The EIA is out with the latest Short Term Energy Outlook. All charts below are in million barrels per day. The one table is in thousand barrels per day. The projected data is through December 2016.
The EIA has Non-OPEC total liquids dropping 620,000 bpd in September, up 280,000 bpd in November but bottoming out in January, February and March, then climbing until October of 2016.
The EIA expects Non-OPEC average total liquids to increase by 140,000 bpd in 2016. The chart above shows the change they expect each country to make. Canada, by far, has the largest increase in production, up by 340,000 barrels per day. Without Canada’s input the EIA says, Non-OPEC total liquids production would be down by 200,000 bpd.
Here are the changes in Non-OPEC production the EIA expects each country to make 2015 to 2016 in thousand barrels per day. Countries not listed had zero expected change from 2015 to 2016.
The EIA says US total liquids production dropped 180,000 bpd in September.
Canada, the EIA says, was down 240,000 bpd in September and up again 270,000 bpd in October and then continue to climb at a steady pace through the end of 2016. The upward trend the EIA expects in Canadian production seems to match the same upward trend that Canada has experienced since 2011. It seems that the EIA expects the drop in the price of crude oil to have almost no effect whatsoever on Canadian total liquids production.
Indonesia has the second highest expected increase in total liquids production, up 70,000 bpd from 2015 to 2016.
Brazil had the third largest expected increase in total liquids in 2016. The annual cycling in Brazil liquids production is due to ethanol production which peaks in June through October and is at the lowest point January through March.
Yemen has the fourth largest expected liquids production increase. The EIA says Yemen liquids will continue at 20,000 bpd through December but jump to 100,000 bpd in January 2016. Production is down in Yemen because of a war going on there not because of natural decline. Apparently the EIA expects peace to begin to break out in January but not to progress much from that point.
This is the latest weekly production numbers from the Weekly Petroleum Status Report. The data here is in thousand barrels per day.
This was mentioned in the comments on the previous post but I would like to bring it up again. Low prices will destroy production then low production will send prices soaring? Then? Somehow this just seems too much to predict but it is a likely scenario. Is it?
U.S. oil output on brink of “dramatic” decline, exec says
* World prices seen too low to support U.S. shale oil output
* Lack of bank financing seen for new shale developments
* Risk low production levels may cause price spike
* U.S. oil sector productivity improvements seen near limit (Recasts; adds U.S. production forecasts)
The chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell Plc agreed, saying U.S. oil producers would struggle to refinance while prices remained so low, leading to lower output in future.
“Producers are now looking for new cash to survive and they will probably struggle to get it,” Ben van Beurden said.
Longer term, there was a risk that low levels of global production could bring a spike in oil prices, he said.
There couldn’t be a better scenario for a peak oil cliff right ahead of us. We have a collapse in prices and recent production increases based on marginal high price sources.
Now the marginals are pumping flat out to pay their bills. Any cash, even if it is earned at a loss, seems better than shutting down production. There are loans to service, employees to pay, machines to maintain and investors to please.
Crunch time is just around the corner. Loss making cannot go on for long.
Yes, it can. Loss is of an imaginary substance called money.
You are aware, that supporting loss making companies doesn’t solve the problem? It may bring some supply, but it will destroy the same amount of demand. The more some project loses money, the more demand destoyed. Who needs oil, that there’s no demand for? Our economy (and demand) exist, because capital in the past was allocated in money making projects. Allocating capital in money losing projects destroys equivalent amount of demand.
Investing capital in some profitable company making insurance brings more oil to the surface in the long run, than investing the same amount of dollars in loss making tight oil company.
Not bad. But the old problem of demand and consumption is encountered.
A poor economy resulting from printing money to lend to get oil is somewhat less important when the level of consumption reaches its minimum, which is enormously greater than 0 mbpd — the minimum required to avoid starvation. The facade of normalcy cannot be maintained when oil consumption levels don’t reflect economic growth, but rather . . . transporting food and spare parts, and transporting workers required to get food, and spare parts for the water pumps.
Thus, we can call demand the desire to consume, perhaps at a level to achieve BAU. But demand is not equal to consumption when one cannot consume as much as one wishes/demands. That’s the point where interest or concern in oil being economical drops to zero.
Isn’t such a scenario already covered by the theory – i.e. “the point where interest or concern in oil being economical drops to zero” is the same point where the price is very high?
No, because government would never allow it. Price is in printed money. It’s not a force of nature. If people can’t pay for oil, it will be subsidized.
I agree, but just because some of the cost is borne by the state doesn’t mean the price isn’t high.
There are loans to service, employees to pay, machines to maintain and investors to please.
LOL! Ironically I just saw an ad in, of all places, the Sao Paulo Craigslist business section, someone in Colorado looking for a partner for drilling, pumping and selling, 195 vertical wells on 1900 acres.
They claim this is a highly profitable venture with a high return on equity. I just thought I’d let everyone here know of this incredible opportunity, just in case the folks here don’t regularly check the Sao Paulo Craigslist business section and might otherwise miss out! Umm, I was about to hit the post button but I decided to ad a /Sarc Tag, just in case, not everyone here has a well developed sense of humor… 🙂
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/did-opec-just-call-time-145315271.html
We will have to see if they cut production together with the Russians. The USA producers are already cutting theirs.
EIA weekly oil production statistics:
US total: +76 kb/d
Alaska: + 18 kb/d
Other states: +58 kb/d (my guess – mainly GoM)
US monthly vs. weekly C+C production (kb/d)
Hi AlexS,
I wanted to continue our conversation from the previous post.
http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-oil-and-gas/comment-page-1/#comment-541458
In the comment above you said:
Annual growth rates of 1 mb/d are in the past, but 500 kb/d are quite possible, probably not for 7-8 years, as Mark Papa says (see Ron’s link below), but at least for 4 -5 years.
I thought at first I did not agree, but with my medium oil shock scenario and the assumption that extraction rates continue to increase at the rate of increase of the past 5 years until 2030 and if we add in NGL output (in boe where 1 b NGL= 0.7 boe) assuming my medium natural gas scenario is followed and barrels NGL per 1000 CF of natural gas produced remains about the same as the past 5 years, I think we peak in 2024. C+C+NGL increases from 85 Mboe/d in 2014 to 88 Mboe/d in 2023, output increases to 87 Mboe/d by 2018 (your 4 to 5 years) so this matches pretty well with your expectations. Doesn’t mean you will be right, but your reasoning (and Rune Likvern’s) seems very sound.
I also agree stocks will continue to rise if the supply expectations of the IEA, EIA, and OPEC are met (I think they are a little optimistic and think supply and demand may balance by the end of the second quarter, unless demand falters as Rune believes, and Rune is probably right).
Scenario for World C+C+NGL below, NGL URR is about 340 Gb, C+C+NGL URR is 3700 Gb with extra heavy oil(API Gravity 10 or less) URR of 600 Gb.
The scenario above seems too optimistic (extraction rates rise to 1979 levels of 8%, which is probably not realistic). The scenario has been modified with C+C less extra heavy oil (C+C-XH) extraction rates rising more slowly to 6.9% in 2024 (from 6.45% in 2014) and then remaining 6.9% through 2030. The peak of C+C+NGL is in 2019 at 86.4 Mboe/d, decline rates are under 1% from 2020 to 2030.
I have my ears tuned for construction and maint. jobs simply because so many friends of my son still work in Alberta in oil related work. Based purely on anecdotal evidence, I find it very hard to believe there will be any increase in Canadian production unless there is a price spike, and even that would be a slow ramp up. Housing is still being built, (apartment construction etc in Alberta), but probably because the financing and starts were in place before current prices settled in. As an aside, my son and his best friend for years are both experienced industrial electricians. Instead of scrambling for construction jobs they have started up their own business based on Vancouver Island and seem to be fairly busy.
Why did it take 100 dollar oil plus 47 more of those dollars per barrel to cause the development of shale oil before it was a threat to price collapse?
Nobody saw it coming and were comfortable with high profit oil prices until shale changed all of the price mechanisms and then shale became the scapegoat about to become, hopefully, a dead horse to be whipped repeatedly with no remorse.
That’s just too bad.
It is herding cats.
English. Desperation as motivation but not as label.
It took more than $100 oil. It also took 0% interest rates and apparently complicit, errr, cooperative lenders who chose to ignore the absence of profitability even at higher prices.
None of this would have happened at $110/barrel and the US 10 yr Treasury note at 6%. It is all borrowed money. Rates were 4% in 2008. Amid the alleged booming recovery, which should have driven them up since, they are now about 2%. The lenders had nowhere else to go.
Watcher,
The lenders had nowhere else to go.
Precisely. Lenders must also show perpetual growth to survive. They are trapped by The Red Queen of finance.
Low interest rates and almost free money required investments, any investments, because that money absolutely had to be put work somewhere to earn something. Shale was attractive and glamorous to lenders, a chance to wear big girl/boy pants in a big business world.
The long term profitability is/was not really important. Most of the people responsible won’t be in the same positions of responsibility at the lenders when/if the losses come home to roost.
The tragedy is the harm this has done to the people who live the oil business, and the loss of small producers who will be pushed out by volatility and low prices with their production not likely to return, ever, and the monstrous waste of resources consumed to develop what Dennis Coyne correctly notes is a pretty small resource in the big picture of global hydrocarbon resources.
Watcher is correct, I think. For the lenders, it was a no brainer, and no choice. Growth is more important than profit, because growth means survival. Losses come due later, hopefully on someone else’s watch.
Jim
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/07/russia-saudi-oil-cooperation-is-hogwash-kilduff.html
Good links, OFM.
Yes OFM, good links.
Although I hate to admit it, LTO has not yet been beaten severely enough into the ground for the oil price to rise much yet.
I doesn’t necessarily need to fall more, and even WTI in the low 50s won’t matter.
However, given the banks are going to keep credit available, and investors just need a $4 WTI rally to bid up shares 40-60%, I’d say the pain, unfortunately needs to continue.
Only if OPEC has had enough, and cuts, can there be a sustained rebound. It will likely be a 1987-1997 type of rebound, with the price between $60-75, with occasional dips back down into the $50s.
That will be better for oil in the long run than another year of $40s, followed eventually by a spike back to $100. I agree with Dennis, OPEC should try to again manage prices. Further, I actually think banks get more conservative if there is a rebound to $60-75. I think banks may demand some principal reduction. Especially of OPEC cuts, but threatens to go wide open again if non-OPEC begins to take off again.
US banks are going to do everything to avoid foreclosure. They will kick the can as long as possible.
Hi SS ,
Your crystal ball is as good as anybody’s but personally I think Old Man Business As Usual will rally at least one more time before he goes to the assisted living home and that oil prices will be back up in the hundred dollar range in the not very distant future.
I just can’t see efficiency of use and conservation measures outrunning depletion- UNLESS of course the world wide economy gets worse instead of better.
There is no doubt in my mind that BAU is a dead man walking- in historical terms. Twenty years isn’t very long in terms of historical time scales, but it’s quite a while on the human scale.
Of course there is a possibility that Iran and Iraq can come on strong, if the perpetual wars in Sand Country can be stopped. Venezuela is headed for a dead sure revolution pretty soon. Anybody who reads the news from that country must agree. Even the home grown mafia that controls the Mexican government may get it’s act together enough to get production up a little, but if so, it will surprise ME.
In the meantime, the population of the Blue Marble continues to grow and to grow more prosperous in spite of all the rhetoric to the contrary.
Now as far as technocopian miracles are concerned, I BELIEVE in them in a general sense. There WILL BE technical miracles- but they are unpredictable and there is no assurance there will be one or more that reduce the need for oil enough to keep the price of it down.
The only one that looks even remotely likely to me at the moment is a major cost break thru in the cost of automobile sized batteries. IF such batteries get to be cheaper than the combined cost of a gasoline engine and transmission, then people would start switching to fully electric cars pdq. But it would take a decade at least for enough plug in only electrics to be built to substantially change liquid fuel demand.
Plug in hybrids will help too, but a VOLT engine and all the associated ice hardware must cost at least four grand at the factory. That much more money going into a less costly battery would put the range up there where it needs to be for range anxiety to be forgotten.
OFM. It is always a tough thing to predict the future. I’m looking out to about 2020-2025 in my previous comment, which I should have quantified.
If OPEC would make a small cut in December, 2015, the price would likely get to $60-75 range IMO, and probably stay there until US hits the downhill on LTO locations, which appears will hit in the next five years, depending on drilling activity.
If there is no cut, I can see the price being much more volatile.
Much depends on how much money is made available in US and elsewhere for CAPEX. It does appear conventional oil has plateaued, and if conventional drops quite a bit, the price could spike by 2018-19. Just all guesses on my part.
I see renewable technology advancing, but I am not yet sure how long it will take for it to become the norm, or if it ever will.
I am in a rural area, so maybe not representative. However, I just do not know of anyone driving EV, outside of one Tesla owner and one Volt owner, both of whom are very well off and both having two other gas powered vehicles.
I do agree, though, EV has come a long way. I had a college professor who had one 30 years ago. Not sure the manufacturer, but it was tiny, and seems like the range was very short.
Hi Shallow sands,
The EV probably does not make sense in rural areas, a hybrid would make more sense (possibly a plugin hybrid). At current gas prices even a hybrid may not pay for itself in a reasonable amount of time. If your suggestion of a long term low oil price environment (10 years?) is correct it will take quite a while for people to move to more efficient vehicles.
My hope is that oil prices will get back to $100/b by 2018, it depends how much oil is produced and how fast demand grows. Such predictions are notoriously difficult.
Rural very poorly defined term. I am “rural ” in just about anybody’s terms.I could get along fine with a Leaf as personal transportation twenty nine days out of the month. The round trip to the town where I shop is twenty five and the county seat for is only thirty miles round trip. The NECESSARY four by four farm truck is a gas hog but I could drive it the thirtieth day.
The thing that blows me away in terms of DISCUSSION of range anxiety and the purchase of pure electric cars is that I seem to be the only person , as a rule, in such discussions, who remembers that most people who can afford a new car already have a conventional car that will be kept as the first or second vehicle.. There are many tens of millions of two car households.
It is NOT range anxiety that is stopping the sale of pure electrics from taking off.. It’s price and lack of confidence in reliability and worry about trade in value down the road.
Now “rural” in Texas or Oklahoma can mean something else altogether.That would be VOLT country for sure. You could get HALF WAY to the supermarket on a charge in a Leaf from some places in REAL farm country. 😉
Hi OFM,
I agree, rural means different things to different people. My cousins from the city called my neighborhood “the country”, it was in fact a suburb with a population of 25,000. The real rural folks, consider a town larger than 300, the “big city”.
I am thinking of parts of the west where population density is under 10 people per square, that would be rural by most definitions, back east we call it uninhabited 🙂
I have put EIA’s world petroleum and other liquids production (Short Term Energy Outlook October 2015) into a stacked, incremental graph.
http://crudeoilpeak.info/latest-graphs
Thanks, Matt. Your graphs are always very informative.
A death spiral for gas demand?
Solar and Wind Just Passed Another Big Turning Point
It has never made less sense to build fossil fuel power plants.
Tom Randall, Bloomberg, October 6, 2015
The actual truth, once you push aside all the liberal propaganda and hot air on display in the mainstream media, is solar and wind are by no means reliable or cost-effective. They require massive government subsidies in the form of money confiscated from us ordinary citizens through taxes just so they can supply a mere fraction of our power needs. The whole scheme is utterly irrational, but makes a certain demographic feel better about themselves. Now, as far as a more realistic power source, nuclear is probably better, but there are a whole host of political problems there. I also won’t rule out the possibility that some other source of energy might be discovered or invented by hardworking entrepreneurs in the future (e.g. cold fusion).
Yet for now, the fact remains that fossil fuels are the cheapest, safest, and most reliable source of energy humanity has ever known. Think about it, fossil fuels have the extraordinary capability to feed and shelter our growing population, power the world’s economies, and make the world a more livable, prosperous place which sets the stage for sustained economic growth throughout the remainder of this century and into the next. Anybody who genuinely thinks solar and wind are going to replace oil and natural gas in our lifetimes is simply dreaming, as it just ain’t going to happen.
Hi Joshua,
Your comment is well enough written to indicate that you are for real rather than a bot. Stick around and you might learn a few things.
It is painfully obvious that you know very little about the falling costs of renewables and the long term depletion of fossil fuels.
Your comment is well enough written to indicate that you are for real rather than a bot. Stick around and you might learn a few things.
I too am willing to bet that Mr. Arthurs is probably real human, at least for now. But and it is, a BIG BUT, I wouldn’t keep betting that way for very long. Just because a text is well written, is no longer a guarantee that the author is human at all… Since I work with corporate communications, this is an issue that I follow very very closely. This might be just one more area where computers put humans out of work a lot faster than any of us might have expected.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_terrifying_implications_of_computers_that_can_learn
So we can see now that computers can not only see but they can also read, and, of course, we’ve shown that they can understand what they hear. Perhaps not surprising now that I’m going to tell you they can write. Here is some text that I generated using a deep learning algorithm yesterday. And here is some text that an algorithm out of Stanford generated. Each of these sentences was generated by a deep learning algorithm to describe each of those pictures. This algorithm before has never seen a man in a black shirt playing a guitar. It’s seen a man before, it’s seen black before, it’s seen a guitar before, but it has independently generated this novel description of this picture. We’re still not quite at human performance here, but we’re close.In tests, humans prefer the computer-generated caption one out of four times. Now this system is now only two weeks old, so probably within the next year, the computer algorithm will be well past human performance at the rate things are going. So computers can also write.
This story is over a year old so maybe the cat is out of the bag already and is visiting sites like this one.
Disclaimer: I am not a computer algorithm 🙂
Yet for now, the fact remains that fossil fuels are the cheapest, safest, and most reliable source of energy humanity has ever known.
Let me guess, you live on Titan?
Saying fossil fuels are safe – just limiting the question to the issue of public health- betrays GLARING ignorance on the part of any person who makes such a statement.
Just about the time you said,”Saying fossil fuels are safe – just limiting the question to the issue of public health- betrays GLARING ignorance on the part of any person who makes such a statement”, this happened.
Three dead in Louisiana gas explosion
Melanie Eversley, USA TODAY 8:32 p.m. EDT October 8, 2015
Three workers died after an explosion at natural gas facility in Gibson, La., Thursday morning, Louisiana State Police said.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/10/08/three-dead-louisiana-gas-explosion/73616596/
The epidemic of asthma and the systemic mercury poisoning of our oceans are just a couple of the major health harms from fossil fuels.
Hi Joshua,
This partly depends on one’s age, if you are 20 and live to 100, it may be that most fossil fuels get replaced by the end of your life. There will not be a need to replace all fossil fuels, just some of them, we should start with replacing as much coal as possible, then oil, and finally natural gas.
There will be an eventual peak in fossil fuel output, probably between 2020 and 2025 for all fossil fuel output in tonnes of oil equivalent (42,500 BTU/metric ton). Once the peak arrives fossil fuels will be in short supply, prices will increase and wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, and geothermal will be more competitive. Demand for hybrids, plug-in hybrids, EVs, and public transportation will increase.
The transition speed will depend on how fast prices of fossil fuels go up and how fast prices of wind power, photovoltaic cells, and batteries decrease as economies of scale reduce costs as these technologies ramp up.
I got my first personal computer 30 years ago and didn’t have internet access at home until 20 years ago, didn’t get broadband until 15 years ago, got my first smartphone about 7 years ago. Technology changes rapidly today. I think a transition time of 40 to 60 years makes sense and that is a conservative estimate, optimists think fossil fuels will be obsolete in 20 years (Tony Seba).
Florida has less than 10 PVwatts per capita… If everyone in the state deployed a
single 280 watt module, the watts per capita would grow by orders of magnitudes. but wait, there’s not enough money for permits.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Worldwide_Photovoltaic_Deployment_in_Watts_per_Capita_by_Country.svg
Permitting is a massive limitation on the PV industry. Germany has a simple web application that takes less than one hour to handle all official requirements. This is an example that needs to be emulated.
