From Jenna Orkin
Quote of the day:
Front page headline on Friday’s Wall Street Journal proclaimed a big up-tick worldwide in the manufacturing sector.
According to the paper, everybody is making more and more stuff. This helps assure that the recovery “has legs.”
Auto sales, too, came in stronger than expected in March. So it sounds like the recovery has wheels too.
What we want to know: does it have a brain? Who’s buying this stuff and where are they getting the money?
Headlines
South Korea destroyer reaches tanker seized by pirates
Blast derails train in Russia
Russia's Chechen War: It All Comes Down to Energy Rents - from Rice Farmer
5,000 flood Mongolia's capital, demand new government - from Rice Farmer
Border patrol agents face lethal force
Economy
Reminder: The Fed Is Meeting RIGHT NOW To Discuss A Possible Hike To The Discount Rate
The coming inflation wave
LA To Be Bankrupt By June 30, Says City Comptroller - from Jon Noel
California Pensions Are $500 Billion Short, Stanford Study Says - from Jon Noel
Faith-based economics in two graphs
Americans head to the mall
Faith without the graphs.
George Soros Thinks No Women Are Fit To Change The World
So much for his new paradigm.
Energy/Resources
U.S. Natural-Gas Data Overstated
Drought causes thermal coal shortage in central China province
Gasoline Still Has Some Advantages as Fuel - from Rice Farmer
Australia to appoint first Population Minister
Land Grab By the Federal Government?
Monsanto GM-corn harvest fails massively in South Africa
Egypt's largest steelmaker raised steel prices 25% to recoup soaring raw material costs - from Rice Farmer
World
China Journalist Club Shuts Website After Attack
Nearly half of Japan's voters don't support any party
North Korea threatens to abandon U.S. MIA remains
Karzai seeks tribal support
Environment
Earthquake rocks U.S. west coast
New York Will Approach Daily High Temperature Record Tomorrow
If It Isn't One Thing, It's Another Dept.
Unexplained sheep attacks 'caused by aliens in UFOs', farmers claim
RE: Gasoline has advantages
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely right about the challenges of selling expensive electric cars and fancy new infrastructure (which is based on a limited quantity of lithium).
But the reality disconnect is apparent in this passage:
"...there is agreement only that the number of cars will keep rising, perhaps doubling to two billion by 2050."
By then, we'll be driving flying cars and everyone will have robot butlers.
Ha!
Jenna, you're just trying to get a reaction, aren't you. Well I'm just the sucker to give you one. Glen Beck says:
ReplyDelete"If we tapped these areas, we could be closer to energy independence. You want to pay off the debt? The West is Fort Knox."
The Federal "land grab" took place in the nineteenth century, and they grabbed it from the Mexicans and the Indians. It has been protected (supposedly) precisely because it was so valuable - not for natural gas (or coal, or oil, or gold) but for natural beauty, fragile ecosystems, unique species and also because much of it cannot support an industrial civilization.
The only people trying to grab land are the governor of Utah and his ilk, who want to privatize fedral lands in order to extract profitable (and highly polluting) minerals.
Okay, that's it.
Yep. 7 gallons of oil per tire.
ReplyDeleteGood luck
German Corporate Failures Hinder Recovery Forecast Record Insolvencies Among Country's Dominant Midsize Companies This Year Threaten to Hurt Euro Zone
ReplyDeleteTight times put gravel on the road Gravel roads, once a symbol of quaint times, are emerging as a sign of financial struggle in a growing number of rural towns.
High costs and tight budgets have prompted communities in Maine, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Vermont to convert or consider converting their cracked asphalt roads back to gravel to cut maintenance costs, officials in those states say.
World facing oil pricing uncertainty - "triple digit" oil predicted
CitizEnergyVideoblog about Energy, Crisis, The Future and much more!
GrTz,
V
RE: New York Will Approach Daily High Temperature Record Tomorrow
ReplyDeletetypical national media... obviously, its not hot if it aint hot in NY or DC; cleveland has averaged 80F for april, with 3 record highs...
Glenn Beck has bought the shale oil con game, hook line and sinker.
ReplyDeleteIt's very low quality fuel and likely requires more energy to extract than is returned.
If it were profitable to exploit, the Federal Government would roll over like a slut dog, to let the oil industry at it.
