The Wall Street Journal says that many Arabs are going to have a hard time finding enough bread to eat over the coming months. Bad weather and lower-than-average crops — plus climbing fuel costs — have driven up the price of wheat by 91% in less than a year. Arabs eat a lot of bread; Tunisians, Algerians and Egyptians, for example, consume almost 3 times per capita than Americans. They account of 1/3 of all the world’s traded wheat.
And they can’t afford it any more. In the past the IMF has urged countries to cut back on their food stockpiles as these were non-financially performing assets. Real estate speculation cut back on arable land in many countries. It may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but now people are discovering an old truth. Man does not live by bread alone, but it sure helps to have it.
What changed the equation was Asia. Spengler writes that rising food demand from places like China “priced the Arab out of the grain market”. The resulting food shortages fueled riots that created the Arab Spring, which was driven not simply by a hunger for democracy, but just plain old hunger. Noting that “even Islamists have to eat”, Spengler notes that controlling food has become a priority activity among Egyptian revolutionaries.
The Ministry of Solidarity and Social Justice is already forming “revolutionary committees” to mete out street justice to bakeries, propane dealers and street vendors who “charge more than the price prescribed by law”, the Federation of Egyptian Radio and Television reported on May 3.
According to the ministry, “Thugs are in control of bread and butane prices” and “people’s committees” are required to stop them. Posters on Egyptian news sites report sharp increases in bread prices, far in excess of the 11.5% inflation reported for April by the country’s central bank. And increases in the price of bottled propane have made the cost of the most widely used cooking fuel prohibitive.
The collapse of Egypt’s credit standing, meanwhile, has shut down trade financing for food imports, according to the chairman of the country’s Food Industry Holding Company, Dr Ahmed al-Rakaibi, chairman of the Holding Company for Food Industries. Rakaibi warned of “an acute shortage in the production of food commodities manufactured locally, as well as a decline in imports of many goods, especially poultry, meats and oils”. According to the country’s statistics agency, only a month’s supply of rice is on hand, and four months’ supply of wheat. …
It will look like the Latin American banana republics, but without the bananas. That is not meant in jest: few people actually starved to death in the Latin inflations. Egypt, which imports half its wheat and a great deal of the rest of its food, will actually starve.
So who’s getting ready to manage the next phase of the Arab Spring? The President in his recent speech on Middle Eastern initiatives mentioned “aid”. But that is a little likely to be effective as a bucket of sand in four-alarm fire.
When historians look back on the first decades of the 21st century they may conclude that the political and economic crisis that swept over the world was the direct result of decades of resource misallocation driven by political objectives. They will look back on the drilling bans, environmental edicts which have shut down agricultural areas, the massive entitlement expansions and quests for carbon sequestration and ask: what were the political leadership thinking?
Maybe those historians will conclude that they weren’t. Because as everybody knows, they think the biggest problem in the Middle East today is Israel’s borders. Never mind that the Arab street has nothing to eat, no employment for its youth. Forget the fact that nearly every country is under the heel of a dictatorship or in transition to another one. That’s secondary. The biggest priority of the age is to tame Israel and build windmills all over the landscape. Do you disagree? Well you don’t count.
Among those that do, it is this single-minded pursuit of the irrelevant by the self-important that constitutes the greatest catastrophe of our time.
“No Way In” print edition at Amazon
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Do not forget Ethanol: 30% to 40% of the US grain crop is turned into motor fuel. You don’t do that without driving up the price of bread.
“What was the political leadership thinking?”
As a voter and observer, every decision our ‘leaders’ make tends to remind me of that old business parody of Churchill’s speech:
We, the willing, led by the unknowing are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much for so long with so little we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
I’ll tell you what they’re thinking: “If we can keep this up a while longer the economy will collapse, followed shortly by civil order. Then we win.”
And a summer be a coming in here in the US when gas price traditionally rise.
There is concern that the exceptionally wet season is going to give rise to an increase in plant diseases, rust, stem rot, and etc. Some are fungicide resistant and others are overcoming the bred in resistance of modern crops.
I’m thinking about investing in farm land in North East Japan, my poo may glow in the dark but at least I won’t have to turn on the bathroom light to check.
I was thinking about:
“Do you think President Obama will be a one term President?”
“He might last that long.”
I’m not smiling about it now.
I was reading that a lot of the gold purchasing being done by China was by the new middle class hedging against inflation not just government purchases.
I wonder if some of the US states will start backing their bonds with commodities. Oil, coal, wheat, beef, iron, rare earths, or what ever and swapping them with each other. Where’s the Beef Bonds.
Interesting. Dependence on a food no humans ate till 8000 years ago, by the people who atarted eating it, but now can no longer produce enough of it.
it is this single-minded pursuit of the irrelevant by the self-important that constitutes the greatest catastrophe of our time.
Wretchard, I assume this quote is totally your own; cause I am going to be totally quoting it. Its the best alternative definition of the “social justice” cult of good intentions that I’ve heard.
I think it’s my own. I sure didn’t look it up. It’s kinda funny realize that you can actually get people to pay you a subsidy for growing cogongrass as part of “looking after the land”. I have visions of retiring to Cebu Island and giving visitors a tour of my planned talahib plantation, well stocked with snakes and other noxious critters for the enjoyment of all.
W: “…it is this single-minded pursuit of the irrelevant by the self-important that constitutes the greatest catastrophe of our time.” Indeed. And the mystery, for me, is why the rest of us let them do it. Have we been hypnotized? How did they game the system so that all the checks and balances, the audit functions, have been bypassed or frozen?
As for the lack of grain reserves: scary. The decisionmakers have little experience in managing a population made desperate by sudden poverty, compounded with sky-high prices for the daily bread on which their families depend. Next few months in MENA will be very instructive. I can see this Administration giving away OUR food reserves to the same countries that have been bending us over the oil barrel. That would be a doubly ironic surrender, and one that is absolutely in line with his values and plans.
Hunger, Disease, Pestilence, War; sounds familiar for some reason.
It is perhaps that the delusion that market forces can be controlled when it has always been the case that market forces, seen, unseen, and in some case unknowable until they appear, control us.
Quick hand me my dead horse beating stick while I recite “The Gods of the Copy Book Headings” to myself once again.
The Four Horsement are about to ride again. It is not going to be pretty, anywhere. As for Chinese buying Gold, they are going to find out that you can’t eat it.
RIP: Cpl Jose Guerena, USMC
Wretchard: Going to introduce an O/T item into your thread, which you can expand upon for comment in another thread, or delete this post if you prefer.
Local incident occurred in the USA which I just found out about. A young ex-Marine was gunned down by a police SWAT team in his own home in Tucson, Arizona. Google search for “Jose Guerena” to read the stories.
Police were executing a sealed search warrant, variously linking this home and three others on the same block to “drugs” or a “home invasion robbery team”. The young man just got home from a 12 hour night shift at a local mine, was asleep, awakened by his wife who saw an armed man attired in black outside her son’s bedroom window. Jose tells his wife to hide in the closet with his son, grabs his AR15, takes a fighting position in the front hallway some distance from the day, and aims towards the front door, with his weapon still on safety. The SWAT team bangs on the door for “15 seconds”, knocks down the door. Apparently, one Deputy kicks off a round that splinters the front door frame, showering splinters on the other deputies. The SWAT team fires 71 times in 7 seconds, 60 rounds hit the Marine, and he apparently rolls over or falls into the next room. Further chaos ensures, wife leaves her baby (hands in the air) and comes out. Wife had been on the phone with 911 operators since she first saw the “gunman”. Son follows out on his own. Wife begs the officers to send in medical aid (which arrived 2 minutes after call, plus life-flight was overhead). Officers consider their suspect “barricaded” and hold back medical support for 1 hour and 15 minutes.
In the aftermath, the Sheriff’s office changes their story about five times. One of the things they claimed as “evidence” was that the “suspect” had “military weapons” and “body armor” in the home. (Aside: I also have an AR15, body armor from military service, and other “military grade” arms in my own home.) The Sheriff’s office does everything they can, in my opinion, to paint the dead Marine as a bad guy and justify the action of the SWAT team. It also turns out interestedly enough, that two of the wife’s relatives were previously killed in a home invasion robbery, so this Marine’s reaction can’t exactly be called an “overreaction”. Also unconfirmed, other than by the deputies, was whether any warning was issued. The police said “there were vehicles in the driveway, emergency lights running” as evidence that they had announced their presence, but the wife and neighbors swear that they had heard nothing. There is no corroborating evidence presented thus far that this young man was anything other than a hard working military veteran, and good father and husband.
Most interesting sidebar to this story, and sheer irony is: The location of this police action is in the politically liberal Arizona bastion of Pima County, and the Sheriff is one “esteemed” Clarence Dupnik. This was the guy who used the guy who used his every photo opportunity immediately after the Congresswoman Gabby Gifford shooting to link the politically left/anarchist nut to conservative groups. He also blamed the crime on the availability of guns in general. So, link a liberal, anti-second amendment attitude of the cops in his department with an ex-Marine standing his ground with weapon in hand in his own home, and you have this “righteous kill” by his officers of an apparently innocent citizen in his own home.
The Sheriff is standing behind his men, defaming this Marine’s good name even after his death. I’d like to think this Sheriff doesn’t survive the next election, but Jose was everything that he and his constituents hate. Moreover, he was probably a conservative Mexican-American, as well as “war criminal”, double evils. I DO NOT expect to see any liberals marching at the City Center demanding justice for Jose.