“the fact remains that fossil fuels are the cheapest, safest, and most reliable source of energy humanity has ever know..” Change know –> to known. No one will argue that …. Change ” For now ” –> ” till it’s not ” . There.. fixed it for you. “nuclear is probably better” – absolutely – from 1 AU away.
aws,
It is not as easy as it looks like at first sight. The German experiment of massive wind and solar expansion over the last decade has shown that wind and solar are very unreliable and need a supplementary energy source, which can be swiftly loaded on the grid. As solar production is the highest over lunch time, the highest consumption is during the morning and the evening, Germany has to sell electricity over lunch time very often at a negative price and has to import electricity at a very high price during the morning and evening. Therefore solar and wind need extensive natural gas and hydro supply. Although some coal and nuclear can be saved it comes at the cost of an unstable grid. In addition, over the last several years it became obvious wind needs extensive maintenance and capacity utilization is very low. Therefore wind growth investments came down significantly.
Hi Heinrich,
Weren’t there other factors as well such as fewer government subsidies.
Based on BP data wind power consumption for the World has grown about 23% per year on average from 1996 to 2014. Chart below (log scale to show exponential trend).
Dennis,
Referring to Wind power consumption, Germany has a worldwide share of 7,9% and the growth rate is 8,2 %. The US has just a share of 0,5 %, yet the growth rate is 26% (all data for 2014). In my view wind power is limited towards suitable locations in a country. The US has still a lot of room to grow, yet in Europe there is probably not that much capacity to grow wind power. In addition, there is currently a kind of sobering mood for wind energy in Europe.
Hi Heinrich,
At some point the good locations for wind become relatively scarce, perhaps Germany has reached that point, I do not know. Eight percent growth is still pretty good growth. Germany has about 9% of its electricity output from wind in 2014 (BP data), 5.7% of electricity output was from solar for a total of almost 15%, further growth will be slower in Germany, but as fossil fuel prices rise and solar costs decrease things may speed up.
For comparison the US wind and solar consumption was only 4.7% of electricity output in 2014 (also BP data), so the US has only a third of the level of Germany for Wind and Solar. Most new wind and solar subsidies will end Jan 1, 2017 in the US, new subsidies are doubtful so investment will likely fall.
At some point the good locations for wind become relatively scarce
But coal has become scarce even faster in most European countries, if they had it in the first place. I don’t know why people assume that wind and solar power have to be produced domestically within the country that consumes it. That’s certainly not the case for coal, gas or oil.
For instance, Spain could export quite a lot of wind and solar power to the rest of Europe.
Spain could potentially export enough electricity to pay the country’s oil bill.
Putting giant solar and wind farms in Spain would be a lot safer than putting them in some other countries that are less politically stable and less reliable friends so far as Western Europe is concerned.
The transmission lines would also be shorter and could be routed overland thru France – if the French are willing. Towers and right of way are damned expensive.
Underwater cable might be cheaper in some cases but the Med is pretty wide.
Spain doesnt have that much capacity for wind. We definitely don’t want the tourism industry hurt by making the country look like a pin cushion anyway.
The solar exposure is decent, but solar itself has poor economic return. However, the British are welcome to build solar plants and ship the electricity.
Spain doesnt have that much capacity for wind
The latest estimates are 150GW. That’s a lot more than Spain needs.
We definitely don’t want the tourism industry hurt by making the country look like a pin cushion anyway.
You’re assuming that because you don’t like wind. There are a lot of tourists in the world that like wind turbines – some wind farms attract people.
Think of the tourist value of the old Spanish windmills. Think of Don Quixote tilting at them…
Hi Fernando,
At some point solar costs will decrease and fossil fuel prices will increase to the point that solar is economically favorable. As far as I understand the insolation in Spain is quite good, at some point the economics for solar will be better than wind in Spain (or at least better than the undeveloped potential wind sites).
Dennis, the good solar is in the south. But the region also gets a bit of dust from the Sahara.
By coincidence, yesterday the government issued new rules for solar power installations. This generated a huge debate because the solar power lobby wants more subsidies. They are being very forceful trying to sell the “net metering” concept, which amounts to a huge subsidy.
The left, brain dead as ever, loves the idea of solar subsidies, but the government studies show the country just can’t afford them.
As for wind, I saw the bullshit about Spain’s potential. The problem they see with such potential is the cost and the intermittency problem. Spain already uses 100 % of hydro capacity to serve as counterpoint to solar and the installed wind.
So in conclusion, my educated guess is that Spain can serve as a solar power source for Great Britain, but there’s very little utility for wind, because their wind fields are better and the wind blows with very similar patterns. Meaning there are many instances when GB has no wind and neither does most of Spain.
Hi Fernando,
There are probably not that many cases where there is no wind blowing throughout Europe. The electricity can be moved over a HVDC grid. At some point fossil fuels will peak and decline, the energy gap can be filled to some degree with improved efficiency in energy use. What do you propose, biofuels and nuclear only? Nuclear is not cheap (without insurance subsidized by government), biofuels are also not that cheap. The least cost option (including all social costs) should be followed.
Why would the UK be the primary market for Spanish power exports? Germany is just as close, and doesn’t require marine cables.
I realize France is in the way, but France is very used to dealing with large power exports and imports.
Germany has to sell electricity over lunch time very often at a negative price and has to import electricity at a very high price during the morning and evening.
This is a very good explanation for the extremely high interest in new battery technology in Germany. It is probably the best argument for investment in new and somewhat expensive large scale batteries. New electricity storage technologies (batteries) are needed because lead acid, flooded lead acid in particular, will not scale well to the level needed to offer support to grids. I stopped in on a battery maintenance presentation, while attending Solar Power International at the Anaheim Convention Center last month and it was immediately obvious to me that, flooded lead acid batteries will not scale to grid support levels, based on maintenance issues alone, unless large armies of people are to be employed to carry out regular, routine battery maintenance.
That is why increasingly , solar power trade shows have sections dedicated to storage technologies, with increasing numbers of storage appliances i.e., turnkey, preassembled solutions with battery management systems built in (a la Tesla Powerwall). Storage is going to be increasingly important going forward.
Although some coal and nuclear can be saved it comes at the cost of an unstable grid.
I’m sorry but that statement contradicts the reality in Germany. An Internet search for “most reliable electricity grid in the world” brings up several hit for Germany, one of which points out that only Japan and Singapore have more reliable electricity grids.Another article has the headline,” Germany Added A Lot Of Wind And Solar Power, And Its Electric Grid Became More Reliable“. Ironically, the same search results page points out the US grid for it unreliability!
A few of us had a discussion following a post on the effect of renewables on grids and theoretical limits to renewable penetration, on the most recent Non Oil and Gas Open Thread (Posted on 10/04/2015). In the discussion I made liberal use of graphics from a page from the Fraunhoffer ISE Energy Charts web site, a fascinating resource with, what appears to be almost real time data, the most recent actual data being from no more than two and a half hours ago! You might find the discussion interesting.
Islandboy, taking this place to respond to a comment you made under the non oil thread
About China’s coal plants, actually, because China has so few gas plants, China uses coal plants both as base load and to balance demand change. This of course could be a wasteful exercise
I suppose this is as good a place as any to post this:
China increases solar installation target for 2015
With China set to add another 5.3 GW of installed solar power this year on top of its earlier 17.8 GW goal, the country has raised its overall solar installation target for 2015 by 30%.
According to Reuters, which cited Chinese state media reports, the additional installations could lead to more overcapacity in view of narrow grid capacity that has made it difficult for new plants to deliver power.
In light of the overcapacity or rather, lack of grid capacity, the real question is, what’s the rush? Maybe the long term goal is to use solar PV to fill the peak midday demand?
islandboy,
A stable grid is a relative statement and the German grid is reliable for other reasons than wind and solar. I probably have to put it in another way. The costs for being stable and reliable for the German grid have grown exponentially. Germany has one of the most expensive electricity prices in the World as it has to import expensive electricity to stay reliable.
A stable grid is a relative statement and the German grid is reliable for other reasons than wind and solar.
According to the Think Progress article I linked to above, the German grid is reliable because, they are doing an excellent job of managing their mixed resources. Not surprising to me, actually.
Germany has one of the most expensive electricity prices in the World as it has to import expensive electricity to stay reliable
It also has to export relatively more “cheap” electricity most of the time according to the data from Fraunhoffer ISE’s Energy Charts web site, linked to above. I hereby predict that Germany will be the first nation to reach 1 GW of grid connected utility scale battery storage! (Not much a prediction if you really think about it)
Hi Islandboy,
Demand management and flexible pricing are key. Storing the excess in batteries is a very expensive way to go, importing “expensive electricity” will likely be the cheaper alternative. Eventually batteries may be used more extensively as battery prices decrease, but the better alternative is excess capacity with widely dispersed sites for wind and solar (over all of Europe) tied together with a HVDC grid. Such a solution requires very little backup (from batteries, fuel cells, or peaking natural gas power plants).
Hi Dennis, I agree that as of today, storing electricity in batteries is too expensive for really large scale deployment. However, think about this for a minute, if the price delta between the high sand low prices is 15 cents per kWh, that is $150 per MWh, $150,000 per GWh and $150 million per TWh. A lot of energy storage/battery start ups have their eyes on that money but, they know that the lifetime costs of the solutions they are developing has to be less than 15 cents per kWh for the market to take off.
Further down Heinrich Leopold, in a response to a post of mine wrote, “Thanks for the excellent link. There Germany exports 9.7 TWh and imports just 2.1 TWh, yet Austria has according to my understanding still a net export surplus in Euro.” The “There” he was referring to, was the page at the following URL:
https://www.energy-charts.de/exchange.htm
I used the interactive chart at that page, to select the import/export balance for January 2015. The two largest sources for electricity imports for Germany were Austria and Denmark with combined exports to Germany of 669 GWh. Assuming that the electricity was exported to those countries for at least 15c less than the price to import it, there was an opportunity to make $150,000 x 669 = $100.35 million just from the storage of electricity in January 2015! I dunno but, I think that’s enough money to get quite a few people interested and bear in mind that since the scale of the problem is huge the opportunities to make/save lots of money are likewise huge.
Trust me there are ground shaking developments in electricity storage in the works. Take note Fernando. Have any of you guys ever heard of a 2MW, 2MWh battery? They exist and the trend is to even larger batteries in terms of power and capacity.
To get a feel for how entrepreneurs are viewing this, watch how Elon Musk discusses the issue of scaling battery storage in his presentation of his company’s energy storage products.
Hi Islandboy,
The assumption that the price differential between excess electricity that is exported and expensive electricity imports will remain at 15 cents per kWh is not a good one. System wide it will be less expensive to tie together the grid with HVDC transmission and move the electricity to where it is needed, than to use large scale battery storage.
When the price of natural gas rises to the point where battery storage can compete with natural gas plants that provide electricity for peak loads, the batteries will be used. This will only be about 1% of total electricity generation in the future and could potentially be provided by a vehicle to grid setup (or at least in part).
I am less optimistic that battery storage can be reduced to 15 cents per kilowatt hour (including losses) in the next 30 years (if ever).
For islands batteries or natural gas backup will be the logical choice (if the island is too far from the mainland for undersea cables.)
I am less optimistic that battery storage can be reduced to 15 cents per kilowatt hour (including losses) in the next 30 years (if ever).
Might I invite you to have a look at this article, Tesla Powerwall & Powerpacks Per-kWh Lifetime Prices vs Aquion Energy, Eos Energy, & Imergy?
IMO we are witnessing the very early stages of an energy storage revolution. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts, after you have read the article linked above. Of course it is only a matter of time before we find out whether the prices calculated in this article are too high, too low or just about right. Note that, for utility scale storage, their price estimates are between two and nine cents per kWh.
I am far more optimistic than you, when it comes to prospects for improvements in energy storage. The technology we have been relying on mostly, up to quite recently, was invented 150 years ago, for goodness sake!
Hi islandboy,
I think the CleanTechnica article may be leaving out opportunity costs (the upfront cost of the battery should be treated as a loan at the weighted average cost of capital for the utility industry and some reasonable estimate of operating costs and maintenance should be included (the article assumes these are free, a very optimistic assumption).
Take the industrial estimates of 5 cents per kilowatt hour, if those are correct why aren’t these being used in Germany rather than exporting low cost electricity and importing high cost electricity.
The analysis is definitely missing something, possibly the ability of the battery storages ability to ramp up quickly to needed power levels. There is a limit to the peak power that the battery backup can provide economically which the article you linked to does not address.
Battery backup in the real world at the utility scale is far more expensive than 5 cents per kWh, otherwise peaking power plants would be out of business.
Far enough. I still remain more optimistic than you since, despite the errors that you pointed out, the fact that these calculations even approach the ballpark, is quite remarkable to me.
Battery backup in the real world at the utility scale is far more expensive than 5 cents per kWh, otherwise peaking power plants would be out of business.
The question is then, who is going to invest in battery storage, even if it is cheaper than peaker plants? Surely not the entrenched interests who already have significant investments in FF burning plants. These investments are sunk cost and a 2012 article at renewablesinternational.com made the following claim, Power too cheap for new gas turbines in Germany.
According to that article, there are gas turbines in Germany that were experiencing 0.7 percent capacity utilization. The article was referring to new plants so, I don’t think the utilities who own these plants are anxious to invest in batteries as a solution.
Call it inertia. Batteries as a utility scale solution to grid balancing are just approaching the costs where they might make sense. I seriously doubt many dyed in the wool power system engineers think it is even remotely possible. Just look at how Fernando is always asking “show me the batteries”. Do you think he believes batteries will ever work at scale?
Before anybody starts accusing me of blind techno-cornucopianism let me just quote from my favorite techno-cornucopian, Tony Seba, at about 1 minute 23 seconds into a video of one of his presentations:
“Disruption is when companies come up with a product or service, technology-based, that essentially transforms or even destroys an existing market and that’s what the car did to the horse.
That’s what digital cameras, does anyone remember film? Film? Does anyone use film? It wasn’t that long ago right and then suddenly we’re all using digital cameras. That’s a disruption. Cell phones? That’s what they did to land lines. Some of you don’t even know what land line is.
It was disrupted by cellphone telephony and that’s what this disruption is and when it happens it happens very quickly but, when it’s about to happen, it’s the experts and the insiders who will actually say, “Meh! It’s not gonna happen or it’s not gonna happen anytime soon. Not in my lifetime. I just can’t see it.
Just like we could not see that one car (in a picture of the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in the year 1900) we just can’t see it but it happens and it happens very quickly.”
Of all the thoroughly industrialized countries in the world, Germany may and probably has the WORST wind and solar resources-given that the parts of Germany with GOOD wind are located at the far end of the country from the heavy industry and most of the population and that the weather is famously cloudy.
Germany is big on the technology for a number of reasons that are not often emphasized in most forums especially by those who think renewables are a waste of time.
First off , Germans are among the most BUSINESS LIKE PRACTICAL MINDED people in the world- and they are well aware of the fact that they are ALREADY competing for limited and SOON TO BE SHRINKING amounts of oil, coal, gas and even uranium ( in case they go back to nukes) in the future. Germany has little in the way of oil and gas and the coal Germany does have is not very good quality and will not last forever.
Second, without needing to be reminded by outsiders that their economy is based on exports, they set out to dominate what they obviously believed and still believe is going to be one of the biggest industries in coming times-renewable energy. They want to own as much of that industry as possible.
Unfortunately for them the Chinese have come on a lot stronger than most people expected- but they are still well positioned to export one hell of a lot of hard renewable energy goods and the necessary services that go along.
If the southern portion of the USA were in German hands, there would be a pv system on every second house by now. Wind and solar farms would be everywhere. They would have built HVDC transmission lines already and be supplying half the sweltering east coast with solar power from the deserts on summer afternoons – during eastern peak hours.
AND the cost of it ALL would have been well under half what it costs CURRENTLY here in the land of the reputed best workers in the world. Nobody would be laughing at them.
I used to be one of those cocky better than anybody else yankee craftsmen myself, but I must admit they have run circles around us when it comes to doing renewables efficiently.
But I have faith in my younger country men and we MIGHT catch up.
What a bunch of bullshit.
The west is deindustrialising aka turning into a 3rd world ghetto.
Obviously, you renewable cranks are delusional.
Who is calling who a crank. : )
The west is deindustrialising aka turning into a 3rd world ghetto.
You know, maybe you ought to visit some of those 3rd world ghettos to understand what is really happening there. It might actually surprise you…
This will take only a little more than three minutes of your time
https://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_brand_on_squatter_cities
I’m within walking distance of places like this and to visit such a place can really change your perspective on life in general… One of the things that happens when you do, is the concept of human rights, ceases to be an abstract concept and it becomes very real!
Oh, and you don’t find may people who are ‘Delusional’ in those squatter cities, they all tend to be hard nosed realists!
Fred,
Do you actually know anyone who lives in one of these squatter cities?
My significant other was born in rural Veracruz, but moved to one of these squatter cities as a child, and still has many family members living there. Numerous such places have sprung up on the outskirts of Mexico city in the past few decades.
I certainly agree that “you don’t find may people who are ‘Delusional’ in those squatter cities, they all tend to be hard nosed realists!”
But your notion that in these squatter cities the “concept of human rights ceases to be an abstract concept and it becomes very real”?
Phew! The horror stories I could tell you about these places and the actual flesh and blood people who live in them.
In Mexico these squatter cities were created by a deliberate, well-orchestrated, decades-long campaign to force rural dwellers off their land and into the cities by:
1) Destroying their rural livlihoods, and
2) Making the countryside so violent that people had to flee the countryside into these urban cess pools.
And apparently, according to Arundhati Roy, the exact same phenonenon of forced depopulation of the countryside is happening in India too:
Do you actually know anyone who lives in one of these squatter cities?
Yes, I personally know real people who actually live in such places! Furthermore, I am not naive about the realities…
Having said that, these people are not all that different from you and I.
Cheers!
The methods used in Mexico to dispossess the peasants and indigenous peoples of their land and drive them into the cities — part and parcel of an over-arching program of forced urbanization — are quite similar to those used in Colombia.
Anywhere and everywhere, it’s about posession and control of the land and the natural resources it contains.
Your Ted conference speaker tries to put a friendly, benign face on the dispossession of the rural peoples. But for those who don’t inhabit his unreality, this is impossible.
Nevertheless, your Ted speaker operates in a long tradition of theolgians, scholars and scientists who try to create a moral and intellectual rationale for conquest and plunder, Augustine perhaps being the first of these.
Al Jazeera did a really outstanding video on this:
“Colombia: The Deadly Fight for Land”
Fault Lines investigates the threats facing Colombian farmers struggling to return to their land
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/faultlines/2014/02/colombia-deadly-fight-land-2014223154229536490.html
Hi RDG,
I am for the least cost non-fossil fuel (when all costs are included such as liability costs for nuclear). Fossil fuels will peak, energy efficiency will help, but will not be enough. What is your solution? Do you think there is no limit to how much fossil fuel can be extracted?
Do a search on “Steve Mohr Newcastle” for access to Steve Mohr’s PhD thesis, or read a summary at The Oil Drum.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6782
Note 1 ExaJoule(EJ) is 5.73 Gb of oil (they are thermal equivalents).
Heinrich,
The data tell a different story than your perception of reality. You are fractally wrong! No, on second thought, you are not even wrong!
“Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!” Wolfgang Pauli
Check this out! It’s about capacity factor and what solar and wind are doing to the capacity factor of fossil fuels. This, BTW, is from Bloomberg Business.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-06/solar-wind-reach-a-big-renewables-turning-point-bnef
Solar and Wind Just Passed Another Big Turning Point
It has never made less sense to build fossil fuel power plants.
Consider a solar project. The sun doesn’t shine at night and, even during the day, varies in brightness with the weather and the seasons. So a project that can crank out 100 megawatt hours of electricity during the sunniest part of the day might produce just 20 percent of that when averaged out over a year. That gives it a 20 percent capacity factor.
One of the major strengths of fossil fuel power plants is that they can command very high and predictable capacity factors. The average U.S. natural gas plant, for example, might produce about 70 percent of its potential (falling short of 100 percent because of seasonal demand and maintenance). But that’s what’s changing, and it’s a big deal.
For the first time, widespread adoption of renewables is effectively lowering the capacity factor for fossil fuels. That’s because once a solar or wind project is built, the marginal cost of the electricity it produces is pretty much zero—free electricity—while coal and gas plants require more fuel for every new watt produced. If you’re a power company with a choice, you choose the free stuff every time.