I don;t know where the Regressives keep getting the idea that environmentalists have so much power that they can dictate to the oil industry where they can and cannot drill. When the oil industry really wants something, they have no problem getting politicians to approve it.
You'd think environmentalists had super hero powers from the way the Regressives, Rush Limbaugh and others put it.
On that Monsanto article, the insufficient fertilization argument is horse puckey. the fertilization for the seed in the field, occurs as wind blown pollen lands on the stigma of the embryonic corn kernels. The stigma is the hair at the end of a corn cob.
Monsanto clearly has a genetics problem, if their corn is infertile. Perhaps the gene for seedless melons escaped to their corn crop?
I've got questions about oil field size estimate calculations.
ReplyDeleteHow are estimate calculations arrived at,what technology is used, what assumptions are used in the model? Is this methodology contentious? If so by whom?
In all my readings about peak oil, this is always glossed over. I haven't even seen a summary explanation of concept. Can anybody point me in the right direction?
The loudest protest we can make is to be conscious consumers and NOT buy things with the Frankfoods from Monsanto in it. Which is actually much harder to do than one might think since GMO's have been around for about 10-12 yrs? Yet if enough people paid attention to what is in the food that gets logged into the registers of America's grocery stores, it would certainly speak very loudly to Unilever, General Foods, Monsanto etc. GMO's are everywhere and shockingly a lot of creepy things like "Roundup" are in the wheat and corn and soy. We know it's not easy to do (hell mr. P still throws caution to the wind and wants to eat Life cereal) until he's reminded it just aint no good for ye. If you buy Cow's milk it's probably got Monsanto's rBST hormone in it - very sick stuff, unless the label says it does Not have it, consider it there. The Cheese and Butter likewise. Boycotting products speaks volumes. We spend a few cents more and get the good stuff often it's less if you shop around. mrs p
ReplyDeletemost of that shale area is pretty arid...it was in the news a month ago that shell abandoned its bid for water rights in colorado, putting that regions oil shale development in limbo...& ive read the pdf on potential bakken shale exploitation; for that to be viable, water will have to be trucked in from the missouri river system...
ReplyDeleteSpot on IMO Weaseldog.
ReplyDeleteAll the recent talk on the blog of nuclear wasted cities, complete destruction by nukes etc. sent my mind racing back 27 odd years to my NBCD military training (nuke/bio/chem/defense).
Amazing films and slides of nukes, effects etc. that I've never seen in the public domain (some were "tests" on POWs, horrid stuff). Now correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a type of device in which the reaction only reacts with water, my memory is poor but I thought it was a hydrogen device but I may be wrong, anyway, the commentary from the instructor was what sticks in my mind to this day (paraphrasing) "besides the immediate detonation area, there would be limited infrastructure damage, but anything made of water would be vaporized for a much wider area - we could drop one of these on major cities, wait a few weeks, and then move in to a completely empty, intact, city - because all the people would have been vaporized leaving the infrastructure intact. The wave would pass through concrete, only reacting when it meets water. Clean-up would be safe, just need a lot of dust pans"
I'm sure we were told these things are banned under the Geneva Convention, but that's never stopped em before!
============================
President Obama said Monday that he was revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/world/06arms.html
Doesn't this make the damn things less of a deterrent? Bit like rubbing out the line in the sand and re-drawing it a bit closer maybe, or telling the other poker players you can't bluff but they can!
Seems a bloody strange thing to announce anyway!
mrs p
ReplyDeleteI agree wholeheartedly. Any more concrete ideas on how to accomplish this?
Because where I live organic products aren't just a few cents more...they are a few dollars more. For example, milk...organic 6.55 a gallon...non organic 2.00. ARRGG!
So...if you know of any online stores or some ideas about how you shop for different items that aren't from the major food corps (because everywhere I look they're all made from the same people!!) I'd really appreciate the input!
the report that's looked into N Dakota's water situation in regards to oil: (www.ndoil.org/.../Bakken_Water_Optimization_Study_-_John_Harju.pdf).
ReplyDeletefor the record, for those who dont want to download the pdf:
As much as 1.0 million
gallons of water per well to
fracture the Bakken
Formation.
• Typically transported to well
site in 7500- to 8000-gallon
tanker trucks.
• Transportation costs for long
haul distances can be
excessive.
Permits to obtain water from high-quality
groundwater sources can be difficult and timeconsuming
to obtain.