I’m outraged, which moved me to write this post. Sorry, Richard, if I polluted your BLOG.
O.S.
My dad served on Cebu in WW2. Also Samar.
One of my favorites.
http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_copybook.htm
AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
“When historians look back on the first decades of the 21st century they may conclude that the political and economic crisis that swept over the world was the direct result of decades of resource misallocation driven by political objectives.”
I recall reading a piece some time ago about an area of Europe where many people decided that The End was coming in the year 1000 BC, apparently simply based on the idea that 1000 years had to be enough. It was like the Y2K hysteria but without computers.
So it was pointless to plant crops since they would never be consumed. And as it turned out the year 1000 was The End for many of those people; they starved to death.
The difference is that the people who starved in 1000 BC had a reason, however faulty. Today we have thousands of interlocking reasons, all of which have to work to induce such failure. The list of stupid things you have to believe in this world, this universe, of unbelievable plenty in order to make it fail is very long. But compared to the people of 1000 BC we are truly exceptional.
We don’t have just the capability to believe six impossible things before breakfast. We can believe thousands of impossible things and in so doing eliminate the capability to have breakfast.
Here, too, survival of the fittest comes to the fore.
Every society in MENA with the exception of Israel is so dysnfunctional they can’t even produce enough food or wealth to feed their own people.
It will be interesting to see how much the Saudis and other petro dynasties help their less fortunate nominal brethern.
I’d reckon there’s gonna be some skinny and very angry mofos on the rampage over the next couple of months.
It will be interesting watching our pampered ideologue/theorist left trying to adjust to the new reality, if it registers on them at all.
Apropos of nothing, here are some rough figures. Feel free to check the math and assumptions. If I have made any errors, please correct me!
2000 calories per person per day.
365 x 2000 = 730,000 calories per day.
250 cups of uncooked rice per 100 pound bag.
approximately 700 calories per cup uncooked rice provides roughly 175000 calories per bag.
730000/175000 = approximately 4.17 bags of rice per year per person.
200 cups of uncooked beans per 100 pound bag.
approximately 1000 calories per cup of uncooked beans (based on about 200+ calories per cup of cooked beans and 5-6 cups of cooked beans per cup of uncooked beans) which provides 200,000 calories per 100 pound bag.
730000/200000 = approximately 3.65 bags of beans per year per person.
Hence, by combining beans and rice, 5 each one hundred pound bags of rice and 4 each 100 pound bags of beans should supply two people sustenance for a year.
Nota Bene: This does not adjust for vitamins, minerals, etc OR boredom.
We have been living in the age of homo economicus for a long time. The printed word, followed by the broadcast word, has created chaos for more than the last 100 years, because it’s easy to spread bad and virulent ideas to the masses this way. Capitalism makes the same promise as socialism, prosperity for all, somehow delivered by wise leaders. All the political systems of the 20th century promised the same thing, order and dignity included, it was just a question of who was going to be in charge and by what principles they would govern.
But all these mass social systems are failing, or have failed- ours included- because humans can’t run a system durable or flexible enough to survive unforeseen crises.
E/16–as a world average I’d say your 2000-cal estimate is significantly too high, thus more people could be supplied than you think.
Gordon:18,
Thanks for your response. I agree with your observation. I was using approximately 10 calories per pound of body weight for a 200 pound active young male. Obviously, there is wide variation. It never ceases to amaze me how few calories per day it takes to survive.
However, food has to be grown, and in season. A concern I have about the flooded farm land mentioned earlier is that even after the water goes down, the window for planting may have been missed.
So, now, Obama will piss off American farmers? I don’t think so.
On the other hand, BUYING is not the same thing as FREE. And, if the egyptians are counting on getting wheat free … maybe, instead, they’d just have to stop their arms tading with Hamas?
On the other hand, I think Obama just did a “slight of hand.” Nothing’s changed much in the official US relationship with Israel. Heck, back in July of 2006, when Condi Rice swung in to dance with the french; I thought Israel had no intention of going into Lebanon. But Condi took Dubya’s reputation down da’ toilet.
Here? Hillary, who is as politically tone deaf as Obama, just attempted to take the Pentagon’s allotment, and transfer it into State. (State is totally an “executive deal.”) All the taxpayer money State can get, gets transferred to foreign banks.) That’s what the IMF does. And, that’s why the IMF is headquartered in DC. 3 blocks from the White House.
As to the “arab spring.” It isn’t. It’s just like the first act of the Cedar Revolution, 2005. Which didn’t bring freedom to Lebanon.
Assad’s still gonna be in Damascus. Just as Q-Daffy seems to stay ensconced in Libya. However, the UN’s NATO set the Tripoli port on fire (in Libya). So exactly how will oil be delivered to Europe, ahead? What if ahead, after the summer is over, things get very cold?
Besides, didn’t Napoleon say that he had to feed his army for it to move on its belly? What makes you think just rushing Israel’s borders by hordes of arabs … gets them to any food supplies?
Since when, when Africans starve, do Americans get upset?
Farmers however want to sell their wheat. Oops. The Mississippi flooded out lots of farmland.
Actually, KSA, Qatar, Bahrain Kuwait UAE etc —the oil rich states –have bought and leased vast fertile lands in Africa to supply their food needs
It is much cheaper for them to import lamb from NZ and Australia than to raise them domestically.
The main problem in MENA is water.
Egypt has a lot of water and could easily grow enough wheat using Aswan water and recycled sewage.
Turkey, Syria and Iraq have fair supplies of water.
The Holy Land, KSA do not.
Libya has huge underground aquifers it can exploit.
The big issue with food world wide is waste and spoilage between production and retail.
With better logistics and rational economics Zimbabwe and other African countries could easily feed MENA well and cheaply.
There have been millions of people who have proven to be ambitious, creative, temperate, and industrious that were trapped in dysfunctional authoritarian societies who managed to flee to the United States or similar havens such as Canada and Australia. They largely succeeded and their grandchildren have thrived to the point where the fourth or fifth generation can lapse into self indulgence. The millions trapped in the downward spiral of the Ummah may prove equally valuable as a source of immigration, or not. If the causes of failure are not simply layered over them, as was true with the peasants of most other pre-modern societies, but is instead embedded within them then they should be viewed as the vectors of a cultural virus and quarantined.
In a related note it can be asked to what extent did socialism actually change or strip away the moral foundations of the people who lived under it for 4 generations in Russia? Is the criminality and selfishness, the shear bad manners and contempt for the law that has accompanied significant recent immigration from Russia and China a passing episode or indicative of something deeper?
Victor @ 21: “With better logistics and rational economics Zimbabwe and other African countries could easily feed MENA well and cheaply.”
And if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.
23. oMan
Zimbabwe has among the most fertile land on the planet and was a bread basket under British rule
The things that need to change are
1/ Get rid of the NGOs that feed corruption
2/ Get rid of the IMF that feed corruption
3/ Allow GM food from Africa in to world markets.
Actually China has introduced good logistics to ship out precious minerals and food from Africa very quickly–they have also demanded rational economics–if rather harshly.–they achieved their goals in a very few years.
It is the UN, IMF and NGOs that feed corruption in Africa
–end those and the free-market system could solve the food problems in MENA in a few years
The EU and US food policies are absurd—we pay farmers to NOT grow food–in the EU they dump millions of gallons of milk and grain.
Thrasymachus @ 17 said:
“We have been living in the age of homo economicus for a long time. The printed word, followed by the broadcast word, has created chaos for more than the last 100 years, because it’s easy to spread bad and virulent ideas to the masses this way. Capitalism makes the same promise as socialism, prosperity for all, somehow delivered by wise leaders. … But all these mass social systems are failing, or have failed- ours included- because humans can’t run a system durable or flexible enough to survive unforeseen crises.”
Human civilization has been around for almost 5000 years. During most of that time, we lived as non-urban agrarian communities ruled by hereditary aristocracy. “Modern society” wasn’t enabled until after the hygenic revolution which in turn was a consequence of the scientific method. Prior to the hygenic revolution, humans lived in their own filth. Population density was limited by critical values dictated by the bubonic plague, cholera, typhoid, child/maternal mortality, etc. Civilizations tended to grow exponentially until they reached a critical value and then collapsed catastrophically due to a plague (medieval Europe had half its population wiped out twice by the bubonic plague). What we are now experiencing is a consequence of our population density reaching a critical value that was not dictated by disease, i.e. Peak Oil meets the “American life style”. This is a totally new situation for the human race. I strongly suspect that a world limited by Peak Oil and other peak resources is not compatible with socialism, direct democracy or unrestrained capitalism. I dare say that socialism was an economic accident only possible during the transition period after the industrial revolution but prior to Peak Oil becoming economic reality. Almost all of our basic economic and political operating methods are becoming invalid because they were based upon prior assumptions of unlimited natural resources and static population. Technology does offer solutions, e.g. nuclear power, development of extraterrestrial resources, etc. However technological solutions require time and resources to implement, e.g. it takes about a decade to build a large nuclear power plant and about 20 years as a crash program to establish a Mars colony. We’re probably already in the situation where economic and political crisis will arise faster than we can implement technological solutions. Ultimately the very basis for a technological solution (industrial infrastructure, technically educated population, etc.) will be overwhelmed by economic and political problems. We the human race, could have dealt with these problem if we had started implementing technological solutions about 30 years ago before our basic infrastructure was under stress. I suspect now, our remaining option is for the system to collapse and then restart with a greatly reduced world population (probably under 2 billion).