It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. As more renewables are installed, coal and natural gas plants are used less. As coal and gas are used less, the cost of using them to generate electricity goes up. As the cost of coal and gas power rises, more renewables will be installed.
Solar and wind are profoundly disruptive technologies and you can love them or hate them but they are here to stay and fossil fuels are going to be used less and less. That’s just the way it is.
In a way those who continue to rail against solar and wind are a bit like the taxi and limousine commissions of every major city everywhere in the world trying to fight the likes of Uber, Lyft and other companies that are disruptive because they also affect the cost factors of providing transportation services . In the long run the Ubers of world win every single time. There’s a reason they are now worth almost 40 billion net and they achieved that in a just a little over 5 years. That reason is: Their models actually work! You just can’t fight success!
Edit: I just saw Dennis’ comment below citing the same article from Bloomberg.
Heinrich,
I don’t think the unholy alliance between the Green Utopians and the German oligarchs really cares how much the renewables revolution costs, just so long as people who have to work for a living can be made to pay for it:
Glenn,
Thanks for your comment. This is exactly my point. Wind and solar just can work as there is massive redistribution of costs from the bottom to the top. Germany can only sustain its grid through importing expensive electricity rather than through excellent grid management. Austria makes excellent business with Germany by sending astronomic amounts of water up the Alps with paid electricity and selling the next day electricity at extreme prices. Thank you Germany.
Heinrich seems obsessed with thinking about the German grid as a stand alone entity. But the entire German economy is substantially integrated with the rest of Western Europe and the WORLD economy for that matter. .
Highways, railroads, and data transmission lines don’t stop at borders. Nor do E U travelers have to be bothered with stopping at borders to any serious extent any more, or even stopping at all. Food crosses borders, oil and gas crosses borders, large German companies have offices and sometimes manufacturing capacity and dealerships in just about every other Euro country. Ditto the other countries, they do business in Germany.
WHY should electricity be any different?
I am not acquainted with the details, but I am willing to bet that the German arrangement with Austria is a win win.
The IDEA is to avoid having to pay for ever more expensive fuel and to avoid the pollution associated with burning it.
OFM,
With wind and solar Germany has painted itself in a corner. Yes the grids in Europe are integrated, yet the German grid has a structural weakness, which will take decades to solve. Germany is desperately trying to construct power lines from the north (wind) to the south where the industrial heart of Germany exists. However, it is nearly impossible to get the permission for these power lines. Austria exploits this situation very much as well as other countries to a lesser extend. Tu felix Austria nube.
Once the situation gets to be critical- once the permits are TRULY necessary- they will be issued. Nation states have a way of steam rolling any internal opposition to an essential policy when the game is down to do or die.
They ARE truly necessary. But the system just doesn’t work here like you think.
As you know, I’ve worked in quite a few countries with multinationals. We have bureaucracy descriptions and timing charts, and the Europeans are very good at making sure very little gets done.
And if you think it’s bad in Germany, until recently Spain was a lot worse. And Greece is even worse. The nature of the bureaucracy is hard to fathom unless you have to deal with it. This is one reason why corruption can flourish, the system seems to be rigged to make things impossible to get done.
And the messianism of the environmentalists certainly lends itself to this sort of corrupt behavior by the bureaucrats.
Those not involved in operations have probably not had the opportunity to deal with bureaucrats, whose institutiuonal- and self-interest is all too frequently their top priority. Combine this with the devotion of the environmentalists and it’s a lethal combination, at least for civil rights.
The idea is to promulgate the maximum number of high-sounding, but sweeping, ill-defined and draconian laws possible, so that the only way to navigate them is through corruption and bribes (or mordidas as they’re called in Mexico).
This certainly was the Spanish crown’s practice in the New World. As J.H. Elliott explains, “high-ranking treasury offices began to be offered for sale on a systematic basis from 1633.”
“As the crown’s difficulties multiplied, so too did the number of offices created and put up for sale.”
“While the sale of offices proved to be a highly profitable source of revenue, it was acquired at a heavy political price.”
“Large sums were diverted into private pockets by corrupt officials, and viceroys watched in despair as the sale of office drastically reduced the effieiency of administration.”
“By the middle years of the seventeenth century the crown was putting provincial governorships up for sale, and under Carlos II the last dam was breached when the crown began systematically selling the judicial posts.”
The outcome of this is that, if you want to see what a bewildering maze of sweeping, ill-defined, and draconian laws looks like — where the only way to navigate them is through corruption — you have to look no further than Mexico. Since government is the best business in town, with the greatest opportunites for growth, Mexican lawmakers never miss the opportunity to regulate something or make it illegal.
But not to worry. Con dinero, baile el perro.
OFM,
You should probably study more the situation in Germany and more important in Bavaria. There is a strong track record in Bavaria for basic revolts against governments and politicians know it.
Germany can only sustain its grid through importing expensive electricity rather than through excellent grid management.
If you had said the German grid only remains stable because it exports or dumps excess production into the EU grid then maybe you would be credible but, I went back to the Fraunhoffer ISE’s energy web site and quickly ran through the winter months and only in May was there any significant level of imports. Even then, Germany exported far more electricity than they imported in May. Imports appear to coincide with a lack of wind.
Please point us to a source of data that supports your assertion. If Fraunhoffer is misleading us with fake data, we need to know!
islandboy,
Are your numbers based on kWh or based on Euro? My numbers show that Germany is only a net exporter in kWh, yet exports a lot of cheap electricity and imports a lot of highly priced electricity and is therefore losing dearly in terms of money. If Germany would make money on their electricity production they could have much lower electricity prices. All the German utilities are in a steep downfall.
“My” numbers are all from:
https://www.energy-charts.de/index.htm
There is a page that includes prices as well. The site appears to be presenting truthful data. If you can identify any bias being introduced into the data or an alternative source with “better” data is there any reason you cannot share that with us?
islandboy,
Thanks for the excellent link. There Germany exports 9.7 TWh and imports just 2.1 TWh, yet Austria has according to my understanding still a net export surplus in Euro. Thus Germany pays much more than four times for electricity to Austria than it gets for selling it.
See also the article:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/15/germany-power-exports-idUSL5N0D22L720130415
Renewable subsidies have caused German solar power glut
* Low German wholesale prices make it attractive for exports
* German households foot the bill for cheap exports
Germany pays a lot for the image of being environmentally sound.
I am about as far from an oligarch as you can get, and no lover of big business.
But German industry enables EVERYBODY in Germany to pay their bills.
And while some people in Germany are not very well off, so far as I can tell, a so called typical or average German is not exactly DEPRIVED when it comes to food or shelter or medical care or anything that really matters.
And if as I am willing to bet, the prices of oil, coal, gas and uranium spike sharply up in coming years, Germans will then have some of the LOWEST cost electricity, given they are building so much renewable infrastructure. They will also have more (relatively ) jobs building stuff to export because German industry has a competitive cost advantage in industrial electricity.
Hi aws,
Great link, amazing to see it on the Bloomberg business website. Another excerpt:
Wind power is now the cheapest electricity to produce in both Germany and the U.K., even without government subsidies, according to a new analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). It’s the first time that threshold has been crossed by a G7 economy.
Once we reach the peak in coal (2020) and natural gas output(2040), we will see the prices of these fuels rise which will accelerate the transition to Wind, solar costs may come down in 20 years so that it is competitive with wind in a wider geographical area, though in the sunniest areas it already competes fairly well.
https://www.solarelectricpower.org/media/322918/solar-market-snapshot-2014.pdf
From the link above(page 10):
In the past year, prices for power purchase agreements (PPAs) in several states continued to fall and approached or in some cases even beat those for natural gas-generated electricity. The improving economics are moving solar into new states. Utilities are even beginning to report that they approach solar as a least cost resource.
and (page 13)
Several recent PPA announcements point to solar becoming a cost-competitive resource in a variety of locations:
• Austin Energy (Texas) signed a PPA for less than $50 per megawatt-hour (MWh) for 150 MW.
• TVA (Alabama) signed a PPA for $61 per MWh.
• Salt River Project (Arizona) signed a PPA for roughly $53 per MWh
I say again. Any cost comparisons solar-fossil fuels which does not include any estimate of cost to the biosphere (my grandkids) fails the ethics test.
I am sending this thread to my granddaughter as proof that she and her very energetic associates should move asap to a lawsuit against the present ff industry and the government.
I say again. Any cost comparisons solar-fossil fuels which does not include any estimate of cost to the biosphere (my grandkids) fails the ethics test.
Well, it’s not looking good for coral reef ecosystems this year… We are in the midst of a massive global coral bleaching event. This is only the third ever event that has been recorded. It is caused by human induced climate change due to the burning of fossil fuels and the subsequent release of CO2 into the atmosphere.
A scientist weeps for the ocean
8 July 2015 Last updated at 20:33 BST
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33451582
A geology professor cried during an interview as she considered the way human CO2 emissions were warming the ocean and acidifying it.
She fears her own daughters will not enjoy coral reefs as we know them by the end of the century.
BTW, If anyone, especially the climate change denialists, should want to track coral bleaching around the globe in real time you can do so here.
http://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/satellite/bleaching5km/index.php
Today I am feeling especially doomerish!
Wimbi, tell your granddaughter and her associates to move ahead with that lawsuit against the present ff industry and the government! I’d like to join them!
Deadly Worldwide Coral Bleaching Episode Underway–Earth’s 3rd on Record
By: Bob Henson , 12:47 PM GMT on October 09, 2015
Earth is entering its third worldwide coral bleaching event of the last 20 years–a disturbing example of how a warming planet can harm vital ecosystems–NOAA announced on Thursday. NOAA also released an eight-month outlook that projects even more bleaching to come in 2016. The only other global-scale bleachings in the modern era of observations happened in 1998 and 2010. Global bleaching is defined as an event that causes bleaching in each of the planet’s major coral-reef areas.
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=3151
Another link: http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=3151
“We may be looking at losing somewhere in the range of 10 to 20 percent of the coral reefs this year,” NOAA coral reef watch coordinator Mark Eakin said…
Horrible.
Most of the coral stress alarm 2 area is in the pacific in areas devoid of islands and coral. There’s a spot in Hawaii, one in Florida, a few in the Caribbean. Australia, Indonesia, Thailand, Indian Ocean are clear. Thus we see the typical bullshit we have prior to Paris.
Hi Fernando,
So your assessment is that there is no problem with coral reefs? Any peer reviewed science to back up your claim?
Dennis, look at the NOAA coral bleaching alert maps yourself. Use a search engine. There’s a problem in the areas I listed. The claim “worldwide bleaching event” is bullshit. Don’t you find it interesting that these statements fail to show the data and the forward model runs they themselves are preparing?
Dennis, about 90 % of what you get in the media at this point is bullshit. You get bullshit about the climate, bullshit about Ukraine, bullshit about Syria, and bullshit about Canadian oil production in 2016.
Fernando, that coral reef ecosystems are being severely stressed by high water temperatures is not bullshit. The effect of this year’s El nino is very real! I’m in Sao Paulo so I haven’t personally visited the reefs in my back yard in Florida recently but my friends who are there are reporting lot’s of bleaching. That is never a good thing.
All right, hold on a moment here, how is it not incredibly hypocritical for you to be concerned about the coral reefs, and by extension any observed climate change, when, as a jet-setter between Brazil and Florida, you likely have one of the highest “carbon footprints” of anyone posting here?
This is one of the biggest problems with the left’s argument about human-caused climate change. If they really believed that humans (including themselves) were responsible for the things the theory says humans are responsible for, shouldn’t the left be taking proactive measures within their own lives to do something about it, rather than doing nothing but telling the rest of us how we need to live our lives in order to cure the problem we all necessarily must be responsible for?
Unfortunately, we on the right see this sort of “do as I say, not as I do” attitude all the time from the true global warming believers on the left. They still hold plenty of those international meetings requiring hundreds or thousands of people to travel upwards of thousands of miles by plane just so they can all meet to talk about what a problem climate change is, for instance. However, as bad as that is, what’s particularly amazing is that after all these years the left still seems unaware of how damaging these sorts of actions are to their credibility on the whole climate change matter.
In first paragraph, change that to read “biggest ‘carbon footprints.'”
I will bet that the amount of energy used by scientists to attend climate change meetings is absolutely a several decimal places to right rounding error in the World energy budget.
Are you seriously going to compare attendance at scientific symposiums on-par as to importance as people globe-trotting to attend the World Cup and the Olympics for example?
Would you not concede that if attendance at climate change/climate science gatherings were to lead to policy changes that reduced World FF consumption even a very small amount that this would dwarf the energy used to conduct such meetings by many orders of magnitude?
I call baloney on your post…you do not accept any shred of possibility that anthropomorphic climate change is occurring, and your best post is a straw man attack.
Go back to your regular Internet haunts, you have made no constructive contribution to this conversation.
Are you seriously going to compare attendance at scientific symposiums on-par as to importance as people globe-trotting to attend the World Cup and the Olympics for example?
All three things all equally unethical if you really believe that man is causing the climate to change.
Look, if the liberals absolutely need to have gatherings and galas to legitimize the whole climate change belief system, they should be on the forefront of using technology, which isn’t even really new at this point, that allows meetings to take place without consuming fuel and pumping out all of the big bad CO2 that ironically some people seem to forget is actually plant food. I’m talking about teleconferencing, Skype, and the like. The internet makes a lot of things possible.
“However, as bad as that is, what’s particularly amazing is that after all these years the left still seems unaware of how damaging these sorts of actions are to their credibility on the whole climate change matter.” ~ Robert Turgio
“Libertarian writer David Boaz argued that terms left and right are used to spin a particular point of view rather than as simple descriptors… Boaz asserts that arguments about the way the words should be used often displaces arguments about policy by raising emotional prejudice against a preconceived notion of what the terms mean…
Some political scientists have suggested that the classifications of ‘left’ and ‘right’ are no longer meaningful in the modern complex world. ” ~ Wikipedia
While I’ve even heard of people’s usage of computers/internet as being hypocritical with regard to their concern for climate change, and while your ridiculous/fallacious anecdote, using Fred Magyar, does what they do, in my case, my lifestyle’s likely way under your carbon footprint, Robert– possibly even if I ‘absorbed’ Fred’s ‘excesses’ (if not your own. Hey, we ‘lefties’ gotta stick/absorb together. ‘u^ )
That said, are you ‘right’ or ‘left’? Haha never mind.
BTW, feel free to say ‘Hi’ to ‘Ashley Alloway’ for me, if you can, and are up to it… the ‘right’ one I mean… if there’s such a thing/entity…
“All three things all equally unethical if you really believe that man is causing the climate to change.” ~ Robert Turgio
Not if much of it, that can be done over the internet, is already being done; nor if time and facility-of-communication in person is of the essence; nor if that kind of thing, as a whole and in terms of its weight of importance, doesn’t contribute all that much relative C02; nor if someone like Robert Turgio simply says so.
Otherwise, perhaps one could argue that it is ethically-questionable to do or don’t do what you propose, Robert, to say nothing of what you do and don’t do about climate change, yourself, which is what exactly?
“…shouldn’t… [they] be taking proactive measures within their own lives to do something about it…” ~ Robert Turgio
Unlike you? (Credibility?)
“Yep, it’s clear to see our government is working against us. Time for an overthrow?” ~ Robert Turgio
Let’s see you walk your talk.
In any case, depending on what you mean by ‘overthrow’, it’s not going to necessarily change/dismantle the system which seems to be what needs to happen.
All right, hold on a moment here, how is it not incredibly hypocritical for you to be concerned about the coral reefs, and by extension any observed climate change, when, as a jet-setter between Brazil and Florida, you likely have one of the highest “carbon footprints” of anyone posting here?
I actually posted my total CO2 footprint produced for personal transportation this year in a previous discussion with OFM recently. It included my round trip flight plus what I emitted by driving my old manual 2002 Saturn which is parked for the six month duration of my stay in Sao Paulo. I do not drive in Sao Paulo, I walk and take public transport such as electric subways and trains.
That calculation is based on a per passenger consumption of about 83 mpg for 8000 miles of my round trip flight figure provided by Boeing, plus, about 30 mpg combined Hwy and city for less than 5000 miles of driving.
That comes to roughly 260 gallons of fossil fuel use in physical transport, by me this year.
If I figure roughly 20 lbs of CO2 emitted per gallon of fuel burned that comes to about 5,200 lbs of CO2 that I have added to the atmosphere by travelling by plane and driving an ICE powered automobile this year.
If I compare that figure to the average US driver who drives about 12,000 miles per year at 24 mpg for a total CO2 emission of about 10,000 lbs for driving alone. And that Doesn’t include any air travel.
Which means I’m still producing about 50% less CO2 emissions than the average US resident does for just driving alone. To be clear I’m not particularly happy to have produced even the 5000 lbs of CO2 that I did.
So I’m curious as to what your CO2 footprint for transportation this year might be? Go ahead don’t be shy do the math and post it so we can all be humbled!
Well said, Fred.
Fred,
When you compare your oil footprint to that of other people who live in the United States, it looks pretty good.
But when you compare it to that of people who live in other parts of the world, then it doesn’t look so good.
Glenn,
Re: my carbon footprint…
But when you compare it to that of people who live in other parts of the world, then it doesn’t look so good.
Fair enough! Though I think I have already said something to that affect myself.
Who knows, maybe in the future we will have scaled up versions of sailboats like this transporting passengers between Brazil and the US
http://www.sail-world.com/SailRocket-2–set-for-short-notice-Weymouth—Portland-Record-attempt/139070
Though I’m sure that even if we do, some people will be quick to point out that since we still need fossil fuels to build such vessels, they are less than ‘green’ and to use them is hypocritical… and to them I say, yeah, no shit, and ‘Perfect’ is the enemy of good enough!
So what is your carbon footprint and how does it compare to the people in Afghanistan?!
Fred,
I figure my oil footprint is about double yours, but about half the average USian’s
However, I make no claim to self-righteousness or piety when it comes to my energy footprint. I am a member of a small, highly privileged minority (just like you) and thank my lucky stars for it every waking day, and take advantage of it.
Therefore, I plead guilty to the charge of having an inordinately large energy footprint. But to the sin of hypocrisy I plead innocent, at least when it comes to my energy footprint.
Glenn,
However, I make no claim to self-righteousness or piety when it comes to my energy footprint.
I don’t believe I made any such claim either. And I also admit to taking advantage of my own fortunate circumstance!
To be clear, I just posted my carbon footprint because I was called a hypocrite for being concerned about coral bleaching while supposedly jet setting around the world. The person who made that claim, also said that I probably had one of the highest carbon footprints of anyone on this site, so I just wanted to post the actual facts and set the record straight… I wasn’t trying to pat myself on the back or pass judgement on anyone else. I don’t find either of those behaviors very productive or useful.
Fred. Sailboats, I love ’em!
Passenger sail boats from here to anythere. That’s a trip/holiday even I would want to take, having sworn off jets forever.
So how about a BIG passenger boat, with kites up high cranking alternator- battery on the boat, so, hybrid drive, no complexity re wind shifts and all that.
You could get the kite up by towing it with the battery propulsion, and high winds would be no problem at all, since you simply trim the kite/glider to minimum drag, which is very small relative to max force trim.
Alright now, somebody do it. I and a couple of million people who think the same are waiting with money in hand to buy a ticket.
Hey Sailboat-Guys, I mention a fleet of them in the manifesto (which is yours too, it’s libre/open source) in part as a form of ‘brick-and-mortar/tongue-and-groove’/safety-net(work) and such as for when the internet goes down.
I also might have mentioned a sailboat cooperative at The Oil Drum some years ago, in the mean time. (Funny how we now have the refugee crisis and that dead child on the beach. All this might have been avoided if we didn’t look to the State for solutions all the time.)
A few guys/gals; one very nice sailboat (which are often offered for free through some online sites– you just have to pick them up, maybe work on them a little)… and a nice trip to Fukushima and surrounds.
Fred (as played by B-movie actor): (sitting with legs dangling in the water) “…I don’t feel so good…”
wimbi (B-movie actor): “What do you mean?”
