have to be built and maintained because of jet aircraft. That is a huge saving in energy, resources and money. Aircraft need no infrastructure in between airports to operate.
—————–
The engines and airframes are becoming steadily more efficient. If we can’t keep up our highways, highly efficient aircraft both for shorter and long range trips is the cheapest and most resource saving way to travel. It’s actually the least expensive now, but it will be a while before people learn how to add and see the total costs of highway travel.
I remember when I could only travel on two lane highways to go a distance, speed limits dropping as they passed through towns.
This modern age of superhighway travel is amazing, when they are not parking lots due to crowding, weather and accidents. It’s difficult to give up the dream but we may well have to.
But I don’t think our kids or their kids will mind having superhighways in the sky.
Hey Zepp. At first I thought I might have to disagree on air as efficient re other choices, since it has lift drag, but then I thought of David McKay’s book on the web and his picture of the ground skimmer heavy weapon carrier the russians made.
Fly in the ground effect to reduce lift drag. Yep, makes sense. I like it.
Now all we gotta do is find long straight flat ground to skim, going where we want to go. How about highways?
Collateral advantage- skimmer scares all the ground traffic offa the highway. Turn ’em into more ground skimmers to skim the now emptied highways.
Watching how India handles it’s problems will be quite educational for the rest of the world that has not faced this yet.
Really now? We have been watching India handle it overpopulation problem for about half a century now. What have we learned? Ditto for Bangladesh. What have we learned from them?
Truth is neither country has “handled” its population problems, they have just let them happen. And of course that will be the case for the future. All we can do is just watch.
I was talking about how they handled the problems caused by overpopulation, not population control.
That’s my point. Countries do not “handle” overpopulation. That is they can do nothing to alleviate the consequences, they just watch and suffer the consequences.
Of course you may be talking about how they handle the food riots and such. There could be something learned from that.
Ron,
Here is how India handles it’s problem. While millions starve in their own country they are exporting food.
https://www.agra-net.com/agra/public-ledger/features/analysis-indian-food-export-boom-targets-african-markets-457337.htm
Quite a paradox, but I guess that is one way to handle population.
Quickly depleting multimillion dollar wells. Viable or No?
** “U.S. Shale Drillers Running Out Of Options, Fast” **
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/US-Shale-Drillers-Running-Out-Of-Options-Fast.html
Lets make a Deal: ” No I didn’t get rich You son of a bitch, I’ll be back you wait and see.
My whole world lies waiting behind Door # Three ” – Youtube >> Door Number 3 : Jimmy Buffet.
That’s the trillion dollar question. We are all waiting to find out the answer. Remarkably, demand for oil is very good when you consider the world economy is at best stagnant and at worst in a depression. We may be looking at zombie economies like Japan’s for many years after all the government mismanagement and financial criminality. We don’t have accurate news orgs anymore so it’s difficult to get good info unless you pay good researchers. Time will tell and those of us in the oil business have to hang in there until the market turns.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/dangerous-hurricane-patricia-threatens-mexican-ports-resorts
CAT 5 Landfall’s are very rare.. Possibility in next few hours. Little time to prep..
“With this type of wind the damage is catastrophic; there are very few structures that withstand this” strength of hurricane, Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and spokesman for the National Hurricane Center, said Friday by phone from Miami. “The trees are long gone, we’re talking buildings ripped off foundations.”
Patricia is bearing down on a part of Mexico that is home to Pacific beach resort Puerto Vallarta and Manzanillo, the nation’s busiest container port. Manzanillo also has a liquefied natural gas terminal and a rail line operated by Ferromex, a railroad owned by Grupo Mexico SAB and Union Pacific Corp. Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-biggest metropolitan area, is about 125 miles from the coast.
The hurricane radius is a bit less than 100 miles. I have a climate simulator showing the hurricane force winds will die in a hurry as the core reaches the beach. The terrain is cold, and rugged.
The wind speeds above the surface at 1000 mb near the eye are terrific. That eye looks very tight, it’s more like a huge tornado. But the wind damaged area will be about 150 square miles. I would worry more about floods and landslides.
This link goes into some detail.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/23/science/hurricane-patricia-what-you-need-to-know.html?_r=0
Mac, I have a climate model output on my screen. The storm is very strong but it’s small, the high speed wind field is close to the eye, but I’m seeing much lower speeds away from the eyewall. The wave direction is haphazard, I don’t think there will be a storm surge because the radius is small. The wind was pushing the waves parallel to the beach until 2300 Zulu.
I zoomed in on the data in Puerto Vallarta, and I saw what they showed on CNN a few minutes ago. Slight drizzle, weak wind gusts, the waves are long period, have nothing to do with the hurricane.
I found a small hamlet, about 1200 meters with houses located fairly close to the shore. That spot looks like it’s taking the direct hit, so tomorrow we will see the propaganda machine grind away with some shots of wind damage blah blah blah.
I’m watching CNN and I can discern the breathless exaggeration in the coverage. They put the speeds up in km, rather than mph or knots to subliminally increase impact. i assume they can see what I’m seeing, the barometric pressure is already incrrreasing (my screen output shows 992 HPa at landfall), and the wind is starting to drop. The European coverage is sedate, they realize it’s not as bad as the USA media makes it look. They barely mention it.
Update at 0006 Zulu. I’m laughing my butt off watching CNN trying to inflate a deflating storm story. They go on blah blah using the words “fear”, “disaster”, “good luck”. Bunch of climate panic vultures trying to hype the storm. They even have a sign saying “strongest hurricane ever recorded about to hit land”. It’s a very nice cherry pick. It’s more like a large tornado, but it’s losing speed.
” … very few structures that withstand this”
I was a kid working on an oil tanker in ’69 when Cat 5 hurricane Camille hit the Gulf coast.
The ship was at a refinery 90 miles upriver from Nawlins when the storm struck. (We actually went through it at sea a few days earlier).
On the several hour long trip south as we were leaving … nothing … not a single upright tree nor standing house to be seen anywhere. River was solid with debris.
Old Mama nature can be fierce sometimes.
Update at 0006 Zulu. I’m laughing my butt off watching CNN trying to inflate a deflating storm story. They go on blah blah using the words “fear”, “disaster”, “good luck”. Bunch of climate panic vultures trying to hype the storm. They even have a sign saying “strongest hurricane ever recorded about to hit land”. It’s a very nice cherry pick. It’s more like a large tornado, but it’s losing speed.
These are the last reported stats from NOAA the latest report should be out shortly.
BULLETIN
HURRICANE PATRICIA INTERMEDIATE ADVISORY NUMBER 16A
NWS NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL EP202015
700 PM CDT FRI OCT 23 2015
…EXTREMELY DANGEROUS HURRICANE PATRICIA MOVING FARTHER INLAND
OVER SOUTHWESTERN MEXICO…
SUMMARY OF 700 PM CDT…0000 UTC…INFORMATION
———————————————-
LOCATION…19.5N 104.9W
ABOUT 50 MI…85 KM WNW OF MANZANILLO MEXICO
ABOUT 135 MI…220 KM SW OF GUADALAJARA MEXICO
MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS…160 MPH…260 KM/H
PRESENT MOVEMENT…NNE OR 15 DEGREES AT 15 MPH…24 KM/H
MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE…924 MB…27.29 INCHES
Anyone who laughs at a Hurricane that makes landfall with sustained wind speeds of 160 mph doesn´t have the slightest clue what he or she is talking about. This is a cat 5 hurricane!
I laughed at CNN’s lame attempts to make the storm look worse than it is. I pulled up a climate model on my screen, it dumps the data from a supercomputer, but it’s tied to incoming data. This allowed me to look at the storm in detail.
The storm simply lacked the punch to be that bad. It had a tiny eye, with a very low pressure, which drove the wind speeds to 200 mph.
But the storm was coming in at an angle and location which told me there would be very little danger to populated areas. It simply had a very tiny damage radius.
These things have physical limits. The lowest pressure ever seen in a cyclone was Tip’s back in the 1960’s, and I understand Tip had a larger eye (but in those days that was harder to figure out). So the comments being made on CNN (and on MSNBC) were pathetic. They were inflating and exaggerating the danger.
That storm is probably going to cause more damage inland from flooding and landslides, and it may even get to Texas and cause tornadoes. And those will be worse than what hit the Mexican coast.
I laughed at CNN’s lame attempts to make the storm look worse than it is.
The fact that this hurricane didn’t make a direct hit on either Puerto Vallarta or Manzanillo was by sheer dumb luck and still doesn’t make a storm as large and as powerful as this one, something to laugh at, MSM’s lame reporting nothwithstanding.
BTW I’m really not sure what you hope to accomplish when you write things like this:
Bunch of climate panic vultures trying to hype the storm.
You seem to be the only person here even trying to somehow connect this storm to climate change. I have to wonder why? To me what you are doing is just as lame as the MSM.
Lemme see here, pro dope, pro gun, hates Republicans, hates communists, Obama is brain dead, a tall skinny Jimmy Carter, libertarian.
Beam me up.
Fernando, there are going to be a LOT of people VERY badly affected by this storm and that is not counting the dead. You insult them.
NAOM
Nota oilman: That storm is a plain vanilla hurricane. It’s going to screw up people’s lives. But the coverage was funny. It’s simply a tv network trying to hype a non event, part of the ongoing global warming hysteria they like to peddle.
And please drop the “you insult them” bs. It sure sounds pretty dumb.
Only lazy and brainless people get their weather info from the MSM. Anyone with intelligence uses the actual meteorological services.
So why waste your time and our time writing about network coverage? Does it make you feel superior?
When storms hit this part of the coast the part to the south suffers far worse than the part to the north. Puerto Vallarta is to the north and separated by the mountains that protect it. We are not badly affected. Places south of Cabo Corrientes will suffer as many are very close to the coast following the main road. Rain will cause many issues.
NAOM
At almost six am this morning the news is that this storm has collapsed to a cat one already. Fernando is not batting zero as a hurricane commentator. It also looks as if his comment about the size of the area with very high winds will be proven correct.
This is not to belittle the consequences of this storm when it comes to the people in the path of it.
It cannot be denied that Fernando has a point about the way the news media reported the storm.
It’s gotten to the point that nothing except extreme hyperbole can get even the momentary attention of the general public.
This hyping of this that and the other including the kitchen sink IS bad for everybody. We should not forget the story of the little boy who cried wolf.
When you make a habit of crying wolf every time you see a shadow, eventually people come to believe there ARE NO WOLVES.
I would not be surprised at all to see my own comments about the collapse of society quoted in some hack book written by a right winger lifted from this or the old TOD site, and twisted all out of context.
MAC, thanks for the honesty. You know, the lesson here is indeed the way they exaggerate. MSNBC actually lied in their coverage. But I put CNN on my tv and put the storm data on my computer screen, and only changed channels to see what Euronews and the Spanish channels had.
The CNN center had to have the ability to pull the same data I had. They probably get a lot more, and the data showed very clearly the storm was a fizzle along the coast. The exception was a tiny area where the wind hit at just the right angle, c.ose to the eye.
I saw them interviewing people in Puerto Vallarta, and it was funny. The interviewees couldn’t report anything they could grab and run with, simply because the storm was coming at the wrong angle. I’ve been to Puerto Vallarta, it’s located in a really good spot to avoid storms. So the whole effort CNN made trying to blow up the impact made them look stupid.
Further south they have a more exposed town, Manzanillo. But the storm was wrapped around tight, so that put Manzanillo out of the heavy winds. CNN simply failed to do their homework and spent hours bullshitting, they were on empty but kept jabbering away. Like you wrote, it was a classic cry wolf routine. They are stupid.
Get over it Fernando, MSM hypes the news. If you find that something new, then you just came out of a coma.
The towns got lucky, it hit a low population area, simple as that. Nothing to do with the reporting or hyping, the storm was of a phenomenal nature. Anyone disagreeing with that is an asshole.
Hi MZ,
Generally speaking, you are correct.
But it does us some good to face up to the fact that the media hyping the hell out of this that and damned near everything else makes serious people trying to get the attention of the public look like chicken littles to that same public.
People determined to make political hay out of relatively minor problems in the past have turned molehills into mountains. Pot prohibition comes to mind, as does alcohol prohibition.
The process can work in the opposite direction too, preventing regulation when it is REALLY needed.
This is probably much less obvious to well educated people who mostly associate with other well educated people but it is VERY obvious to anybody who spends much time around people who know no more than they hear on the six thirty news. Hearing the same stuff presented over and over in breathless alarmist tones leads people to the belief the message is bullshit.
The media did it’s job in notifying people of an approaching hazardous situation.
If you cannot interpret the language used by the media by now, I say think about it.
As far as alarmism goes, maybe not so much. Unless you think 1500 people dying in the same area of Mexico in 1956 when a big typhoon struck there does not heighten the need to wake people up and get them moving to safe places when a very major storm threatens.
They were luckier this time. But they were also better prepared because of all the communication we have now.