You out-did yerself yet again, Mr. (Dr?) Fernadez. What a superb précis! What a brutal capsule of bien pensant delusions! What a compelling warning of how and why the sh*t’s gonna hit the fan!
Frankly I’m starting to miss George III. I’d settle for Prince “Mad as a Fish” Charles. At least his Wookie isn’t nearly as pretentious. Actually running the US would be a lighter schedule for Queen Elizabeth if she wanted to abdicate. I can see the convention now when she is nominated. “Wait you can’t do that she is not a US citizen. So what’s your point, just following precedent. The Constitution has been ignored by the “progressives” so much how can they object when the Tea Party follows through?” I think we could scrounge up enough silver to redo our currency to Pounds Sterling.
INSTALLING RAPTURE.
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Install delayed….please wait.
Installation failed. Please try again. 404 error: Rapture not found.
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If price of wheat now goes sky high
And bread that Arabs make
Now costs so much then they should try
To eat more chocolate cake
Or mayhap try a nice gateau
A cupcake would be nice
A jellyroll or just for show
A strudel filled with spice
It breaks my heart to hear them cry
And tears from me are rung
To see they can no longer fry
Their pancakes over dung
“I recall reading a piece some time ago about an area of Europe where many people decided that The End was coming in the year 1000 BC, apparently simply based on the idea that 1000 years had to be enough. It was like the Y2K hysteria but without computers.”
I can’t help myself, but I have to mention that people living in 1000 BC didn’t think of themselves as living in 1000 BC. They used some other time measurement. The BC/AD designation came much, much later. They thought 1000 years was enough? From what? There is no 0 BC. Even the Romans wouldn’t recognize the dates we ascribe to their history since they dated events by who was serving as consul at the time (if I remember correctly). Some places in Rome dated events by counting forward from the time the city they lived in was founded.
As for the year 1000 AD, there definitely was a sense that the end of the world was coming. Some scholars have written books about it. Of course, some people in certain places in Europe could look back to Christ’s birth and carry the date forward. Such dating was not possible in 1000 BC.
I do vaguely recall reading something related to what you mention, but I don’t remember the specifics. Perhaps they saw something in the heavens (a comet, an eclipse, a supernova) that made them want to check out early.
Carol.Herman @ 20 said:
“On the other hand, BUYING is not the same thing as FREE. And, if the egyptians are counting on getting wheat free …”
The Founding Fathers based the American Revolution upon the premise of “no taxation without representation”. The Arab tyrants and monarchs used exactly the opposite formula, i.e. “forfeiture of political control in exchange for free food”. Liberty is not an option under a welfare state. The Egyptians foolishly believe they can have liberty and still get free food. All they are really doing is exchanging one tyranny for another. In fact they are probably trading-down by enabling theocrats to replace an ordinary tyrant.
e @ 25: you going green on us? looks to me like the world can sustain 6b at current levels of technology, and if we clean up our act a bit, maybe even 10b without major changes. With modern hygiene we can squeeze most of that population onto about 5% of the land surface, and we still haven’t learned to use the ocean surface or floor, for population, but we may, in small or large ways.
I’m not sure the previous human ways of life were limited by hygiene as much as natural food resources and accidents of climate, nor that “hereditary aristocracy” – or any aristocracy – was ever very widespread.
We’ve probably lived mostly as tribes trading and warring with each other since about forever, under a wide variety of arrangements, I believe that’s what we know about things going back six to eight thousand years, and it might just have been that way for twenty or fifty thousand before that.
Dack Thrombosis @ 30 said:
“As for the year 1000 AD, there definitely was a sense that the end of the world was coming. Some scholars have written books about it.”
The apocalyptic nonsense of the early Christian church was a side effect of the Second Temple and bar Kochba revolts. Given what the Romans did to the Jews after the bar Kochba Revolt, believing in the near-term end-of-the-world had a certain logic to it. However I don’t understand why the Book of Revelations remained canonical after 1000 AD. IMHO, it’s a fairy tale dreamed up by someone with a mental problem. Take away the Book of Revelations and most of the crazier Christian denominations go “poof” or are forced to cook up something like the Book of Mormon.
The effete ruling classes will have plenty to eat under the new scheme of things. The serfs, on the other hand, will be expected to tighten their belts (or just starve); but hey, they’ll be buoyed up in their spirits (as they sink) by the beauty of the wealthy man’s beautiful pastures and all the wildlife. The politically-connected wealthy – and the wildlife – they’ll be OK – so don’t worry.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others… We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we’re doing… Power is not a means, it is an end… The object of power is power… Always there will be the intoxication of power… We are the Priests of Power… Power is power over human beings, over the body; but above all over the mind… The real power; the power we have to fight for night and day is not power over things but over men. How does one man assert his power over another… by making him suffer… Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.” George Orwell – 1984
30. Dack Thrombosis
Damn TDE users! You can hammer into their heads that they can’t provide any time scale marker reference on their trips but would thy listen? I think they are doing it for fun, kinda “let’s see what happens”.
Josh @ 32 said:
“e @ 25: you going green on us?”
Josh, you’re hurting my feelings.
“belief in Peak Oil” is not “being green”
33. Eggplant
Actually, no. It is not a description of the future per se (just employing the concept of cyclical cataclysms), but a description of past events (mashed together from different events and periods). It was probably deemed prudent to include it because someone at a later time may understand. Unfortunately, the concepts went through many iteration and the original message got FUBARed nearly in toto. Such is the fate of other “prophecies” as well.
“Civilizations tended to grow exponentially until they reached a critical value and then collapsed catastrophically due to a plague (medieval Europe had half its population wiped out twice by the bubonic plague).”
Yeah, but think about what happened in Europe during and after the plague. So many people died that laborers could charge top wages for their work. Artisans even more so. When all your competitors die off, the bottom line tends to move up a notch or two…or a thousand. How many people emerged from the plague wealthy and larded with power. More than a few I’d wager.
So I know I’ll find decent work when half the world dies off due to starvation. At least that’s what I keep telling myself…
I agree with what you’re saying. None of our political memes can survive in a world overflowing with people and short on resources. Well, except for brute force employed brutally and with no remorse or concession to such overly sentimental nonsense we see in our own time. In that case we’ll end up back in a place most humans lived in during our time on the planet. Thomas Hobbes, please pick up the white courtesy phone!
‘Among those that do, it is this single-minded pursuit of the irrelevant by the self-important that constitutes the greatest catastrophe of our time.’
That sentence is a keeper and to prove out that sentence, the EU is going to reduce subsidies for food production and start subsidizing skylark production (see video).
One ironic result of the huge EU agricultural subsidies has been huge surpluses of food and milk that cannot be consumed by Europeans. These surpluses have either been dumped (literally pouring milk into holes in the ground) or have been dumped on third world countries like Ethiopia, at prices so low that they have destroyed the local agricultural industry. Ethiopian potato farmers were wiped out by the dumping of surplus EU potatoes into their domestic markets.
Agricultural subsidies and supply management – and Canada and the US are guilty here too – hugely distort the matching of supply to demand for different food products. Subsidizing skylark production will do the same to the supply/demand relationships for these feather-bedded songsters.
Whatever the effects of Byzantine Organized Subsidized Horse-manure (BOSH) that fuels the Agricultural world, millions of Arabs are starting to go hungry because they can’t pay the going rate for BOSH food products. Here’s another economic problem that does not have a political solution. The economic problem is that a growing number of Arab economies can’t produce enough wealth to support the eating needs of their growing populations. Until they do, food and other necessities will be scarce.
They can’t fairy-dust their way out of this reality by blaming the Jews, Bush, Richard the Lionheart or Rock ‘n Roll. They can’t price-control their way out of hunger because they can’t afford to pay the going rate for food in the first place. The ‘self important, single-mindedly pursuing the irrelevant’ in Araby and in the western developed countries have teamed up to divert wheat from the Casbah to the ‘Hòu jiē’ of China.
That isn’t funny to the millions in the Middle East who will be eating air pita-bread and windy hummus. Unfortunately the resultant food riots won’t grow their economy.
The US debt is now $ 14.3 trillion
Forget about Pakistan, Israel and Egypt
–end the handouts to these alien nations –now
–they are all leeches and parasites on American taxpayers
The American debt is a major national security threat.
Right now–and it is getting worse day by day.
Perhaps the greatest problem with increasing food production is that much of the farmland is not utilized to maximum effectiveness because it is (has to be, politically) divided up into many small holdings. In other words, the problem is what will all the small-time farmers do if agriculture is “rationalized”. China has gotten half-way out of the agrarian trap but it still has a long way to go and besides there has to be a limit to the world’s possible demand for ex-farmer factory workers. Turning farmers into advernture tourism operators actually might be a solution for some.
Thrasymachus @17
“Capitalism makes the same promise as socialism, prosperity for all, somehow delivered by wise leaders. “
This is not correct. Capitalism does not promise anything except to allow markets to set the price of materials, goods and services. A capitalist society may provide some restriction and regulation ON A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD, equally to all enterprises, that will likely impact the price of materials, goods and services set by the markets. I’ll go further and say that rule of law, a well defined and functional trading system and fractional reserve banking are all necessary for successful capitalism.
What we have throughout most of the world today is blatant fascism, where government intervenes, controls, regulates and in many cases owns at least a portion of the raw materials, production, corporation and any income generated by the commerce they dominate. We haven’t had anything approaching capitalism for centuries, and then only a limited version, all within the boundaries of some political construct.