Fred: “Oh I don’t know… Something just doesn’t feel right.”
wimbi: “Well why don’t you just go for a swim. I hear the water’s exceptionally warm around here.”
Fred: “So is that really your real name?”
wimbi: “Sure.”
Fred: “Oh I don’t know… Something just doesn’t feel right.”
wimbi: “Well why don’t you just go for a swim. I hear the water’s exceptionally warm around here.”
LOL!
https://www.ted.com/talks/lewis_pugh_s_mind_shifting_mt_everest_swim
It’s not a “world wide event”. Check the maps.
You’re right Fernando, it isn’t a ‘TRUE’ world wide event. It only affects shallow water tropical coral reefs every place that those coral reefs exist.
To say it doesn’t affect tropical coral reefs in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where the water is too deep to have coral reefs is a wee bit disingenuous, wouldn’t you say?
The overwhelming evidence coming from every coral reef around the world right now, is that we have a big problem. If you want to keep arguing that ‘BLACK’ is actually ‘WHITE’ that’s certainly your prerogative, though I personally don’t find your arguments very persuasive and neither do most people who study coral reefs.
I know from your posts in the past that you dislike the current US administration and have expressed disdain for NOAA and it’s scientists. I on the other consider the scientists at NOAA to be a lot more credible than your contrarian personal opinions. Sorry, that’s just me!
Check the maps. There’s no world wide problem for existing reefs.
http://www.reefteach.com.au/coral-bleaching/
Coral species live within a relatively narrow temperature margin, and anomalously low and high sea temperatures can induce coral bleaching. Bleaching events occur during sudden temperature drops accompanying intense upwelling episodes, (-3 degrees C to –5 degrees C for 5-10 days), seasonal cold-air outbreaks. Bleaching is much more frequently reported from elevated se water temperature. A small positive anomaly of 1-2 degrees C for 5-10 weeks during the summer season will usually induce bleaching.
http://www.marinebiology.org/coralbleaching.htm
This is a global climate reanalysis from a climate model running in a super computer.
I set the link to show you the ocean temperature anomaly in color, blue & dark are negative, red and yellow positive. It also shows surface currents.
The area I hope shows up ranges from Indochina to Australia/New Guinea, with Hawaii at th extreme right. If that’s not on screen you can wiggle the map, grab it and drag. If you want to check or change download parameters touch “Earth”, it will open to allow you to change the download.
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/ocean/surface/currents/overlay=sea_surface_temp_anomaly/orthographic=-213.15,-9.35,873
How global warming is driving mass coral bleaching
“What the science says…
On a world scale coral reefs are in decline. Over the last 30-40 years 80% of coral in the Caribbean have been destroyed and 50% in Indonesia and the Pacific. Bleaching associated with the 1982 -1983 El-Nino killed over 95% of coral in the Galapagos Islands and the 1997-1998 El-Nino alone wiped out 16% of all coral on the planet. Globally about 1% of coral is dying out each year.”
Skeptical science tends to be bullshit. It’s run by the same guys who did the bogus 97 % paper.
When I read these type of articles I simply look up “NOAA Coral Alert Maps”.
If you look at the maps AT THIS POINT you can see the actual data they CREATE.
If we parse the SKS article we can detect the way they distort information (this is a technique perfected in the Soviet Union, improved upon by the Shultz school in the USA, and put into heavy use by Wolfowitz et al at the Pentagon during their bullshit campaign about WMD). The distortion technique is quite common. In this case, specifically, they fail to mention that a significant portion of coral loss isn’t caused by temperature changes.
“Skeptical science tends to be bullshit. ”
No; you tend to be bullshit.
If we parse the SKS article we can detect the way they distort information (this is a technique perfected in the Soviet Union,…
…The distortion technique is quite common. In this case, specifically, they fail to mention that a significant portion of coral loss isn’t caused by temperature changes.
You are sounding like a broken record! Come on, you can’t really be serious! I know you are smarter than that.
Somebody get the rat poison, quick. ?
“Somebody get the rat poison, quick”
Don’t eat too much at once. Takes a while to build up an immunity. A little Wharfirin (sic) a day will keep the doctor away, but too much can do you in.
A Formula for Dosing Humans with Rat Poison
http://massgenomics.org/2010/05/rat-poison-saves-live.html
Fred, of course lawsuits are part of the State’s legal system and that we really need to altogether escape ‘State thinking’ as if there is no other option between it and some false dichotomy, often-utopian-mischaracterized, other.
Hi Caelan,
For better or for worse, I don’t see the ending of all nation state governments on the planet happening anytime soon. If such a transition might one day occur so be it. In the meantime I think we will all have to find ways of working within the nation state framework.
Since I currently work with executives of many different corporations both large and small in Brazil I have begun introducing them to the concepts of ‘The Circular Economy’ as promoted by the http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/
It may not be the best or the final solution to our global dilemmas, however, I think taking a few small steps for now, is better than taking no steps at all.
Cheers!
While I understand what you’re saying Fred and, in a sense, am inclined to appreciate the efforts you seem to be making which, I imagine, go beyond the norm, we both know that, as a species, we’ve taken a lot of non-steps, wrong steps and missteps– small or otherwise– and in wrong directions that have got us precariously close to the proverbial cliff. We may already be in freefall.
So what to do and not do, etc.?
(Hint: What ‘we’ are doing right now is not working, and worse.)
I will check out your link this weekend and thanks for sharing.
“The obvious point is that most social activists look constantly to the state for solutions to social problems. This point bears labouring, because the orientation of most social action groups tends to reinforce state power. This applies to most antiwar action too. Many of the goals and methods of peace movements have been oriented around action by the state, such as appealing to state elites and advocating neutralism and unilateralism. Indeed, peace movements spend a lot of effort debating which demand to make on the state: nuclear freeze, unilateral or multilateral disarmament, nuclear-free zones, or removal of military bases. By appealing to the state, activists indirectly strengthen the roots of many social problems, the problem of war in particular…” ~ Brian Martin, ‘Uprooting War’
What I see here are many people who seem to be the victims of a misinformation campaign because recent studies show that sea life is far more adaptable than previously thought. Moreover, some corals have been shown to receive net benefits from higher ocean temperatures. The real threat to most corals and other sea life is not lower pHs/ocean acidification or warmer temperatures, but nutrient and particulate pollution, problems that could be much more effectively and less expensively addressed than eliminating CO2 even if CO2 really were a problem on a global scale. Regrettably, the propagandists have been so effective thus far at fooling the environmental community about CO2 that there is no energy left to tackle real environmental problems.
E.g., reference;
Gooding, R.A., Harley, C.D.G. and Tang, E. 2009. Elevated water temperature and carbon dioxide concentration increase the growth of a keystone echinoderm. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 106: 9316-9321.
Levas, S., Grottoli, A.G., Warner, M.E., Cai, W.-J., Bauer, J., Schoepf, V., Baumann, J.H., Matsui, Y., Gearing, C., Melman, T.F., Hoadley, K.D., Pettay, D.T., Hu, X., Li, Q, Xu, H. and Wang, Y. 2015. Organic carbon fluxes mediated by corals at elevated pCO2 and temperature. Marine Ecology Progress Series 519: 153-164.
Chua, C.M., Leggat, W., Moya, A. and Baird, A.H. 2013. Temperature affects the early life history stages of corals more than near future ocean acidification. Marine Ecology Progress Series 475: 85-92.
The real threat to most corals and other sea life is not lower pHs/ocean acidification or warmer temperatures, but nutrient and particulate pollution, problems that could be much more effectively and less expensively addressed than eliminating CO2 even if CO2 really were a problem on a global scale.
I’m 100% in favor of reducing nutrient and particulate pollution in our oceans! So what are you doing to accomplish that? Do you have an organization or foundation that is working on this problem?
Unfortunately despite your claims, increases in temperature together with ocean acidification are also severe stressors.
What I see here are many people who seem to be the victims of a misinformation campaign because recent studies show that sea life is far more adaptable than previously thought. Moreover, some corals have been shown to receive net benefits from higher ocean temperatures.
Sorry, but that is pure bullshit!
Of course there’s a misinformation campaign. I use a simple rule: assume the author has an agenda, is putting out misinformation, sometimes it’s outright lies. List what appears to be questionable, and start digging. Kosovo genocide? Bullshit. Iraq WMD? Bullshit. A lot of the “bad climate change impact”? Bullshit. Israel is a good USA ally? Bullshit. The International space station serves for useful research? Bullshit. It takes time and a very open mind to function properly in most areas.
“I use a simple rule: assume the author has an agenda, is putting out misinformation”
A lot of us use the same rule for you.
I take it you think trolling the blog with personal attacks contributes something useful?
I think you trolling a whole lot of climate blogs makes you a trolling denier.
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. – See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/09/unforced-variations-sept-2015/#sthash.pSA07TCM.dpuf
Fernando’s comments are an impediment to understanding is the way I would put it.
Fernando, aside from the apparent fact that the petroleum industry is the one that you’ve spent a good part of your entire waking life working in and for– thus helping to wreck the planet apparently– the problem with denying or questioning climate change (to allay some sort of cognitive dissonance on your part?) is that it goes beyond merely thinning ice and melting glaciers, and into all sorts of correlations and ramifications. Best with setting yourself up with that, such as with coral bleaching. But, hey, you’re retired, right? So you have a little more time on your hands perhaps. To set things right, right?
“Lindzen accepted that his paper included ‘some stupid mistakes’. When interviewed, he said ‘It was just embarrassing’… Lindzen and Choi revised their paper and submitted it to PNAS. The four reviewers of the paper, two of whom had been selected by Lindzen, strongly criticized the paper and PNAS rejected it for publication. Lindzen and Choi then succeeded in getting a little known Korean journal to publish it as a 2011 paper. Andrew Dessler published a paper which found errors in Lindzen and Choi 2011, and concluded that the observations it had presented are not in fundamental disagreement with mainstream climate models, nor do they provide evidence that clouds are causing climate change. Suggestions that significant revisions to mainstream climate science are required are therefore not supported.” ~ Wikipedia
“helping to wreck the planet apparently”
You had better not ever ridden in a gasoline powered vehicle, Caelan. Otherwise, you are full of shit.
Much of this whole thing we call culture or society is full of shit, if we can insult a great element of compost, which we instead flush, with potable water, down things we call toilets.
Despite that, and against the cultural sewage flow, hard as it is, I continue to more or less not do what you think I had better not and do/try to do what we would all likely do far better to do/not do within the sewage-flow we call culture/society.
BTW, Bill Mollison of permaculture infamy, ostensibly felt similarly some decades ago and ‘left’ culture (as if that’s possible when one’s entire planet is being fucked up by it) momentarily, only to ‘return’, presumably in part because he felt one can’t really leave it and that he could somehow change the flow of the sewage and at the same time clear it up.
By the way, Greenbub, within us all, including you, lie little turds waiting to exit. Maybe yours are green.
Caelan, I think it’s pretty stupid to deny the climate changes. Anybody who thinks the climate remains in a steady state has to be mentally retarded.
Returning to the topic, here’s a climate model output for today, showing the temperature anomalies. These are quite low to negative in large areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and islands such as New Guinea. This is the data which makes me think outfits such as NOAA have a tendency to issue a lot of climate panic propaganda.
If you move the model you will see El Niño’s plume of abnormal temperature wafer. I’d like to remind the readers this isn’t necessarily “hot water”, it’s warmer than its usual state, which tends to be cool due to deep water upwelling near the South America coast.
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/ocean/surface/currents/overlay=sea_surface_temp_anomaly/orthographic=-220.36,-15.89,537
Fernando, It’s not climate change, it’s anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
#whut rock have you been hiding under?
WebHubTelescope’s distinction is an important one, because anthropogenic global warming is of course, human-activity-correlated, whereas, climate change is not necessarily.
I respond to you also with my previous response to Fernando.
We better hope to hell that sea life is far more adaptable than previously thought what with the crony-capitalist plutarchy’s shit-for-brains industry’s assaults on the ecosphere, which is not limited to C02.
Eliminating/Reducing industrial C02 will likely, if not doubtless, eliminate/reduce the cause(s) of many other problems.
And once again these public sector scientists don’t mention the record numbers of years that have passed since a hurricane passed over all these coral lands in the US Gulf Coast. It is known the corals have positive responses to passing storms since the water gets turned up and cleans up the corals in the same way a fan blown in a dusty room will turn around all the dust and dirt. I think what these scientists forget about many times is realization nothing man can do will ever exceed the impact that earth itself can do to the environment (volcanoes, earthquakes etc). The only external forces that can change the environment on earth are the sun (and it’s level of solar activity) or an asteroid impact. Other than that climate change or global warming is just another name given to a political activity which seeks to control masses of people two uneducated in the sciences to understand they are being active manipulated. I do realize this fact is very difficult for many to understand especially those who vote democrat.
The only external forces that can change the environment on earth are the sun (and it’s level of solar activity) or an asteroid impact. Other than that climate change or global warming is just another name given to a political activity which seeks to control masses of people two uneducated in the sciences to understand they are being active manipulated.
LOL! Mr.Razler is quite the dazzler…
“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.” – Albert Einstein
‘Two uneducated’? Someone needs an editor.
Maybe two uneducated imbeciles.
There is an excuse for ignorance, but not for stupidity.
Burning 20 million tons of coal and 12 million tons of oil each and every day will have a minimal effect on the earth and its systems, hydrology, geology, none of it will change at all, no one will ever notice the impact.
These are not the droids you are looking for. Move along.
Hi Ronald,
For those who don’t know you you may want to occasionally throw in a 🙂 when you are not serious.
You said:
Burning 20 million tons of coal and 12 million tons of oil each and every day will have a minimal effect on the earth and its systems, hydrology, geology, none of it will change at all, no one will ever notice the impact.
Only those with their heads in the sand will not notice.
What was I thinking?
The extra super large giant dollop of exaggerated hyperbole wasn’t enough, a sarc tag is also required.
Alrighty then. ☺
Love the blush. ^u^
mr.razler said:
While I very much disagree with your assessment of the state of science in regards to AGW and the destruction of the seas, I nevertheless concede your point about the lurking political dangers.
Wherever “a majority are united by a common interest or passion,” James Madison concluded, “the rights of the minority are in danger.”
And when it comes to the passion department, the environmentalists are certainly no slouches. Combine this with the self- and institutional-interests of the government autocrats, and you have all the makings for an inquisition.
A stunning example of this was when U.S. Fish & Wildlife shut down the Gibson Guitar plant in Nashville. Reason TV made a video documentary which explains the gestapo-like tactics of Fish & Wildlife, which were inspired and given license by the quasi-religious fanatacism of the environmentalists:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5IYGroW1nA
Caelan MacIntyre — our resident, self-proclaimed anarchist — likes to talk about the cognitive dissonance of others, and about his dislike of government. But when it comes to something he’s passionate about, like his environmentalism, his anarchism goes out the window. And where do we find him, other than lined up with the Brown Shirts, despite his token protestations to the contrary?
Hi Glenn,
I am sure that Caelan’s position would be that the government is never the solution, he shares that perspective with the far right parties.
In some sense, the very far right and very far left seem to meet at anarchy. Of course with anarchy the terms left or right would have no meaning because there would be no political system.
There can always be fanatics that go too far, you paint with a very broad brush when you throw everyone concerned about climate change into the “brownshirt” category.
So are you hinting that Fred and Caelan are “eco-Nazis”?
That is patently absurd.
I thought these discussions were supposed to occur on non-oil threads.
Oh well, I might as well jump in here and suggest to take a gander at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/11/1430653/-The-origins-of-the-QBO, which I put together this morning.
It is substantiation that the so-called “respected AGW skeptics” are nothing more than crackpots and contrarians.
Dennis is right on when he suggest that the far-right and far-left alias each other. Aliasing is an interesting scientific phenomenon as well — if you want to see how aliasing applies to climate, check out the link.
Daily Kos?!? LMAO, everything written there is pure communist trash. All part of the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. Which, if Daily Kos doesn’t have a problem with climate change “science” plastered all of their page, I guess that just goes to show you what the climate researchers’ real agenda entails.
You didn’t read far enough. I posted that to see the response. I can comment where ever I want to. You can too.
Hi WebHubTelescope. Thanks for sharing, I read it and it seems to make sense. I love finding patterns in things that help describe the whole.
The War on Science goes much deeper than just climate denial and “skepticism”, it is a war on nature and a war on reason. This means that it is a war on all species and is a promoter of dark ages and medievalism and wholesale death.
The War On Science
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e1XX-ngJcc
Much like splitting a log, anti-climate change and anti-science movements drive in false ideas to reduce the credibility of mainstream science. Reality becomes as flexible as a politicians tongue, even more so. The doubters and fringers appear stronger than the scientists, since they are often driven with a bulldog-like religious zeal to promote their versions of reality. They are the modern day berserkers, leading the charge, killing reason, knowledge and the planet for the profit and power seekers.
So next time you try and have a sensible discussion on a topic and it seems to always go awry, look to who is the disrupter. They will be continuous and obvious in their quest.
Judges plan to outlaw climate change ‘denial’
A semi-secret, international conference of top judges proposed to make illegal any opinion that contradicted climate change
We might think that a semi-secret, international conference of top judges, held in the highest courtroom in Britain, to propose that it should be made illegal for anyone to question the scientific evidence for man-made global warming, was odd enough to be worthy of front-page coverage.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11924776/Judges-plan-to-outlaw-climate-change-denial.html
MarbleZeppelin,
Well I certainly agree with the film’s conclusion that science is losing its mojo.
The empirical evidence of this is everywhere, such as in the graph I have attached below. It is from a Gallup poll and shows a steady decline over the years in the number of people who believe climate change is happening or will happen in their lifetimes.
But do you really think that blasting anyone who disagrees with your epistemology and with your beliefs as being “anti-science” and a “modern day berserker” who is waging a “war on science,” a “war on reason,” a “war on nature” and a “war on all species” and “is a promoter of dark ages and medievalism and wholesale death” is a winning rhetorical strategy?
It doesn’t seem to be working.
Why do you suppose that might be?
Glen said “…is a winning rhetorical strategy?”
First I am not vying for political votes or self-accolades. Second, your amazing conclusion that I meant all people who might have a disagreement with a particular piece of science is way off base. Thirdly, considering what is at stake here, using weak and politically correct rhetoric is the same harmful mistake scientists and politicians make.
Glenn says “It doesn’t seem to be working”
Yes, Glenn anti-science and anti-knowledge rhetoric is working just as it was planned, just as your graph shows.
Did you really think that reversing the elements of the discourse would get by me?
Let’s deal with reality, not belief. Belief is the land of the politician, the priest and the denialist.
MarbleZeppelin says:
…considering what is at stake here, using weak and politically correct rhetoric is the same harmful mistake scientists and politicians make.
When the institutions of a society, such as its scientific institutions, begin to lose credibility and legitimacy, it is an all but automatic reaction for them to attempt to substitute force for persuasion. But again, do you really believe people can be browbeaten into believing the scientific consensus? And talking about “what is at stake here,” only 36% in the latest Gallup poll believe that global warming poses a serious threat to their way of life.
MarbleZeppelin said:
Yes, Glenn anti-science and anti-knowledge rhetoric is working just as it was planned, just as your graph shows.
And concomitantly the “pro-science” and “pro-knowledge” rhetoric, as I believe you would call it, is not working. So I ask you once again, aren’t you at all curious as to why the scientific consensus is being rejected by large and growing portions of the society?
And even more puzzling, what researchers have found is that, for those of some political persuasions, the more science intelligence they have the more likely they are to reject the scientific consensus about global warming. Overall, there seems to be no correlation between a person’s science intelligence and whether he or she will accept the scientific consensus on global warming, as the graph I have attached below shows (from this study).
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2466715
I find that to be an absolutely fascinating finding, and am curious as to why it is.
MarbleZeppelin said:
Let’s deal with reality, not belief. Belief is the land of the politician, the priest and the denialist.
Right, and of course what you believe is sure truth, since you believe it has the imprimatur of science upon it.
But those who don’t believe in global warming also believe their belief has the imprimatur of science upon it.
Your passion and conviction in the rightness of your own beliefs very much remind me of John Calvin. “When the papists are so harsh and violent in defence of their superstitions,” he asked, “are not Christ’s magistrates shamed to show themselves less ardent in defense of the sure truth?”