• The North Dakota State Water Commission
(SWC) is encouraging withdrawal of water from
the Missouri River system for uses like fracing.
• The SWC and Corps of Engineers are currently
working together to identify “low-risk” corridors
for water extraction (i.e., easy access, low
probability of cultural features, etc…).
Relatively low recovery of the original frac
water within the first 10 days.
– Ranges from 15% to 50% recovery
• Very high salinity in flowback water.
– Salinity levels as high as 200,000 mg/L
• Water chemistry is predominantly sodium
chloride (NaCl), with lesser amounts of
calcium, potassium, and sulfate.
Bakken Recycling Challenges
• Slow recovery of flowback water
• Relatively low volume initial recovery
• Extremely high dissolved salts early in the
flowback
• Treatment very challenging, even with the
most robust technologies
• Treatment very likely not cost-effective in
most cases
Current Frac Water Costs
• Acquisition costs
– $0.25–$0.75 raw water cost
– $0.63–$5.00 transportation costs
• Disposal costs
– $0.63–$5.00 transportation
– $0.50–$1.00 disposal via deep well injection
• Total costs
– $2.00–$11.75/bbl
Soaring petrol prices 'force car use cutbacks'
ReplyDelete"This is a dark time for motorists, with the worst affected virtually paying £6-a-gallon for fuel.”
How would $9-a-gallon for gas go down in the States?
Namaste
Mrs P, in the USA it's illegal to mention GMO on food labels. A product that has a label that says whether it is GMO or not, runs afoul of the law.
ReplyDeletePaul, on the topic of methodology on calculating oil field sizes, that simply get's into deeper geological territory than the Peak Oil crowd gets into, for two reasons.
l. You need proprietary data on the production profiles of wells in a field, along with information about the known geology of the field.
2. That information is not generally published.
The geologists of likes of Dr. Colin Campbell, keep extensive personal libraries of this information and can publish results of their studies, but they are not at liberty to publish the data their studies are built upon.
Colin Campbell has described his methodology as essentially adding up the production profiles of every well in a field, to get the aggregate production profile. According to him and many other geologists, if you know the past production profile of a well, the technology used and how it is situated in relation to other wells, you can accurately predict the future production profile.
To get the profile for the field them simply involves adding all of the production profiles together.
I'm not aware that this is contentious.
One confusing thing you'll see in reports are P10, P50 and P90 numbers. They breakdown like this.
P10 - Ten percent probability that this is accurate. This is the number usually reported in newspapers and slick promotional ads to lure investors in with. This figure is generally ten times the actual recoverable value.
P50 - Fifty percent probability that this is correct.
P90 - Ninety percent accurate. I'm not aware of any modern fields where this wasn't the correct number.
Then we get to the sticky problem that reserve figures are largely self reported, and there are many reasons to lie about them. The reasons to lie would be to have increased production quotas, or to inflate your company's reportable assets to attract investors, or federal subsidies.
Look at Shell Oil's bombshell admission in 2004 that they had been lying for years about their reserve sizes.
This corn problem could be absolutely catastrophic.
ReplyDeleteBut don't worry much, only 85% of all corn planted in the US is genetically modified....
It might be useful to note that boycotting companies that provide GMO animal products is an act of terrorism.
ReplyDeleteThe Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act makes it a crime punishable by imprisonment to cause any business classified as an “animal enterprise” to suffer a loss of profit — even if the company’s financial decline is the result of legal activities, such as peaceful protests, consumer boycotts, or media campaigns. The term “animal enterprise”; includes manufacturers, distributors, and sellers of animals or animal products including research facilities, pet stores, breeders, zoos, rodeos, circuses, furriers, animal shelters, and the like.
Now we discover what the real agenda for the health care bill was. I wonder what other surprises we are in for.
ReplyDeleteMicrochipping to Begin Under New Health Bill
http://theflucase.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3207%3Amicrochipping-to-begin-under-new-health-bill&catid=1%3Alatest-news&Itemid=64&lang=en
The article on Aliens attacking sheep is the answer to the article on faith based economics! The aliens will show us how to utilize heretofore unknown technology to fulfill our energy needs. And, they have some awesome recipes for lamb dishes for us to enjoy as the economy rebounds.
ReplyDeleteOn my recent trip to California, the chemtrail activity was intense throughout the San Joaquin valley. Some in the EU are asking questions about it:
Chemtrails
See also: Geoengineering
Blogger Paul said...