Respectfully, Armageddon Rex
truepeers @ 41 said:
“Perhaps the greatest problem with increasing food production is that much of the farmland is not utilized to maximum effectiveness because it is (has to be, politically) divided up into many small holdings. … China has gotten half-way out of the agrarian trap but it still has a long way to go and besides there has to be a limit to the world’s possible demand for ex-farmer factory workers. Turning farmers into adventure tourism operators actually might be a solution for some.”
It’s true that Chinese field hands have left the farm and gone to urban areas where they could work on assembly lines as unskilled workers. This was a repeat of what happened in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. However this situation will be turned on its head after Peak Oil and the failure of Globalism. The Chinese economic miracle was based upon American and European consumers buying cheap Chinese goods with fiat money and the Chinese odd willingness to accept payment this way. The value of the US dollar compared to gold and oil is collapsing. The Chinese may soon find themselves holding worthless American and European bonds and paper money. If there are no US greenbacks and Euros to drive the Chinese manufacturing industry then the Chinese unskilled assembly line workers will have no choice but to go back to the farm. Likewise if the American Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) economy goes fully tits-up then many Americans will end up going back to the farm. This trend of going back to the farm will be reinforced by increasing energy costs. Modern farming methods are very energy intensive. Peak Oil may force abandonment of energy intensive agricultural methods. Nineteenth century farming methods are much more labor intensive and produce less yield than modern methods but require far less energy. Reversion back to nineteenth century farming methods will be one of the reasons/consequences of the world’s population collapse.
More open markets and free trade with less government meddling would solve the problem. Burning corn in your gas tank? Fine if the market will cover it. We need to go back to capitalism and enough of this Marxist planned economy BS.
-Forget about Pakistan, Israel and Egypt
–end the handouts to these alien nations –now
Victor, you are such a kidder! No, really, it’s a beautiful, well-honed routine: Pakistan, Israel and Egypt in the same breath! Absolutely beautiful. Well done! Take a bow!
Since we all know (don’t we?) that (from:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/05/21/why-doesnt-obama-pressure-turkey-on-terror/):
The United States has consistently helped Turkey in its fight against terrorism. Frank Ricciardone, U.S. ambassador to Turkey, estimates that U.S. assistance to Turkey’s anti-terror fight costs American tax payers about $1 million per day, well over a quarter billion dollars each year….
But wait! There’s more:
If the terrorism is directed against Israel—and, as many Turks will say, America as well—then it is somehow justified. That’s why prominent Erdogan advisers like Cuneyd Zapsu donated money to and assisted an Al Qaeda financier.
Well-honed. (And I say this with admiration!)
Egypt is on the skids?
No tourism? No money? No food?
Well, never fear (what, us worry?): All Egypt has to do is threaten Israel, threaten instability, declare it can’t possibly be held accountable for what MAY happen, because, well, you know—no money. We’re just not responsible. No way, nossiree!!
And those dollars and Euros will flow, flow, flow!!!
(It’s an old technique, I mean strategem, I mean trick—tried and true—of Nasser’s. A golden oldie. Elegant. Simple. Never fails.)
What’s that you say? Egypt has already made threatening noises?
Well then those dollars should be flowing, flowing flowing!!
Tried and true. Tried and true.
17. Thrasymachus
Capitalism makes the same promise as socialism, prosperity for all, somehow delivered by wise leaders.
Uh. NO! By individual effort.
Your thinking is corroded by capitalism = socialism. I blame your schooling.
Take away the Book of Revelations and most of the crazier Christian denominations go “poof” or are forced to cook up something like the Book of Mormon.
Given demand there will always be supply. But you may not be able to afford it.
The crazy will always be with us.
Turning farmers into advernture tourism operators…
I believe that in the real world they are referred to as warriors.
30. Dack Thrombosis
You are entirely correct…
The true date was 1,000AD…
When the world did not end the Pope ( Urban II ) confabbed the Christians and thrust them towards God’s tomb.
There were simply NO END of end-of-the-world predictions at that time; rather like the Y2000 buggists.
Nice catch.
Revelations?
…-
“The Revelation of Saint John the Divine”
“1:1 The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass; and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John: 1:2 Who bare record of the word of God, and of the testimony of Jesus Christ, and of all things that he saw.
1:3 Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.”
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Bible/stjohn.html
I wouldn’t have a problem with Muslim nations collapsing under starvation, but for this problem: if Egypt starts starving, how long will it be until the Muslims start slaughtering the Copts, both in blame for their problems and to steal their property to buy food? Same goes for the Maronites in Lebanon, Greek Orthodox in Syria and Turkey, and the Chaldeans in Iraq.
Thrasymachus 17: “Capitalism makes the same promise as socialism, prosperity for all, somehow delivered by wise leaders. “
I prefer the expression “Free Enterprise” to Capitalism; the latter was a term used by Karl Marx in a derogatory sense because Marx did not desire economic freedom for anyone except for Marxist government – the Marxist ruling class. Under true Free Enterprise prosperity is not delivered by government. Under true Free Enterprise prosperity is created by individuals and groups of individuals.
Armageddon Rex 42: “What we have throughout most of the world today is blatant fascism, where government intervenes, controls, regulates…”
Fascism is government-controlled individual and group economic activity – Fascism is Crony Capitalism. Both Marxism and Fascism (Crony Capitalism) are the enemy of free enterprise. Under Free Enterprise the animals (of Animal Farm) bring home to their families their own labored-for corn and place it into their own barns which they built. Under Marxism and Fascism (Crony Capitalism) the “little animals” are forced by government to bring the corn (for which they labored) to the Pigs (of Animal Farm) where all the corn is placed into a communal government pot under exclusive Pig ownership (Marxism) or Pig control (Fascism). The Pigs, after gorging themselves on a lion’s share of communal corn, require all the “little animals” to approach their communal pot, tails wagging, in order to receive leftover rations; and they must lick the hand that feeds them.
“Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation’s economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property – so long as the state reserves to its self the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property. If “ownership” means the right to determine the use and disposal of material goods, then Nazism endowed the state with every real prerogative of ownership. What the individual retained was merely a formal deed… which conferred no rights on its holder. Under Communism, there is collective ownership of property de jure. Under Nazism, there is the same collective ownership de facto.” Leonard Peikoff
http://www.peikoff.com/lr/review_rand.htm
http://www.peikoff.com/lr/chapter1.htm
Both Marxism and Crony Capitalism (Fascism) are “Left.” Free Enterprise (and freedom in general) is “Right,” but not “far-Right.”
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=bee_1219809172
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.” — Robert A. Heinlein
Victor wrote:”Egypt has a lot of water and could easily grow enough wheat using Aswan water and recycled sewage.
Turkey, Syria and Iraq have fair supplies of water.
The Holy Land, KSA do not.”
And yet Israel is a net food exporter. Bananas among them.
Soon they will be energy independant.
They have nearly solved the water deficit as well.
They do this with a huge defense financial and workforce burdon and a lack of regional trading partners.
How can this be?
Maybe the Egyptians should hire some Jews to help them out. It has been done before:
33 “And now let Pharaoh look for a discerning and wise man and put him in charge of the land of Egypt. 34 Let Pharaoh appoint commissioners over the land to take a fifth of the harvest of Egypt during the seven years of abundance. 35 They should collect all the food of these good years that are coming and store up the grain under the authority of Pharaoh, to be kept in the cities for food. 36 This food should be held in reserve for the country, to be used during the seven years of famine that will come upon Egypt, so that the country may not be ruined by the famine.” Genesis 40
In a way, Victor and his ilk have helped Israel to achieve its astonishing results. Because of them Israelis take nothing for granted. They achieve the impossible because everything must be possible, there is no other alternative.
Every time Victor calls for Israel boycott, or US to withdraw support, Israel gets a little stronger.
I am perplexed as to why no referenced publication, and also no other commenter, have pointed out that global wheat production – and particularly production in North Africa and the Middle East (MENA)- is now suffering badly from a new strain of wheat rust disease: http://www.commodityonline.com/news/MENA-region-worst-hit-by-wheat-rust-disease-38380-3-1.html
Surely I cannot be the only one that is familiar with this recent emergent problem.
I gotta’ say – I’m not particularly sympathetic to the national problems of the greater Caliphate. If there must be famine, I cannot think of a more deserving region. But – widespread famine is certainly not a recipe for stability and prosperity anywhere.
Oh, and Victor brought up another point which deserves mention.
(That guy, he is always finding subtle ways of praising Israel and showing how they should be a model for other nations)
He wrote: “Libya has huge underground aquifers it can exploit”
How to grow fish in the desert. (Listen up Libyans)
Those discoveries led Israeli geologists to look for water under its own Negev desert.
They did find a huge reserve of water. However the water is brackish around 10% of sea water and very warm around 40c. Too salty for most crops.
It is perfect for fish though. So they have devised an ingenious system for aquiculture in the Negev desert growing multiple foodsources from the same gallon of salty water.
First, the heat of the water is used to heat vegetable hothouses and the fish ponds at night.
The water is first used for species such as Sea Bass which need high quality water. The effluent is then used for ponds of Carp or Tilapia which thrive very well in water with some waste. It can even be further reused for crayfish and other crustaceans.
Finally because the fish waste water is an excellent fertilizer it is finally used for tolerant crops such as olive or date trees.
—-
Thanks again Victor!
There’s a space debate on PJ. I posted a comment there to the effect that a mission to Mars would take 20 years or so to plan and execute, require 100′s of billions of dollars,1000′s of new pieces of technology. There would be a payoff. But it would be in the distant future.