Glen, you are wandering off into a zone of your choosing, not discussing what I really said. If you cannot see the purposeful and well funded attack upon science, or the general attack upon nature itself, then just put your head back in that hole.
MarbleZeppelin, Glenn seems to be becoming a bit adrift in too much information or text/word-count or something like that so that, for example, my shirt seems to be appearing brown to him and it’s as though I like to talk about cognitive dissonance practically every day and so forth.
Anyway, Glenn, if you’re reading this, don’t mind me, go crazy.
MarbleZeppelin,
The thing is that not everyone agrees that there is “an attack upon science.”
Most, I would venture to say, believe that the skepticism, the messiness, the dialogue, the dissention, the doubts, the uncertainty, and the pliability are all part and parcel of the way science works, and is supposed to work.
“Too much information,” Caelan?
So your solution to being confronted with information which conflicts with your deeply held beliefs is to launch another episode of know-nothingness?
Judges plan to outlaw climate change ‘denial’
A semi-secret, international conference of top judges proposed to make illegal any opinion that contradicted climate change
Absolute bollocks!
Wharf, I’m not sure if you actually watched Professor Sanders give this legal lecture to the UK supreme court? BTW, the UK supreme court can hardly be considered a semi-secret organazition by any reasonable measure. The subsequent comments by Judge Crawford of the ICJ and also the summation proffered by the Indian woman who is addressed only as Levania, were both quite illuminating in their own right.
In any case, I came away with the distinct impression that anyone who makes the claim, and I’m not in any way saying you have, that there is a plan afoot to outlaw climate change ‘denial’, as it were, has either not listened to the lecture and comentary or has an agenda, or is him or herself a climate change denialist. Such people might wish to spin this in ways that would foment outrage by the lay public, who in turn would probably never bother to actually listen to an hour and a half long presentaion of very dry legalese, let alone actually understand what is being said. A quick perusal of the comments in the article you link to, should more than underscore my point.
In my opinion the lecture and commentary were of an exceedingly cautious and measured tone. Having said that, what seemed to come accross was that those who operate at the level of the ICJ no longer accept as valid, the arguments of climate change denialists, pseudo skeptics and members of the anti science community, namely their claim, that the science is still unsettled.
I think what is being made clear, is that the courts accept that the science of climate change is indeed settled, and that as a consequence of that knowledge they will henceforth have a framework within which to be able to make legally binding decisions.
This from the transcript of the actual lecture:
“The events of the past weeks in Europe, in relation to forced migrants and refugees, underscores the consequences of a failure to have a proper framework to deal with crises of these kinds, and the terrible human consequences. Appalling as the current situation is, it will be as nothing compared to what climate change may bring.”
The UN General Assembly should pass a resolution calling on the ICJ to make an advisory ruling, he said, on what sort of responsibilities countries have in terms of cutting carbon emissions to avoid dangerous warming. The court could also consider whether the science-based ‘safe’ level of 2C warming – which governments have agreed to hold rises to – should now be considered a legal obligation on countries.
But Sands admitted that the earliest the ICJ could make any such judgment would be 2018 at best.
The barrister said that a ruling by a Dutch court in June forcing the Netherlands government to cut its emissions faster by 2020 was “remarkable”.
“So your solution to being confronted with information which conflicts with your deeply held beliefs is to launch another episode of know-nothingness?” ~ Glenn Stehle
It’s actually here.
In a sea of text. Much of it your own and some of it, such as where I’m concerned, apparently spun out of your own imagination. (You may do well to stick with books if reality gives you a hard time.)
Believe it or not, Dennis, the people who drafted the U.S. Constitution actually knew a thing or two about human nature. And perhaps no one expressed it more eloquently than John Adams:
Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions avarice, love and resentment, etc., posess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party.
And we can thank our lucky stars that it was Madison, and not Jefferson with his “naive empiricism,” as David Little called it, who was tasked with drafting the constitution. For when it comes to the three pivotal concepts which dominated the revolutionary debates — power, passion, and reason — Jefferson still labored under the delusion that “the power of government was supposed to control the passion of social interests and to be controlled, in its turn, by individual reason.”
Madison and others at the Constitutional Convention, most fortunatley, rejected this halcyon notion, and instead were more influenced by the thought of Montesquieu.
As Hannah Arendt explains in On Revolution, the principle underlying the whole structure of separated powers in the U.S. Constitution is that “power arrests power,” that “power, contrary to what we are inclined to think, cannot be checked, at least not reliably, by laws,” and that “in a conflict between law and power it is seldom the law which will emerge as victor.”
Arendt goes on to explain that:
Montesquieu’s famous insight that even virtue stands in need of limitation and that even an excess of reason is undesirable occurs in his discussion of the nature of power; to him, virtue and reason were powers rather than mere faculties, so that their preservation and increase had to be subject to the same conditions which rule over the preservation and increase in power. Certainly it was not because he wanted less virtue and less reason that Montesquieu demanded their limitation.
So it was from Montesquieu that the idea came about of “erecting a system of powers that would check and balance in such a way that the power neither of the union nor of its parts, the duly constituted states, would decrease or destroy one another.”
As Arendt goes on to explain:
How well this part of Montesquieu’s teaching was understood in the days of the foundation of the republic! On the level of theory, its greatest defender was John Adams, whose entire political thought turned about the balance of powers. And when he wrote: “Power must be opposed to power, force to force, strength to strength, interest to interest, as well as reason to reason, eloquence to eloquence, and passion to passion,” he obviously believed he had found in this very opposition an instrument to generate more power, more strength, more reason, and not to abolish them.
Dennis,
And as to Caelan’s anarchism, what he offers up is a bowdlerized version of the doctrine, giving us only the constructive side of the philosophy, but not the destructive side.
Anarchists are fully aware that, before the dream of absolute freedom and subjectivism can be achieved, that the status quo must first be destroyed. And, as you point out, this is as true of the right libertarians as it is of the left anarchists, both who are heavily influenced by the philosophies of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
Bakunin speaks of the destructive side of anarchism as follows:
Let us trust the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternally creative source of life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too….
The star of revolution will rise high and independent above Moscow from a sea of blood and fire, and will turn into a lodestar to lead humanity.
The constructive side of anarchism, which might have helped counteract the organizational centralism of later socialism, was overshadowed by Bakunin’s mystical emphasis on the powers of negation.
Sergey Nechaev, who was perhaps Bakunin’s most influential follower in Russia, also subscribed to the same sort of revolutionary Jacobinism:
The revolutionary is a man set apart… Anything assisting the triumph of the revolution is for him moral, anything hindering it is immoral and criminal… All the gentle and enfeebling sentiments of kinship, love, gratitude and even honor must be suppressed in him by the single cold passion for revolution… In the unflinching pursuit of merciless destruction he must be prepared to perish himself or to destroy with his own hands everything standing in the path of revolution.
Stalin’s reign of terror, as well as Pinochet’s (and here we’re talking about Friedman, Hayek and the rest of the Chicago Boys), were both informed by this philosophy.
Glenn, this doesn’t seem very precise to me…
For example, I don’t really, as you write, ‘like to talk about’ ‘the cognitive dissonance of others’ (if you’re referring specifically to my asking a question of it and in parentheses) or about my ‘dislike of government’. I talk about the latter, but it’s not something I like, like, say, mountain biking or making love.
With regard to anarchy, well, it appears to make the most sense that I’ve seen so far– at least ‘plural anarchy’, as opposed to ‘State anarchy’, if those are the correct terms. Otherwise, maybe you prefer living in a glorified large-scale open-air prison and being pimped and played by a mutant symbiosis of what you call ‘government/business-as-usual’, which is apparently different from real government. I just quoted a piece in response to one of Dennis’ comments about that.
But, oh how convoluted.
It wouldn’t have gotten this far if a whole lot of my fellow species weren’t pissing into the wind, and on a global scale now no less, and rationalizing much of it away. Fouling the nest.
Which all means what exactly?
Or is it designed, (perhaps via an ulterior motive), to be deliberately obfuscatory, misleading, and/or (otherwise) imprecise?
Well, it’s not like we’re short of those kinds of things these days anyway.
The Roach Motel At The End of The Universe
“The people doing these things are the spiritual offspring of serial killers and mass murdering psychopaths. They know what they’re doing and they know what happens but it just doesn’t matter and… maybe, at this point it doesn’t. Most of the population is in bed with it on some level; some are just sleeping in better accommodations,..
Those who are getting just what they deserve, from the government they deserve, will keep right on nodding their heads, like plastic, bobbing flamingos on high ball glasses, while whatever infernal alien in chief that runs their slice of Idiocracy, drones on and on about recovery and a return to the good life they never had to begin with…”
I agree.
But…the present day cost of sulfur, NOX, mercury, particulates etc., is also massive. An Harvard researcher puts it at 15 cents per kWh.
Just look at the half million deaths per year in China due to coal pollution.
A piddly half a million a year is not enough to help them with their population problem. Maybe if they burn TWICE as much coal, the result will be to kill ten million every year. Now ten million would be a significant help.
Sarcasm light ON.
Thanks Dennis,
The Austin Enery PPA is impressive.
BTW, check out the graph at the this link for the exponential decline in cost that Austin Energy anticipates.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/cheapest-solar-ever-austin-energy-gets-1.2-gigawatts-of-solar-bids-for-less
Hi aws,
In your link above they talk about the expiration of federal subsidies for utility scale solar at the end of 2016 and the effect on new utility scale solar investments.
Nationwide, an ITC expiration is expected to slow utility-scale project development for at least a year. According to GTM Research, large installations will drop from 7.2 gigawatts in 2016 to around 1 gigawatt in 2017.
Was, solar and wind have operating expenses. Their electricity isn’t “free”.
Natural gas use features two seasonal peaks per year
EIA, Today in Energy, September 11, 2015
The duck curve does a nice job of explaining how PV can, has and will, take away the lucrative day time revenue that coal generation and gas peakers once could count on. Refer to the previous images I have posted in this post to understand the bigger picture vis-a-vis future gas demand.
California’s Fowl Problem: 10 Ways to Address the Renewable Duck Curve
There are a lot of potential solutions for thinning out Califonia’s fattening duck curve.
by Katherine Tweed, GreenTechMedia, May 14, 2014
Turn that duck into a little wiggly worm. Take the solar at noon to 3 and compress air and also heat a rock pile. When the duck starts to rise its head, run the compressed air over the hot rock pile and thru a gas turbine-alternator and whack that duck head back down level.
DUCK!
Compressed air is great for short term storage– call it peak shifting.
Whatsamatter with you people to bother about such a simple problem?
Hi Wimbi,
There are other simple solutions such as demand management. Reduce electricity prices from no0n to 3, people can set timers to heat water or heat or cool their homes, charge their car batteries, dry their laundry, etc during the times of excess energy. If that is not enough we can use high tech solutions such as heating and storing water in super insulated tanks for later use, or make ice for cooling later.
What we have here is a lack of imagination (not you, other people). You are more imaginative than most (much better than me anyway).
Much of the world’s electricity is billed time of use. TOU. Many in the US can’t relate to kWh’s as an energy metric. There are so many games like seasonal averaging that alters the consumers reality.
Dennis. Sure, the simple things first – demand management. I do that. Anyone would, I should hope.
And, the heavy artillery later, if necessary. It’s there.
So, looking at the whole picture re energy ups and downs, it seems to me that a collaborative society would have little or no problem.
Once again, sigh, how do we get the collaborative society?
My simple engineer’s solution. Start small, like with me. Then go on to the next big step- me and my wife, and after that one, everything should snowball.
Hi Wimbi,
I agree that collaboration is great when you can get it. For several billion souls it is difficult. Markets are far from perfect, but with appropriate price signals to the consumer (using smart meters and other such technology), just make electricity prices follow supply hour by hour. In the future smart phones will be able to talk to appliances and HVAC systems. When prices are low you heat the water or living space (or turn on AC or make ice) or maybe charge your car battery.
If this is not enough then we need really imaginative people like you to suggest other ways to use excess energy, air compressors, batteries, hydrogen for fuel cells, just find the most energy efficient solution.
Collaboration (such as car pooling and tool sharing) could be improved with social media and smart phone apps.
Sounds a bit childish, but lots of people have reported the Prius effect- which is that, when you see a meter, like a range left or mpg, you start playing the meter mizer game almost compulsively. Do anything, even (gasp!)slowing down, to get that meter where you want to see it.
So, right, rig up a meter over the kitchen sink, showing instantaneous power from grid, and see the kids and wife start playing the whack-a-meter game.
All they would need to know is that lower is better, nothing like anything seriously hard, like difference between watt and watt-hr.
BTW, the game players would immediately latch on to the sport of programming the smart grid control algorithm to do better than the other guy’s algorithm.
Excelsior!
After all, the race is not to the swift, nor yet the battle to the strong, but insane passions happeneth to them all.
Hi Wimbi,
Nice idea as usual. My son drives a prius, but thinks fast is better and low MPG is a badge of honor. He’s young though, when he is on his own and paying all the bills this may change. My brothers also drive their cars like they were stolen, so not everyone will go for the high MPG game, though gas prices at $5 or $10/gallon might change some attitudes.
The reference did in fact talk about exactly the compressed air storage idea, but what I was getting at is that compressed air is what gas turbines run on, except usually the poor turbine has gotta spin the compressor as well as the alternator, which cuts the alternator power way way down. So if we use surplus solar to do the compressor work, lo, the gas turbine is suddenly putting three times as much push on the alternator, everything else remaining what it was.
Sum of all of above- big boost for the boost engine.
Laugh if you will, but I am actually trying to do this in my workshop, using a motorcycle turbocharger and a house solid waste pyrolyzer as fuel source. I already have the excess PV, sitting there being copiously excessive.
Hi Wimbi,
I just realized that there are many solutions in the article linked by aws. Your ideas could be used to flatten the load curve even further.
A sign of things to come.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34468821
“With no cooking gas and kerosene for their kitchens, the demand for firewood has suddenly jumped and our forests are under pressure,” said Ganesh Karki, chairman of Federation of Community Forestry Users Nepal, an umbrella organisation of community forests across the country.
Well since they claim they get all their supplies from India anyway then I suggest they start importing these ASAP!
http://www.atpmart.com/index.php/home-kitchen/solar-products-online-india/solar-cooker-online-india/
I just have no sympathy anymore for people who refuse to do things differently than they have in the past, especially when their actions endanger all of humanity. BTW, for the record, you can build solar cookers from cardboard boxes and aluminum foil for a few bucks.
http://www.instructables.com/id/The-5-6-Solar-Oven/
Anyone for starting an international campaign to send the Nepalese shipping containers full of solar cookers? Who knows, maybe we could even crowdfund such a venture?
You want to send cardboard and tin foil to Nepal?
You want to send cardboard and tin foil to Nepal?
Nah, the Indians, are closer and they already have the supply chains in place… 🙂
Old government study for solar and wind
http://www.aepc.gov.np/docs/resource/subreport/20130818124528_Solar%20and%20Wind%20Energy%20Resource-Assessment%20in%20Nepal.pdf
Nepali village tour site
http://www.nepaltraveldoor.com/nepal-village-tour.php#
Landing in Katmandu video
http://youtu.be/HMfEy7ZGxBI
Weather forecast
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/weather/nepal/bagmati/kathmandu
Just for you, Fernando!
https://goo.gl/3la4t9
Just for you Fred! http://youtu.be/urNsqBAHOmM
Thanks, made me think of Temple Grandin and how I used what she taught us about animals in general and how I applied that in bringing up my own Aspie son… Anyways, it was raining here in Sao Paulo yesterday and today the sun came out!
Cheers!
“I believe that the place where an animal dies is a sacred one. There is a need to bring ritual into the conventional slaughter plants and use as a means to shape people’s behavior. It would help prevent people from becoming numbed, callous, or cruel. The ritual could be something very simple, such as a moment of silence. In addition to developing better designs and making equipment to insure the humane treatments of all animals, that would be my contribution.”
― Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism
I think Joshua Arthurs is closer to it than OFM. As an example, renewables in the UK over the last 4 years have produced an average of 27% of their installed capacity. At times of peak demand in the middle of winter cold spells, renewables contribution was quite often zero%.
The renewables industry calls for gas-fired backup generation plants for periods when renewables cannot provide enough. Why not just have the gas-fired plant and reduce the costly, uneconomic, subsidy-requiring renewables?
As another example, which renewable technology is going to replace jetfuel for aviation?
Society is pushing for renewables at present not justified by the possible future lack of hydrocarbon reserves, but because of predictions related to global warming related to CO2. However, over the last 15 years, calculated estimates of sensitivity to CO2 doubling are reducing over time. in 2000, sensitivites were estimated at 3 to 6 degrees C, whereas in 2015 latest estimates are between 1.6 and 1.8 degrees C.
Mitigation of influences at these levels is not justified.
Given all the uncertainties regarding the climate system, positive or negative feedbacks, oceanic cycles such as ENSO, PDO, AMO and their influences, can we afford to change how society powers itself based on numbers declining in that way?
It seems there are a lotta residents from Titan on here today!
In case any Titans missed the memo, the main reason Earthlings are going to need to transition away from fossil fuel use has more to do with the fact that fossil fuels are a finite resource here on earth. Unlike on Titan where it rains methane. It isn’t so much because they are concerned about earth’s climate…
The utilized capacity, time wise of my ancient old Ford Escort is about one percent- which is to say, I drive it about ten to fifteen minutes on average every twenty four hours period. Once in a long while, I use it as much as ten percent of a day- about two and a half hours.
But it saves me enough money on gasoline to make it economic for me to own it, rather than driving my truck. If my Escort was a solar panel instead of a car, it wouldn’t use ANY fuel at all. HOW ‘BOUT THAT?
A lot of countries are already in a hell of a fix when it comes to paying for imported coal and gas.
In case you missed the memo, Kieth, the UK used to be the industrial powerhouse of the world- back when the was plenty of coal close to the surface and easily mined in the UK.
Presuming you are a citizen of the UK, you might want to think long and hard about the fact that you are ALREADY importing most of your coal and gas and will -unless it turns out you have a good tight oil resource- be importing nearly all your oil within a couple more decades.
How much coal does your country produce TODAY?
Just WHAT do you propose to EXPORT to pay for imported oil, coal, and gas?
I can’t see your country competing for much , LONG TERM, in the line of export business considering your people are used to earning wages and salaries that are three four five or even ten and twenty times more than the wages and salaries of people in places such as Indonesia, India, Thialand…..There are at least a couple of dozen countries that are situated to eat your lunch….. and incidentally…your country is a major net importer of FOOD as well.
About the ONLY natural resource you appear at first glance to have in abundance is RAIN. I pray it does not eventually get to tasting so sour you have to put an anti acid tablet in it to drink it-you will you know if we keep burning coal by the hundreds of millions of tons.
Forgive me, I had a senior moment, on second thought you don’t know.
I put up replies to comments of this sort so any kids or open minded adults who might stumble onto this forum hear both sides of the issue in everyday common sense language.
A lot of people simply will not bother to read purely technical material. A lot of people CAN’T understand technical material.
Hi Keith,
On power output vs capacity, for the World in 2012 power output was 44% of capacity for all types of power, so 27% output for renewables is pretty good, as fossil fuel prices increase wind will be a bargain and as the peak arrives fossil fuel prices will increase. The switch to alternatives will not happen overnight, it is better to start the transition now.
Using WebHubbletelescope’s Oil Shock Model for coal, oil, and natural gas and Steve Mohr’s estimates for fossil fuel resources (his middle case for coal and natural gas and a slightly lower estimate for oil, 12% less). The case 2 estimate by Mohr assumes 1000 Gb of kerogen resources will be recovered, I assume no kerogen resources are recovered and that other oil resources are larger than estimated by Dr. Mohr, if Mohr had estimated a kerogen URR of 500 Gb, our oil URR estimates would be the same.
