I Like Mike

I listen to the radio every chance I get. Having it on in the background doesn't bother me and I consider it an auxiliary source of breaking news. At about this time in the evening I relax to the soothing sounds of Mike Malloy on XM satellite radio courtesy of Air America. Unfortunately, sometime this week the suits at AAR showed extreme rudeness in dumping the Malloy show.

The Malloy lexicon has embedded itself into many a cranium:

• "Hello Truth Seekers!"
• "Have I told you yet today how much I hate these people?"
• "The Bush Crime Family"
• "Bunny Pants"
• "Chuckle Nuts"
• "Pickles Bush"
• "Watch your back!"
• "Goodnight Kevin Kinney, Wherever you are."

Some people say that Malloy displays mainly rage with little substance. Au contraire, of all the AAR hosts, he shows the most knowledge on the U.S.'s energy dependence, and has understood well the issues of Peak Oil, global warming, and blood for oil since I started listening to him about two years ago, like here or here or here or here or here or here or here.

Sign the petition to bring back Mike

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Contrast the passion of Malloy with the desperate conniving opportunism of the right-wing radio nuts. Case in point, consider Hugh Hewitt (aka Spew Spewitt) who works under syndication to the Salem Communications corporation. Well, what do we discover but that Will McBride, son-in-law of the Chairman of Salem and family friend of Karl Rove has this week had the run of corporate son Hewitt's radio show in pursuit of unseating floundering favorite Katherine Harris for the Republican primary in the Florida senate race. Nothing that the sleaze radio merchants won't do to retain power and prevent the truth from coming out.

I pity the people that use radio as their only source of info. The corporatists at Salem and Clear Channel have got a lock on that particular media outlet and tell their 'minions to whine like babies and puppies when someone else usurps their self-proclaimed, urine-scented "territory". (I caught wind of that when Hewitt whined about AAR's Sam Seder hogging the spotlight when the two guested on Tucker Carlson's show. Best of all Seder read my note of his micro-rant over the air and doubly pawned Spewitt ... HaHa Hugh-baby.) Yet, even if we let them have their way, too bad that they refuse to understand that conventional broadcast radio has only a brief time left in its current carnation. I feel that in no time at all we will have an explosion in broadcast communications technology. WiFi, different types of podcast, Satellite radio, internet streaming, Bluetooth, cell phone radio, and power-line carrier transmission will open up the broadcast spectrum so that the right will no longer have the stranglehold over the spoken word. As John Dewey said (thanks to Alterman on Seder's show this evening): "Democracy begins in conversation". I would add that Dominionism thrives in blind toady servitude.

Words of the Day:
   Petrofascists - Members of The Bush Crime Family
  Clownish Hag - defined

Thin Skin and Robert's Rules of Order

Alert to some classic posts on The Oil Drum recently. Robert Rapier somehow got under Argonne Lab's Michael Wang enough for Wang to say:

"You are entitled to have your opinion, but do not imply personal attack on my professional work."

And what did Rapier say to engender this response? He claimed that Wang practiced a bit of "sleight-of-hand". Rapier went on and logically deconstructed the energy efficiency tricks that Wang purportedly used to prove that Ethanol would prove very competitive with gasoline, if not exceed its EROEI!

Even though Rapier has a clear explanation, people in general don't seem to understand energy return arguments. I have a suggestion that might work. Instead of saying that X amount of gasoline provides Y amount of fuel, we should switch the X to indicate the cost of that gasoline. As most people relate to money more easily than symbolic fuel cans as input, it makes a bit more sense to lay it out that way. People like Wang would have no leg to stand on.

Also in the post, Rapier gives vulture capitalist Vinod Khosla another spanking:

Robert's argument would make solar cells a horrible source of energy at an efficiency of 0.15! And why would we ever use electricity?

And Khosla pretends expertise in Silicon Valley electronics? Vinod, please, solar cells don't have the lifetime of disposable razors -- as Robert reminds us, solar cells keep on running and will recoup their cost many times over. This proves Khosla has no business as a leader in the alternative fules debate.