Don’t get carried into the court of the naysayers. Most naysayers just like hearing themselves and are actually short on the complete picture.
The media hyped and bullshitted, period. I accessed the output of a large climate model that runs on a supercomputer 24/7, looked at the model’s forward projections for 36 hours, and could see the storm was strong but tiny. I could see it was going to miss any large towns. I also saw the interaction with the mountains slowing down the winds before that tiny core hit the coast. I saw, and mentioned, that the wind field switched direction so fast it didn’t get a chance to create a surge. The wave predictions were humdrum. And the main problem was rain, which can cause landslides and flooding.
The media must have had access to professionals who saw what I was seeing, but they didn’t tell the truth. They chose to disinform. MSNBC was extreme, it lied.
International Energy Agency (IEA) projections that show the world will continue its heavy reliance on fossil fuels deep into this century are uncertain and being used to mislead governments and shareholders, according to a new report.
The fossil fuel industry commonly cites modelling by the IEA, an intergovernmental organisation considered to be an authoritative source of information on energy, which finds demand for their products increasing until at least 2040.
But analysts at the London-based Carbon Tracker thinktank found IEA models were based on high-end assumptions about global population and economic growth. In additon, the agency has failed to track the exponential growth of the renewable energy industry.
An IEA spokesman defended the agency’s modelling: “We stand by our analysis. We also think that the world’s climate goals should not rely on a hope that there are fewer people in the world or that they are all poorer.”
But he said that the IEA’s reports were not predictions of the future, instead they were a guide to inform policy makers, shareholders and industry of the consequences of certain courses of action.
“These are projections and are not forecasts,” he said. “Of course, other paths are possible.”
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/23/are-fossil-fuel-companies-using-iea-reports-to-talk-up-demand
US coal wars
WASHINGTON — Twenty-four states filed a legal challenge to President Obama’s Clean Power Plan on Friday, filing a protest immediately after the Obama administration published rules putting the plan into effect.
The petition for review filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia used 10 of its 13 pages just for the signatures of the 24 state attorneys general backing the lawsuit. Its single argument: “The final rule is in excess of the agency’s statutory authority, goes beyond the bounds set by the United States Constitution, and otherwise is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with law.”
Leading the challenge is West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who represents the nation’s second-largest coal producing state. He called the regulations a “blatant and unprecedented attack on coal.”
The states first filed their challenge in June. The appeals court, accusing them of “champing at the bit” to challenge rules that were in the proposal stage, ruled that they had to wait until the final rules were published. That happened when the Environmental Protection Agency published two sets of rules in Friday’s Federal Register, clearing the way for the lawsuit.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/10/23/24-states-file-legal-challenge-obamas-power-plan/74472236/
The Obama administration seems to be brain dead on quite a few issues. I think Obama will be remembered as the tall skinny Jimmy Carter. Nice guy with a shitty foreign policy who batted zero in energy. The only plus he has is the way he half pulled the economy out of the hole he inherited from W. But W was definitely worse. The USA is simply going down the tubes.
Well oil production has just about doubled during Obama’s watch. And oil imports have halved. If that’s batting zero then I have no idea what batting a thousand would look like.
The US may be going down the tubes but for damn sure a lot of Europe is in a lot worse shape. Just what country do you represent Fernando?
That oil production had nothing to do with Obama. He’s basically brain dead, pandering to watermelons. Take the stupid way he blocks exports, or the keystone XL delays. He also screwed up early on, before Macondo blew out. That regulatory agency overhaul was badly needed. Bush sat on the needed reforms, but so did Obama.
Macondo reminds me of the USS Cole. The republicans like to bitch Clinton did nothing. But Bush did even less. The way I see it both parties have extremely serious problems. This is starting to look like the Roman Empire getting run into the ground by very weak leadership.
Take the stupid way he blocks exports,
Well if you think that was his idea, that it’s him blocking exports, then I know how to evaluate your posts from now on. I will know because you know diddly squat about how the US political system works.
And you blame Obama for the Macondo incident. Good God! And Clinton did nothing. Goddammit, just what was she supposed to do? And you did not tell us what country you champion. Just who are the genius politicians in this world?
I think your rhetoric stinks Fernando. Bitching about every US politician but offering nothing as an alternative. You remind me of a fifth grade school boy, bitching about everyone and everything with not a fucking clue as to what the hell you are talking about.
I noticed that when I said insurance companies were funding climate research, Fernando said that was just PR.
So he doesn’t trust US government, doesn’t trust scientists, and doesn’t trust insurance companies.
Yet, somehow people are supposed to pull together to free Cuba.
Yes, I’ve come to think Fernando doesn’t like anyone.
It probably has something to do with first growing up under Batista’s right wing dictatorship as a elite in the country, and then hightailing it to Fascist Spain under Franco.
Causal relationship.
I would offer myself as presidential candidate. But I’m not native born. If I were, I would dye my hair blonde and run on an anti illegal alien, anti war, pro gun pro abortion and pro dope platform. I guess I would be known as Fernando Paul.
I suggest you try to parse hat I write carefully. I brought up the Cole because it was a clear case of Bush incompetence laid on Clinton in the 2001 days. Macondo is a technical and regulatory problem you may not fully understand, but that happens to be my area. I see the problem starting during the Bush presidency, Obama inherited it, and did nothing .
Simply put, the deep water operations had gradually extended into very deep water and steep pressure gradient environments, and there was a tendency to allow for weak well designs. I used to have a position which made me give talks to engineering supervisors, and remind them that nobody ever gets up in the morning with the intention of killing a few dozen people, but shit happens. And in our work we have to make damn sure shit doesn’t happen.
I think in this case everybody screwed up, BP, Transocean, Halliburton, and the government because they permitted that process. And Obama simply failed to sit down and put people in charge with the brains to understand they were sitting on a ticking time bomb. The same way Bush failed to do anything about the Cole incident or the information about the coming attacks.
My Pet Goat syndrome, dude.
Fernando Leanme said:
Simply put, the deep water operations had gradually extended into very deep water and steep pressure gradient environments, and there was a tendency to allow for weak well designs. I used to have a position which made me give talks to engineering supervisors, and remind them that nobody ever gets up in the morning with the intention of killing a few dozen people, but shit happens. And in our work we have to make damn sure shit doesn’t happen.
I think in this case everybody screwed up, BP, Transocean, Halliburton, and the government because they permitted that process….
But it gets worse, for the very same government agencies which “permitted that process” are now waging a holy war against the American people and American businesses (or at least those who lack political clout):
With military precision, the federal officers surrounded the building, donned flak jackets and helmets, readied their weapons, burst in, and forced terrified employees out at gunpoint. Officers ransacked the facility, seizing computers, papers, and materials.
It was the second raid in three years by the Fish and Wildlife Service on Gibson, maker of the famous Les Paul guitar. The situation would be laughable, if the consequences for Gibson weren’t so dire….
“In two cases we had a SWAT team, treating us like drug guys, come in and shut us down with no notice,” lamented Gibson chairman and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz. “That’s just wrong. We’re a business. We’re making guitars.” Juszkiewicz says the raid, seizures, and resulting plant closure cost Gibson more than $1 million.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/278379/gibson-raid-much-fret-about-pat-nolan
But here’s the rub: Fish & Wildlife is the very same agency which, only a few short years earlier, concluded that drilling in the deepwater Gulf posed little threat to wildlife:
By law, the minerals service, before selling oil leases in the gulf, must submit an evaluation of the potential biological impact on threatened species to the Fish and Wildlife Service….
But in a letter dated Sept. 14, 2007, and obtained by The New York Times, the wildlife agency agreed with the minerals service’s characterization that the chances that deepwater drilling would result in a spill that would pollute critical habitat was “low.”…
Deborah Fuller, the endangered species program coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service’s office in Lafayette, La., led the team that reviewed the minerals service’s biological assessment. She said that her office recognized that a big spill would be disastrous to wildlife and that it made suggestions for increasing preparedness for the cleanup of a spill as part of an informal consultation on the biological review.
But she said her office did not challenge the minerals service’s assessment of the risk.
“We all know an oil spill is catastrophic, but what is the likelihood it will happen?” Ms. Fuller asked. She said her office had considered that any likelihood under 50 percent would not be enough to require the protections of her office.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/us/06wildlife.html?_r=0
Anybody even remotely concerned about justice and the rule of law ought to read this link.
http://humanevents.com/2014/05/30/the-true-villains-behind-the-gibson-guitar-raid-are-revealed/
Incidentally,
Any self identified liberal intellectuals who may have made the mistake of saying intelligence EXISTS as an identifiable trait and is a heritable trait or MIGHT exist and MIGHT BE a heritable trait should be aware that they may find themselves excommunicated from the liberal intellectual establishment.
Such thoughts and statements are heresy pure and simple in the leftish leaning academic environment, and that is where the standard of membership is ultimately determined.
The pen, as they say, is mightier than the sword.
I see that the IRS lady who held up the paperwork for conservative organizations has been declared innocent of breaking the law. I don’t expect to hear much about this from the msm press, but if she had been EXPIDITING such paper work almost all the MSM would be calling for her to be drawn and quartered.
Here is another worth contemplation.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/10/20/3713761/exxon-climate-denial/
This former federal prosecutor thinks a RICO case investigation is justified.
Methinks the odds are HIGH that only smaller conservative outfits are in any danger of prosecution by the current day justice department.
This is not to say republicans aren’t even WORSE. Generally speaking, they may be and definitely are when it comes to their big business buddies. I am saying the current D administration is not exactly a stellar example of impartial enforcement of the law.
OFM,
I’m interested in why, in the courtroom of public opinion, the Fernandos of the world are winning so decisively over the Fred Magyars of the world.
This is one of the concerns Matthew Schneider-Mayerson raises in his book. As he puts it:
the decline of trust in social institutions [which] has troubling implications…in our response (or lack of response) to a more immediate contemporary carbon crisis, climate change.
But in order to understand why institutions stop working, we must first understand why they worked in the first place. For as the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson puts it, “Once the others realize they are being exploited, they withold their own invstments and cooperation disappears like water draining from a bathtub.”
The environmentalists and the governmental institutions they work so closely with don’t seem to have gotten their heads around this simple fact. Their morality is of the expedient, Benthamite variety, as opposed to the “sacred,” non-negotiable type. As the president of Gibson Guitar put it in the article you linked:
“You’re fighting a very well organized political machine in the unions,” Juszkiewicz concluded. “And the conservation guys have sort of gone along.” Hey, what’s not to like about $50,000?
Trust seems to be key in establishing and maintaining a unifying belief system and the transmission of knowledge it achieves (if it is successful). “[K]nowledge and information flows require interaction to promote trust,” Maija-Leena Huotari and Mirja Iivonen write in Trust in Knowledge Management and Systems in Organizations.
https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=sVjmAKhRpWIC&pg=PA17&lpg=PA17&dq=information+flow+people+find+someone+they+trust&source=bl&ots=9W29w5-gdh&sig=gh-7ewsOWMqmwgOLu25WyECFO74&hl=es-419&sa=X&ved=0CFYQ6AEwBmoVChMI3M6xo4jbyAIVDPhjCh27KwB2#v=onepage&q=information%20flow%20people%20find%20someone%20they%20trust&f=false
The one-way process of our “culture of technical control,” as Daniel Yankelovich calls it, simply doesn’t work. It is the process whereby the expert speaks and the citizen listens. The experts “assume that they have much of value to communicate to the public, without imagining that the public has much of value to impart to them,” Yankelovich explains in Coming to Public Judgment. “Often without realizing it, they impose their personal values on the country because they fail to distiguish their own value judgments from their technical expertise.”
Or as Huotari and Iivonen conclude, “formal hierarchical structure…has a significant negative effect on knowledge sharing.”
LOL “…Fernandos of the world winning so decisively over the Fred Magyars of the world.” The same reason religious doctrine trumps reason perhaps; we humans seem susceptible to mantra. Sort of like Nick with his: bla bla bla EV bla bla bla EV bla bla bla EV. After awhile discussion is drowned.
I’m interested in why, in the courtroom of public opinion, the Fernandos of the world are winning so decisively over the Fred Magyars of the world.
This is one of the concerns Matthew Schneider-Mayerson raises in his book. As he puts it:
Perhaps you just haven’t really been paying attention as to what is happening recently in that courtroom of public opinion.
Surprisingly, a large majority of Americans (62%) believed that global warming is an urgent threat requiring immediate and drastic action.
– See more at: http://environment.yale.edu/climate-communication/article/american-opinions-on-global-warming-a-yale-gallup-clearvision-poll#sthash.BHRpUXwD.dpuf
And while the jury may still be out in America in the rest of the world that is definitely no longer the case, even Vladimir Putin in his recent address to the UN, was quite clear about this being an urgent issue…
ladies and Gentlemen,
The issues that affect the future of all people include the challenges of global climate change.
It is in our interest to make the UN Climate Change Conference to be held in Paris a success. As part of our national contribution, we plan to reduce by 2030 greenhouse gas emissions to 70-75 percent of the 1990 level.