I said compare that to this vision.
in 10 years, Collapse the cost of water desalination and transport, turn the deserts of earth green, double the size of the habitable planet create a green revolution that would feed the world for the next 100 years and provide the kind of wealth and time that would be needed to make it possible to execute large offworld colonization.
What would it take in terms of technology to accomplish this. Just two things. Efficient durable cheap membranes. Efficient, durable cheap membranes.
The real cost of for developing these would come in under 10 billion.
Which vision sounds more plausible.
(so far I have not seen my comments post.)
OFF TOPIC – Belmont Clubber note*
I heard Herman Cain, newly announced Republican candidate for President, mention “Leo Linbeck” on TV today. I immediately thought of our Leo Linbeck, III, but after a little googling, I see Mr. Cain worked with Leo Linbeck, Jr. on the Fair Tax campaign.
Ah well, at least I got to tell my wife I “know that guy” (in the Belmont Club sense) before I found my mistake.
All the best to all of you at the Belmont Club!
Tony
c @ 58: if I were going to place a blind bet on technology getting somewhere just by focusing the effort and funding it, I’d put it into thorium reactors, with those maybe the current desalination processes would be just fine (plus, windmills are the perfect power source for desalination because it’s not time-sensitive, that’s insofar as windmills make any sense at all, which is debatable).
also flood the qatar depression and flood the dead sea to raise it back up to historic levels, hopefully climate-changers. and I’d be happy if we could just get most of California’s Central Valley back in production against various green and tax idiocies.
but that’s not sexy enough to compete with the Mars mission. energy independence for the US might be. natural gas, oil shale, coal gassification, thorium (!), maybe a few conventional and super-safe uranium plants, rapid transit, yes drilling domestically, government price-support guarantees that the barrel price won’t go below $80? $60? would be enough to attract private money, and I strongly doubt the government would ever see a claim on that guarantee.
and I might add some other stuff.
but I’m afraid something else comes first: bringing back 10,000,000 jobs from China and India. that doesn’t happen, the rest of this is just blog fodder.
Boy, there are a lot of millenial, end-is-near posts in this thread. Writing from the middle of the “corn-belt”, all I can say is there is a LOT of corn and soybeans in private storage. Farmers here have been putting up storage bins since the big farming boom of the 1970′s. Then, they plowed anything that could be farmed, “to feed the world.” It didn’t last, but the storage is there. Honestly letting on how much there is would drive prices down. Ethanol has driven the price of corn up, but a “crisis”, spiking prices way up would bring a surprising amount of grain “out of the woodwork.”
According to the Dept. of Agriculture, we will end the year with a surplus of only 675 million bushels of corn.
I suspect that’s a lowball.
w: The biggest priority of the age is to tame Israel and build windmills all over the landscape. Do you disagree? Well you don’t count.
Among those that do, it is this single-minded pursuit of the irrelevant by the self-important that constitutes the greatest catastrophe of our time.
Aside from noting that the Israeli government is not operating at an historic optimum – at yet another critical juncture in ME history (will they never end?), renewable energy is not ‘irrelevant.’ Renewables will be part of the *mix* of the next generation of energy technologies, especially in the context of institutions (governments) and infrastructure (energy) reorganizing into more successful – and yes, sustainable – configurations:
The big loser, once countries start customizing the rules to suit themselves, not totally breaking away but with greater degrees of freedom, are the big transnational bureaucracies.
Agreeing that fossil fuels are not going bye-bye is not the same as dismissing the growing market for renewable energy.
And tax policy matters:
“The fossil fuel generation has had permanent tax incentives in place of 100 years,” says Bode. “Each energy industry has (tax) advantages, and those incentives have encouraged the development of American energy. The incentives that are put in place for us do provide encouragement but they are allowed to expire every other year … we would like to have a longer term policy.”
“Our strategy going into 2012 is not just focused on the tax piece…it’s focused on having renewables and wind energy be part of the national energy policy,” says Bode. “We believe there should be an all-of-the-above policy, and that Congress shouldn’t be picking winners and losers. We’ve demonstrated that wind can scale up, that it can be part of the energy portfolio.”
“All of the above” and “level playing field” – are neither irrelevant nor self-important, given that the energy game can and/or should be decoupled from ME misadventures, all within the context of enabling the transition into institutional ‘fits’ that are more responsive to specific regional demands – along all vectors – cultural, political, economic, and religious. Although I am not at all comfortable with the suggested outline of a ME “fit” nor confident in suggesting an alternative, the rest of world is moving along. Critical decision-making juncture.
“Peak Oil”
Now there’s an apocalyptic prophesy that keeps coming back to life no matter how many times it gets discredited. At least the Population Bomb and Coming Ice Age and Dying Oceans prophets moved on to other things instead of beating the same dead horse.
fc@61: Boy, there are a lot of millenial, end-is-near posts in this thread.
It’s the hangover from 2008. It wasn’t the direct pain from loss of wealth, but the nothing short of nefarious and carefully orchestrated intent leading to the crash. The Bush Congress had warnings aplenty, but the Roubini (et al) message wasn’t part of the accepted narrative. The American public was presented with a vivid reminder of human nature at it’s worse, just when we thought we had achieved a marginally improved existential state. With the armed nutjobs in the ME putting on another coat of warpaint, the public is understandably fidgety. The veneer of sophistication was peeled back in 2008.
Firecapt:61,
bushel = 72800 kernels
1 ear = roughly 800 kernels = 3/4 cup or 1066 kernels per cup
68.3 cups per bushel
130 calories per cup (varies)
8878 calories per bushel
675,000,000 bushels * 8878 = 5,992,682,000,000 calories
Wow, that’s a lot…or is it?
If no one cheats, that will feed approx 8,209,154 people for a year based on 2000 calories per person per day and 365 days per year (and Gordon is right – 2000 calories is high for many cultures).
Population of Egypt (2009 World Bank) 82,999,393.
Hmmmmm!!!!!!
55. Spindok wrote,
“They achieve the impossible because everything must be possible, there is no other alternative.”
As you may know, our Torah places very strict conditions on our behavior in literally every facet of life. If we did not improvise in order to both obey and prosper, adherence to the teaching, per se, might well impoverish us. Torah forces us to think outside the box – ideally finding solutions that allow us to have our cake and eat it too.
Our success has been a source of irritation to our every adversary. Historically, these adversaries have been dumbfounded and perplexed by the notion of “Sabbath”, for instance. Losing over 1/7 of each work week, quite apart from the lengthy, annual cycle of holy days, should make us beggars. But beggars we are not.
Two maps: One of water scarcity and the other of islam,somebody has a gigantic problem on its hand..
http://tinyurl.com/42h8nam
http://tinyurl.com/y3pwed
Arme Pederson:67.
As shown on that first map, the US water shortage area.
One of the problems in the US is the number of people who are moving into the Southwest and putting a further strain on the Aquafier that supplies most of the water for that area. Ranchers and farmers in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, West Texas, are in trouble even without the ongoing dry spell. There was a low key battle on between ranchers and farmers around Los Vegas who want to conserve water and property developers who wanted to develop high dollar bedroom communities for Los Vegas. I don’t no where that stands since 2008.
I’m not worried about the prospect of mass starvation in Egypt.
I figure that Obama will “loan” that government all the money it needs to buy food, should a famine commence.
I feel bad for the Copts. I suspect precious little of that food will make it down to them, as I expect the muslim brotherhood to begin an Egyptian version of the final solution to make that “problem” go away forever. The reaction of Obama and the rest of the US bureaucracy will of course be the continued complete indifference to the fate of non-muslim minorities in the ME.
Emrys, Thank you for doing the food math.
Modern Hygene is a western possesion. 99% of africans lack running potable water and excrete on the ground. The outhouse will be a technological leap forward in africa.
@ Bob Smith
Exactly the likely outcome, before the ultimate outcomes of the ulema’s anti-modern policies are realized: a demographic crisis fueled by Islamic orthodoxy coupled with utterly uncompetitive/dysfunctional economies. The next few decades in the Arab ME are going to be Hobbesian, at best.
@ Xennady
As a Canadian, I trust that our federal government will fast-track Coptic immigration as required, much as it did when Canada scooped the hyper-ambitious and -accomplished Ismailis out of the East African Islamic pogroms of the 70′s.
Raoul Ortega @ 63 said concerning Peak Oil:
“Now there’s an apocalyptic prophesy that keeps coming back to life no matter how many times it gets discredited.”
The following historical graph shows how oil production peaked in the continental US in 1970:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/US_Oil_Production_and_Imports_1920_to_2005.png
The emphasis here: This plot is a historical record and not based upon computer models or arm waving. There is no “theory” or “narrative” to discredit because the data is historical fact.
Next refer to regular oil discovery and production:
http://www.energybulletin.net/image/primer/growing_gap.png
We can not produce petroleum that we have not discovered. Oil discovery peaked around the mid-1960s. Ultimately petroleum production must track petroleum discovery. Again this is based upon historical fact.
It’s a mistake to confuse Peak Oil with Global Warming. If anything, the concepts are diametrically opposed. Global Warming assumes there is an infinite fossil fuel supply and if we continue to exploit it, then the resultant carbon dioxide will cause an environmental catastrophe. The belief in Global Warming is based upon computer models and fraudulent data. The belief in Global Warming is partially driven by socialists pursuing hidden political agendas and ideology-blinded or semi-competent or unethical scientists pursuing easy funding from socialist politicians.