A summary of Steve Mohr’s estimates are at the link below (note 1 EJ=5.73 Gb oil)
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6782
An introduction to the Oil Shock Model can be found at the link below.
http://oilpeakclimate.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-oil-shock-model-with-dispersive.html
Applying this model to coal, oil, and natural gas we get a peak in fossil fuels in 2021, so even without climate change concerns we will need to find other energy sources. Nuclear could work, but it is no less expensive than wind power, but could be used as back up. If wind and solar are widely dispersed with regions tied together with a high voltage DC grid, and renewables are overbuilt by a factor of 3 above average power output (similar to current capacity for conventional power), then very little backup will be needed (about 1% of average power output).
See http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378775312014759
Chart with fossil fuel output assuming no reduction in demand due to crises or increased use of alternative energy below, output is in millions of tonnes (metric) of oil equivalent per year (Mtoe/a).
Dennis, the 27% capacity utilization for renewables includes lots of biomass/geothermal.
As wind/solar grows, the renewable average capacity utilization has trended down. I think in the future it will approach about 20% as solar starts to overtake wind
Hi PE,
You may be correct in the very long run. Currently Wind has better economics and in optimal areas (Iowa in the US for example) they get about 30% utilization rates for wind power, world wide it is only about 23% but may trend higher for wind power as technology improves. Capacity utilization for solar is only about 13% worldwide so as we run out of good sites for wind and solar begins to dominate, it will fall to 20% for wind and solar, probably even lower, maybe 15%, that simply means we will need to build to a level that supports demand. At some point (2070 or so) population will peak and begin to decline as Total fertility ratios fall below 2.1. As the world approaches OECD levels of output per capita (or less if we are smart) and population falls, demand for electricity will peak and decline (maybe in 2100). Any resource bottle necks for wind and solar will be solved by substitution (rare earths). If wind and solar ramp up at similar rates to oil and natural gas from 1900 to 1973, there will be no energy shortage, liquid fuels will be used more efficiently (hybrids, plug-in hybrids, EVs, car pools, and public transportation. Prices will direct resources efficiently if market externalities are taxed properly so that prices reflect full social costs.
Renewables are allowed to feed power without regards for demand. Therefore the comparisons you make are incorrect. There’s no way to provide a comparison such as you tried, simply because wind turbines and solar aren’t load following nor dispatchable.
In the oil industry we run isolated power systems, for example for offshore platforms. The typical set up has one stand by per two operating units. That’s about 67 % for an isolated system. When we start interconnecting the loads, and units are of a similar size, we can run at 90 % efficiency. The amount of standby is a design basis item. This in turn dictates the overall efficiency.
The problem I see is that you fail to account for system variable load. Evidently a system designed to handle a peak load equal to 2X the average load with sufficient spare capacity will end up with less than 45 % overall efficiency. Do you see how this works?
Fernando do you see how this works?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-06/solar-wind-reach-a-big-renewables-turning-point-bnef
Solar and Wind Just Passed Another Big Turning Point
It has never made less sense to build fossil fuel power plants.
Hi Fernando,
A widely dispersed interconnected renewable power system requires very little backup, with demand management and flexible pricing, load will adjust to supply.
Mission critical sites such as fire and rescue and hospitals will have priority over other loads and will have emergency back up supply.
Dennis, that’s not what computer models are showing. Let me ask you, do you understand how large wind shut down transients can impact an electric grid covering from Poland to Portugal?
Hi Fernando,
Do you understand that wind can be forecasted? Do you also realize that there can be problems at thermal power plants that are unexpected and utilities know how to deal with these? Wind can be backed up with existing natural gas plants, and coal, nuclear, and hydro power.
Weather often disrupts power grids, utilities know how to deal with power fluctuations. Modern computers allow very good forecasts of power output from wind farms 24 hours ahead, utilities can deal with the intermittency.
The current ability to forecast wind amounts to the ability to forecast a disaster. At high wind penetrations there is no way to avoid large transients in the system unless it has a large amount of spinning reserve. Having a large amount of spinning reserve requires narural gas fueled turbines, and reserving hydro to back up the wind failings. What the models show is transients which lead to regional system shutdowns. This in turn causes additional transients and can lead to a chaotic failure of 100 % of the European grid, except for countries with switchgear to isolate themselves from the overall mess.
General Lomborg/Curry troll alert.
Good luck with this projection. It seems like Opec might be the only wild card, but otherwise it looks like we are sliding over the peak. No amount of hopeful thinking will keep us from that. Here it comes…
I was talking about the topic of this thread and not the total fossil fuel model that was posted by Dennis Coyne. That is possible. I think we are headed for Bardi’s Seneca Cliff, and the downslope will be steeper than the upslope, but time will tell…
Hi Revi,
The Seneca cliff will happen if extraction rates fall due to a lack of demand for fossil fuels.
If we are unable to adapt to slowly falling fossil fuel output (under 2% per year through 2100) by greater energy efficiency and a ramp up of non-fossil fuel energy sources, then we get the Seneca cliff due to an economic crisis.
I admit this is possible, but it is by no means certain.
Rolling on the floor laughing my ass off!
Hi Ron,
Uncertainty is pretty funny. I do think a depression is likely as the World tries to adjust to declining fossil fuel output, so a crisis is fairly likely, I think a collapse is less likely, but admit it is possible. If the likely economic crisis does not lead to an appropriate response (an attempt to ramp up non-fossil fuel energy as rapidly as possible), then collapse is virtually certain.
I think it unlikely that OECD nations will react by choosing the path least likely to succeed, clearly you disagree.
Glad I could amuse you.
This is disturbing…who is running this country. If he was know to have dementia why was he included in any succession plan?
Saudi King Hospitalized for Dementia
http://en.abna24.com/service/middle-east-west-asia/archive/2015/10/06/713917/story.html#oo
http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-oil-and-gas/comment-page-1/#comment-541559
I agree, and of course SA is not an isolated case
The Monterey Formation in the deepest parts of California’s San Joaquin Basin contains an estimated mean volumes of 21 million barrels of oil, 27 billion cubic feet of gas, and 1 million barrels of natural gas liquids, according to the first USGS assessment of continuous (unconventional), technically recoverable resources in the Monterey Formation.
The assessment team concluded that most of the petroleum that has originated from shale of the Monterey Formation in the assessment area has migrated from the source rock, so there is probably relatively little recoverable oil or gas remaining there, and most exploratory wells in the deep basin are unlikely to be successful.
Geological data from more than 80 older wells that penetrated the deep Monterey Formation indicate that retention of oil or gas in the Monterey Formation shale source rock is poor, probably because of natural fracturing, faulting, and folding.
The oil and gas readily migrates from the deep Monterey Formation to fill the many shallower conventional reservoirs in the basin, including some in fractured Monterey Formation shale, and accounts for the prolific production there.
Although the data suggest that there is apparently not a large volume of unconventional oil and gas resources in the Monterey in the deep part of the basin, there are still substantial volumes of additional conventional oil and gas resources oil in the Monterey Formation in the shallower conventional traps in the San Joaquin Basin, as indicated by earlier assessments.
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=4352&from=rss_home#.VhaHSf3ovrc
The EIA once estimated Monterey TRRR at 15.4 billion barrels
The EIA once estimated Monterey TRRR at 15.4 billion barrels.
At ninety million barrels a day- about eleven days per billion – roughly six months worth for the WORLD. How often do we hear about a new field even a third that big ?
The current estimate is a very small fraction of that.
Hi OFM,
Yes if we just look at the oil it is about 0.13% of the EIA estimate (15.4 Gb). Enough for about 6 hours of World oil use.
I don’t think the EIA does reserve estimates. They probably use USGS type figures. Those can be highly speculative. They were speculative figures, which typically have to be taken down to 10 to 15 % of the “estimate”.
The EIA has its own methodology. Their numbers are probably even more speculative than USGS
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/assumptions/pdf/oilgas.pdf
Hi Fernando,
In the case of the Monterrey shale the EIA used an outside consulting firm. EIA resource estimates should be ignored. Sometimes the USGS underestimates resources (2008 Bakken estimate).
Dennis, when we use a consulting firm we become responsible for their failures, unless such consultants warranted the figures (which they don’t do in these cases). If I recall right, their consultants were a lower ranked outfit. The outfit I consulted for would have never developed those Monterrey numbers.
I do not put much stock in most of what I read at Seeking Alpha but I read the site in order to hear different opinions on various topics. But sometimes you will find out things there sooner than otherwise.
This piece claims that GM is getting battery cells for around a hundred fifty bucks, fifty bucks cheaper than TESLA.
Does anybody know if this is credible?
http://www.businessfinancenews.com/24629-general-motors-company-cell-costs-less-than-tesla-motors-battery-pack-ubs-i/
I do believe the Volt is going to sell like ice water in hell within the next three or four years because I believe oil will spike sharply within that time frame and by then enough people will be quit worrying about short battery life.
Just yesterday I stopped a hard core anti electric friend (who believes in driving a car till the wheels fall off) dead in his tracks with the observation that he could have made his daily commute for the last forty years in a Volt without buying a drop of gasoline- and that when a Volt battery starts going down hill at around say a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand miles- the I C E will still be basically brand new unless the owner has taken the car on a lot of long trips.
And as far as battery life is concerned- after half a century of development, you were damned lucky to get to seventy five to a hundred thousand miles with a 1950 model car or pickup truck without a major engine rebuild.
Even now a LOT of car and pickup truck engines fail in very expensive fashion at well under a hundred thousand miles.
Yes, the cell prices quoted in the business week article are legit. Right from a presentation by GM’s CEO and other GM exec. It’s not just GM, either. These prices will be what Nissan, Audi, and other major EV players will be paying too, as they all will be buying cells from LG Chem. So Tesla’s gigafactory is not an EV “game-changer”. It is what Tesla needs to do to have a hope of matching their competitors on price.
http://insideevs.com/gm-chevrolet-bolt-for-2016-145kwh-cell-cost-volt-margin-improves-3500/
Please note the quoted values are the “cell” price. The EV battery pack is an assembly of cells, with interconnecting conductors, cooling panels, structural frame, enclosure, etc. The pack assembly can add another $50-$100 per kWh, but full pack prices of $200-$250/kWh is a fraction of what had been projected just a couple of years ago. And as the manufacturers figure out how to simplify pack architecture, the per-kWh for the assembly will drop even more.
Thanks, It looks like Tesla is at somewhat of a disadvantage for the next couple of years then, and this is explanation enough for Tesla to stick with premium priced cars until the giga factory is ready – which presumably will be state of the art and capable of producing batteries as economically as LG.
Is LG turning a profit at these prices- or just holding onto market share and keeping the production lines up and running in hope of better days?
We pay ~$270 per kWh US for the 8 volt 66 Ah LG Pancakes – for Golf Cart Retro’s.
Small quantities.. Would prefer CALB – Superior Chemistry. But they are closer to $370 US, and a bit nervous sourcing from Chinese Aviation LB. It’s going to be interesting if/when the USN sails with 20km of that Artificial Island next week. A123 was purchased by the Chinese after the US Gov gave them a bundle to develop Battery technology. Tier 1 – LiFePo4 “Prisms” have been stable for $1.00 Ah ( $312kWH ) FOB China for a while. Expect prices to be lower on future orders. IIRC Elon said $40 per kWh Material cost.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/major-shale-could-guarantee-israel-202317867.html;_ylt=AwrC1CkDKhdWt1MADa3QtDMD;_ylu=X3oDMTBybGY3bmpvBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMyBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzcg–
This oil discovery is located in the disputed area occupied by Israel during the war some decades ago.
I am not taking sides, but my strong opinion is that Israel will punp it and burn it if it is really there.
It’s a Darwinian world.
The EU would be forced to impose economic sanctions on Israel if it starts exploiting the Golan. As it is, Israel faces an intifada triggered by Netanyahu’s aggressive posture and human rights abuses. Netanyahu has been goading the Palestinians to force a revolt, which will supposedly allow him to carry out ethnic cleansing.
But he’s facing a demographic problem, about one third of the Jewish population refuses to join the army.
He also faces a big public relations problem. In the USA the people see a constant barrage of pro Israel propaganda. But outside Israel their regime is seen as a bunch of right wing nuts. And this bad image he has created means he’s going to have a really uphill struggle to extract shale oil in Syrian territory.
This interview with Jane Goodall is dead on topic in terms of the BIG PICTURE- although it has nothing to do with oil in the immediate sense.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-interview-with-primate-researcher-jane-goodall-a-1056465.html
http://www.bnsf.com/about-bnsf/financial-information/weekly-carload-reports/
BNSF week 39 of 2015
Petroleum cars at 9,231
Coal cars at 46,739
Week 39 of 2014:
Petroleum cars at 10,909
Coal cars at 43,212
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/wind-farms-killing-millions-of-birds-and-bats/
“The Obama administration is issuing 30-year permits for “taking” (killing) bald and golden eagles. The great birds will be legally slaughtered “unintentionally” by lethal wind turbines installed in their breeding territories, and in “dispersion areas” where their young congregate (e.g. Altamont Pass).
By chance (if you believe in coincidences), a timely government study claims wind farms will kill “only” 1.4 million birds yearly by 2030 (1). This new report is just one of many, financed with taxpayers’ money, aimed at convincing the public that additional mortality caused by wind plants is sustainable. – It is not.
Dr. Shawn Smallwood’s 2004 study, spanning four years, estimated that California’s Altamont Pass wind “farm” killed an average of 116 Golden Eagles annually (2). This adds up to 2,900 dead “goldies” since it was built 25 years ago. Altamont is the biggest sinkhole for the species, but not the only one, and industry-financed research claiming that California’s GE population is stable is but a white-wash.”
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/wind-farms-killing-millions-of-birds-and-bats/
It is only fair to have wind turbines that can slaughter eagles, partridge, bats, owls, meadowlarks, and hawks, since humans are good at slaughtering themselves on the highways and byways around the world, you have to have a balance, not a one-sided lopsided kill rate for a single species and the rest of the animal world gets off scot-free, it has to contribute somehow too, and humans are the most capable of providing that balance, something that needs to be done, then that is what humans will do, good or bad, right or wrong, if nature doesn’t provide for that balance, then humans need to take action. Invariably, they always will find a new way to kill anything that moves.
Tar pits swallowing an animal or two from time to time isn’t enough. Mother Nature is not contributing her fair share of die-off, humans are there to fill in the gap. So there.
Might as well white list eagles and western meadowlarks.
I think those birds will adapt by mutating to avoid the blade noise. It will take a few hundred years, and this may require a bit of genetic engineering. For example, they could cross an eagle with a hummingbird to make a hummingeagle able to change course in milliseconds.
Solar Industry Swings Back At Lies, Fake Studies
Mark Twain said it best, there are “lies, damned lies and statistics.” It’s hard to tell which is which after closely reviewing the latest hatchet job on solar energy by the Koch brothers’ front group, The Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA).
Aside from spelling solar correctly, much of the report, Filling the Solar Sinkhole, is untrue or misleading – including its basic assertion that the U.S. solar industry receives $39 billion in annual subsidies. Seriously? How can that be? How can an industry with a U.S. market value of $15 billion receive $39 billion in annual subsidies? The answer: it doesn’t. This is fuzzy math, and dirty tricks, at their very worst. But that shouldn’t come as a surprise. The purpose of this report isn’t to inform or educate. The purpose is to incite activists and generate scandalous headlines, when, in fact, no scandal exists.
http://www.seia.org/blog/solar-industry-swings-back-lies-fake-studies
There’s this famous Mahatma Gandhi quote: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
New Report: U.S. renewable energy surges to historic levels; Solar power output doubled for the fourth year running
America’s reliance on wind, solar and other renewable sources of energy has reached historic levels and is poised to make even greater gains in the near future, according to new report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC, Washington DC).
NRDC’s third annual energy report, “A Tectonic Shift in America’s Energy Landscape,” found that the energy sector in the United States emitted less dangerous carbon pollution last year than in 1996, with a full 10 percent reduction over the past decade.
Meanwhile, coal and electricity consumption are down nationwide, while oil use today is lower than in the early 1970s, the report shows.
My guess is that, the time for ignoring and laughing is long gone and the fighting stage has been entered. One wonders how long this stage will last, that is, how long before renewables win, as I believe they ultimately must?
I am re-reading Loren Steffy’s book “Drowning in Oil BP and the Relentless Pursuit of Profits”. If you haven’t read it, the book is about the Deep Water horizon blowout and BP’s corporate culture of profits without regard to costs.
It’s an excellent read and is certainly analogous to the shale industry and Wall Street.
David Teverbaugh, the Texas City fire captain who responded to the refinery explosion and searched for survivors and the remain of the perished employees said this in Chapter 6: “Those people who make the decisions to cut corners, to maximize profits, to compromise safety, will never see what I saw,” he said. “They will never allow themselves to be exposed to the chemicals we crawled around in to save the few that we did. They will never talk to me, to the other responders, or to the families that they devastated. The message was clear to me that we are expendable if there is a chance to profit.”
A little trip down memory lane . . . .
I think that Loren’s book is the best one on the topic of the blowout. I’ve met Loren a couple of times and I was the source for a story that he looked into several years ago and reported on, i.e., the precipitous decline in production from the Thunder Horse complex. I had gotten an email from someone working the Gulf Coast who told me that Thunder Horse production was falling much faster, and sooner, than BP had predicted.
In any case, BP was not at all pleased to get an inquiry from a reporter (Loren at the time was working at the Houston Chronicle), and Loren told me that the BP guy angrily accused the late Matt Simmons of being the source. I told Loren that he was about as welcome as a skunk at the company picnic when he called asking questions about the Thunder Horse production decline. I told Loren that I always find it interesting when people get mad at you for telling the truth, to which he replied “Welcome to my world.”
I subsequently sent Loren a stuffed toy skunk that he said he got a big kick out of; he said he kept it on his desk at the paper.
I don’t think BPs tendency to have large accidents can be compared to the aggressive developments of marginal oil fields. I think BP has had a structural company problem since the early 1990’s (as told to me by an old BP engineering manager), caused by the stress of being able to rely on very nice North Sea fields to a much meaner competitive environment. Their top management chose to lay off engineers and create more of a bean counter mindset. But I’m confident Dudley will have been making very large changes, he’s a very decent fella, I met him many years ago and we got along well.
Breeders abandoned plans to cross Eagles and Humming Birds when it was realised that
1) The hum would exceed noise control limits
2) The draft from the wings would cause damage to the flowers it fed from
NAOM
Fernando,
Perhaps you are right. I won’t argue very strongly with you. But, I live in the middle of the Permian Basin. I see, on a weekly basis, the accidents in the field, on the highways and the streets. I see the crime, domestic violence,and family crisis.
While the aggregate financial magnitude may not approach the Deep Water Horizon/ Macondo blowout, the aggregate human cost is just as significant. Perhaps it’s just human nature gone awry but it wouldn’t have happen here without Hedge Funds, Wall Street, and Greenspan/ Bernanke/Yellen.
I’m not saying they don’t have a problem in Texas. My point is that BPs accidents are caused by management behavior, which in turn was caused by the downgrading of engineering skills and systems being designed to hinder engineering ability to communicate with upper management.
I saw BP operate with management isolated by a ring of bean counters. Exxon is different, their problem is more the isolation between departmental tribes, but they don’t compromise safety. Other companies simply lack the right skills. And quite a few couldn’t care less for their impact on the communities or the work force.
“If he is told that what he saw before was not real but that the objects he is now struggling to see are, he would not believe it. In his pain, Plato continues, the freed prisoner would turn away and run back to what he can see and is accustomed to, that is the shadows of the carried objects…
Plato continues: ‘suppose…that someone should drag him…by force, up the rough ascent, the steep way up, and never stop until he could drag him out into the light of the sun.’ The prisoner would be angry and in pain, and this would only worsen when the radiant light of the sun overwhelms his eyes and blinds him. The sunlight is representative of the new reality and knowledge that the freed prisoner is experiencing…
The prisoners, according to Socrates, would infer from the returning man’s blindness that the journey out of the cave had harmed him and that they should not undertake a similar journey. Socrates concludes that the prisoners, if they were able, would therefore reach out and kill anyone who attempted to drag them out of the cave.” ~ Wikipedia
Plato? Socrates? What do they have to do with peak oil? Who said they can get involved? Besides, who in the hell are they?
Sounds like those prisoners are just plain chickenshit scared of there own shadow, scared stupid. They should just remain in a fetal position in the cave. Blinded by the light. Sing it Manfred Mann.