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In another TOD post, Petropest said this in a response to the creative accounting practiced in oil production reporting:

I don't think it is fair to add in bitumen or CTL or "refinery gain". You can't change the rules in the middle of the game. Counting some of that tar they pull out of the ground now is bad enough.

Anyone with software expertise would surely appreciate how many times managers have redefined what a "line of code" means. It could mean a count of semicolons, actual lines, lines minus comments, etc. The bottom-line remains that the definition will change depending on how middle management wants to show progress in their metrics with respect to productivity. I have seen it happen to software, and have to agree with Petropest that big oil can redefine what oil production metrics entail any time they want, yet no one asks the right question on what the peak really means.

North Sea Update

Oil production from the UK North Sea continues to plummet:

Oil production growth was down 4 per cent compared with May at 1,411,961 barrels per day (bpd) and down 13 per cent on the same month last year.

From last year's oil shock model for UK North Sea, I added an additional data point (green star):

No sign of new discoveries either.

Free Gum

With the advent of web-based spreadsheets, data has freed itself from its shackles. Khebab made an important first cut by contributing his oil production data to the editgrid on-line spreadsheet here. To grab the data, select what you need and then paste to a clipboard; in the end you can easily create a nice space-delimited flat file.

Geko45 also contributed his own apparently painstakingly collected data as an Excel spreadsheet. Unfortunately, placing the data in a proprietary format like Excel demonstrates the limitations of such an approach -- I for one couldn't load this data set reliably into Quattro.

Half Hour of Power

I recorded and uploaded this morning's "Energy Efficiency Hour" radio program here:
[mp3] (18 minutes)
The host, Don Johnson, doesn't possess lots of radio polish but he took a few callers (on wind power and geothermal) and wedged in a little rant over our war for oil. Curiously, the show got billed as an hour but it got interrupted halfway through by a run-of-the-mill herbal medicine infomercial at which I quit recording. If nothing else, cutting an hour-long program in half at least shows a certain amount of conservation awareness -- don't want to waste unnecessary electrons.

Alternative Treatment Modalities

"The world's real superpower is oil." -- Deepak Chopra

Noted spiritualist Chopra's self-help advice? Stop the rhetoric of militarism entirely.

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Looking at the HitMaps counter for this site, I find it odd that the area around Anchorage, Alaska has generated a disproportionate share of visits. The small hitmap appears a bit strange, showing a tumor-like growth at the port of call for Alaskan oil. If I let my imagination wander a bit, I envision members of the oil elite firing up their internet kiosks during happy hour.

Hmmm.

Evidently they don't work during the week; what on earth do they do on the weekends?

Carrion Eaters

The HuffPo offers a good bunch of regular contributors, but one fellow who has somehow captured the energy pundit role there continues to spout nonsense couched as a mix of libertarian and progressive idealism. In his latest post, the commodities trader and HuffPoster Raymond Learsy somehow managed to say glowing words about free energy huckster Sean McCarthy of Steorn¹, vulture capitalist Vinod Khosla, and SilVal libertarian TJ Rodgers. Which means he said basically nothing.

Fascinating how the hucksters group together; in an attached comment on the Learsy HuffPost, who else do we see chime in but an employee from Magnetic Power Inc., purveyors of "zero-point energy".

Magnetic Power, Inc. (MPI) applauds Steorn. We are also developing magnetic devices which deliver electric power without fuel, and without breaking the basic laws of physics. MPI is glad to see that Steorn's challenge has already had more than 3,000 volunteers from the scientific community offer to test the device.

How these vultures detect the carrion remains a mystery to me. You'd think they can synthesize biodiesel off the garbage spewing from Learsy's words. But then again getting something out of nothing remains the (what'cha smokin'?) pipe's dream.

Read TheOilDrum for good info on Kholsa.

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¹McCarthy a possible hoaxster? From Wikipedia:

A page on Steorn's website titled "Press Coverage" had a non-working link to a news story claiming the discovery in the Guardian on April 1, 2006. The date "April 1" is commonly observed as "April Fool's Day" in many countries, including Ireland and Great Britain, and is often a target date for hoaxes. No such news story from the Guardian exists.