The message behind global warming: Socialists need to take over the energy production process which drives the whole economy because the free market will lead to environmental disaster.
We will ***never*** run out of petroleum but we will run out of economically accessible petroleum. In California there is more gold in the ground than was ever mined but hardly anyone mines gold in California because it is uneconomical (the remaining ore is too deep).
The message behind Peak Oil: We need to convert our energy basis from petroleum to nuclear and synthetic petroleum. The best way to achieve this is through the free market. Ultimately socialists are hostile to Peak Oil because Peak Oil contradicts the main arguments behind Global Warming.
Earl @ 71 said:
“… the ulema’s anti-modern policies are realized: a demographic crisis fueled by Islamic orthodoxy coupled with utterly uncompetitive/dysfunctional economies. The next few decades in the Arab ME are going to be Hobbesian, at best.”
Which is why they are pursuing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Ultimately they are driven there by economics. Wretchard’s Third Conjecture logically follows. Their only long term hope for survival is to reform their rotten religion and culture. They probably don’t have time to do this (should have started doing this 30 years ago). However we are almost as stupid as the Islamists and also heading towards a brick wall.
The communists have already imploded and the Islamists are next. Unfortunately we’re the third act in a three act play.
herman Cain on Chris Wallace –right now –Fox
Earl@71
Agree with you about the Ismailis being desirable immigrants.
Go Cain! great interview on Fox. People need to become more familiar with the “Fair Tax” it is the way to go! all will pay a “Fair” amount including the illegal’s, Under the table employee’s and others that the “Flat Tax” wouldn’t touch just like our current Tax structure does not now! Cian has the right Morals and ethic’s, Cain will keep America STRONG!
eggplant
“We can not produce petroleum that we have not discovered. Oil discovery peaked around the mid-1960s. Ultimately petroleum production must track petroleum discovery. Again this is based upon historical fact.”
Discovery tempos are determined not by geology — but by politics.
Russia and China and India have vast tracts — all off limit to Big Oil.
Mexico, Iran, Brazil et. al. restrict who shall drill…
The exclusion list is vast.
Beyond that, fracking works with both gas and oil. This method is now creating vast new reserves at an exponential tempo. The Bakken has risen from trivial to elephant — the upward revision has not yet reached the encyclopedias. Competitive reasons, cause the players to hide their astounding successes as long as possible.
And then, there’s the exponential take-off of the Canadian Tar Sands. At current prices it’s a money spinner.
Naturally, the Green Dependency Movement is opposed to it.
—-
Higher efficiency motors make it acceptable to pay ever higher prices for energy — to a point.
The next trend in the oil biz is the consumption of natural gas as a feedstock for gasoline and middle distillates.
It’s a case of feedstock arbitrage: natty becomes cheaper than synthesis gas — adjusted for capital inputs.
This change over will dominate European refineries for a generation.
If the Israelis pull off their own version of tar sands — in a generation she’ll be pumping more than Libya!
As it stands, Israel may end up surpassing Algeria with her natural gas exports to Europe.
@ blert:
As it stands, Israel may end up surpassing Algeria with her natural gas exports to Europe.
This fascinates me. Truly, this has the potential as a game changer (as a recent article suggested). But not necessarily positive for “that shitty little country”, insofar as Putin’s enervated and sclerotic economy is going to sit idly by as IL steals its Yurpean gas markets?
/and, per Earl’s razor, as always, what are the Chinese doing?
Old Salt 11,
“Law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right [to life] of an individual.” Thomas Jefferson
http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/law508/JeffersonRights.htm
I agree with Eggplant, but future energy needs will be met the same way they are today, with “all of the above.” There is some very interesting work being done by universities and private firms on creating portable fuels from other resources, such as plants and coal, but not using ethanol. These are already at the point of being economically viable. So is compressed natural gas – for further info contact the Clean Vehicle Education Foundation.
And a company has an effort underway to build an electrically powered airplane with the same capabilities as a Cessna 172. They think they will get there inside a few years.
But solar and wind will only be used where they make sense, which is where nothing else is available, just like today. The big question is whether we figure that out before we give con artists like those in Spain a lot more money.
By the way, the one of the first fracking efforts used not water but nuclear explosives. A small underground nuke opened a cavity that filled with natural gas that had been trapped in the surrounding rock. My high school physics teacher said this would be a big deal in the future, but instead water-based fracking has become popular. Imagine what those opposed to fracking would say if you told them that since they did not like the water you were switching to nukes.
I saw Cain on Fox this morning.
While I would take him over Obama every day of the week and twice on Sunday, he’s a newbie to politics his own self, and I have zero confidence he’d be efficient in any way in office. Of course, simply not being destructive would be major progress, but somehow I still hope for more.
But I am glad to see him in the game, and hope he does find a role to play now and in the future.
65, emrys
Don’t you think they would get awfully tired of corn?
My real point was, the Dept. of Ag has no clue.
Before anyone takes the caloric calculus too far: the corn crop under discussion is animal feed.
It’s how we have corn-fed: hogs, cattle and chickens. ( and turkeys, ducks, aquaculture… )
So it is unwise to assume direct conversion.
Cheers…
O/T but too good to not share – hope you like it Victor.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0511/fischer_judea_samaria.php3
Despite Obama’s Speech, Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria Will Outlive Us All
By Rabbi Dov Fischer
What the the past half-century has taught those who are awake
In approximately 18 months Barack Obama may no longer be President, or just a lame duck limping to January 2013. At most, he would be President for another 5 and half years.
During the same period, more thousands of Jews will continue being added to the population of Judea and Samaria. Since 1967, the following people have passed away when G-d took them in His own good time: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan. During that same period, the Jewish population of Yesha (Judea and Samaria), including the areas of East Jerusalem liberated in June 1967, have grown to 558,000 — 230,000 in Greater East Jerusalem and 328,000 throughout the rest of Yesha. The numbers are on the way to reaching a million.
Yitzchak Rabin had an Oslo plan to withdraw from Yesha, and he tragically was assassinated. Shimon Peres thereupon entered as Israeli Prime Minister with a higher than 90% poll rating, and assured everyone that he would complete the process of withdrawing. Yet, in an unforeseen short period, an outbreak of Arab bus bombings wiped out his support, and he lost office to Binyamin Netanyahu. After Bibi compromised on Hebron at the Wye Conference, his stellar polls suddenly plummeted south, and he was ousted by Ehud Barak. Barak, touted as “Mr. Security,” proceeded to withdraw unilaterally from South Lebanon, creating a vacuum soon filled by Hezbollah, and then worked with Bill Clinton to prepare a complete withdrawal from virtually all of Judea and Samaria.
Miraculously, Arafat turned him down, started an Intifada, and Barak lost the government to Ariel Sharon in a landslide. Sharon unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, creating a vacuum soon filled by Hamas, and then turned his attention “kadimah” (eastward) to withdrawing from Judea and Samaria. And suddenly, just in the blink of an eye, he sustained a stroke that has left him in a coma for years. Ehud Olmert followed him with the promise to complete the withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. Suddenly, however, a war erupted in Southern Lebanon, and Olmert’s military miscalculations and failures, augmented by the incompetence of a Defense Minister with no meaningful qualifications other than being a union organizer who rose to head the Labor Party, obliterated his authority. Stymied by the scandal of war, Olmert eventually recouped over some time and again began to work towards withdrawing from Judea and Samaria, until financial scandals suddenly erupted and forced him out. Next came Tzippi Livni, and she was voted out soon after. And now Netanyahu again.
Nothing seems to have prevented Israel from withdrawing from the Sinai, from Southern Lebanon, or from Gaza. By contrast, everything — the logical, the inexplicable, and yes the miraculous — repeatedly has prevented a withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. During that same period, Nixon had the Rogers Plan. Nixon is dead, and Rogers is dead. Ford came up with the Reassessment Plan. Ford is dead. Jimmy Carter has done everything imaginable to advance the cause of Hamas and Fatah. As President, he pushed Israel until he remarkably was overwhelmed by 19% inflation, Iranian hostages and a botched rescue mission, and Soviet progression throughout Asia, Africa, and South America. Israel got a bit of a remission during the Reagan Years, particularly with Secretaries of State Alexander Haig and George Shultz.
Then George H.W. Bush came in, reached 90% popularity with the Desert Storm Kuwait War, turned his attention to pressing Israel under an anti-Semitic James Baker and even condemned American Jews for lobbying in Washington for Israel, and his poll numbers disappeared overnight, as the economy up-ended and as he was caught on camera in all his human mortality vomiting at a dinner in Japan. Bill Clinton came in, invited Arafat to the White House more than any other Clinton White House visitor, pressed Ehud Barak to give up Judea and Samaria, including most of East Jerusalem, and somehow saw it all fizzle as Arafat rejected the offers and as the Clinton White House unexpectedly became consumed with its own survival as scandals up in scandals began erupting.
George W. Bush came in, supported Israel initially as no President before had done, and enjoyed stellar poll numbers, even expanding his party’s leads in the first bi-elections and then winning reelection. As he turned during his second term to pressing Israel, under his “Road Map,” to give up Judea and Samaria, the American economy inexplicably collapsed overnight, eradicating his poll numbers and wiping out his party.
And now Barack Obama.