I suggest however, we should take a wider view on this issue. Yes, we might diffuse the problem for a while by setting quotas on harmful emissions or by taking other measures that are nothing but tactical. But we will not solve it that way.
We need a completely different approach. We have to focus on introducing fundamentally new technologies inspired by nature which would not damage the environment but would be in harmony with it. Also they would restore the balance between the biosphere and the technosphere upset by human activities.
It is indeed a challenge of planetary scope. But I am confident that humankind has an intellectual potential to adress it
Well Imagine that. Heck it almost sounds like Putin has already bought into the concept of the Circular Economy, next thing you know he will be promoting Biomimicry!
https://goo.gl/4josrS
I don’t have a link handy but there is very solid scientific evidence showing that to be able to be successful at affecting social change you do not need more than a few percent of the public to buy into your program at the beginning… It’s simple all that needs to happen is for people to see that the old ways aren’t working anymore, so you don’t have much to lose by trying a different route.
Even Putin can not be the all powerful ruler of Russia with aspirations of ruling the world if Russia’s and the world’s ecosystems collapse. Putin gets this the Fernando’s of the world, not yet.
Fred,
I based my claim on a series of Gallup tracking polls which have been conducted over the years. Attached is a graph illustrating the results.
The percentage who say global warming “is happening/will happen during their lifetimes” has dropped from 75% to 65% during the last 7 years, with the percentage saying global warming “will pose serious threat to way of life” dropping from 40% to 36%.
As to the article you linked, first it says:
Americans were evenly split, however, on their level of worry about global warming, with 50 percent personally worried either a great deal (15%) or a fair amount (35%) vs. 50 percent worried only a little (28%) or not at all (22%).
And then, no sooner than having said that, it turns around and says something very different:
Surprisingly, a large majority of Americans (62%) believed that global warming is an urgent threat requiring immediate and drastic action.
All togehter, it’s just one more layer of contradictory, confusing information for the public to try to work through.
This Gallup tracking poll shows the percentage who say that priority should be given the environment (over the economy) to be dropping signficantly over time, from 70% in 2000 to 46% in 2015.
And this Gallup tracking poll shows that the percentage who respond that the “seriousness” of global warming is “generally exaggerated” in the news has increased from 30% in 2001 to 42% in 2015.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/1615/environment.aspx
Glenn,
You say:
It’s just adds more contradictory, confusing information for the public to try to deal with.
Please go back and read it again. It is quite clear in what it says and it is not confusing or contradictory in any way. You may not like it. You may think the numbers are bogus because you have different information from another source but the content is clearly written.
Is English not your first language perhaps? Or maybe you are missing that fact that he is talking about a couple of different things? Are you confused by the way he breaks down the percentages into subcategories?
On second thought it really isn’t all that important, don’t bother trying to understand it.
I’m interested in why, in the courtroom of public opinion, the Fernandos of the world are winning so decisively over the Fred Magyars of the world.
Aside from the fact that it might not be true, I’m not sure it makes much difference.
Climate is going to do what it is going to do. Whether people believe that or not doesn’t change what will happen in nature.
We are already seeing changes in energy consumption and production because of economics. As resource depletion happens, those realities aren’t likely to change, either.
“Chinese whispers (or telephone in the United States) is a game played around the world, in which one person whispers a message to another, which is passed through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings or as many studies have shown, people have a intentional or unintentional knack for embellishing messages (stories) when they repeat it, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly, and often amusingly, from the one uttered by the first. Reasons for changes include anxiousness or impatience, erroneous corrections, and that some players may deliberately alter what is being said to guarantee a changed message by the end of the line.” ~ Wikipedia
Continuum Filter
I don’t see this as a “who’s winning” or “what does the majority think”. I seldom agree with the US majority, in part because I’m much more educated and smarter, in part because I’m not isolated culturally within the USA, and in part because I strive to avoid brainwashing.
When the neocons orchestrated the lies to create us public support for the Iraq invasion in 2003, I saw right through it. The majority of Americans didn’t. I thought it was a monumental blunder. Most Americans thought it was a good idea.
When it comes to today’s issues, I happen to think the USA is making the wrong moves on almost everything. Illegal aliens, Cuba, Islamic State, Ukraine, global warming, presidential choices… And I keep hoping desperately that I’m wrong, because a nation can’t take so many stupid moves president after president forever. Evidently the whole structure will collapse and it will mostly caused by stupid leaders running a sophisticated propaganda machinery which turns people into stupid followers of really stupid blunders. I don’t have much hope.
Fernando is a stagnant idealist. Nothing passes the Fernando test, however he no doubt has a wonderful fantasy land in his head that we can all strive for. Clearly a fanatic.
I am not familiar with the expression ‘pandering to watermelons’.
Can anyone interpret the meaning of this turn of phrase?
Thanks!
Watermelons is Fernando’s term for environmentalists whom a lot of people call “greens”. Fernando believes they are really communist in disguise. Green on the outside, red on the inside’.
LOL! Even though I already knew that, when I read it it still made me laugh. I mean seriously! I just imagined a comedic animation with talking avatars replaying some of the conversations that occur on this site. I think if we put it on YouTube we might even get a paying audience… Some of this stuff is just pure comedy gold! And not to worry, I can laugh pretty hard at myself as well.
I agree Fred, some of the stuff written hear could easily be put on a conspiracy site. Some people have a very displaced sense of reality.
I think Jean Shepard would have had a great time observing and weaving this century’s pandemonium into entertaining but very enlightening stories.
Fernando has created a second career for himself as a gad fly. His rhetoric is tedious, but he is not nearly so far out in left field as you would think from just a casual look at his stuff.
He for instance acknowledges peak oil, and predicts prices in the one fifty class constant money within a few years. He doe NOT DENY forced warming will occur, but he does think that it will probably be in the lower end of the lower range of IPCC scenarios.
He is DEAD RIGHT imo about the usual IPCC scenarios being totally unrealistic in terms of how much oil and gas we will be burning due to depletion – he does NOT deny peaking resources.
The point I am trying to get at is that even though Fernando constantly grumbles about the same old same old things, he does make some valid points.
Old men have a hard time changing their minds about things.
Well ? Most of us who recognize that eternal growth is an impossibility on a finite planet, those of us who understand the reality of the exponential function, the depletion of non renewable resources, etc, apparently also believe that RENEWABLES ARE TOO LITTLE TOO LATE TOO EXPENSIVE to save our collective ass.
IF we stand FAR enough back from the trees, a whole lot of us see more or less the same forest that Fernando sees, even though he may never admit it. BUT if you are technically literate, and he is, and you do not believe in renewables, but you do believe in peak oil etc, well…. you have a problem.
Old guys do not like to contemplate death and collapse of their world. Most of us deal with this sort of problem by working hard at not thinking about it.
We look for scapegoats.
There are plenty to go around.
Fernando has created a second career for himself as a gad fly. His rhetoric is tedious, but he is not nearly so far out in left field as you would think from just a casual look at his stuff.
Mac, you have your fields confused. Fernando is not in left field, he is deep in right field.. And I know he is deep in right field from a very close look at the crap he posts.
And “gadfly” is one word.
BUT if you are technically literate, and he is, and you do not believe in renewables, but you do believe in peak oil etc, well…. you have a problem.
Yes. I’ve felt Fernando is in doomer territory even if he doesn’t say so. If you acknowledge peak oil but don’t offer solutions, then presumably you expect a crash in some fashion.
OFM, having spent multiple decades working in scientific fields, mostly R&D, for major worldwide corporations, I have an idea of how things work and what is realistic.
One of the big problems in science is not taking into account enough variables and forgetting that some variables are not independent.
The IPCC is probably underestimating the global warming scenario. However, having spent the last two decades studying the situation and reading papers, I now have a new grasp of the subject. If we do not have major changes in the atmosphere (not talking about CO2 level) then the heating will be near the high end of the proposed scenarios. There have already been atmospheric changes in the Arctic regions that have slowed the heating, so it is quite possible that changes in cloudiness and haziness could slow the heating down across the globe. We have some of that due to pollution but so far the atmospheric changes are not happening globally.
So until we see major changes in cloudiness, haziness (aside from pollution) I will stay with the higher end models.
The next decade or two will really show it as we reduce coal burning and replace it with other energy sources.
The key to all this is that the atmosphere controls 70 percent of the energy input/output. The oceans, land masses and ice/snow control about 30 percent. So look to the skies for any major reduction or increase of heating. Smaller changes will be induced by surface changes.
re: Gadfly is one word…
Here are a few more, from realclimate..
6 Sep 2015 at 11:51 PM FYI ‘Fernando’ above: http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=18727#comment-635518 is Fernando Leanme, a tedious self-styled gadfly/social critic/contrarian who regularly posts bosh on various climate forums (e.g. Rabbett Run) and just as regularly gets swatted down for it. His high opinion of Lomborg is not at all surprising. – See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/09/unforced-variations-sept-2015/#sthash.pMW7P5j2.dpuf
He may think it is clever but it really doesn’t help him given the term’s long running racist history.
Tool push this goes up above at your link about collateral: It won’t appear there:
Going thru that in detail. It looks like the chart of a few days ago where an amazing number of resets were put into place pre 1 October.
The SEC reg is the price used to determine reserves valuation for collateral is first of month price over the past 12 months.
Skimming I see mention of non collateral tightening — Chesapeake’s credit line had been unsecured. The bank apparently demanded that it be secured. At first glance this would not matter for a big company because a default is a default — whatever loan, but by securing the line they establish a position in the collection queue for that asset. They are imposing an interest coverage covenant too.
Big picture from what is in that article — the major headline splash of collateral valuation destruction of credit lines is being dodged by the banks, while still limiting new borrowing the companies can do via imposed covenants. Completions are going to fall.
I can’t see this comment but it says it’s posted, so I’m changing text.
The consequence of the above is not particularly different from a credit line reset. The companies still won’t be able to borrow, or if they do they have to undo the borrowing before the next re-examination of covenant compliance by the bank, which is more frequent than 2X per year. It’s a prevention of borrowing rather than forced liquidation — which may still happen.
In general it looks like they have bought time for the companies, but it’s time during which the companies can’t do much. They are really, extremely, gambling on a price rise.
“They are really, extremely, gambling on a price rise.”
If they go broke, it hardly matters to them how much they owe, they aren’t planning on paying it back after going bankrupt.
Borrow more and maybe pull thru. Quit borrowing now and go broke for sure.
Test
Going thru that in detail. It looks like the chart of a few days ago where an amazing number of resets were put into place pre 1 October.
The SEC reg is the price used to determine reserves valuation for collateral is first of month price over the past 12 months.
Skimming I see mention of non collateral tightening — Chesapeake’s credit line had been unsecured. The bank apparently demanded that it be secured. At first glance this would not matter for a big company because a default is a default — whatever loan, but by securing the line they establish a position in the collection queue for that asset. They are imposing an interest coverage covenant too.
Big picture from what is in that article — the major headline splash of collateral valuation destruction of credit lines is being dodged by the banks, while still limiting new borrowing the companies can do via imposed covenants. Completions are going to fall.
I can’t see this comment but it says it’s posted, so I’m changing text.
The consequence of the above is not particularly different from a credit line reset. The companies still won’t be able to borrow, or if they do they have to undo the borrowing before the next re-examination of covenant compliance by the bank, which is more frequent than 2X per year. It’s a prevention of borrowing rather than forced liquidation — which may still happen.
In general it looks like they have bought time for the companies, but it’s time during which the companies can’t do much. They are really, extremely, gambling on a price rise.
Thanks, can’t see what the original spam trigger was but better too sensitive a trigger than too insensitive.
http://www.worldoils.com/landrigs/
Rigs for sale.
The last one, the national 2000 hp with the top drive looks nice.
Fernando, just who in the hell do you think you are? Huh? Come on, give it all a rest with these weather watching antics using data from weather satellites.
lol
I guess if there were a storm the size of a hurricane heading towards where I’m at, I would heed any warnings regardless of what might not happen.
‘Don’t you dare take that boat out to sea’ are lyrics to a song written by Guy Clark.
“You better take a weather warnin’ you’ll be shark bait in the mornin’
If you dare take that boat out to sea,” as the song goes.
I know where I am there is oil under my feet, so a rig will come in handy some time in the future, but not right now.
R Walter, I think it’s my background and professional training. I spent years in a senior position supervising or advising very senior managers. My role was to make sure the information being gathered, the decision making process, and the actual execution of decisions, didn’t cause harm, get people killed, or lose money.
My experience shows quite often the information flow is warped. Or cut off. Inconvenient truths are hidden, falsehoods are created. People make the wrong decisions. And when those in the trenches try to carry out decisions, they can get killed or harm others. In other words the chain has links, all the links can have flaws and break, and if one link does break the result can be pretty ugly.