Plato’s daughter was married to Alexander the Great. It is believed that Plato had a hand in Alexander’s assassination. Plato committed a crime, he should have been a prisoner himself. Instead, he opened a school.
This link has relevance:
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/athenians.html
If you have ever been to a place that is forested, tree tops kind of obliterate the sky above, no Moon, no light at all, everything is dark, pitch black, night for sure, all of a sudden it dawns on you that it is too dark to see, no math involved, you begin to develop an uneasy feeling, fear of not knowing what is out there in the dark, you are then scared and you will turn tail, you will naturally turn away and head back to where the light is, just to be safe and sound. Back to the cave where the unexamined life is not worth living. har
Plato? Socrates? What do they have to do with peak oil? Who said they can get involved? Besides, who in the hell are they?
The Greeks beat the Germans…
https://goo.gl/NrUvlm
I seldom call him our resident court jester any more , but he still fills that role.
The best way to extract meaning from anything he says is to pretend to see him in the mind’s eye in the kings court telling stories, telling jokes, making sarcastic remarks about those out of favor with the king.
Court jesters in some cases were among the wisest of the king’s men.
Why the fight and bloodshed in Syria ? Is the country being distroyed over a pipeline easement?
look at the map. it is cork of champagne bottle.
“cork of champagne bottle” pointed @ Southern Europe. So Tragic, The magnitude of the carnage can be seen by searching “Syria images”. Sure appears like won’t support life for many much longer.
Who has the bottle opener for the cork controls how much champagne you get.
Syria has a Sunni majority historically abused by an Allawite minority, allied with Christians. This was set up by the French during colonial rule. Iraq has had a Sunni minority beating up on Shiites, set up by the British during their colnial rule.
The USA invaded Iraq, dropped the ball, fought Iraqis for many years, which meant the Iraqi rebels who survived were very tough fighters (they learned combat fighting USA troops). The USA put a Shiite government in charge which proceeded to abuse the Sunni.
Eventually the Sunni, including many hard core survivors of years fighting the USA forces, rebelled in Iraq. Meanwhile the USA encouraged a Sunni rebellion in Syria, which was promptly aided and linked to their Sunni brothers across the border in Iraq.
The Islamists used this opportunity, grabbed recruits from al Qaida, the Sunni rebels in Iraq, and got the ball rolling. Then they started getting war veterans from other regions who wanted to help Sunnis overthrow the Shiite regimes. This includes Chechens, afghans, European Arabs, some of them military trained and very skillful at killing.
So, right now we have Assad fighting to avoid his people’s genocide (Allawites are really hated by the Sunnis). Assad’s Christian allies have mostly left the region. I happen to have a Syrian Christian refugee living with me, so I follow their ins and outs first hand. The Christians have been mostly coming to Europe, but quite a few are in Latin America, Canada, and in Lebanon, Turkey, etc.
Thus the Russian move to preserve the Allawite enclave makes a lot of sense. If they can’t carve out a territory and defend it the Sunnis will exterminate them. Meanwhile there’s also a Kurd Sunni population allied with Iraqi Kurds which are in turn friendly with Kurds in Turley. The ones in turkey are separatists. This means the Turks won’t allow all those Kurds to join up and get armed, which they are trying to do.
In a sense, as explained by American historian Pat Buchanan, the root cause was USA (president Wilson) interfering in WWI and allowing the French and British to make an incredible mess when they drew their colonial maps to make conflictive societies, into which, to make matters even worse, they threw a million Jews fleeing European abuses.
PBS Frontline has done some interesting coverage on the issue:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/rise-of-isis/
longtimber says:
Zero Hedge argues that is the case:
John Helmer reports that Russia has put together its own “Friends of Syria” coalition to support the Assad government:
When Helmer puts on his odds-maker cap, he gives the Russian-led alliance, which he reports has the tacit support of Israel, anywhere from a 12-to-1 to several 100s-to-1 odds of prevailing over the US-led coalition:
Obama in this CBS news interview, however, asserts that the United States is fully in control of the situation in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine and has Putin on the run. I suppose time will tell.
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/60-minutes-interview-president-obama/
This means we should expect civil unrest within Ukrainian factions in Kiev, and Poroshenko running away to London. The Iraqi civil war will get hotter, and Assad forces rolling back IS in Syria.
Bit of a doom issue.
How long . . . when trucks are devoted only to carrying food and not spare parts for gizmos would it be until the internet fails.
Answer: Typical MTBF for internet servers is 180 days with a standard deviation of 10 days. Given brand new ones would not all have been installed the day before transport gets shut off, there will be quite a bit less than 6 months. Probably about 3, practically.
The Baker Hughes Rig Count is out. The rigs just keep dropping. Land rig count down 16. Oil down 9, gas down 6. Permian down 10, Eagle Ford down 2 and Williston down 1.
Oil rigs:
Arkoma Woodford 5 (+5) (gas rigs down from 8 to 3)
DJ-Niobrara 22 (+1)
Eagle Ford 67 (-2) (new 5-year low)
Granite Wash 6 (-3)
Mississippian 13 (-1)
Permian 230 (-10) (returned to end-June low)
Williston 65 (-1) (new 5-year low)
Others (conventional) 152 (+3)
Could someone clarify “active rigs” in the following sense. Are active rigs solely used to drill for new wells or are they also used to rehabilitate/rework old wells?
From BHI FAQ:
“To be counted as active a rig must be on location and be drilling or ‘turning to the right’. A rig is considered active from the moment the well is “spudded” until it reaches target depth or “TD”. Rigs that are in transit from one location to another, rigging up or being used in non-drilling activities such as workovers, completions or production testing, are NOT counted as active.”
Target depth. hmmmm Suppose you drill down but not the entire horizontal length. Since you haven’t reached target depth, that well could be called active even if the rig went elsewhere for a time to do the same, planning to return at higher price?
Nah. Too obvious.
Thanks Alex. Sounds like active rigs are drilling for new oil. Workovers don’t count.
Hi all,
I checked the pivot table at Baker Hughes and the drop in Permian basin oil rigs. There was a drop of 12 oil rigs in total for the Permian basin from 309 to 297. This 12 rig drop consisted of 8 vertical rigs, 3 horizontal rigs, and 1 directional rig. This includes both the New Mexico Permian and the Texas Permian basins. So there has been a shift in focus from vertical to horizontal drilling.
One year ago in the Permian basin there were 762 oil rigs, 515 horizontal, 222 vertical, and 25 directional rigs. In the most recent week the oil rig count was down to 297 oil rigs with 246 horizontal rigs, 47 vertical rigs, and 4 directional rigs. In percentage terms vertical and directional oil rigs have fallen much more than horizontal oil rig counts.
Hi AlexS,
I get something different for Permian basin, did you include New Mexico? I have 297 oil rigs in the Permian for the most recent week, the low for oil rigs in June was 313 oil rigs in the Permian basin. Horizontal oil rigs in the Permian have fallen by 3 since the low point in June.
Dennis,
Try to re-check your numbers. There were active 235 rigs in the Permian, of which 230 oil rigs
Permian basin oil rigs
Hi AlexS,
You are correct, I mistakenly combined Eagle Ford and Permian oil rigs.
Chart below has combined oil rigs for Bakken, Eagle Ford, and Permian Basin with the horizontal, vertical, and directional split for the past 53 weeks.
Permian basin oil rigs September 2014 – October 2015
Permian basin oil rigs 2011 – 2015
Thanks Alex.
Is anything known about the drilling efficiency in the Permian? How the wells/rig/month metric has developed recently there?
Enno,
The active rig number is from Baker Hughes database. Unfortunately, their quarterly well count has been suspended from January 1st
I don’t know if TRRC provides data on new wells drilled
Wells drilled per rig per quarter by key LTO basins (2012-14)
Source: Baker Hughes
Thanks!
Recent trend: the number of horizontal oil rigs in the U.S. is down 67 units (-12,9%) in the past 6 weeks, vertical: -13 (-11,5%); directional: +10 (+24,4%).
From last year high:
horizontal -56,4%
directional -68,1%
vertical -71,5%
Total oil rigs: -62,4%
U.S. oil rigs, May-Oct 2015
Hi AlexS,
I got my numbers from the Baker Hughes pivot table.
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=79687&p=irol-reportsother
This is the second excel file and gives a different count from the rotary rig count file. It is not clear why there is a difference, but to find vertical and horizontal rigs in specific basins, you have to use the pivot table.
Edit:
I double checked, AlexS has the correct numbers.
I inadvertently cheched both Eagle Ford and Permian Basin so the incorrect counts I gave up thread were for the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford combined
Dennis,
I also used pivot table. The numbers are exactly the same as in the main file.
Hi AlexS,
Yes you are correct, I mistakenly checked Eagle Ford and Permian so my numbers were wrong. Sorry.
No problem
I will post the following here, as quite some posts/comments are related to forecasting.
I am reading a marvelous book about forecasting: “Superforecasting: The art and science of prediction” (the book is way better than the title)
Not halfway yet, but I already want to share some nuggets, and strongly advice it to anybody who has an opinion about forecasts…. 🙂
——————-
Daniel Kahneman noted, “but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”
This compulsion to explain arises with clocklike regularity every time a stock market closes and a journalist says something like “The Dow rose ninety-five points today on news that …” A quick check will often reveal that the news that supposedly drove the market came out well after the market had risen. But that minimal level of scrutiny is seldom applied. It’s a rare day when a journalist says, “The market rose today for any one of a hundred different reasons, or a mix of them, so no one knows.”
All too often, forecasting in the twenty-first century looks too much like nineteenth-century medicine. There are theories, assertions, and arguments. There are famous figures, as confident as they are well compensated. But there is little experimentation, or anything that could be called science, so we know much less than most people realize. And we pay the price. Although bad forecasting rarely leads as obviously to harm as does bad medicine, it steers us subtly toward bad decisions and all that flows from them—including monetary losses, missed opportunities, unnecessary suffering, even war and death. Happily, physicians now know the cure for all this. It is a tablespoon of doubt.
One group tended to organize their thinking around Big Ideas, although they didn’t agree on which Big Ideas were true or false. Some were environmental doomsters (“We’re running out of everything”); others were cornucopian boomsters (“We can find cost-effective substitutes for everything”). Some were socialists (who favored state control of the commanding heights of the economy); others were free-market fundamentalists (who wanted to minimize regulation). As ideologically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions. Allergic to wishy-washy answers, they kept pushing their analyses to the limit (and then some), using terms like “furthermore” and “moreover” while piling up reasons why they were right and others wrong. As a result, they were unusually confident and likelier to declare things “impossible” or “certain.” Committed to their conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when their predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, “Just wait.”
The other group consisted of more pragmatic experts who drew on many analytical tools, with the choice of tool hinging on the particular problem they faced. These experts gathered as much information from as many sources as they could. When thinking, they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition markers such as “however,” “but,” “although,” and “on the other hand.” They talked about possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. And while no one likes to say “I was wrong,” these experts more readily admitted it and changed their minds.
Enno, thanks for sharing!
Some years ago a colleague sent me the book “Future Babble, Why Expert Predictions Fail and Why We believe Them Anyway” by Dan Gardner (who coauthored the book you refer “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction”.
“Future Babble” is worth the read.
Another recommended read is Robert Trivers’ “Deceit and self-deception, Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others”
I am well into “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman a promising read.
“OVERSHOOT” By William R. Catton, Jr. I believe many posting on POB has read.
I have read the entirety of Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow.” I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how and why we get things wrong when we try to think.
I’ve read Thinking fast and Slow as well but was familiar with a lot of Kahneman’s thinking about thinking from his course at Edge Master. Note: his lecture on ‘Framing’ is particularly interesting, I won’t spoil it by telling you exactly what it is about, go ahead and watch it.
http://edge.org/event/edge-master-class-2007-daniel-kahneman-a-short-course-in-thinking-about-thinking
A SHORT COURSE IN THINKING ABOUT THINKING
Edge Master Class 07
DANIEL KAHNEMAN
Auberge du Soleil, Rutherford, CA, July 20-22, 2007
AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT
BTW, you can get this there as well, I will take a peek myself this weekend.
http://edge.org/event/edge-master-class-2015-philip-tetlock-a-short-course-in-superforecasting
Edge Master Class 2015: Philip Tetlock: A Short Course in Superforecasting
Event Date: [ 7.31.15 ]
Location:
Spring Mountain Vineyard
St. Helena, CA
United States
Rune, Don, Fred,
Yes, Thinking fast and Slow is also one of my favorites, and I very recently gave it as a present.
Another good book about human (mis)judgement is “Poor Charlie’s Almanack”. I was happy to see that Philip Tedlock referenced Charlie Munger as well, as a lot of the things Charlie has mentioned cover similar grounds.
I must say I am really taken aback by the quality of “Superforecasting”. It’s based on decades of study, with lots of important anecdotes, and makes a very easy read. I think it really helps in understanding what makes a good forecast.
Another nice quote from the book that touches on some earlier discussions here:
“All models are wrong”, the statistician George Box observed, “but some are useful”.
But the best part is the description of traits and methods that lead to above average forecasting quality, and I think everybody can benefit from understanding those.
I really would like to see more weight on human (mis)judgement as part of schooling. Humans are naturally far from rational beings, and more rationality should have major benefits for us as a race. Rationality should become a trained response.
Enno Peters said:
But to what end?
As Jonathan Haidt notes:
“Rationality should become a trained response.”
But to what end?
To me at least, the answer to that question, is a no brainer!
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard Feynman
Fred,
But “not fool yourself” about what?
Not fool yourself about how and why human languge and reason evolved, and how they really operate to enhance one’s fitness?
So you’ve got me wondering. Given that Feynman seems to believe it is possible to “not fool yourself,” is he one of the disciples of High Modernity who believes that human beings are a blank slate?
In their quest for timeless certainty and coherence, the modernists formulated the idea that handling problems rationally means making a totally fresh start. Thus the necessary first step in this process is to put all the superstitions, tyranny and corruption of traditonal European society behind and start anew from a fresh, new “scratch line.”
A lot of Modernists thought they had found a true ally in Nietzsche when, towards the end of the 19th century, he boldly declared that “God is dead!”
But what they seldom mention is that Nietzsche also declared science dead. As George A. Morgan explains in What Nietzsche Means, “Even science is anthropomorphic.”:
Thus, though metaphysics is an illusion from the point of view of science, science in turn becomes but another stage of illusion as far as absolute truth is concerned. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche already attacks the scientific optimism of his time under the guise of “Socratism.” The “theoretic man” pursues truth in the delusion that reality can be fathomed, and even purged of evil, by rational thought and its applications. But faith in the omnipotence of reason shatters, for the courageously persistent thinker, not only on the fact that science can never complete its work but chiefly on the positive apprehension that reality is irrational. As Nietzsche writes later, “We are illogical and therefore unjust beings from the first, and can know this: that is one of the greatest and most insoluble disharmonies of existence.”
“Rationality should become a trained response.”
Repeat it 10,000 times and it just might become just that.
Sounds like brainwashing to me and who wants to be brainwashed?
There is a bar in Missoula, Montana that is open 24 hours a day 365 days per year. The name of the bar is The Oxford Saloon and Cafe.
It is there where rationality is practiced night and day. Any other place on earth has become an irrational nightmare. har
In their own words:
“The Oxford Saloon & Cafe’ located in the heart of downtown Missoula was established in 1883 and is open 24 hours a day, all through the year. The Ox has been open 24 hours a day for so many years that there are no keys for the entrances. The Ox, as it is affectionately referred to by locals, has been highlighted in several national publications throughout the years as a”must see”. It will surely prove to be one of the most interesting stops for any visitor passing through Western Montana. The patrons are an eclectic mix: from local businessmen grabbing lunch to cowboys and bikers. Locally it is known for the live poker 7 days a week and its extensive menu including their infamous gigantic 1/2 lb Ox burgers, 1lb rib-eye steak dinners and chicken fried steak with JJ’s special gravy.
We have served over 200,000 orders of chicken fried steak with JJ’s special gravy since we introduced it on our menu in 1986.”
And the website:
http://www.the-oxford.com
Might not be Oxford, but it’s close enough.
I often think how lucky I have been to have spent so much of my time in an activity that allowed, and even demanded, much freedom of invention, but was of a nature that that morning’s brilliant insight could be proven silly by a definitive experiment before lunch, forcing on us a humility otherwise not in our character.
Dogma and unneeded complexity simply could not survive such an atmosphere. It bred an easy willingness to say with a laugh ” Well, wrong again, Heer Geheimrat, so let’s try this other one”
But here, as so many other places, I find ever so many strongly asserted specific predictions which I or anyone thinking a few seconds, could show to be but one possibility among a semi-infinite number of equally plausible ones, and hence unworthy of any weight of assurance.
Religion comes to mind.
I am baffled by this, given the obvious intelligence of most commenters. In what sheltered grove did they grow up?
Hi Wimbi,
For a complex system such as the World economy or the oil market or the climate system accurate prediction is not possible. The best we can do is create plausible scenarios that might create an envelope around the infinite possible realities that may come to pass.
For brevity I often present a single scenario in the comments, but these are usually pulled from an analysis which has presented high and low scenarios. It is impossible to know in advance how things will play out, but life is like that we try to plan the best we can for an uncertain future.
A nice link from the book:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-conventional-wisdom-on-oil-is-always-wrong/
I agree with the author that access to liquidity by producers may be a better indication of future supply than other factors. The typical traits of any CEO include optimism and the desire for growth.
Hi Enno,
What determines access to liquidity? It is by no means straightforward.
The statement is correct, access to liquidity will determine supply. Without a model for “access to liquidity” you don’t get very far. Essentially access to liquidity will in large measure be determined by economic growth, a healthy economy will result in adequate oil demand and oil prices that are adequate for a reasonable return on investment, that in turn will lead to adequate liquidity. Nobody can predict what will happen to the economy and thus access to liquidity cannot be predicted.
Even in the best of all possible economic circumstances fossil fuel supplies cannot grow without limit as depletion limits the upper bound of possible extraction rates.
My models assume this best possible economic scenario plays out (in most cases), sometimes I assume extraction rates fall due to recession.
In any case, no accurate prediction of oil output is possible without accurate economic predictions, these are problematic at best.
wimbi, did you misspell herr on purpose to try to be clever in illustrating the context, or did you just misspell it flat out like your wife said you did? I think the later, given you never learned to spell in any language, especially englis.
Well, my excuse is I never had to. I got into the lazy habit of using my brother, who somehow was born with the ability to spell anything correctly on the first try. Weird.
Wimbi,
A nice part in the book demonstrates that modesty in ones believes has a positive correlation with the quality of them. It just makes for bad media, and the initial response of many is to take a confident and sweeping view as more convincing.
Right, and my initial response is to label the over-assertive as a fool, not to be further considered.
Or, maybe he is a non-fool, just trying me out to see if I am such a fool as to consider his unsupported assert any thing but foolish.
We used to play games of that sort at the friday evening grad school beer blasts; the more beer, the more bombast. Nobody was fooled. Everybody knew full well what was going on. Harmless Fun.
Hi Enno,
How does one experiment with the economy? One problem with applying “science” to human behavior is that the theories that are generally accepted as mainstream social science, often have the tendency to change the way the system works so that the old theories no longer apply. There are no controlled experiments in social science, so repeatable experiments are not possible.
I agree with all that you wrote above, but the following sentence:
But there is little experimentation, or anything that could be called science, so we know much less than most people realize.
I agree with the above 100%, my point is that in social science, how could it be otherwise?
Well, not quite little experimentation- just not controlled. Look around and we will see lots of tries at this and that social system. Good and bad in their results. And each under different conditions.
A nice little logic problem to find a way to dig out real lessons from a pile of uncontrolled experimental results.
I am guessing that some mathematician lurking around here already knows how to do it.
wimbi said:
If you’re looking to mathematics for a solution, I think you’re looking in the wrong place.
We are “confident that we have tamed uncertainty” by assuming a Gaussian distribution when it comes to predicting human affairs, Nassim Nicholas Taleb begins his book, The Black Swan. “Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud.”
“We will see how they [economists, financiers, and politicians] dress up the intellectual fraud with mathematics,” Taleb adds.
“Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating — or, worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models,” Taleb continues.
“We produce thirty-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these next summer — our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.”