Obama came in with excellent poll numbers, rapidly moved towards pressing Israel to halt all construction in Judea and Samaria, and heaped the onus for Mideast problems on Israel, even traveling throughout the Arab world on an Apology Tour, making that speech in Egypt and pressing Israel to retreat from Judea and Samaria. As the pressure grew on Israel to withdraw, even with White House snubs of Netanyahu, suddenly the oil well inexplicably blew in the Gulf of Mexico. And now, as he has unfolded his new Mideast speech, the Mississippi crests as housing starts recede, joblessness sits at 9 percent, gasoline moves beyond $4 a gallon, all before and leading up to the speech.
As all experienced public speakers know, sometimes a one-hour speech is significant for the two or four sentences buried within the hundreds of other sentences. The entire speech today was crafted around those few sentences in the end, calling on Israel to squeeze itself back to the 1967 borders. A cursory look at all the newsmedia reports of the Obama speech confirms that each and every news analyst understood that the key points of the speech were Obama’s call for Israel to return to the 1967 borders, with minor land-swap adjustments — essentially the proposal that Ehud Barak offered to Arafat, long since rejected by Israelis and by Arabs in Judea and Samaria, as well as by those in Hamas Gaza.
All the talk about demilitarizing and assuring and guaranteeing that weapons will not infiltrate into such an Arab Judea-Samaria are ridiculed and amply countered by the massive rearming of Hezbollah in South Lebanon under the noses of the UNIFIL forces and the rearming of Hamas in Gaza since the Goldstone War. If the past half-century has taught anything, it has taught that Israel will not withdraw from Judea or Samaria unless a Higher Power than those in the White House or the Knesset agree and that the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria will outlive all of us, including those now in the White House and the Israeli Prime Minister’s residence.
The current Israeli regime can do what it wants–if it goes off the reservation it will be on its own.
If bibi continues to disrespect the office of POTUS he will be deposed by sane Israeli voters.
If not he will make his ill defined state a pariah–he is a PR fiction with a PR history and name
We do not have time for this–we have an American debt crisis and a tiny client regime is ordering America what to do while taking our tax payers money?
enough is enough –we need to end this nonsense -and we will
We have wasted billions of dollars trying to help in the Holy Land
We need to declare Jerusalem an international city and preserve the Holy sites-
If we are going to define countries by religion then America is Christian country, Japan is a Shinto country etc—that is crazy
No more handouts to Pakistan, Israel or Egypt
Aipac must register with FARA
http://www.fara.gov/
We need to end dual citizenship for Americans who work with defense or national security agencies–ASAP.
American interests first.
@60
“also flood the qatar depression and flood the dead sea to raise it back up to historic levels, hopefully climate-changers.”
When I first read this, I thought Josh meant filling the Dead Sea with climate change believers. And I’m o.k. with that.
Victor, i do not recall having appointed you my spokesman, and i am indeed a certifiable American. However, the way you just broke water hitting that surface lure, was quite a sight and showed plainly that as an American, you are indeed a fine trout.
I guess that Victor the abominable turkey didn’t enjoy my link, too bad.
Victor, from my earlier link -
‘ … If the past half-century has taught anything, it has taught that Israel will not withdraw from Judea or Samaria unless a Higher Power than those in the White House or the Knesset’
or Jew haters like you
‘ agree and that the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria will outlive all of us, including those now in the White House and the Israeli Prime Minister’s residence.’
Victor – may you and Pat Buchanan live long in you bile and hate yourself everyday you wake up, because you have not succeeded.
…and Victor, stop by Luke, Book of, and see Chapter 4 paragraph 4; “…man does not live by bread alone” –and do contemplate the phrase, as thoughtful folks have contemplated it for Lo! these many generations.
Growing Market for renewables? Only if the renewables are subsidized. In some cases wind farms are paying $40 a MWh to deliver electricity to the grid. i.e. the energy has negative nominal cost. The subsidy must be really good.
If bibi continues to disrespect the office of POTUS he will be deposed by sane Israeli voters.
Obama’s popularity is running 6% in Israel. There are not enough “sane” voters in Israel. Heh. And it is looking like the insane voters in America may not re-elect Comrade Zer∅ either. Heh. Heh.
Hey Victor, you want to feel like a real American, have a taffy pull. That’s Turkish Taffy.
–if you need a calculator to figure out whether a friend in trouble is friend enough for you to lend a hand, what you’re calculating is not his value but yours.
New engine technology gets 2X to 5X the output per gallon vs conventional engines.
So not only are new supplies coming on line but we are beginning to get better ways to use it.
re: #83. blert “Before anyone takes the caloric calculus too far: the corn crop under discussion is animal feed … it is unwise to assume direct conversion.”
I’m one generation removed from Michigan dairy farms, but as I recall, corn and wheat ag requirements are roughly parallel. If the corn crop expands at the expense of wheat (i.e. farmers plant the crop which brings the most cash, and wheat prices just dropped below corn for the first time in 15 years), then there is a direct conversion. Also, wheat contains more protein than corn, and can be used as an effective mix with other grains for animal feed. So, again, there is direct linkage and conversion between corn and wheat.
Regards,
O.S.
Link to article “The Arab World’s Scientific Desert” by Daniel Castillo, published by The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 March 2004. Since I found it entire on the net, it’s been restricted to subscribers, but it’s not clear whether they require money, or just want to get subscribers…
Here’s a brief quote from Castillo’s article:
I’m not just using this occasion to express contempt for Arab culture, but to point out the titanic changes they must make in their own hearts in order to lift themselves from the cesspool in which they have wallowed for centuries.
No outside group can benignly force this upon them. But it is also certain – as demonstrated by the remaking of Japan and Germany after WWII – that monstrous cultures can be remade into healthy members of the international community. The cost is what we saw in World War II, and mainly involves the death or defeat and imprisonment of the monsters, followed by the careful nurturing of a new generation. The alternative seems to be either “Kill’em ALL” – which we of the West call “unthinkable” but which our opponents do NOT – or forcible long term sequestration.
Hell, we can’t even keep society’s individual murderers and rapists in prison. They get out by escapes, legal tricks, parole boards, pardons, clerical errors, and go forth to rape and murder some more. We’ve paralyzed ourselves with PC constraints and half-assed intellectual hucksters. Nope, it looks like it’s going to get a lot worse before it can start to get better.
Nations can awaken and transform themselves for good or ill. The Delusionality of the Marxist-Liberal in the West makes it astronomically unlikely that negotiation-as-with-equals or appeasement of the Islamists will lead to any end but bloody conflict. The history of Islam consists of 14 centuries of expansion by military assault upon its neighbors, with only pauses to consolidate their gains and prepare for further campaigns. Anyone who tries to say otherwise is a liar.
So, I have no easy solutions. Simply, no solution is possible that does not see the world as it is, instead of through the delusional lens of Leftist dogma.
If the Israelis pull off their own version of tar sands — in a generation she’ll be pumping more than Libya!
Though to do that, Israel’l first have to find a way to neutralize the “spoilers.”
The Turks, not to mention the Lebanese and the Egyptians (and friends) are not going to allow the Israelis do it without a fight (for all the best, most ethical and progressive reasons, of course).
File under: “If she ain’t mine, well then she aint’t nobody’s.”
Fiddler, without a trace of shame or irony the Democrat party politicians stand before voters amidst the undeniable party handiwork of rubbled public squares in ruined cities across the whole blue American arc from sea to shining sea, and proclaim resoundingly the wondrous history and achievements of the Democratic party. And this party you say needs to quit looking at the middle east through a delusional lense?
Egyptians are listed as the fifth fattest people in the world.
MS@91: Growing Market for renewables? Only if the renewables are subsidized.
Then level the playing field by eliminating oil and gas tax incentives.
Some current information on the renewable energy markets:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/02/19/solar-power-almost-as-cheap-as-natural-gas-in-six-states/
http://cleantechnica.com/?s=renewables+market
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2011/04/renewable-energy-rps-california-electricity-jerry-brown.html
That’s just a taste. The technology is not just evolving – it’s soaring.
…………..
Footnote on natural gas.
ybr/101 footnote, not that it disqualifies his conclusions, but David Hughes, a geoscientist who serves on the board of the Assn. for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas-Canada and is a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute in Santa Rosa, Calif. is hardly a disinterested party to the topic.
…it’s just that sweet old ‘santa rosita’ is such an eccentric town –
bl@101: I noticed that. Everybody that writes in the energy field has an agenda, which is why I take the white papers lightly and stick to the research, development and construction reporting of sites like CleanTechnica, which is really quite fascinating. My take is that the developments of the past 5 years have changed the energy terrain substantially in terms of feasibility (solar R&D being almost a vertical line), especially, as I have said many times, in specific regional areas where factors combine to support one alternative over the others. One size won’t fit all.
I was disappointed to see the recent “debate” on eliminating oil & gas subsidies reduced to a 6th grade shouting match. The free market encroachment of industry-specific tax incentives apparently too touchy to actually touch.
I used to sneer at renewables. Not any more. Level the playing field and let ‘er rip.
Mad Fiddler @ 97 said:
“I’m not just using this occasion to express contempt for Arab culture, but to point out the titanic changes they must make in their own hearts in order to lift themselves from the cesspool in which they have wallowed for centuries.”
I agree with Mad Fiddler’s conclusions. The Arab world has dug itself into a deep hole mainly as a consequence of their damned religion. However I should point out that we in the west are also guilty of ignorance. I recently purchased and read the book “Cairo of the Mamluks” by Doris Behrens-Abouseif. This is a fascinating and beautifully illustrated book. Something that I learned from this book was one of the most important historians of the Arab world during its golden age was al-Maqrizi. However none of al-Maqrizi’s many books have been translated into English (some have been translated into French). This simply amazes me. How are we to avoid having conflict with these people if we don’t understand their history? The Arabs are genuinely interesting and we should better understand them.