I’m pretty sure you guys have heard this before. But you don’t have it built into you. I used to drill people over and over and over about this topic, I needed team leaders who took it seriously because I couldn’t be everywhere. But it was a constant struggle. Unfortunately we do have people who think they can go through life trusting a tv weather report, and that’s all there is to it.
For example, this article’s title is a lie. Patricia wasn’t the strongest storm ever.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/hurricane-patricia-strongest-storm-ever-measured-hit-mexico-n449731
“In advance of the Tokyo motor show which opens next week, Nissan executives are telling the press that the company expects 10% of its sales to be electric cars by the year 2020 and 50% electric and plug-in hybrid cars by that date. Nissan also says it will lead the auto industry in autonomous driving technology by then.”
I have no idea who may be leading in autonomous autos a few years down the road but I suppose Nissan has as good a shot as anybody. There are plenty of good engineers and programmers at all the larger auto companies, and plain old luck will mean that one company or another will get it right a little sooner than the others.
At any rate Nissan executives are not at all shy about their belief that the day of the electrified auto is here, and that ever tighter fuel economy and emission standards are going to FORCE all manufacturers to build pure electrics and or plug in hybrids.
I have not run across anything in the line of a direct quote from a Nissan spokesperson or executive about peak oil, but let’s not forget that the CEO of TOTAL a couple of years or so ago laid it on the line in no uncertain terms, saying that oil production was just about peaked out and that just holding supplies steady would be the best the industry would likely manage. It seems to me that he was right, even though there is a current oil glut. That won’t last too long given that the population is still growing and the size of the auto fleet is growing even faster.
France is a country that has HAD her sharp edged brick upside her collective head in terms of war and has not forgotten the lesson- not yet at least. Energy security is the primary reason France has a mostly nuclear grid, and plans on having a one hundred percent electrified rail system within the near future.
I would not be too surprised if pure electric autos make up half of new car sales in France within a decade or so. All it would take to make it happen would be a major oil supply crisis, and Sand Country is not exactly the most stable region of the world, to put it mildly. Between Gallic pride and their well founded worries about their security and economy, they are apt to go electric faster than any other major country in the world.
I have been reading that it costs three times as much to put a fender on a TESLA as it does other comparable cars. Now I am a big TESLA fan, although I will never own one and probably will never even RIDE in one.
BUT given that the company maintains apparently near total control over data, and independent garages are stuck without any data, I am wondering just how much it is going to cost to maintain an older TESLA down the road. For sure there will be next to nothing available in the line of after market parts that you could safely install in a fully computerized car unless TESLA gives up the data.
Something is going to HAVE to change in terms of repair work if TESLAS are going to be worth anything when they get older.
Maybe the company will buy up and refurb older models in a company controlled facility and sell them as used cars with a warranty.
In any case my old Chevy truck and my old Ford car can be kept going indefinitely for less than the likely routine maintenance cost of a TESLA S. Never mind depreciation or out of warranty repairs.
But as the parts counter guy told me with a grin once upon a time at the local Mercedes dealership, if people need to ask about the PRICE of Mercedes parts, we would rather they bought a Chevy.
A little piece of chrome plated trim I needed that day cost a couple of hundred bucks- and that was back in the eighties. It probably cost all of a dollar to manufacture at that time including the cardboard box.
It cannot be denied that TESLA has done more to move the auto industry away from oil and towards electricity than any other company. It’s not just sales volume, it’s public awareness that counts.
Maintenance on our Nissan Leaf (4 years old) and Chevy Volt (3.5 years) has been near zero. Replaced the cabin air filter on the Leaf, changed the oil on the Volt, rotated tires. Nothing else.
A few decades ago, I did a repair on one of our gasoline cars nearly every weekend. I must say that the boring lack of maintenance on electric cars is very enjoyable.
With self-driving cars, we may not need to replace fenders very often.
Agreed, but at some point your Leaf and your Volt WILL need repairs- and if you have no access to the necessary data and no aftermarket parts are available, you will be at the mercy of the dealer. So far GM and Nissan are cooperative. Tesla is not -not yet anyway.
If independent shops and back yard guys cannot work on an old car, it will be nearly worthless.
Techsan: Which car gets more use? Also what are your thoughts on the extra mileage on the 2016 Volt. Would it be significant enough to change the amount of driving you do between the Leaf and Volt, if you owned it.
The usage of the Leaf and Volt is probably about equal these days. Mileage limits rarely come into play.
A few years ago, we would drive the Volt to Colorado on summer vacation (1000 miles each way); clearly the Leaf would not be suitable for that.
Both the Leaf and Volt will get a bit of extra mileage in 2016, but it would make no difference to us. My commute to work is 7 miles each way (I bike a couple of days each week). Our longest regular trip is for my wife to visit her mother (25 miles each way, much of that on freeway); the Leaf will make that trip, but my wife takes the Volt because she doesn’t want to worry about it.
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/2985945/wind_and_solars_15_billion_electricity_price_cut.html
This link clearly reveals the sort of cost data that anti renewables folk like to keep out if sight of the taxpaying public.
As far as I can see, this reduction in wholesale electricity costs to the collective buyer is based only on the merit order effect.
There is another effect that comes into play as well, which is not mentioned , but which will become more and more important as time passes.
If we simplify a bit and assume that nuclear, hydro and biofuel use holds steady, then wind and solar power would displace only coal and gas powered generation for all intents and purposes in the USA.
Since we are now getting five percent plus of our electricity from wind and solar power in this country, this is obviously seriously depressing the price of coal and gas on the domestic market to some extent. This is an economic win win for almost everybody, excepting the coal and gas industries and generating utilities of course. Cheaper gas means cheaper food and lower heating bills etc. Cheaper coal means cheaper steel etc.
My guess is that renewable energy subsidies are a bargain taken all the way around.
Even though it is obvious that renewables cannot shoulder the current day fossil fuel load within the foreseeable future, they are already postponing the peak oil and peak gas and peak coal day of reckoning to some extent.
If we can double wind and solar electricity to ten percent in this country over the next few years, this will buy us some time, delaying the day when gas is ultra expensive and burning very much coal is an obvious no no even to a coal miner.
The bigger the renewables industries GET TO BE, NOW, the FASTER renewables production can be ramped up later on when we REALLY need renewable electricity simply because coal and gas are unavailable or too expensive.
It’s the DELIVERED price of coal and gas that counts. Even when both are readily available, delivery might prove to be impossible.
In the event of a drawn out WWIII it is for instance very unlikely that the warring sides will allow tankers and bulk carriers to make deliveries to the enemy.
A single squadron of modern day naval ships could wipe out the existing tanker and bulk carrier fleet in the Pacific or the Atlantic in a week, maybe even faster. Such ships as make port in the event of WWIII will STAY in port.
The article is sheer bullshit. I get an electric bill which has the renewable support segregated as a line item. It’s a positive number.
What we are seeing is a huge flood of garbage, it’s as if a giant bulldozer was rolling up just about any piece of shit, trash, junk, and dead animals, covered with flies, rats, and roaches, to cover people with a sea of corrupted and evil smelling crap.
Here, read this World Bank report. If you don’t have the time, start on page 26 and continue reading a few pages.
http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2014/12/23/000350881_20141223091204/Rendered/PDF/PAD10070PAD0P100disclosed0120220140.pdf
This link clearly reveals the sort of cost data that anti renewables folk like to keep out if sight of the taxpaying public.
let’s face it. the anti renewables folk are not stupid and they can read the writing on the wall. They most definitely don’t want the people to understand what is really happening in the world today. Just imagine what happens if more and more people divest from fossil fuels and start investing in companies like these instead.
https://goo.gl/FGaTse
On second thought maybe the anti renewables folk aren’t as smart as they think after all, if they were they would be massively investing in renewables and divesting from fossil fuels as fast as possible.
“But what…is it good for?” — Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
CONGRESS MOVING TOWARD EXTENDING DEADLINE FOR RAILROAD PTC
It appears at this point that Congress might extend the deadline for positive train control implementation. This will essentially prevent freight and passenger service from grinding to a standstill.
http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/257566-agreement-reached-on-automated-train-extension
Freight railroads have been very good at adapting to political and business changes, but they respond slowly due to the large size of their infrastructure.
So maybe we will get a few more years of business as abnormal before the real resource depletions hit home.
Another pure energy comment (I presume this site is dominated by Texans).
WHY DO NORWEGIANS USE ‘TEXAS’ TO MEAN ‘CRAZY’?
“Nowadays, the word is widespread all over Norway. It’s frequently used in the phrase “helt texas” [completely crazy], which has appeared in Norwegian newspapers 50 times this year…”
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34622478
Oh they have crazier than Texas much closer to home. Try this 🙂
http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/10/feature-bizarre-reactor-might-save-nuclear-fusion
On the other hand maybe we’ve all just been saved…
Having spent many years working with superconductors and seen some early fusion attempts first hand, this looks like a hugely complex and expensive way to make no power.
Meanwhile that billion dollars could be making 50 million kwh per day or more if it had been invested in solar PV.
My mistake counting zeros, should be 5 million kwh per day.
Anyhow, a mighty good investment. I am puzzled that the money flow to wind/solar isn’t even much greater than it already is.
And, as to hoarding for the crash, how about a warehouse full of PV? when it hits the fan, what could be an easier sell?
And, while we wait, take that warehouse full and spread it around for rent, cheap, so cheap that anybody would go for it.
And teach them how to put up a supersimple use, like farmer’s stock tanks and so on– or at the very least, lotsa hot water.
Anyhow, a mighty good investment. I am puzzled that the money flow to wind/solar isn’t even much greater than it already is.
I think this article from the WSJ underscores a simple fact that even die hard supporters of the fossil fuel business will be very hard pressed to deny. As the EROEI ratio of oil continues to decline. ‘Solar’ is really making economic sense right now. So I predict we shall see that money flow, going from a mere trickle to a raging torrent, in the not too distant future.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/oman-to-build-giant-solar-plant-to-extract-oil-1436344310
Ironically it looks like solar energy is subsidizing fossil fuel… 🙂
I couldn’t read the full WSJ article so I went directly to the Times of Oman.
That is a huge installation, two square kilometers of active thermal solar. Glad to see that a lot of CO2 is being displaced, too bad the product will produce CO2.
Just one more way for solar power to get it’s foot in the door.
I agree with you Fred, solar power will in high demand in the near future.
Yep wimbi, PV and it’s fittings is great to hoard. Also copper pipe and fittings, along with solder, propane tanks and such. Worth their weight in gold (or food) when things get in a pinch.
If things don’t go belly up fast enough, the stuff is still valuable and stores well.
Oil producers with Texas oil are crazy to give away oil, for every one barrel you buy, we’ll give you one for free, 2 for 1, a twofer. Give me 90 bucks, I’ll throw in an extra barrel. It’s Gasoline Alley down in Texas, it’s a gas no matter where you are down there in Texas.
Why not? Everybody else does. The Ruskies do, the Saudis do, the Canadians do, the Norwegians do, the Nigerians do, everybody sells oil two barrels for the price of one. You have to get with the program, can’t fall behind. If we can burn 45 million barrels per day, then we can burn 90 million barrels per day at the price of 22.5 million barrels per day. It’s good bidness, and bidness is good, just like war.
And just like war, we are losing our asses, but who cares? We’re winning!
Who needs renewables when there is plenty of oil to burn? Oil needs to be burned as fast as one possibly can, time to get the job done. Nothing else really matters.
And just like war, we are losing our asses, but who cares? We’re winning!
reminds of this…
“Two farmers bought a truckload of watermelons, paying five dollars apiece for them. Then they drove to the market and sold all their watermelons for four dollars each. After counting their money at the end of the day, they realized that they’d ended up with less money than they’d started with.
“See!” said the one farmer to the other. “I told you we shoulda got a bigger truck.”
David Hughes has posted a “Bakken Reality Check” on the Post Carbon Institute Web site.
http://www.postcarbon.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Hughes-Bakken-Reality-Check-Fall-2015.pdf
If this was posted in the comment on Ron’s Bakken Update on October 13, then I apologize in advance for double posting.
Can’t post this one enough. Shale Oil Seduction! Needs to be on Seeking Alpha. Any such graphics for sweet spots for Texas plays? Actually quite a testament to how industrious these firms are on harvesting the juice. . Once harvest / flows drop on core sweetspots, things will get even nastier . Ugly even for firms that jumped ship before the price collapse:
“Sumitomo now expects to make a net loss of Y85bn ($710m) for the year to March 31, versus an earlier forecast of a Y10bn profit and net income of Y223bn in the previous financial year.
That would rank among the worst performances in its 95-year history. The profit warning comes just six months after the Japanese trading house claimed to have drawn a line under its disastrous two-year foray into shale oil in the US, with writedowns connected to the project almost completely erasing its full-year earnings.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9ba194a4-d2c6-11e4-a792-00144feab7de.html#axzz3papsSJIt
It’s a very basic presentation. I would love to see an intelligent discussion about the impact opex has on ultimate recovery, horizontal well lifting technology at lower reservoir pressures and higher GOR, the potential number of wells at different oil prices, etc.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/science/quantum-theory-experiment-said-to-prove-spooky-interactions.html?_r=0
spooky action at a distance.