I was referring to real mathematicians, not mathematics itself – or – prostitutes who use mathematics.
“Real” mathematicians.
Is that kind of like those “real” Christians? Or those “real” neocons?
After all, after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld made such a mess of things in Afghanistan and Iraq, they got excommunicated from the neocon church by the “real” neocons.
The same goes for Greenspan and the neoliberals. After he made such a mess of things with the Great Financial Crisis, Greenspan was summarily excommunicated from the neoliberal church by the “real” neoliberals.
Well, I, a mere engineer, think of a real mathematician as somebody who thinks up something that works to get my job done.
Where do I put the armor on the bomber?
“Where the surviving ones didn’t have any bullet holes”
How many gunners is best for the bomber to carry?
“None”
From WWII operational research, Q’s to young maths guys like Freeman Dyson.
wimbi,
When I think “real” mathemetician, I think of garbage in, garbage out. I say this because the mathematical models they create are no better than the assumtions they used to create them.
Back in 1814, when the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason were still young and brimming with youthful optimism, and at a time before WWI, the Great Depression and WWII had wiped the blush from the Modernist rose, an ambitious scientist by the name of Pierre-Simon Laplace took reductio scientiae ad matamaticam to a level never seen before.
As Ivars Peterson explains in Science News:
The success of Newton’s laws of motion made it possible for Laplace to envision a completely transparent, deterministic world in which the entire past and future lay within reach. In principle, everything was predictable, and the finest detail accessible to calculation. You could construct yesterday’s or tomorrow’s world from what you knew today.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/tolstoys-calculus
So what are some of the assumptions necessary for Laplace’s differential equations to be able to predict as he claimed they could:
1) That the positions, masses, directions and velocities of all particles are known by Laplace’s “demon,” as it came to be called,
2) That Newton’s laws of motion were “adequate” to predict the behavior of particles, and that the early 19th century developments of the concepts of irreversibility, entropy, and the second law of thermodynamics, as well as the early 20th century developments in quantum mechanics, could be disregarded,
3) And when it comes to predicting human behavior, that human beings behave the same way as inert particles of matter or assemblages of inert particles of matter do, and that there are no spiritual or religious forces in the universe which drive human behavior.
To this very day, determinists cite Laplace’s mathematics as evidence that determinism exists, and furthermore that free human will doesn’t. Others, on the other hand, point out that the assumptions Laplace based his calculations upon were implausible, or false, and argue that he offered no new empirical evidence in support of his assumptions.
So in the end Laplacian thought and calculus settled nothing, and the debate over determinism rages on.
I think simple. I like Feynman’s answer to the why of quantum laws.
“I don’t know why, I never think of that. What I ask is – does it work? That’s all I need.”
By “work” he meant- is it capable of predicting what we observe. If it does, good enough.
Calculus settled nothing? Bah! Calculus works – good enough for me and my ICBM.
Determinism? Don’t know and don’t care.
Next problem?
Glenn, So some things you can’t predict. Big whoop. But there are still many many things you can, like tides.
Have to read this as an example:
http://contextearth.com/2015/10/09/qbo-is-a-lunar-solar-forced-system/
Use the same lunar forces that drive tides, to model stratospheric wind changes. And then ENSO and El Nino.
Well you’re busy damning a “real”mathematician don’t forget to include James Clerk Maxwell, Euclid, John von Neumann, Edward Witten, John Napier, Albert Einstein, Leonhard Euler and Paul Dirac, to name a very few. Actually I like your reference to “garbage in, garbage out” because it seems oddly applicable to non-mathematicians criticizing the vast number of contributions by “real” mathematicians who have been striving for centuries to find answers to serious questions. Oh, you forgot to criticize, or mention, Laplace’s five-volume Mécanique Céleste (Celestial Mechanics) which contains numerous bits not accepted by “modern” astronomers. Maybe give Einstein a kick or two; the stupid bugger didn’t even properly incorporate quantum mechanics into his theories. Actually, in my experience, “real mathematicians” don’t make a practice of putting down efforts of colleagues’ attempts at solving problems but perhaps you know better. Are you a mathematician Glenn?
Suppose aliens invade the earth and threaten to obliterate it in a year’s time unless human beings can find the Ramsey number for red five and blue five. We could marshal the world’s best minds and fastest computers, and within a year we could probably calculate the value. If the aliens demanded the Ramsey number for red six and blue six, however, we would have no choice but to launch a preemptive attack.
Paul Erdős
https://xkcd.com/599/
🙂
Hi Wimbi,
So far nobody has found the answer, or if they have they are not sharing.
The fact is there are many different models of the economy and the many social experiments do not give solid empirical support for any single model, certainly the lack of reliable economic forecasts suggests more work needs to be done by “real” mathemeticians, statisticians, and economists.
It is funny that in the Nature of this week, exactly the same topic, of how to make science less prone to human biases, is highlighted.
I have many concerns on how China is governed, but one of striking successes to me is the way how they always seem to experiment with new economic ideas on a small scale, before rolling it out more broadly. I don’t know how common it is elsewhere, but about China I often encountered this.
“There are no controlled experiments in social science, so repeatable experiments are not possible.”
I think that once one sees the absolute need for experiments to confirm certain ideas, one can become rather creative in finding something that comes close to what would be theoretically the best.
Right on! Try new ideas on a small scale first.
Gee, could it be that some people in governments somewhere are actually intelligent?
Astounding, if true. Could we find a way to import a few of them?
I’ve watched how bias gets into science.
Primary vehicle is grant funding. Trivially easy to get conclusions you want by funding researchers who propose looking into subjects you want elevated.
Same of journalism. Fund deep research into Gary Hart many years ago and you can destroy his presidential campaign.
When the Bell Curve came out in the early 90s with its conclusions about societal stratification by IQ, the ONLY sociology areas funded for research were those pointed at rebuttal.
Hi Enno,
I don’t know if China does small scale social experiments first, but let’s assume that is correct. There are often effects on a larger scale that are unforeseen. As an appropriate understanding of the economy becomes widely understood, you immediately have people trying to game the system to get an advantage. This changes the nature of the system, with a social system we are trying to understand an evolving complex system, econometrics tries to tease out the behavior of the system using statistics, but deciding which measures are causes and which are effects is by no means clear. Which is why for every two economists you have about 6 opinions on what is going on in the economy.
Perhaps somewhat related,
”By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.”
”Honesty may be the best policy, but it’s important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.”
”No one knows what’s next, but everybody does it.”
All quotes by George Carlin
Rune Likvern says:
This is Platonism. As Hannah Arendt explains:
Enlightenment thinkers, however, at the dawning of a new age and a new nation were far more optimistic about speech being a valid method of truth-finding:
Plato’s solution to the truth-seeking problem — rationalism — without being tempered by empiricism and dialogue, quickly degenerates into what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “Platonicity.”
Glenn,
To make it clear the quotes are from George Carlin.
Also, J.S. Mill, On Liberty.
Do oil futures give any hint of future demand and the futures are indicating lower demand?
The other day I had to buy some gasoline. Since the coupon exchange works as best it can, the cost was five dollars for about six gallons of gas, 84 cents per gallon. Not bad. You only have to have fuel when you need it, not necessarily all of the time, it just needs to be available all of the time, if not, there will be a problem, not short term, long term.
You can limit your fuel consumption and cease being a hellbound hypocrite. If you can eliminate using crude oil in any form, you get a ticket to paradise in heaven. Everybody knows that by now. har
Ronald Walter said:
Are we witness to a bonafide revival of asceticism, or to an orgy of hypocrisy?
In reference to a previous discussion regarding CO2 floods and OPEX.
Chevron has a 220 BOEPD (gross) CO2 flood on the internet auction, with all data being public.
Appears OPEX averaging $46.50 per BOE (97% oil).
Also note SM Energy has large acreage blocks and production for sale in WY. Most data is confidential, but from the public data, appears mostly a break even proposition.
Chevron probably has pockets deep enough to run a break even oil field for a year or two no problem. The gamble appears to boil down to this- hoped for future higher oil price versus for sure future lower production.
If Chevron sells this property cheap, you can probably infer that Chevron management thinks prices are going to stay low for a good while. BUT otoh, maybe management needs the cash, or has a better place to invest it.
OFM. No doubt this CO2 flood is of little consequence to Chevron.
Just some anecdotal evidence of high US OPEX.
Would note CO2 flood initiated in this project at a time when oil prices were much lower, under $20 per barrel.
As depletion marches on, the current reduction in OPEX and CAPEX per barrel will be a very temporary phenomenon.
Note my previous example of two 6 well leases we own, one at 9 BOPD and one at 4 BOPD. The 9 barrel lease has posted a decent profit even at $40 oil, the 4 barrel lease has not.
As production from a well declines, OPEX per barrel generally increases.
Personally I believe mathematicians can at least theoretically dig out a lot of real lessons from the uncontrolled grand experiment known as real life or reality on the grand scale.
The quality of their results would depend on who is paying them to do the work. When people hire people, they give their employees guidelines to follow. Just about all the predictions I have encountered personally, in terms of actual numbers- numbers such as the future price and quantity of oil for instance – are based on assumptions of this sort.
Assumptions make asses of you and me.
The Black Swan book is one of the most important books ever.It ought to be REQUIRED reading for any manager or policy maker.
Math and science cannot be used to make DEPENDABLE predictions of what may come to pass in the affairs of men- but math and science enable us to recognize MANY things that WILL NOT come to pass.
This is must reading- a longish piece at the LA TIMES about Exon and company knowledge of climate changing in the far north as far back as the eighties.
http://graphics.latimes.com/exxon-arctic/
Yes, we knew the arctic ice was thinning. I wasn’t with Exxon, but we were partners, and they backed a proposal I made to develop a tanker navigation through ice model in a joint project. I wrote a simple model, showed it around, wrote a short paper with a few co workers, and tried to flesh out the whole issue. But we just didn’t have enough data.
So the arguments we see being made are bullshit. We saw some trends, nothing solid, and the satellite data and computer models just weren’t good enough. And while I can’t swear I knew what Exxon was doing, they definitely weren’t as aggressive as say Shell. Their Sakhalin developments stayed onshore. Shell may have had much more aggressive engineers, they went for Sakhalin II to the neck.
“So the arguments we see being made are bullshit. ”
Were you by any chance at this conference?
As early as 1977, one of Exxon’s senior scientists warned a gathering of oilmen of a “general scientific agreement” that the burning of fossil fuels was influencing the climate. A year later, he had updated his assessment, warning that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/opinion/exxons-climate-concealment.html?ref=opinion&_r=2
Remember this one, Ratty?
“Dr. Richard Lindzen. Go ahead, show me the cheque he got
Almost 9 years ago… How’s the sweater holding up?
“Remember this one, Ratty?”
Not until now
:>)
Web’s article continues the dismantling of Lindzen.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/11/1430653/-The-origins-of-the-QBO#
Even though he is an MIT professor, Lindzen doesn’t act like a scientist as much as a contrarian. He seems to develop all these crackpot theories to show how gullible his fellow scientists are. He has been quoted as saying they don’t have the “brightest minds”.
Science is really about building on the work of others, not what Lindzen is doing. There is something really odd about Lindzen’s behavior all these years.
No, I wasn’t in that conference. I worked the problem in the 1990’s. We had the files and reports going back to the 1960’s, the problem was always kept, as far as I know, as one to be dealt with for successful exploration and development in the Arctic. There were sub fields, such as iceberg drift around Greenland and New Foundland, the overall ice behavior in the Beaufort, etc.
I didn’t work for Exxon, so I don’t know what a scientist working for Exxon was saying in 1970. In the early 1990s we had the records from the 1960s, and it’s clear to me anybody looking at the ice data we had, in the mid 1970’s, would have feared cooling more than warming. The data simply didn’t show any warming to the mid 70’s.
By 1990 we could see a short term signal, about 15 years’ worth, of warming. I had conflicting information coming in, some saying the ice would thin, others saying it was a cyclic phenomenom we couldn’t trust. I decided the information was too unreliable to change the design basis to anything other than the data we had, and as a result, in part because we saw the environment as a huge problem, we walked away from the Arctic offshore Russia, which was the big prize we eyed in those days.
As I’ve written before, it’s evident others had a similar position during the 1990’s. Shell, same as now, was much more aggressive. They must have somebody inside with an optimistic view of the ice environment. It’s evident Exxon, as a company, didn’t put weight on global warming. This is shown by their Sakhalin I development, which never dared install offshore platforms.
So as far as I can see, what we got here is similar to the legendary gas in the water tap from Gasland, a story inflated by people with an agenda. But hey, in a world where Ché Guevara is a hero for so many, we find all sorts of wrong beliefs, won’t we?
The point is not so much that Exon or any other company knowingly took chances, ran risks, that could have resulted in horrible consequences for the biosphere in general and humanity in particular. The POINT of this article is that Exon – and some other oil companies- have been engaging in a deliberate coverup of what they knew or suspected.
Of course the oil industry is not alone. My own industry, agriculture, has behaved and continues to behave in the same manner. I have never personally had a job dealing with or even touching on public relations matters in my industry- nobody with any sense would ever have hired me for such a job since I have the rep of telling it like it is. Got hauled into state level supervisors offices for failing to teach a unit on PRODUCING tobacco and substituting one on the known health effects of smoking. THAT really pissed off a bunch of people considering Phillip Morris was a local mega employer and almost all my kids were farm kids. I would have stood my ground and they would have fired me the following year most likely- but I quit to go to work at North Anna right down the road. Got a four hundred percent raise.
It took me a good long while to see thru my own blind spots and recognize the dangers involved in using the chemicals I used to apply PERSONALLY in the orchards and fields. The short term benefits vastly overwhelm the short term problems, no question whatsoever.
Think beer if you please, having beer as much as you want, in the absence of drinking water. Staying mildly drunk is far preferable to dieing of dehydration, but sooner or later,long run, the beer itself becomes an insoluble problem. Pesticide residue in the environment is nothing, compared to people starving- in the short run. In the long run, pesticide residues all thru the environment can kill as surely as starvation.
The long and the short of it is that we have made a bargain with the devil of technology and we WILL have to pay up. We are paying already of course, but the note is coming due balloon fashion, like a mortgage that costs five hundred bucks a year for many years and then has a hundred thousand dollar final payment due all at ONCE.
Exxon
Conoco Phillips has become a new Wall Street darling. 5+% dividend and an American oil. High yields like that are more usually on Euro oils.
Big Alaska holdings.
This is good news.
We in North America need to husband our NG resources.
Why would we succumb to the siren song of short-term profits when we need that fuel here to last as long as we can make it last?
I would make a constrained/limited amount exception for exports to Mexico, Cuba, Bermuda, and Greenland.
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2015/10/09/85-gas-projects-dying-on-the-vine-as-lngs-promise-falls-short/#27079101=0
Build a NG pipeline from northern AK to the Ak southern coast..maybe through Canada even better to serve the U.S. Subsidize the cost and field development now as an investment for the future…stop thinking about the immediate future exclusively and stop decision-making driven by shorter-term profit-motive only.
Same thoughts about exporting our crude oil. Save it for use here down the road.
This Bloomberg link is about the man made versus natural factors having to do with warming. It plays like a video, if you give it plenty of time. I have not yet given it any close attention but it is too good to pass up without some study..
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/
Media attention for a 2015 Global Peak. Found on Peakoil.com
Energy Independence one way or another !
http://fuelincluded.com/2015/10/peak-oil-round-up/
What looks like a peak may lead to a valley on a graph and some may gasp, “We are past peak!”, then later to their amazement it surpasses the previous peak. The undulations of the connection between economically viable geology and consumer affordability will keep seesawing until what was actually THE peak is so far in the rear view mirror, it’s obvious it was the peak, but for now it’s just too early to know.
http://wolfstreet.com/2015/08/24/whose-capital-is-getting-destroyed-in-us-natural-gas-chesapeake/
“Regardless of what the hype is, no driller can survive for long at these prices.”
“The Marcellus Shale is where money went to die the fastest.”
“Especially the “smart money” got fooled by the hype and false hopes of natural-gas fracking.
Hope for US NG producers – LNG Exports?
“Five U.S. LNG projects already under construction, including Cheniere’s two terminals in Louisiana and Corpus Christi, will cross the finish line, but beyond that, construction appears “increasingly unlikely” for the remaining proposals, according to the latest study unveiled Tuesday by a task force of natural gas experts assembled by the Brookings Institution, a Washington D.C.-based thinktank.”
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2015/07/14/most-u-s-lng-projects-wont-cross-the-finish-line-new-study-says/#27079101=0
Yes, we (finally) have a solution:
ALASKA MULLS EXTRA OIL DRILLING TO COPE WITH CLIMATE CHANGE
“Expanding the search for oil is necessary to pay for the damage caused by climate change, the Governor of Alaska has told the BBC.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34501867
Alaska is the only US state that doesn’t have an income or sales tax, getting 90% of its day-to-day expenditure from levies on the production of oil and gas. That wouldn`t be a factor in the Governor`s thinking of course.
“Scientists estimate that due to climate change, the village of Kivalina, in northwestern Alaska, will be underwater by the year 2025.”
http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-08-09/will-residents-kivalina-alaska-be-first-climate-change-refugees-us
So will the Atlantic coastal waters be filled with oil platforms to fund the moving of Jersey City, New York City, Atlantic City, Miami and countless coastal towns and infrastructure?
Political lemmings.
My home town is a beach town. When I was a kid (about 10 or 12) I carved my initials at the high tide mark on the wooden pilings of our city’s pier that all the kids used to dive of off (nanny state liberals have now made it illegal to do that). Whenever I’m back in town I show to my grandkids those initials that I carved more than 50 years ago. The sea level hasn’t risen at all there. Or is it the land is rising as fast as the sea? I suppose if the scientists raised taxes so they could get bigger grants they might be able to figure out the answer.
In some places the ground IS rising, faster than the water, thus making it look as if the water level is actually FALLING. In other places the land is sinking, creating the impression the water is rising faster than it actually is.
If the earth were sitting dead still and there was no moon or sun to create winds and tides, no rising heat from the core of the earth, etc, sea waters would actually ” seek their own level” cease to move and then freeze.
But with the wind blowing, and tides running, and currents moving water from place to place, and the water being colder in some spots and warmer in others, the sea is NOT LEVEL. Pun intended.
However, the AVERAGE LEVEL OF THE SEA IS RISING, and this is confirmed by actual measures kept for a very long time at a very many different seaports.
Troll alert.
Or is it the land is rising as fast as the sea?
Actually depending on where you are that is exactly what could be happening.
Sea level rise is happening but the effects can be masked by the something called post glacial rebound which causes the land to rise therefore offsetting the effect of sea level rise.
Recently, the term post-glacial rebound is gradually being replaced by the term glacial isostatic adjustment. This is in recognition that the response of the Earth to glacial loading and unloading is not limited to the upward rebound movement, but also involves downward land movement, horizontal crustal motion,[3][4] changes in global sea levels,[5] the Earth’s gravity field,[6] induced earthquakes [7] and changes in the rotational motion.[8] An alternate term that is sometimes used is glacial isostasy, because the uplift near the centre of rebound is due to the tendency towards the restoration of isostatic equilibrium (as in the case of isostasy of mountains). Unfortunately, that term gives the wrong impression that isostatic equilibrium is somehow reached, so by appending “adjustment” at the end, the motion of restoration is emphasized.
Source Wikipedia
There’s no oil in the USA Atlantic shelf. Sea level isn’t going to increase fast enough to require moving cities the way you envision. The propaganda is getting laid on extremely thick.
Fernando, they are not going to move the cities, they will be mostly left to destruction. The people will be moved and smaller useful materials/equipment. New York is already planning sea walls, good luck with that.
Now with your proclamation, I think that sea level will rise at least 5 meters this century.
DougL,
Why does “We had to destroy the village in order to save it” come to mind?
The human mind is a wonderful thing.
A lot of very valuable real estate sits only a couple of feet above high tide levels on the east coast of the USA.
You and I are not likely to live long enough to see that real estate flooded- but if you have grandchildren, they very will might.
Dunno, visit me in Miami sometime and I’ll take you on a tour of South Beach during the high tide of a full moon. Make sure you bring your flipflops because your feet will get wet!