The subsidies the oil companies get are the same tax breaks every companies get, and some of them only apply to small operators.
I don’t mind anybody getting those, not even wind and solar. I do mind when the subsidy for wind is so much that wind farm operators pay the grid to take their power, as happens in Texas. Or, as has happened in Europe, solar operators shine lights on their PV arrays to generate “renewable” power at night.
The only way you’re going to convince me that “renewables” are more than just a scam is to eliminate the specific subsidies and mandates for solar, wind, and biofuel (including ethanol), and let the market sort them out.
LD@106: I do mind when the subsidy for wind is so much that wind farm operators pay the grid to take their power, as happens in Texas.
The logistical problem is an inadequate transmission grid – and the storage issue. The financial problem is obtaining “reliable incentives” needed to fund the “mega-projects,” which the oil industry has acquired over the last century (nearly.)
There’s a ton of information on the logistics of wind energy:
Here is a start:
While Congress’ one-year renewal of production tax credits in October satisfied the wind power industry’s desire for reliable incentives, the financial crisis that fell upon Wall Street in late 2008 may have a more powerful negative impact on wind power’s continued development. With no debt financing available from Wall Street banks, fewer companies would be able to develop the kind of “mega projects” needed to feed the growing demand for energy, Reyad Fezzani, CEO of BP’s wind and solar operation, said in October.
LD: The only way you’re going to convince me that “renewables” are more than just a scam is to eliminate the specific subsidies and mandates for solar, wind, and biofuel (including ethanol), and let the market sort them out.
Nor is the question of financing particularly straight forward:
Financing Renewables: Stimulus or Market?
Are fossil fuels really cheaper than renewables? We don’t know.
In fact, the development of wind energy reminds me of the hydropower buildout on the big rivers of the western US by USACE during the first half of last century. The T&D lines came after. As I’ve noted many times, historians attribute the availability of cheap and plentiful energy to the rapid industrial mobilization within US that provided war materiel to Britain and Europe after Pearl Harbor, a mobilization considered critical to ultimate allied victory in European Theater. Someone sprinkled water on The Sleeping Giant.
You can never have too much energy.
Are fossil fuels really cheaper than renewables?
I suggest that anyone claiming that we don’t know should spend 10 years living only on renewables and then come back and tell us how things went.
In the ‘not so simple’ category of financing:
The financing of new wind projects varies from that of fossil-fueled power projects due to the different cost characteristics of each. Specifically, wind projects are capital-intensive to build but have no ongoing fuel costs, while fossil-fueled power projects are less capital-intensive (per unit of production) but have higher operating (e.g., fuel) costs. Furthermore, whereas Federal tax incentives for fossil-fueled power plants can be (and generally are) distributed throughout the entire fuel cycle (e.g., from exploration and extraction to transportation, power production, and emissions controls), tax incentives for wind projects are instead targeted almost exclusively at the power production stage. The two principal Federal tax incentives available to wind projects are the production tax credit (“PTC”) and accelerated depreciation deductions (together with the PTC, the “Tax Benefits”). These Tax Benefits provide a significant value to wind projects, but also complicate wind project finance, since most wind project developers lack sufficient Federal income tax liability to use the Tax Benefits efficiently.
In response, the wind sector has developed multiple financing structures to attract various investors to projects, manage project risk, and allocate Tax Benefits to entities that can use the Tax Benefits most efficiently. Some of these structures are intended to attract actively involved large equity investors with a strategic interest in the wind sector, labeled here as “Strategic Investors.” Others are designed to tap into more-passive equity capital from “Institutional Investors,” which are primarily interested in the Tax Benefits. Still others enable developers and equity investors to layer on debt financing to leverage their equity exposure and returns.
101. YBR
Brown’s brown-out is what destroyed the Spanish national budget.
33% is an absurdly impossible number.
Windmills don’t survive economics. When engineered with enough robustness to survive peak winds – they’re so over designed that they can’t possibly pencil out.
Which leaves us with PV and geothermal. The latter is pretty much maxxed out, already.
PV, the Spanish choice, destroyed Zapo’s budget. Everything Brown is doing has been done by Zapo. He’s destroyed his nation and his party.
Way to go, Brown!
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None of these schemes can compete with Andean hydro-potential nor British Columbian hydro-potential.
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Natural gas reserves are exploding globally. Our grand-children will be old and gray before they run out.
“How are we to avoid having conflict with these people if we don’t understand their history?”
You aren’t. Their religion demands our subjugation or elimination. You don’t avoid conflict with such people.
96. OldSalt
The calculation of issue is the calories available to humanity, net, from corn grown.
While there are certainly areas where soils and climate permit crop substitution between wheat and corn — such is not always true. ( Winter wheat loves the Dakotas — the Ohio River valley, not so much. )
Anyhow, Congressional meddling/ Central Planning is making a mash out of our corn markets.
b@111: Zapo’s budget was destroyed by 2008.
California’s already at 20% renewables for electricity generation. 2030 is almost twenty years away. Ambitious is far from impossible.
All mechanical systems are designed for peak loads – from power plants to bridges. (The suggestion is that increased solar generation will raise the price of fossil fuels electricity because plants are less efficient at lower generation capacities.) Robust design doesn’t seem to have slowed the exponential growth shown in these charts – or the Think Big investors.
Although I haven’t made up my mind, the explosion of estimated nat gas reserves comes from hydraulic frakking for shale extraction. As I’ve said several times, the next generation of oil & gas extraction technologies will be trickier and more expensive, with emphasis on tricky, as in risky.
T&D applies to nat gas as much as renewables. Pipelines have to be built or the trucks have to be outfitted.
Not a slam dunk. If the world continues to ‘fractionate’, regional constraints will potentially dominate the economies of scale making alternative energy sourcing more attractive.
There are a lot of negative factors regarding wind that haven’t gotten much press.
Two that stand out are the noise factor and the underground ballasts.
Ask anyone who lives in proximity to a large turbine or, worse, set of turbines. That constant low-frequency wooshing isn’t something you’d like to endure whenever the wind blows – which is often, in any place being considered for wind power. Of course, if the turbines are located far from human towns/cities, that eliminates the problem.
The underground ballast thing is a problem wherever you put wind power. Large blocks of concrete must be poured below ground level for most wind turbine applications – often weighing hundreds of tons. These serve as anchors and ballasts for the turbine, both for the torque of it’s spin and for the torque generated against the tower itself by the wind. This necessitates excavation and large amounts of steel reinforced concrete, which are both energy intensive. And when the turbine has reached its lifespan, there will still be a block of concrete left in the ground, which will either be left there (not a great thing to do for the land) or be excavated, broken up, and disposed of somehow (again, very energy intensive).
I’m not saying wind doesn’t provide an energy solution in some cases but it’s usefulness is limited by these and other factors.
FWIW:
Figure 3: EROI of various electric power generators.
More here.
I know – the supply chain issues for computing EROI are under dispute.
Gets back to the question of cost effectiveness – tricky.
YBR, the only way renewable compete is with heavy subsidies and making the utilities buy the ‘crap”. Take those away and nobody, I repeat, nobody would put up a windmill or solar panel farm.
Tarnsman et al:
The top ten oil & gas companies, Exxon being the largest, bring in annual revenues of close to $2 trillion. That does not include the NOC’s (National Oil Companies) such as KSA’s Aramco, which has ten times the reserves of Exxon.
Looks like Texas overbuilt their wind generation capacity – lo and behold the gleeful headlines. (I can’t help but wonder how such a thing could have happened in the savvy state of Texas.)
Huge amounts of money are in play. The financing structure is unique for each alternative. Oil & gas are subsidized from capitalization through to production (permanent authorizations). Renewables get help only at the production end (temporary one-yr authorizations), not at the front-end capital-intensive buildout of the infrastructure, which is why they have to produce power – whether it’s needed or not. The subsidies are structured about as intelligently as the CA electric deregulation at the wholesale level, but not retail.
It’s complicated and the disinformation is thick – by calculation, as is, I suspect, the unfavorable tax treatment.
In CA more than a decade back, the moronic legislators passed a bill granting homeowners tax breaks for investing in renewable energy technologies – Solar, wind, and insulation mostly. As a practical matter, most homes would be excluded from taking advantage of the “break” because of neighborhood covenants, municipal ordinances & zoning, the unworkability of row housing, condos, whatnot. That meant only people living on a sizeable piece of land…
Anyhow, after a few years, the fradulent electrical generation crisis engineered by the Gray Davis administration colluding with various out-of-state suppliers stampeded the legislature into signing contracts for a decade of outrageous rates. At about the same time, the legislature reversed the tax benefits, and turned on the CA taxpayers who’d invested in the “green” technologies for their homes, now charging those same people higher rates for the increased value of their homes.
I was going to put closure on the subject, but I just can resist:
When people talk about how we’re ‘running out of oil,’ they’re not counting the heavy oil. There’s a huge amount of resource there…It’s just a question of developing the technology. – Amy Myers Jaffe, head of the Energy Forum at Rice University’s Baker Institute
Was heavy crude just thrown an Amy curve ball?
119. JJRedfan
California Law specifies that assessments CAN’T include the value of Green Upgrades: PV arrays, in particular.
That proviso extends across time.