That would make perfect sense if the universe is predicated on paradox.
It is entirely possible that the universe both exists and does not.
This would fully explain why Wile E. Coyote did not fall until he looked down.
Toolpush:
So you are saying every month, these calculations need to be made? Does this just discount the previously stated reserve figures, by the drop in the average oil price, or does that actually remove reserves that have become uneconomic due to decreasing oil price, and therefore shrinking, the reserve base. Plus each down grade in Capex, must be putting more PUD leases into no mans land and out side the SEC time frame for the areas to be produced.
http://www.jonesday.com/sec_clarifies_new/
Economic producibility is definitely part of the SEC evaluation. This would seem to involve the valuation of The Company, not of its reserves, and largely that is what a bank cares about. Scroll down to the para labeled 12 Month Average Pricing for Reserves Estimation. Read carefully.
My read is PUD barrels number will not be decreased but claimed potential cash realized from that number will be reduced, and it’s that number that the banks will depend on. However, this procedure determines valuation of the company (as an extrapolation of reserves value). The bank then decides what to do lending-wise to a company that has that poor financial appearance. The previous link somewhere above makes clear the banks are imposing covenants that prevent borrowing while not having to endure the pressures of a headline splashed cut to credit lines. In other words, it looks like the credit lines are not changed, but the covenants prevent them from being used.
“In other words, it looks like the credit lines are not changed, but the covenants prevent them from being used.”
That happened to me when I had my geophysical consulting business. I recall my (Canadian) banker saying: “Yes, that’s all very well but….” The applicable covenant, in microscopically fine print, along with a gazillion others, was related to the price of oil.
Hi Ron, this is an out of sequence reply, but the software means here or nowhere.
Yes, Fernando is much more of a right wing type than a left winger but he has a libertarian / liberal streak too. He is pro abortion and pro dope and anti Isreal. These are not positions associated with the right wing in this country.
I have heard people say “he’s way out in left field” many times meaning a person is badly mistaken in his opinions or maybe a simpleton or nut case.
You say “out of pocket” when you are unavailable, which is a new use of this phrase in my experience.To me it relates to unexpected minor expenses. ” I’m out of pocket ten bucks for parking because I had to go downtown on personal business.”
English slang and local usage can be confusing to say the least.
Yair . . .
OFM . . . especially American English slang, very confusing and some American folks don’t even think it’s slang! (big grin)
Cheers.
Yair . . .
Yair Bipin.
My attention has been drawn to that fact and the Wiki entry before.
However, in the context of my posts it serves as it does in my speech.
It is in fact an aberration of “yes” and some of us old bushies so of drawl it out a little before we speak or make a statement . . . gives a bloke a moment or two to put his thoughts in order.
I notice these days some young folks do the same with the word “so” before they start speaking or making a statement.
Cheers.
I will apologize to Fernando. I was maybe being a shithead, but that’s OK. I’ll place the blame on pigeons.
However, and I may not agree with everything President Obama has done or his policy decisions, he is hardly brain dead. Regardless of the circumstances that have placed him in the position he has attained, those circumstances do not make him a bad person. On the whole, he is a decent human being in the world’s toughest job. If President Obama has done one thing good, it is raising awareness. That is not easy to do. Have to give credit where credit is due.
I did write Obama was like Jimmy Carter. Nice guy but lousy results. McCain would have been much much worse. The American political system is broken.
RRC Texas Oil Production
A long term analysis of the recent RRC Texas oil production reveals a very interesting dynamic. Although the last three months are subject to revisions, it shows that year over year changes of monthly production data have a two year lead time over the production peak. In other words it has been already very clear in 2010, when growth rates in production peaked at close to 50%, that production will grow exponentially. This was therefore an excellent entry point for investments. However, this time, sharply declining growth rates signal currently a precipitous fall of production over the next year. As this is just a year over year analysis of growth rates and not a multivariante analysis, it shows surprisingly clear the dynamic of future production rates. It does not tell why production will fall steeply. The reason could be the bond market, the oil price, depletion of sweet spots or declining well productivity.
Heinrich
I suspect that type of scenario is happening across the spectrum and not just with Texas. We may get some pretty nice drop in production next year but I fear the worldwide terrible economy may negate the effects. Demand is holding up though and growing substantially.
HR,
Thanks for your reply. The most important thing for me is if it is really possible to predict a certain outcome from the data of the the first five months. It has been the case for the upswing of production. I am curious myself if this is possible.
For a slightly different and perhaps more human perspective about climate change from the scientists who actually study climate science…
http://www.isthishowyoufeel.com/how-do-you-feel.html
For anyone interested, Q3 earnings releases are beginning for US E &P. Cabot, COG reported Friday. They have curtailed production in the Marcellus and only completed 6 wells in EFS in Q3, with production dropping in EFS 8%. They are releasing their remaining EFS rig and are running just 2 in Marcellus. They are having trouble with the state of NY re gas pipeline approvals. They lost 4 cents per share in Q3.
Some more Cabot information.
2015 plan on $875 million of drilling and completion CAPEX, $695.8 million has been spent in first 3 quarters, so less in Q4 with activity in EFS being only completions, no new wells.
$265 million cash burn through first three quarters.
Realized $48 per barrel on oil v $97.05 per barrel oil first nine months of 2015 v first nine month of 2014.
Per Texas RRC website, highest oil month was 12/14 – 594,340 barrels of oil sold. 8/15 down to 377,362 barrels sold in Texas per RRC website. A drop from 19K bopd to 12K bopd.
I know Cabot is primarily a gas producer, but it is clear they are just going to gradually complete their remaining DUC’s in EFS absent a rebound in oil prices. Look for their EFS production to continue to fall.
Regarding gas, note CEO says industry is not well hedged in 2016, something like only 20%. Without a rebound in gas prices, could be a large drop in new gas wells also, especially in the NE USA.
For Cabot, per your numbers, annualized exponential net rate of decline in C+C production in Texas was about 70%/year (12/14 to 8/15). Of course, the decline rate from existing wells in 12/14, absent contributions from new wells, was even higher than 70%/year (annualized).
Blink. Isn’t 19K bopd to 12K bopd 37%? Not 70? And since bopd it’s already annualized? Price fall 50% over 8 mos. Maybe that’s the 70 annualized you mean?
Cue Dr. Bartlett. . . .
Take the natural log of 12 divided by 19, and then divide by 0.67. If the decline had taken place over a one year period, the exponential decline rate would have been 46%/year.
And barrels per day has no bearing on annualized exponential decline rate calculations.
okie doke
Shallowsand:
Kinda off topic but I’m curious how much the going rate has fallen out there for properties similar to what you run?I take it a year or 2 ago the going rate was around $100k per flowing barrel & ~$25/bbl proved reserve. Have those come down much in this environment?
That’s a painful question.
A bunch of us oil patch guys working the night shift at Dairy Queen were talking about this very issue the other day.
KellyB. Interesting and painful question. In June, when everyone thought we were headed toward a 2009 style recovery, a lease sold for in the $60K range at public auction. Recently, I have heard of sales around $30K, which is too high if prices stay in this ballpark for awhile.
Sales were anywhere from $80K -$130K in 2013 and early 2014.
The small field we are in has very low declines but very high OPEX, due to a lot of wells not producing much oil, but a lot of water. Well numbers have stayed pretty constant, with about the same number added and the same number plugged each year over the past 15, and probably 1% of the wells producing being wells less than one year old at any time. Since 1999, highest annual production bopd average was 2,759 and lowest was 2,417, with 2014 being 2,568.
I think people here are getting by due to being in extremely good shape financially after a strong 10 year run from 2005-2014, cutting workforce to bare minimum, and almost zero new wells. Those who bought a lot of production 2011-2014 and borrowed most of the money are really hurting.
There are some wells shut in here, but not a lot, probably still less than 5% of the number in 6/14. However, pretty glum mood in oil patch around here, no different from most places I am sure. Several small operators here who could have sold out 2011-2014 and retired probably wishing they did. Not many newbies here, most lived through 1986 and, of course, more recent ones.
We would be better off producing DQ custard than oil right now, for sure. How much more will it cost me to have Krunch Kote on my cone Jeffrey?
Edit, probably less than 5% of producers active in 6/14 have been shut in due to low prices. I foresee more over winter, the low volume ones that tend to freeze up will probably be shut in the first sign of really cold weather and will be left that way till March, if oil stays in the 40s.
First off I want to say that I probably have more “alternative energy” systems than most anyone here so I am not against them.
My argument has always been those who talk about peak oil and climate change mitigation invariably dismiss very real collapsing economy and resource depletion. SImply stating that the “alternative energy” economy will provide jobs for everyone is a lie. This article is closer to the truth;
Like Everything Else, Alternative Energy Requires Cheap Oil
http://fpif.org/like-everything-else-alternative-energy-requires-cheap-oil/
“The trap will become ever more acute the further we move along the depletion curve, since the sacrifice required to invest in renewables will have to come out of an ever-shrinking pie.”
Like Everything Else, Alternative Energy Requires Cheap Oil
In some places it seems that idea is being turned on it’s head. See my comment to wimbi upthread.
http://peakoilbarrel.com/texas-oil-and-gas-decline-in-august/comment-page-1/#comment-543908
Remember the unlimited US 30% US Tax credit for PV goes away next year.
You better have equipment sourced by Q1 2016 and Installed by Q3 if you are going to put in a base system. Expect long lead times next year. I suspect prices will adjust lower in 2017.
I’d agree Jef, most of this “alternative energy” hype is a few guys running toward an impending jumbo jet crash carrying boxes of bandages – too little, too late. If the process had ‘got-going’ a decade or two ago the outcome might have been — at least hopeful. Currently fossil fuels supply approximately 85% of the world’s energy; a lot of solar panels. For the record, my biggest concern for my Grandchildren is global warming followed by economic collapse.
The scenario is non linear.
Transport gets steadily limited to food. So nothing else gets spare parts. Acceleration.
Yes, multi varient and non-linear ————> chaos.
Yeah Doug, with sand and aluminum being such scarce resources there is no chance of PV ever making a big dent in the energy scene.
Now that sounds a tad sarcastic Marble. How about heavy rare earths, gallium, germanium, etc.? 🙂
I just get a bit miffed when that hackneyed but incorrect attitude that everything is rare and we can’t do anything to scale rant starts up.
I’ll try and keep calmer. :-{
Heavy rare earths are not used to make silicon based PV systems.
If you have a need for extremely efficient PV such as in space systems then other elements are used to make triple junction systems that have a broader spectral capability and efficiencies up to 40 percent.
The 20 percent efficiency of single junction silicon is quite adequate for earth based systems, much less expensive, non-toxic and do not depend upon rare elements. We have plenty of room, lots of cheap and common materials to work with, no need for the highest tech systems.
Marble Z,
There was an article on Reuters in mid-September that surprised me: the electrolytic process that gets aluminum out of molten bauxite uses low-sulfur petcoke for the carbon anodes. Aluminum production is thus dependent on petroleum refining, as petcoke is a refining byproduct.
The message the authors had is that refining LTO yields less petcoke than does refining crudes from conventional reservoirs, that the “dominant” (their word) producers of petcoke are China and the US, and that both China and the US have shales in their eyes (go for LTO!) The article was a heads-up.
Aluminum requires much less energy to recycle than to produce, and if need be there are other sources of the carbon for anodes (coal!), but I was struck by how out of left field the possible problem would be if it came about that petcoke availability decreased.
Bauxite? Hell, you want aluminum, why start with that? Just go to the city dump and dig- lotsa aluminum metal, no bauxite needed, and no petcoke either.
And if by some feat of idiotic management, you get really hard up for Al, go to the kitchen, plenty of it there, I looked.
Besides, when you pyrolyze biomass, you get lots of carbon, to stick in the ground, or if you want the bother, into the electrode.
And, not to forget, there are other good ways to get solar electricity. PV is by no means the only one.
Perhaps we need to go back to the drawing board and reexamine all our systems and materials from scratch.
https://goo.gl/nopDea
I enjoyed the video, Fred, as well as your previous TED Talk about the one swimming in the Arctic and mountain.
Tks, Caelan,
You know, the interesting thing about nature and ecosystems is that they work perfectly well without a centralized top down governing body. On the other hand there are very strict rules and all organisms have no choice but to abide by them.
If you take the 3.8 billion years that there has been life on this planet and you illustrate that by representing it with a time line of one year, on that time line, modern humans have only been here for a few minutes…
Back when children behaved like animals from time to time, two children, siblings, were arguing over who wanted a butcher knife. The younger brother pulled the knife from the hand of the older sister, don’t ask me why, they were fighting.
The knife produced a wound, blood poisoning developed soon afterwards and a trip to town to see the doctors. Something had to be done. All of the doctors concluded nothing could be done, no treatment will help, the girl and her parents were sent home to watch her die.