ReplyDelete"I've got questions about oil field size estimate calculations."
Paul, Try the book "Twilight in the Desert" by Matt Simmons. He is in the energy finance business and really knows his stuff. He delves deeply into the technology as well as the mythology.It is a hefty read but well worth it.
4,06,,10; 7:10pm.
ReplyDeleteWe go around & around about this finger pointing, boxing in of human nature, you can Quote
any one person you want, & I could name someone else.
I am old enough to remember the KKK in Michigan (I've said that before), there were few N (I know all the names), to pick on so they (Those respectable Republican
Whites), hiding behind White sheets, meeting in farmers' fields, at night, while pretending
outrage in the daytime, swearing
on the Bible that they were unbiased, used accent as the focus of their discrimination.
I at the time I was Republican, when you had to pretend to be Democratic to get elected in
Michigan, this was the same time my good Friend, Republican, was willing to shoot me over 1
Dead Mallard Duck, You never know who is in the Duck blind with you
until the gun is pointed at you!
Have you ever faced down a loaded 12 Ga.?
A BIGOT, black, white, tall, short, even your best Friend can/Will kill you as DEAD, as someone you see as a danger. A Bigot, each BIGOT has their own standards, don't expect them to tell you they hate your guts! During Our American Civil War, I had Relative brothers who fought on opposite sides, one Killing the other in hand to hand Combat, he was therefore disowned, & fled west, ending up robbing Stagecoach's in Calif, never fired a shot, then he just disappeared. I digress, just know, that smile may be only skin deep.
Sabastian Says, "The liberal era is dead."; where are you at THIS ERA is if not dead, its dieing, what ever you name it the light will go out, there will possibly be a race war but Americans are not unarmed bushman, there
will be killing on both/ALL sides, Conservationism when I was young
meant thinking before you took sides, in the 1950's my grand old party became reactionary, I have never regretted becoming "Unaffiliated", I decide the issues, and who gets my support--By how they have performed, in the past, if they betray me once, they loose all/any support! Mean what you say/SAY what you mean, don't tell me I misunderstood.
Don't tell me I am the Bigot, or Hypocritical, you can call me LIBERAL, but all those boxes will come crashing down around all of us, human nature is ugly when cornered!
EGO, self centered ness/the will to Survive!
"Death came to Eugene Terreblanche not with his boots on, rifle in hand, defending the volk from the heathen hordes, but tucked up in bed in his pyjamas, probably passed out with the drink, and bludgeoned to death by two of his own black staff"
Read the complex story/joke here, A true HERO!!
http://tinyurl.com/yaepzqp
And here is the dark side, pick your poison.
http://tinyurl.com/ygw45ef
How many people of color have been treated likewise, or worse?
Almost every time I post these days, the machine sends me to a page that says "We could not complete your request" or some crap. Once, it completed it anyway. But usually no. This is pretty annoying.
ReplyDeleteIf I'm particularly alert, I highlight and copy before I send. Then, after two or three tries, I get through. This morning, I trusted the technology, and lost.
Can this be fixed?
eyeballs
ReplyDeletei don't know. it's google's dept; i am no match. but when collapsenet launches, i believe these mishaps will recede into fond memory. meanwhile, they occur at this end as well.
@agape
ReplyDeleteBigotry comes in many forms. Consider America's love of Islam... How does someone like a 17 year old kid from Davenport, Oklahoma end-up hating 'towel-heads'? And, more to the point... why doesn't that upset the people around him?
For The Boys
ReplyDeleteNot sure where Trader Joe's gets their milk but they sell a half gal for 1.69 and it clearly states on the front lable No rBST! Hubbby has to have milk in his coffee--refuses to use coconut milk, almond or soy in his coffee. Can't say I blame him. You might consider giving up cow's milk though. Most of all the cow's milk in the U.S. has jet fuel in it but we buy it anyway. Hate to think what's in those coffee beans. I prefer Cocount milk but it's an aquired taste.
Weaseldog
We just avoid wheat, corn and soy that's Not Certified Organic yet we have noticed many products do have labels that specifically state, from "Non-GMO" sources. And as for "an act of terrsum" when boycotting Non-green unhealthy vampire squid corporations; we think you're taking the description of "loss" a bit too far in your interpretations. mrs p