On the way back to the farm they stopped at the neighbor’s farm and the bad news was told to the neighbors. The farmer’s wife at the neighboring farm said, “Oh, I can fix that,” she went out to the barn and retrieved some fresh cow’s manure, placed it in a paper bag and plunged the young girl’s infected hand into the cow manure. Within 30 minutes she was feeling better and the blood poisoning was treated with success. The doctors did not know what could be done, clueless.
It is a true story, she died at the age of 97 and led a very productive life.
Cute, and then there’s also maggot and leech therapy…
And bloodletting and old wives’ tales (some of which could be true or based somehow on it, or…)…
Of course we want to be careful about correlation versus causation.
Pet coke and coal tar pitch are essentially waste products of the refinery process, so that source of carbon has been adapted to the aluminum industry.
About 50 million tons of aluminum are produced each year.
About 21 million tons of anodes and 210,000 metric tons of cathodes were used by the aluminum industry worldwide in 2008.
If oil production reduces, we will have to go back to that good old source of carbon, coal.
Did you know that coal coke was used in heat shielding for spacecraft such as the Apollo command module? Apparently it has great heat shielding properties.
Much more info here about the use of petroleum coke for aluminum arc furnace electrodes.
http://www.rd-carbon.com/data/documents/publications/raw-materials-carbon-products/carbon_products_-_a_major_concern.pdf
Aluminum scarcity, or at least rising prices, may be coming sooner than one might think.
One ton of aluminum requires almost one half ton of petroleum coke – petcoke – in the manufacturing process. The source of petcoke, heavy, non sulfurous crude, is becoming somewhat scarcer as US refineries are processing more lighter crude.
RBN energy just ran an informative piece on this topic.
I was under the impression you mostly BURN pet coke like coal, mostly just to get rid of it as profitably as possible.
At any rate, we can easily afford more expensive aluminum if it is used to reduce the weight of passenger cars and trucks that will be on the road an average of fifteen years or longer, saving some gasoline every trip.
So peak aluminium is predicted in 2018?
“I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke – Can An Impending Aluminum Industry Petcoke Shortage Be Fixed?”
https://rbnenergy.com/i-d-like-to-buy-the-world-a-coke-can-an-impending-aluminum-industry-petcoke-shortage-be-fixed
That should pour cold water on Green Utopia, although I suspect team green will stare us straight in the eye and tell us it doesn’t matter.
There’s also the problem that China, which produces 53% of the world’s aluminum, doesn’t use high-grade anode petcoke, but fuel-grade petcoke, which is outlawed in most of the world because it “contravenes environmental regulations in most countries such as the U.S. where the use of high sulfur petcoke is not permitted.”
That should pour cold water on Green Utopia, although I suspect team green will stare us straight in the eye and tell us it doesn’t matter.
Personally I don’t think in terms of Utopia and I really hate the term ‘GREEN’ but I do understand ecosystems, biology and biochemistry and I think you first have to understand how all of that works before you can speak knowledgeably about what can and cannot be done.
Watch the video I linked to upthread. It’s about biomimicry and Janine Benyus narrates it. I’m sure you will find plenty of reasons why we can’t put any of that knowledge to use but I think differently. And yes, I will look you right in the eye and tell you, you are fractally wrong!
What the heck I’ll put link here again as well: https://goo.gl/nopDea
I think that this is but one of the directions we need to go in.
Uh, Oh. Time to get the Uh, Oh squad out. Another case of impending doom. Has anyone thought to use coal to make coke?
If I only had a brain.
Right, brain in gear. Here we go now.
Lets, see if we use the carbon to make low weight, extremely high strength vehicle bodies there will be no need for a lot of that aluminum and steel making and ergo the need for petcoke for anodes and cathodes. Those bodies and parts will almost last forever because they don’t corrode. I drive a polymer bodied vehicle and no sign of rust at all. So stop burning all that carbon and make things that last from it. Jeez.
Damn, the tree huggers have done it again! Better to be a tree hugger than somebody digging the graves for mankind. Yippeee!! Problem solved.
Oh yeah. Stop calling us greenies, that is so last century Yuppie talk. Tree huggers is OK. Environmentalists, if you can say words that long is fine.
HI MZ,
Do you have an opinion about the FUTURE cost of carbon fiber and polymer materials of the sort used to manufacture aircraft and high end cars – compared to aluminum and high strength steel alloys?
So far as I know a carbon fiber and polymer based car body is for now at least substantially more expensive than a comparable aluminum and steel alloy car body.
If carbon fiber and polymer manufacturing and purchase costs come down far enough, auto manufacturers will necessarily switch away from steel and aluminum.
Ford has in my estimation just bought the loyalty of truck nuts for another decade at least by going to the aluminum bodied f 150, given the improved fuel economy and durability. A well cared for new F150 will still look great when it is fifteen or twenty years old.
Carbon fiber and polymer based cars and trucks would be even better of course- if we can afford them.
Thanks for your thoughts on the viability of air travel and commerce. I believe you are on the money, so long as fuel remains reasonably affordable.
At some point it might be necessary to sharply curtail air travel in order to keep other industries running. Hopefully it won’t come to that anytime soon.
My thinking at the moment is that unless renewables can shoulder the fossil fuel load, or there is a break thru in nuclear or fusion energy, we will be giving up our globe trotting ways. If ground transport is eventually mostly electrified, there would be fuel enough for aircraft for quite some time in spite of peak oil.
It seems very unlikely to me that commercial aircraft can be made to run on electricity within the easily foreseeable future.
Old Farmer Mac,
Apparently there is a problem with getting the components needed to produce greater quantities of aluminum. So I solved the problem, short circuited the steel and aluminum industry. Now you want cost. Well OFM, cost always seems to fall as production goes up. Plus you are getting a material that is lighter than aluminum and stronger than steel that does not corrode. A far superior product that doesn’t need all that coke, coal just some energy to make (at far lower temperatures).
We should be using petroleum and natural gas products to make chemicals, components that last and not burn it.
So we have electric cars with composite bodies that can last thirty years or more with simple maintenance and some replacements. If you could buy one car that would last half a lifetime and not pollute, would it worth a few more bucks.
We have PV and wind to drive low energy industries and cars, homes and businesses. Battery and storage technology is gaining ground fast.
Limestone gravel roads that are bonded with bacteria to be like concrete.
We have all the answers, don’t worry about the cost.
I bet much of the high cost of things is caused by the fossil fuel industries and all those high energy industries we keep trying to promote forward into a lower energy world. Will we keep them limping along when the cost to do it is two or three times monetarily and global destruction environmentally?
The cost of not getting away from metals will be huge. Read that paper on aluminum arc anodes and cathodes and the aluminum industry that I put up just a few comments above.
Not all ideas are good ideas. Maybe the move to aluminum was not a good idea, maybe those engineers a few years ago that said we should go right to composites were right.
So we have short circuited the electric power industry, the petroleum industry and now the steel and aluminum industry.
Keep the faith, there are a lot of answers out there. You are good at doing the smart thing.
Not all ideas are good ideas. Maybe the move to aluminum was not a good idea, maybe those engineers a few years ago that said we should go right to composites were right.
I certainly think that may be so. In my opinion if they were to remake the movie ‘The Graduate’ today, that famous quote: “One Word: Plastics”, would be: “Polymers from CO2 sequestration” . And Dustin Hoffman’s Spider would be a composite fiber electric and it wouldn’t run out of gas… maybe it would need a recharge. 🙂
This is but one example of a company that has taken this tack and is already producing products from sequestered CO2.
http://www.novomer.com/
CO2 Business
Novomer is commercializing a proprietary catalyst system that transforms waste carbon dioxide (CO2) into high performance, low cost polymers for a variety of applications. These polymers contain up to 50% CO2 by mass, sequestering this harmful greenhouse gas permanently from the environment. In addition, waste CO2 is a very low cost starting material that enables competitively priced materials.
Currently ethylene vinyl alcohol (EVOH) and polyvinylidene chloride (PVDC) are used as the barrier layer in most flexible and rigid packaging applications. These petroleum based plastics require significant amounts of energy to manufacture and release large amounts of greenhouse gases in the process. PEC not only offers similar performance but sequesters carbon dioxide from the environment.
As we all know: “making predictions is difficult, especially about the future…” but I have a hunch that we are just starting to see a great increase in some highly disruptive new technologies. BAU is going to be taking a lot of hits.
Because we sure as hell can’t continue on this path.
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/environment/article41416653.html
All this adds up to the fact that stopping ff carbon flow to the environment is not enough, we have to get it back out. Asap.
The only real way I see is by biomass. Lots more of it. That’s why I am working on pyrolyzation- not only carbon back out of the air, but energy out too.
I was surprised to find how easy that was to do, even on a woodstove scale that anybody could do.
Sure, can’t replace ff’s at their present rate of use. Right, and should not- nothing should, given that a very high fraction of ff use right now is stupid, useless, and flat out harmful, so why should any sane person want to keep that up?
The most glaringly obvious example is right in front of the house- the private car. Goddawful waster any way you cut it, and so easy to replace with sane transportation that would be far, far less costly, and more convenient, summed over all.
PS. Warning – gratuitous advice coming up. I wish you good thinkers would do more good thinking and put it down here for me to use, and get the time for it by dropping ANY responses to the likes of Fernando, et al.
Unless, of course, you are doing the responding for amusement and diversion from too heavy do-gooding.
I’m all in favor of amusement. And diversion from dogooding, what a drag.
Fred
Extending, somewhat, on this field of CCS (Carbon Capture and Sequestration), there continue to be rapid advances in products and processes associated with this.
The oil industry is keen on having cheaper, more abundant supplies of CO2 for EOR projects.
The biggest boosters, by far, however, are the coal producers. Their Holy Grail is to be able to burn coal with little to no atmospheric release of CO2 … and that possibility is no longer considered far fetched.
I just read that Miami article.
Of course, it’s those Cuban communists who are behind Florida’s water and flooding problems.
MarbleZeppelin said:
That’s what worries me. It sounds like something straight out of the iconic gay dark comedy, Female Trouble.
Divine, the main protagonist in the film, lectures her little girl:
It’s 1970s gay counter-culture at its best, and thanks to the internet, that iconic two-minute clip can be viewed instantaneously on YouTube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK_4ILe2Iq4
Don’t worry Glenn, costs have a way of going down and when accountants and economists learn to add, the real costs of fossil fuel and heavy industry would knock your socks off. But we live in a world of lies and hype. Hardly anyone can look reality straight in the face for very long.
However those honeys you pictured above might seem free but they could leave you with a costly long term problem. That you should worry about.
Of course women are the most expensive thing in the world. Without women just think how inexpensive everything would be. And all the problems would be solved. Now that is the cheap way out if you worry about money.
But I think Glenn has other things on his mind beside the cost of materials.
Glenn S,
China is moving away from high-sulfur petcoke in aluminum production as part of the effort to reduce air pollution. That was one of the points in the article: China would take more of the low-sulfur petcoke off the market if the international standard for sulfur content is what they adopt.
http://graphics.latimes.com/exxon-research/
Good reporting, the msm does get it right sometimes.
The LA Times is biased and slants their presentation. In the late 1970’s to early 1980’s Exxon forecast more warming than either Hansen or the IPCC, both of which are now known be off by more than half [guess which direction]. So Exxon had the worst forecast. Public documents. Great msm reporting.
??????????????
The reporting is about the coverup rather than the data itself.
Well that certainly is a dastardly thing Exxon did.
“Ideal truth seekers,” as Scott Aaronson calls them, will undoubtedly conclude from this outrage that the only rational thing for our government to do in response is to increase taxes on people who have to work for a living, so that it can help Bill Gates pay for installing solar panels on his 66,000 sq.ft., $150 million house.
Now that would take a load off the grid, saving the burning of untold amounts of fossil fuels.
Looks like a sad version of an amusement park.
Relax, The park runs on top of Windoze Vista ? What could go wrong with hundreds millions of lines of Vista Code? Westworld anyone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westworld
I know Billy G has donated a lot of money to good causes and I am so thankful every time I get on my windows driven computer. Where else in the world could someone make so much money by pushing a cranky mediocre product, over and over again. Good old US of A.
Another worthwhile read.
http://www.ft.com/intl/indepth/china-great-game
Paying for our vehicle infrastructure (roads, bridges, and so forth):
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/driving-true-costs/412237/#article-comments
Wind turbines lose parts while they operate and it is only a matter of time for them all to fail in one way or another, the life of a wind turbine is not as much as expected. They’re obsolete now.
What energy corporation lobbied the legislature in Texas to pass production tax credits for wind turbines and wind farms located in Texas?
a) Enron
b) Enron
c) Enron
d) Enron
e) all of the above
Tesla’s bladeless turbine is receiving some attention.
Leave it to Tesla to have the solution, doesn’t matter when, now is just as good as then.
http://wearechange.org/tesla-technology-5-bladeless-turbines-revolutionize-energy-production/
On sustainable fisheries:
http://www.oceanoutcomes.org/news/sakhalin-salmon-fishery/
R Walter,
You gave me a belly laugh with the ‘revolutionary wind turbine’ site you posted!
Kind of like ‘The Onion’ for wind turbine science and engineering!
http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/25/investing/oil-prices-saudi-arabia-cash-opec-middle-east/index.html?sr=twcnnbrk102515oilpricessaudiarabiacashopecmiddleeast512pStoryMoneyPhoto
“Low oil prices will wipe out an estimated $360 billion from the region this year alone, the IMF said. “
Making products from atmospheric carbon dioxide. Sounds like a great idea. But it’s more than an idea, it’s being done right now.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/540706/researcher-demonstrates-how-to-suck-carbon-from-the-air-make-stuff-from-it/
This is better than the limestone based wetsuit material from Japan. Yes, flexible wetsuit material (poly chloroprene) made from rock. Been on the market for a number of years.
This is just a small scale lab demonstration. It would be great if it could scale to a cost effective way to make use of CO2 exhausts. Carbon nanofibers can be very valuable.
Author,
You do understand that these peaks are not due to a supply shortage but politics? Oil prices have dipped and production is falling off, as soon as oil prices increase and certain shale fields become profitable again.. US production will again begin to increase. Im 23 and at one point I thought I would see peak oil in my lifetime, but with fracking now in full swing, there will always be oil supply available during the next century. Production will depend on world prices not supply limits. 10 Years ago the cries of peak oil were loud, but just look how technology has changed that. We now have a massive increase is known oil supplies and as the future progresses, we will discover even more ways to harness oil that was once deemed non-recoverable. In 5 years the US has surged to the largest oil producer in the world, something no one saw coming a decade ago.. The old peak oil debates are invalid
Waltemj, oil production has always depended to a great extent on the price of oil, and always will. Oil production is a function of the availability of oil at what price. The recent price collapse was as much a function of what the people could afford as it was the supply of oil.
Global Trade Is Collapsing As The Worldwide Economic Recession Deepens. And the recession was caused, in a large part, because of the price of oil.
The peak in world oil production will be the point where more oil is produced than has ever been produced before or ever will be produced in the future.
The available supply of oil is certainly limited by the price of it, that cannot be questioned. In turn, geology and politics (meaning interest rates, taxes, etc ) put a limit on how much can be produced at any given time.
My new rich neighbor is still going to fill up his giant motor home even if it costs him a thousand bucks, instead of two hundred, as it did yesterday when he was in line in front of me. Why SHOULD he pay MORE when he can buy for less?
Sellers right now are willing and obviously FOR NOW ABLE to sell for peanuts, but they won’t be “able” for very long, some of them are in bankruptcy court already. .
This sort of discussion is kind of like watching a dog try to catch its tail. Success always seems to be within sight, but just out of reach. We can’t ever be sure what will happen, but we can at least rule out somethings from happening.
We WOULD be paying a hundred bucks again very shortly if the amount coming to market were to fall off a couple of million barrels or so a day.
But hundred dollar oil would as Ron says put the current shaky economy down for the count. Nevertheless we would pay the hundred, for a while at least.
Personally I believe the world will eventually pay two hundred bucks a barrel in todays money and think nothing of it. Given today’s economy, two hundred dollar oil would be a bullet in the heart. . But fifty years from now, if people are still driving lots of cars, they will be electrics, and ships will be running on coal or coal based synthetic oil.
Oil is the sort of substance that will be worth ten times the current price, eventually, unless it can be manufactured from coal or water and co2. I I already pay fifty bucks a gallon for high quality lubricants in buckets and the transmission fluid for some new cars costs twenty bucks a liter. As the supply shrinks, the price of it will go up and up and up, until it gets to be cheaper to manufacture it than it is to drill for it.
This scenario assumes there will be a successful transition away from the use of oil as transportation fuel of course. If it gets too expensive to BURN it, then the remaining supply may be more than ample at a much lower price to meet our needs for lubricants and other specialty chemicals manufactured from oil. Another tail just barely out of reach, we just can’t say for sure.
IF people quit burning it because it costs too much, then the price will fall and they will roll the old ice car or truck out of the carport and start burning it AGAIN.
Coal to liquid tech will probably work at around two hundred bucks a barrel in constant money according to various estimates I have seen at different websites.So if the economy can adjust to two hundred dollar oil – eventually- coal to liquid tech will likely cap the price at about that level.
It is very unlikely any of us reading this forum today will live long enough to see the price of oil STAY up around two hundred bucks in constant money.
But I would gladly pay ten bucks a gallon, or even twenty, for a little oil and diesel fuel rather than try to plow with a mule or ride a horse to the store. There is a Honda scooter for sale nearby that averages well over a hundred mpg. I couldn’t even think about feeding a horse for what that scooter would cost me to run it at twenty bucks a gallon. I could get to town and back on it for five bucks in less than an hour round trip. It would take about all day on a horse.
Yogi sez predicting is hard.
“…there will always be oil supply available during the next century…”
Your right about dat dude. Everything else you say is completely wrong.
Although the following analysis is from February, I found this one of the most comprehensive analyses of the current situation in the oil market I have encountered, and still very relevant. It nicely combines much of the info we have seen on these pages.
Jeremy Grantham Divines Oil Industry’s Future
There are many nice pieces, but just one excerpt:
”
Why the Saudi’s Decision May Be Wrong
To move back to Saudi Arabia’s decision not to cut back, one thing they may have overlooked, as most of us investors do, is unintended consequences. It is important to recognize in this case that the short-term benefits are spread widely and thinly, but the negatives are concentrated painfully and thus may destabilize the system. The economic pain from the lower oil price on Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria, Libya, Russia, or the Gulf States might set off regional political disturbances or provoke some rash action. Their debt problems combined with those of overleveraged oil sector companies might set off global financial problems. Major shocks like this to the status quo are just plain dangerous, and Saudi Arabia, which loves stability much more than most, may come to regret not having sucked up the pain of selling less for a few years. Cutting back up to half the Saudi oil would have certainly cleared the market for several years and very probably until U.S. fracking supplies peak. Even at its worst for the Saudis, in four or five years isn’t selling half the oil at twice the price a real bargain? All of the fracking oil that can be produced for under $100 a barrel will almost certainly be produced eventually anyway. Current events are very probably merely postponing the production for a while. And the same goes for the bankruptcy of some U.S. oil companies, whose properties will just be taken over by stronger players. Neither of these events appears to be of any longer-term benefit to Saudi Arabia or OPEC in general. Would it not have been better for the Saudis (and OPEC) to let the U.S. fracking industry unload its easy production as fast as possible, peak out in three to six years, and then leave the Saudis firmly in the saddle as the marginal producer once again? If I were on the Saudi long-term planning committee that would definitely have been my vote anyway, especially with the recent passing of King Abdullah, whose successor might not be as careful, generally successful, or as lucky as his predecessor. “
Enno, hard to say, but likely the KSA strategy caused all of the fat to be cut from US shale and Canadian tar sands, making them lower cost than they would have been. OTOH, the ZIRP could very well have led to US producing 10-12 million bopd before geology/economics would have limited the growth.
I still think KSA will lead an OPEC cut at some point. I am a believer in looking at the past to predict the future. It may not occur 12/4, but I think maybe a special meeting in March, similar to 1999?
Hopefully, with a slew or earnings coming out in the next two weeks, we will be able to get a better handle on how uneconomic US shale is at $40, as well as where production is. WLL reports Wednesday.
Enno,
Yes good piece, but it is written in much coded language. And I bet you that 99% of people will not understand what exactly he is talking about.
And who are beneficiaries of the “current system that will destabilize” as he say in that excerpt? Saudi’s are only one of the beneficiaries. And since this was written in February and we are in October we can say that he was very right up to now because what happened in ME since he wrote this piece is equivalent to the fall of “Berlin Wall”.
It’s not a good piece. Here’s what’s wrong with it:
Major shocks like this to the status quo are just plain dangerous, and Saudi Arabia, which loves stability much more than most, may come to regret not having sucked up the pain of selling less for a few years.
Why isn’t it US oil that should have such regrets? Why doesn’t US oil cut back instead of KSA?
Cutting back up to half the Saudi oil would have certainly cleared the market for several years and very probably until U.S. fracking supplies peak.
Why isn’t it US oil that cuts back half? Why doesn’t US oil institute their own peak without outside pressure? Aren’t they already? In fact, this is the core flaw in the article. There Has Been No Significant US Oil Production Decline. The article presumes a boost in price from a KSA cut will fund US oil flow and accelerate a peak. Well, if US oil flows regardless of price (and it is, look at Bakken’s numbers) then why should it make any sense that only actions from KSA would create the US shale peak. They are flowing nearly the same now as before.
And the same goes for the bankruptcy of some U.S. oil companies, whose properties will just be taken over by stronger players.
Banks are keeping them afloat. What numbers is Grantham reading?
Oh and btw, he knows nothing. He’s like all the other newsletter writing hedge fund manager wannabes. Nothing.
Watcher, the US government does not produce oil and the government has no authority to order private companies to cut back production. Who would do that, the President or congress? And whomever did it then it would be political suicide.
Only national oil companies can order a cutback in oil production, or at least countries that have no elected officials that can be tossed out when they displease their constituents.
The US govt could tighten oil lending regulations and cut off the oxygen supply.
There’s not much capitalism left now.
Watcher is a lot smarter his comments indicate, we all know that.
”Why isn’t it US oil that cuts back half?”
I can think of two EXCELLENT reasons right off the top of my head. Both of them will have occured to Watcher.
One is that the Obumbler administration could care less about problems in the oil patch, because the overall benefit of cheap oil to the economy, here in America and world wide, is simply ENORMOUS. Happy consumers tend to reelect presidential candidates of the outgoing incumbent party.
The USA is a trading nation, and also one that imports huge amounts of oil. Cheap oil not only helps Joe Sixpack out every time he fills up his F250, it helps keep our trading partners and allies afloat.
My guess is that the Obumbler has very little use for HRC, but he sure as hell would rather see her in the WH than a republican.
It would be just about impossible, politically, for the Obumbler to restrict oil production. That sort of proposal would fly like a brick, one tossed straight up to fall back on the head of whoever is dumb enough to propose it.
The Saudi royal family is not hogtied by the niceties of ELECTIONS and an opposition party. THAT is why the Saudis CAN cut if they so please.
Furthermore, the Saudis are in effect engaged in a regional war which they are fighting using the price of oil as their primary weapon.
Thirdly, they may not believe they have YET convinced the rest of the OPEC nations that cheating on production quotas is a NO NO.
In a few more months maybe the other OPEC countries will be willing to make some SERIOUS promises about sticking to quotas.
There is obviously enough some infighting going on inside the House of Saud at this time. It may be that the country is running on auto pilot right now and will continue to run on auto pilot until the succession is settled and the new boss is able to consolidate his power.
Well SA is an oil exporter, the US an oil importer, so Saudis, altruistic fellows that they are, should help us with energy independence, by cutting back: we’d both be delighted. To hell with those godless countries who don’t deserve any oil anyway, especially the Chinese, Japanese and Swedes.
One is that the Obumbler administration could care less about problems in the oil patch, because….
Bullshit! Obama has no authority to order private oil companies like Exxon, BP, Shell or even the small companies in the Bakken and Eagle Ford to cut their production.
Of all people Mac, I would have thought you would know that. In fact I think you did know that, you just couldn’t resist a chance to slam Obama for something that you knew all along that he had no control over.
And Obama is President of all American people, not just those that work in the oil industry. He cares about all of them. How in god’s name do you think he could order oil companies to cut back to raise the price of oil? That would hurt all american consumers while helping all the world’s oil companies, but helping American oil companies the least because they cut back while the rest of the world did not.
That would be a very, very stupid thing for Obama to even try to do. And Obama is a very smart man, not at all that stupid.
That would hurt all american consumers while helping all the world’s oil companies, but helping American oil companies the least because they cut back while the rest of the world did not.
Besides, it has been the oil industry that has assured us that it has tons of oil and that the US should let them drill whenever and wherever they want.
Low oil prices are what the oil industry offered us, and now that’s what they have.
Actually Ron if you read carefully you will see that I hardly ever have anything to say favorable about any politician.
I could go back and point out numerous times in this blog, your blog, where I have said Obama is marginally better than the candidates he defeated, that he has done a lot of good things etc.
I agree he has no authority to order oil production curtailed.
My point was that NOBODY, including Obama, would be so politically stupid as to even PROPOSE any legislation allowing that authority, neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I guess I should have pointed out that allowing it would require legislation.
Any republican in office would be in the same spot.
I agree Obama is a very intelligent man.
But national politics in this country is one of the hardest of all hardball games.
He no doubt is SYMPATHETIC at a PERSONAL level concerning the problems of the people in the oil patch, in his role as the president responsible (to some extent) for the overall economy and to a huge extent for the future of his party over the next election couple of election cycles , he wouldn’t do any thing to raise the price of oil even if he could.
There are a few hundred thousand people, maybe a million at the outside, who are directly involved in the oil production industry in this country.
There are a hundred million plus who own cars and trucks and LOVE CHEAP GASOLINE, cheap heating oil, cheap diesel fuel for their tractors and bulldozers and over the road trucks etc.
He has NOT proposed doing anything to raise the price of oil BECAUSE he IS an intelligent politician.
Watcher,
We can’t discuss the things that were not said in the article. We can only discuss what he wrote. What he said was that there are significant risks for Saudi’s with their decision not to cut. That does not mean there are not even higher risks for the rest of the world oil producers especially the high costs ones.
He did say: ” Major shocks like this to the status quo are just plain dangerous” without specifying. But drop of active rigs from 1700 to 595 in North America is quite dangerous to me.
But the core premise is wrong. Overtly. The data is in. Not subject to interpretation. Wrong.
Cutting back up to half the Saudi oil would have certainly cleared the market for several years and very probably until U.S. fracking supplies peak . . . All of the fracking oil that can be produced for under $100 a barrel will almost certainly be produced eventually anyway.
It’s Still Being Produced. That’s the key flaw to the rationale. It’s Still Being Produced.
KSA doesn’t have to do anything to get that oil drained out of US shale. It’s happening with KSA not having changed anything. If that’s the goal, why need they change anything?
Watcher: “If that’s the goal, why need they (KSA) change anything?”
They need them (KSA) because current economic system based on growth is jammed. They need them for “extend & pretend” free market purpose so they can extract the rest of the marginal shale oil. It is hard to pretend that is all fine & dandy with $40 when even Exxon needs $100.
Ves, could you please explain this again another way?
He’s suggesting KSA will act to protect a global narrative of normalcy.
Don’t see it, but it has merit.
KSA will act to secure their future as dominant over their enemies. Just like Russia will. That doesn’t have to align with normalcy.
But. From the Russian perspective, they DO want a configuration of life where their enemies are draining . . . . money . . . for perpetual oil imports, and that’s normalcy. The problem is . . . the Russian strategy for dominance must necessarily not engage on a battlefield where money matters, because of US banking control globally.
So . . . policy will be dictated by pursuit of victory. Not profit, because money is the wrong arena to fight in.
I think that would be preferred but Putin and his advisors likely think in terms of budgets and it would be a hard paradigm change to get into place, so . . . they are forming banks with China and excluding the US from them. It’s a sidestep of sorts and defines a new arena that isn’t defined by US money, but by some other money.
Yep.
Folks like Grantham are so consumed by classical and neo-classical ideology that they can’t imagine life outside the fishbowl of their own making.
Thanks for the elaboration, Watcher.
Enemies? Normalcy?
This kind of stuff here and elsewhere just reads like a sleeping dream– you know– where the scenarios sort of, or almost, make sense, but at the same time, they can be totally surreal and sometimes play on your deepest fears?
But then you wake up. That’s the difference.
By the way, you see this? Syria’s right at the bottom.
…In one dream, there are countless humanesque stick-figures of various shapes and sizes all running toward fences. They scale a few of them and keep running toward these squares, which they enter, after which, the squares blow up. And then the scene cuts to a repeat of the same thing, and so on…
Jeffrey Brown
Jeff, you’re definitely a NG expert, what’s your take on the following. I follow the oil news in Alaska fairly closely but more-or-less ignore the former. With North Slope oil in terminal decline Alaskans seem to be pinning hopes for the future on gas. Would appreciate your opinion on where this is likely to go in real world terms.
GUIDE TO ALASKA NATURAL GAS PROJECTS
“The great North Slope oil discoveries of the 1960s and 1970s also found an estimated 35 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — almost one and a half times the entire volume of U.S. production in 2013. The U.S.G.S. estimates an additional 221 trillion cubic feet await discovery in Alaska’s Arctic, onshore and offshore. If only an economically viable way could be found to move the gas to consumers.”
http://www.arcticgas.gov/guide-alaska-natural-gas-projects
Actually, I wouldn’t classify myself as an expert on NG. But in any case, of course here is the key line from the article, “If only an economically viable way could be found to move the gas to consumers.”
Finally, thank you God (all gods), after centuries of gazing at the heavens astronomers have made a useful discovery.
SPACE BOOZE, ANYONE? THIS COMET IS SPEWING ALCOHOL
“NASA says a comet near the sun is releasing large amounts of ethyl alcohol, which is in alcoholic beverages.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/04bdcc1e0a338d83c5f677633a6caa19.htm
“We found that comet Lovejoy was releasing as much alcohol as in at least 500 bottles of wine every second during its peak activity,” said Nicolas Biver of the Paris Observatory, France, lead author of a paper on the discovery published Oct. 23 in Science Advances. The team found 21 different organic molecules in gas from the comet, including ethyl alcohol and glycolaldehyde, a simple sugar.
And people thought all those UFO’s were coming to earth to visit us. Only after they got drunk on our comets.
Or it could be an alien distillery comet.
Yeah, maybe they put it here so they could get up the courage to visit us.
This guy with the ECONOMIST says the Chinese don’t believe their own economic figures.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/10/chinas-economy
Canadians don’t believe their own economic figures either, especially “official” inflation figures.
OFM, how the hell could they?!
Many analysts reckon real growth is closer to 5-6%, well shy of the government’s 7% target. More than three years’ worth of producer price deflation tilt risks to the downside.
Does anyone really believe that a 7% growth rate year over year is anything other than a pure fanatsy?! That means a doubling of the economy roughly every decade! So in 50 year’s time the Chinese economy would be 32 times it’s present size. There is no way in hell the planet can handle even one more doubling of the Chinese economy!
The late Dr. Albert Bartlett sure was right about the greatest shortcoming of the human race…
Any economist still talking about growth should be lined up against a wall and given a chessboard and all the rice on the planet…
“There is no way in hell the planet can handle even one more doubling of the Chinese economy!”
Well Fred, perhaps you’re being a tad defeatist here. Fact is, many scientists seem to think Earth has a carrying capacity of 9 to 10 billion people so there should be room for a couple billion thriving middle class Chinese. ‘Course they’ll need more space but this can be achieved by continuing to get rid of non-essentials. You know: rhinos, leopards, gorillas, elephants, giraffes, dolphins, wild horses, polar bears, tigers, wolves…….
So long and thanks for all the fish – Hitchhiker’s Guide
LUND university researchers have confirmed that extremely powerful solar storms, far more powerful than any since the Industrial Revolution, have hit the Earth twice within the last thousand years or so.
Tree rings and ice cores that match up by date both have otherwise unexplainable elevated radio carbon content.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151026112106.htm
A really powerful solar storm would DESTROY civilization as we know it, since hardly anything that really matters is shielded, excepting maybe some military equipment. Cars would never run again, and the grid would STAY down, because the lead time needed to source a large transformer is a couple of YEARS and spares are nearly non existent.. Water and sewer would be down with the grid, even late model farm equipment would mostly be down due to being computerized to some extent.
EVEN if the infrastructure necessary to survive such a storm were to remain mostly intact, we would be very unlikely to restart it from a dead stop. Too many things would be wrong, from key people being dead to everybody able to hunker down and hide hunkering down and hiding. The technicians needed to get a power plant running again couldn’t even get to the plant, except by walking. Sourcing enough replacement parts would be totally out of the question.
Such a storm would not in and of itself wipe out humanity, but it might lead to wars that would get nearly all of us. Even the handful of people living the hunter and gatherer life in the Amazon jungles or the outback of Australia might die of radiation poisoning.
Ya can bet the ICBM’s are shielded.
Now we KNOW that there have been two such storms within the last thousand years. That is not enough data to predict the likelihood of another on an annual basis , but it is definitely higher than ZERO.
We fucking KNEW that tsunamis bigger than the one that wiped out Fukushima were possible before the reactors there were ever even CONTEMPLATED.
I read about astronomy, but I do not follow the field closely. Supposedly we can detect transmissions deliberately or inadvertently sent our way by any intelligent alien species that might be out there, this being the whole point of SETI.
( My own personal guess is that any species ABLE to send signals powerful enough to be detectable over hundreds or thousands of light years would have better sense than to do so DELIBERATELY unless the signal was sent out to attract prey dumb enough to reply. Something tells me that ordinary day to day business is not apt to generate such powerful signals. Even the signature of an air blast atom bomb would be extremely faint at interstellar distances. )
If we CAN detect such a signal, it appears to me that it most likely would be extremely faint. Detecting a major solar storm on another star ought to be a piece of cake by comparison. And while only one star in millions might have a planet with intelligent life able to send a signal, presumably every star is going to be subject to having storms. This ought to make it easy to build a solar storm data base.
OTOH , the storm itself consists mostly of charged particles, if I understand this correctly. Would the RADIANT energy associated with it be powerful enough to be easily detectable? Maybe such storms on other stars are not easily detected.
So- does anybody know if astronomers are recording solar storm activity on other stars?
If so, and they are stars similar to our own, after a while this ought to provide enough baseline data to estimate the annual likelihood of our own star producing such storms. If the possibility turns out to be fairly high we ought to be doing at least some preliminary planning to deal with the consequences.
My personal plan, depending on the amount of notice I would have, would be mainly to stock up on anything and everything non perishable and edible I could get home with before it hit and man the barricades, figuratively speaking. I don’t actually have any barricades but I do have water and firewood and a lot of food, but not enough.
NASA Advanced Composition Explorer. Get your real-time solar wind data right here.
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/ace-real-time-solar-wind
OFM, I would not confuse the electrical disruptions caused by a Carrington Event type solar storm with the EMP from a nuclear explosion. A solar storm induces large DC currents in power lines and damages large transformers that assume AC in a narrow range; but my guess is that a solar storm will do little to cars, solar panels, most electronics. A nuclear explosion happens in about a microsecond and sends out a fast pulse that can damage electronics.
The solar storm does not travel at light speed; we will know it is coming and have some time to prepare.
Thanks Techsan, this sort of thing is WAY out of my areas of expertise.
But even if cars would still run, we would be royally and terminally and fatally fucked by a solar storm big enough to take out most or all of the large transformers in the grid. Only a handful of spares are kept on hand, because they fail only rarely and in a predictable fashion. The lead time for a new one, made to order, is said to be a couple of years.
The lead time for a whole new batch with the grid down would probably be forever in practical terms.
Now it just might be barely within the realm of possibility that by using some sort of emergency decree the federal government could force the shut down of the grid, wholesale, on very short notice. But it seems extremely unlikely that this could be done on short enough notice to matter, and the big transformers are most likely hard wired to the transmission lines and most of them would be fried any way imo.
Losing the grid, just losing the grid and nothing else, would put us in mad max territory within an hour. A large city would be totally unlivable within a day without working water and sewer systems.
Food for thought.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/26/cold-economy-cop21-global-warming-carbon-emissions?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Version+A&utm_term=133885&subid=9848135&CMP=ema_565a
Took a look at CLR 10K and 10Q over lunch hour. Looks like they ended 2014 with around 200,000 BOEPD and from most recent press release (9/8) they are projecting to end year 2015 at about 200,000 BOEPD.
Gas part of GOR has been increasing, looks like will end year about 63% oil 37% gas and NGLs.
Looks like will spend about $2.7 billion CAPEX in 2015 to keep production roughly flat, or $37 per BOE.
They have practically no oil hedges, but do have gas hedges. But, assuming no gas hedges or oil hedges, I do not think their realized BOE will be $37 if current prices hold. Looks to me it will come in closer to $32 if things stay at present, so a deficit of about $5 x 73,000,000+ BOE produced in 2015.
So, it appears to me that, absent gas hedges, CLR CAPEX will be greater than gross sales. This means nothing left to pay OPEX, severance taxes (about 10% of gross sales), G & A, or interest on $7+ billion of long term debt. Roughly, OPEX $5, G & A $2, interest of $5, taxes of $3 (all per BOE). So need about $52 per BOE to hold production roughly constant and be cash flow neutral. Assume gas at $2, and 37% is gas, would need to realize about $75 on oil to break even, which I define as flat production, cash flow neutral. This would mean WTI of about $80. This, of course, does not take into account any income tax matters, which I still have trouble getting my hands around sometimes, given the very large deferred income tax liability on the balance sheet.
My figures are rough, done pretty quickly.
This may be why they are targeting SCOOP, the gas hedges? They do still have 8 rigs drilling in Bakken. Wonder if they can keep on drilling at this level if prices remain depressed thru 2016? They say they only will need to spend $1.6-$2 billion in 2016 to keep production flat. But, I assume gas percentage of BOE will continue to increase. And, there will be no ability to pay down and debt principal.
CLR is truly a mystery to me as, given the above, they are trading as if they are worth $100K per flowing BOE, which is at least two times too high given recent asset sales.